SOURCE: Schneidau, Herbert N. “Safe as Houses: Forster as Cambridge Anthropologist.” In Waking Giants: The Presence of the Past in Modernism, pp. 64-102. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

[In the following essay, Schneidau explores the ways in which Howards End evidences “autochthony,” or “an ideology of sacred space,” as symbolized by the house Howards End.]

Can what they call civilization be right, if people mayn't die in the room where they were born?

—Ruth Wilcox

Many agree with Lionel Trilling that Howards End is “undoubtedly Forster's masterpiece.”¹A Passage to India, written much later, may have reached a wider audience, partly because of the topicality of its antiracist and anticolonialist sentiments, and of course Forster enthusiasts can make cases even for the earlier works. But for those interested in the twentieth-century novel, this creation of “1908-1910” counts as a high-water mark for Forster and the genre. The British novel just before the Great War attained a level it has not, in general, reached again, and the best novels of the 1920s were written by those who had attained maturity and mastery before 1914. The War harrowed English sensibilities and sent several of its writers into spiritual exile, ironically imitating James Joyce's prewar remove. Their later works belong to International Modernism, not British literature. There was no surge in the number of new British writers after 1918, as in American, because those writers who stayed at home had trouble assimilating Modernism and especially could not embrace Ulysses, its pivotal work. Even Virginia Woolf called it the book of a “queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples,” a remark that says nothing about Joyce but tells all about the mental paradigms of Bloomsbury.²

By 1918 the urge toward uncompromising “truth telling,” the frankest possible presentations of social and sexual issues, was overpowering. The War in its official version (no photos or veridical reports had been allowed from the front), and the society out of which it had grown, were nothing but “old lies and new infamy.”³ This too figures in the ascendancy of the American novel and the stasis of the British: for the former, the uncensored aspect of Modernist writing was congenial to its prophetic-puritanic impulses, while the circumlocutory preferences of the latter, typified by Forster's genteel evasions in matters of sexuality, seemed dated or even duplicitous. Here again A Passage to India seems belated, and perhaps the years of novelistic silence before and after it appeared were Forster's tribute money to the presiding spirits of a world that had passed him by. Moreover, Forster's methods did not conform to Flaubertian and Jamesian proscriptions of authorial “comment.” Indeed Forster revelled in addresses to “dear readers.”

Forster and Modernism were thus sundered by powerful forces and beliefs. But in a cautious way he prefigured the world of Joyce and the others, in his deployment of what T. S. Eliot would later call, in regard to Ulysses, the “mythical method.”⁴ The parallels with mythological episodes in Howards End do not call attention to themselves, and there are few obviously classical motifs in the novel, in contrast to Forster's earlier works. But Forster does dramatize, through the motifs of the house and the land around it, an ideology that we can call that of sacred space, or autochthony, that is, the belief that spiritual powers, which Forster reticently calls “the unseen,” inhere not in heavens or in ethereal forms but in the earth; that they are beings, incarnate in landforms or dwellings or tombs; and that they forcefully affect even godless lives. In many tribal societies, powers such as conception are credited not solely to sexual intercourse but to ancestral spirits who reside in groves, rocks, trees, and the like. Such was the legacy of autochthony, and it persisted into Hellenistic culture in the cult of the genius loci, the spirit of place.⁵ After this, it became merely “poetic.” Forster wants us to suspend disbelief; without going over into fantasy, he wants it to occur to us that these archaic beliefs are true in ways that we, under the dominance of materialist heritages, cannot acknowledge. He means to persuade us to lower our skeptical guards and to take literally such offhand metaphors as Margaret Schlegel's “‘Houses are alive. No?’” For in the story the house is alive—it has a heart, and in a revelatory moment the heart is heard beating—and the land too lives: “England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas.”⁶ In context, Forster always gives us the chance to write off such remarks as characters' or author's “fancies,” but the totality of the design makes it clear that he intends a “logic of the imagination” to work on us, so that the figures have a cumulative or accretive effect. His personal beliefs are of course not necessarily determinative of the novel's imaginative structure, but he did want to be known as one who had tried various spiritual adventures, and his Clapham Sect ancestors revisited him in the form of an ambition to be a spiritual mentor to his age.

Most of the criticism on Howards End has centered on “personal relations,” on the epigraph “only connect” and the other mottoes that cue a reading of the work as a bourgeois-liberal drama. “Panic and emptiness,” “telegrams and anger,” and other phrases are used by the Schlegel sisters to signal their rejection, whether contemptuous or forgiving, of the way of life represented by the Wilcoxes: domineering, crass, impersonal, and complacent; life by the code of the successful businessman and the dutiful colonial, highminded and coarsegrained. Here they are businessmen, in A Passage to India colonials; Forster may have said that he wanted to “connect” with such people, but he really wanted to stamp them out. In any case the book is not simply a tragicomedy of manners. “The personal” in this work is absorbed and eventually eclipsed by the drama of “the unseen”; the salvageable characters are separated out from the hopelessly obtuse by their intermittent insights into this development, which in turn involves dim awareness—all that any of them are ever vouchsafed—of the theme of autochthony.⁷

Trilling's elegant reading of the book on the social level is now several decades old but remains typical in many ways. He regrets the “mythical fantasy” of Forster's early stories, remarking that “surely the Greek myths made too deep an impression on Forster,” and regrets further the persistence of these elements into the earlier novels. The implication is that Howards End advances beyond these by subordinating the mythical elements, reducing them to the dominant social criticism. The truth in this is that the autochthonic theme is implicitly critical of the modern consciousness, but it is misleading to imply that myth is subordinated: actually, it is less obvious but more pervasive. Moreover, Trilling supposes that the motifs of house and land are essentially political.

Howards End is a novel about England's fate. … England herself appears in the novel in palpable form. The symbol for England is the house whose name gives the title to the book. Like the plots of so many English novels, the plot of Howards End is about the rights of property, about a destroyed will-and-testament and rightful and wrongful heirs. It asks the question, “Who shall inherit England?”⁸

Trilling insufficiently signals his irony. Not only might the unwary suppose that Schlegel liberalism is an adequate answer to Wilcox crudeness, but to frame the question legalistically is wholly inconsonant. The novel asks, “Is it credible that the possessions of the spirit can be bequeathed at all?” (pp. 98-99) The concept of “rights of property” is firmly associated with the Wilcox mentality; and when the odious Charles Wilcox goes to prison for killing a man, his sentence grossly misrepresents the situation: but “the law, being made in his image,” (p. 334) is incapable of truth.

Forster does labor to make us fear that Wilcox ideals will overwhelm the modern world, but as for inheriting Howards End, the Wilcoxes were never in the running. They are too stupid and insensitive, and are easily outmaneuvered by the powers immanent in house and land. They are caricatures whose genial or generous moments are somehow the results of misapprehension (except for those female Wilcoxes who “marry in” and are thus not real ones), and projects to “connect” with them are absurdly misplaced charity, at best. Forster's inveterate tendency was to practice novelistic overkill against the type of Englishman he feared and resented: clubbable, self-possessed, aggressively conventional. He will set up such a figure and then kill him off quickly and painfully—the revenge of the timid, sensitive, bullied schoolboy, which Forster remained to the end of his life.⁹ The Wilcoxes are so grotesque that we may miss the fact that the Schlegel nostrums for progress and social change are likewise caricatures. The sisters are saved only because their openness gives more scope to the force of “the unseen.”

In thus dramatizing mythological themes, Forster connects not only with Modernism in general but specifically provides a link between his friend Hardy and his other friend (despite plebeian origins) D. H. Lawrence, in whose works the whole idea flowered rather showily. For Forster it was thus “in the air.” His years at Cambridge are best known for his membership in the Apostles and for other friendships that prefigured the Bloomsbury mystique, but his education in classics also enticed him with its promise of recovering a lost world and turning it into a merely misplaced one. He may even have heard something of Jane Harrison and the other Cambridge anthropologists, though he never manifested firsthand knowledge. In a sense his work uncannily recapitulates Harrison's discovery that underneath the Olympian pantheon there was a layer of chthonic, local traditions, cults, and numens of place.¹⁰ The goal of Howards End was even more ambitiously revisionist than was Harrison's: he aimed to change not only our understanding of ancient religions but also our thinking about the nature of our lives and their relation to the earth on which they are carried out.

The grandiosity of these ambitions and their thematic conceptualizations surely gave Forster pause, and hesitancies appear even in the famous diffident opening: “One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.” This effete tone—“Oh dear yes, the novel tells a story”—betrays Forster's fear of seeming “hearty,” unforgivable in British gentility with its decayed ideal of sprezzatura: “A country in love with amateurs … where the incompetent have such beautiful manners,” as Ezra Pound put it.¹¹ Forster like other well-bred Englishmen disguises his own seriousness, so that the first episodes are dominated by the sisters' goodhearted playfulness and by the comic distractions of Aunt Juley, the interfering relative whose blunders land both families in an awkward misunderstanding. When Helen Schlegel and Paul Wilcox tryst—Helen being perversely attracted to Wilcox manliness—Aunt Juley and Charles Wilcox, Paul's older brother, turn the affair into a shouting match, a “game of Capping Families, a round of which is always played when love would unite two members of our race. But they played it with unusual vigour, stating in so many words that Schlegels were better than Wilcoxes, Wilcoxes better than Schlegels. They flung decency aside” (p. 21). These early pages of sub-Wildean farce are disguise, distraction, sleight-of-hand; Forster is already insinuating hints that will open out as the story progresses and especially as we reread. The very first pages of the book are disguised as an inconsequential letter from Helen to her sister Margaret, describing the house and its trees and grounds, but every detail comes to be part of the book's spiritual pattern. The letter introduces the person Helen cannot know is the presiding genius of the place, Ruth Wilcox, nee Ruth Howard at Howards End, later prevented from dying there only by her husband's habitual insensitivity and underhandedness (p. 283):

This long letter is because I'm writing before breakfast. Oh, the beautiful vine leaves! The house is covered with a vine. I looked out earlier, and Mrs. Wilcox was already in the garden. She evidently loves it. No wonder she sometimes looks tired [later we learn that she was dying even at this time]. She was watching the large red poppies come out. Then she walked off the lawn to the meadow, whose corner to the right I can just see. Trail, trail, went her long dress over the sopping grass, and she came back with her hands full of the hay that was cut yesterday—I suppose for rabbits or something, as she kept on smelling it.

