Howard's End #2: Beginning to "Only Connect"

So already, the great news today is that my student, Solomon, is loving Howard's End.  He's read the first twelve chapters, which we began talking about today, and he's hooked.  Yesterday, as we planned that we'd each choose ahead of time some passages from Chapter X and Chapter XI -- they blew him away -- to discuss today, he remarked that he already knew this was a book a person could read multiple times and always have new thoughts about.

Recently, Solomon has been talking a lot about loving books that portray people who are in conflict -- whether or not they understand the conflict, or are choosing to acknowledge it to others, or even to themselves.  He's fascinated by the degree to which the characters in these books are willing to explore and confront whatever differences distinguish them and to resolve the conflicts between them, even if that simply means respectfully acknowledging their differences, or walking away from each other because of them. So Howard's End is very satisfying to him in this regard.  

Solomon's interest in how we come to understand the simmering and overt differences between people, especially as readers of literature, made him aware much sooner than I was of the way Howard's End's anonymous narrator regularly inserts societal commentary into a novel that seems to be mostly about two families and a house.  I think that because I so quickly became fascinated by Margaret Schlegel and her relationship with Mrs. Wilcox, and then with Mr. Wilcox, I paid less attention on my first reading to the narrator's remarks about London and its inhabitants.  But I couldn't ignore the narrator  (Forster as Forster?) and the way he seemed to be enjoying himself when he pronounced at the beginning of a paragraph in Chapter XIII, "To speak against London is no longer fashionable."  It was a relief to know this.

I plan to write about London and England, and about Margaret Schlegel's relationship to them, in a later post.  As a matter of fact, this topic has been the root of my sustained fascination with this novel since I reread it.  Once I got beyond being obsessed with what was transpiring between Margaret Schegel and Mr. and Mrs. Wilcox respectively -- no doubt fueled by my reverence for Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, and Vanessa Redgrave -- I became completely fascinated by Margaret's relationship to London, and even to England as -- I think -- some kind of a function of her relationship with Howard's End itself. I haven't been able to wrap my mind completely around what it is that Margaret's negotiating with England, and with herself -- which is where Solomon comes in.

I'm so excited that Solomon seems drawn to those same passages that make me stop and say, "Wait a minute, has the tone just completely changed?" or "Wait minute, how seriously should I be taking him here?" or "Wait a minute, are they understanding each other at all? Are they even really listening to each other?" When, in Chapter X, Margaret regrets not accepting Mrs. Wilcox's spontaneous invitation to go to Howard's End that very afternoon, the narrator reports, "She had failed to respond to this invitation merely because it was a little queer and imaginative -- she, whose birthright it was to nourish imagination!" Is he being mocking? serious? kind? appreciative?  some of the previous? all of the previous? A little later, after Margaret reverses her decision and joins Mrs. Wilcox at the train station, he seems more on her side:  "Before imagination could triumph, there were cries of 'Mother! Mother!' . . .."

I'm wondering what kinds of relationships London and England can have, will ever have, with imagination, according to Forster.

This is all my way of saying that I think my conversations with Solomon are going to help me develop answers to the questions I have. Solomon and I are connecting here, so other connections are bound to be forthcoming. We're actually choosing a lot of the same passages to share and discuss.

And speaking of "Only Connect," here is a picture of a store I saw in Cushing Square in Belmont, MA a few weeks back.  I don't know if this business is opening or closing -- the storefront was definitely looking empty, but that could signify extreme newness or yet another failure to "only connect," at least with Belmont consumers. Somehow I don't think that the tree on left side of the photo is the wych elm -- a very English tree. Even so, clearly Forster is electrifying!