Happy Returns? Adapting Howards End

New Year’s Day is E.M. Forster’s birthday. He was born 1^st January 1879. And this week I read that Howards End is to be serialized by the BBC sometime in 2016. Cause for celebration? I hope so. It is certainly a novel that lends itself to adaptation, and the 1992 film of Howards End, starring Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins, is still fresh in my mind. But the adaptations began much earlier. In 1967, I watched a stage version in London, with Gemma Jones as Helen Schlegel. In 1970, this was adapted as a BBC Play of the Month, with Glenda Jackson as Margaret. I don’t remember much about that production; my regret now is to have no recollection of its specially commissioned music. The composer was Elizabeth Poston, a close friend of Forster’s who would one day live at Rooks Nest, both the childhood home of Forster himself and the actual model for Howards End. Poston’s score might have been the best way of providing what is essential in Forster yet always gets lost in adaptation: the controlling but chameleon narrative voice.

It isn’t only adaptations into other media that mark out Forster’s novel. Novelists, too, have turned to it – notably David Lodge in Nice Work (1988) and Zadie Smith in On Beauty (2005). Both these novels are acts of homage to Howards End, and aspects of the novel are threaded gleefully into the warp and weft (Forster’s own phrase) of the plots and the characters of each. I have enjoyed all these attempts at adaptation. They show, if nothing else, the novel sustaining a lively afterlife. But still the loss of that narrative voice troubles me.

In Concerning E.M. Forster (2009), Frank Kermode observed

… in Howards End the characters are represented as free individuals, with minds of their own, but the book contains a strikingly large amount of authorial reflection, wise sayings about love, class and culture, panic and emptiness, prose and passion, connecting and not connecting, straightforward announcements of the Forsterian way of looking at the human condition.

I admire Kermode, but disagree with him here. What he calls ‘authorial reflection, wise sayings’ are often neither authorial nor necessarily wise. And although ‘the Forsterian way of looking at the human condition’ is exactly what Forster’s novels offer the reader, such announcements aren’t straightforward. I take his narrators to be as carefully created (and as subject to their creator’s criticism) as all his other characters. When the narrator begins Chapter VI by proclaiming , ‘We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable’, who exactly does that ‘We’ include? Forster himself? And us, his ‘hypocrite lecteur’?  Surely Forster’s justification for such an outrageous statement – ‘This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk’ – fools no-one, least of all Forster himself?

This is an unusual instance of the narratorial ‘We’ in Howards End; from the first word onwards, the

narrator is elsewhere singular (‘One may as well begin…’). Later in Chapter VI, when describing Mrs Bast’s ‘teeth of dazzling whiteness’, he whispers knowingly to the reader, ‘Take my word for it,’ (leaving unsaid but not un-implied a confidential ‘old chap’) ‘that smile was simply stunning’. Immediately afterwards, though, he assumes a more discriminating relationship, a shared superiority:

…it is only you and I who will be fastidious and complain that true joy begins in the eyes, and that the eyes of Jacky did not accord with her smile, but were anxious and hungry. (Howards End, ed. Oliver Stallybrass, Penguin Books, 1975, p.61)

Later in the novel, Mr Wilcox and his son Charles have to decide whether or not to tell Margaret  Schlegel that Ruth Wilcox has left Howards End to her. At this point, the narrator tells us it isn’t necessary to follow the conversation to its conclusion:

It is rather a moment when the commentator should step forward. Ought the Wilcoxes to have offered their home to Margaret? I think not.  (p.107)

The more the narrator proceeds to justify this conclusion – ‘No, the Wilcoxes are not to be blamed … it is natural and fitting that after due debate they should tear the note up and throw it onto the dining room fire’ – the more evident it becomes that their decision is neither natural nor fitting. They are to be blamed.

So we grow reluctant to accept what the narrator tells us. Forster’s calling him ‘the commentator’ allows us to put some distance between ourselves and this ambiguous presence. As Forster, too, distances himself: there are even times in Howards End when the narrator adopts a female persona. After revealing that, though Helen had told her sister her feelings towards Paul Wilcox, she had said nothing to her brother Tibby, the narrator comments that this was neither prudishness nor precaution; rather, it was ‘the feeling that she betrayed a secret into the camp of men, and that, however trivial it was on this side of the barrier, it would become important on that.’ (p.67) I take ‘this side’ to imply women’s side, her side, on which she, the narrator/commentator, stands alongside Helen.

If you think I’m stretching a point here, consider the passage where the narrator ponders the way Margaret deals with the discovery of Henry’s former affair:

Pity was at the bottom of her actions all through this crisis. Pity, if one may generalize, is at the bottom of woman. When men like us, it is for our better qualities, and however tender their liking we dare not be unworthy of it, or they will quietly let us go. (p.240)

Whether these sayings are wise, or not, they are unarguably said here by a woman, and that woman is both narrator and commentator. She deserves her place among the cast of characters, and I hope for the day when an adaptation of Howards End finds room for her. Meanwhile, happy birthday to the shade of Morgan Forster.

Adrian Barlow

[illustrations: (i) The Penguin Modern Classics edition of Howards End that I used for A level English 1965-7; (ii) Rooks Nest, Stevenage, Hertfordshire; photo © the author

I keep returning to Forster. My previous post, ‘The Threat to Madingley Dell’ , refers to his novel The Longest Journey. See also ‘Venice Inscribed: Ruskin and E.M. Forster’ and ‘King’s Cross and E.M. Forster’. Some of the posts on Forster from my previous blog, World and Time: Adrian Barlow’s blog, form a chapter in my book Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning (Lutterworth, 2012).

A complete inventory of my blog can be found here.

