Category: British and Irish Literature

Making a Mystery – Conrad’s Lord Jim

Lord Jim is the novel where Joseph Conrad’s ingenuity of construction and technique come together most spectacularly in service of creating an atmosphere of mystery. A simple work in story, it tells the tale of a man who, having once lost his honour, cannot live down this fact, and instead chooses always and ever to flee it. Upon this simple foundation Conrad builds a formidable sense of psychological depth for its main character with his prose, so that even as the story becomes no more complex than this, its main character himself never quite comes to bore us.

At the same time, to me the novel is also one of Conrad’s clearest failures. Having created a masterful atmosphere, a wondrous fog of mystery, Conrad shines a torch on it in the later sections of the work and devalues much of the power of the world he had made. Be that as it may, the creation is what is interesting, and it is this that I propose to discuss here today.

A Body as much as a Mind

“He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his living as ship-chandler’s water-clerk he was very popular.”

What an opening! We must really imagine this for a moment. Out of the void of the first page we suddenly have a figure coming straight for us – you want to leap out of the way before it’s too late, like those people encountering the first moving pictures of oncoming trains. With Jim like a “bull” we have a sense of latent violence, of danger. But then “dogged” comes along and contains this opposite: we think of a much smaller animal, so that this initial violence is immediately tempered by uncertainty – is there “nothing aggressive” in it after all? Such initial ambiguities are only heightened by words like “seemed”, “apparently.” Here we have all that we will come to recognise as Jim – an impression and an uncertainty, mixing together. Yet before all this, we have a body. For it is as a body that Conrad creates Jim as a real figure. We see him, from the first sentence, as a physical thing – we know how he walks, where he has been, how he is dressed.

Without such solidity of body, speculating on a personality feels like cheating – it’s as dull as a friend gossiping about someone you do not know. Throughout Lord Jim, Jim himself is a bodily presence just as his mind is an absence. Apart from the first twenty-or-so pages, the novel is narrated by the sailor and gentleman Charles Marlow, whom we might know as the narrator of Heart of Darkness (among other stories). This adds a powerful limitation to the narrative’s range by keeping us behind his eyes, within his knowledge, until this finally becomes stretched unfairly near the end of the work. While Marlow thinks he knows Jim’s heart, he certainly knows him as a presence: “A feeble burst of many voices mingled with the tinkle of silver and glass floated up from the dining-room below; through the open door the outer edge of the light from my candle fell on his back faintly; beyond all was black; he stood on the brink of a vast obscurity, like a lonely figure by the shore of a sombre and hopeless ocean.”

We see Jim here, as a body in the world. Marlow has to see him thus, or he would have nobody to talk about. But we see his back – the physical representation of the distance between his heart and ourselves. At the final time Marlow sees him, we also see Jim as a body without seeing inside him: “The twilight was ebbing fast from the sky above his head, the strip of sand had sunk already under his feet, he himself appeared no bigger than a child—then only a speck, a tiny white speck, that seemed to catch all the light left in a darkened world. . . . And, suddenly, I lost him. . . .” As descriptions, they do a thing that is by no means easy – they frustrate our desire for complete knowledge without being unfair. They say that just as with a real person, we can know Jim as a presence without fully knowing him as a spirit. They force upon us the duty of interpretation – we must try to piece together the scraps of a soul to match this bodily outline.

Interpreting a limited material

This disjunction between revealed body and hidden mind is certainly one way Lord Jim creates its mystery and encourages interpreting it. Another is that it foregrounds interpreting as a general condition of life almost from the very start, through Jim’s time in court. Jim’s great crime, his original sin, is to have been first mate on the “Patna” and to have acted in dereliction of his duty: he abandons its passengers, pilgrims heading to Mecca, together with a few other members of the Patna’s crew, after the ship appears to have sustained critical damage while at sea. “I had jumped… it seems.” Our first view of him through Marlow’s eyes is when he is already in the dock being tried. Jim is trying to “tell honestly the truth of his experience”, while the court is after facts. But the narrator despairs: “as if facts could explain anything!” The contrast of the bureaucratic, fact-finding, courtroom language with the complex descriptions and uncertainties of Jim’s experience is the first clue that interpretation is central to the novel.

Or perhaps not, because Jim himself is an inveterate interpreter too: “He loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality.” He is, as another character remarks, a “Romantic.” Unlike the other characters, there’s evidence that Jim engages in that most dangerous of occupations – reading. It is for this reason that there’s such a gap between his idea of himself and the cowardly (or human) reality that he demonstrates when tested in the Patna case. It is Jim’s horror at his own self that leads him to constantly flee the positions that Marlow arranges for him in various places around South East Asia, before finally ending up in the remote village of Patusan, far away from anyone who might know his shame at his one staining moment of weakness.

