I am reading “Howards End” by E. M. Forster. This for two reasons:
- I put a picture from the movie in my posting on June 8th, the one on archaism. I thought it took place in Britain of the 1930s. In fact, it takes place 30 years before, but all the same it got me interested in the book. His language is close to Common English – 85% of his words are common to our time and Shakespeare’s. That will help me in my writing.
- It takes place a hundred years ago – close to the time of my 1897 Sears Catalogue. To write for a hundred years from now, I must know what the world was like a hundred years ago so I can see what sorts of changes do – and do not – take place on that scale.
But it is not a book that Augustine could have read – he died 1480 years too soon. That means it costs me points according to my Rule. So to make up for this secret vice, I must read so many verses of Scripture.
No, I have never seen the film.
In the movie, I now find out, Margaret has red or brown hair and Helen black. Too late, I have already imagined them: to me Margaret will always be dark-haired and Helen fair-haired.
I like the book because of Forster’s little asides, the way he tells it like he sees it (yes, poor people are more ill-mannered and unlovely than the rich). He sees how so much of life is made of almost nothing, like it was sugar clouds, and can be gone in a moment.
I also like it because of Margaret. She seems much like me at that age (and even now). Our heads are full of dreams and books and high ideas, so much so that others think us a bit mad, not with both feet firmly on the ground. We are both live in an English world which we see as blind to true beauty and true life, having put a cheap busy-ness in its place. And while we see all that, yet we lack true experience of life – partly due to age, but partly because we live too much in our own heads.
Am I making sense? Maybe not.
Our insides are alike, even though she was woman of 1910 and I a man of 2006.
And because she brings to mind my younger self, she helps me to see how overly serious I have become over the years, how I have let the cares of money take the place of simple joys.
Forster writes in an English close to Common English, but it seems likely he will turn me against the idea as a whole: He does not seem the sort who would see America as a model of anything true and good. It is Britain only worse. (Common English is partly based on American English.)
See also:
The book seems to be about what is irreconcilable. Among classes and among people. It’s also about the stirrings of social agitation, and the injustices of hte era, and for this reason, for me, the centre of the book is really Leonard Bast.
Leonard Bast is the character that “spoke” to me most. He is at the centre.
I feel this, as much as I love the Schlegels, and the wonderful Margaret in paricular. (Margaret is much of what Ruth Wilcox may have been as a younger person; no wonder Henry falls for her!)
What a story.
I can forgive Edward Morgan for his habit of writing in sudden deaths into his (excellent) plots because without the sudden death of Ruth Wilcox or Leonard, there is no movement or inner change or connection.
Connection is everything in E.M.’s books.
The story is set in Edwardian times, when lines of the Class System were probably at their most strict in England. This was when Great Britain (!) still had the holdings and reserves of Empire. So, the “poor people are more ill-mannered and unlovely than the rich”, but the brutal and reactionary middle classes — stress classes, because there are or were, several — would fend off even the moderate aspirations of decent and good-hearted young men like Leonard. They preferred to keep him poor and ignorant (something Leonard resisted), and combined with the structural forces of that society — would utlimately crush him.
Leonard Bast was kept in quarantine a lot like Jude Fawley (from Thomas Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure”), a young man who strived to be something more than his class allowed him to be.
E.M. Forster Snr., Forster’s father, died far too young too, and I can’t help but feel the spirit of the author’s father’s thwarted life in Leonard Bast’s character.
A clip of when the polite, lower-lower middle class Leonard, enters the upper-lower middle class life of the Schlegels:
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N5FeizGKI8)
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