Howards End

1910, 1992 Signet edition
E. M. Forster
Howards End
Bought new for $4.50
Tattered paperback
B

This edition has movie tie-in front and back covers.  I remember attempting to watch a Merchant Ivory version of E.M. Forster, but I couldn't tell you if it was A Room with a View or Howards End.  I might've even tried both.  All I remember is being bored despite the excellent cast and shutting off the TV after about 15 minutes.  Perhaps I was unjust, but I don't remember Merchant Ivory capturing Forster's wit and complexity.


This novel is very funny, although as Benjamin DeMott points out in the introduction, it's a painful humour.  Helen Schlegel can joke about stealing umbrellas because she's too well off to worry about it, yet everything she says cuts into Leonard Bast.  While in the world of The Automobile Girls, anarchists' resentment of the class system is madness, and a talented Gypsy girl can become civilized, Forster shows that there are no easy solutions, or even clear questions, for the current economic situation.  The Wilcoxes, particularly Charles, think that money solves everything, even the deaths of a cat and a man, but money also creates problems, the possession of it in a different way than its lack.  The title "character" is a house that's owned by possessive people who don't want it to go to people who would appreciate it more than they do.


The Wilcoxes are unlikable, probably more than Forster intended, but I think the Schlegels are meant to be seen, by the reader as well as the other characters, as impractical dreamers.  Looking back over a century later, in which both sides have won and lost-- money is still king but liberalism has made a difference; the "lower classes" have access to education but nobody on the Internet can spell-- all I know is I can't forgive Charles, and Margaret Schlegel is the most reasonable person around.  As for the Basts, it's hard to buy Jacky as Leonard's wife, harder to believe she was Henry Wilcox's "mistress."  A one-night stand, maybe.  I can sort of see Leonard and Helen's one-night stand, although their thread wasn't developed enough and his tragic ending a bit contrived.


For a "modern" book, it's very fatalistic.  At the tail end of the Edwardian period, things still feel very Victorian, but with motorcars.  My favorite character, the first Mrs. Wilcox, is deliberately anachronistic, a relic of a genteeler, more rural time.  Aunt Juley is like Charlotte Bartlett in Room with a View, an interfering older relative, and so it was startling to realize that she's a "Mrs." and not an old maid.  And yet, there is a sense of what lies around the corner, with a line about "the remark, 'England and Germany are bound to fight,' renders war a little more likely each time that it is made, and is therefore made the more readily by the gutter press of either nation."