This 1910 novel about a country divided along class lines hits awfully close to home
The “prosperous vulgarian” at its center feels nothing for the poor
Perhaps you have heard that we live in a divided nation, in which red and blue states represent not only political differences but discordant realities. The contemporary novelist who can offer a literary reckoning of these disparate points of view has yet to step forward, but as charming a book about class warfare as one could rightly hope for was published by an Englishman in 1910, and the ideological arguments of its characters hold up an uncanny mirror to the American now.
At the end of the twentieth century, Howards End rated a respectable 38 on the Modern Library’s Hundred Best English Language Novels (a hierarchy compromised by its astounding white maleness, but which nevertheless represents what we until recently regarded as the best). It is, formally speaking, a traditional novel with a wise, omniscient narrator and a solid beginning, middle, and end. E.M. Forster’s penultimate work of fiction can certainly seem quaint to 21st century tastes (“a classy old frame,” Zadie Smith called it, in reference to her own novel On Beauty, which is partly an homage to Howards End). Yet Forster’s earnest toggling between the world views of progressive sisters of independent means and a conservative family with ill-gotten wealth offers a balm for our own troubled times.
Howards End keeps popping up in the culture, too: a restoration of the 1992 Merchant Ivory adaptation was recently released and screened around the country, and a BBC/Starz miniseries is currently being produced. This time around the script was written by Kenneth Lonergan, whose previous work explored the nativist impulse in American history (Gangs of New York) and blue-collar suffering (Manchester by the Sea).
The plot follows the Schlegels, bohemian intellectuals whose social activities Forster based on the real life Bloomsbury group, and the Wilcoxes, a patriarchal clan whose fortune was originally derived by exploiting the natural resources of the British colonies, as they come together and apart over matters of the heart and matters of property. Helen, the younger sister, is briefly engaged to the younger Wilcox son Paul; Margaret, the elder sister, maintains a longer engagement with the widowed patriarch, Henry. Meanwhile, members of both families are fascinated and repelled by each other. Into this dialect stumbles Leonard Bast, an economically disadvantaged clerk at an insurance company who would like to be saved by high art, and his gaudy yet faded wife, Jacky. For these two, basic survival trumps abstract world views. Howards End falls into several literary subgenres: it is a real estate novel, a novel of in-law drama, a romantic comedy in which two girls on the verge of their expiration dates take unconventional paths to true love, and a novel of ideas about England. But it is most especially a novel about what the rich do or do not owe the poor.
For the Wilcoxes, the answer is not much. “The poor are poor, and one’s sorry for them, but there it is,” says Henry Wilcox, waving off any obligation to the Basts. He and his offspring are against indulging servants, or giving out jobs as charity. For the Schlegels, the answer is give as much as you possibly can. At a salon where the Schlegels and their friends debate what kind of philanthropy should be done with a large bequest, Margaret argues against handouts with strings attached: “Give Mr. Bast money and don’t worry about his ideals. He’ll pick those up for himself.” However generous this notion, Leonard understandably recoils at the first whiff of condescending patronage. Later, when a tip of Mr. Wilcox’s has led the Basts to the brink of financial ruin, Helen drags the couple to a lavish wedding and demands that her future brother-in-law right his wrong by giving Mr. Bast some kind of dignified work. This goes spectacularly wrong, and the Schlegels’ attempts to save the Basts from falling into what Forster calls “the abyss” (the realm of the very poor, where “love and hatred have both decayed”), once again have the opposite of the desired effect.
Although Forster seems solidly Team Schlegel (they’re the most likable, get the best lines, and are the closest to what Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, his book on craft, calls “round” characters, while the Wilcoxes — at least the second generation — tend to the “flat”), he does a good job of articulating the Wilcox appeal. Helen, in her early enchantment with the family, experiences the Edwardian version of being told she lives in a bubble, and likes it. She is informed her life is “sheltered and academic,” that “one sound man of business did more good to the world than a dozen of your social reformers,” and concludes: “I am swathed in cant, and it is good for me to be stripped of it.” Margaret too has the idea that the Wilcoxes, unlike the Schlegels, live in the real world, what she calls “the outer life of ‘telegrams and anger’” which “fostered such virtues as neatness, decision and obedience,” virtues that “keep the soul from becoming sloppy.”
There is also in these pages a convincing sense of how political coalitions can be formed of constituencies from opposite ends of the economic spectrum. Bast echoes Wilcox’s line that, “There will always be rich and poor,” and later states: “the real thing’s money and the rest is a dream.” Wilcox has a nice spin on the position of “practical fellows” like himself, who are “more tolerant than you intellectuals. We live and let live, and assume that things are jogging on fairly well elsewhere, and that the ordinary plain man may be trusted to look after his own affairs.” He may be sugarcoating his indifference to human suffering here, but Leonard Bast would certainly prefer to be regarded this way, rather than as someone beholden to the haphazard Schlegel largesse.
And yet the psychological portrait of Henry Wilcox, that “prosperous vulgarian,” is not ultimately flattering. Forster several times uses the metaphor of a fortress to explain the patriarch’s inner life — “his intellectual confusion, his obtuseness to personal influence, his strong but furtive passions.” He misses some things, and refuses to see others, and ultimately can only be saved by a personal crisis strong enough to level the fortress. He is unmoved by his second wife’s disillusionment with him as: “Stupid, hypocritical, cruel… A man who ruins a woman for his pleasure, and casts her off to ruin other men. And gives bad financial advice, and then says he is not responsible.” (Sound like anyone you know?) Only the destruction of his own son Charles can teach him empathy.
“Only connect,” the phrase most associated with Forster, is the epigraph and theme of Howards End and a liberal elite credo if ever there was one. In The New Republic, Adam Kirsch writes that this has come to signify “the moral importance of connection between individuals, across the barriers of race, class, and nation,” but points out that when the phrase originally appears in the text, Forster was getting at, “the difficulty of connecting our ordinary, conventional personalities with our transgressive erotic desires.” Forster, a gay man who by his own account did not understand the mechanics of heterosexual intercourse until the year before he wrote Howards End, and was not initiated into sex until he was 37 years old, may have implicitly understood the link between our personal and political selves.
For some Americans, the lesson of 2016 may have been that the treatment of women and vulnerable populations cannot be separated from larger questions of morality and even competence, while for others it seems to have been that they were always right to regard empathizing with such groups as an impractical waste of time. Forster’s argument — that only a tragedy can reconcile the Wilcoxes of the world to its Schlegels — is not an especially hopeful one. But if an attack on Republican congressmen can bring Ted Nugent around, perhaps he was on to something.
There is a touch of Don, Jr. in Charles Wilcox — he is greedy, unwittingly criminal, slow to catch on, and destined to remain always a weak impression of the father — and it is tempting to wonder if Don, Sr., might find redemption in the potential downfall of his namesake. But of course that is just a thought game for Edwardian salons. We live in different times.
