Howards End (47 page)

Her husband was lying in a great leather chair in the dining-room, and by his side, holding his hand rather ostentatiously, was Evie. Dolly, dressed in purple, sat near the window. The room was a little dark and airless; they were obliged to keep it like this until the carting of the hay. Margaret joined the family without speaking; the five of them had met already at tea, and she knew quite well what was going to be said. Averse to wasting her time, she went on sewing. The clock struck six.

“Is this going to suit everyone?” said Henry in a weary voice. He used the old phrases, but their effect was unexpected and shadowy. “Because I don't want you all coming here later on and complaining that I have been unfair.”

“It's apparently got to suit us,” said Paul.

“I beg your pardon, my boy. You have only to speak, and I will leave the house to you instead.”

Paul frowned ill-temperedly, and began scratching at his arm. “As I've given up the outdoor life that suited me, and I have come home to look after the business, it's no good my settling down here,” he said at last. “It's not really the country, and it's not the town.”

“Very well. Does my arrangement suit you, Evie?”

“Of course, Father.”

“And you, Dolly?”

Dolly raised her faded little face, which sorrow could wither but not steady. “Perfectly splendidly,” she said. “I thought Charles wanted it for the boys but last time I saw him he said no, because we cannot possibly live in this part of England again. Charles says we ought to change our name, but I cannot think what to, for Wilcox just suits Charles and me, and I can't think of any other name.”

There was a general silence. Dolly looked nervously round, fearing that she had been inappropriate. Paul continued to scratch his arm.

“Then I leave Howards End to my wife absolutely,” said Henry. “And let everyone understand that; and after I am dead let there be no jealousy and no surprise.”

Margaret did not answer. There was something uncanny in her triumph. She, who had never expected to conquer anyone, had charged straight through these Wilcoxes and broken up their lives.

“In consequence, I leave my wife no money,” said Henry. “That is her own wish. All that she would have had will be divided among you. I am also giving you a great deal in my lifetime, so that you may be independent of me. That is her wish, too. She also is giving away a great deal of money. She intends to diminish her income by half during the next ten years; she intends when she dies to leave the house to her—to her nephew, down in the field. Is all that clear? Does everyone understand?”

Paul rose to his feet. He was accustomed to natives, and a very little shook him out of the Englishman. Feeling manly and cynical, he said: “Down in the field? Oh, come! I think we might have had the whole establishment, piccaninnies included.”

Mrs. Cahill whispered: “Don‘t, Paul. You promised you'd take care.” Feeling a woman of the world, she rose and prepared to take her leave.

Her father kissed her. “Good-bye, old girl,” he said; “don't you worry about me.”

“Good-bye, Dad.”

Then it was Dolly's turn. Anxious to contribute, she laughed nervously, and said: “Good-bye, Mr. Wilcox. It does seem curious that Mrs. Wilcox should have left Margaret Howards End, and yet she get it, after all.”

From Evie came a sharply drawn breath. “Good-bye,” she said to Margaret, and kissed her.

And again and again fell the word, like the ebb of a dying sea.

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Dolly.”

“So long, Father.”

“Good-bye, my boy; always take care of yourself.”

“Good-bye, Mrs. Wilcox.”

“Good-bye.”

Margaret saw their visitors to the gate. Then she returned to her husband and laid her head in his hands. He was pitiably tired. But Dolly's remark had interested her. At last she said: “Could you tell me, Henry, what was that about Mrs. Wilcox having left me Howards End?”

Tranquilly he replied: “Yes, she did. But that is a very old story. When she was ill and you were so kind to her, she wanted to make you some return, and, not being herself at the time, scribbled ‘Howards End' on a piece of paper. I went into it thoroughly, and, as it was clearly fanciful, I set it aside, little knowing what my Margaret would be to me in the future.”

Margaret was silent. Something shook her life in its inmost recesses, and she shivered.

“I didn't do wrong, did I?” he asked, bending down.

“You didn‘t, darling. Nothing has been done wrong.”

From the garden came laughter. “Here they are at last!” exclaimed Henry, disengaging himself with a smile. Helen rushed into the gloom, holding Tom by one hand and carrying her baby on the other. There were shouts of infectious joy.

“The field's cut!” Helen cried excitedly—“the big meadow! We've seen to the very end, and it'll be such a crop of hay as never!”

 

 

E. M. Forster cultivated his heart the way a gifted singer might spend a lifetime on her voice. With his confiding letters, his warm shoulder, his care to every detail of a developing relationship, Morgan (as he was known to those near him) could sometimes give a friend the impression he or she was the only person he was close to at that time. In his midtwenties he had found a role model in Keats, who had also made his friends the center of his life. “He has seized upon the supreme fact of human nature, the very small amount of good in it, and the supreme importance of that little,” Forster remarked in his diary.

So sedulously did he nourish this “small amount of good” in himself—and so generously recognize it in others—that, near Forster's death, his longtime friend J. R. Ackerley wrote: “in so far as it is possible for any human being to be both wise and worldly wise, to be selfless in any material sense, to have no envy, jealousy, vanity, conceit, to contain no malice, no hatred (though he had anger), to be always reliable, considerate, generous, never cheap, Morgan came as close to that as can be got.”

Why does it matter to the reader of Howards End that its author was both loving and well-loved, or that his friends regarded him as a paragon of kindness? It matters in the way that knowing Melville's history as a sailor deepens our appreciation of
Moby-Dick,
but more than this. Love in its broadest definitions is as central to Forster's novels as the marriage plot is to Jane Austen's. Howards End succeeds, for Forster, to the degree in which it conveys his vision of how to live, and more specifically, how to heal modem England—the often-quoted epigraph: “Only connect ...”

