A Room with a View, Where Angels Fear to Tread: Introduction by Ann Pasternak Slater (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series) - Hardcover

Forster, E.M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307700909 ISBN 13: 9780307700902

Verlag: Everyman's Library, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

E. M. Forster’s beloved Italian novels, now in a single hardcover volume.

Forster’s most memorably romantic exploration of the liberating effects of Italy on the English, A Room with a View follows the carefully chaperoned Lucy Honeychurch to Florence. There she meets the unconventional George Emerson and finds herself inspired by his refreshingly free spirit— which puts her in mind of “a room with a view”—to escape the claustrophobic snobbery of her guardians back in England. The wicked tragicomedy Where Angels Fear to Tread chronicles a young English widow’s trip to Italy and its messy aftermath. When Lilia Herriton impulsively marries a penniless Italian and then dies in childbirth, her first husband’s family sets out to rescue the child from his “uncivilized” surroundings. But in ways that they can’t possibly imagine, their narrow preconceptions will be upended by the rich and varied charms of Forster’s cherished Italy.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

E. M. FORSTER (1879–1970) was an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer, and the author of A Passage to India and Howards End.

ANN PASTERNAK SLATER is a writer and former Fellow and Tutor at St. Anne’s College, Oxford.

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I N T R O D U C T I O N
By Ann Pasternak Slater

Cover-ups and the Unspoken

It is 1901.

E. M. Forster, a young man of twenty-two, has just arrived in Florence, and is deeply shocked. ‘How flagrantly indecent,’ he writes to a friend, ‘are the statues in the Uffizi with their little brown paper bathing drawers.’ Even Catholic fig-leaves are preferable. Rubens is unacceptable ‘because he paints undressed people instead of naked ones’. Forster, wayward maiden aunt of the Modernists, is affronted by the cover-ups of conventional propriety.

The excessive decorum dominating the turn of the last century is barely conceivable today. It’s hard to imagine Michelangelo’s David politely wrapped in paper pants. In A Room with a View Forster signals his amused dissent, when Lucy escapes from the Pension Bertolini ‘to do something of which her well-wishers disapproved’, and buys an armful of art reproductions. An innocent rebellion? No. They are all nudes: Georgione’s ‘Tempesta’, the ‘Idolino’, Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus’. At which point Forster’s narrative blandly slips into the voice of his times:

Venus, being a pity, spoiled the picture, otherwise so charming, and Miss Bartlett had persuaded her to do without it. (A pity in art of course signified the nude.)

That shift in voice is one tiny example of Forster’s delicate ironies. Often his delivery is so successfully deadpan, it’s hard to tell where he stands. The difficulty is compounded by his own inarticulable uncertainties.

Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View fall neatly within the Edwardian era (1901–10). This was the period when audiences rioted nightly against the word ‘shift’ in The Playboy of the Western World; when gentlemen’s trousers were euphemized as ‘ineffables’ or ‘unmentionables’; when one of Forster’s Cambridge friends congratulated him on flouting linguistic decorum by calling Gino’s newborn son a ‘baby’ rather than a ‘child’. It is the time when Forster’s fictional alter ego, Maurice, seeks the help of a doctor, shamefacedly introducing himself as ‘an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort’. Forster was sixteen years old when Wilde was condemned to two years’ hard labour on a charge of gross indecency. Wilde died in 1900, just before the Edwardian decade began, and Forster was coming to a slow understanding of his own homosexuality.

