Back to the Classics Challenge 2021 #19

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2021.

Classic by a New-to-You Author: The 1992 movie adaptation of Howards End made it to an art house in Riga, Latvia in 1994, where I was teaching English at a university. My wife and I went to see it. We waved to my local – mainly female – colleagues in the theater since everybody in English-interested circles went to see it. In the office the Monday after, Ilze, Ieva, and Vineta expressed outrage over Mr. Wilcox’s indiscretion. Couple days later, feeling mischievous, I casually asked Ilze “Is that new German teacher married,” and Ilze, with forehead cutely furrowed , said, “Gee, I don’t know…” – then the penny dropped and she hollered, “Hey! Why do you want to know?”

Howards End - E.F. Forster

First published in 1910, this novel tells the story of three English families during the leisured reign of fashionable Edward VII. Modernity is beating impatiently on the door but generally speaking the culture is still conservative. It’s a stodgy unsympathetic England in which for a man to go hatless on the street is inviting insult:

   He discovered that he was going bareheaded down Regent Street.  London came back with a rush.  Few were about at this hour, but all whom he passed looked at him with a hostility that was the more impressive because it was unconscious.  He put his hat on.  It was too big; his head disappeared like a pudding into a basin, the ears bending outwards at the touch of the curly brim.  He wore it a little backwards, and its effect was greatly to elongate the face and to bring out the distance between the eyes and the moustache.  Thus equipped, he escaped criticism.  

Forster introduces us to three families. The middle class Schlegel family is made up of two sisters, Margaret and Helen, and brother Tibby. There is the upper middle class Wilcox family, made up of a father, mother and three children (two boys and one girl). The third family are the Basts, a newly married couple, of the lower middle class, so only an accident or illness or job loss away from the abyss.

The Schlegels, an Anglo-German family, are affluent, cultured, progressive, cosmopolitan, dedicated to an intellectual and independent-minded life. The Wilcoxes are wealthy, pragmatic, anchored to the conventions of English society of the early twentieth century. They are a family with a narrow dull mentality and a hypocritical personality, dehumanized by imperialism and economic power, assuming everybody is on the make, proving to be united only when the possibility of accumulating more money and property is at stake. Forster presents two kinds of culture, with two different orientations to life and asks and what does their country, their England, mean to them:

For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast?  Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity?

The Schlegels can easily see that the Wilcoxes are nihilists, with nothing but “panic and emptiness” to guide them through troubles. The Schlegels also like the adventurous but bookish Leonard Bast and want to help him get over his confusion (“[writers] are not to blame if, in our weakness, we mistake the sign-post for the destination”).

But good intentions, as usual, are not enough. Life is full of risks and twists that we can’t foretell

Looking back on the past six months, Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians.  Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere.  With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes.  The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.  On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent.

Lots of hardcore readers into reading challenges and critics like Virginia Woolf say this novel lacks focus, that Forster tries to juggle too many dichotomies. Progress: Chum or Bogey? Empire: Noble Enterprise or History of Grab? Ideal: The City or Suburbia? The Motor Car: Threat or Menace? Howards End as Novel: Victorian or Edwardian or Experimentally Modern? Howards End as House: Love It or List It? More Potent Phallic Symbol: Umbrellas or Swords?

I read this novel, after putting it off for more than 25 years. I couldn’t get my arms around it. I let it bark and whine in the dingy kennel of my mind for a couple of months. And then I read it again.

Forster advises:

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

Ambiguous enough so that the veteran seeker and seasoned mystic will have to bring her own thinking to it. A lot. There’s also sentences like:

Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe.  It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle.  It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.

Don’t look at me, I’ve got all I can handle fighting off the dangers that morality has had me believe. Plus, I’m too agreeable to snipe at poor old romantic beauty, who’s taken a helluva beating in the last century from meaner sonsabitches than me. I think life’s essence is making the best use of what is in my power, my scope, what’s up to me, and taking the rest as it happens. But that’s me, who gets short of breath in rarefied air.

Not often up to the big ideas, I, however, found Howards End a compelling read, albeit vague at times. Both times I thought Forster unfolded the story in an absorbing way. Woolf said Forster had “a power of creating characters in a few strokes which live in an atmosphere of their own.” It’s true. The novel is worth reading for secondary characters who are their own people. Sweet caring annoying Aunt Juley Munt; formidable Mrs. Avery; dippy Dolly and her godawful baby talk; terrible sportsgirl Evie (“staring fiercely at nothing after the fashion of athletic women”); hungry-eyed Jacky Bast; brother Tibby probably an Aspie; and the odious snot Charles Wilcox, haunting the margins of this novel like an imp in the gloom of hell.