(p. 4)

The smelling of the hay, like her lack of concern for her dress, is symbolic of Mrs. Wilcox's affinity for the earth, and in the final chapter the Schlegel sisters enact half-consciously her bequeathed awareness: the chapter is framed by an opening in which the “sacred centre” (p. 335) of the hay field is about to be harvested, and an ending in which Helen says more than she knows: “‘The field's cut!’ Helen cried excitedly—‘the big meadow! We've seen to the very end, and it'll be such a crop of hay as never!’” (p. 343) The “very end” is not only the end of the book but also a long perspective that looks back through and past time, all the way back to the eternal present of ancient man and la pensée sauvage, which Forster calls “the Now” (p. 249, cf. pp. 315, 323). Thus the hay participates in a double framing, of the last chapter and of the book, and it identifies the first appearance of Ruth Wilcox in Helen's letter as the theophany of Demeter: the hay is her cereal icon. Demeter was Forster's favorite mythological figure, who “alone among gods has true immortality.”¹² The hay reappears so often that critics who do not grasp autochthony find it obtrusive—Mrs. Wilcox is said to be “a wisp of hay, a flower” (p. 74)—and at the climax the same phrase refers to “death” (p. 330). She therefore represents fructifying, sacrificial death, and in that sense plays the role of Persephone as well as that of Demeter: she disappears to emerge in renewed forms of life, organic and inorganic. She is incarnate in the house and field as well as some of the characters, notably Margaret Schlegel, who becomes “Mrs. Wilcox” and is pointedly so addressed at the end, even by the defeated, hostile Wilcoxes themselves.

Not surprisingly, the real Wilcoxes all have hay fever. Helen's letter continues:

Later on I heard the noise of croquet balls, and looked out again, and it was Charles Wilcox practising; they are keen on all games. Presently he started sneezing and had to stop. Then I hear more clicketing, and it is Mr. Wilcox practising, and then, “a-tissue, a-tissue”: he has to stop too. Then Evie comes out, and does some calisthenic exercises on a machine that is tacked on to a greengage-tree—they put everything to use—and then she says “a-tissue,” and in she goes. And finally Mrs. Wilcox reappears, trail, trail, still smelling hay and looking at the flowers.

(p. 4)

Much later the book's sibyl, old Miss Avery, cackles maliciously at the thought of the Wilcox hay fever. “There's not one Wilcox that can stand up against a field in June—I laughed fit to burst while he [Henry] was courting Ruth. … This house lies too much on the land for them” (p. 273).

To the Wilcoxes, Howards End is merely an ungainly and useless property—“‘one of those converted farms. They don't really do, spend what you will on them,’” says Henry Wilcox (p. 135)—and they hold on to it only from a grasping instinct. That the house has been in the Howard family for generations means nothing to Henry; for him it is hay fever and problems. To Ruth, on the other hand, it is “a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir” (p. 98), and her “one passion … the Holy of Holies” (p. 85), though she herself understands this only vaguely and nonintellectually. Throughout she is characterized as dim, evasive, and remote, out of focus with the everyday and the material, although loving and generous and above all majestic. She is in short a figure from another world. Her wisdom comes from atavism, from the voices of her ancestors sounding in her brain (as in Julian Jaynes's theories of “schizophrenic” ancient man).¹³ When Aunt Juley and her son Charles have quarreled bitterly at “Capping Families,” she settles all, first defusing Charles's efforts to play inquisitor:

“Paul, is there any truth in this?”

“I didn't—I don't—”

“Yes or no, man; plain question, plain answer. Did or didn't Miss Schlegel—”

“Charles dear,” said a voice from the garden. “Charles, dear Charles, one doesn't ask plain questions. There aren't such things.”

They were all silent. It was Mrs. Wilcox.

She approached just as Helen's letter had described her, trailing noiselessly over the lawn, and there was actually a wisp of hay in her hands. She seemed to belong not to the young people and their motor, but to the house, and to the tree that overshadowed it. One knew that she worshipped the past, and that the instinctive wisdom the past can alone bestow had descended upon her—that wisdom to which we give the clumsy name of aristocracy. High-born she might not be. But assuredly she cared about her ancestors, and let them help her. When she saw Charles angry, Paul frightened, and Mrs. Munt [“Aunt Juley”] in tears, she heard her ancestors say: “Separate those human beings who will hurt each other most. The rest can wait.”

(p. 22)

Her instincts contrast vividly not only with her family's obtuseness but also with Aunt Juley's self-satisfaction and itch to interfere. After the contretemps,

Mrs. Munt soon recovered. She possessed to a remarkable degree the power of distorting the past, and before many days were over she had forgotten the part played by her own imprudence in the catastrophe. Even at the crisis she had cried: “Thank goodness, poor Margaret is saved this!” which during the journey to London evolved into: “It had to be gone through by someone,” which in its turn ripened into the permanent form of: “The one time I really did help Emily's girls was over the Wilcox business.”

(p. 23)

So it is delicious irony that we are introduced to still more symbols of “the unseen” through this unseeing person. On her train trip to the village where Howards End stands, “a series of tiled and slated houses passed before Mrs. Munt's inattentive eyes, a series broken at one point by six Danish tumuli that stood shoulder to shoulder along the highroad, tombs of soldiers” (p. 15). These mounds, called the Six Hills, grow in significance as the novel progresses, and link the landscape's eternal “Now” with the historic past. Margaret Schlegel responds to the Six Hills with instinctive admiration: “Beneath them she settled that soldiers of the best kind lay buried. She hated war and liked soldiers—it was one of her amiable inconsistencies” (p. 198).¹⁴ She looks often at them, “tombs of warriors, breasts of the spring” (p. 309). At the crisis of the book, she is sitting on the “glebe,” all that is left of the old farmland: “Henry's kind had filched most of it. She moved to the scrap opposite, wherein were the Six Hills.” When Henry confesses to her that the Wilcoxes have been utterly defeated, “Margaret drove her fingers through the grass. The hill beneath her moved as if it was alive” (pp. 333-34).¹⁵ They symbolize the renewing vitality of the earth, again uniting life and a fructifying death. In another connection, Forster notes another local “myth”: “Six forest trees—that is a fact—grow out of one of the graves in Tewin churchyard. The grave's occupant—that is the legend—is an atheist, who declared that if God existed six forest trees would grow out of her grave” (p. 323). If we share the Wilcox mentality, we stick to facts. Henry writes off the Six Hills with a passing remark: “‘Curious mounds,’ said Henry, ‘but in with you now; another time’” (p. 204). He is handing Margaret into his “motor” and has no leisure for tourist speculations, but his “another time” is of course a major dramatic irony: he does not know that he is evoking what he himself so grievously lacks, the sense of the Past, the sense that the modern “restless civilization” that seems to him the telos of all the ages is simply a phase in the real life of the earth. For Wilcoxes the time is always out of joint, but they like Mrs. Munt are fatuously unaware of it, “incapable of grouping the past” (p. 259). Henry's “mental states became obscure as soon as he had passed through them” (p. 178).

Forster works many more landscape details, such as trees with “healing powers” and other legendary attributes, into his mosaic of the living land and house, but these examples should suffice; the others can easily be tallied if we reread the book with open minds to what the text pointedly says. The cumulative effect of the motifs is an interesting adaptation of the literary impressionism that is more familiarly associated with Ford and Conrad: it requires us to pay attention to minute details, to remember motifs, to put them together by looking again and again, varying our perspectives.¹⁶ As in pointillisme the details can hardly be seen for what they really are until they cohere into Gestalten. Forster's techniques culminate in scenes that suddenly irradiate many details with revelatory significance. Possibly the best managed is the entry of Margaret, after years of strange delays and frustrations, into Howards End. She is not consciously aware that she is entering a sacred space, but is unaccountably moved by the landscape as she stands on the porch. A Hardyesque “fancy” pops into her mind: “How Helen would revel in such a notion! Charles dead, all people dead, nothing alive but houses and gardens. The obvious dead, the intangible alive, and—no connection at all between them! Margaret smiled” (p. 200). Then the house opens itself up to her, though it had seemed locked to Henry (he's gone to get the key), and she enters full of “fancies” she doesn't grasp, like Adela Quested going into the Marabar caves.

She paced back into the hall, and as she did so the house reverberated.

“Is that you, Henry?” she called.

There was no answer, but the house reverberated again.

“Henry, have you got in?”

But it was the heart of the house beating, faintly at first, then loudly, martially. It dominated the rain.

It is the starved imagination, not the well-nourished, that is afraid. Margaret flung open the door to the stairs. A noise as of drums seemed to deafen her. A woman, an old woman, was descending, with figure erect, with face impassive, with lips that parted and said dryly:

“Oh! Well, I took you for Ruth Wilcox.”

Margaret stammered: “I—Mrs. Wilcox—I?”

“In fancy, of course—in fancy. You had her way of walking. Good day.” And the old woman passed out into the rain.

