“You and I and Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence. It’s only when we see someone near us tottering that we realize all that an independent income means.”

After enjoying one of E. M. Forster’s novels and disliking the other, I thought I would read his last remaining major novel, Howard’s End, to act as a tie-breaker.  While I enjoyed it more  than A Room With a View, I still found my mind drifting through many chapters in this novel and to finish the text proved a chore, even during the times I was sort of enjoying it.

The story is about two wealthy families, the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels whose lives continually intertwine in both tragedy and love, centering around the house at Howard’s End. The Schlegels lives revolve around the arts, literature, music, and believe love and human relationships are the ultimate virtue in the world, while the Wilcoxes are a family of practical businessmen who keep impractical aspects like emotions neatly tucked away on the shelf. Caught between the story of these two wealthy families is a lower middle-class clerk named Mr Bast and his wife, Jacky, who have their lives and dreams smashed to pieces as they get caught in the middle of these two families and their conflicting approaches to life.

During a visit at Howard’s End, Paul Wilcox and Helen Schlegel form a one-day hasty romance, which ends when it is discovered Paul has no prospects of money and must travel to Nigeria to make his way. Both families embarrassed by the event for different reasons, go about living their lives, with the Wilcoxes expanding their wealth and rising in the ranks of business, while the Schlegels continue attending concerts, reading books, and meeting friends for intellectual discussions. Eventually their lives cross again when the Wilcoxes move across the street from the Schlegels. The eldest sister of the Schlegel family, Margaret, begins a short-lived friendship with Mrs. Wilcox who is secretly suffering from some terminal illness and dies.

The two families keep in touch with each other over the years, and eventually Henry Wilcox (the patriarch of the family) and Margaret develop a relationship and marry each other. The two sisters, Margaret and Helen, try to help a poor clerk named Mr Bast who is in an unhappy marriage. They give him business advice from Henry that leads Mr Bast to leave his job. When he loses his second job shortly after, Mr Bast tumbles down the path of financial ruin.

Margaret marries Henry Wilcox for the qualities she admires, hoping also to change the qualities she doesn’t admire, such as his hypcrisy, his fear of emotions, and his ability to ignore anything in the world that doesn’t directly affect him or puts himself in a bad light. Her sister, Helen dislikes Henry because he represents everything she detests and can’t see why her sister wants to marry him or how she will ever be happy with such a man. Helen learn of Mr Bast’s finanicial ruin and blames Henry for it. She confronts Henry and Margaret about it. During this confrontation, Margaret finds out that  Henry once had an affair with Jacky, who is currently Mr. Bast’s wife. He admits that ten years ago he had an affair with Jacky, while still married to Mrs. Wilcox. Margaret forgives him his sins, but also thinks it would be best to get rid of the Basts.

She writes a letter to tell Mr Bast that Henry is unable to secure a job for him. Mr Bast tells Helen that Henry has now ruined his life twice (in business and in love).  She feels sorry for him and sleeps with him, which gets her pregnant. She runs away to Greece to hide her pregnancy. Margaret thinks she leaves because she dislikes the Wilcoxes and how the whole affair turned out with Mr Bast. Later Helen returns to England when the Schlegels’ aunt, Mrs. Munt, gets sick with acute pneumonia. Margaret thinks Helen sounds strange in her letters. So Margaret tricks her sister to meeting at Howard’s End, and discovers that Helen is pregnant.

Margaret discusses the situation with Henry who is willing to help her as best he can, but refuses to treat Helen normal and as if she didn’t commit a sin by having sex out of wedlock. Margaret calls him out on his hypocrisy for criticizing her illicit affair, while having engaged in one himself and expecting to be completely forgiven. They have a falling out.  Meanwhile, Mr Bast is seeking out Margaret at Howard’s end in hopes of apologizing. Charles Wilcox, Henry’s eldest son, learns the truth of the father’s identity, while trying to reconcile Margaret and Helen to his father’s wishes. Mr Bast arrives and in a fit of passion Charle’s kills him by beating him with a blunt edge of a sword and being crushed by a bookcase.

Charles is sentenced to three year. Henry Wilcox finally notices the world around him, is devastated by the blow to his family, rethinks his entire life and philosophy, and reconciles with Margaret. The novel ends with him bequeathing Howard’s End to Margaret.