The court interprets in search of facts, Jim interprets in search of heroism, but Marlow does his own interpreting too. Marlow sits and tells a story after dinner. It is dark, but the other figures create the sense of a community, a class, of which Marlow is both merely a representative and a critical voice. Marlow’s interest in Jim comes from his recognition of Jim as also “one of us” – a phrase repeated, over and over, in the novel. “Perhaps, unconsciously, I hoped I would find that something, some profound and redeeming cause, some merciful explanation, some convincing shadow of an excuse.” Jim is a gentleman, well-bred, well-spoken, and in a trust-based world like that of shipping, he has not only disappointed himself, he has also shamed his people – Marlow included.

The sense that Jim’s crime is touches all within this group is emphasised by the way that Marlow lets others speak of it and share their own view of it. There’s a Captain Brierly, whose passages in chapter VI are a perfect story in themselves. This man, who has the proven heroism of having saved lives at sea to his name, is part of the three men judging Jim’s case. “Why are we tormenting that young chap?” He asks Marlow between sessions. Jim’s guilt so challenges his world that Brierly jumps overboard a few weeks after the trial is concluded. There is also a Frenchman that Marlow meets in Sydney, who was crew of a gunboat that discovered the Patna, floating aimlessly with its white crew absconded. Hence the story that Jim tells is added to, changed, challenged, by the others that Marlow encounters.

The most interesting, from the perspective of the narrative, is the character of Chester, a West Australian who plans a scheme for extracting a significant amount of guano in a dangerous region of the ocean. He correctly identifies Jim as someone down on his luck who may see the offer of a risky and remunerative trip to the to a guano island as a way out, and tries to persuade Marlow over to his view. It does not work – Marlow has taken it upon himself to sort Jim’s destiny out, perhaps in the hope of saving his whole people the shame. Angry, Chester retorts: “Oh! You are devilish smart… but you are like the rest of them. Too much in the clouds. See what you will do with him.”

Two things are interesting in this moment. The first is that it is an attack on our narrator. Marlow is an active participant in Lord Jim, not a passive spinner of yarns. He catches Jim immediately after the trial, helps him get jobs across South East Asia. We expect him to be benevolent, and he is not maliciously “unreliable” in the way that some narrators are. We might recognise that his own interest is driven by a murky set of elements, including his desire that Jim not let “us” down, but we largely trust him. By having Marlow be challenged so directly, readers now also have to judge him not just as a narrator, but as an actor too. In other words, through challenging Marlow, Conrad makes it clear to readers that they should be engaging in judging him too. We must interpret our interpreter.

The second interesting thing here is that it is a clear example of a branching path in the story. Conrad is a writer we generally associate with a deterministic view of life, of dark fates leading to inevitable demises. Marlow’s judgement of Chester is correct – the expedition to the guano island most likely leads to the deaths of everyone involved following the passage through the region of a hurricane – but that means it is fatal, but not fatalistic. For once Conrad seems to be suggesting there was another option for his story. That every moment contains a choice is a truism. That Jim made the choice to jump and that this has cursed his life is a central fact of Lord Jim. But what Jim does afterwards is up to him, though his character naturally plays a significant role in determining what he does.

We cannot choose without a sense of options, and here we have an option provided directly – Jim could follow Marlow’s advice, or he could follow Chester’s idea. The story could be otherwise – it is open. By doing this, perhaps unintentionally, Conrad is furthering the idea of being critical towards Marlow. If Marlow were merely good or bad we might give him no further thought, but if there’s an alternative offered, readers can actively consider which one is best. It is another impulse towards involvement, created through Conrad’s technique.

Further makers of mystery

I have read almost everything in Conrad’s major works now, have read his letters, have re-read much, including Lord Jim itself. Some aspects of his style are now more transparent to me than they would be to someone encountering him for the first time. He is extremely reliant on tripartite descriptions, on weighing down nouns with barnacle-like adjectives, on abusing the thesaurus for synonyms for “unclear”. He brings in a view of a fallen world not subtly, but through countless references to devilry, the infernal, and downward movement. In the same way he suggests a rigidity of destiny through his regular references to fate. His primary sources of reference are biblical. At least some of the turgidity of his prose comes from the heaviness of the adjectives and the occasional bad English (words or phrases directly translated French or Polish). When read with the right frame of mind, however, all these features of his language become another source of atmospheric murk and hence of mystery.

