E. M. FORSTER, A ROOM WITH A VIEW: “...TOO MUCH BEETHOVEN...”

 

E. M. FORSTER, A ROOM WITH A VIEW: “...TOO MUCH BEETHOVEN...”

The quotation in the title does figure as such in the text of the novel (1908) written by Edward Morgan Forster (*1879-†1970)¹, but it is pronounced by the clergyman Mr. Beebe (Simon Callow) in a somewhat different scene of the film-version (1985), directed by James Ivory (*1928), screenplay written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (*1927-†2013)². It is one of the many jewels contained in the script, which won the authoress several awards‒and a never-diminishing admiration ever since. Forster was a Beethovenian English-man, a resolute and almost vociferous one, whom not even the First World War would assuage.

Ruth Prawe Jhabvalka rightly understood the scene in the Bertolini pension centred on a piano and the German composer, but made it shorter and tighter, pinpointing at the turbulences agitating the heart of the young Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham-Carter, 1985). The expression would then be turned “head-down” in another scene, much later in the novel, already back in England, where we find the phrase:

“and ‘too much Schumann’ was not the remark that Mr. Beebe had passed to himself when she returned.” ³

It was at a dinner-party in London organised by her would-be-husband, Cecil Vynes (Daniel Day-Lewis), mainly to show-off his future to be enslaved oeuvre d’art, the would-be-Mrs. Lucy Vynes, to his upper-class family and acquaintances. She plays first Schumann, he then asks her to play Beethoven, but she refuses, and plays Schumann again. In the film it is Franz Schubert, Piano Sonata No. 4 in A minor, Op. 164, D 537.

E. F. Forster refused sternly to let his opus be filmed, despite substantial offers from Hollywood, already in 1946. That refusal was inherited by the trustees of his legacy to the Cambridge University, until they were seduced by the proposal by James Ivory (director) and Ismail Merchant (producer). We cannot conjecture as to how Forster would have reacted by confronting the first film-version of his novel, aware that the richness and melodiousness of language, the many layers of substratum in the narrative, pose a tremendous challenge to film-makers, at least to those who tremble at the possibility of debasing the original source.

Yet there are perhaps few other examples of such a remarkable interaction between literary-text and screen-translation, both in terms of what the “screen” adds, but also in terms of what the “screen” does not import. The latter, as we want to discuss in this contribution, being also very much relevant.

Beethoven will re-appear in the next novel by Foster, “Howard’s End”, in particular his 5^th symphony, which acts as the décor of a chance but soon to become consequential-meeting of the Schlegel sisters with a young man of a “lower” social extraction. English obsession with class distinctions, and distances, remained a recurrent subject in almost all the novels by Forster. It is there, when the narrator decorticates the soul-turbulences provoked by the music of Beethoven on men and women alike, that he wrote one of the most famous, and relevant, accolades in the history of world-art:

“It will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.”⁴

     

Yet A room with a view is not a novel about Beethoven’s Geist in Italy, albeit it hangs like an overcast sky, a tedesco italianato. It is rather about an English mademoiselle of the “upper-middle-class” (on the threshold between a teenager and a young-woman, corporeally and spiritually) who accompanied by a chaperon (Maggie Smith), her older, spinster cousin, undertakes a tour of Italy. Florence and Rome are the highlights, then a must for any English citizen aspiring to be a connoisseur of the pillars of European civilization, and not a parvenu to be snubbed in a sophisticated soirée.

In the Pensione in Florence they get to know some “queerest, oddest”⁵ tourists, among them Emerson-father and Emerson-son, lower in the social-ladder, impertinent and tainted by an iconoclast radicalism, but very much alive and amiable. There is also a flamboyant romance-writer, Ms Lavish (Judy Dench), who relish to observe her surroundings like an entomologist. Plus two elder spinster sisters, the most amusing Ms and Ms Allan.

 

    Thus a voyage of initiation to that other galaxy, the cradle of the Western world, the country of the Renaissance, of sunny life. Of passionate and sensual love, seemingly camouflaged in late-Victorian England, perhaps still in early Edwardian-England, whenever it happened to be present. That “Southern”, “Catholic”, “epidermic”, “Mediterranean” combustion of emotions and physical desires was–at that time–supposed to be observed by the Lutheran Anglo-Saxons from a given distance, like the sighting of an exotic animal. There are those, however, who came much closer. And were engulfed by flames.

