J.I.M. Stewart on the slow growth of a country house

E. M. Forster published only a single novel after the First World War, and died at a great age in 1970. Howards End (1910) had been a notable success, and the reputation consolidated with it he never lost. Through half a century his friends were able to assure him that this was so: a satisfactory circumstance, since he owned a fair share of innocent literary vanity. When he did die, this eminent Victorian (as he had come virtually to seem) proved to have left behind him a very large amount of manuscript material. Scholarship, with a ready-made classic thus on its hands, has not been slow to get on the move: Miss Ellem has provided us, at least in outline, with a fascinating genetic study of A Room with a View — or of Lucy and The New Lucy, as the novel was successively known during its evolution — and Miss Levine has worked similarly, and most revealingly, on the manuscripts of A Passage to India. Now comes a full-scale attack on Howards End.

Should anybody without interest in textual criticism take up Mr Stallybrass's first volume he will be aware of not much more than a further step in the progress of the handsome Abinger Edition, and delighted that the book includes a description of Rooksnest, the Forster family home which was to become Howards End itself, written down for the most part when the future nonagenarian was fifteen. There are also a dozen pages of editorial notes, useful to readers unfamiliar with the name of Carter Paterson, or anxious to know that Elvas plums are preserved plums from Elvas in Portugal or that "the pylons of Euston" refers to Philip Hardwick's Doric arch (1846-8) demolished when the station was rebuilt in 1963-8. But in fact what Mr Stallybrass has achieved is a major bibliographical monument, quite as massive in its own way as anything Philip Hardwick contrived. The second volume (4a in Abinger) is devoted to an intricate and abundant apparatus criticus, based on a rigorous collation of the earlier editions, and extending to a complete exhibition of the growth of the novel as Forster refined it in manuscript. Almost every scratch of his pen, it may be said, is here recorded, keyed with the utmost technical resource to the definitive text provided in the first volume. Such a task cannot be performed without devotion as well as technical accomplishment, and Mr Stallybrass has put all lovers of Forster greatly in his debt.

Thus privileged to look over the novelist's shoulder as he works, we can set our curiosity at play in various ways. There is, for example, the question of what manner and pace of writing suited him best. Are his finest effects achieved happily, or by labour? Joseph Spence in his Anecdotes records an occasion on which, being shown some of the foul papers of Pope's translation of the Iliad, he commented to the poet upon how much was corrected and interlined. "I believe," Pope rejoined, "you would find upon examination that those parts which have been the most corrected read the easiest." Is something of this sort revealed of Howards End? A few hours work with Mr Stallybrass's collations will show, not suprisingly, that Forster's corrections and revisions nearly always improve the writing in lucidity and the minor graces of style. Many small changes are dictated by opportunities seen ahead. Thus Leonard Bast's umbrella, so fatally carried off by Helen Schlegel from the Queen's Hall, begins life as a walking stick ("the lady has, inadvertantly, taken away my walking stick"); it becomes an umbrella in order that Helen, almost equally fatally, may unfurl it in Bast's presence and cry out that it is an appalling umbrella, all gone along the seams. Mr Stallybrass enables us to achieve, by mere browsing, numerous happy serendipities of this sort. Harder, but rewarding, is the task of deriving from these three hundred and fifty four pages of concentrated textual information and complex sigla any confident impression of the temperament of the writer, and of those areas of thought and feeling in which he moved confidently on the one hand and cautiously or painfully on the other. In general one concludes that any surprises here must lurk in the small print, since a first fairly extensive survey renders only much what one might expect.

Thus one sees, for instance, that Forster was in certain regards an unashamedly oldfashioned novelist. He had comparatively few misgivings and second thoughts about authorial intrusions and reflective passages. If he begins a chapter with "One speaks of the moods of spring" the words come smoothly until, half-way through the paragraph, people turn up again. George Eliot, whose wise, witty and tender sayings once filled a popular anthology, is still a power with him. In one such passage, which he does delete but marks providently for use "elsewhere", Margaret Schlegel is even compared with St Catherine, which brings us close to Dorothea Brooke as St Theresa of Avila in Middlemarch. Again, the whimsical or fantastic must have come to Forster easily; the famous description of the Fifth Symphony, although a little tidied up, appears to have been a one-go affair. We cannot be certain, indeed, about the first page, since there is a lacuna in the manuscript. But the goblins are there from the beginning (although they make a brief false start as gnomes), and the trio of elephants dancing, and the vast roarings of a superhuman joy.

Characters came less easily to Forster, and so did what happens to them. Both these facts are now documented in a variety of ways. Thus in the second paragraph of Chapter Six the young man encountered in the Queen's Hall is named for the first time as Leonard Bast. Behind this in the manuscript lies a different surname, Cunningham, and two different Christian names, James and Edward;

three pages on, Bast's wife is briefly Nessie and then Tootsy before settling down as Jacky. It is perhaps no more than a conjecture that this reflects uncertainty before characters uncomfortably beyond the writer's range. (Indeed, Mrs Munt, with whom Forster is so perfectly at home, starts off as Mr Yool.) But there can be no doubt that Forster carried quite far into the novel somewhat vague notions of what was eventually to happen in it. A preserved working note envisages Bast as killing Charles Wilcox and then committing suicide, or Bast and Helen as both dying, or Bast as surviving. Mr Stallybrass speaks of this discovery as "startling", but there is really nothing very out of the way about it. Forster's friend Virginia Woolf was for long equally in the dark as to what should happen in Mrs Dalloway or be dimly intimated as happening in The Waves.