At the heart of the novel is the future of England and the two family’s conflicting approaches to life. The Wilcoxes are associated with imperialism, capitalism, and movement throughout the novel. Margaret admires Henry Wilcox because she realizes people like hin make England wealthy and the rulers of the world, through their productivity and ambition. People like the Schlegels have leisure to enjoy the arts and literature only because of people like the Wilcoxes.

“If Wilcoxes hadn’t worked and died in England for thousands of years, you and I couldn’t sit here without having our throats cut.”

The Schlegels, on the other hand, are associated with the arts and literature and they believe personal relationships is what makes life meaningful. The families represent a lot of binaries relationship contrasted through their different approaches in life:  practical life versus intellectual life, logical versus emotion, living in the present versus living in the past, conservative view of women versus a liberal view of women, etc. The difference between the two family’s philosophies can be seen in how they view Howards End, the house that is at the center of the novel. To the Wilcoxes it is just a piece of property. To the Schlegels and Mrs. Wilcox, Howard’s End, represents their deepest memories and greatest emotional experiences (it’s the embodiment of their lives). .

Mr Bast stands in for the aspiring lower middle-class man who wishes to better his lot in life. He lives a bit of both approaches in life (the business and literary) and never excels in either. He looks up to the Schlegels because he views them in a Romantic light, as representative of his ideas of literature and the intellectual life. Their wealth is tied up with their intellectual pursuits in his mind. Leonard views culture, particularly book reading, as way of raising his social status. It’s almost as if he believes by being cultured like the rich he will raise his economic and social status to their level as well. This is all a romantic belief. His mistaken view is best contrasted with Margaret’s epiphany. Margaret comes to realize money is a means to culture, not culture as a means of money and status as Bast seems to vaguely believe. It is hard to have leisure time for literature if you haven’t a lot of money.  Bast also fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of literature, ignoring his own romantic everyday experiences as trite and boring. The Schlegels try to teach him that literature and art are supposed to connect us more fully with the real world and with each other. Leonard misses this point and thinks intellectual discussion is a way of making himself superior to his lot as a lower-class worker.

Another major motif of the novel is the English countryside itself. London is shown as ever-changing, while the English countryside can only be appreciate by people like the Schlegels, who notice the poetic and adventurous side of life, and don’t just think in dollars and cents.

“I hate this continual flux of London. It is an epitome of us at our worst–eternal formlessness; all the qualities, good, bad, and indifferent, streaming away . . .”

Modern culture is an eternal formlessness. Cosmopolitan life is always changing, never settled. It lacks a foundation. Henry symbolically represents London Cosmopolitan life. He is constantly described as always moving, never able to pin down roots anywhere. The symbolism is obvious. Such people have no roots, and therefore can have no deeper life beyond the superficial. Forster invokes this same problem by returning to the literature question, noting that England has no mythology (a problem that prompted J. R. R. Tolkien to write The Lords of the Rings). The lack of English mythology is also Forster pointing out the lack of foundation and roots. The central problem with English identity is a kind of rootlessness. People like the Wilcoxes define themselves by what they’re not: not poor (but rich), not intellectual (but practical), not India or Nigeria (but England).  They have no identity inherit in the place itself, but their identity is forged by everything outside of themselves. Place then takes on new importance, and this is why Howard’s End is the ultimate symbol of the novel. It’s the roots that keeps joins the Wilcoxes and Schlegels together; it’s the image the opens and ends the novel bringing the beginning and end of the novel together; it’s a place where they can finally form roots and be with the ones they love.

While I didn’t love the novel, I grant that Forster wrote a sophisticated piece of literature that puts his other two major novels to shame (and I say that despite enjoying A Passage to India much more). This is one of those novels that I suspect would constantly yield new interpretations and sub-text every time I read it, and in which I am missing half of what is actually happening in the text. Forster shows a true comic wit when depicting his character. Take the following quote below as an example in which Forster compares Charles and his father protect each other from feeling emotions over Mrs Wilcox’s death with Ulysses and his companions stuffing their ears with wool and protecting themselves from the Sirens.

“Charles and his father sometimes disagreed. But they always parted with an increased regard for one another, and each desired no doughtier comrade when it was necessary to voyage for a little past the emotions. So the sailors of Ulyssess voyaged past the Sirens, having first stopped one another’s ears with wool.”

There is a lot to admire about Forster’s work, but still I didn’t like it enough to want to wade through it again anytime soon. Although I might re-read this again sometime in the far future. Based off my experiences with his three major novels, I think it’s safe to say I’m not all that interested in reading any of his other novels.

Advertisement