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a . M. , . y: By iag Catherine Lanone Laurent Mellet www.cned.fr www.belin-education.com

ISBN: 979-10-358-0888-4 ISSN: 4100-1258 Dépôt légal – 1re édition : 2019, octobre © Éditions Belin/Humensis, 2019 170 bis, boulevard du Montparnasse 75680 Paris cedex 14 CONTENTS

Introduction...... 9 Howards End, a novel and a ﬁlm...... 9 Context ...... 10 A critical success...... 11 Biography ...... 13 Heritage and the novel ...... 15

PARTONE BEYONDLEGALANDLITERARYLEGACY: THEETHICSOFCAREINTHENOVEL

1. THRESHOLDS AND LITERARY INHERITANCE...... 19

A | Revisiting the epistolary novel ...... 19 1. “Amusing letters home”, 20 • 2. Signiﬁcant polarities, 24 • 3. A proleptic montage, 30 B | The comedy of manners ...... 33 C | Tragedy...... 43 D | Intertextuality and musical ekphrasis ...... 46 E | Twisting the legacy of the omniscient narrator...... 50

2. CAPITALISM AND CULTURAL CAPITAL...... 62

A | Social class and social accountability ...... 62 B | The symptoms of social difference...... 69 1. Food for thought, 69 • 2. Contemporary social geographies, 70 • 3. Commodities: objects and cars, 72 • 4. Blubber and rubber, 75 • 5. The sword and the umbrella, 76 6 | Howards End (E. M. Forster, J. Ivory): Beyond Heritage

C | Musical experience and cultural capital ...... 78 D | Books and cultural capital ...... 83

3. CONNECTION AND TRANSMISSION...... 88

PARTTWO CONNECTINGTHEMERCHANT-IVORY ADAPTATIONTOTHENOVEL

1. MERCHANT-IVORY ET HERITAGE FILM...... 121

A | Merchant-Ivory et l’œuvre romanesque de Forster...... 121 B | Heritage ﬁlm : premières convergences critiques et théoriques...... 126

2. LE FILM EN TANT QU’ADAPTATION : ENTRE ACCÉLÉRATION ET EXPLICITATION...... 136

A | Rappels méthodologiques et théoriques ...... 136 B | Différentes stratégies scénaristiques et esthétiques pour adapter Howards End...... 139

3. BEYOND HERITAGE 1—DEL’ÉTALAGE À LA FORME SIGNIFIANTE...... 148

A | Oppositions visuelles et formelles ...... 148 B | Quels matérialismes à l’écran?...... 151

4. BEYOND HERITAGE 2— FILMING“CHARACTER’S LIVES” (J. IVORY)...... 158

A | From connected plots to connecting characters ...... 158 Contents|7

B | Individual and narrative voices on screen...... 160 C | L’exemple de Margaret ...... 163

5. BEYOND HERITAGE 3—“THE LIFE OF THE BODY” (P. 98, P. 186): RECONCILING THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN ...... 167

A | Seeing the novel steadily and seeing it whole?...... 167 B | Forsterian symbolism on screen: spatializing individuals and families...... 173 C | Connexions sensorielles et corporelles ...... 178

Bibliography ...... 181

Introduction

Matthew Lopez’s play 2018 The Inheritance 1 begins with a young man who is reading Howards End; Edward Morgan Forster (or Morgan, as he was known to his friends) enters, and wonders how we may relate to the novel today: Young Man 1: I keep returning to this book again and again. Morgan: Tell me: what is it about the novel that speaks to you? What do you ﬁnd in its pages? (Lopez, p. 9) Like Zadie Smith’s 2005 campus novel On Beauty, which recycles citations and elements from Howards End, Lopez’s play reclaims Howards End as a novel that must be engaged with today, mocking the tendency to dismiss Forster’s and Ivory’s works as mere period pieces: (To the Lads.) […] You’re just books on a shelf gathering dust. You’re a Mer- chant Ivory ﬁlm. Young Man 3: I like Merchant Ivory Films. (Lopez, p. 147)

HOWARDS END, A NOVEL AND A FILM

Thus the legacy of Howards End is alive and well, and is now entwined with the film’s. James Ivory’s 1992 film was the first cinema adaptation of Howards End. This may seem surprising for a novel which was published in 1910, but Forster feared film adaptations; he even refused to grant the rights of A Passage to India to Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray. While he was alive, he only allowed other kinds of performances; for instance, Lance Sieveking adapted the novel for BBC radio in 1964, and a stage version (written by Sieveking and Richard

1. A tribute to Forster, the play is a gay modern transposition of Howards End, set in New York, which premiered in London in 2018. The play has met with public and critical acclaim in London and it is scheduled to open on Broadway in the fall of 2019. 10 | Howards End (E. M. Forster, J. Ivory): Beyond Heritage