Just as Conrad’s prose makes the mystery, so too does his use of languages. The Frenchman mentioned earlier speaks partly in French, just as the central figure among Marlow’s advisors, Stein, speaks in an English brutalised into something half-German: “It is not good for you to find you cannot make your dream come true, for the reason that you not strong enough are, or not clever enough. Ja!” His advice for Jim: “In the destructive element immerse… that was the way. To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream…” The idea of this blog post has been that Conrad builds a mystery in the novel by showering us in interpretations and forcing interpretation upon us. Such phrases as these from Stein, comprehensible yet not quite clear, serve this purpose also. They are not only memorable for their unique phrasing, they are also just vague enough to force us into reflection. What exactly does this mean?

The actual language of the novel, the light and dark, the fog, all of the adjectives, is perhaps less interesting once you have read enough of it. It creates a mood of mystery, rather than being itself mysterious. “The views he let me have of himself were like those glimpses through the shifting rents in a thick fog.” Like the images of Jim with his back turned, or pacing, or whatever, they tell us we cannot know him – but we, stubborn, if we are in a good mood and are willing to give the story its due, try regardless.

Conclusion

The story its due… Well, Jim’s first half is up there with Heart of Darkness, and indeed the two works were written near-simultaneously, but as soon as the action moves to Patusan and Jim becomes a kind of ruler there, everything falls apart in my eyes. (And in that of many critics.) Conrad’s characterisation of the native population is less well done than of the Europeans, Marlow’s narration becomes more reliant on what he has not witnessed, which simplifies the interpretative layering, and an external figure is introduced to resolve Jim’s ambiguities by bringing the story to a violent and silly, however real the sources are, conclusion.

On the final page Marlow asks: “Is he satisfied—quite, now, I wonder?” But this would be just as appropriate a remark to be made as Marlow retreats from Patusan after his one and only visit, watching Jim shrinking by the shore… some hundred pages before the novel actually ends. To me, Lord Jim is not a “Romance”. It is a mystery of a single man’s soul. Therefore, what deepens that mystery improves the book, while what takes it away diminishes it. The last third of the novel is therefore its unravelling and could be removed without harm.

Still, the ravelling is brilliant. When Lord Jim is at its best every word, every sentence, serves to create a sense of depth and mystery around its central character. It’s humbling, and shocking, how simple the story actually is. A man jumps from a boat, mistakenly thinking it is sinking. He is tried and banned from working as a sailor again. A fellow gentleman aids him in finding new work, which he flees each time his past is remembered. Eventually he ends up on an island where nobody knows his past, and he gets the chance to recreate himself. This works, for a time, until a figure from the outside world comes to break the illusion.

It’s a story we could tell in thirty pages, not three hundred. Even psychologically, Jim is not that complicated. But we see him as from a chair in a dark room, with his back to us as he stares into a moonlit night, and Conrad creates thereby something more than a man – a symbol, a mystery, a ghost to haunt us. Regardless of whether we ultimately like the work, in terms of the writing there is so much deserving of wonder.

Dragging Myself Through Beckett’s Molloy

It’s probably fair to say I dragged myself through Molloy with only the occasional moment of more willing crawling. Samuel Beckett, perhaps, would have approved. This novel, his work as a whole, is full of pained movement that seems only one kick away from stillness. At school I studied Waiting for Godot and Endgame, two plays that I loved (eventually), but Beckett’s prose has always been both intimidating and unenticing. In Molloy we have big black brutal blocks of text with nary a paragraph break. I was hardly going to rush to read this, given I knew only to expect death and misery in what I did read. What is strange is that Beckett also wrote during his career its polar opposite, formally speaking: tiny fragments so fragmentary I could get nowhere at all in them, where even a single sentence seemed something so primordially bare that comprehension eluded me.

Regardless of these varied torments, I felt I had to make a sustained attack upon his prose. There are many good books I still have to read, of course, but always nudging me for Beckett was the awkward fact that many authors I really like – Jon Fosse and Thomas Bernhard, for example – are often claimed by critics as being his inheritors. And so, I tried again. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” – so does Sam put it in his late story “Worstwood Ho”. If I’ve failed, this time it’ll at least be a failure of interpretation, rather than a failure to get past the first page.

