ARTICLES WRITTEN ABOUT E.M. FORSTER
Some years ago, in a Guardian review, I mentioned in passing the homosexual themes in EM Forster's fictions. I was startled to receive, by return as it were, an exceedingly sharp missive from the great man, bidding me on no account to say or write such things again. Everyone of course knew all about it, and I inferred that my real offence lay in making such a boorishly casual reference to an important mystery.
Clearly Forster liked to keep things separate. Only his own circle participated in such matters, and in the stories with a directly sexual theme, which I then knew nothing about. I think in any case my comment was misleading, for although there is an undercover element in his novels their success lies in the way in which it has been completely socialised, turned into a mastery of plot, tone, and humour. When he wrote the first study of his fiction Lionel Tulling was quite unaware of Forsters' homosexuality.
Unlike fiction today, where everything is laid on the line, his novels have an extra dimension which makes the 'faking' as Forster called it, all the livelier and more compelling. Jane Austen is a not too distant parallel. Her fiction hangs serenely over a gulf in which her fear, deprivation and resentment abide, powerless to affect it aesthetically and yet giving it their own kind of power.
Forster himself, however, appeared to equate the extra dimension with what has been rather stuffily called by critics the Fallacy of Imitative Form. In a letter to William Plomer, of 1934, a very revealing one, he remarks that in A Passage to India 'I tried to show that India is an unexplainable muddle by introducing an unexplained Muddle - Miss Quested's experience in the cave. When asked what happened there, I don't know.'
There were obvious reasons why he wouldn't. A muddled novel conveys that life is a muddle, and Plomer's novel The Invaders has, he suggests, also been 'left untidy' in order to 'show the untidiness of London.'
In a typical show of modesty Forster in fact does less than justice to A Passage to India, in which the real underlying ambiguity is about the nature of his sexual consciousness. Maybe in Plomer's case too. Forster shrugs the matter off, by writing that 'some fallacy, not a serious one, has seduced us both, some confusion between the dish and the dinner.' Since he was 'a bit old fashioned as regards form' Forster was in the odd position of taking up a stance in his novels - that of the 19th-century writer-sage like Hardy and Meredith - on which he had no intention of delivering.
Jane Austen wrote before such a stance was invented or adopted, and he could perhaps have gone on writing as she did if he had not been expected, as he told Christopher Isherwood, to 'feel advancing at this point to some Grand Pronouncement. However, it will not come.' He is not going to strike an attitude which says: 'This, this have I achieved before civilisation crashes.'
During the period of these letters Forster was in a sense 'recovering' from being a writer, whose unconscious had been hard at work. ('Dr Norman Haire has tittered to William Plomer that if my novels were analysed they would reveal a pretty mess. and that the works of H Walpole and S Maugham would be even prettier,') and was now embarking on a new life of friendship and self-discovery
Most of the letters are too hebdomadally intimate to mean much to posterity, and are intended for their correspondents rather than for the annals of literature. They have been beautifully edited, and the note are sometimes more informative than the letters themselves.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/1985/jun/02/biography.fiction
2.- "Whose books once influenced mine": the relationship between E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and Virginia Woolf's 'The Waves.'
Michael J. Hoffman
In a letter to Ethel Smyth on 21 Sept. 1930, Virginia Woolf spoke of her friend Morgan Forster as "E. M. Forster the novelist, whose books once influenced mine, and are very good, I think, though impeded, shrivelled and immature" (Letters 4: 218). In earlier letters Woolf had often alluded to Forster's influence, even insisting on one occasion that "I always feel that nobody, except perhaps Morgan Forster, lays hold of the thing I have done" (14 June 1925; Letters 3: 188). By 1930 this literary friendship had continued for more than two decades and was characterized by the kind of edginess that often marks the relationships of highly competitive artists. During the same year, Forster recorded his own anxieties about Woolf in a note that we find in his Commonplace Book: "Visit to Virginia, prospects of, not wholly pleasurable. I shall watch her curiosity and flattery exhaust themselves in turn. Nor does it do to rally the Pythoness" (54). These comments, written when both writers were well launched as established novelists and public figures, give some indication of the complex literary friendship that goaded and nourished both writers. In this essay we shall explore how that relationship manifests itself in two of their best-known novels, Howards End and The Waves, through significant parallels in their thematics, narrative voice, and imagery.
Although Forster was himself just three years older than Woolf, he represents an earlier generation, in part because of his extraordinary precocity and also in part because Woolf - not enjoying some of the educational advantages afforded Forster - began her career more slowly, publishing her first novel when she was 33 years old. In contrast, Howards End, one of Forster's two most celebrated novels, was published when its author was barely 31, having been preceded by three other novels and followed a year later by a collection of tales. When Woolf's first novel appeared in 1915, Forster had been publishing fiction for ten years, and Woolf considered him a senior peer among British writers.