(pp. 201-2)

Forster has designed the scene so that with the words old woman we are ready for a ghost: “‘Did you take her for a spook?’” asks the crude but insightful Dolly Wilcox in the next chapter (p. 202). In consequence, the line, “‘I took you for Ruth Wilcox’” might have confused Margaret even more than first appears, because it voices her own reaction to the descending figure. This is no spook but the “eccentric” Miss Avery. The momentary confusion is expertly planned: the three women instinctively share much, and at this point their identities actually interpenetrate. Margaret, we learn, was “clutching a bunch of weeds” (p. 202) when she saw the apparition. Near the end of the book, Margaret—by then being called “Mrs. Wilcox”—senses an even more comprehensive incarnation.

“I feel that you [Helen] and I and Henry are only fragments of that woman's mind. She knows everything. She is everything. She is the house, and the tree that leans over it. People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness. I cannot believe that knowledge such as hers will perish with knowledge such as mine. She knew about realities. She knew when people were in love [Helen and Paul], though she was not in the room. I don't doubt that she knew when Henry deceived her.”

“Good night, Mrs. Wilcox,” called a voice.

“Oh, good night, Miss Avery.”

(pp. 313-14)

The oracular, disembodied voice of Miss Avery, who also “knows everything,” emphasizes the interpenetration of Margaret and Ruth Wilcox, but she is included. In fact, the vagueness of the antecedents in Margaret's sentences gestures toward her.

By the end of the book, Margaret even acts and speaks like Ruth Wilcox, settling disputes and muddles with instinctive, atavistic generosity rather than with her earlier Schlegel liberalism, which tends to victimize its legatees. On being praised for this by Helen, she says, sitting amidst the hay: “‘Things that I can't phrase have helped me’” (p. 339). “The wisdom the past alone can bestow” has descended on her, through Mrs. Wilcox. But Miss Avery too is a reincarnation; she appears in the book only after Mrs. Wilcox dies, and gradually we learn of an extraordinary bond between the two, who outwardly have been almost mistress and servant. The country people credit Miss Avery with “prophetic powers,” and she foretells the futures of all the key characters and of Howards End. So she carries on the “spirit” of Ruth Wilcox in the ordinary sense, but also becomes the genius loci, though the male Wilcoxes insist on treating her as a simple charwoman. Whereas the “inattentive” Aunt Juley can never get straight the name of Howards End, she knows every inch of the place as if it were her skin, knows that the Schlegels are fated to oust the obtuse Wilcoxes, and knows just what the latter are good for: “‘Wilcoxes are better than nothing, as I see you've found,’” she says dryly to Margaret (p. 274).

Miss Avery is not only sibylline and a genius loci, but also embodies the idea of “folk” wisdom. Forster does little with the folk except for one memorable scene, the aftermath of Ruth Wilcox's funeral. Without telling us that she had died or even that she was ill—indeed the immediately preceding chapter has her “‘fit as a fiddle,’” by her own account (p. 87)—Forster begins Chapter 11 with “The funeral was over.” Here the “virtual” narrative consciousness (though not the voice) is that of the country people, and eventually one of them in particular, a young woodcutter who pollards elms while the funeral takes place beneath him. For him and the other villagers the ritual is a sensual experience, not a mock-solemn mummery. “The funeral of a rich person was to them what the funeral of Alcestis, of Ophelia, is to the educated. It was Art; though remote from life, it enhanced life's values, and they witnessed it avidly” (p. 88). For the Wilcoxes, in contrast, the woodcutter and his ilk are merely nuisances; blind to the values of communal ritual, they think of the funeral as their property, which others may mar or mishandle.¹⁷ Through the woodcutter Forster underlines all the previously established connections between fatality and fertility, death and rebirth, which are such regular features of autochthonic ideology.

The young wood-cutter stayed a little longer, poised above the silence and swaying rhythmically. At last the bough fell beneath his saw. [The very pollarding of the elms emblematizes the ritualistic, sacrificial sense that death is necessary to make way for new life.] With a grunt, he descended, his thoughts dwelling no longer on death, but on love, for he was mating. He stopped as he passed the new grave; a sheaf of tawny chrysanthemums had caught his eye. “They didn't ought to have coloured flowers at buryings,” he reflected. Trudging on a few steps, he stopped again, looked furtively at the dusk, turned back, wrenched a chrysanthemum from the sheaf, and hid it in his pocket.

(pp. 88-89)

Later we find it was Margaret who had the instinct to send the chrysanthemums; her act would no doubt have pleased Mrs. Wilcox, but it annoys the conventional-minded family. In the same spirit, Margaret herself attended the funeral but “stood far back among the [village] women” (p. 101)—another instinctively correct gesture, but not because of the implied deference for which the Wilcoxes approve it.

Forster has been accused, with some justice, of romanticizing his yeomen; indeed, this aspect of his autochthonic thinking might be called Tory apologetics. The Wilcoxes are certainly representative of Whiggery: they are climbing, grasping, snobbish without right, vulgarly “modern,” and shallow—in short, self-righteous arrivistes in their worst form.¹⁸ They have no sense of the land, of the people, of the culture; they care only for commercial success, social appearances, and the rights of property construed suspiciously and legalistically. Forster does not trouble to subtilize their offensiveness: “When Mr. Wilcox said that one sound man of business did more good to the world than a dozen of your social reformers, [Helen, in what can only be called a moral rape-fantasy] had swallowed the curious assertion without a gasp, and had leant back luxuriously among the cushions of his motor-car” (p. 24). The motorcar is a fine touch, for it symbolizes their rootless, thoughtlessly destructive way of life. For Forster, entrepreneurial and imperialist drives are simply rationalized spoliation of the earth. Against these activities he sets a complex of almost feudal values: landedness against mercantilism, instinct against calculation, atavism against sophistication.

Forster's latent Toryism shows up most gracelessly in the unsatisfying treatment of Leonard Bast. In spite of his tepid Bloomsbury leanings, Forster was capable of uttering such disclaimers as this: “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” (p. 45). Even his most fervent admirers must squirm at that one. This is by no means the only passage that implies that men were better off when all knew their places: when Wilcoxes treat the lower classes rudely, this is meant to contrast with the noblesse oblige of true aristocracy, under which all ranks prosper amicably. But Forster's political views are not as troublesome as their consequence, which is the inability to make the Basts materialize for us. Leonard remains precisely the theoretical pauper of the women's-club debate that leads the Schlegels to try to help him: the novel patronizes him as remorselessly as the ladies do.¹⁹

However, Forster's social views are well adapted to engender another important pattern of imagery in the novel. Throughout, the thrusting, exploitative Whiggery of the Wilcoxes is characterized by restless, aimless movements from place to place, house to house; they cannot alight anywhere; unsurprisingly, they approve of developers' demolitions of huge blocks of flats in London, in order to throw up more flats, as “good for trade,” whereas Margaret finds the “continual flux” deeply unsettling: “us at our worst—eternal formlessness” and loss of differences (p. 182).

The feudal ownership of land did bring dignity, whereas the modern ownership of movables is reducing us again to a nomadic horde. We are reverting to the civilization of luggage, and historians of the future will take note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty. [N.B. the implied warning to readers.] The Schlegels were certainly the poorer for the loss of Wickham Place. It had helped to balance their lives, and almost to counsel them. Nor is their ground-landlord spiritually the richer. He has built flats on its site, his motor-cars grow swifter, his exposures of Socialism more trenchant. But he has spilt the precious distillation of the years, and no chemistry of his can give it back to society again.

(pp. 149-50)

Much of the book is occupied with searches for new houses, as leases expire and other modern barbarisms take effect. Margaret sees the tides of the Thames as emblematic of the condition and of the forgetfulness it brings (p. 137). London in this book always stands for an unsatisfactory blur of hurry and construction, an aimless tide washing this way and that, a pointless aggrandizement (Howards End is small). London engenders a “red rust” creeping out into the country in the form of Suburbia (pp. 15, 167, etc.). Looking at this glow of supposed energy but real decay, Helen mourns: “And London is only part of something else, I'm afraid. Life's going to be melted down, all over the world.” To which Margaret can only reply, “This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won't be a movement, because it will rest on the earth” (p. 339). They speak at Howards End—itself a survival, a time capsule of the real England sealed against Suburbia and such threatening forces manifest in Wilcox values. The house itself has maneuvered the Schlegels to victory over the Wilcoxes in order to ensure its own preservation.

The pattern of rest versus movement is admirably expressed in the opposition of house to motorcar: as mentioned earlier, the car represents the unseeing, uncaring, destructive oscillation of Wilcoxes careering back and forth. Every time car journeys are described or mentioned, the danger to children and animals is dwelt on. In the most distasteful incident, Charles Wilcox leads a convoy of cars, one of which runs over a cat; instead of stopping, Charles drives on, and Margaret jumps out of the car.

No doubt she had disgraced herself. But she felt their whole journey from London had been unreal. They had no part with the earth and its emotions. They were dust, and a stink, and cosmopolitan chatter, and the girl whose cat had been killed had lived more deeply than they.

