Great Writing

I wrote awhile back about the great pile of interesting books I picked up for a song at The Book Addict, a local used-book store. I was quite impressed by Doris Lessing’s novel The Good Terrorist at that point, but I had also picked up a volume that contained three (yes, three) novels by E. M. Forster, an early 20^th-century English writer. I read the first two, Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room With a View, and enjoyed them both very much. Now, Forster’s biggest success as a novelist was with A Passage to India, published in 1924, which was also made into a successful movie in the 80s. That is not part of this collection I bought, the third novel being Howard’s End, published in 1910 and turned into a movie in 1992.

I am about 2/3 of the way through Howard’s End and it is excellent. I think Forster has replaced Robertson Davies as my favourite wordsmith, the writing is just superb, as are the observations of people and life in early 20^th century England. Here is a long quote from the novel, describing one of the characters, a struggling lower-class clerk, who encounters the novel’s two chief protagonists, the sisters Meg and Helen, a pair of well-to-do young ladies who we might today characterize as ‘limousine liberals’.

This is the omniscient narrator’s (i.e., Forster’s) description of Mr. Bast:

The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss, but he could see it, and at times people whom he knew had dropped in, and counted no more. He knew that he was poor, and would admit it; he would have died sooner than confess any inferiority to the rich. This may be splendid of him. But he was inferior to most rich people, there was not the least doubt of it. He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food. Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly colored civilizations of the past, he would have had a definite status, his rank and his income would have corresponded. But in his day the angel of democracy had arisen, enshadowing the classes with leathern wings, and proclaiming: “All men are equal – all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas,” and so he was obliged to assert gentility, lest he slipped into the abyss where nothing counts and the statements of Democracy are inaudible.

A great paragraph, laying out in beautiful prose the situation in which Leonard finds himself in England at that time. His interactions with Meg and Helen are a source of great turmoil for poor Leonard, a fact of which the sisters are so far entirely unaware.