EVELYN WAUGH, BRIDESHEAD REVISITED: “THE SACRED AND PROFANE MEMORIES OF CAPTAIN CHARLES RYDER”.

 

EVELYN WAUGH, BRIDESHEAD REVISITED: “THE SACRED AND PROFANE MEMORIES OF CAPTAIN CHARLES RYDER”.

When it was first published in 1945, Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh (Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, *1903-†1966) achieved a considerable success. Yet it was the adaptation as a television serial in 1981 which catapulted the novel to an iconic status‒worldwide. It is usually ranked as the best-ever in the UK, receiving 29 nominations and 11 awards. And it has not lost one iota of fascination and relevance ever since. A film version was released in 2008, and a new adaptation, another grandiose production, was announced in 2020, and should soon be available.

I had the privilege of being in London at the time of the first screening. It seemed as if the whole country was swimming across gentle, lukewarm waves of nostalgia and aesthetic enjoyment, lamenting the gone age of British splendour and dominance, mesmerised by the complex emotional imbroglios of a hugely-rich aristocratic Roman-Catholic family, into which the narrator in the novel (and in the film…), the atheist (or at least agnostic…) Charles Ryder gets accepted, and “adopted”, despite his agnosticism.

Winter of 1943. Charles Ryder’s battalion takes part in routine training and manoeuvres of the army in England. He will be reprimanded by his “Commanding Officer”, because of some untidiness in the barracks and surroundings.

Dialogue added by the screenwriters. Jeremy Irons as "Charles Ryder". 1981 serial.

He is going to unveil to us the “The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder”, beginning in the winter of 1943. Ryder is a captain of the British army, being conveyed across the English countryside, fatigued by simulacrums of military action, exhaling a melancholic Weltschmerz, fearing that the new class of mercantile philistines, represented by Sargent Hooper, will soon take control of society and destroy beauty.

By then he had already become a successful painter– a status Evelyn Waugh secretly always wanted to achieve. Thus he will regale us with thunderstorms and drizzles of gigantic wall-frescoes, splendid oil-paintings and scintillating water-colours, capturing physical and human landscapes of a gone age, while he attempts to come to terms with his devastated personal life. And the seemingly elegant yet unstoppable meandering into self-destruction of a family which had everything to be insouciantly halcyon, everyone else’s envy notwithstanding.

Shortly after the last episode was broadcasted, I had to go to a hospital in London, to undergo minor surgery. They expected me to spend two nights in a huge hall, together with other patients. I remember the smile of a nurse who, after discovering the book I had in my bed, said loud to her colleagues: “Look! He is reading Brideshead Revisited”. It was my first encounter with Evelyn Waugh as a writer, which left me as enchanted and pensive, as moved and puzzled, as when I saw the last episode of the 1981 serial. His other novels followed later on, in particular Scoop (1938), which in 1988 almost threw me into jail in Hamburg, Germany. I was laughing uncontrollably while going through customs and police control at the airport; a zealous policeman though I was being overtly and consciously disrespectful to them. It ended with just a reprimand.

It would take decades for a thorough “revisitation”, which began in Berlin in the year 2014, including the first reading of A Handful of Dust (1934), part of his correspondence and essays.

 First "decent" encounter between Charles Ryder and Lord Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Andrews), 1981 serial.

Evelyn Waugh ingeniously constructed a novel which hooks the reader by a well-planned usage of “flash-back” and “flash-forward” techniques. We begin in 1943 (“prologue”), then go back to 1923, a “flash-forward” to the first visit of Brideshead, and again back to the beginning of Ryder’s sojourn at Oxford, until we retake the first “flash-forward”. The story resumes then linearly glued to Chronus, though there are several “flash-backs”, and one key “flash-forward”, to throw us again into the final years of the Second World War (“epilogue”).

