This will not be a positive review; you should know this in advance. I am sure that Howards End is considered in many circles one of the prime examples of British Modernism, that it is one of the landmark works of the Bloomsbury Group, and perhaps one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century. All that having been said, I did not enjoy it. So know that now, before you go on.

The plot of the novel concerns three families whose lives intersect in various obvious and not-so-obvious ways. The Wilcoxes are a wealthy family with many houses (including the titular home) and a business-like approach to their wealth. The Schlegels, represented mostly by siblings Margaret and Helen, are comfortably middle-class but very into art and society, and hold proto-socialist beliefs that cause them to think the wealthy (i.e. the Wilcoxes) owe something to the poor. And the Basts, Leonard and Jacky, are, well, the poor. The lives of the families are relatively tangential for the first segment of the book, but when Mrs. Wilcox passes away, Margaret becomes more involved in the lives of the Wilcoxes than any had anticipated.

Perhaps the thing that most distressed me about the novel was how little I felt I was able to identify with the characters. For a long while, I simply believed that it was a consequence of time: that I, the twenty-first-century reader, simply couldn't relate to the twentieth-century motivations of the characters and therefore wouldn't (ironically enough) connect with them. But the other part of the problem is that each character is incredibly stubborn, and the change in each is so hard to detect that I think they feel more like types than fully fleshed-out people. So while you may identify with some of the issues and concerns that come up with them, it's a bit hard to truly, legitimately care.

On the upside, I would have to argue that the novel does get better as it goes along. Once Margaret takes on a more fully invested role in the life of the Wilcox family, Forster is able to send his thematic conflict--the question of what the rich owe to the poor--in motion. And despite the fact that the characters don't exactly change very much, Forster is adept at providing us with the expectation that maybe, just maybe, they will. This suspense drives the novel to its conclusion, which features a surprising twist that seems to come out of nowhere but nevertheless makes sense, and pushes the conflict to a resolution that is surprisingly satisfying.

I suppose my own issues with Howards End are more personal than I should allow in what's supposed to be an objective review. But from the point of development, I felt it was a novel that, much like Margaret and Helen in the early goings, was more invested in ideas than it was in the elements that make a good, readable novel. Leonard Bast, who turns out to be a pretty critical character, feels marginalized throughout, and that doesn't help make it feel as if his class gets its due in the end. Not much, in fact, felt to me like it got its due when the story ended. Perhaps it just wasn't for me. But I guess all the other readers who have loved Howards End can't be wrong, so I'll just have to chalk it up as not being my cup of tea.

Howards End: Ein ziemlich geschwätziger Roman, dieser "Howards End"! Ein Roman im Stile der englischen Autorinnen und Autoren, die vor Edward M. Forster schon Geschichten aus der vornehmen Gesellschaft geschrieben haben. Jane Austen etwa oder George Elliot. Man erlebt starke Frauen und nicht ganz so starke Männer. Das ist alles sehr nett geschrieben, da gibt es auch eine Reihe tieferer Gedanken, aber es ist halt doch geschwätzig und konstruiert. Es ist alles ein wenig vorhersehbar. Ein wenig zu wenig, für eine Geschichte, die man in eine Reihe von 50 Bücher ausgewählt hat, die zu den besten des letzten Jahrhunderts gehören sollen.
Ein lesbarer Roman, ja; einer, den man gelesen haben muß?

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... ( )