(p. 214)

Even when not so stupidly lethal, cars rob their occupants of the sense of space—which, given the importance of land and geography, is severe loss. Wilcoxes never notice this, of course, but Margaret does: “She looked at the scenery. It heaved and merged like porridge. Presently it congealed. They had arrived” (p. 198). This journey takes them smack up to the entrance to Howards End, but she cannot grasp this because the car has deprived her of spatial orientation. “A little porch was close up against her face. ‘Are we there already?’” (p. 199)

This quality of motor journeys is also used metaphorically, in a passage that contrasts Mrs. Wilcox's slowminded nobility to the mercurial dartings of a representative set of Bright Young People (among whom, interestingly, is a Miss Quested): “Clever talk alarmed [Mrs. Wilcox], and withered her delicate imaginings; it was the social counterpart of a motor-car, all jerks, and she was a wisp of hay, a flower” (p. 74). She says to Margaret, “You younger people move so quickly that it dazes me” (p. 78). Margaret has the wisdom to feel this as a reproof from a spiritual agency she cannot comprehend, “a personality that transcended their own and dwarfed their activities” (p. 76). Mrs. Wilcox's transcendence lies of course in her merger with the earth—literally so at her funeral, after which even her smallminded husband has a glimmer of insight: “Ruth knew no more of worldly wickedness and wisdom than did the flowers in her garden, or the grass in her field” (p. 89). The Biblical imagery joins together the associations of her first name, plus Keats's line about the “alien corn,” with the Demeter motif. But Henry's metaphorical thought is ironic—and far more accurate than he realizes—because, as we later learn, behind his reverence for her innocence there is a self-congratulatory smugness; he thinks she never suspected his affair with the improbable Jacky. (Later Margaret and Helen intuit that she knew, but her transcendence must have entailed untroubled acceptance of all things brought to her by atavistic wisdom.) Henry's flash of insight dissipates among his hypocrisies. His world is business and motor-cars: even the furniture he likes consists of “chairs of maroon leather. It was as if a motor-car had spawned” (p. 163). Margaret, at this point about to marry Henry under the delusion that he deserves “connecting” with, sinks into such a chair, just as Helen earlier leaned back in his car when yielding to his preposterous views. The most offensive of all the Wilcoxes, Charles, whose corrosive suspicions twist every act and motive into caricatures, persistently drives or attends to cars throughout the book. No wonder that when Helen most keenly grasps how the Schlegels and Wilcoxes have unwittingly combined to ruin Leonard Bast, she has a vision of him being crushed by a “Juggernaut car” (p. 316).

The automobile imagery is linked to yet another pattern: whereas men in the story are associated with cars and restless proprietorship, women are the vessels of true possession, permanence, and rest. In acquiring property, women react instinctively to places and houses themselves, endowing them with feelings and lives in cheerful acceptance of the pathetic fallacy. Thus feminine discourse provides Forster his opportunities to embed autochthonous figures of speech that provide the thematic backbone of the book. The female Schlegels keep up a drumfire of proleptic remarks about the importance of place and their own dependence on it, even before they see the point of their own understanding. Long before she ever sees Howards End, Margaret says “I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place” (p. 130). The implausibility of the sisters' interest in Leonard Bast is sketchily concealed by giving him a role in this pattern. His pitiable attempts to acquire culture have entailed shallow reading of some of the English travel writers and historians of place, from Ruskin to Stevenson and George Borrow; hence his failure to transcend these writings can become the occasion for remarks by Margaret: “Haven't we all to struggle against life's daily greyness, against pettiness, against mechanical cheerfulness, against suspicion? I struggle by remembering my friends; others I have known by remembering some place—some beloved place or tree—we thought you one of these” (p. 143).

Even Evie Wilcox, otherwise a hardminded and conventional girl with all the Wilcox suspicion and concern for appearances, responds to places with feminine instinct. She it was who induced her father to buy Oniton Grange, another house that Margaret quickly learns to love, only to have her new husband rent it out from under her. Of Evie and Oniton, Henry says: “Poor little girl! She was so keen on it all, and wouldn't even wait to make proper inquiries about the shooting. Afraid it would get snapped up—just like all of your sex” (p. 260-61). Whereas his own approach, naturally, is businesslike and unsentimental, all calculation and hardnosed beating down of others, with few thoughts about the house itself. “One bit of advice: fix your district, then fix your price, and then don't budge. That's how I got both Ducie Street and Oniton. I said to myself, ‘I mean to be exactly here,’ and I was, and Oniton's a place in a thousand” (p. 155). As usual, Henry's accounts of the acquisition contradict themselves, but his sense of the difference in the masculine and feminine approaches to house buying is ironically accurate. For him no house will really “do,” because of his placeless instincts; he is ingenious in finding reasons for moving. Since the act of acquisition is for him more important than the property itself, he gets his satisfaction from the negotiations, which he no doubt conducts on the model of his rebukes to servants and inferiors. Without bothering to tell his new wife, who had “determined to create new sanctities” there (p. 222), he disposes of Oniton because it is “damp” (p. 260), although Forster lets us understand that in reality the house has purposefully repelled him as an intruder, just as Howards End later does. Indeed, while Evie is getting married from Oniton, Margaret feels that the ceremony is somehow unreal and that “the Norman church had been intent all the time on other business” (p. 222).

We find that the whole pattern of rest and movement, with cars and houses, is sexually polarized, and that the shadowy struggle between Schlegels and Wilcoxes is really between atavistically sensitive females and no-nonsense males. Unsurprisingly, the book brings itself to this question: “Are the sexes really races, each with its own code of morality, and their mutual love a mere device of Nature to keep things going?” (p. 240) This thought occurs to Margaret; she thrusts it down, but it recurs later in unanswerable form when she shuts herself up in Howards End with her fugitive and pregnant sister. “A new feeling came over her; she was fighting for women against men. She did not care about rights, but if men came into Howards End, it should be over her body” (p. 290). Here at last the metaphors coalesce, and the struggle that seemed between families is revealed as sex war, full of overtones of race war. Howards End is not to be the possession of any family—the “ancestors” are ultimately generalized—but a home for refugee women and their nameless, almost parthenogenetic offspring. Women deserve it; while males have striven to dominate the earth and to inherit it in a legalistic sense, the females have been half-consciously serving as guardians and stewards.

Forster was not much of a feminist, but he did see that such devices as chivalry are at best patronizing. Margaret knows this, but pretends not to in deference to Henry: a deference she is obliged to repeat again and again until goaded beyond it by what she sees as Henry's attack on her sister, in his refusal to let the two women spend one night with their ancestral lares at Howards End. Men are equally objectionable, whether patronizing or suppressing women. Henry has done his best—fortunately that's not much—to denature Howards End with his improvement projects, undertaken to “please” his first wife: the result is a “series of mistakes,” a house disfigured internally by rooms “that men have spoilt through trying to make it nice for women” (pp. 297-98). Always men will rationalize their spoliations with cant about doing it all for wives and families, but they make no effort to grasp female points of view, nor would they be caught dead understanding women. The book is unrelieved by the presence of males who can take even a step beyond themselves to try the female side of any issue. Even Tibby Schlegel is an outsider who can silence feminine play (p. 65), although in her early infatuation with Wilcox maleness Helen compares him unfavorably with them, grumbling that he's not a “real boy” and calling him “Auntie Tibby” (p. 43). In a distracted way men sometimes aid women's projects, to keep them quiet, but underneath the sexes are at eternal cross-purposes.

This view of life has enough truth in it to carry the plot over some gross implausibilities, though it is no profound contribution to the theory of sexual warfare. Forster's males, except for the unconvincing Leonard Bast and the inert Tibby Schlegel, are simply projections of his enemy, the arrogant bullying public-schoolboy, or “Red-blood.” And his females, for all their sensitivity, are only vaguely women. They are theoretical in every sense, whether idealized or caricatured. Forster had, after all, only a limited ability to imagine himself in other identities, and just as his portrayal of a clerk on the lowest rungs of gentility lacks all effet du réel, his women are substantial only from a distance. They are “Mollycoddles,” the opposite of “Red-bloods,” in dresses.

Forster's characters serve well enough on a first quick reading, but the trouble is that his quasi-impressionist techniques of accreting images are best savored on rereading, and such scrutiny provokes embarrassing questions not only about the characters but also about the plot. Many critics have found Forster's plots in general, and that of Howards End in particular, to depend far too heavily on unlikely coincidences, improbable impulses, strained connections. Given the nature of the Wilcoxes, why would the Schlegels ever have anything to do with them? Forster can get away with asserting that for a brief period Helen was perversely attracted by their “manliness,” but the plot requires continued contact, so they have to turn up literally across the street from the Schlegel's London house: a shameless device. Then comes the celebrated problem of the attraction between Margaret and Henry Wilcox—equally unlikely for either one, given what is established of their characters.²⁰ Forster does labor to suggest that the motive force of their union is Margaret's desire to “connect the prose with the passion” (p. 186). Henry is certainly prosaic, so Margaret's deference to his supposed strengths and forgiveness of his weaknesses is just barely plausible as an extremely deluded form of generosity. But even if that problem is put aside, many more improbabilities intrude. The Basts have to be dragged in repeatedly, by the handle of Leonard's umbrella. Leonard's overpowering urge to discuss books is the barest contrivance, but not worse than Jacky's unimaginable liaison with Henry in an unlikely past, or Helen's ridiculous invasion of Evie's wedding party with them. Most contrived of all is Leonard's supposed desire to confess to “ruining” a woman of higher station. This brings him on a pre-dawn train ride to Howards End, there to be “thrashed” by the bully Charles Wilcox and to die, most conveniently, of heart disease. Although Forster tries to imply that this trip is a kind of Grail quest for Leonard, it is the last term of an absurd series.

As one reads through the book to see what happens next and why, to see a “story” turn into a “plot” in Forster's own terms, one credits these events provisionally, always hoping for further explanation or insight. On rereading, one finds little more than chatty rationalizations by the narrator or the characters. Yet sometimes Forster can make one problem mask another: for instance, he knew better than to attempt direct transcription of the impossible scene in which Leonard impregnates Helen. No amount of insistence on Helen's sexual impulsiveness or deranged state can make us believe this, and Leonard's acceptance is even more unthinkable (Katherine Mansfield said the umbrella did it).²¹ However, we don't learn of this intercourse until the crescendo of final events is already in motion, when Margaret and Henry are pursuing what they suppose to be a “mad” Helen, and the revelation of the pregnancy comes as a nice touch. Then our attention is diverted from the impossible by the merely implausible: Leonard's fatherhood is almost forgotten in the impressionist handling of the death scene.