And then, of course, there is Waugh’s prosa, at times reaching in this novel heights of such breathtaking beauty, such soul-stirring intensity, that the common adage, Waugh should be considered as one of the “great prose stylists of the English language” in the 20^th century, ought to be modified by adding one or two previous centuries. For example, at the beginning:

“Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s day; her autumnal mist, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer – such as that day – when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth.”¹

Oxford, Anno 1923. An unexpected, and rather unpleasant incident, brings the undergraduates Charles Ryder and Lord Sebastian Flyte, youngest son of the Marquis of Marchmain, for the first time together. They would soon become close friends, Charles being introduced to the group of aristocrats and eccentrics surrounding the ethereally handsome Sebastian, all of them engaged ad infinitum in using (or wasting) their time at Oxford “getting tight”, as Waugh himself would define his sojourn there in a noted interview with the BBC². 

 

 

Julia (Diana Quick) awaiting Charles, at the station nearest to Brideshead. 1981 serial.

 Charles is then requested during the summer to go to Brideshead, as Sebastian had a “serious accident”. He would meet for the first time Julia Flyte, the oldest daughter of the Marquis of Marchmain. The two young men manage to get to Venice, to stay at a palazzo on the Grand Canal rented by the Marquis, who lives there with his Italian lover, Cara, whom the “Byronic” looking Englishman met during his service in the First World War. The friendship will continue back in Oxford, though the first dark clouds emerge over the horizon. Lady Marchmain, the ultra-protective mother, welcomes Charles Ryder as a suitable company for her son, yet the path towards self-destruction is not to be erased, in spite of numerous efforts.

                                          "Ought we to get drunk every night?" - asks Charles Ryder.

                                             "Yes, I think so" - answers Sebastian Flyte.

Charles and Sebastian enjoying wine at Brideshead. Dialogue added by the screenwriters. 1981 serial.

Perhaps the shrewdest literary construct to appear out of Waugh’s prestidigitator’s hat, superbly amalgamated within the unfolding of the core of the novel, is that of introducing two “exotic outsiders” (albeit at the time of events very much “in”). They are two “unmistakable foreigners”, who are commanded to act as perspicacious, sharp-edged decoders of the “unmentionable” hidden, deep-sea currents in the ocean of feelings and secrets of the soul. Two souffleurs, who, although “whispering” to the other figures, are giving the readers the clues to unveil the concealed maelstrom leading to self-destruction and emotional disaster. 

                                Sebastian and Charles being enchanted by Venice. 1981 serial.
 

The first one is Anthony Blanche, the exotic “world-citizen”:

“You must remember I am not English you know. I cannot understand this keen zest to be well-bred. English snobbery is more macabre to me even than English morals...”³

First appearance is almost a shock to Charles Ryder:

“He had on a smooth chocolate brown suit with loud white strips, suede shoes, a large bow-tie and he drew off yellow wash-leather gloves as he came into the room, part Gallic, part Yankee part, perhaps, Jew; wholly exotic.”⁴...”the aesthete par excellence, a byword of iniquity, from Cherwell Edge to Summerville.”⁵

"You don't know Charles Ryder..."-says Sebastian. "No, but I have the most delicious feeling I am going to...", says Anthony Blanche (Nickolas Grace), 1981 serial. Dialogue added by the screenwriters.

Anthony Blanche keeps bouncing between Argentina, France and England, likes to pose as a homosexual, befriended by Jean Cocteau and André Gide. Albeit he is rather keener on appearing as a mannered flamboyant aesthete and haughty provocateur, whose penetrating eyes were tantamount to x-rays, seeking without the slightest compassion the recondite layers of the most innermost of those unfortunate enough to stumble upon him. Perhaps the figure who most exults with Schadenfreude, when stumbling onto personages getting drown in the whirlpool of emotional malheurs and personal limitations.