Eventually I felt I was getting something out of the work. But rather than try to summarise a book that is full of nonsense (Molloy spends several pages working out the optimal sequence for transferring sixteen stones between his four pockets and one mouth, to give one example), it makes more sense to note the path into meaningfulness, or at least the possibility of meaning, that I found most helpful, and reflect upon the relationship between the text I’ve read and the authors following him that I love.

Chasing

I mentioned movement at the beginning, and movement is maybe the best way into forming an understanding of Molloy, especially as it relates to the more accessible and well-known Godot. The plot of Molloy concerns two people, Molloy and Moran, each the narrator and author (both are writing reports) of their equally-sized parts. The first man is looking for his mother’s apartment, while the second man is seeking the first. Whereas Estragon and Vladimir in the play are tasked with waiting for someone, Molloy and Moran are tasked with finding someone – Molloy by himself, Moran by a figure called Youdi via his messenger Gaber. Molloy gets distracted often in his quest, and has experiences like getting arrested, running over a dog, and possibly murdering a man. Moran is more driven, if not for that any more successful. He is accompanied by his son, but though his narrative and voice are distinct, there are many similarities with Molloy’s path, including the talk of bicycles, a murder, and the decay of the body and mind.

Movement towards a goal, as opposed to waiting at an appointed point. These are not so different as they seem. In both cases Beckett’s tales are readable as a kind of allegory. Moran is instructed to find Molloy, but quickly forgets what he’s to do when he meets him – still, he trusts his instructions on faith. Just as Vladimir and Estragon are informed about Godot by a boy, Moran doesn’t hear from Youdi directly but via Gaber. These names are all richly interpretable. Gaber is Giver in German, but I also noticed it sounded like the archangel Gabriel. Youdi, as an invisible presence giving orders, reminded me of Yahweh, with whom he shares a syllable count and first letter. If the waiting of Vladimir and Estragon resembles that of the early Christians who believed the end of the world was about to arrive if only they waited a little longer, I thought there was something similarly religious in the shape of Moran’s quest in particular. Travelling with his son, and with a marked faith to his narration and cruelty to his action, I thought of the Binding of Isaac. In other words, the novel’s central dynamic and naming feels religious without ever being explicitly so, in the way that might make us feel comfortable resting upon such a view and ceasing any further enquiry.

Yet a simple allegory this is not, no more than is Godot. One topic that complicates matters is that of something close to movement: the body itself. Both Molloy and Moran’s bodies are in decay. Beckett might say with a wry and considered smile that they are both on their last legs. Certainly that seems the case for Moran, whose legs stop working over the course of his section. Molloy’s hardly seemed to work to begin with – he traverses the earth with a combination of crutches and a bicycle, something I could only imagine with some difficulty. No matter the damage, however, the bodies keep going. We could relate this back to the idea of faith by saying this is proof of how determined the characters are to honour their commitments – to one’s mother, to Youdi. But there’s too much humour in the writing to make this interpretation a comfortable one. Molloy ends his story crawling on the floor, before accidentally falling into a ditch; at one point, Moran gets on the floor and starts rolling about like a “cylinder”. Such moments are too funny to allow a straight-faced interpretation of the action. Their bodily faith seems too much like lunacy.

Beckett’s bodies try to reorientate the reader’s attention to the disregarded parts of existence. At one point Molloy sings the praises of the anus in more flowery language than I am prepared to quote; Moran, meanwhile, is obsessed by masturbation. It’s hard to think of the book as being about faith when that faith goes nowhere but the bodies with their earthiness are constantly present on the page. Then there is the matter that Moran, who is depicted as consciously religious, is guilty of all the crimes the religious normally are in the eyes of the confidently irreligious. He is full of pride (“I was short of sins” is a shockingly good way to tell us the exact opposite), he holds fast to that strain of Christian thought which demands “a horror of the body and all its functions”, yet is excited when he has a moment free from his son because it will allow him to masturbate. He also murders a stranger and drives away his son through repeated corporal punishment. Religion is certainly not the hero of this work, and devotion to the ideal seems hardly capable of taking its place.

Both Moran and Molloy’s sections of the story are bleak. Their bodies don’t work, their minds are in so much disorder, and all their strivings are unrewarded. Moran, for example, eventually, struggles home from his wanderings to find his animals dead. Both characters keep going because of a kind of faith, but the problem is that their leap of faith leads them not to land in God’s arms, but to fall straight into a ditch.

