Tag Archives: Where Angels Fear to Tread

Book review

Collected Short Stories, by E. M. Forster, 1947

Having recently broken my short story review duck, I decided to read another collection, this time by the Edwardian modernist E. M. Forster. This edition, available as a Penguin 20th Century classic, is a good introduction to Forster, because it so clearly demonstrates what is wrong with his work, avoiding the need (if you are lucky enough to start here) to go on and read the novels.

The problem is essentially one of perspective. All of these stories, and I think this comment also applies to many if not all of the novels, are written from the narrow upper-middle class point of view from which Forster is never able to move away, no matter how he tries. All his point of view characters are to a greater or lesser extent prosperous, never seem to have to work, have servants or paid companions, and can afford long, indulgent if apparently unenjoyable journeys across southern Europe. Working class people and foreigners do appear in Forster, but the world is never seen from their perspective, and to be blunt they always seem two-dimensional participants.

Forster does, to be fair, consistently side with the people who are polite and condescending to these “others”. In novels such as Howards End and Where Angels Fear to Tread this extends as far as being able to contemplate relationships across class and national divides, but these relationships almost always end in tragedy or violence. Howard Bast is murdered, (Howards End) Gino loses his wife and baby (Where Angels) and Dr Aziz (Passage to India) has his life ruined by the false accusations made against him. Here the Greek family who are kind to Mr Lucas in The Road from Colonus are wiped out in a freak accident the day he moves on.

I don’t know whether Forster was unable to see the world through the eyes of the people who obviously fascinated and attracted him, or simply chose to write about what he knew. The relentlessness of yet another group of fussy English people settling into yet another picturesque Southern European town, with its hotels, its funny foreigners, the stereotypical alpha-male trying to assert himself by speaking English loudly, the older women, often in pairs, fussy about their luggage, eventually becomes wearisome.

Forster kept his sexuality a well-guarded secret in his lifetime, refusing to publish Maurice until after his death, but the homo-erotic gaze is also apparent here, not least in The Story of the Siren where a young Italian diver entrances the narrator:

“With a jerk he became alive, seizing my arm and saying “…I will show you something beautiful”….He drew me away from the light till I was standing on the tiny beach of sand…there he left me with his clothes…for a moment he stood naked in the brilliant sun…the man is past all description. His effect was that of a silver statue.”

(I’ve edited some text here to emphasis the point. Quite why he needs to be naked to go diving to recover a book, which surely would have floated anyway (thus avoiding the need for the naked diving) is unclear.)

These stories differ from the novels in one important way, and that is in their handling of the supernatural. In the introduction to the 1947 edition Forster describes them as “fantasies”. An element of the other-worldly is introduced in most tales. In some it is creatures such as Pan, fauns or sirens; in others it is the afterlife – one character goes to heaven, finds it boring, and leaves. Another character escapes from a boorish fiance by becoming a tree. At some points these injections of fantasy seem largely whimsical, and to this reader at least a little nauseatingly so. Elsewhere the allegorical nature of the tale is more obvious. In The Other Side of the Hedge for example, life is described in Bunyanesque terms as a walk beside a hedge, on one side of which is a hard-paced race with no obvious end in sight, and on the other an Elysian paradise of fields and recreation.

The Story of a Panic, the first story in the collection, demonstrate many of the inherent problem in Forster’s use of the fantasy genre. It is a silly melodramatic story about a sulky teenage boy, Eustace, (possibly the inspiration for Eustace Scrubb?) who one day, while on a walk in the ubiquitous Italian countryside, is possessed by the spirit of Pan. Instead of narrating the story in a way that is at least marginally sympathetic to the child, giving us some insight into what happens to him, Forster narrates the tale through the eyes of an older English tourist, who insists on being addressed formally, and looks sneeringly down on the Italians working in the hotel.  This strange little mis-firing tale establishes the template for many of the other stories in the collection, where essentially the same mystical experience is predictably repeated using the same set of characters and features. The tiresome and repetitive nature of these motifs almost became too much for me by the end of the collection, to the point where I didn’t want to read on because a) I knew what was coming, and b) I felt patronised by it. The most interesting story in the collection, The Machine Stops, which I reviewed earlier this year, is an exception to the fantasy genre, and is all the more refreshing for it.

