Only connect! But to what?
Earlier this year, I received an email from fellow WFTC contributor Olga Gardner Galvin suggesting that I consider doing a column about “Only connect,” the epigram attached to E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End. I wrote back that I thought it was a good idea, but I would first have to reacquaint myself with Forster’s novel. Shortly thereafter I downloaded Howards End onto my Kindle, where it remained unread until a few days ago.
Unfortunately, now that this reacquaintance has taken place, I am not at all certain I understand the epigram any better than I did before.
To begin with I had forgotten what a peculiar novel Howards End is. Take the narrative voice. The narrator is never identified, but late in the novel comes this:
Pity, if one may generalize, is at the bottom of woman. When men like us, it for our better qualities, and however tender their liking, we dare not be unworthy of it, or they will quietly let us go.
The narrator, it seems, is a woman. And so is the source — in the novel — of the epigram. It is the protagonist, Margaret Schlegel. Here is how the narrator tells us what is on Margaret’s mind:
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its heights. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
This seems to make some sense as long as you don’t examine it too closely. But once you do … well, there’s that odd opposition of prose and passion, for one. The usual oppositions are between prose and poetry, passion and reason. “Live as fragments no longer” sounds like something cribbed from Emerson.
But this is not the first mention of these notions in the book. Earlier, as Margaret considers her forthcoming marriage to Henry Wilcox, she thinks this:
Mature as he was, she might be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire.
Later, though, when she and Henry — now married — quarrel over her sister Helen’s pregnancy, Margaret speaks to him of connecting in quite a different sense:
“You shall see the connection if it kills you, Henry! You have had a mistress — I forgave you. My sister has a lover — you drive her from the house. Do you see the connection? … a man who insults his wife when she’s alive and cants with her memory when she’s dead. A man who ruins a woman for his pleasure, and casts her off to ruin other men. And gives bad financial advice, and then says he is not responsible. These, man, are you. You can’t recognize them, because you cannot connect.”
We’re talking here about connecting the dots between action and consequence, not any bridging of prose and passion. And Henry’s failure to connect the dots becomes grounds for moral censure as harsh and inflexible as anything we like to associate with the Victorians: “He had refused to connect, on the clearest issue that can be laid before a man, and their love must take the consequences.” In one of her recurring bouts of sanctimony, Margaret even declares that “It is those that cannot connect who hasten to cast the first stone.”
What is interesting about this is that, in the episode from the Gospels Margaret alludes to, those invited by Jesus to cast the first stone do not, in fact, hasten to do so at all — precisely because they see the connection he is making. Not a great point, perhaps, but enough to underscore Margaret’s obtuse self-righteousness.
The fact is, like Margaret, E.M. Forster is rather a squishy thinker, never more so than in his notorious pronouncement that “if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” This is sentimentality reduced to moral moronism. Actually, I doubt if even Margaret would think it courageous to ignore, out of affection, a friend’s moral shortcomings, let alone ignore them to the extent of gravely jeopardizing the welfare of her fellow citizens.
Nevertheless, despite its didactic insistence on some obscure manner of “connecting,” Howards End does make for compelling reading, in part because the characters, while odd, are so interesting, but most of all, I think, because it is a ghost story. I’d be willing to bet that the unnamed narrator is the first Mrs. Wilcox.
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I can roll with the opposition of prose and passion, but I can see how the whole thing, from integrating one’s suppressed and cultivated sides to making connections between behavioral patterns, can be attributed to squishy thinking. Thanks, Frank!
Frank~
I think people who make connections are intellectually fit, and the rest wither without exercise. The beast and the monk each have a task to do. Maybe they represent drudgery. If you focus on the place where one idea meets another, a connection can create a new idea. This is the place where a creative mind dwells. Forester spent a lot of time there, but it is hard to describe. This quote is another stab at it. I like this one even better:
“Truth is a flower in whose neighbourhood others must wither.”From Joseph Conrad”.
And this from “Our Diversions”
“Failure or success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle.”
~Gwendolyn
I have no problem, Gwen, with the idea of connecting in theory. I can even, with Olga, roll with connecting prose and passion. My problem is that when it comes to a practical application her ideal, Margaret equivocates and uses the term in quite a different sense to bludgeon her husband. Remember that she tells him that she forgave him his infidelity. But in fact she could not forgive him for that – as she herself earlier acknowledged, since it was his first wife he had been unfaithful to, not her. I started out liking Margaret, but liked her a lot less by the end. I really liked the first Mrs. Wilcox, though, and I think she’s the book’s great character.
I’ve always wondered how seriously Forster takes Margaret. The whole ‘goblin footsteps’ piece at the beginning is surely laced with irony – the two sisters are cut off from authentic experiences and are casting around for meaning. I therefore see the novel not as solely a criticism of Wilcox’s world of ‘anger and telegrams’ but about how neither Margaret’s nor Wilcox’s worlds are sufficient alone.
This is in part, I think, a criticism of the emotional consequences of modernity, perhaps also urbanism. Satisfaction and happiness can only be gained by putting the fragmented shards of a more authentic way of life and mentality back together, making them ‘connect’. This is done, rather weirdly, in material and geographical terms – Howard’s End provides the synthesis in this dialectic. ‘Connection’ arrives via the return to a pre-modern, more rooted form of living. (The last redoubts of this though are under threat by the red rust of the encroaching housing estate.)
So ‘connect’ refers to the unification of two sorts of modern sensibility, a return to a sort of wholeness.