One of them was Miss Lucy Honeychurch, the other the young George Emerson, whom Italy provided the honey, the light and the perfume to water-down the gloomy cogitations of Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer et al. Miss Honeychurch is engulfed by the discovery of healthy, spontaneous passion, but only for some minutes, perhaps some hours. Then she returns to her English, Anglican, cool, self-controlled upbringing, refusing to transform an unsolicited (yet perhaps desired) kiss on a violets-swamped hill (“azure foam”) in Tuscany into the possibility of a stable, tranquil married life, comme il faut, back in London.

Not quite a Bildungsroman, as the novel captures only a year of the life of Miss Honeychurch, though not unblemished by the elegant yet unobtrusive clouds of that literary genre, appearing over the horizon-line from time to time. A voyage-novel, indeed, the first part, plus a graciously constructed social-comedy, at times refreshingly hilarious.

It does not take long for Miss Honeychurch to fall under the spell of the country:

“Then the pernicious charm of Italy worked on her, and, instead of acquiring information, she began to be happy.”⁶

Miss Honeychurch is eager to find some emotional pied-à-terre which should, if possible, allow her to discover the compass for a joyous social life, outside. If not, at least to protect her from the cyclical and unpredictable waves in real life.

“It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano”.⁷

Mr. Beebe had already met her in England, in Tunbridge Wells ”at one of those entertainments where the upper class entertains the lower...”⁸, whose one promised item was “Miss Honeychurch. Piano. Beethoven”.

“…when his composure was disturbed by the opening bars of Opus 111 (Note of this author: Beethoven’s last piano sonata, No. 32),...” The Reverend Mr. Beebe was stirred up, “...things were going extraordinarily; in the chords that herald the conclusion he heard the hammer-strokes of victory...” Yet the vicar then tells Mr. Beebe:

“I do not consider her choice of a piece happy. Beethoven is usually so simple and direct in his appeal that it is sheer perversity to choose a thing like that, which, if anything, disturbs.” ⁹

Re-encountering Miss Honerychurch by chance in Florence, who also learnt that Mr. Beebe is to become “their vicar” in the parish enclosing Window Corner, the residence of the Honeychurch family, he now reassess her, again at the piano. He says to her what he expressed to the other vicar, at that entertainment in Turnbridge Wells:

“If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting–both for us and for her.”¹⁰

There is no mention in the text of which piece of Beethoven was interpreted with so much heart in the Pensione. In the film it is the Piano Sonata No. 21 in C Major, Op. 53, „Waldstein“, 2nd movement: Introduzione: Adagio molto.

Then Lucy mentions that her mother harbours some misgiving about her being so involved with the piano, “Music‒”, said Lucy, as if attempting some generality. She could not complete it...”¹¹

The screen-writer re-translated that particular scene into:

“Mother does not like me playing Beethoven. She said I am always peevish, afterwards.”¹² And this is, again, a marvellous trouvaille.

A very much English outing to the countryside near Florence follows, to which the English chaplain in that city is invited, to accompany the Emersons, Miss Honeychurch, Ms Bartlett, Ms Lavish and Mr. Beebe. No one suspects that such an inoffensive and unpretentious excursion will ignite the passion of one young-man and one young-woman, sculpturing the backbone – in narrative terms – of the whole novel:

“It was PHAETHON who drove them to Fiesole that memorable day, a youth all irresponsibility and fire, recklessly urging his master’s horses up the stony hill. Mr Beebe recognised him at once. Neither the Ages of Faith nor the Age of Doubt had touched him; he was Phaethon in Tuscany driving a cab. And it was Persephone whom he asked leave to pick up on the way, saying that she was his sister – Persephone, tall and slender and pale, returning with the spring to her mother’s cottage, and still shading her eyes from the unaccustomed light.”¹³

 

Yet Mr. Eager does not take long to discover that the caresses between the driver and his impromptu Persephone are far from being just filial. He demands for the woman to descend, and go back alone, to the vain opposition of Mr. Emerson father, and of the females, under the ironic eyes of Mr. Beebe.

    

The film cannot possibly capture all the nuances and the metaphors of the text, as it is precisely the driver, the dispossessed Phaethon, who is going to set the whole earth ablaze, as it almost happened to the son of Zeus, by taking revenge, and leading Miss Honeychurch on the hill not to the clergymen, but to the young George Emerson. 

