Do I like Forster or Emma Thompson? ( )

Excellent characterization... even if the characters will drive you nuts. It has very little to do with a dispute over a house, but rather, if one will 'only connect'... it is about the dispute with providence. ( )

In a letter to Forrest Reid in 1915, E.M. Forster wrote, “My defense at any Last Judgement would be ‘I was trying to connect up and use all the fragments I was born with’—well you had it exhaustingly in Howards End, and Maurice*, though his fragments are more scanty and more bizarre than Margaret’s, is working at the same job.”

You may be aware that the epigram to Howards End is ‘Only connect…,” itself a fragment of a crucial speech which lays forth the central philosophy of our heroine, Margaret Schlegel: “She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. 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.”

This theme of connections, inner and outer, and above all interpersonal, forms the backbone of the work. Margaret and Helen Schlegel, quietly focused on their inner lives, on connecting up their fragments and becoming fully realized individuals, encounter the Wilcoxes, with their “outer lives of telegrams and anger,” and Leonard Bast, teetering on the edge of poverty, focused on survival but wishing for better. The Schlegels, part of a disappearing class in England, living comfortably off of the money they inherited from their father, enjoy the luxury of the pursuit of art and lofty ideals. Leonard Bast’s life of struggling to put food on the table prevents him from reaching those heights of art and the mind, instilling in him a great desire for them and leading him to idealize the Schlegels. Mr. Wilcox makes his money in the brutal world of colonial exploitation and greedily acquires possession after possession, while his money-hungry children keep their hands outstretched.

The book is commonly analyzed as an exploration of the question of “who shall inherit England,” as Lionel Trilling put it. Howards End, the Wilcoxes’ residence, passed down through Mrs. Wilcox, stands in for England in this scenario. Alongside this consideration is the question of whether individuals of different social classes and temperaments can, indeed, “connect,” or whether this is simply an impractical ideal. These questions come together in the end, and the answers are not straightforward. The simple answer to “who shall inherit England” would seem to be the Schlegels (particularly, Margaret); however, I think that the final chapter suggests a certain synthesis that contains something of the Schlegels, the Wilcoxes, and even of Leonard Bast. It may be a tentative synthesis, even a slightly uneasy one, but it points hopefully toward future generations. That all is not neatly and happily wrapped up with every character at the end shows that connection is sometimes, but not always, possible. Perhaps it is because of this that Margaret states, “It is only that people are far more different than is pretended . . . It is part of the battle against sameness. Differences—eternal differences, planted by God, in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow, perhaps, but colour in the daily grey.” For those who do connect, the reward is the special joy that left me smiling after the final sentence.

Mrs. Wilcox is one of the most fascinating creatures I have met in fiction recently. From her first appearance, she radiates a sort of spooky otherness that hangs over all the action, seeming to guide the movements of the other characters even after her death. I cannot quite penetrate her veil yet, though I have a sense of simultaneously knowing and not knowing her. In her first scene, I decided that she was my new hero—next scene, oh wait, no—next scene, oh yes she is—oh, then again… It is not that she is inconsistent, it is that her motivations are so far removed from mine that I can’t always predict her. At any rate, her domestic “tunnel vision” makes a fascinating counterpart to Mr. Wilcox’s aggressive imperialism.

Overall, this is a book that I can’t possibly grasp on a first reading. Only two-thirds of the way through did I start to assemble a list of themes and repeated phrases—movement vs. stillness, proportion, inner/outer, colour vs. grey or black and white, tangible/abstract, seen/unseen, item by item vs. the whole, and so forth. And of course there are those little connections that you notice as you read but know that there are so many more of, like Helen’s description of Howards End as a cozy “rabbit warren,” and the chilling description 200 pages later of Mr. Wilcox’s workplace areas as “little rabbit-hutches faced with glass or wire.” So it is with pleasure that I say that as of now I only perceive the work item by item, but that I look forward to future readings and hope, like Margaret, to perceive it as a whole.

All lovers of music should read chapter five, in which Forster details the characters’ differing reactions to a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. On a personal note, I was lucky enough to take a class two years ago with Michael Steinberg (“Talking About Music,” he called it), a great man with a great love of the arts and a lifetime of service in the classical music world. He died a month ago, and he is greatly missed. He read that chapter aloud to us in class one day, and it was a sweet pleasure to read it on the page and hear his voice in my head. Professore M. was an inspiration, and I hope that I will have the chance someday to read that passage aloud to my own students. Of particular note was Helen’s fanciful reaction, in which little “goblins” crept into the work—“they merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world”—the goblins were vanquished, crept in again, and were vanquished at last in the joyful, heroic conclusion. “But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things.”

And that, too, is why I trust Forster. He is also funny, witty, warm, wry, and a moralist in the best sense. There are even more layers that I haven’t packed into this review—characters, symbols, philosophical musings, finely crafted prose. But I’ll stop here and say, read it, and tell me what you think.

(*E.M. Forster's Maurice was written 3-4 years after Howards End. My review of the former is here:
http://www.librarything.com/work/2156... ( )

1366 Howards End, by E. M. Forster (read 7 Nov 1975) This book was written in 1908-1910 but not published till 1921. I don't quite know what to make of it. It tells a story that moves along enough to keep one's interest, but it is all meaningful and intended to be very profound, but I am not sure I followed much of the inner meaning. I don't think I got nearly what I should have out of the book, but I don't regret reading it. It certainly wasn't the struggle to read that reading A Passage to India was back in January, 1951. ( )

This is an elegant book--one of those that gets better each time you come back to it and look further into the characters and settings. I'd see it as halfway between Kazuo Ishiguro and Charles Dickens, with thoughtful characters and clever conversation. I was too young for it when I first had it assigned to me in a class (twenty, maybe?), but coming back to it in my late twenties was a pleasure once I found my way back in. I'd recommend it for a quiet day by the fire--it's not a traditional page-turner by any means, but it's worth a look. ( )