Cottrell) was performed in London in 1967. There was also a BBC TV production in 1970, the year of Forster’s death. Both the stage and the early TV adaptation boiled down the plot. Since then, there have been other radio and theatre performances, and a new television adaptation, written by Kenneth Lonergan and directed by Hettie MacDo- nald, was broadcast on BBC One in 2017. This time, the script closely followed the novel. The production was praised for its choice of loca- tions, for the actors and for engaging with today’s England by introduc- ing non-white actors (Jacky, the Schlegels’ maid and the doctor who visits Mrs Wilcox in London were played by black actors). But it could not compete with the simultaneous release of a remastered version of Ivory’s film. For the audience, the characters have become identified with the main actors, Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter and Anthony Hopkins. When the film was re-released, positive reviews sug- gested that it differed from other nostalgic period pieces of the 90’s and from the later TV series Downton Abbey, because of its social concerns: “screenwriter and frequent Merchant Ivory collaborator Ruth Prawer Jhabvala create the sense that with the advent of suffrage, England’s class structures” were “more elastic for both women and the working class.” 1 The renewed interest in Howards End in 2017 may suggest that, as Lucy Mangan puts it, the question “at the core of E.M. Forster’s work of who will inherit England has perhaps never been as relevant since he first posed it” 2, implying that the novel and its adaptation resonate with a country on the brink of Brexit.

CONTEXT

Howards End was published in 1910, an eventful year which was marked, among other things, by the death of King Edward VII and the accession of King George V. There were two general elections; in 1909, the Liberal government had tried to pass the “People’s Budget”, that introduced taxes on the wealthy and a social welfare programme,

1. Simran Hans, “A Welcome Return to the Big Screen”, https://www.theguardian.com/ ﬁlm/2017/jul/30/howards-end-review-restoration-merchant-ivory-emma-thompson-anth ony-hopkins Accessed July 15, 2019. 2. Lucy Mangan, “Timely, Careful Remake Explores Class and Race”, Sunday 12 Nov. 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/12/howards-end-review-timely-car eful-remake-class-race Accessed July 15, 2019. Introduction| 11 but it was blocked and a general election was called in January 1910; the “People’s Budget” became law in April 1910. When Prime Minis- ter Herbert Henry Asquith called for another general election, on November 18, 1910, three hundred women marched towards Parlia- ment demanding voting rights for women. The repression was violent and 115 women were arrested; for the Suffragettes this became known as “Black Friday”. This was also the year which Virginia Woolf later singled out as an aesthetic turning point: “On or about December 1910, the human character changed”. (Woolf 1950, p. 96) Her provoc- ative formula referred, among other things, to the artistic earthquake created by the ﬁrst Post-Impressionist exhibition organized by Roger Fry. Christine Froula adds that Freud founded the International Psy- choanalytical Association in 1910: “all contributed to the innumerable raining atoms of modern experience and the ‘change’ in conscious- ness.” (Froula, p. 90) Woolf herself was to publish The Voyage Out in 1915 and her signature modernist novels in the 1920s 1.

A CRITICAL SUCCESS

Howards End appeared on October 18, 1910. E.M. Forster was thirty-one years old and was already an established novelist; he had published his two Italian novels, Where Angels Fear to Tread in 1905 and A Room with a View in 1908, and a novel set in England, The Longest Journey, in 1907 2. Howards End was instantly perceived as a different kind of novel and met with unexpected success. The novel sold well and received a lot of critical attention. Whereas A Room with a View had been considered as successful entertainment, Howards End was seen as “the year’s best novel”, the work of “an author of distinc- tion and exceptional ability” 3: “In subtle, incisive analysis of class dis- tinctions, manners, and conventions, he is simply inimitable.” The Telegraph opened with a bold statement: “There is no doubt about it

