How to Read an Aphorism

The aphorism, that snippet of wit and wisdom, is not a prose form I imagine many of us encounter regularly these days. It is primarily French in origin, with its most celebrated practitioner being the moralist François de La Rochefoucauld. I myself first encountered it through Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ill-health meant he could only focus long enough to put down a paragraph or two before needing to cool his brains, and who was happy to take any influence provided it wasn’t German. Both of these men are long dead; just as dead can the aphoristic form itself strike us as being.

An aphorism is a sentence or two, maybe at most a few paragraphs, on whatever takes the author’s fancy. They are philosophical, in that they are driven by ideas, but never system-building. If you wanted to build, you would write an essay, not scatter fragments like seeds. To write an aphorism, you must typically believe against something. In Theodor Adorno (in Minima Moralia) or Nietzsche’s cases, this “against” is a dislike for significant portions of the world they lived in. In the case of the French-language Romanian thinker Emil Cioran, it’s a dislike of nearly all the world he lived in, indeed of life itself. The typical impression of an aphorism is of witnessing someone engaged in a futile conflict with a great edifice, an elegant swordsman stabbing at the cold stone of castle walls.

Prejudice is often necessary to the aphorism, and it is precisely this which makes the form seem challenging to imagine writing today. An infamous one by Nietzsche, “You go to women – do not forget the whip”, provides an example. On the one hand, it conveys succinctly the importance of power dynamics for Nietzsche to his reader, but on the other it is reliant upon a (male) reader who is happy to take sexist ideas without question. The more prejudices we attempt today to dissolve – on race, gender, nation – the more we lose that centre of common understanding which an aphorism can work with. Nietzsche may dislike much of the modern world, but he needs it there to make his points. The best aphorisms are short, but brevity is enabled by us being able to recognise the world, the idea, for ourselves.

Prejudice and the absence of a system are not the only things that are needful to the aphorist. The most important is an overwhelming sense of one’s own importance and, of course, correctness. We shouldn’t underestimate how rare this actually is. Writers, especially of fiction, are uniquely predisposed to consider themselves great geniuses – but they are also typically wracked with self-doubts. In the case of fiction a creator typically believes in the merits of each work as a whole, rather than every aspect of it. Philosophers and other thinkers may likewise be utterly convinced that their key ideas are right, yet ready to deny themselves the megalomania that sees their every thought as being worthy of a crown of laurels.

For the aphorist, it is not so. Your ideas in your aphorisms range widely, and you must believe each one to be totally correct and worth sharing. In other words, you must be willing to assert to yourself and the world that you are a polymath, a rare genius. Such arrogance is another reason why few aphoristic books are being written and published today – the people truly arrogant enough to produce such a book are too busy in politics or leading large companies. This is why, to a certain extent, for the modern aphorism, we should look to social media, because it is here that we hear the select thoughts of those who believe the entire universe needs to hear them, compressed into the shortform.

We need arrogance because to doubt, for an aphorist, is fatal. Since an aphorism rarely has time to give examples, let alone argue, it works by the beauty of its prose and the power of its emotions to persuade us to its view. (“Logic and sermons never convince, / The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul” wrote Walt Whitman, whose poems are often filled with aphoristic little moments.) Since this is the case, to show doubt is to undermine everything you write – if you doubt, the reader will have cause to also. Regardless of the arrogance noted above, the aphorists I have read seem to be human, and no freer ultimately from self-questioning than the rest of us. Not showing it, then, is the thing.

This tension between feeling and revealing becomes part of the excitement of reading aphorisms. I think one of the best ways into reading someone like Cioran or Nietzsche is to think of their works as collectively constituting a work of fiction, complete with a highly opinionated narrative voice trying to get our attention and our trust. One of our goals becomes, as it is when we read fiction, the analysis of this narrative voice, the pinning down of its consistencies and inconsistencies, and identifying those moments when it seems to be hiding something from us that may yet prove essential. In many cases we can read a book of aphorisms looking for the gaps between the mask and the man – and it is normally a man – and not feel our time has been entirely wasted.

All of the above is a kind of defence of the aphorism and its writer. But this does not, really, get us any closer to reading or enjoying reading the things. Here I can only speak for myself, those things I noticed that helped me in a recent attempt at this.