Woolf and Forster related to one another as practicing novelists, as critics who reviewed each other's work, and as friends within their Bloomsbury connections. In 1910 Forster gave his first talk to the Friday Club on "The Feminine Note in Literature," and before that he had known Leonard Woolf at Cambridge through their membership in the Apostles (Furbank 1: 192). Forster began his practice of reviewing Woolf's novels with The Voyage Out. Indeed P. N. Furbank, Forster's biographer, claims that after Forster's "favourable review of The Voyage Out in 1915 [Woolf] 'became very dependent on his opinion'" (qtd. in Dowling 85). It is instructive to compare this relationship to the much more vexed one of Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Viewed within that context, the ties between Forster and Woolf seem extraordinarily positive and long-lasting.
Forster appears to have been most comfortable with Woolf's earlier works, such as The Voyage Out, a book similar to his own: in "The Early Novels of Virginia Woolf" (1925) he describes it as "a strange, tragic, inspired book . . . [whose] closing chapters . . . are as poignant as anything in modern fiction . . ." (Abinger Harvest 107). (It seems to us that in A Passage to India Forster repeats many of the structural and thematic motifs he found in The Voyage Out.) But when Woolf began, with Jacob's Room (1922), to assume her more distinctive voice, Forster's praise became more ambivalent. Even following the comparative success of Jacob's Room, however, Woolf continued to see Forster as her senior in accomplishment until the mid-20s, when her next novel, Mrs. Dalloway, established her as the equal of her friend.
But we should not underestimate the element of competition. Both writers were trying to establish the narrative aesthetics of their time, and each resisted definitions developed by the other. In "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" (1924), Woolf places Forster among the Georgian, or new novelists who are moving away from old-fashioned realism (Captain's Death Bed 95); a year later, in "The Early Novels of Virginia Woolf," Forster praises Jacob's Room and Mrs. Dalloway, particularly as artistic structures, but his reservations peep through when he refers to Woolf's style of "inspired breathlessness" and her "shimmering fabric" (Abinger Harvest 109, 111), traits he suggests may be a mask for covering over the lack of real characters in Woolf's books.(1) In Aspects of the Novel (1927) Forster also patronizingly lumps Woolf together with Laurence Sterne as a "fantasist," and describes her style as "a rather deliberate bewilderment, an announcement to all and sundry that they do not know where they are going" (19-20).
Woolf's diaries testify to the influence that Forster's critical response had on her self-esteem. Her entries reveal that with each successive novel it is Forster's judgment she awaits and his critique that - other than Leonard's - she values most highly. When he followed his favorable review of The Voyage Out with a more measured response to Night and Day (1919), a book that almost no one liked, Woolf protests: "I see no reason to be depressed on his account" (Diaries 1: 310). After the publication of Jacob's Room, the letter containing Forster's simple praise ("I am sure it is good") is the one Woolf "liked best of all" (2: 209). While anticipating reviews of Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf writes: "The only judgement on Mrs. D. I await with trepidation (but that's too strong) is Morgan's. He will say something enlightening" (3: 22). When she receives his approbation three days later, her sparse diary entry underscores the significance of the event. "Well, Morgan admires . . . This is a weight off my mind." She notes, as well, that Forster "kissed my hand" (3: 24).
Two years later, it is not until she receives Forster's letter on To the Lighthouse ("It is awfully sad, very beautiful . . . I am inclined to think it your best work") that she feels free to put that novel "behind" her (3: 137). The following year (1929) she is initially concerned that Forster will not review A Room of One's Own and is then relieved that he likes it (3: 262). In 1931 she quotes Morgan's response to The Waves directly, and at some length, into her diary: "Here I will give myself the pleasure - shall I? - of copying a sentence or two from Morgan's unsolicited letter on The Waves." Delighted that Forster declares the novel a "classic," Woolf reports: "I daresay that gives me more substantial pleasure than any letter I've had about any book. Yes, I think it does, coming from Morgan" (4: 52). Later she reflects, "Isn't it odd that I'm really, I believe, ostracized by some of my friends, because of The Waves, & lifted to the highest pinnacle by others, because of it? . . . Morgan is the only one, either side, that matters" (4: 54). Woolf dreads Morgan's silence again after the appearance of Roger Fry: A Biography (1940), the last book she published before her death. She fears that "Morgan will say - just enough to show he doesn't like, but is kind" (5: 303), then reports that she would "be relieved if Morgan approves" (5: 305), and finally records her attempts to cope with Morgan's silence about this book - "No review by Morgan, no review at all. No letter" (5: 308).