1. She published Jacob’s Room in 1922, Mrs Dalloway in 1925, To the Lighthouse in 1927. 2. The Longest Journey depicts an unhappy marriage between a cold woman and a lame young man who is fond of books; he discovers his half brother, physically strong and close to the earth. 3. Unsigned review, “The Part and the Whole”, Morning Leader, 28 October, 1910, in Philip Gardner (ed.), E.M. Forster: The Critical Heritage [1973], London: Routledge, 1999, 128. 12 | Howards End (E. M. Forster, J. Ivory): Beyond Heritage whatever. Mr E. M. Forster is one of the great novelists” 1, and so did The Times Literary Supplement: “Mr E.M. Forster has now done what critical admirers of his foregoing novels have confidently looked for—he has written a book in which his highly original talent has found full and ripe expression.” 2 For The Standard, it pointed towards an entirely new kind of work: “Mr. Forster’s work—Howard’s End is Mr. Forster’s fourth novel—occupies a niche entirely by itself in the house of contemporary fiction. It is not like anything else that is being done.” 3 Similarly, one of the reviewers, R.A. Scott-James, defined Forster’s method as a cross between Joseph Conrad and John Galswor- thy, that is to say the unique, proto-modernist Conrad and the Edwar- dian Galsworthy, the author of The Man of Property (1906) which became part of The Forsyte Saga. 4 This definition reflects a key aspect of the novel, which has come to be seen as a transitional novel, repur- posing Victorian tropes to pave the way for modernist uncertainty. Forster also challenged some established rules of fiction and certain reviewers were puzzled by the sudden deaths or by the ending that did not seem to tie up dangling threads in the usual way. The trans-class illegitimate child who inherits the family property was also seen as risqué: “The story of Helen’s fall is disagreeable 5” (note the Victorian cliché of the fallen woman applied to Helen here). As opposed to those who were shocked by the novel, D.H. Law- rence and Katherine Mansfield considered that Forster was too coy in his treatment of sexuality, and that the pivotal sexual connection between Helen and Leonard Bast was not explicit enough, a point which we shall come back to. But overall, the novel was also well received among the intelligentsia and by the literary set that was closest to Forster, the Bloomsbury Group; in his review, Arnold Bennett com- plained about the élite still discussing the book throughout 1911 6.

1. Unsigned review, Daily Telegraph, 2 November, 1910, in Gardner, Critical Heritage, 130. 2. Unsigned review, The Times Literary Supplement n°459, 27 October, 1910, in Gardner, Critical Heritage, 128. 3. Unsigned review, Standard, 27 October, 1910, in Gardner, Critical Heritage, 128. 4. R.A. Scott-James, “The Year’s Best Novel”, Daily News, November 7, 1910, in Gardner, Critical Heritage, p. 135. 5. Unsigned review, Observer, 6 November, 1910, in Gardner, Critical Heritage, p. 135. 6. Arnold Bennett wrote the review under a pseudonym. He was annoyed because he too had published a novel in 1910, which was eclipsed by Forster’s. In the 1920s, Vir- ginia Woolf would turn Bennett into the embodiment of backward realism, as opposed to the Georgian writers, among whom she includes Forster. Introduction| 13

BIOGRAPHY

Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) was the son of an architect who died of tuberculosis before Forster was two years old; he was brought up by Lily, his mother. In 1883, they moved to a house called Rooksnest, near Stevenage in Hertfordshire; they spent ten years there, and it was later to become the model for Howards End. When he was fifteen, Forster drew a map of the house, the paddock and the meadow, and later wrote a description of Rooksnest which mentions a tree with teeth stuck in its bark: About four feet from the ground were three or four fangs stuck deep into the rugged bark. As far as I can make out these were votive offerings of people who had their toothache cured by chewing pieces of the bark, but whether they were their own teeth I don’t know and certainly it does not seem likely that they should sacrifice one sound tooth as the price of having one aching one cured.1 With a characteristic touch of humour at the end, Forster suggests that the house is a Proustian memory for him, as well as the blueprint for the house of fiction. Rooksnest is also a house that was lost. In 1893, the lease was not renewed, and Lily and Morgan had to move. They went to Tonbridge, where Forster attended a school where he was bullied and unhappy. On his father’s side, Forster descended from the Clapham Sect, a group of abolitionists who fought against slavery. It is no wonder that his work should revisit humanism 2. His paternal great-aunt, Marianne Thornton, was the daughter of the abolitionist Henry Thornton, a banker and an MP and one of the foremost campaigners for the aboli- tion of the slave trade. Forster only knew his great-aunt in his youth, since she died in 1887. But she was fond of him and bequeathed him 8000 pounds in trust. The role of Aunt Monie (Marianne’s apt dimin- utive) was crucial; the money helped him to go to university, and to spend time travelling as a young man; it was when he was visiting Italy that he wrote his first short story, “The Story of a Panic”, in Ravello. Italy also inspired the two novels that made his name before Howards End. Forster was very much aware of what the legacy had brought him, and somewhat uneasy at being part of rentier culture. Much of

1. E.M. Forster, “Rooksnest”, in E.M. Forster; Howards End, Ed. Alistair M. Duck- worth, Boston: Bedford Books, 1997, p. 7. 2. See Evelyne Hanquart’s ﬁne analysis of Forster as a humanist. 14 | Howards End (E. M. Forster, J. Ivory): Beyond Heritage

