The Books: “A Room with a View” (E.M. Forster)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

A Room With a View – by E.M. Forster

I saw the movie before I read the book – this is the case with all of Forster, actually. I came to Forster late – I read Howards End in the fall of 1994 – why I remember such things, I’ll never know – but I was reading it when I was in Ithaca, doing a show, recovering from a horrible love-loss, and finding myself falling in love with Michael. And all we did together (besides … you know …) was sit around and read. He was reading the 5,000 page Brando biography and I was reading Howards End. I’ve re-read Howards End since and it’s weird – because of the vividness of the time when I first read it, I still, when I pick it up, feel that blazing autumn of 1994 hovering around its pages. The atmosphere of the world I was living in when I read it – has somehow seeped into the pages. I LOVED that book – it’s my favorite Forster – but I pick up Room with a view right now – and naturally I had to check the front page to see when I bought it (I do my little month/year thing on every book I buy). And there it is: Oct. 94. So I bought it while still in Ithaca – still enraptured by Howards End – and knowing I wanted to stay on the Forster kick a bit longer. That’s why I write that little month/date … it can trigger memories that I really want to hold onto.

I re-read Room with a View last year, I think – and had just as good a time wiht it as I did the first time. Howards End is his masterpiece, I think – it’s almost like he somehow gets the entire history of England and humanity into one book – NO IDEA how he does it … Room with a View is a bit more light, although it touches on many of the same issues.

Lucy Honeychurch is traveling with a babbling entourage through Italy. Much of Forster’s work has to do with watching how English people deal with “the other”. Meaning: anyone who is not English. The fad at the time was to take sweeping trips across Europe – with an entire staff to carry your 25 satchels behind you … and yes, the point was to ‘see’ Italy – but Forster also shows how some people need to bring their home country with them wherever they go – they don’t REALLY want an exotic experience, they don’t REALLY want to be confronted with any scary “other”. They want to say they’ve traveled, it’s just what you do … but they expect England to follow THEM. This makes for MUCH high comedy. Room with a view is a VERY funny book – all of those English people sitting around in the drawing room of the pension, being all British, and moaning about not “having a view” … meanwhile: RIGHT OUTSIDE is Italy proper! Go out and see it!

Lucy – a lovely character – actually DOES want to have adventures, wants to see the “real” Italy. But she is a young lady, traveling with chaperones – and it’s very hard to get any alone time whatsoever.

Her first moment of alone time (in excerpt below) ends in tragedy, fear, a dead faint, and a fateful encounter with George Emerson, another young British man in Italy. In his own way, EM Forster is quite quite radical. Lucy does not have “any system of revolt”. A critique of an entire culture is in that line. And notice how often SPACE is mentioned here – the distances, George seeing her “across something” … the “receding heavens”, the “vast panoramas”, etc. Lucy feels cramped – not just by her room without a view, but by her whole life. The way it’s set up, the rules for women, etc. But the book is full of images of space, and air, and light … It’s like we are inside Lucy’s head, in her spinning of airy castles, her yearning for unlimited space and freedom. It is not an accident that she first sees George “across something” … it’s like HE is her view. She doesn’t know it yet – but it’s all there in the language. It’s so romantic!

It’s a lovely read. Deep, funny, thoughtful, beautiful prose, great characters.

EXCERPT FROM A Room With a View – by E.M. Forster

Mr. Beebe was right. Lucy never knew her desires so clearly as after music. She had not really appreciated the clergyman’s wit, nor the suggestive twitterings of Miss Alan. Conversation was tedious; she wanted something big, and she believed that it would have come to her on the wind-swept platform of an electric train.

This she might not attempt. It was unladylike. Why? Why were most big things unladylike? Charlotte had once explained to her why. It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored. Poems had been written to illustrate this point.