For her part, reviewing Aspects of the Novel a month after its publication, Woolf contradicts the central tenet of Forster's aesthetics when she criticizes him for his vagueness in defining the novelist's capacity to create "life," the most important of his self-proclaimed evaluative categories. "Life," she writes in fluent condescension,
it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are poles asunder. (Orlando 267).(2)
Forster apparently responded with a personal letter in which he obliquely expresses both injury and pique.(3) Although each writer was hurt by the other's criticism, Woolf no longer defers to Forster. She is by this time (1927) a well-established, important British writer, and she knows it. When Woolf publishes The Waves four years later, Forster the novelist has been silent for seven years, and Woolf clearly feels herself the more prominent literary figure. Thus when Forster compares Woolf to the snake that crushes its prey in his Commonplace Book (quoted earlier), he reveals his discomfort with her swelling powers and fame. He may also intuit the shift in her assessment of his literary powers; this is the same year, remember, that Woolf tells Ethel Smyth that she finds Forster's works "impeded, shrivelled and immature" (1930).
To illustrate the reversal in their relative positions, we might consider an incident recorded in a series of letters that Woolf wrote to various friends in 1932, a year after publication of The Waves. Several of her contemporaries mistook an anonymous book review of Jane Austen's letters, actually written by Forster, to be by Woolf.(4) Woolf responded by disparaging the writing, and disclaiming any similarity to her own, although some anxiety is apparent in the extremity of her reaction. To Ethel Smyth, for instance, she writes:
Where is your taste, your judgment - I ask in all solemnity (I'm rocking with laughter) - 'The Austens are of your very best' - do you really think so? Well, the article may be a masterpiece - I thought it feeble in the extreme, and said to L. 'heres someone trying my tricks in the Times - ' No, of course I didn't write it. Surely - (13 Nov. 1932, Letters 5: 125)
She refers to this matter in two more letters to Smyth (20 Nov. and 29 Nov. 1932), and then again in a letter of 1 Jan. 1933 to W. Colston Leigh, the agent who arranged an American lecture tour by Vim Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson. By the time of her letter to Leigh, Woolf already knows that Forster had written the review. She writes:
I dislike the expressions separately - in their context, bathed in Morgans very peculiar sensibility they may be all right - I'm not Morgan. Thats one of the puzzles of letters - how an atmosphere - person - taste - pose - an transform the good into the bad. (5: 143)
What is really going on here? Had Forster swerved stylistically to the extent that he was unconsciously imitating Woolf? Or, in fact, had the two writers, after 20 years of reading each other and measuring themselves thereby, developed similar discursive styles?(5) Given how much earlier Forster started to publish, the issue of Woolf's influence on him does not become strong until she has, with Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, achieved a major reputation, and Forster has published the last novel to appear in his lifetime, A Passage to India.
Questions of style and of fame preoccupied both writers and served as a subject of discourse for both. Both were interested not only in developing an individual style and in measuring themselves against their contemporaries and each other, but also, on a grander scale, in trying to imagine their places in a larger literary history, one that extended beyond national boundaries. It is remarkable that in these projections Forster and Woolf often use similar kinds of visual imagery. In his critical assessments, for instance, Forster often employs architectural tropes as images of containment. In Aspects of the Novel he envisions the English novelists (regardless of period) "seated together in a room, a circular room, a sort of British Museum reading-room - all writing their novels simultaneously" (21). Similarly, in "The Early Novels of Virginia Woolf," Forster compares English fiction from Fielding to Arnold Bennett to a series of evenly spaced portraits in a picture gallery; the gallery itself is the "one factor that never varies" (Abinger Harvest 115). When he describes what Woolf would do to the gallery, Forster expresses both his highest praise and deepest anxiety: "She wants to destroy the gallery . . . and in its place build what? Something more rhythmical. Jacob's Room suggests a spiral whirling down to a point, Mrs. Dalloway a cathedral" (115). In general, Forster regards the "little mansions" of British fiction as dwarfed by the "colonnades" and "vaults" of such novels as War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov (Aspects 8). By comparing her works to cathedrals and whirling spirals, Forster was effectively ranking Woolf in the same class as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Similarly, it seems to us that Woolf transmutes Forster's imagery into the sculptural when, while revising The Waves, she writes: "What I fear is that the re-writing will have to be so drastic that I may entirely muddle it somehow. It is bound to be very imperfect. But I think it possible that I have got my statues against the sky" (Diaries 3: 300).