The question at this point is why read this book, or Malone Dies, or The Unnameable? The second novel of the Trilogy has the eponymous Malone stuck in what may be a hospital or a prison, telling stories to pass the time before he dies, only to get annoyed at his own work every-so-often and declare it “tedium”. This is an even more cramped space for narration than Molloy. At least with the first novel we could hope that something better might await Moran or Molloy – foolishly, perhaps, I thought perhaps their striving might be rewarded. With a man in bed, telling fictional stories and wishing he were dead, it’s even harder to find the traditional joys of fiction. If you don’t find Beckett funny, and I don’t find him quite funny enough, and you don’t love his language, which is often technically impressive and inventive (one favourite was “the unconquerable dark” which “licks the light” on a character’s face), the work is a hard sell. Indeed, it’s work. But now I can at least say I’ve managed the first two parts of the trilogy. That’s an achievement for before I die, anyway.

Two influences: Fosse and Bernhard

Besides thinking about religion and the body, I also found trying to compare Beckett with Jon Fosse and Thomas Bernhard a useful exercise to understand what Beckett might be trying to say, and why I found the others so much more enjoyable than I found him.

The main links between Fosse and Beckett concern ageing and madness and their associated changes to cognition. If only Molloy will monologue about his arsehole, excrement plays a role in both writers’ worlds. In the final section of Fosse’s Melancholy, for example, we could say the main narrative tension concerns the old woman Oline and her challenge to balance her need to pee with her promise to visit her dying brother. Something has gone wrong with her body, and she must resist it as long as she can. This is a similar dynamic to Molloy – the need to balance one’s duty to something higher with the demands of the body that carries us there. Another link, and related to this, is one of susceptibility. Both writers’ characters’ consciousnesses are very vulnerable to their external experiences, leading them to constantly lose track of what they are doing. Again, in Melancholy, there’s Lars, who in the scenes at the pub in Düsseldorf allows his idea of reality to be shaped by the words of his obviously-ill-intentioned fellow artists.

What separates these two writers, it seems to me, is their associated value judgements of these states. If the body is played for laughs in Beckett, it is also something decidedly important because it is the most human part of us. The “going on” of his characters is a physical going on, even if it’s just Molloy’s bizarre crutches-cum-bicycle hobbling. Fosse, I think, has less love of the body. Perhaps this is his (latent at the time of Melancholy, open by the time of Septology) Catholicism showing. Oline’s decay is something she has to avoid to remain connected to higher ideals, while Lars’ madness is just that – a sense that he has lost contact with something important and necessary for his art, something emphasised in the second section of the novel where he is in an asylum and more susceptible than ever to the faintest suggestions. In Septology, meanwhile, the second Asle is dying from alcoholism and hence unable to paint or, indeed, hold himself to life.

The things that Fosse values are beyond the body – our flesh and blood are necessary only insofar as they enable us to reach them. The overwhelming mystical experience of a world where the boundaries between past and present blur, as in Aliss at the Fire, or the presence of God in Septology – these are the things that really matter. If Beckett, in his bizarre and comic and even cruel way, celebrates the body, Fosse condemns it. But because Fosse’s vision has this religious and mystical angle instead of the bleak metaphysical emptiness of Beckett’s, I naturally prefer the former’s work, it being closer to my own leanings.

My second favourite who came, allegedly, from under Beckett’s overcoat is Thomas Bernhard. What links both writers is a certain cruelty. Beckett’s we see, for example, in Moran’s corporal punishment of his own son, which eventually leads him to flee, or in the pig butchery of the Lambert father in Malone Dies, who relishes in the creatures’ deaths. We might also perceive cruelty in Beckett’s treatment of his characters generally – the need to leave them immobile, bedbound, trapped. Bernhard’s cruelty is located differently: in his narration, in the bile of his narrators – the snobbery of the narrator of Woodcutters towards the artistic pretensions of the people at the party, or Roithamer’s hatred of his family in Correction. My preference here is again for the successor. Beckett’s narration bloodies his characters to build a bleak world, whereas Bernhard’s narrators bloody their world in order to big up themselves or what they like. If I am ultimately equivocal about Beckett’s bodies – the cruelty and bleakness balances the sense that they are important things – there’s no such sense of this with Bernhard.

Bernhard’s narrators are arrogant snobs. In Wittgenstein’s Nephew Bernhard describes a road trip across Austria just to get a copy of the Swiss newspaper, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, because he detests Austrian papers and wants to read a particular article in this one. Crazy, certainly, but also an indication of passion, even of love. We may not share his good taste but it’s hard not to respect the idea of good taste. Woodcutters is a broadside against the bourgeoisie, but through the figure of the actor at the dinner party there are moments when Bernhard seems to say “look here, here’s something real and important.” In other words, proper snobbery can only be possible where there is a real value of the things and people one looks down on – a negative judgement that implies an affirmation of what is absent. You don’t need to agree with him to value the very valuing.

