Chekhov’s Mistess

How I Spent My Summer Vacation: Part One

I don’t think I ever had to write one of those papers, but there it is, the dreaded first day of school essay caught in my consciousness with the same anxiety as being summoned to the black-board – to the blackboard to do math or something equally evil. Agh!

What to say?…Just get through it, I tell myself; what’s the worst that can happen? They’ll turn away, I respond; I’ll bore them and they’ll never come back again. Oh, woe to me who did nothing but read and sit on the beach for nine days. Wait!…I say, these people like books! I’ll just write about what I read and maybe they won’t be bored. Skepticism ensues, but here goes:

Thinking about school, and summer school, which I seem to recall suffering through more than once in my life, I’ve been enjoying Salon’s Summer School series of articles where various writers read a classic and respond to it supposedly to see if it stands up to its status as a member of the “canon” or their expectations built around that status. Earlier, I commented on Laura Miller’s thoughtless article, but was intrigued by the idea nonetheless and others have done it more justice.

Reading “classics,” like reading literature in translation, is something I do regularly without much thought about the book’s status as such. Still, I thought I would read something not normally on my radar screen of must-reads just to test it out, like the folks at Salon. I chose E.M. Forster’s Howards End in the Norton critical edition. Why the critical edition? In this case I happened to pick it up used for about five bucks. I like Norton’s editions though, packed with glosses, contemporary (to the book) criticism, enlightening tidbits like author diaries or letters and in this case movie reviews. Of course, these editions are meant for college or high school students so the publisher doesn’t worry too much about the fact that they pack so much into every page they’re barely legible, reminding me with every page that I turned 41 over the course of this vacation. On a recent visit to the optometrist I was told I didn’t yet need reading glasses, but my eyes are not what they used to be – still, I’m happy to no longer be momentously 40.

Being largely self-taught when it comes to literature, I expected to identify with Leonard Bast, Forster’s representative of the lower classes trying to transcend his station in life through reading. But Bast was not quite who I thought he might be, though he did manage to be one of the few truly enigmatic characters in the book. Most every person in Forster’s 1910ish London and environs fit rather neatly into a purposeful role in his storytelling, for the book is one of moral contrasts: city versus country; material versus spiritual; apartment versus house; England versus Germany; men versus women; future versus history; rich versus poor; capitalism versus intellect or culture; mechanical versus human or horse powered; the future versus the present; fast versus slow.

Time plays a great role in this story, defining good and bad, where moving fast appears to mean bad and slowing down, living in the moment is naturally good and the chain of events in the book is propelled by a brief instance of rashness. Of course, that’s a simplification. Forster’s use of Time to create and release tension is what truly separates him from lesser writers, in my view. When everyone is put in their place in the book’s denouement – some in their hell of death or prison, others in a purgatory of hay fever (or their own vacuous lives) and others in the heaven of Howards End – you can feel Time trickling to a crawl as the lives of the generations return to a peaceful quotidian existence.

At Howards End:

The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.

Time, as in life, makes decisions for Forster’s characters. When Helen and Margaret are forced to find a new home when their lease expires, they procrastinate, hanging on to the past that their home represents instead of doing what is necessary to get a new place to live, working the (apparently tight real estate) market to their advantage. As a result they find themselves floundering in an uncertain present, homeless for a while – granted, only as homeless as the wealthy could be, but ungrounded or momentarily rootless nonetheless.

But time, as they say is money, as Leonard Bast realizes. His claim, when he gives up on his intellectual aspirations, is that he is getting too old and must foremost earn a living – money is inextricably linked to time. The futility of Bast’s efforts arise as much from the circumstances of business that roars past him (he’s a lowly clerk), as from the constraints of his character, his life and his age, all of which weigh on him like humanity’s sins on Jesus Christ. That may be a grand leap, but as the sole representative of everyone outside of the wealthy class, the humble Bast seems to serve here in a greater capacity than his small sacrificial role might suggest. Forster most certainly seems to lay a blanket of morality on his country’s – society’s – imperialistic, capitalistic, short-term mentality, anticipating today’s reality t.v. generation as perhaps a good novelist should.

Ultimately, despite the feeling that every character, thing and place (although here places are characters themselves) represents one side of a warring pole, the story is engrossing and we live momentarily in the world that Forster created for us. As Mr. Forster himself said, “The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.” Interspersed between dialogue and story line, Forster gives us his and his character’s thoughts in flourishes of beautiful prose that renders the book’s (often less than subtle) overarching themes secondary. That’s about all I can ask for and I found Howards End every bit as enjoyable as I feared it would not be.

I have not yet seen the Merchant-Ivory movie version of Howards End, although I know who their usual cast of characters are. In verifying the actors by the reviews in the back of the book, they, particularly the urbane Anthony Hopkins as Henry, did not meet up to my mind’s eye expectations. But, I suppose they never do. Now I’m looking forward to seeing it if for nothing else than to get to relive the story a bit and enjoy the lush Merchant Ivory filmmaking without feeling guilty for never having read the book.

Read widely, think well, and write often

comments

Bud, the film is quite wonderful. I think you will be agreeably surprised, it is probably the best of their films. I did this the other way around, and was just saying to my daughter the other day how Forster and Woolf both anticipated cinema in their writing, and how I felt that role had been written for Emma Thompson. She really is Margaret Schlegel. It is a completely filmable book, whatever that may mean. I still have a bit of a thing about overloaded bookcases.

    – genevieve (07/27  at  06:59 AM)

Page 1 of 1 pages of comments

« Back to main

About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: August 01, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

• Comments:1
• Links to this Post: Technorati

Recommended Links