The experience of reading a book of aphorisms is strange because it neither asks us to keep a thread of argument in mind, as does a typical non-fiction work, nor asks us to remember characters and stories as does a work of fiction. Yet memory is vital to the aphorism. “There are some words that hit like hammers. But others / You swallow like hooks and swim on and yet do not know it.” We ought to replace Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “words” with “aphorisms” to get an idea of the role of memory in reading aphorisms. We must read to remember. The startling thing, for me, when I read Cioran, or even Nietzsche (a writer I much prefer), is how so many of the aphorisms do nothing for me. I read them and shrug to myself. But if we remember them, they will return to us, and if they are good aphorisms they will return to us at precisely that moment when they can best reveal their value and hidden truth to us. To someone in the habit of letting the words one reads leave their head as soon as they move onto the next sentence there’s almost no point reading the aphorisms at all.

To say that we have to read to remember hints at the importance we need to place in ourselves as readers. Just as the aphorist cannot show doubt, the reader of aphorisms must believe she will one day be receptive to them. The faith, the confidence, must be on both sides. To give up a book of aphorisms as we may give up a novel damns us as much as it damns the aphorist, for in doing this we say, in effect, that we believe we will never have the right frame of mind, that we are incapable of the receptivity needed for appreciating what is in front of us. That we are fixed, and dull, and heavy of spirit.

Such were my thoughts, anyway, as I wondered whether to write about Emil Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born. I finished it last week, and had thought it would get no blog post. There was too little underlining, too few thoughts of my own to work with. That strange aphoristic rhythm – where we read page after page before suddenly gasping at something of beauty, or wit, or profundity – was not doing anything for me. Cioran, who has found a posthumous popularity among the anti-natalist community, (“Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one’s reach”), is relentlessly negative in a way that I try to avoid adopting for myself.

Only occasionally would I reach for my pencil. “No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive” – certainly a silly view, but one well expressed. At one point he describes mankind as “fidget[ing] as if he were on the threshold of an astonishing career.” These things we can respect for their imagery, even as we chuckle from beyond the margin. (Just as Adorno wrote that there can be “no right life in the wrong”, there can be no good aphorism in wrong prose.)

Other moments required more consideration at my end. “There is no ‘ecstasy’ which either memory or imagination can resuscitate!” seems frightening in its implications about the value of our moments, and for that reason worth carrying about, seeking in life the evidence that may one day disprove it. “The jealousy of the gods survives their disappearance” is another good example of something that works for me. Even if there are no gods, nor ever were, such a phrase by its mystery makes me wonder about their value in trying to explain something about the world I live in. Just flicking through the book now, I have come across another thing to note, as if to prove my point about needing to find the right time, the right inner receptivity, for what at another moment may be so many dead words. (What a relief to find something I wrote at the beginning of this post makes sense, at least for my own case…) The aphorism in question: “Every friendship is an inconspicuous drama, a series of subtle wounds.” Here, it’s less a question of whether I agree, but whether this provokes something. Perhaps that’s another good way of looking at an aphorism – each successful one seems to carry in itself the seed of any number of novels.

Perhaps the hardest thing about aphorisms is writing about them. They ought to speak for themselves. At school I might be given one and told to go away and write 1,500 words, the length of a short blog post on this website. But to write, as I normally do, a few paragraphs on each of the above, would make me look like an idiot. (This result may occur by accident at other times, but is not the intention of the blog.) I trust readers to know how to unpack the obvious meanings of a saying. And as for the deeper meanings, the ones that come out of the wound an aphorism leaves in us – these are too personal for me to share, and I imagine are just the same for you too.

They are strange things, aphorisms. These sentences of prejudice, arrogance, at times barely-concealed anxiousness, sometimes resonating, sometimes aggravating, sometimes doing nothing at all. I wrote the first part of this post in an attempt to make myself believe the time I spent with Cioran (not the first, because I read A Short History of Decay a few years ago) was not wasted, and with the magic that is granted me as your blogger, I somehow succeeded. Reflection added meanings, brought a certain sense to stacks of nonsense. Cioran himself writes of his form: “An Aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.” This is a deliberate silliness, one we shouldn’t take too seriously. A mask, a play, an act.

We don’t read such things to become warm. As Kafka wrote of good books, they must “be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” Aphorisms are for when we are cold. They are the prick of pain that tells us we’re alive, and we must keep a store of them inside us, just in case the ice is ever at risk of getting too thick.  

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