There is no such vision in Beckett, where all and each seems so much dirt. In Bernhard we laugh at the narrators for being nincompoops, and we laugh at the objects of their rage. But in Beckett, the few things he seems to place some value upon – the body, the faithful adherence to a duty – are also mocked relentlessly. The result is that Beckett seems more negative than the all-denying Bernhard.

The Unnameable awaits. I’ll keep it waiting for the moment – I need a break from Beckett for now. I do not, however, regret reading either Molloy or Malone Dies. Fun they decidedly were not. But like many difficult books, trying to gather my thoughts together for a blog post has done a good bit to redeem them. I have a better sense of why Beckett has so many fans, even if I cannot yet call myself one of them, and I can see how his influence eventually wound up inspiring those whose works I more unequivocally love. There’s much more to the texts than I got out of them. The theme of identity, for example, is worth exploring. I could also, should also, probably do more close reading of the language itself. But in my defence, these are tasks for books we love. So poor Sam will miss out on the premium™ MAS blog post treatment for the moment.

For a long time, I was kept away from Beckett by a lack of a way in. I had seen so many titles and articles, indeed own Beckett’s Dying Words by Christopher Ricks (gifted, rather than bought), which told me how much love and pleasure he could offer to the initiated, but this only made me feel foolish for not having any success myself. I hope this post may nevertheless have helped you.

Meanwhile, if you, reader, are a Beckett fanatic, what helped you to get into him?

Narrative in Crisis in Forster’s Howards End

Howards End, E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel of Britishness and class conflict, is without a doubt one of the most strangely contemporary old books I have ever read. While it fits politically nice and snugly into the mild meliorist tradition of someone like Turgenev, what makes Howards End so disarming to me is the specificity of its problem set. We might read a novel by Sally Rooney, who regularly expresses her political positions in public, but never really find those same views stated quite so obviously in the text itself. Instead, with her worlds of permissive and diffuse relationships she seems to describe what is, rather than tell us what she wishes for. 

Not so here. Howards End very clearly advocates for empathy with its “only connect” tagline, questions the obligations of those with money by literally having a dinner party where alternatives are acted out, and shows a kind of class striation and conflict that is still uneasily present today in the UK and elsewhere. As a work, its sympathies are not just “liberal” in the sense that most books are because authors generally have to care about at least some people or they wouldn’t bother writing about them – it is liberal in the sense that a reader today who doesn’t agree with that particular sets of views will probably find themselves feeling attacked and yet unable to dismiss the book as being of another time as one might with, say, a feminist novel of the 1860s. That is its strangeness.

None of this makes great literature, however. I came away from Howards End disappointed in it, but I think in my disappointment I have found an interesting thread to expand on in this post. This book’s politics are unmissable, for good or ill, and they are important to Forster, or else he would not have written the book. But just how he presents his theme, the way he arranges and explores it through his characters, is full of choices. Here I find decisions of focus, narrative, and characterisation, that I cannot help but fault. What is more, I suspect Forster would agree. For connected to the novel’s politics is also a kind of conscious crisis of representation – the story itself is in strain – as the narrator practically admits of the difficulty of writing his theme with the toolset of an Edwardian novelist. 

The Plot

Howards End is the story of the Schlegel family, in particular its two eldest children, the daughters Margaret and Helen. They are middle class in that hugely spacious definition of it current somewhere like the UK. Each has what today would be about one million pounds in the bank, according to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator – enough, in the 1900s, to live without working, but not quite enough to feel fully at ease. Though living in England, they are half-German, hence the name. Their father was first a soldier with the Prussians, then a philosopher of sorts, before he moved and settled in England. His name is a slight unsubtlety – a real Schlegel was an idealist philosopher in the early 19th century, and “idealist” is the word we might use to describe Margaret, Helen, and their younger brother Tibby. Without obligation to live in the world, the sisters are free to philosophise upon it at little gatherings of their friends and their brother free to enjoy the abstractions of beautiful music.

There is another world, however – the world of “anger and telegrams”. This is the world of the Wilcox family, with its patriarch Henry, scion Charles, daughter Evie and colony-bound Paul. The Wilcoxes are also middle class, (apologies to my international readers), albeit far wealthier than the Schlegels due to their involvement in business. Having met the Schlegels on a tour of Germany, the two families are later brought together by fate and chance within England itself.