 

 

 

 

 

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Book review

Where Angels Fear to Tread, by E M Forster, 1905

I first read Forster’s Where Angels forty years ago as one of my ‘O’ level texts. It was interesting to reflect on what I remembered and what had not survived the loss of brain cells over the years. The basic plot outline was still there, although the ending came as a pretty unpleasant surprise. Strangely one sentence about the novel’s protagonist, Philip, one of the fools rushing in where angels fear to tread, remained crystal clear:

“He might be a puppet’s puppet, but he knew exactly the disposition of the strings”.

This was the type of quote that we all were taught to underline and memorise, as a key to understanding Philip’s character. Looking back I am not so sure it works that way, although certainly Forster suggests as much by the heavy handed language (in what way is Philip a puppet’s puppet – who is the puppet who is controlling him – his mother? Hardly a puppet surely, more a very headstrong woman, another fool rushing in without thought or consideration. And ‘he knew exactly’ rather than ‘he knew the exact’ is a clumsy formulation which again serves to make the sentence stand out.)

‘Where Angels’ is a slight novel, chosen I suspect as an ‘O’ level text because of its length rather than any particular intrinsic literary value or its interest to teenagers. Lilia Herriton is widowed in her early thirties, and undertakes a Grand Tour of Italy at the suggestion of her in-laws, who appear keen to get rid of her for a while, despite the fact that she leaves behind a young daughter, Irma. Her travelling companion, Caroline Abbott, a younger single woman, is intended to act as a chaperone, but fails miserably to prevent Lilia from falling in love with and marrying a much younger Italian man, Gino. The Herriton’s suspect Gino is a Mediterranean cad – his father is a dentist for goodness sake!

“A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano. A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty! He thought of Lilia no longer. He was anxious for himself: he feared that Romance might die.” 

(I recognise, of course, that this over-the-top reaction is supposed to be funny, pricking Philip’s pomposity. I am not sure it is though.)

Arguably this is the first of several instances of fools rushing in, but it is quickly followed as Lilia’s brother-in-law Philip hurries to Italy to try to prevent the marriage, arriving too late and leaving ineffectually empty-handed. Philip feels partly responsible for this inappropriate marriage – he was very enthusiastic about the idea of Lilia going on an Italian tour, being something of a connoisseur of all things Italian.

Lilia finds life in Italy much less romantic and interesting than she anticipated – Gino is a stereotypically unfaithful Latin lover, and she is effectively confined to her house in a small provincial town. Forster sometimes uses deus ex machina techniques such as a sudden death to inject drama to his novels, and he succumbs to this plot device again when Lilia dies in childbirth. This felt as if Forster was laboriously setting up the novel’s denouement, getting his pieces in play for the final scene, rather than an integral part of the narrative, and her death is announced casually. The reaction back in England is at first to ignore the new born (who is not a blood relative of the Herritons). Quixotically they change their minds – or more specifically Mrs Herriton, the family matriarch, changes her mind – when she hears that Caroline has decided to go back to Italy to ‘save’ the child from the horror of being brought up motherless, and worse, Italian. Philip follows Caroline accompanied by his scary sister Harriet aiming to gazump Caroline and effectively buy the baby from Gino.

Gino is not interested in selling his son, of course and is planning to remarry to provide him with a mother. In a melodramatic finale Harriet kidnaps the baby and flees for the coast. Racing to meet the train, their coach crashes and the baby is killed. The aftermath of the crash is painful to all. Philip eventually realises that he is in love with Caroline but she is still in love with Gino, having been so all along.

There is a soap opera element to the repeated overnight journeys to Italy and back, the sudden deaths and unsuitable and unrequited romances. In an otherwise positive essay for the Guardian back in 2002, Zadie Smith wrote “there is a lot in Forster that fails, is both cloying and banal” – which made me wonder what she would have said if she really didn’t like his work. I quote her here because this phrase resonated with me – there is a lot in Where Angels that doesn’t work, is sentimental, over-written and dull. When it was first published over 100 years ago the Guardian then called it (again in another not altogether hostile review) “a sordid comedy culminating, unexpectedly and with a real dramatic force, in a grotesque tragedy.” The two elements, humour and tragedy, sit uncomfortably together – the novel is neither a gentle comedy about silly English people and their class distinctions, nor a tragedy about how good intentions can go wrong. Ultimately I found it melodramatic and not in a good way.

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