A survivor of prep school bullying, Forster held few illusions about human nature. His architect father died of tuberculosis in 1881, before Morgan was two years old, and his mother, Lily—a kindly, conventional woman, inclined to depression—doted on her only child, convinced that his health was frail. He grew up surrounded by elderly aunts and female relatives—the source of his ironclad patience as well as his distaste for “gentility,” for the English middle-class alertness to fine shades of class and respectability. Early photographs show a cringing, knock-kneed boy, but Forster was sturdier than he looked. The best part of his childhood was his mother's ten-year lease of an old farm-house, Rooksnest in Hertfordshire, where he played in the fields and barns with local boys.

His mother lost Rooksnest—the house on which
Howards End
was based—in part through fumbling the lease renewal with the landlord. Eventually she moved with her son to Tonbridge, where he embarked on a joyless adolescence at the hearty, athletics-dominated Tonbridge School. He never forgot the “general atmosphere of unkindness,” as his biographer put it, and immortalized Tonbridge as the brutal Sawston School in his second novel,
The Longest Journey
(1907).
¹

If Forster left Tonbridge in revolt against callousness, it was at King's College, Cambridge that his own ideals of empathy would be put into practice—first in balancing his school friends from Tonbridge with the new, more sophisticated young men he was meeting. Forster became adept at keeping friends from different circles, a policy of inclusion that came naturally to him but could result in comical juxtapositions when he tried to bring his companions together. It also barred him from full, ecstatic belonging to any one group or clique. In his last year at King‘s, Forster was elected to the Apostles
²
and grew close to the art critic Roger Fry—the great proponent of Postimpressionism—and other men who would later become part of the Bloomsbury group: Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey.
³

Like Forster, Bloomsbury valued freedom of speech, artistic innovation, sexual liberty, and personal relations. In an era in which classical statues were clothed in brown paper underwear, Bloomsbury set out to strip Victorianism bare. None of the bourgeois ideologies were sacred: race, religion, Empire, marriage, manliness could be probed, ridiculed, reformed. In this searching and irreverent company—Lytton Strachey described the Apostles as practicing “the higher sodomy”—Forster could think out loud about sex, class, and money. The pivot of
Howards End
is Margaret Schlegel's Bloomsbury-like insistence on exposing the financial under pinnings of her leisured, cultured life in London: “You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence.”

But Bloomsbury was only one of the overlapping orbits in which Forster moved after leaving Cambridge in 1902. He had also begun teaching Latin at the Working Men's College in London and writing professionally, aided by a legacy from his aunt that provided him with an independent income. And although his private life began to flower in a series of deep infatuations with male friends, he remained a dutiful son, living with his mother at Weybridge and then at Abinger, Surrey, until her death after the Second World War.

This settled suburban existence—punctuated with foreign travel and frequent escapes to London and Cambridge—provided Forster with much of his material as a writer. It was not only the events of daily life that struck him—the comic potential of the rector's visit, for example—but his own imperfect fit in his surroundings. As a writer, as a homosexual (“a minority” was his customary term), as a liberal, he was both the accommodating young man pouring tea for his mother and a masked observer. While another writer, such as D. H. Lawrence, might have kicked against perceived rejection or, like some of his Bloomsbury friends, drifted toward bohemianism, Forster took on protective coloration. As a result, although he chafed against the small mindedness of his relatives and neighbors, he was able to see them in the round.

This carried through in Forster's fiction, from the alarmed relatives of
Where Angels Fear to Tread
(1905) who rush to Italy to prevent a wealthy English widow's misalliance with a much younger Italian, to the earnest college men of
The Longest Journey,
and the commonplace, naive heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, of
A Room with a View
(1908), who is made uncommon—and given a chance at happiness—by eloping with a passionate, socially unsuitable man. She begins as a flat character and achieves roundness.

Forster made explicit the distinction between “flat” and “round” characters in his 1927 Clarke lecture at Cambridge,
Aspects of the Novel.
Flat characters can be “summed up in a single phrase,” he explained. They are useful to the novelist because they “never need reintroducing, never run away, have not to be watched for development, and provide their own atmosphere—little luminous disks of a prearranged size, pushed hither and thither like counters across the void or between the stars; most satisfactory.”
⁴
Flat characters can be memorable—most of Dickens' characters are flat, Forster points out—but round characters wax and wane and have facets like human beings: “The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way.”

Forster's fourth novel,
Howards End
(1910), has its share of both round and flat characters. The roundest of them, Margaret Schlegel, is often read as the author's self-portrait, especially since the narrative voice tends to approve and expand on Margaret's views.
⁵
This voice often blurs into Margaret's so that it is difficult to tell where Margaret ends and the narrator begins:

Margaret's resolution that in the future she will be “less cautious, not more cautious, than she had been in the past” could summarize one of Forster's New Year's diary entries: “don't be so afraid of going into strange places or company, & be a fool more frequently.”

With both Margaret and the narrative persona pushing Forster's philosophies of life, it's no wonder that the message of
Howards End
blares from the page. “Only connect ...” How does the reader stand it? From the epigraph through the evocation of the “rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion” to the painstaking association of the Wilcoxes with the builders and rulers of England and the Schlegels with the poets and artists who immortalize it—Forster lays it on as thickly as the novel will bear. In some ways, this is deeply satisfying for readers, like eating a stew that has simmered all day. Every element of
Howards End
is aligned with its theme. The book is full of contrasts that support the central antitheses: prose vs. passion, rich vs. poor, culture vs. materialism, kindness vs. brutality, city vs. country, modernization vs. tradition, masculinity vs. femininity. Even the plot is wrestled into compliance by means of coincidence, sudden death, unlikely meetings, implausible couplings.