Only Connect

Elsa Cavalié & Laurent Mellet (eds)

Only Connect

E. M. Forster’s Legacies in British Fiction

PETER LANG

Bern · Bruxelles · Frankfurt am Main · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien

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About the author

Elsa Cavalié is a Senior Lecturer at Avignon University, France. Her research focuses on Contemporary British fiction and Cultural Studies with particular emphasis on the notions of Englishness and Britishness.

Laurent Mellet is Professor of British literature and film at the Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès (France). He specialises in Modernist and contemporary British fiction, and in film and adaptation theory.

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JEREMY TAMBLING
(University of Manchester)

Civilization and Natural Depravity: On Forster, Melville, Lawrence, and Britten

Melville’s novel Pierre is mentioned in Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, the Clark lectures in Cambridge in 1927 dedicated to Charles Mauron (1899–1966), Forster’s translator, an admirer of Bloomsbury and of Roger Fry, and a writer on psychoanalysis and literature. Aspects of the Novel is more interesting than its discussions of story, plot and character imply; these are formalist, because a central limitation of Forster is not to relate novels to history, rather to consider them ahistorically. As he says, ‘History develops, Art stands still’ (Forster 2005, 36). This statement, which does not allow for the novel creating history, nor for how history shapes novels, follows on from a negativity which criticises criticism for looking at novels in terms of how they respond to ‘tendencies’, i.e. historical changes. He prefers a quotation from Melville, from the novel most slighted in his own lifetime, but perhaps now more possible to read: Pierre, or the Ambiguities (31).

In 1924, John Freeman (1880–1929) published a book on Melville, as, at the same time, Billy Budd had first appeared in an edition from Raymond Weaver. Like Maurice, its appearance was posthumous, thirty-three years late, though unlike Maurice, Billy Budd was late work with Melville, being written up to the time of his death in 1891. The quotation from Pierre appears at the end of Weaver’s book on Melville, Herman Melville. Mariner and Mystic (Weaver 382) and also in Freeman (Freeman 118). The context in Forster for ‘Oh what quenchless feud is this, that Time hath with the sons of Men’ is ‘the demon of chronology which is at present our enemy’ (Forster 2005, 31), and which may be the enemy of writers, too. At its simplest, it connects with the end of A Passage to India and the defeat of a relationship between Fielding and Aziz: ‘no, not yet’, and ‘no, not there’ (Forster 1961, 317), as well ← 27 | 28 → as the dedication of Maurice to ‘a happier year’. The Pierre utterance implies that two systems work against each other in any life: humans are held by something outside them, which they cannot know, which instantiates ambiguity; it is also significant that Forster identifies conflict (a feud) as central to Melville. But the sense that history develops, and that art stands still, puts art into a position where it cannot change history, which means that when Maurice appeared its techniques lacked momentum, so limiting its considerable interest.

Yet if Forster’s work looks formalist and non-historical, Aspects of the Novel reveals other things that he is interested in, which, implied or argued for later in it, qualify the formalism of plot, and character: those terms cease to have the significance that most readers think as being central to Aspects of the Novel, whose complexity is belied by its rather whimsical and self-dismissive and amateurish Bloomsbury mode. Its complexities are not always, perhaps never, sufficiently worked out, making some of its judgments unfair, as on Joyce, and on Woolf, who criticised Forster in her turn, and, outstandingly, James, wilfully so (Goldman; Watt). But there are strong, generous sympathies, too. His interests in novels emerge as centring on fantasy, which he finds to have the concept of muddle at its centre (Forster 2005, 106), in other words, of a sense that the writer cannot be in control of the material, and prophecy, a term which, like fantasy, I also think does not quite work because the usual associations of either term are not the subject here. Prophecy for Forster means a mode of speaking which he calls song. The other is rhythm, which he contrasted favourably with pattern. The latter, for him, was in danger of being at the expense of ‘life’: a point he makes about James, finding absence of life there (Trivedi). In a rare moment, Forster finds James’s characters and experience ‘gutted of the common stuff that fills characters in other books, and ourselves’, calling this a ‘castrating’ – that term suggests Freud – which removes philosophy, religion, and prophecy, and is ‘no benefit for the superhuman at all’ (Forster 2005, 142) – which suggests Nietzsche. The charge against James is that he has been forced to, or has opted for, compromise.

For Forster, pattern is predictable; rhythm is unexpected; or variable, it yields surprises. Whereas ‘pattern’ gives a visual model for thinking, making everything visible synchronically, rhythm works in relation to music, which extends through time, and memory, and does ← 28 | 29 → not permit complete visibility or knowability, as is also the case with literature, which like music works diachronically. Rhythm, which for Forster implies Beethoven, divides into two types: easy, or difficult. By ‘easy’, Forster understands ‘repetition plus variation’ (149), its function being ‘not to be there all the time like a pattern, but by its lovely waxing and waning to fill us with surprise and freshness and hope’ (148). There is no sense of closing anything off. Of ‘difficult rhythm’ he says he can give no example, save that it has to do with: ‘not rounding off but opening out. When the symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom’ (149).