When Forster asks the question, in Aspects of the Novel, "may the writer take the reader into his confidence about his characters?" he answers, "better not" (81). But any reader of Howards End soon realizes that Forster's narrative voice never hesitates to tell us about the characters, even though that voice is more explicit in making generalizations about character than in giving away secrets about the characters. Here is an area in which the two writers' practices ostensibly clashed, with Woolf attempting either to transmute the narrative voice or do away with it entirely in the Jamesian spirit of dramatizing or rendering. In reality, however, Woolf found other ways to get her comments into the text - for instance, by using one character's voice to describe another character, and by dramatically giving that commenting character a prominence in the narrative that establishes his or her authority (for example, Bernard in The Waves).
Literary history has situated Forster and Woolf as part of a community known as "Bloomsbury," often neglecting the nuanced differences in their family backgrounds. Even though most of Forster's contemporaries among the British artists and intelligentsia came from a milieu that resembled that of the Schlegel sisters, his own familial roots were Wilcoxian: property, politics, business. He spent his boyhood (1883-93) on a small country estate called Rooksnest in Stevenage, a home not unlike Howards End. It is no doubt the Wilcox in Forster that seeks to identify an essentially English art, an aesthetics that arises from an English mythology. One can trace a British chauvinism in both his aesthetic and political manifestoes as well as in his desire to compete with such French and Russian masters as Proust and Tolstoy.(6) Forster chose to live in a country town (Weybridge) and a country village (Abinger) consistent with his more rural family roots. Woolf, the consummate city dweller (like the Schlegel sisters whom they resemble, Virginia and Vanessa were natives of London), later took refuge with Leonard in rural Sussex to escape the demands of London literary and political life. Their country home, Monk's House, Rodmell is another dwelling reminiscent of both Howards End and Rooksnest.
There can hardly be two novels that seem more explicitly opposite than Howards End and The Waves. The first clearly finds its affinities in the long realist tradition of the British social novel, with its concerns about class, marriage, and property. Howards End is full of houses; it presents the rich and the poor; it divides the middle class into lovers of property and lovers of the arts; it has three marriages, at least one marriage plot, two infidelities, and an illegitimate birth. These have been conventions of narrative fiction since Clarissa and Tom Jones. The Waves, on the other hand, is the quintessential "impressionist" novel, meant to be read with the care one brings to a lyric poem full of images, tropes, and archetypes; it moves not on the flow of plot and story line but on accumulated fragments from the lives of a variety of characters, all of whom speak but not all of whom control the discourse; its characters are not created psychologically through action and dialogue but through apercus and juxtaposition. The two books seem as though they were written out of totally different novelistic traditions, as to some extent they were.
Yet their thematic concerns converge. Howards End was published during 1910, the year in whose final month human consciousness supposedly changed - as Woolf later suggested in "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown." In its social content Howards End sums up a Europe on the brink of a world war that will forever change the fortunes of England. It places in conflict two upper-middle-class families, one descended from English yeomanry (or the folk), the other from cultivated German burghers, bringing them together in a not altogether comfortable marriage and placing both families in conflict with a member of the urban poor, himself descended from yeoman stock. Without focusing on the specifics of international conflict, Howards End nonetheless presents a country that is poised between two worlds, those of "culture" (the Wilcoxes) and "civilization" (the Schlegels). In the late nineteenth century, German critics began to make an
impassioned distinction . . . between Kultur and Zivilisation. . . . German Kultur . . . was said to be concerned with 'inner freedom,' with authenticity, with truth rather than sham, with essence as opposed to appearance, with totality rather than the norm. (Eksteins 77, 79)
These were binary poles that English critics also contested during the time that Howards End was written and during the years preceding the rise of the Third Reich and the war that Woolf prefigures so vividly in her final novel, Between the Acts (1941).
If Howards End presents an English culture that is ready to disappear in the face of modernity and global conflict, The Waves chronicles an England two decades later that emerged from the First World War with the end of its colonial hegemony, the breakdown of traditional relations between the sexes, and the frustrations of individuals who wish in vain for lives like those idealized in Howards End. But they now live in an England that is no longer a model that the world can follow or its citizens believe in.
Such thematic elements are as important to The Waves as they are to Howards End, often in the way they differ from or invert more traditional modes of narrative presentation. For instance, four years after focusing so heavily in To the Lighthouse on the Freudian family drama, Woolf presents seven characters in The Waves, none of whom appears to have siblings. Similarly, allusions to parents, spouses, or children in The Waves tend to be fleeting and mostly insignificant. We hear early in the novel, for instance, that Bernard is engaged, but it is not until his final monologue that he tells us in passing that he has fathered children. In a strange response to Forster's criticism that she did not give "life" to her characters, Woolf denies the characters in The Waves almost all forms of "connection," ironically inverting a judgment she makes in her diary that Forster himself was "aloof" (3: 152). Whereas Forster portrays the extraordinary power of family bonds in Howards End, Woolf seems intent in The Waves upon ignoring the extensive, indeed determinative powers of the family.