There is much that is immortal in this medieval lady. The dragons have gone, and so have the knights, but still she lingers in our midst. She reigned in many an early Victorian castle, and was Queen of so much early Victorian song. It is sweet to protect her in the intervals of business, sweet to pay her honour when she has cooked our dinner well. But alas! the creature grows degenerate. In her heart also there are springing up strange desires. She too is enamoured of heavy winds, and vast panoramas, and green expanses of the sea. She has marked the kingdom of this world, how full it is of wealth, and beauty, and war – a radiant crust, built around the central fires, spinning towards the receding heavens. Men, declaring that she inspires them to it, move joyfully over the surface, having the most delightful meetings wiht other men, happy, not because they are masculine, but because they are alive. Before the show breaks up she would like to drop the august title of the Eternal Woman, and go there as her transitory self.

Lucy does not stand for the medieval lady, who was rather an ideal to which she was bidden to lift her eyes when feeling serious. Nor has she any system of revolt. Here and there a restriction annoyed her particularly, and she would trangress it, and perhaps be sorry that she had done so. This afternoon she was peculiarly restive. She would really like to do something of which her well-wishers disapproved. As she might not go on the electric tram, she went to Alinari’s shop.

There she bought a photograph of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus”. Venus, being a pity, spoilt the picture, otherwise so charming, and Miss Bartlett persuaded her to do without it. (A pity in art of course signified the nude.) Giorgione’s “Tempesta,” the “Idolino,” some of the Sistine frescoes and the Apoxyomenos, were added to it. She felt a little calmer then, and bought Fra Angelico’s “Coronation,” Giotto’s “Ascension of St. John,” some Della Robba babies, and some Guido Reni Madonnas. For her taste was catholic, and she extended uncritical approval to every well-known name.

But thought she spent nearly seven lire, the gates of liberty seemed still unopened. She was conscious of her discontent; it was new to her to be conscious of it. “The world,” she thought, “is certainly full of beautiful things, if only I could come across them.” It was not surprising that Mrs. Honeychurch disapproved of music, declaring that it always left her daughter peevish, unpractical, and touchy.

“Nothing ever happens to me,” she reflected, as she entered the Piazza Signoria and looked nonchalantly at its marvels, now fairly familiar to her. The great square was in shadow; the sunshine had come too late to strike it. Neptune was already unsubstantial in the twilight, half god, half ghost, and his fountains plashed dreamily to the men and satyrs who idled together on its marge. The Loggie showed as the triple entrance of a cave, wherein dwelt many a deity, shadowy, but immortal, looking forth upon the arrivals and departures of mankind. It was the hour of unreality – the hour, that is, when unfamiliar things are real. An older person at such an hour and in such a place might think that sufficient was happening to him, and rest content. Lucy desired more.

She fixed her eyes wistfully on the tower of the palace, which rose out of the lower darkness like a pillar of roughened gold. It seemed no loger a tower, no longer supported by earth, but some unattainable treasure throbbing in the tranquil sky. Its brightness mesmerized her, still dancing before her eyes when she bent them to the ground and started towards home.

Then something did happen.

Two Italians by the Loggia had been bickering about a debt. “Cinque lire,” they had cried, “cinque lire!” They sparred at each other, and one of them was hit lightly upon the chest. He frowned; he bent towards Lucy with a look of interest, as if he had an important message for her. He opened his lips to deliver it, and a stream of red came out between them and trickled down his unshaven chin.

That was all. A crowd rose out of the dusk. It hid the extraordinary man from her, and bore him away to the fountain. Mr. George Emerson happened to be a few paces away, looking at her across the spot where the man had been. How very odd! Across something. Even as she caught sight of him he grew dim; the palace itself grew dim, swayed above her, fell on to her softly, slowly, noiselessly, and the sky fell with it.

She thought: “Oh, what have I done?”

“Oh what have I done?” she murmured, and opene dher eyes.

George Emerson still looked at her, but not across anything. She had complained of dullness, and lo! one man was stabbed, and another held her in his arms.

They were sitting on some steps in the Uffizi Arcade. He must have carried her. He rose when she spoke, and began to dust his knees. She repeated:

“Oh, what have I done?”

“You fainted.”

“I – I am very sorry.”

“How are you now?”

“Perfectly well – absolutely well.” And she began to nod and smile.

“Then let us come home. There’s no point in our stopping.”

He held out his hand to pull her up. She pretended not to see it. the cries from the fountain – they had never ceased – rang emptily. The whole world seemed pale and void of its original meaning.