E.M. Foster is an admirable writer, who can be read simply for his technical perfections. Here’s how he does that most difficult thing, letting time, blank time, pass, in Howard’s End.
“And the conversation drifted away and away, and Helen’s cigarette turned to a spot in the darkness, and the great flats opposite were sown with lighted windows, which vanished and were relit again, and vanished incessantly.”
This is superb on every level. The great flats opposite will soon be figuring in the story, for one thing, so their place as a sort of chronometer is appropriate - and yet, since the reader, at this point, doesn’t know that, their insertion here is one of those ways a writer insinuates his facts into the reader’s unconsciousness, becoming a sort of fate in the process, something that presses, however mildly, upon the reader, as we know that those lights will press upon Helen Schlegel - whose cigarette is (in a bit of a cheat) lit for an awful long time. The perfection of this kind of writing extends to the freedom it gives Forster with regards to his characters. Forster, again and again, will come out of his seemingly neutral role and make blatant and manipulative comments that he means to be read as blatant and manipulative. Thee reader, who is already caught up in the artificial fate spun by the text, has the sense, in these passages, that luck itself is speaking - that here at last privilege, the unfairness in things, is disclosing itself, becoming palpable.
Which brings us to Bast. Those who’ve read Howard’s End will remember that Bast is the striving clerk, the lowbrow from the East End whose entanglement with the Schlegel sisters will lead to disaster. Forster sizes up Bast with a famous passage. This passage crystallizes a mood and tone that, at least since the seventies, has been endemic to the American progressive culture. It comes in Chapter VI, which announces “We are not concerned with the very poor.” The hauteur of this announcement sets the whole tone for Leonard. He doesn’t have the Dickensensian advantage of rags and sentiment. No, he is merely one of the lowly.
And the lowly must be squashed. In Howard’s End, literally.
“He knew that he was poor, and would admit it: he would have died sooner than confess any inferiority to the rich. This may be splendid of him. But he was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it.” This, so far, is such a break with the politics of the English novel that we have to pause. Even Thackeray, who probably thought along these lines, never violated the novelistic rule here: the poor might be shown as greedy, criminal, ungenerous, etc. But at the end of the day, the poor anchor the novelistic notion of virtue. This is true not just in Bleak House, but in the Princess Cassamassima; in Vanity Fair, which departs about as far as any Victorian novel from the sentimentality that we associate with the Victorians, the excesses of the rich, or at least those who possess the credit of the rich, are projected, as it were, upon the screen of a society in which one man’s excess is the absence of another man’s bread.
What Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was supposed to have done, Forster, with these brief sentences, does; he rings down an era by negating its deepest sentiments. It is a curious gesture. There’s a fierce defence of caste encoded in it - a freezing of the social whole to preserve it from the social mobility that Wells’ characters were all about - as well as Dickens, although his poor are definitely helped by godfathers and the death of distant relatives. As well, perhaps, as Becky Sharp. This, in a way, is Foster's blow against the Invisible Man -- for the Invisible Man is from that class of the self-educated whose threat to Foster's own group will grow with the century. Forster effortlessly merges this affection for a rentier caste into a liberalism of what we would now call identity. His caste might take on a progressive role, but that role is to worry, infinitely, about the social inequities at the origin of their wealth, even as they weld it as a weapon to defend their cultural privileges. This, I think, has a lot to do with the alienation between progressives and what would seem to be their natural constituency. Here is how Foster catalogues the gulf between Bast and the Schlegels (who, we later learn, are rich only by Bast like standards - between the three of them, they bring in a rentier income of about 1,900 pounds a year, not exactly wealth on the American scale -- but much more like the kind of income a tenured American professor can depend on): "He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food.”
The astonishing impudence of this affects a reader like me with the force of a slap in the face, because I am much like Leonard Bat than I am at all like E.M. Forster. It is rare for a novelist to so forcefully hustle the reader out of the door because the reader doesn’t have what it takes to be the author’s friend. This, I think, is snobbism raised to a novelistic principle. It is this, more than anything else, that makes the Bloomsbury set so curiously indifferent to Ullyses – when Woolf compares Joyce to an undergraduate scratching his pimples, she is Bast-ing him. She was too great an artist to let this be the final word, and in fact Woolf, like Joyce, was a genuine socialist, one of the few British writers to support the General Strike of 1926, and a pamphleteer whose pacifism is, to my mind, so much more convincing, on a moral level, than any George Orwellish bellicosities.
In my opinion, the corpse of Leonard Bast is buried under the British novel of the twentieth century, which is why it never quite adopted to modernism, save in a comic mode.
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