Difficult rhythm is more like a perception of something else which is not simply in the work, but as activating it, is in it and beyond it. In Howards End, the ‘goblins’ marking the Scherzo of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, always ‘might return’; despite the affirmations of the conclusion, ‘the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things’ (Forster 1941, 33). One rhythm implies that there is something else, a counter-rhythm (Fillion 85–8). Whereas pattern exists as something to be seen, rhythm implies something else happening, which it points to. It may be compared with prophecy, which implies ‘a tone of voice’, where what is said is not exhausted by its speaker, or its context, where the text ‘reaches back’ (Forster 2005, 123). The novelists who concern him here are Dostoevsky, and Emily Brontë, Melville, and Lawrence (126). I will discuss the latter two.

Prophecy for Forster relates to an ‘intermittent realism’ which illuminates much more than common sense can: he quotes Melville, who, in the chapter called ‘The Fountain’ is discussing the whale blowing: ‘I have ever found your plain things the knottiest of all’ (Melville 2002, 312). He compares that fascination with detail which questions ordinary rationalist realism, with Lawrence, who ‘can describe a field of grass and flowers or the entrance into Freemantle’, i.e. ‘little things in the foreground’ and he asks ‘what does he feel during these intermittencies?’ – using a word from Proust. Intermittencies are gaps, moments of going astray, which defeat a sense of time as uniform. They evoke rhythm instead. ← 29 | 30 →

Perhaps Forster already knew Melville through Henry Salt (1851–1939), a friend of Edward Carpenter’s, a correspondent with Melville, and an enthusiast for him in articles in 1889 and 1892, as he was also an advocate for Thoreau and Whitman to whose work he was introduced by Carpenter after 1885. Salt was living near Millthorpe when Forster visited Carpenter and George Merill there in 1913 (Furbank vol. 1, 257; Hendrick, 160). The context for this reception of Melville was, then, socialist and humanitarian, counter-cultural, and sexually liberating. But Raymond Weaver was the first to publish a book on Melville, in the USA in 1921, while D. H. Lawrence produced wonderful essays on Melville in Studies in Classic American Literature, a book which started life as articles in the English Review in 1918 and 1919 and was finally published, after much re-writing, in the USA on 27 August 1923, and in Britain in June 1924 (Lawrence 2003, 435). Women in Love, from which Studies in Classic American Literature is inseparable, had appeared in the USA on 9 November 1920, and in England, on 10 June 1921. Billy Budd, because of its date of publication, plays no part in Lawrence’s essays: Aspects of the Novel makes a first use of it; his fascination extends to his re-writing it as a libretto for Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd (first performed in 1951). Aspects of the Novel makes clear use of Lawrence’s essays, and of John Freeman’s Herman Melville (1926), which he acknowledges in a footnote (it is one of very few citations to other critical work).

Forster gives two pages to Moby-Dick, finding the pursuit of the White Whale part of a battle against evil (Forster 2005, 126), Ahab against the white whale. Then he says it is a contest, but corrects himself again: ‘we get false if we say that it is between good and evil, or between two unreconciled evils’. Once he has said the novel deals with evil, he takes that back, as if uncomfortable, and says that ‘the essential in Moby-Dick, its prophetic song, flows athwart the action and the surface morality like an undercurrent’. This gives the sense of a counter-rhythm at work, but I will come back to it after commenting on him on Billy Budd.