  

  Another sumptuous contribution of screenwriter and film-director follows. The embrace of the young Emerson with Miss Lucy having been frostily interrupted by the chaperon, the young lady is ushered away with the rest of the group, while George Emerson decides to remain, and then go back alone. There is an old Italian woman in the background, who has no doubt sensed that “something” was in the air, that a sort of “romance” had erupted. 

 

She then says in Italian to George Emerson: “Come into my house, come, I will offer you a glass of wine...”

I believe now that E. M. Forster would have been quite pleased with those congenial and delightful “grafts”.

There is humour (at times sublime), of course, combined - as Malcolm Bradbury pointed out – with a razor-sharp portrayal of the supercilious, social-class obsessed persons, like the spectacles-wearing, bookish, mannered Cecil Vyse. Forster intrudes, softly and elegantly, as the narrator-author, bringing a fresco, just escaped from the Sistine Chapel (Sacellum Sixtinum), displaying, once more, his skills as high-carat writer.

“Cecil enters.

Appearing thus late in the story, Cecil must be at once described. He was medieval. Like a Gothic statue. Tall and refined, with shoulders that seem braced square by an effort of the will, and a head that was tilted a little higher than the usual level of vision, he resembled those fastidious saints who guard the portal of a French cathedral. Well-educated, well-endowed, and not deficient physically, he remained in the will of a certain devil whom the modern world knows as self-consciousness, and whom the medieval, with dimmer vision, worshipped as asceticism. A Gothic statues implies celibacy, just as a Greek statue implies fruition, and perhaps this was what Mr. Beebe meant. And Freddy, who ignored history and art, perhaps meant the same when he failed to imagine Cecil wearing another fellow’s cap.”¹⁴

Cecil would meet Lucy in Rome, to where her cousin took her, to escape from the emotionally charged atmosphere in Florence, and to keep Mr. George Emerson at bay.

“He (Cecil) had known Lucy for several years, but only as a commonplace girl who happened to be musical...” “...But Italy worked some marvel in her. It gave her light, and – which he held more precious -it gave her shadow. Soon he detected in her a wonderful reticence. She was like a woman of Leonardo da Vinci, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things that she will not tell us. The things are assuredly not of this life: no woman of Leonardo’s could have anything so vulgar as a “story”. She did develop most wonderfully day by day.”¹⁵

Cecil is, of course, unaware that the “not-to-be-told-thing” is the seed planted on a hill near Florence, some days before. And, albeit repressed for those curious in the outside world, it keeps germinating and flowering inside. Miss Honeychurch had become a woman with a Beethovenian flame embracing life, but only she, Mr. George Emerson, and perhaps The Reverend Mr. Beebe, know it. 

 

  
 

One of the most successful symbiosis between text and screen takes place around the “Sacred Lake”, near Windy Corner. “The Sacred Lake” does bring a resonance of the “Walden Pond” of Henry David Thoreau (*1817-†1862), one of whose proverbs (”Mistrust all enterprises that requires new clothes”) is painted on the cornice of a wardrobe in the rented-house of the Emersons, which was found, thanks to the unwise intervention of Cecil Vynes, not far away from the abode of Mrs. Honeychurch. The family-name “Emerson” may well have been a fortuitous choice of the author, though perhaps not, as the American essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (*1803-†1881) was a close friend of Thoreau. But Forster mentions also Wagner, The Twilight of the Gods, as he describes the return to childhood of George Emerson, the brother of Miss Honeychurch, and Mr. Beebe, who decided to take a bath and behave like riotous children.

It cannot be denied that the screen-play had “sweetened” up the original text, softening sharp-edges, leaving aside rougher and more duplicitous roles and comments. Mr. Beebe says in the film, when first visiting the new residence of the Emersons, “...George reads German...” In the text the talk is about Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche¹⁶, a more incisive description of the anti-religious, libertarians avenues explored by that family. Hence precisely the serious accusations aimed at Mr. Emerson father, not detailed in the film, as the English chaplain in Florence, Mr. Eager, accuses him of having “murdered” (emotionally) his own wife, by procrastinating on the suitable and timely baptism of their son (George).