In fact, the awareness of separateness and difference - the movement out of a prelapsarian oneness - marks the first apprehensions of the characters in The Waves and remains a driving force throughout the narrative: in his final monologue, Bernard remembers that, as children, "We suffered terribly as we became separate bodies" (241). That experience of separateness does not, however, acknowledge separation from the mother, since the family scarcely exists in The Waves. And while Woolf avoids certain inscriptions of traditional family elements, she does include, as the first break in the novel, the British compulsion to separate the sexes during adolescence. The characters' destinies are henceforth marked by gender, and the schools they attend are differently endowed. Authority, history, and fellowship compensate for some of the less positive aspects of the boys' boarding-school experience. By contrast, the boarding school of the three girls is like a holding cell: sterile, confining, regimented. One is reminded of the descriptions in A Room of One's Own of the differences between male and female Oxbridge colleges, particularly their dinner tables. The boys in The Waves are inspired by the speakers at chapel; they become poets on the river banks, lounging in friendship amid the luxury of metaphysical speculations. Woolf clearly envied and idealized the Cambridge experiences of her brothers and their friends, which she felt had been denied to her. Moreover, she grants none of the female characters a destiny she would have desired for herself (although she does write aspects of herself into each): Susan the housemother/earthmother; Rhoda the psychological misfit; Jinny the narcissist. Although Woolf severs her characters from oppressive Victorian/Edwardian family structures, she does not incorporate positive plot options into their adult lives.
This does not mean she treats all characters with strict evenhandedness. Although unhappy, Neville has his poetry, and Louis is one of those powerful men who make the world run. Percival experiences the fate of an athlete dying young, embalmed forever in the amber of Victorian masculinity. And Bernard, whose voice increasingly comes to dominate the novel, completely filling the last 20 percent of it, comes to be a spokesperson for the author. But his ironic, worldly, and somewhat exhausted wisdom seems finally based less on Woolf herself and more on her friend Morgan, in persona, age, and physique, "a rather heavy, elderly man, grey at the temples" (238). (Forster was in his early 50s when The Waves was published.(7)) What does this reliance on Bernard's voice suggest? Is Woolf invoking Forster's voice, consciously or unconsciously, to represent a kind of authority? If so, does she, through this displacement, express envy for the kind of narratorial authority possible only to a male voice of the dominant culture? Or is Woolf trying to show us, through Bernard, the failure of a life lived through the point of view of someone like Forster?
If we are correct in identifying Bernard as a kind of doppelganger to Forster, the latter set the precedent for such a gesture by writing characters reminiscent of Virginia Stephen and her sisters into his early novels. Indeed, the Schlegel menage - two young women independently managing the family resources and directing the education of their younger brother - seems to be directly modeled on the Stephen household after Leslie's death. Clearly the freedoms engendered by the Stephen circle inspired Forster to present them as viable alternatives to more accepted social practices. In fact, Forster proffered a more ironic assessment of the Cambridge experience, as one who had had it himself, in his portrayal of the solipsistic, hedonistic Tibby Schlegel (cf. Thoby Stephen, Virginia's older brother who is usually seen as the model for Percival) in Howards End.
It is apparent that both Forster and Woolf coveted certain qualities of the other's life, and that they enunciated in their novels many of the social concerns that preoccupied the other. Forster, for example, felt constrained from creating overtly homosexual characters. Maurice was, of course, not published until after his death, and the erotic dimensions in the relationships between characters of the same sex (as, for example, between Aziz and Fielding in A Passage to India) were veiled. On the other hand, Woolf, through the persona of Neville (usually thought to be based on Lytton Strachey), was able to place a homosexual character into a normal, rather than an exceptional or ostracized life.