The thread showing that all the implausibilities are linked together is sexual evasiveness, and this is not surprising given Forster's astonishing ignorance, at the age of thirty, of the physical facts of sexual intercourse.²² Even the unlucky Jacky's sex life, though several times asserted, is portrayed by no more than half-hearted hints. But Forster's reticence achieves more than conformity with Victorian standards, for it forces us to look elsewhere, to see if sexual energy shows up in deflected forms. And though the sexual lacunae mar the book novelistically, they contribute to the theme of autochthony a sense of ominous and telling silence. Sex becomes an indescribable mystery at the heart of human existence, as fertility is for tribal societies: it is sex that is truly “the unseen” in Howards End.

In autochthonous cultures, not only is fertility the great mystery but intercourse also is the model of human relationships with the world of nature and animals, much to the distress of missionaries. On cave walls in France and Spain, on rocks in Australia and Polynesia and America, representations of animals survive that are clearly emblems of power, including sexual power. In some instances the intercourse with humans is portrayed, or mimed in ritual. Totemism is an ideology that is inconceivable without animal ancestors, and the proliferation in mythology of hybrid creatures—Centaurs, satyrs, and the like—is evidence of the ubiquity of this kind of thinking. Western writers cannot touch the theme explicitly, though Lawrence comes close and Faulkner gives us glimpses: one Snopes falls in love with a cow, several characters achieve reverence for a totemic bear, and so on. Forster does little with animals—even later with Hinduism to help him—and presumably would have been horrified by “bestiality,” but he preserves the sense of sanctified yet obscene mystery and overpowering curiosity that a child's approach to sex can embody, and which figures in autochthonic art.²³

There is, however, one exception to the rule of loveless coupling in Howards End, one tender and intimate scene, at the end of Chapter 40.

The peace of the country was entering into her. It has no commerce with memory, and little with hope. Least of all is it concerned with the hopes of the next five minutes. It is the peace of the present, which passes understanding. Its murmur came “now,” and “now” once more as they trod the gravel, and “now,” as the moonlight fell upon their father's sword. They passed upstairs, kissed, and amidst the endless iterations fell asleep. The house had enshadowed the tree at first, but as the moon rose higher the two disentangled, and were clear for a few moments at midnight. Margaret awoke and looked into the garden. How incomprehensible that Leonard Bast should have won her this night of peace! Was he also part of Mrs. Wilcox's mind?

(p. 315)

Out of context, the only element that would prevent reading “this night of peace” to refer to postcoital languor is the fateful and phallic “father's sword,” which is unobtrusive here though manifest later. Notice the images of house and tree, already given as both vital and personal on the first page: while the house pervades the book, even the wych-elm recurs insistently. It has pigs' teeth set in its bark, to cure “toothache.” When Margaret first sees it, she identifies it as “a comrade.” “Neither warrior, nor lover, nor god,” it is beyond “any simile of sex” and yet suggests earthy relationships (p. 206). Now, in the night which she spends alone with Helen in the house, against her husband's express prohibition and with all males barricaded outside, the house-tree relation embodies that of the “comrades” Margaret and Helen. As we read the paragraph, we look over the preceding chapters and realize that, as Wilfred Stone says, this reunion is the “only convincing love-scene” in the book.²⁴ Hence the surprisingly ambiguous phrase “as the moon rose higher the two disentangled.” Checking ourselves and the text, we find that no, Forster has not written a scene of lesbian incest, but in one way it would certainly seem fitting if he had, and we pass on with relief or disappointment. Forster was good at these tricky situations: what really happened in the Marabar cave? That in both cases the ambiguities are intentional is not to be doubted. When Margaret and Henry finally trap the “truant” Helen in the house, Margaret has only time to “whisper: ‘Oh, my darling—’” before she has to shoo all the males away (289). Then a chapter later, she returns and says “‘Oh, my darling!’” and “‘My darling, forgive me,’” bolting the door from the inside (p. 292). Forster goes far enough, during the ensuing conversation, to establish that Helen has been living with one Monica, a “crude feminist of the South,” that is, Italy (pp. 293-94). Much of “dear,” “dearest,” “dear old lady,” recurs in the sister's talk, along with the earlier noted rhetoric about war between the sexes. Then this:

And the triviality faded from their faces, though it left something behind—the knowledge that they never could be parted because their love was rooted in common things. … Helen, still smiling, came up to her sister. She said: “It is always Meg.” They looked into each other's eyes. The inner life had paid.

(p. 299)

With “the past sanctifying the present,” the house is their “salvation” because, among other things, it furnishes a redoubt against males. Finally: “‘But it would give me so much pleasure to have one night here with you. It will be something to look back on. Oh, Meg lovey, do let's! … Why not? It's a moon’” (p. 301). Presumably Helen means a lark, but also a honeymoon. (This theme could then be entitled “Come Back to the House Again, Meg Lovey.”) Before the scene of embracing and falling asleep “amidst the endless iterations”—of the murmur of “now,” of course, but do we not also think automatically of lovers' protestations?—Helen asks Margaret to flee with her, to leave her husband for life in Germany (in spite of a Monica with whom she would not “get on” [p. 314]) in a most unconventional ménage. Though this flight is obviated by the death of Leonard, the imprisonment of Charles, and the breakdown of Henry, the two sisters in the final chapter are living in the house, in full control of it and of the situation. Helen's unnamed baby who is to become legal heir plays in the hay field, Henry is defeated and so “eternally tired” that he can no longer careen about, the Wilcoxes are dismissed, Leonard can barely be remembered, and the sisters are as contented a couple as appears in Forster's work. No more is said about Monica.

Forster had the grace to recognize the greatness of Proust, whose Albertine was really Albert, and whose example suggests that the insights of homosexuals into love can be especially keen. Critics have, it appears, been looking for love in all the wrong places in Howards End, just as they have caught the autochthonic theme only fitfully. Forster's transposition of sexes, turning homosexual lovers into sisters, has the effect of making his characters vague as women, but it allows him to treat “passion” with some knowledge. Moreover, he can use it as a screening device: as with Hardy's image of the stiffening corpse, readers were disposed to deny what they saw, even to themselves. But, as with the autochthonic motifs, we have only to read what the text says without Wilcox assumptions. Indeed, the themes are intertwined; it seems likely that the tenderness of the love scene owes something to Forster's imagination of the reunion of Demeter and Persephone. This maiden is with child, a child with no real father—so much the better mythologically. The homosexual's point of view opens up possibilities to Forster that he might otherwise not have explored: knowing that sexual desire cannot always be made to behave in approved ways, he becomes excruciatingly aware of blindnesses of all sorts. “‘Oh, Meg, the little that is known about these things!’” (p. 313) If we insist on reducing the novel to a “believable” bourgeois drama, we do violence to the imaginative structure and reveal our own conventionality, in sexual as in spiritual matters.

Given the book's opportunities for méconnaissance, its history of misreadings is predictable. Some have been more revealing than others. D. H. Lawrence wrote to Forster that he had made “a nearly deadly mistake in glorifying those business people in Howards End. Business is no good.”²⁵ What can he have been thinking of? To be sure, Forster makes some efforts to persuade us that Margaret's love for Henry is not hopelessly inconceivable, and Margaret is made to give a few rationalizations of modern capitalism. More to the point, Forster makes Schlegel liberalism boomerang: every time Margaret and especially Helen try to help the Basts, they pauperize or degrade them a little more, from the umbrella business to the unpaid hotel bill at Oniton. Helen's ultimate gift, of herself, leads directly to Leonard's death, in a reversal of the myth of Zeus and Semele (so much for heterosexual love). Yet these touches of grim comedy don't really balance the treatment of the Wilcoxes, which is surely a caricature and not a glorification. In Lawrence we should probably diagnose a case of willful blindness, along the lines that Harold Bloom and the late Paul de Man have sketched out. Lawrence's own interest in autochthonic themes was already developed—his fondness for the Pluto-Persephone myth, with a dark male from underground carrying off a pale virgin, has been remarked—and was to grow obsessive.²⁶ Perhaps he could not see Howards End because similar ideas were consuming him, in other forms. But whereas he, like Hardy, embraced primitivistic emphases, neither used autochthony as an actual plot element as Forster does. Nor, on the other hand, does either offer a brittle comic surface over which casual readers can skate, avoiding the deeper reverberations as “some mystic stuff.” Hence Howards End can be read without the mythological meanings, whereas Lawrence's work can hardly be mistaken for bourgeois drama.

Some critics, feeling the tension between readings, have argued that Howards End is seriously flawed by a confusion between the realistic conventions of the traditional novel and the “mystic” or “fabular” elements.²⁷ This seems imprecise, for the convention is not the book's problem. Howards End is a realistic novel but with certain premises that the modern mind is not disposed to accept; in fact it could be said that the book dramatizes just this weakness, as Forster sees it. Wilcox offensive behavior is a consequence of spiritual poverty. But with the autochthonic premises accepted—or at least disbelief suspended, for after all this is fiction—the book makes quite good sense in its own terms. Its problems arise not from its convention but from Forster's limitations as a novelist. As I have argued, these problems catch up with the book when it is reread; yet the rereading is necessary to savor the themes fully. The difficulties are there, but do not prevent the book from being a significant novel, and at least a timid precursor of Modernist developments.