And The Reverend Mr, Beebe, magnificently interpreted in the film as a bon-vivant, amiable, tolerant vicar, an ever-smiling Seelsorger (in German, “the-caretaker-of-the-soul”) does have in the text a multi-layered personality, including a caustic and even cynical mood, who rejoices at the possibility of observing spinster women trying to adjust whatever pieces life has still provided them with. He has his humoured-waspishness, amusing himself by watching the pirouettes of those taking part in the comédie humaine. Who also does not mention to the Pensione’s group his own naughty experience with Italian women, as when a lady intrudes without previous communication into the bathroom, to notice Mr. Beebe laying naked in the bathtub. She swiftly resolved the embarrassing faux pas by saying: “Fa niente. Sono vechia...” (It does not matter, I am an old woman…).

Nor is it mentioned in the film that Miss Lucy bought a postcard, early in the novel, in the Piazza not far away from Gli Uffizi, which her cousin-chaperon urged to get rid of, as soon as possible. It was The Birth of Venus by Botticelli.

Not to be forgotten: This is a novel about Britons in Italy, but not quite a novel about Britons interacting with Italians. The contacts are sporadic, and the expected distance between “Northerners” and “Southerners” is kept.

Yet in spite of all the English idiosyncrasies one might be tempted to underline, we have in our hands one of the sunniest, funniest, as well as most uplifting, novels produced by the English literature in the first decades of the 20^th century.

It leaves you swimming in a subtly perfumed cotton-sea of joie de vivre, as if La Primavera of Sandro Botticelli had become the “Sacred Lake” invoked in the novel.

As stated by Malcolm Bradbury in the introduction to Room with a View:

“E.M. Forster is one of the wisest and the warmest, one of the gentlest and yet one of the most sharp-edged modern English writers.”¹⁷

The key question: Why did Forster select the Sonata Opus 111 of Beethoven as the secluded, smooth “lighthouse” of the novel? It is considered one of the most difficult, enigmatic, polyvalent sonatas of the German composer. An encyclopaedic discussion has been going (and still is…) since the early 19^th century, encompassing contradictory interpretations, and there are even furious skirmishes concerning how its piano interpretation has changed. One of Beethoven’s contributions to world-culture is that of having transformed the “symphony” into an instrument of philosophical expression. The same can be said of the late Sonatas. Opus 111 has been labelled as a musical crystallization of the “crisis of life”, a precursor of “French symbolism”, passing trough “excessive scientificism”, “mislead heroism”, “exuberant German metaphysics”, and tutti quanti.

We dare to suggest that Forster used the Opus 111, as interpreted by Miss Honeychurch, to suggest that the soul of the young lady was bursting, that she was more matured than what her look transpired, longing for a meaning to give to life – and hungry for love. She will also link her “secret” Beethoven to that kiss on a hill in Tuscany, and to the “Sacred Lake” in England. That is why she refuses to play Beethoven at that soirée in the London house of her prospective husband, insisting on, and repeating, Robert Schumann.

Beethoven is to be given, out of her soul, only to the true beloved. But she realises that late – albeit not too late.

“Too much Beethoven?” Yes, perhaps a little bit “too much”, but not really that much. If an overdose were to have been found enacted, lethal it was most certainly not. Just the right amount, to let life blossom inside soul and body.

In an epilogue written much later, in 1950, which does appear in some of the editions of the novel, but not in others, Forster insisted on his Beethovenian leitmotif. Emerson father would die during the First World War, shortly after having a confrontation with the police, which was to arrest Mrs. Lucy because she was playing Beethoven. Mr. Vynes, now relocated as a military officer in Egypt, would succeed in convincing a hostess to play the Moonlight Sonata, arguing that the composer, was, in fact, “a Belgian” (Flemish).

Not to be forgotten: The flamboyant romance-writer carries the first-name Eleanor. Her female heroine in the novel, capturing the seconds of passion between Miss Lucy and Mr. George is called “Leonora”¹⁸. It might have to do with “Leonore”, the initial name Beethoven gave to his only opera, finally to see the light of the world with the name “Fidelio”. An Italian first name which comes from the Latin “fidelis”, the “faithful one”.

Berlin, 19.12.2021.

1E.M. Forster, “A room with a view”, Penguin Classics, 2000, p. 36.

2There is another film version, 2007,directed by Nicholas Renton, which we are yet to see.

3P. 113.

4Forster, Howard‘s End, Penguin Classics, 2000, p. 26.

5The Reverend Mr. Beebe in the 1985 film-version.

6P. 19.

7P. 28

8P. 29.

9P. 29.

10P. 29.

11P. 30.

1200:13:24 to 13:27.

13P. 54.

14P. 81.

15P. 83. Our underlying.

16P. 116.

17…, p. vii.

18P. 142.