The final family is the Basts, Leonard and Jenny. They are poor, but still in a way middle class too. (The narrator notes: “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.”) Leonard works as a clerk, which allows him some purchase above “the abyss” of true poverty, but as the novel progresses that abyss gets closer and closer. Jenny, meanwhile, is crude and childish. However, an experience in her past connects her to the Wilcoxes, just as Leonard’s accidental acquaintance with the Schlegels, via a misplaced umbrella, brings him into their world. In this way, Forster sets up the Schlegels to act as a balancing point between the two extremes of their class, and sets the stage for a conflict between them, one involving all the usual things we expect of an English novel – marriage, love, and property.

The Brilliance of a Missing Name

Our introduction to Leonard Bast comes in the novel’s fifth chapter, when all the Schlegels, including a relative from Germany, are gathered to listen to a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. This chapter is one of the novel’s best, because it manages to use not just this event as a way of delivering its themes, but also its very form. For a novel about the importance of connecting, Howards End tells us exactly how everyone responds in a different and hence disconnected way to the music: the Schlegel’s aunt taps, Helen visualises a heroic conflict, Margaret hears music, Tibby follows the score on his knee, and their German cousin thinks patriotically of how Beethoven was German. It is not quite a cycling of free minds, as in say, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, but it is still usefully weightless narration.

This, however, is not what makes the chapter good. What does that is the presentation of Leonard. Margaret, socially minded as ever, has been speaking to “some young man”. Later, after the next few pieces of music this man interrupts the Schlegels to say that Helen (who had just run off, overwhelmed by the music), has taken his umbrella. His awkwardness is obvious – he had “for some time been preparing a sentence.” Margaret helpfully gives him their address, but he suspects instead some hidden deceit. “To trust people is a luxury only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it,” begins the narrator. We learn how “the young man” had been the victim of confidence tricksters in the past, and how it has made him wary. The Schlegels, learning instead from their father, view every deceit as “rent.” “Rent to the ideal” of a society where we trust one another, that is.

The young man comes home with them to collect his umbrella, but does not stay for tea. He is forgotten, except as a memory of another world, of how “beneath these superstructures of wealth and art there wanders an ill-fed boy, who has recovered his umbrella indeed, but who has left no address behind him, and no name.” This ending makes explicit what has given the chapter its force: not once is Leonard named. He is both forcibly a character in the sense that he physically occupies space, yet forcibly denied that most basic right of character – an identity instead of a mere description. It seems to me that this is the most interesting moment of the whole novel, because in the denial (which only lasts a chapter) we see reflected an attitude relevant to the work as a whole. This strange clerk, this young man, does not seem to matter. He does not matter to the people talking to him, even if politically he might be on their side, and Forster chooses to let this come across in the text. That the text both draws our attention to this, then reveals his name in the next chapter, serves a simple purpose – it shames us into realising how easy it is to think nothing of another human life.

A story told with the wrong tools

With the comment earlier about the text’s refusal to depict “the poor” there’s the clearest indication from the narrator there’s some kind of representational crisis afoot alongside all the other crises of the early 20th century, such as changing demographics (“our race is degenerating”, the progressive Margaret remarks) and the threat of war. The problem is that even if the narrator is uncomfortable with his telling, he cannot quite see the solutions that will come to change the face of literature only a few years later. Structurally, Howards End is as conservative as its politics are liberal. Even if we have advanced beyond the days of Turgenev or Austen, when the story must end with a harmonious marriage, Howards End still ends with its shadow – domestic happiness and stability at last achieved. So much, so acceptable – happy endings do happen.

What I find much harder to accept is the role of chance in Howards End, which substitutes for the representation of tragedy by other means. That Leonard Bast might make the acquaintance of the Schlegels at a concert is possible. That his wife might have become a fallen woman thanks to Henry Wilcox while he was visiting a business concern of his in Cyprus some ten years previously is too much. Chance becomes unfair when the reader feels they are not being taken seriously. Howards End reminded me a little of Hardy, who seemed in The Mayor of Casterbridge to enjoy the action of hurting his characters more than he cared for the point he was trying to make. I don’t believe Forster did have any great love of scandal, which makes his choices even more absurd to me.