Aside from its place in relation to the Modernist concern with mythology, there are interrelations of Howards End with texts by other writers, in ways not easily discerned and almost surely indirect. Two curious examples can be taken from T. S. Eliot and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Forster was well acquainted with Eliot, as they had met at Bloomsbury salons and on Garsington weekends. Forster declined however to contribute to a volume of appreciations of Eliot on grounds of insufficient sympathy.²⁸ Possibly he felt Eliot's churchiness to be a problem, and certainly Eliot could not have liked the dismissal of “poor little talkative Christianity” in A Passage to India. But consider this section from Howards End, one of several in which Forster sets Nature against London:

Nature, with all her cruelty, comes nearer to us than do these crowds of men. A friend explains himself: the earth is explicable—from her we came, and we must return to her. But who can explain Westminster Bridge Road or Liverpool Street in the morning—the city inhaling; or the same thoroughfares in the evening—the city exhaling her exhausted air?

(p. 108)

Westminster Bridge naturally suggests Wordsworth, who found the city beautiful when asleep and uncrowded, and his sonnet's currency made it easy for Forster to play with the image of the city as sleeping giant. A natural progression leads to some of the most unforgettable lines of The Waste Land:

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

(ll. 62-65)

The exhalation is displaced into the crowd of clerks, of Leonard Basts, but the force is the same. The clock delivers its “dead” sound, and Stetson is queried about the corpse planted in his garden—a touch of English murder-mystery macabre that opens into an autochthonic motif. Eliot of course put the Cambridge anthropologists to the most vigorous use of any Modernist. He covered over his poem's heteroclite origins in prophetic rhetoric (“voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells” is from a very old layer, and “I John saw these things, and heard them” was excised) with a “mythical method.”²⁹ The passage on London Bridge reads as if Eliot had been badly depressed while watching early newsreels: the crowds move spectrally and jerkily. But in the light of the Howards End passage, several possible points of contact show up, starting with the image of exhalation. Eliot returned to it in the third section of Burnt Norton:

Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London. …

Another displacement, but the same Dantesque adaptation as in The Waste Land: the crowds are dead souls, blown aimlessly over a hellish landscape. Even if these lines do not derive directly from Forster's passage, they certainly show a similarity of vision. The mythology of earth and place is after all the organizing principle of the Four Quartets. Especially at the beginning of East Coker (“Mirth of those long since under earth / Nourishing the corn”) and at the end of The Dry Salvages, Eliot acknowledges “The life of significant soil”; but Frazer and Jane Harrison and even Jessie Weston are implicit throughout.³⁰ If Howards End served as mediator, it added several chips to the mosaic of intertextuality in Eliot's work.

The response of Forster with Fitzgerald is of a different order, less spiritual and more mechanical, in several senses. The Great Gatsby can be read as an American piracy of Howards End, in the vein of San Simeon or London Bridge in Arizona. But the autochthonous themes are transmuted beyond recognition; the house of the novel, no longer small and sacred, has hypertrophied into Gatsby's garish mansion, “a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy”—the book mocks what it enacts.³¹ Geography is vital in Gatsby but not in Forster's way, although the dialectic of country versus London reappears in the theme of “Westerners” who are “subtly unadaptable to Eastern life” (p. 177).³² Eastern life is flashy, impersonal, pseudosophisticated, like the Wilcoxes transplanted. It is in pursuit of a “vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty” (p. 99), in contrast to more earthy Western ways. The towns beyond the Ohio are “bored, sprawling,” and smallminded (p. 177), but they are at least free of the specious glitter of New York and its satellite communities. The problem with this geographical pattern is that Fitzgerald confuses it by mixing in his own obviously cherished memories of New York's “meretricious beauty” and its romantic appeal to his permanently adolescent sensibility. He remained entranced with the “incomparable milk of wonder” that leads us to pursue “the green light, the orgastic future” long after he knew he should have outgrown it (pp. 112, 182).³³

Paradoxically, it is the transparent, innocent quality of his own breathless wonder at riches and success that makes Fitzgerald ultimately palatable. Like Gatsby, he is admirable because, not in spite of, the “colossal vitality of his illusion.” As Hugh Kenner has remarked, the story of Gatsby is Fitzgerald's attempt at the theme of metaphysical ambitions “to be as gods,” which were reborn in our cultural tradition with the grandiose promises of the Renaissance, and which America both lives out and symbolizes: the land is the “fresh, green breast of the new world [that] had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams,” the last goal—he did not think of space—“commensurate to [man's] capacity for wonder” (p. 182).³⁴ The novel, like Gatsby's project, is only a partial success, but as such serves all the better as a parable of the American fetishization of illimitable ambition.

The means that Gatsby uses to achieve his ends are as vague as those in a Horatio Alger novel, or as Heathcliff's in Wuthering Heights. But the enabling act is the creation of a new identity, sprung “from his own Platonic conception of himself,” that makes him a “son of God” instead of a product of his “shiftless and unsuccessful” parents (p. 99). In unrooted America, especially the West, the Family Romance becomes as valid as any other genealogy. Indeed, parents themselves nurture the Family Romance by planting fantasies that their offspring will emerge as wunderkinden, cancelling their own ordinariness (cf. Mr. Gatz). We Americans are under an unspoken command to succeed, to prove ourselves, and the usual mark of success is to outdo our parents spectacularly. Hence Walker Percy suggests, “Imagine that you have lived your entire life in the house where you were born. For an American, an uncanny, even an unsettling fantasy.”³⁵ Gatsby is the antithesis of Ruth Wilcox.

Gatsby also has no access to the simple homebound pleasures that Ruth's life at Howards End affords. Indeed, his own fetishization of ambition turns him into a typical American anhedonist, unable to enjoy what he's worked so hard for. He could never have enjoyed Daisy; so much is evident from his wistful attitude toward his car, his speedboat, his pool, his shirts, his house (“I have been glancing into some of the rooms,” he says absently in reply to Nick's wonder at its illuminated splendor). The watchful sobriety that keeps him from enjoying his own parties—fittingly, since their only purpose is to serve as lure for the Buchanans—characterizes him. Throughout, he watches over others, but his voyeurism has no hint of the sensual. (Americans like to think that they have a powerful streak of sensuality, but this is merely a Puritan self-accusation: they are far more inhibited, in spite of their eroticized environments, than those of other behavioral traditions, and frank, luxuriant hedonism is much rarer than the confusion between needs and desires, means and ends, that leads to acquisitiveness.) A torrid affair with Daisy would have satisfied him were desire his motive force, but he must acquire and possess, and therefore lose. At least he got a swim in.

Living the life of a socialite partygoer himself, Fitzgerald imagined what happens to poor sons of God/bitches (the transformation is accomplished in the words that were Gatsby's and his own eulogy) who don't get rich enough to marry their Ginevras or Zeldas until too late. Although he had acquired both money and princess, Fitzgerald remained haunted by the fear of failure—naturally enough, since he couldn't see why he had earned them. So he sympathized as Nick Carraway does with those who futilely chase success in New York, such as “poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life” (p. 57). This pseudopathos about America's Leonards betrays a juvenile romanticism that obtrudes everywhere, in raptures about the “racy, adventurous feel” of New York, and of course in the building up of Gatsby.

If Gatsby is an Americanized Leonard Bast, devoted to self-improvement, Tom and Daisy Buchanan have a full measure of Wilcox nomadism and exploitiveness. They “drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. … I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game” (p. 6). They also have the Wilcox attitude toward servants and inferiors; Tom is concerned to preserve the “Nordic” race against “the colored” and all immigrants and arrivistes. Like Charles Wilcox he is often found in automobiles, though he affects horsiness as a form of defiant nostalgia: “‘I'm the first man who ever made a stable out of a garage’” (p. 119). Fitzgerald adopts Forster's vision of the “Juggernaut car,” but for him it does not signify merely the onrush of Philistinism. He sees it as a glamorous but lethal weapon, destroying not only our geographical mooring and orientations but very often life itself, and raising grave questions of responsibility. The key question in the book is: Who was driving?

Several critics have commented on the patterns of movement and drift in Gatsby, but the elaborate structure of “driving” imagery that holds the book together is not often noticed, although Nick's head is full of it.³⁶ On his thirtieth birthday he thinks, “Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade” (p. 136). He gets involved with the “incurably dishonest” Jordan Baker, and his first insight into her coincides with finding that she was a “rotten driver.” Chastised about this, she gives a Wilcox retort. “‘They'll keep out of my way,’ she insisted. ‘It takes two to make an accident.’” This mentality augurs trouble, although it will come from Daisy rather than Jordan. Nick muses further: “Her gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires …” (p. 59). Fitzgerald sensed as early as anyone that American was becoming a culture in which the locus of romance and sexual initiation is likely to be a car: the earliest recorded tryst of Gatsby and Daisy is in her “white roadster” (p. 75). Fittingly, on his honeymoon with Daisy, Tom has an injurious, adulterous auto accident in Santa Barbara, breaking the arm of the girl with him, a chambermaid (like Henry Wilcox, Tom likes his liaisons with the lower classes).

The climax of Gatsby comes not with a runover cat but with a hideous accident to Tom's most recent mistress. The preposterously energetic “Myrtle Wilson, her life violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her thick dark blood with the dust.” This near-Homeric simile degenerates into a gross evocation of an Aztec sacrifice: “Her left breast was swinging loose like a flap, and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath” (p. 138). Daisy was the driver, we finally learn, although Gatsby with foolish chivalry takes the responsibility and literally dies for her, in a shooting that is as grotesque a mistake as is Charles Wilcox's “murder” of Leonard Bast. But there is a poetic justice in the verdict against Charles, for Wilcoxes bear collective guilt, whereas in Gatsby the unpunished real culprit is the callous Wilcox-like indifference of both Buchanans: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made” (pp. 180-81).

Not many readers observe that Fitzgerald has prepared for the climactic accident by inserting a parodic anticipation of it, in a “bizarre and tumultuous scene” created by the drunken guests leaving a Gatsby party. In a ditch next to the road rests a coupe, “violently shorn of one wheel.” Out steps a man in a long duster, who says to spectators:

“I know very little about driving—next to nothing. It happened, and that's all I know.”