Forster repeats ‘it is to his conception of evil that Melville’s work owes much of its strength’ (128). There is in the ambiguity of that sentence the sense that Melville’s ‘evil’ feeds his art. Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in March 1850, and met Melville that August ← 30 | 31 → at Lenox, Massachusetts. It began an exciting interchange, intellectual and emotional. Hawthorne began The House of the Seven Gables in summer 1850: it appeared in April 1851, and Melville commented in a letter (April 16 1851) that Hawthorne says ‘NO in thunder, but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes’ (Melville 2002, 555). Melville finds a disdaining of traditional morality in Hawthorne; an acceptance of the novel as beyond good and evil. Moby-Dick, dedicated to Hawthorne ‘in token of my admiration for his genius’ appeared at the end of 1851, and in a letter of that November, Melville tells Hawthorne, ‘I have written a wicked book and feel spotless as the lamb’ (566). Pierre, started at the same time, responded to The House of the Seven Gables, as The Blithedale Romance (1852) responded to Pierre. Melville wrote an anonymous review of Hawthorne’s work, ‘Hawthorne and his Mosses’ (Literary World August 17 and 24 1850). On 17 and 24 August, Melville published in the Literary World ‘Mosses from an Old Manse’, which described a ‘blackness’ in Hawthorne, as an object of absolute fascination to Melville, perhaps calling out homoerotic feelings; the blackness derived its force from: ‘that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free. For, in certain moods, no man can weigh this world without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance (540–1). Such visitations have the force of a ghostly haunting. Forster quotes this first in his Commonplace Book and then in Aspects of the Novel (Forster 2005, 130; 170). Melville compares this blackness, which makes Hawthorne’s writings emerge out of obscurity, with Shakespeare, who, he says, ‘through the mouths of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago’ insinuates things ‘that we feel to be so terrifically true that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter or even hint of them’ (Melville 2002, 541–2). Such a sense of what the novelist cannot say compares with what Forster means by prophecy, which, however, begins with the impossibility of speaking out; its character is to be, as with Billy Budd, ‘a song not without words’ (Forster 2005, 129).

With Melville on Hawthorne, I compare Lawrence on The Scarlet Letter: ‘You must look through the surface of American art, and see the inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning’ (Lawrence 2003, 81). ‘Inner diabolism’ implies that the devil in the writing works to overturn all ← 31 | 32 → stated meanings, and that this ‘diabolism’ is subterranean, American art working on two levels. On the surface, Hawthorne is the ‘blue-eyed darling’, but underneath in his writing there is a devilish underconsciousness; American art says, in its diabolism, ‘Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!’, meaning, says Lawrence, that: ‘the American has got to destroy. It is his destiny. It is his destiny to destroy the whole corpus of the white psyche, the white consciousness’ (81). Clearly that implies a reading of what the white whale is. John Freeman quotes D. H. Lawrence on the conflict within the novel: Moby Dick is ‘the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature. And he is hunted, hunted, hunted, by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousnessness […] Hunted by monomaniacs of the idea’ (Freeman 117 quoting Lawrence 2003, 146). Taken that way, the white race, by which Lawrence means white America and slavery, is in pursuit of its own spontaneous emotional being, and destroying that, perhaps in its very slave-keeping, certainly in its commitment to rationalism which is itself destructive. And though the book contains ‘a half humorous, subtly erotic tone’ (Chase 111), there is self-hatred in that destructiveness, since it is the white whale that is hunted down. Ahab is certainly monomaniacal, and a ‘maniac of the idea’: Lawrence returns repeatedly to that phrase, examining the fascination of whiteness, which is problematic in a way that the blackness of Queequeg is not, because, as the last paragraph of Moby-Dick chapter 42 speculates, ‘whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour’, so that it implies ‘dumb blankness’. All colours are laid on from without, ‘so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot’, and that white light, without operating without medium upon matter, ‘which touch all objects, even tulips and roles, with its own blank image’ means that ‘the palsied universe lies before us a leper’ with a ‘universal white shroud’ that wraps all the prospect. ‘And of all these things the albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?’ (Melville 2002, 170).

The whale then, opposite of blackness, is no less ambiguous; it is Lawrence’s blood consciousness, ‘the last phallic being of the white man […] hot blooded, sea-born’ (Lawrence 2003, 146); the figure of death, which needs ‘colored and coloring glasses’ (Melville 2002, 170) not to gaze oneself blind. Both sides in the conflict within Moby-Dick are heroic and diabolical: Lawrence responds to the American novel in ← 32 | 33 → Women in Love, with Gerald Crich, whose own whiteness makes him an object of wonder, heterogeneous, both Ahab and the whale. Birkin, looking at Gerald may well fear in him the ‘strange, glistening malice in Gerald, glistening through the plausible ethics of productivity’ (Lawrence 1995, 56). Gerald’s self-destructiveness is noted from the time he killed his brother accidentally, and in the way his sister Dinah dies in the chapter ‘Water-Party’, and of course in his own death in the snow.

Forster’s comments on Moby-Dick relate to Lawrence’s; especially the stress that Lawrence makes that the whale is a symbol, but of what? ‘I doubt if even Melville knew exactly’ (Lawrence 2003, 133). Forster says the novel’s action lies ‘outside words’ (Forster 2005, 126), ‘what the connection was in the prophet’s mind [between the name of the ship Delight in Melville’s text and its shattering by the whale] I cannot tell nor could he tell us’ (127). Forster has already quoted a passage where refusal to compromise with the world is called a source of delight, ‘a note of joy more terrifying than a menace’. It is a Nietzschean moment and the connecting of the two uses of ‘delight’ is suggestive, down to the implications of ‘light’, which make any symbolism operate as purely a connection between signifiers.