In our reading group discussion of Howard’s End, I called Henry Wilcox “despicable”—a comment that generated some push back from other members of the group. And in discussing our meeting afterwards with Jane, I realized that I had not made myself clear. Straight out: I was not saying business people are despicable. Henry is a fictional character; if he is despicable, that’s because Forster has portrayed him as such. Henry is Forster’s portrayal of a certain type, not the reality of how actual business people (who come in all stripes) are. That Forster did not portray a practical man we could respect and like is the central failure of the novel. I believe Forster wanted to give “both sides” their due, but that he failed to do so.
To explain: I agree with Scott in our group that Forster wanted to write a novel that accepts (even “demonstrates”) that we need both the artsy intellectuals (who attend to the “inner life) and the practical business people who get things done. Forster endorses Meg’s insight that their artsy life is utterly dependent on the business men. Meg’s income—and even more concretely the clothes she wears and the food she eats—exist only through the work done by other hands. She does nothing herself to make those necessities appear—as they regularly do. She is a parasite, feeding off what others produce. By extension, Forster–and yours truly–are also parasites.
Given that fact—and Forster’s desire to live up to that fact—the novel strives to provide a bridge, to forge a connection, between the intellectual world and the practical one. It wants to pay homage to the strengths of each side, to show that each has a contribution to make to creating the “good life.” And this notion of the “good life” is grounded in the somewhat more concrete question of national identity. What should we, as a people, make of England? The novel is shot through with a deep love for the English landscape and of English places—and suffused with a fear that modern speed (cars are a menace even as they move too fast to allow a true appreciation of the countryside through which they move) and modern rootlessness (loss of attachment to place) threaten any ability to retain identity.
But when it comes to executing his design, Forster (in my opinion) fails spectacularly. The deck is just too stacked against Wilcox and in favor of Margaret. Wilcox is obtuse and selfish. What are his sins? He fails to understand his first wife and her attachment to Howard’s End. He ignores the first wife’s desire for the house to go to Margaret, even though he has no love for or even use for the house himself. He is unfaithful to his first wife—and thinks the sin is the sexual act not the violation of his relationship to his wife. He fails to “connect” his off-hand remark about Leonard Bast’s place of business to Leonard’s subsequent economic ruin (part of his more general inability to connect large-scale business decisions with their real impact on individual lives). He is generally (and persistently) condescending to women, convinced of their inability to understand or handle anything, of their congenital hysteria. This attitude culminates in his attempt to prevent Meg (now his wife) from going with him to see her sister Helen when she has finally reappeared after an eight month absence. His behavior toward women convinces Helen and Meg that men have absolutely no ability to understand women. There is only the slim chance that in two thousand years from the present some connection (that key word in the novel) between the sexes will be achieved.
Finally, of course, there is the crucial moment when Meg challenges Henry to “connect,” to see that Helen (whom he condemns) has only done what Henry himself has done and Meg has forgiven him for doing. To see that his real crime was the deceit and infidelity to the first Mrs. Wilcox (not the sexual act); to see that he is, at least in part, responsible for Leonard’s plight. But Henry cannot see any of that. And, at that point, Meg’s forbearance comes to an end. She cannot forgive this moral blindness—and there will now be a break-up of their marriage.
So the novel does not portray the virtues and vices of each side (in the duality it sets up between the artsy and the practical) evenly. Throughout the novel, Meg has had to discount Henry’s flaws in ways that he does not have to discount hers. All the yielding and forbearance is on her side. Forster has failed to make Henry likeable or to paint a convincing picture of his virtues. In fact, the narrator from the start keeps making snide comments about the “Wilcox” way of thinking and of not feeling. True, the narrator also offers some criticisms of the Schlegel girls—and the portrait of the selfish and ineffectual brother Tibby is devastating. But (at least for this reader) I never lose sympathy for Meg while I never get any sympathy for Henry. His flaws accumulate until their culmination in his failure to “connect” at the key moment in his history. The mystery of the book is why Meg would ever agree to marry Henry, knowing his general attitude to (and contempt for) women and his specific ill treatment of and disregard for the first Mrs. Wilcox.
And then Henry collapses when the crisis also entails his son Charles going to prison. Henry becomes a child at the end, helpless and totally dependent on the care of the women. Instead of portraying a world that pays equal homage to the virtues of practical men and artsy women, it looks instead like Forster really (in his heart of hearts?) can’t feel any respect or liking for men—and would, ideally, like to see a world run by women. All his sympathies, it seems to me, lie on the feminine side. Forster, too, if you will, fails to connect. He knows, intellectually, that men are necessary—but that doesn’t mean he has to like that fact or the men who embody it. He tries to write a book that overcomes some of his most basic feelings (prejudices). That’s a noble enterprise (I think), but one I don’t believe he pulls off. His emotional commitments override his intellectual effort to write against their grain.
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