In a similar paradox, Forster dealt with a series of feminist issues in Howards End long before they became a central subject of Woolf's writing. In that novel Forster obliquely and ironically raises the abiding issue of primogeniture, even though the Englishwoman's right to own and bequeath property had been established by law more than three decades earlier. After exposing the family's collusion in dismissing the first Mrs. Wilcox's deathbed legacy as worthless writing on a piece of disposable paper, Forster delivers his own poetic justice by assuring Margaret's final ownership of the house. He also champions the right of a single mother to bear and raise her (illegitimate) child on English soil in a state of moral impunity. Helen feels guilt not over her sexual impropriety but over the fact that she has taken advantage of someone from another, less protected class. Furthermore, she states at the end that she does not wish to be married to anyone. Forster also exposes the Wilcoxes' sexual double standard, and punishes the family by stripping it of its public powers. In addition, in the character of Margaret Schlegel he heroicizes a woman who is neither young nor strikingly attractive nor likely to bear children (she states her desire not to have children), and he aligns his narrative voice and his most perspicacious insights with hers. With the exception of Jacky Bast, Forster's female characters of 1910 fare better than Woolf's of 1931.(8)
Just as the central voice of Howards End is that of Margaret Schlegel - whose moral values occupy the book's center and seem most like those of Forster - in The Waves, ostensibly written without a narrator in a version of the dramatized poetic novel, the voice of Bernard increasingly dominates, his sections becoming longer and longer, until we overhear the entire final section told in his own voice. By having Margaret Schlegel unaggressively tame the powers of patriarchal capitalism (even as she marries into and accepts its advantages), on the one hand, and by granting her both aesthetic principles and a rational consciousness on the other, Forster hails "feminine" qualities that have nothing to do with fertility, beauty, or youth. Woolf, in creating Bernard, grants him nurturing qualities more often associated with women, as for instance when he comforts Susan in a manner similar to Margaret's comforting of Helen. Both Bernard and Margaret, aside from speaking as the respective moral centers of their novels, also serve a similar, cohesive function in terms of their novels' plots.
Moreover, Bernard's attachment to the public role of the British male in the successful functioning of the British Empire (even at the expense of diminishing his private life) bears an uncanny resemblance to some of Forster's characterizations in Howards End. For instance, as an older man Bernard resembles not only Forster but Mr. Wilcox and his son Charles. When he receives a telephone call at breakfast, Bernard entertains the parodic notion that "it might be (one has these fancies) to assume command of the British Empire" (261). He identifies sanity, the entire body functioning properly, with breakfast time:
Opening, shutting; shutting, opening; eating, drinking; sometimes speaking - the whole mechanism seemed to expand, to contract, like the mainspring of a clock. Toast and butter, coffee and bacon, the Times and letters - suddenly the telephone rang with urgency. (260-61)
Readers will recall that it is during breakfast at Howards End, following her flirtation with Paul, that Helen Schlegel realizes she does not belong with the Wilcoxes, and it is also at a later breakfast that the Wilcoxes conspire to destroy Mrs. Wilcox's bequest of Howards End to Margaret.
When we examine other images we also find some provocative parallels. Procreation clearly stands in Bernard's consciousness as one's "surrender . . . to the stupidity of nature" (268). For this reason, among others, we find it difficult to believe in Bernard as a father. He is at the book's end a lonely person, unable and unwilling to connect. When he says "Let me be alone" (294), he reminds us of Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India, unable to translate the muddle of life as represented by "ou-boum" and asking to be left alone. In another sense Bernard also resembles Mr. Ramsay, with the Berkeleyan nihilism wherein he questions the existence of the Ding an sich and in his attempts to reestablish it as a basis for the continuity of experience. It may well be, however, that in 1910 Forster established the blueprint for all these characters when he has his narrator say of Margaret Schlegel that "she had outgrown stimulants, and was passing from words to things . . . Some closing of the gate is inevitable after thirty, if the mind itself is to become a creative power" (206).
While Woolf's overall narrative conventions show her independence of Forster's genial prescriptions, Bernard's narrative concerns do echo those of Forster. In Aspects, for instance, Forster decried the difficulty of using complex plots without correspondingly intelligent audiences, pointing out that the average reader is interested only in a story that progresses along the lines of a pedestrian, linear chronology, which Forster characterizes with the image of "and then - and then." In the final section of The Waves, Bernard more than once uses a similar figure to describe the passage of life, the equivalent of Forster's "story." "Nevertheless," Bernard says, "life is pleasant, life is tolerable. Tuesday follows Monday; then comes Wednesday" (257). "And then - and then," we clearly hear in echo, just as we clearly hear Bernard trying out, though self-consciously, the prophetic voice that Forster attributes to Dostoyevsky (Aspects 126).
Not only do these novels have themes that converge, they also share other elements: in particular, their language and tropes show how the friends functioned as almost kindred writing spirits. Houses, to which both Woolf and Forster attach extraordinary significance, seem to represent for each writer a permanence, reflected in Helen Schlegel's remark to her sister that "The house has a surer life than we" (237). The house by the sea that dominates the interludes of The Waves recalls the St. Ives holiday home of Virginia's childhood as well as the summer house in To the Lighthouse, which serves as the quasiprotagonist of the "Time Passes" section of that novel. And the empty Howards End, bereft of its tenant, remains the monument if not the mausoleum of Ruth Wilcox. Indeed, when Margaret visits it for the first time, the eerie Miss Avery believes that she is the original Mrs. Wilcox come back from the dead to return her maternal spirit to the empty house. But it is in The Waves that Woolf raises the house to its fullest archetypal dimensions.