What is so bad about Jenny’s history with Henry is that it is utterly pointless within the story. The reveal takes place some two-thirds of the way through the book at the wedding of Henry Wilcox’s daughter Evie, a time of conspicuous consumption and general opulence. Into this place arrives Helen, bringing the Bast couple, who are destitute following Leonard’s loss of his job. Leonard and Henry have already met, briefly, at the Schlegel’s. Following Henry’s offhand suggestion at that time that Leonard look for another job the richer man has caused, inadvertently, the latter’s stumble towards his abyss. To accuse Henry of responsibility for another man’s fall the text need do precisely nothing, for the matter is clear already.

Adding guilt for a crime committed in the past, about which there is no prior evidence or indication in the text, merely cheapens all this. (If anything, Henry is depicted as made uncomfortable by the idea of sex, which makes the incident harder, not easier, to believe.) If we want to comment, as I believe Forster does, upon the unfairness of economic outcomes, then the contrast of starving Basts and feasting Wilcoxes is entirely sufficient. Further, if it is moral intrigue that we want, then Margaret (engaged to Henry), forced into the morally unpleasant position of attacking her sister for her “theatrical nonsense” in bringing the two uninvited guests to the party, provides drama enough. This is psychology, rather than scandal, and all the more interesting.  

In other words, Forster lacks subtlety here. Or rather, he’s capable of it, but allows unsubtle moments such as this into the plot at key moments. Through events like the running-over of a dog in the Wilcoxes’ motorcar and their response to it, (“the insurance company will see to that”), their attitudes and carelessness are skewered well enough.

The novel’s finale is another moment involving the Basts where Forster seems to prefer silly action to serious subtlety. After Margaret’s rejection of the Basts at the wedding, in a moment of rage and confusion, Helen sleeps with Leonard while his wife is in bed next door. This is reasonably plausible if we assume more alcohol than was previously mentioned was involved. Helen becomes pregnant from the encounter and with still more confused emotions leaves England for the continent. After some time and concerned by her sister’s lack of contact, Margaret devises a plan with Henry to catch Helen at Howards End, where the family books are now being stored. Helen arrives, Margaret and she meet, and they decide to spend one night together before Helen departs again. Meanwhile, Leonard, who has been living for the past few months by cadging money off family members, decides he must see Margaret to confess. Hot-tempered Charles also heads to Howards End, to get Margaret away and back to her husband.

When Charles sees Leonard, the cause of his sister-in-law’s shameful pregnancy, his response is to whack him over the head with the Schlegel’s sword. (The blunt side.) Leonard falls over and is crushed by a bookcase he bumps on the way down. He does not get up. The aspiring upper middle class murders the descending lower middle class – one cannot get more direct than that! But one certainly should be less direct. Leonard doesn’t need to die at all. A life of despair, as Leonard watches his family gradually give him less and less money until he becomes truly desperate, would be far worse. It would also serve the book’s key message, “only connect”, far better, by showing how he was slowly disconnecting from everything. Instead, at the novel’s end, it’s an attempt to connect that he dies, which certainly makes Charles look bad, but is far less impactful as a political message of the sort the novel seems to want to make.

In other words, it’s not just that the drama is silly, it’s that it is cheaper, less interesting, than the alternative. Margaret’s divided loyalty between her husband and her sister is much more morally meaty than having her be divided over her husband’s unbelievable indiscretion from before they ever met. Charles’ failure in life is much better depicted in the scraps of his home life that we see – his too many children, his too small prosperity, and his anxiousness over his own class position – than through having him become a murderer. And finally, Leonard’s abjection is far more interesting than his poor heart. In other words, I am trying to say something like – more Chekhov is needed. As he well knew, drowning, slipping into the wrong life and having no idea how to escape it, is far more horrible – and relevant to our own existences – than scandal.

Conclusion

Howards End is an accomplished novel. The pieces fit together, the characters exist reasonably well, the theme reaches the reader without too much difficulty. The rich remain so, the poor suffer, and those in the middle muddle along, maybe with a bit of mental torment but no real difficulties. Its strength is its articulateness – its discussions feel forceful in the way that only discussions felt as part of a tradition can do – and in many of its subtleties and images, such as the “rent” to the ideal of trust. Yet overall, I think it is ruined by structural decisions that devalue the effort Forster clearly put into his more subtle comments. If it had been published not in 1910, but say, 1924, as was A Passage to India, or even later, perhaps Forster would have had more opportunities to tell his story more effectively. He might have read Woolf’s “The Russian Point of View”, for example, and realised all the options he had missed.

As it stands, this is a strange work. It’s so modern in its sympathies, so outdated in its approach, that the overall effect is of a contemporary novel by a new writer who hasn’t yet mastered their craft.

For more ambivalent comments on Forster, I’ve written on Maurice here