A. S. Byatt, novelist, on Howard’s End
When I was a student, I regarded Howard’s End as the moral epitome of goodness. One used to think: 'This is wonderful, here is a novelist who says we must connect the businessman with the world of the arts,' then you slowly realise that E. M. Forster actually can’t do it. His businessman is not an adequate businessman to carry the weight Forster wants him to carry, he’s simply unpleasant. Forster is too parochial and he holds inside himself the snobberies that he thinks he is castigating. The Schlegel sisters [in the novel] feel they’re very superior, but Forster also sort of feels they’re superior. I particularly dislike his treatment of Leonard Bast — Forster is really mocking him. Just think what D. H. Lawrence would have done with it.'
And Forster cannot do sex between a man and a woman. When Helen Schlegel and Leonard Bast make love, it is simply Forster the author saying: 'My plot requires these two people to make love to each other.' He cannot really imagine it happening. He can’t really imagine the world he is trying to call into being.'
Though tending toward overstatement, many of these have a point, several of which I am in sympathy with, but it is the anti-Forster selection from Byatt—whose work I actually admire, unlike James Wood (see his eviscerating takedown from the LRB here, complete with spirited riposte from Isobel Armstrong; I much preferred his takedown of Paul Auster in the New Yorker here)—that has given me the most pause. For I admire Howard's End, too, and Forster more generally, but she's right about Bast and I suspect there's a germ of truth in the rest of it. That said, I wonder how much I am being swayed by this recent piece in the New Criterion on Forster (by way of Kermode lectures under consideration), faulting him for the same snobberies but praising him in the main.
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