In view of Woolf's overwhelming response to the early death of her mother, many critics have tried to locate the "absent mother" in the substrata of Woolf's novels. Certainly the empty house in The Waves broods over the novel in the guise of a departed mother-spirit much as does the house bereft of Mrs. Ramsay in "Time Passes." We should also remember that both Mrs. Ramsay and Mrs. Wilcox die parenthetical, offstage deaths, and the disembodied house of To the Lighthouse recalls the fate of Howards End, which remains unoccupied after Mrs. Wilcox's death until another mother (Helen) and another matriarch (Margaret) arrive to regenerate it.(9)
Yet Woolf allows the house in The Waves to remain disembodied; she does not intend to create the exemplary house of consciousness. Rather, the house by the sea acts more like a human intervention against a transitory nature that also partakes of the eternal, a kind of Ding an sich. The only female character in the novel who distinctly occupies a house is Susan, and the implications of Susan's matriarchy are primarily negative. Her role as house mother destines her to a primitive, almost visceral subsistence, with her emotions suffocated and her personality weighed down by quotidian obligations. Having metonymically associated "house" with "mother" in To the Lighthouse, in The Waves Woolf neutralizes those charged associations by leaving the mother out of the archetypal house entirely. It is an easier move for Forster to repeople Howards End with the Schlegel angels because he has sentimentalized his own childhood in the English countryside; Woolf, on the other hand, abandons her childhood residence through apostasy, after building a fictional crypt to her parents' consciousness. In The Waves Woolf paints the still life of her house in the changing diurnal light as a series of studies not unlike those executed by Monet at Etretat and Rouen.(10)
Both Howards End and the house in The Waves are, then, shells of memory, and if Forster insists upon regeneration, Woolf allows her house to remain immaculate, purged of the violent, the visceral, the living. The "house" that signifies for Woolf is the house of the mortal body represented repeatedly (in the interludes) in its vulnerability by the shell of a snail broken open by a bird that spears the soft flesh inside. Bernard himself peoples this microcosmic house when he hears the "tap, tap, tap of the remorseless beaks of the young" (The Waves 288), and realizes that the oncoming generations signal his own impending death.
Needless to say, when Bernard finally enters the "dry, uncompromising, inhabited house" near the end of The Waves, it does not vibrate with the interaction of the living and the inanimate as do the ultimate furnishings and residents of Howards End (254). Much of Bernard's final soliloquy involves, in fact, a rejection of the domestic in his self-image of the domesticated man: "Was there no sword," he says, "nothing with which to batter down these walls, this protection, this begetting of children and living behind curtains . . .?" (266) And it is with the flat of the Schlegels' ancestral sword that Charles Wilcox attacks Leonard Bast in an ironic defense of the English moral values that arise from property - including the sexual purity of female family members. The image of the sword, in its flourish, is somewhat reminiscent of the language Forster idealized in a letter to Woolf during their exchange about Aspects of the Novel:
I find the continentals greater than the English not because Flaubert got hung but because Tolstoy etc., could vitalize guillotines etc., as well as tea-tables, could command certain moods or deeds which our domesticity leads us to shun as false. (qtd. in Furbank 146)
Our final points of comparison touch on what may be the deepest sources of similarity between the two writers: their use of imagery and their attempts to create powerful archetypes for both "life" and England. We shall solidify these points of comparison with evidence of remarkable parallels between the works each writer composed at the end of the 1930s, prefiguring the apparently inevitable approach of another world war. Shakespeare scholars often refer to the "matter of England," meaning by this the material drawn from chronicles of British history that the playwright used in his dramas. Forster and Woolf make their own use of an equivalent "matter of England," demonstrating an abiding concern with English history, landscape, and character. Take, for instance, their contrasting attitudes toward London. If the country house stands as one site of Forster's ode to England, the streets of Bernard's London (and Clarissa Dalloway's, for that matter) represent, for Woolf, the living force of English culture. A central subtext of Bernard's soliloquy is Woolf's own ode to England, expressed through Bernard's wandering in London - a celebration of the urban experience that Woolf attempted in a number of other novels, beginning as early as the opening chapter of The Voyage Out, in Mrs. Ambrose's revelation that London consists of more than the West End. If Woolf fails in that passage to capture the Dickensian diversity of the great city, she comes closer to succeeding in Bernard's rendition of London as "the pageant of existence" passing through him (270).(11) Unlike either of the Schlegel sisters, Bernard seems unconcerned by - indeed, even immune to - the complexities of London's real estate; Margaret, in marrying Mr. Wilcox, marries not only a house but property and a landed social class.