All Forster's novels contain an element of symbolism: sometimes it is explicit and unmistakable, at other times elusive and doubtful. Does the manuscript of Howards End, we may wonder, anywhere assist our understanding here? Take Mrs Wilcox's habit of wandering round carrying a wisp of hay. Mr Stallybrass prints a fragment in which Margaret Schlegel meditates on Mrs Wilcox thus: It was as if she said 'What does it matter? I have got hold of something far deeper, even if you have not.' And to Margaret that something was vaguely associated with a bunch of hay. It was as if she said 'I have got hold of something deeper than truth or falsehood, deeper than passion or disgust. You hope to grasp it by going to concerts and plays. But I inherit it as a right,'

"This," Mr Stallybrass comments, "places beyond doubt Forster's deliberate use of hay for symbolic purposes." True enough — but equally interesting is the fact that Forster deletes the passage, thus showing himself aware of his liability to facile expatiation in this manner. And side by side with this we should notice the very last change recorded in the text of the novel:

'1 he tield's cut!' she cried excitedly — 'The big field. We've seen to the very end, and it'll be such a a crop as never!'

That is the manuscript. The published text reads:

'The field's cut!' Helen cried excitedly — 'The big meadow! We've seen to the very end, and it'll be such a crop of hay as never!'

The addition represents a felicitous final touching in of a quite slight symbolic theme; artistically it is as right as the inclusion of Margaret's rather heavy rumination would have been wrong.

There are two events the treatment of which is commonly felt to show Forster as experiencing particular difficulty in reconciling character, plot, and symbolic intent. The first is Margaret's marriage to Henry Wilcox, which comes to us as an even more uncomfortable affair than Dorothea's to Casaubon in Middlemarch or Isabel's to Os-. mond in The Portrait of a Lady. The earlier heroines are at least passionate in their way, and they misdirect their passion; Margaret is doing little more than dutifully submitting to a sociological thesis thought up by her creator: Schlegels must connect with Wilcoxes if England is to be saved. That Forster was aware of something missing—aware, indeed, of a sheer indelicacy in the match — is revealed by one striking passage in the manuscript. Margaret returns home from a call on Mrs Wilcox, and finds her brother Tibby's tutor waiting for her:

Though clerical and pedantic, he was not a fool, and offered his own explanation of Tibby's 'headaches.' He was also handsome, and as they bent over some papers together she felt attracted by him. The emotion was easily concealed and quickly forgotten, and the reader need not keep this tutor in remembrance, or even be told his name. He, like Paul, is a storm signal, not the storm.

This hopeless passage has been first tinkered with and then abandoned. It was intended, plainly, to endow Margaret with a sufficient measure of physical responsiveness to sex to render verisimilar a marriage in which, as things stand, we simply find it hard to believe. The other and yet more implausible event of this sort is Helen's giving herself to Bast. Forster is elsewhere on record as pretty well throwing up the sponge here, and admitting that this element in his story carried no conviction whatever. Again the manuscript shows that he struggled, but on the evidence it would appear to have been in the knowledge that here was something he simply didn't know how to do.

Finally, Rooksnest in Hertfordshire. It became Forster's home at the age of four; at fifteen he recorded his memories of the occasion and went on to a detailed description of the house and the neighbours; he continued this at twenty-two; and at sixty-eight made a last return to what he calls "this book," transcribing some extracts from letters relevant to the place. One or two points of biographical curiosity turn up — as here in the last sequence of entries:

I am getting a little mixed over dates, but I know I went to school at Eastbourne in the autumn of 1890. Mr Hervey, my dubious tutor, left England about then. He had overlapped my beloved Ansel! . .Anseii was a garden boy, and Forster's chief playmate. His name provides the title for the first story in The Life to Come: there he appears to be the actual Ansel', imagined as grown-up and almost a gamekeeper. Stewart Anse11 in The Longest Journey is quite a different sort of person, yet his Christian name is now revealed as also derived from Rooksnest days. But what is of chief interest is the loving precision with which the boy describes his childhood's home, apparently just after leaving it; this, and the detail in which the house and its surroundings are reproduced in Howards End. Appreciation here is much enhanced by an early photograph of Rooksnest and a detailed sketch plan of the property drawn by Forster from memory. One finds oneself constantly referring to them as one reads. Unfortunately (and inexplicably in view of the high cost of these volumes) they appear only on a dust jacket. And where in the text Forster, who is sparing no pains in the interest of topographical exactitude, ;ecords of the Rooksnest meadow that "it was of very odd shape, something like this:—" what the publishers provide is the word diagram set within square brackets. I should like to be able to judge for myself whether Forster was right about the shape of his meadow. Its image was with him as he penned the last sentence of a great English novel.

J. I. M. Stewart has previously written Eight Modern Writers.