Unspeakable, unmentionable, ineffable: social taboos impose and are created by linguistic blackout; they are mutually reinforcing. The unspoken doesn’t cease to exist. But it becomes unrecognizable, unknown, dimly sensed, feared, reviled. In Forster’s case, initial innocence was compounded by his unusually protected and protracted upbringing by a myriad maiden aunts and a young mother who was widowed at twenty-five, when he was a year old. On his own admission, he only ‘understood how copulation took place’ when he was thirty. This bred fruitful ambiguities. In his early work, his inherent sexual ignorance, and an ingrained disinclination to offend, combine with deliberate literary occlusion, and a mocking adoption of Edwardian euphemism – as in Venus being ‘a pity’. Consequently, in his work it’s often difficult to distinguish the consciously ironic from the unconsciously acquiescent. The English muddle, which Forster’s novels combat so energetically, often reflects his own half-articulated and imperfectly recognized confusion.

Take Forster’s first piece of fiction. In ‘The Story of a Panic’, a group of English tourists are terrified by a visitation from Pan whom they sense but cannot see. Eustace, a boy in their company, is liberated and transformed. His instinctive perception of nature disturbs the rest of the group who try to imprison him; his kindred spirit, a low-bred Italian waiter, helps him escape into the woods. Charles Sayle, a Cambridge fellow-student, deliberately misread the story in the basest sexual terms, wryly recounted by Forster many years after the event.

B— by a waiter in the hotel, Eustace commits bestiality with a goat on that valley where I had sat. In the subsequent chapters, he tells the waiter how nice it has been and they try to b— each other again. [To others, the travestied story] seemed great fun, to me disgusting. I was horrified and did not want to meet Charles Sayle. In after years I realized that in a stupid and unprofitable way he was right and this was the cause of my indignation. I knew, as their creator, that Eustace and the [goat’s] footmarks and the waiter, had none of the conjunctions he visualized, I had no thought of sex for them, no thought of sex was in my mind. All the same I had been excited as I wrote and the passages where Sayle thought something was up had excited
me most.

With age, Forster admitted, such ambiguous passages grew rare in his work, as he left behind him ‘that enchanted valley where beauty is lust, lust beauty, and neither has nor needs a name’. Forster’s adaptation of Keats’s insoluble aphorism (‘Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty’) is at once straightforward and ironic. The relationship between beauty and lust isn’t a conundrum, but an unspoken truth. Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name is Forster’s lust that neither has nor needs a name.

The unsaid and the unspeakable throw their shadow over Edwardian married life too. Forster’s friend, J. R. Ackerley, was brought up in a seemingly normal well-to-do London household. Ackerley only discovered after his father’s death that he had also raised an alternative family nearby, visiting them regularly while walking the dog. To take another example, Forster wrote a tart memoir of his aptly named Uncle Willie, a member of the Northumberland landed gentry, whose house Forster frequently visited. Uncle Willie married a woman eight years his senior, the unfortunate Aunt Emily, while maintaining in his household sparkling Leontine Chipman, thirteen years his junior. So much Forster tells us directly: the unspoken inference is that Leontine was Uncle Willie’s live-in mistress. However, ‘the proprieties were strictly observed’, Forster observes sardonically. Uncle Willie forbad his unloved wife to take trips away from home unless young women could be found ‘to keep dear Leontine company . . . during the hours when copulation is possible in Northumberland’. Such plans invariably fell through, and drove Uncle Willie ‘half out of his mind’. He sounds very like Edward Ashburnham in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.

In spite of Uncle Willie’s insistence on public form, sex played a large part in his life. There was ‘the youthful feminine trash that thronged the house as years went on . . . Little girls he took an interest in too, and would pay for their school: indeed in the end he was interested in nothing but little girls . . .’ His well-trained wife and aging mistress made no objection. Forster himself, and his secret desires, were something quite other. Note the hiatus in Forster’s manuscript. ‘I [one-word blank] was outside his vision, and though he once referred to ‘‘the worst thing in creation’’ he was not illuminating about it. It never struck him as it did me that the groom was alone during hours that are possible in Northumberland’. Like the brown paper shorts on Florentine statues, Forster’s shorthand draws attention to what it hides. These are the great unanswered questions: what is the worst...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Everyman's Library
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0307700909
• ISBN 13: 9780307700902
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 424
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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