Margaret’s musings on the problematic nature of stable “islands of money” comes close to home. He later wrote his aunt’s biography as a tribute, as if to pay his debt. Though Tonbridge School was a dismal experience (The Longest Journey is in part a satire of the ideology of public schools), liberation came when he left for Cambridge. His years in King’s College (1897- 1901) were formative, restorative years. Tibby’s association with Oxford owes something to Forster’s own attachment to his college. Forster became a member of the “Apostles”, Cambridge’s secret “Conversazione Society”, which owes its name to the fact that it had only twelve members, and was very much influenced at the time by G.E. Moore’s 1903 Principia Ethica. The friendship, the intellectual discussions, the free unconventional conversations, were things Forster relished at Cambridge. He also tutored a young Indian, Syed Ross Masood, whom he later visited in India; Masood was a very handsome, affectionate friend, but did not return Forster’s love. Thoby Stephen, the brother of Virginia and Vanessa Stephen (later known as Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell) was a close friend of the Apostles, though he was not a member, and he introduced his sisters to his friends when the siblings set up house together after their father’s death in 1904. The close-knit group of friends was to become the Bloomsbury Group, which included the ironic writer Lytton Strachey, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell, the painters Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, the civil servant and writer Leonard Woolf, the writers Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster. Discussions were stimulating; they all paid attention to each other’s work, and remained lifelong friends. Forster did not seem the most outstanding member of the group, and because he tended to remain silent in discussions, then suddenly came up with an idea, he was nicknamed the mole, or as Woolf puts it in her diary, he flitted like a blue butterfly. The success of Howards End took them by surprise, as he was the first of the group to earn such a reputation, but then, he was as surprised as they were. Forster wrote Maurice, in 1913, but he could not publish it. Homo- sexuality was still illegal at the time, and Oscar Wilde’s trial had left a deep scar. He circulated it among his friends, and it was to influence other writers like W.H. Auden. After two trips to India and a long period of gestation, A Passage to India was published in 1924, and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Forster also wrote an essay on literature, Aspects of the Novel, in 1927. He had been a pacifist Introduction| 15 during World War I (serving with the Red Cross in Alexandria) and during the 1930s and World War II, he became a familiar voice on the BBC, with broadcasts that upheld the ideals of freedom and culture as opposed to totalitarianism. In 1954, to his great joy, he collaborated with Benjamin Britten and, with Eric Crozier, wrote the libretto of the opera Billy Budd, an adaptation of Melville’s work (whose reputation he had helped rescue from oblivion in Aspects of the Novel). He returned to Cambridge in 1946, and remained there as an honorary Fellow of King’s College. He died in 1970.

HERITAGE AND THE NOVEL

Howards End differs from Forster’s previous novels; it engages with the spread of capitalism, class differences and the performance of gender, as well as marriage as a problematic institution. There has been much critical debate surrounding the novel. Whereas early criticism focused on imagery, in the 1990s Forster’s depiction of class and gender came under scrutiny, his relation to liberalism was discussed, and there has been an ongoing reappraisal of his relation to modernism. The plot of Howards End revolves around the eponymous house and who may or may not inhabit it. Like Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park or Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Howards End is about inheritance. In each case, mapping a house and family relationships is a metonymy for the state of the nation, in a time of change. But in Howards End, the method is more fragmented and the crisis more acute. Howards End is a Condition-of-England novel, exploring new alienating forces like the widening gap between haves and have-nots and the manipula- tion of real estate. As Lionel Trilling famously put it, ultimately, the book is concerned with “Who shall inherit England?” (Trilling, p. 118) In the first half of this volume we shall explore the way in which the novel dwells on, and reaches beyond, the concept of heritage. The first part deals with literary heritage, to consider how Forster revisits genres (comedy and tragedy), intersemioticity and the Victorian omniscient narrator, to see how the text moves towards modernism and uncertainty. The second part engages with the notion of inheritance in terms of money, property and commodities (houses, cars and umbrellas), and cultural capital (including music and books), all of which will lead us to reconsider the notions of social class and of the distribution of the 16 | Howards End (E. M. Forster, J. Ivory): Beyond Heritage sensible, in the sense of Jacques Rancière 1. The third part shows how Forster strives to reach beyond the legal technicalities and ordinary logic of heritage, to challenge capitalism and definitions of gender, in order to propose an ethics of care based on connection and the unseen, though not all contradictions can be resolved. The second half of this volume offers a close study of the film by James Ivory, in connection with the novel.

1. In English, sensible means reasonable, prudent and practical, or “sensé”, and sensi- tive means “sensible”, designating susceptibility of feeling. However, Jacques Rancière’s concept, “le partage du sensible”, has been translated as the “distribution of the sensible”. Always specify that you are using a concept and not confusing two words. See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, Trans. Gabriel Rockhill, London: Continuum, 2004. PARTONE BEYOND LEGAL AND LITERARY LEGACY: THE ETHICS OF CARE IN THE NOVEL