Woolf's biographers record that her protectors often considered London to be a source of overstimulation for their ward's fragile emotional state; they often removed her to the country to allow her to recover from the excesses of urban life. While Bernard is clearly exhilarated by the panorama of London life, he also manages to maintain a panoptic distance from it, which allows him to retain mastery over his experience.(12) Moreover, through a classically modernist self-mockery (242, opening paragraph), he avoids losing consciousness completely in the waves of successive impressions that he fashions and that overcome him; in contrast, for instance, to the extremely fragile Rhoda, who in so many ways resembles her creator.
While Woolf executes her contrasts primarily through metaphor, Forster characteristically works more by direct statement. Here are a few examples of his attempts to situate the countryside and London historically and thematically. First is a description of London in relation to the Schlegels, in which Forster presents the city as being "emblematic of their lives." "The literature of the near future," his narrator claims, "will probably ignore the country and seek inspiration from the town." The general public he characterizes as "Victorian, while London is Georgian" (84). In the famous passage on the Purbeck Hills, Forster takes us by panorama from city to country to city again, showing the immense interconnectedness of everything English (131-32).
Later in the chapter, Margaret Schlegel, becoming more and more the novel's central voice, characterizes the Wilcoxes to her sister:
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. There would be no trains, no ships to carry us literary people about in, no fields even. Just savagery. (137-38)
The narrator states at the end of chapter 21 that the Wilcoxes will "inherit the earth" (146). We see Forster striving to define a British character worthy of a world-class literature, simultaneously rejecting attributes that might be deemed dainty or domestic (feminine) rather than grand or worldly (masculine):
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. . . . England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature - for the great poet who shall voice her. . . . (210-11)
In her most poetic novel Virginia Woolf may well have been responding to that call.
Woolf uses more indirect strategies, particularly after her first two novels. By the time she writes The Waves she has submerged any message about England into the dramatization of her characters and, by the end, into the lonely voice of Bernard speaking to an implied listener.(13) Woolf dramatizes her message about the fate of England by presenting characters from middle-class circumstances, each representing a particular personality type rather than a serious cross-section of British society. She makes clear the relative privileges accorded the two sexes, gives a historical panorama of gender relations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shows the changing relationship of the colonies to the patria in the character of Louis, and almost parodies the imminent decline of England as a colonial power in the death of Percival while riding a horse in India. Bernard speaks in the fatigued voice of a man of rich sensibility who has grown cynical and demoralized about city life and his own failure to "connect," and Woolf lets him end the novel with words that are replete with irony as he echoes "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (a poem Mr. Ramsay and Leslie Stephen both loved).(14)
Only the brief, italicized voice of the interlude follows Bernard's lines, returning us to the eternal recurrence of the sea, an image that Forster uses in the opening chapter of Howards End, as Margaret Schlegel feels the sea's presence even in London: "One had the sense of a backwater, or rather of an estuary, whose waters flowed in from the invisible sea, and ebbed into a profound silence while the waves without were still beating" (4). For Woolf the sea's voice is an objective, unchanging standard against which to measure the passage of time and human lives. Even within the apparently anonymous, transcendent voice of the Interludes, however, Woolf's own preoccupation with the "matter of England" reveals itself when she says that "the sun struck at English fields" (149, italics added). Forster also uses images of eternal recurrence, as in the final chapter of Howards End when he relies on the eternal round of seasons to lend stability to the odd Schlegel-Wilcox-Bast(ard) menage: "July would follow with the little red poppies among the wheat, August with the cutting of the wheat," and a few lines later, "The noise of the cutter came intermittently, like the breaking of waves" (265, italics added).
Does this sound familiar? It is almost descriptive of the setting of Between the Acts, including the interruption by rainfall, the setting of an elegant country home, and the village procession. Certainly the irony of Woolf's 1930 claim of Forster's previous influence over her work gains resonance when we consider the historical sequence of these two texts. We should also remember that by this time Forster had long since given up writing novels. It is typical of their relationship that Woolf takes matter that Forster has used, perhaps helping to edit it; but then she transmutes the idea, even creating a homosexual, the lesbian Miss LaTrobe, to be in charge of both writing and directing the pageant within the novel. Because he outlived Woolf, Forster had the final word, eulogizing his friend in the Rede Lecture at Cambridge after her death. But in her art Woolf - by transmuting such unlikely stuff into a novel that not only celebrates England but gives us a strong sense of the impending doom that she foresaw in The Waves - might well have established mastery over her most enduring literary friend and competitor.