Earlier this year, I received an email from fellow WFTC contributor Olga Gardner Galvin [1] 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.
- Author Bio [2]
- Latest Posts [3]
Frank Wilson [4]
Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts [6])
- An illusion of precision [7] - September 9, 2015
- Watching the passing scene [8] - October 28, 2013
- To see like a child [9] - June 26, 2013
- Riffing and digressions [10] - January 21, 2013
- Life is a parenthesis between one darkness and another [11] - September 13, 2012