“Well, if you're a poor driver you oughtn't to try driving at night.”

“But I wasn't even trying,” he explained indignantly, “I wasn't even trying.”

An awed hush fell upon the bystanders.

“Do you want to commit suicide?”

“You're lucky it was just a wheel! A bad driver and not even trying!”

“You don't understand,” explained the criminal. “I wasn't driving. There's another man in the car.”

The real driver appears, much drunker than his passenger: “‘Wha's matter?’ he inquired calmly. ‘Did we run outa gas?’” When the “amputated” wheel is pointed out to him, he remarks:

“At first I din' notice we'd stopped.”

A pause. Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders, he remarked in a determined voice:

“Wonder'ff tell me where there's a gas'line station?”

At least a dozen men, some of them a little better off than he was, explained to him that the wheel and car were no longer joined by any physical bond.

“Back out,” he suggested after a moment. “Put her in reverse.”

“But the wheel's off!”

He hesitated.

“No harm in trying,” he said.

(pp. 55-56)

This driver's inability to see reality proleptically parodies Gatsby and his intoxicated dream: “‘Can't repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’” (p. 111). And the confusion over apparent and real drivers grotesquely foreshadows Daisy's repellent irresponsibility. With this scene in mind, we can more fully appreciate observations contained in the famous catalog of Gatsby's guests, that Miss Claudia Hip came “with a man reputed to be her chauffeur” and that Ripley Snell “was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Sweet's automobile ran over his right hand” (pp. 62-63). That right hand had long forgotten its cunning, probably. Fitzgerald sees us as alternately obsessed with and maimed by our cars, endlessly led on; so the green light at the end of the Buchanan dock that stands for “the orgastic future” appears as a transcendent traffic signal, beckoning treacherously. It links the “boats against the current” of the book's very last image with the careening automobiles that have replaced war as our way of eliminating surplus young men. The car is linked to us by unbreakable bonds of desire, however, so we can't get rid of it. Fitzgerald shrewdly links the “Dutch sailors'” fateful vision of the New World with the romantic intoxication of the world seen from cars: “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world” (p. 69). Hart Crane saw the American myth in bridges, Fitzgerald in the vehicles upon them.

Musing on American self-contradictions, Walker Percy wonders “whether it is a coincidence that this country is not only the most Christian and most eroticized of all societies but also the most technologically transformed and the most violent.”³⁷Gatsby articulates a vision in which Americans combine “romantic readiness” with violence—especially if it can be produced by technology—in the service of projects not only to repeat the past but also to correct and purge it, to pursue a future that is really a retreat: we are “borne back ceaselessly into the past” (p. 182). Fitzgerald's vision marks him as the product of a culture that is haunted, even for its Catholics, by an ambivalent Calvinism that distrusts great cities, great desires, great projects, and yet feeds on them at the same time.

This makes him very different from Forster, whose Biblical thinking is much less obvious. Indeed, Forster's very classicism represents among other things an embarrassment with “Hebraism,” which in England means Dissent, not Jews, and with the evangelism of his forebears. In his day, Greek and Latin, gentility, public school education, and the Established Church were the marks of privilege; to be a scion of evangelistic traditions was (at least latently) socially precarious. No wonder Forster's autochthonous ideology smacks of Tory apologetics. He borrows, however, the rhetoric of the prophets of Israel against all human pride and pretension, against all imperialism and massive power structures, in indirect and disguised ways. Surely his denunciations of Wilcoxery owe something to the prophets' assurances that all great works, rich cities, and mighty armies will end where we all began: in the dust.

Forster sometimes invoked this idea as a Mephistophelean spirit of Denial. It appears in Howards End as “goblin footfalls” emanating from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, or at least from Helen's synesthetic fantasy about it. “[The goblins] were not aggressive creatures; it was that that made them so terrible to Helen. They merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world” (p. 33). For Helen this represents a sudden collapse of ideals, connected to her disillusionment about the Wilcoxes. Later she arrives at a more engaging paradox, in which the goblins of Denial become the force of mortality itself. “‘Death destroys a man; the idea of Death saves him.’” The idea of Death, undercutting all human ambitions but especially those swollen with pride, triumphs because it

shows me the emptiness of Money. … men like the Wilcoxes are deeper in the mist than any. Sane, sound Englishmen! Building up empires, levelling all the world into what they call common sense. But mention Death to them and they're offended, because Death's really Imperial, and He cries out against them for ever.

(pp. 238-39)

This rhetoric is not however totally compatible with autochthonic premises, which may be why A Passage to India embodies a harsher vision. The earth of India transcends and precedes even the mythical powers invested in it. “The high places of Dravidia have been land since land began. … They are older than anything in the world, [they are] flesh of the sun's flesh.”³⁸ As such “they are older than all spirit” (pp. 116-17). The Marabar caves are not holy, have no particular powers; they are so primal that they precede all attributes. “Nothing, nothing attaches to them” (p. 117). Their smooth polished surfaces have no carvings, paintings, not even bats' or bees' nests, and their famous echo wipes out all distinctions, reduces all words to “ou-boum.” “A Marabar cave can hear no sound but its own” (pp. 145-46). For Mrs. Moore the echo destroys Christianity—“All its divine words from ‘Let there be light’ to ‘It is finished’ only amounted to ‘boum’” (p. 141)—and all Western certainties. In this landscape the incursions of all conquerors—Hindu, Muslim, or English—are fatuous illusions. The English invasion is comically symbolized by the right-angled streets, mentioned in the first pages, that fit so poorly in the landscape of Chandrapore, “symbolic of the net Great Britain had thrown over India” (p. 11). But the earth of India mocks such ludicrous impositions. “How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home” (p. 128). The lives of plants and animals are almost undisturbed. “It matters so little to the majority of living beings what the minority, that calls itself human, desires or decides. Most of the inhabitants of India do not mind how India is governed” (p. 105). The heat, beginning in April, produces in men “irritability and lust” (p. 201) and spreads infectious, impersonal evil among them, but it awakens life in the very rocks. Thus Adela, climbing up to her cave, feels the sun quickening the soil under her feet: “The temperature rose and rose, the boulders said, ‘I am alive,’ the small stones answered, ‘I am almost alive’” (p. 142).

But there are comparatively few metaphors for the animate earth in the novel, compared to Howards End. This time what interests Forster is not life, but death. In the cave is “something very old and very small … the undying worm itself” (p. 198). Like the goblins it mocks all large ideas, all heroism, all generosity, all achievement, even our ideas of “Heaven, Hell, Annihilation”: “No one could romanticize the Marabar, because it robbed infinity and eternity of their vastness, the only quality that accommodates them to mankind” (p. 141). Thus the echo that can reduce even “the tongues of angels” to a meaningless reverberation tells Mrs. Moore: “Pathos, piety, courage—they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value” (p. 140). This is true levelling. Indian earth is purposive, but not in the services of Eros: at the end it thrusts itself between the horses of Aziz and Fielding in spite of their desire, just as the mirrored surface of the cave prevents the struck match and its image from uniting. “The two flames approach and strive to unite, but cannot, because one of them breathes air, the other stone. A mirror inlaid with lovely colours divides the lovers” (pp. 117-18). (Forster's vision of human love varies that of Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium.) So the ideology of A Passage cannot be called autochthonous; nevertheless, here as in Howards End geography is destiny, a point that several of the characters apprehend but in ironic or misleading forms, usually racist.

There are no houses of importance in the later novel, for even the most magnificent buildings are mocked by the Indian landscape, and the bungalows of the conquerors seem pathetic. The land is deeply and essentially jungle, absorptive and proteiform; its boundaries flow, and forms of life spring up and fall back, escaping human classification: “Nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else” (p. 78). Adela, as her last name indicates, is always searching and asking; this is why she seems a prig to Fielding, as if always taking notes, and why she cannot grasp India. To the inhabitants of the jungle, other than human, a house is simply “a normal growth of the eternal jungle, which alternately produces houses trees, houses trees” (p. 29). Mrs. Moore's wasp is found inside, having “no sense of an interior.”

There is autochthony in India, as in the cult of “Esmiss Esmoor” that springs up at her death, and in Hinduism and related ideologies it goes far toward grasping the essence of things, but it remains a posteriori to what is in the cave. Though it cannot answer final questions, it gives Indians clear spiritual advantages. One of the most important is their sensitivity to poetry:

Of the company, only Hamidullah had any comprehension of poetry. The minds of the others were inferior and rough. Yet they listened with pleasure, because literature had not been divorced from their civilization. The police inspector, for instance, did not feel that Aziz had degraded himself by reciting, nor break into the cheery guffaw with which an Englishman averts the infection of beauty.

(p. 97)

In Howards End the role of India is played by Germany. The German characters and material are trivial and forgettable, and seem to represent some unassimilated personal experiences of Forster's (he lived in Germany for a few months), although he is able to get off a few sadly prophetic remarks about the looming conflict of the countries. But if we start from the clue given by the Schlegels' name—relating them to the propounders of Romantic, organicist aesthetics—the major pattern becomes clear. A German does

take poetry seriously. … He may miss it through stupidity, or misinterpret it, but he is always asking beauty to enter his life, and I [Margaret] believe that in the end it will come. At Heidelberg I met a fat veterinary surgeon whose voice broke with sobs as he repeated some mawkish poetry. So easy for me to laugh—I, who never repeat poetry, good or bad, and cannot remember one fragment of verse to thrill myself with.

