No End to Howards End

It's almost a week that I've been in Rome, and I'll have more to say about the experience once I've been here longer. One of the wonderful gifts about being here is having the time to reread books I love, which is probably the most important thing for a writer to do.

Having just finished Howards End by E. M. Forster for possibly the fifth time, I'm firmly convinced that it's possible to learn everything you need to know about writing from studying this magnificent work of art. It would also serve as an excellent guide on how to think, and more than passable as a blueprint for how to live.

At first glance, the plot seems to amble aimiably, almost carelessly from minor crisis to minor crisis, introducing us to charming characters who get into sticky, though hardly life-threatening, situations. What a miracle it is when the pieces "connect"--the book's epigraph is "Only Connect..."--so beautifully in the powerful finale, like a sleeping giant who's been hidden under a blanket of earth, grass, trees, and rocks until he wakes with a jolt, and we realize that nothing short of the meaning of life is at stake here.

An oversimplified way to present this book is as a struggle of competing values between two English families who meet by chance while on vacation, the Wilcoxes and the Schlegals. Yet Forster's presentation of this schematic conflict is much more highly-nuanced, and with Forster (much like it is with John Kerry) nuance is all.

Yes, the Schlegals, particularly the heroically sensible Margaret and her passionate but shortsighted younger sister Margaret, represent sensitivity, art, culture, liberal humanitarian values. Yet among their camp is the utterly banal Mrs. Munt, who appreciates culture in the most mundane way possible. On the opposite extreme is the youngest Schlegal, Tibby, a careless aesthete (most likely spoiled by his older sisters) whose selfish devotion to the realm of ideas blinds him to the troubles of the living. Even when his own sister cries desperately to him for help, Tibby's more interested in leafing through a text on learning Chinese or checking on his dessert so that it doesn't get cold.

The Wilcoxes seem a much more disciplined, uniform camp at first, embodying the coldness of order, efficiency, what Forster lumps together under a category called "the seen." Yet they too have their degrees. The eldest son Charles is the worst of their lot. Forster tries valiantly but ultimately cannot bring himself to conceal his dislike for Charles's stubborn, cold heart, even in the hour of Charles's mother's death. Next is Charles's younger brother Paul, who's mostly a plot device to develop other characters, and remains shunted offstage until the end of the book so he can appear as a stand-in for Charles when he can no longer be physically present. However, then there's Evie, the only daughter, seems like a brat, good at sports, breeding puppies, and spending her father's money on a needlessly elaborate wedding, but she shows surprising tenderness for her father at the end of the book. She is actually capable of sentiment. Henry, the Wilcox patriarch, is the best of them. Somehow (Forster never explains satisfactorily how), Margaret sees his inner potential for feeling, which comes through at the book's end, though with one glaring deficiency. (Mrs. Wilcox, Henry's first wife, is actually a Howard, and of an entirely different order.)

The question this book poses, still useful today, is which is better, to be sensitive or to make the trains run on time? Supreme in his feeling for nuance, Forster answers, you need some of both, but if you're going to err, choose sensitivity. And yet, as Forster shows, even then the balance is imperfect. We're stuck with events that are out of our control, illness, war, forces of nature, and petty cruelty. There is no answer to the dilemma of being alive.

We can find some hope, however, here and there in various corners of this tragic novel, which feels oddly sunny despite a sour note at the end. I'm especially moved when in Chapter 4, Charles Wilcox tries to explain to Helen Schlegal that it's no use being polite to servants, since they don't understand it. Forster explains to us that the "Schlegal retort" to such cant is: "If they don't understand it, I do." That strikes me as exactly on target. The good we try to do may not always be appreciated by others, but then we don't try to live in the right way for other people. We do it for ourselves.