The Threat to Madingley Dell

Westwards from Cambridge, the first glimpse of real countryside comes as you turn off the main road at the foot of Madingley Hill.  Head towards Madingley village and at once you’ll see farmland on your right and, on your left, a windmill overlooking the fens, which start here. On a clear day you have a level view towards Ely Cathedral, north east on the horizon.  

The verge widens as you approach the American Military Cemetery; from the road you can look back and up to the Memorial Building and Chapel, but the sweeping rows of the crosses are hidden behind a hedge. It’s an extraordinary place, perhaps the most beautifully landscaped of any military cemetery in Europe. Visitors standing by the flagpole near the main entrance see the ancient Madingley Wood on their left and, beyond the slope of the cemetery and road below, the wide-angled landscape of the fen edge. In 1954, the British Government promised the American Ambassador that the land around the cemetery would always be ‘restricted to agricultural use’ – and so it has remained, until now.

But now, there are plans for a new and much larger Madingley Park and Ride to be sited up near the roundabout at the top of Madingley Hill. That the present P&R has to be relocated somewhere because of the University’s rapidly progressing North West Cambridge development, I accept. What is harder to credit, though, is that one of the County Council’s key proposals is to create a new busway that, skirting the corner of the American Cemetery, will cut into the lower edge of Madingley Wood and then plough through the new 800 Wood. This wood was opened with great fanfare in 2009 to mark the octo-centenary of the University’s foundation, and to make a major contribution to the ecology and topography of Madingley.  It would seem to me utterly cynical to decide, only six years later, that the wood is so unimportant a bus route can be driven through the middle of it.  Madingley Wood is an even more precious place, a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest (an SSSI) whose flora and archaeology have been studied and recorded for over 350 years. This makes it one of the oldest continuously-recorded woodland sites in Britain.

And in the corner of Madingley Wood where it abuts the 800 Wood and where the bus way will start its ascent towards the new Park and Ride, there is what I should like to call a SSLI, a Site of Special Literary Interest. This is Madingley Dell, and it provides another argument for not allowing proposed siting of the P&R and the dedicated bus route to go ahead. A petition has been launched, and I hope you will sign it.

Madingley Dell features in E.M. Forster’s Cambridge novel, The Longest Journey (1907), the one Forster called ‘by far’ his best book and ‘the only book which has ever given something back to the places from which I took it’. Madingley Dell mattered to Forster, and to this novel, as much as the Marabar Caves mattered to A Passage to India:

A little this side of Madingley, to the left of the road, there is a secluded dell, paved with grass and planted with fir trees [….] Rickie had discovered it in his second term, when the January snows had melted and left fjords and lagoons of clearest water between the inequalities of the floor.  

Indeed, the dell looks to Rickie, the Cambridge student who is the protagonist of The Longest Journey, ‘as big as Switzerland or Norway’ and ‘and he came upon it at a time when his life too was beginning to expand’.  He treasures it as a special place, ‘a kind of church – a church where indeed you could do anything you liked, but where anything you did would be transfigured’:

If the dell was to bear any inscription, he would have liked it to be “This way to Heaven”, painted on a signpost by the highroad, and he did not realize till later years that the number of visitors would not thereby have sensibly increased.

Later in the story he brings his girlfriend Agnes to Madingley: they visit the church and Madingley Hall; what happens next, in the dell, prefigures everything that will happen to Rickie thereafter. The dell is the locus of the novel’s action.

To follow Rickie and Agnes into the dell today you would have to trespass: casual visitors are not welcome in Madingley Wood. But you don’t have to take Rickie’s route over the gate (which wasn’t there in Forster’s day), and along the main ride through the wood before turning right, finding yourself in the centre of the dell and feeling yourself enclosed by a great wall of chalk. Instead, you can look down into it from the easternmost edge of the 800 Wood. Standing there, you are almost on the lip of the ancient and abandoned chalk pit, but tread carefully: the fence is precarious and the drop precipitate. The dell still has a strange atmosphere – a hidden world no one can enter, walled in by chalk and only twenty yards but a world away from the road.

Chalk provides a leitmotif running through The Longest Journey. Later in the novel, Rickie is in Wiltshire, where ‘chalk made the dust white, chalk made the water clear, chalk made the clean rolling outlines of the land, and favoured the grass and the distant coronals of trees.’ Forster sees the chalk formations that spread across southern and eastern England as veins and arteries running to and from the heart of the country and uniting the elements of his story. Indeed, at the defining moment of the novel, Rickie, standing on the edge of Salisbury Plain and learning a secret that will change his life forever, ‘was reminded for a moment of that chalk pit near Madingley’.

Would it matter if Madingley Dell were destroyed? Forster would have thought so. I hope you’ll think so too.

Adrian Barlow

[illustration: Madingley Dell, 2009

For full coverage of the background to the online petition against the proposed bus route, and to sign the  petition,  CLICK HERE.

There is a counter proposal to site the new Park and Ride site  north of the Hardwick roundabout on the A428 that is gathering momentum. The Madingley Village Traffic Group is urging everyone responding to the City Deal survey to object to a P&R at Madingley Mulch and to relocate it 1.25 miles further west at Hardwick.  If successful, that would remove the threat of light and emission pollution from a P&R site at this elevated position.

I have written about Madingley Dell before, and some of my account above draws on that earlier writing, which can be found in my book Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning (Lutterworth, 2012). I’ve also written about Forster and the dell in World and time: Rupert Brooke and E.M. Forster.

I recommend also the website of the Friends of the Forster Country.

For an Inventory of all my blog posts 2011-2015, please click here.

Text and photo ©  Adrian Barlow 2015