I came late to E. M. Forster, in college introduced only to his Aspects of the Novel with its wry, deft voice and wonderful chapters—straightforward yet a touch fey—on plot, story, rhythm, characters. Round characters, he says, are capable of surprising you; flat characters like Mrs. Micawber in David Copperfield with her tag phrase, “I will never desert Mr. Micawber!” delight in their energy and sameness. Subsequently I read his novels, in which I recognized the same appealing voice, capable of mustering authority, at times diffident, but unwaveringly humanistic. Forster brings to mind something Lionel Trilling remarked of George Orwell: that he is “not a genius,” and that “the virtue of not being a genius “is “of fronting the world with nothing more than one’s simple, direct, undeceived intelligence.” I don’t mean to minimize Forster’s imaginative powers, but I can’t help responding to an essential modesty in his work, a trait that distinguishes him from many other authors (including even determinedly nonegotistic George Eliot). Forster builds his world out of finely observed encounters, at once simple, subtle, and symbolic: Helen Schlegel’s walking off with Leonard Bast’s umbrella; Margaret’s eating saddle of mutton—and not the fish pie she wanted to order—with the Wilcoxes at Simpson’s in the Strand; in Shropshire Margaret’s jumping out of the car that has hit what was first thought to be a dog but turns out to be a cat—an animal even less worth stopping for in the eyes of the most unfeline and unfeeling Charles Wilcox. Hinting at our negotiations and accommodations, at stretches of boredom and saving moments of intimacy, at planes of passion and prose, at wells of muddle and mystery, Forster seems so reasonable in what he observes of the world and what he would ask of us. “Only connect,” he says. Yet this is exactly what is so hard to do.
Perhaps I also appreciate Forster because he tried to work within heterosexual paradigms as I for so long tried to do. Though his unexpected first kiss startles her and she “nearly screamed,” Margaret Schlegel commits herself to Henry Wilcox and does her best to love him. Critics have talked of Forster’s inability to portray heterosexual love, but there are many moments, if not of passion then of closeness, that one can sense between them. Margaret does work to be close to Henry. Sometimes this means acting a part as when she pretends to have been silly about the cat that was killed. Sometimes this means gently challenging him. I like the small moment when, after she learns of his past with Jackie, Margaret takes away the newspaper he is hiding behind and asks him to look her in the eyes. She can also, when it is necessary, be fierce—as in her choosing Helen over Henry, choosing to fight for women against men. All sexual connection, Forster recognizes, is not in the bedroom.
Henry Wilcox reminds me of the man who, for forty-six years, I thought was my father. As a self-made engineer, Trevor Westbrook rose during World War II to become head of aviation production for all of England in Lord Beaverbrook’s Ministry of War. Working from designs everyone said were completely impractical, he heroically produced the Spitfire, the plane my mother always said saved England in the Battle of Britain. He was persistent and efficient—admirable in the contribution he made to his country. Then after the war he made money, investing in copper mines and other schemes, and took pride in his country house, Little Brockhurst, with its sweeping vistas of the Sussex downs. His emotional life, though, was dismal. Dazzled by glamorous women like my mother, dour, repressed, and hopelessly disconnected from his feelings, he failed, time and time again, to see beyond his own impulses and narrow assumptions. Once he embarrassed me, his sixteen-year-old daughter, by taking me out dancing to the Savoy and resting his hand on my bottom. His life ended sadly in a kind of dystopian version of the conclusion of Howards End. Trevor Westbrook fell prey to his venal second ex-wife, Carmel, an Australian gold digger he had married and soon divorced after his equally brief marriage to my mother. Carmel returned to England to ensconce herself at Little Brockhurst and take advantage of him in his senility. The last time I saw him, on a day I visited with my mother, he was, to use Margaret’s words about Henry Wilcox, “pitiably tired.” “Wakey, wakey, Trevor,” Carmel urged at our pub lunch because he had to be roused to pay the bill. He could hardly walk or talk; palsy seemed to have gripped his whole being. He died soon afterwards.
In my experience with men and marriage, I see parallels between myself and Margaret Schlegel. I have worked to be connected to men, and they have often, though not always, felt very “other” to me. I have liked best men of charm and lightness of being, men who connect easily with women, who have a strong component in them of Forster’s “feminine” but without being effeminate. My grandchild Sam, Emily’s son now in his teens, in whom I have always delighted, seems one such man in the making—his best friends, interestingly, are girls, indeed, sisters—and any men I’ve been at all close to, including both Donald and my son Sean, have had a balance of sides. As for dominant men who take charge in the style of Henry Wilcox, choosing the restaurant you eat in and suggesting you order mutton instead of fish pie, my experience with them is slight. I have known a few and shared their company, but never for long.
I hope for a different paradigm for relations between the sexes than that of dominance and subordination, something other than men’s bullying women or women’s castrating men. And perhaps Forster shows us the way to one in Howards End. In the figure of the