(p. 73)³⁹

Forster is here rebuking the English more than praising the Germans—he had a deeper admiration for Indians—and the issue concealed an important facet of his own sense of alienation from his culture. Indeed, he put himself into the novel under a German name—just as Shakespeare hid himself among puns on “will” in his sonnets and plays. One of the book's most ironic passages concerns Helen, who had a proposal from a German that seemed to her merely comical; he was “Herr Forstmeister” (literally, “forest master”) who “lived in a wood” (p. 105).

“It is sad to suppose that places may ever be more important than people,” continued Margaret.

“Why, Meg? They're so much nicer generally. I'd rather think of that forester's house in Pomerania than of the fat Herr Forstmeister who lived in it.”

(p. 130)

“Fat” was a sufficient disguise, but the play with “forester” leaves little doubt about what is going on—in fact the passage suggests, appropriately, that Forster is the house, not the character. This self-exile places Forster himself in the milieu, here Germany, where “literature and art have what one might call the kink of the unseen about them” (pp. 77).

Even before Wilcoxes and other imperialists went about their business of trying to crush venerable civilizations, there was a spirit of pragmatism in the English heritage that Forster identifies as the root of his own self-estrangement.

Why has not England a great mythology? Our folklore has never advanced beyond daintiness, and the greater melodies about our countryside have all issued through the pipes of Greece. Deep and true as the native imagination can be, it seems to have failed here. It has stopped with the witches and the fairies. It cannot vivify one fraction of a summer field, or give names to half a dozen stars. England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature—for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.

(p. 267)

Plaintive hopefulness is evident, but Forster also knows that even if he becomes one of the “little poets” he will still be a “Mollycoddle” to most of his countrymen. One must keep this poignant passage in mind to know how Forster felt personally about the theme of autochthony; it was not mere scaffolding for him. In some earlier passages, we might be tempted to underestimate the irony:

To speak against London is no longer fashionable. The earth as an artistic cult has had its day, and the literature of the near future will probably ignore the country and seek inspiration from the town. One can understand the reaction. Of Pan and the elemental forces the public has heard a little too much—they seem Victorian, while London is Georgian—and those who care for the earth with sincerity may wait long ere the pendulum swings back to her again.

(p. 108)

This is related to the dismissals of “Borrow, Thoreau, and sorrow,” and also serves to forestall criticism of the more labored mythology of his earlier work. “Pan” was truly too arty, too colorful, too decorative. Houses that can seem to live are a far more appropriate motif. Any Englishman can be made to respond, even against his instincts for real-estate development if necessary, to Ruth Wilcox's plaint about being allowed to die in the room where one was born. Gatsby would never want that, but even Leonard might have found it a comfort. For those who understand autochthony, it becomes a mighty theme, expressive not merely of pietas and continuity, but also of “only connecting” to those spirits of place that can give our lives wholeness. Henry's frustration of his wife's dying wish is the lowest of his mean tricks.

Forster plants the phrase “safe as houses” several times on Henry Wilcox's lips, and it encompasses the book's irony: Henry means it of course in the most reprehensible sense, turning spirits into investments. If he had only tried to understand why his wife wanted to die in her house, he would have had a glimpse into a world in which houses offer safety of a kind that mocks the rise and fall of fortunes and empires. His lack of a sense of the past, and of its religious insights into earth's tenure of us, does him in. For Forster, the past can transform our ineffectual liberalisms into social harmonies, redeem our greedy commercialism, and so on. Had he had more of Lawrence's ruthlessness, Forster might like his friend have been drawn closer to an atavistic vision that is hard to distinguish from an idealized Fascism.

Notes

1. E. M. Forster (New Directions, 1943), p. 114.

2. Woolf, quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 542.

3. Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” IV.

4. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” Dial 75 (1923): 483.

5. See my Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Louisiana State University Press, 1976), pp. 69-77. See also Geoffrey Hartman, “Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci,” in his Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-1970 (Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 311-36. Hartman covers the older literary allusions to the idea but does not bring in autochthony. See also Jane Chance Nitzsche, The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Columbia University Press, 1975), which also knows nothing of autochthony.

6. Howards End (Vintage Books, n.d.; originally published, 1910), pp. 155, 175. Subsequent page references in the text are to this convenient edition.

7. See p. 338: “Don't drag in the personal when it will not come.” Critics should heed Margaret's advice.

8. E. M. Forster, pp. 38, 118.

9. The obvious example is Gerald Dawes in The Longest Journey.

10. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religions (see note 44 to the Introduction).

11. “The Prose Tradition in Verse” in T. S. Eliot, ed., Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New Directions, 1954), p. 371.

12. Forster, “Cnidus,” in Abinger Harvest (Harcourt Brace, 1936), p. 176.

13. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Houghton Mifflin, 1976).

14. Miss Avery says that Ruth should have married a “real soldier” (p. 275) instead of Henry, the degenerate imperialist descendant of “warriors of the past.”

15. Even critics trying to illuminate Forster's mysticism frequently ignore such passages: for example, Denis Godfrey, in E. M. Forster's Other Kingdom (Oliver & Boyd, 1968), though alert to the “instinctive mysticism of the English soil,” does not quote it (pp. 137ff.).

16. A textbook example of impressionism is this passage from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, in which Marlow's steamboat is ambushed by natives: “Sticks, little sticks, were flying about. … Arrows, by Jove! We were being shot at!” Bruce Harkness, ed., Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the Critics (Wadsworth, 1960), p. 39. Compare the passage in which Leonard, about to be struck by a sword, sees only a “stick, very bright,” descend (p. 324).

17. Compare p. 219: “Henry treated a marriage like a funeral, item by item.” Naturally the Wilcoxes are unaware of the fructifying power of Leonard's death, which is manifested in the hay harvest of the last pages.

18. Malcolm Bradbury makes the connection with Whiggery in his essay on Howards End in Forster: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 132.

19. See the later comparison of Leonard with Fitzgerald's Gatsby.

20. As Frederick C. Crews puts it: “Both Margaret and Forster struggle unconvincingly to remind themselves of the Wilcox virtues.” E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism (Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 108. F. R. Leavis, remarking that “nothing in the exhibition of Margaret's or Henry Wilcox's character makes the marriage credible or acceptable,” discusses the problem helpfully: see his essay in Bradbury, Critical Essays, pp. 40-41.

21. Quoted in Francis King, E. M. Forster and His World (Thames & Hudson, 1978), p. 49.

22. See P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life (Secker & Warburg, 1977), vol. 1, p. 37.

23. See again my Sacred Discontent, pp. 60-62, 92-93. The one touch in which Forster shows some awareness of this motif is having young Tom, of Miss Avery's lineage, charmingly confuse humans and rabbits (p. 300).

24. The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E. M. Forster (Stanford University Press, 1966), p. 265.

25. Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Aldous Huxley (Viking, 1932), p. 558.

26. See George H. Ford, “The ‘S’ Curve: Persephone to Pluto,” in Julian Moynahan, ed., Sons and Lovers: Text, Background, and Criticism (Viking, 1968; originally published, 1913), pp. 577-96.

27. For example, Peter Widdowson, E. M. Forster's Howards End: Fiction as History (Sussex University Press, 1977), pp. 14-15, 55, 97-98. Forster's chapters on “Fantasy” and “Prophecy” in Aspects of the Novel (Harcourt Brace, 1954) are apropos here, especially the latter. The world of The Brothers Karamazov or Moby Dick, Forster says, “is not a veil, it is not an allegory. It is the ordinary world of fiction, but it reaches back” (p. 134). The oracular phrase is clear if we remember what the Past means to Forster. He does not claim a place for his own work with that of Dostoevsky, Melville, D. H. Lawrence, and Emily Bronte, yet his discussions of them strongly suggest that he aspired, if wistfully, to this status.

28. King, Forster and His World, p. 52. See also Forster's essay on Eliot in Abinger Harvest.

29. See Valerie Eliot, ed., The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), pp. 9, 75.

30. On Eliot's debt to the Cambridge anthropologists, see Chapter 5 of this book.

31. The Great Gatsby (Scribner, 1953; originally published, 1925), p. 5.

32. Fitzgerald deliberately has Gatsby place San Francisco in the Middle West (p. 65) as part of his Family Romance, but the operational moral geography of the novel can be described by adapting the remark attributed to John Barrymore: Outside New York, every place is Bridgeport.

33. Fitzgerald insisted on “orgastic,” as he believed it to be “the adjective for orgasm.” See Jennifer E. Atkinson, “Fitzgerald's Marked Copy of The Great Gatsby” in Matthew J. Bruccoli and C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr., eds., Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1970 (NCR Microcard Editions [Washington, D.C.], 1970), pp. 30-31.

34. See Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (Knopf, 1975), pp. 26-31.

35. Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (Pocket Books, 1983), pp. 146-47.

36. Compare Gale H. Carrithers, Jr., “Fitzgerald's Triumph,” in Frederick J. Hoffman, ed., The Great Gatsby: A Study (Scribner, 1962), p. 316: he observes that “images of drift, flutter, or rush, the figure of purposeless action” run through the novel. This aligns even the billowing skirts of Daisy and Jordan (p. 8) with the driving imagery.

37. Percy, Lost in the Cosmos, p. 177.

38. A Passage to India, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (Arnold, 1978; originally published, 1924); subsequent page references are to this text.

39. That Germans are the mediums of poetry here relates to the Germanic wordplay on his own name. The Schlegels are half German, and this spirit in them is part of the reason that they are the true heirs of Howards End. Thus the complex of meanings that inhere in the house in the novel—based on Forster's own childhood in a house named Rooksnest—seems also to include his own interlude in Germany as a tutor in a castle. Only the name is then unexplained; on that, no one seems to have noticed that there is a tiny place called Howletts End not far from Cambridge.

    On Forster's view of poetry, see his remark in Aspects of the Novel, p. 93: “Hardy seems to me essentially a poet,” even in his novels. This relates to the discussion in Chapter 1 of this book.