In a long conversation with Charles Ryder, drink after drink, he would throw his diagnosis of the “Marchmain family” onto the perplexed Charles:

-“Sebastian has charm, but no brain”,

- His brother (Brideshead) “...something archaic, out of a cave that’s been sealed for centuries. He has the face as though an Aztec sculptor had attempted a portrait of Sebastian; he is a learned bigot, a ceremonious barbarian, a snow-bound lama…”

-”And then Julia… a face of flawless Florentine quattrocento beauty...all she wants is power…”

-“There is another sister (Cordelia), too, I believe in the schoolroom. Nothing is known of her except that her governess went mad and drowned herself not long ago. I am sure she’s abominable”.

- (Lady Marchmain) “… she meanwhile keeps of small gang of enslaved and emaciated prisoners for her exclusive enjoyment. She sucks their blood. You can see the tooth marks all over...They never escape once she’s had her teeth into them. It is witchcraft. There is no other explanation.”⁶

Then comes the “Lady in Venice”, Cara, a former “highly talented dancer”, the Italian lover of the Marquis of Marchmain, who in a dialogue with Charles Ryder in Venice would sum up in an offhand, courteous but lethally precise way the affective quicksand at whose borders everyone lingers, and which may swallow her too. While Blanche’s autopsy of the Brideshead set-up is malicious and intends to spread venom, Cara’s confession is a cold x-ray, displaying the bare bones. No illusion, no self-delusion.

“-I know of these romantic friendships of the English and the Germans. They are not Latin.”⁷says Cara (Stephane Audran). 1981 serial. On Sebastian: “-Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy.”⁸

“-...they are full of hate – hate of themselves, Alex and his family...”⁹ “Alex (Marquis of Marchmain) does not love me. But not the littlest piece. Then why does he stay with me? I will tell you; because I protect him from Lady Marchmain. He hates her, but you can have no conception of how he hates her.”¹⁰ Again, on Sebastian:  “- Sebastian drinks too much.- I suppose we both do (says Charles).- With you it does not matter, I have watched you together. With Sebastian is different. He will be a drunkard if someone does not come to stop him. (...)Alex was nearly a drunkard when he met me; it is in the blood. I see it in the way Sebastian drinks. It is not your way.”¹¹

A question mark has been raised from the publication of the novel, and still hangs around: That of the true nature of the relationship between Charles and Sebastian, that “romantic friendship”, and whether it has a more concrete sexual connotation. Waugh himself was quite clear, placing that friendship in a rather airy sphere:

"Charles's romantic affection for Sebastian is part due to the glitter of the new world Sebastian represents, part to the protective feeling of a strong towards a weak character, and part a foreshadowing of the love for Julia which is to be the consuming passion of his mature years."¹²

Sex plays almost no role in the whole novel, although metaphors and allusions abound. It appears only once as a possibility, at the first encounter between Charles and Julia, “I caught a thin bat’s squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me”¹³, and brief hints towards the act itself being enacted appear very late, in the ship bringing Charles, his wife, and Julia, from New York to England. The links between Charles and Sebastian are better placed in that other world conceived by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wahlverwandschaft, usually (and not-quite-correctly) translated as “elective affinities”. It is a spiritually (in the German sense of geistig, not geistlich) being together, chosen not by primaeval blood, or by attraction to flesh, but by the inner will of the soul. The two young men live for a long time in sand-castles and air-balloons. Hence the harshness of the awakening, due to arrive sooner or later.

Politically “incorrect”

Evelyn Waugh would nowadays be tagged as a very much “politically incorrect” writer, and not only because of the novels which deal with Africa (Scoop, 1938 and Black Mischief, 1932). He never did eschew controversy, persisted on being iconoclast, irreverent, using satire and all the scales of humour to capture his epoch. Conservative, traditionalist, a converted and vociferous Catholic, he was disparaged for being out of touch with the Zeitgeist. He answered to the latter onslaught that he certainly wished he had been born some centuries earlier.

Lady Marchmain (Claire Boom) reading a story by G.K. Chesterton, “The Queer Feet”, to the family (plus Charles Ryder) assembled at Brideshead, whilst Sebastian gets drunk – again. The moral of that short-story will appear later, in a conversation in London, between Charles and Cordelia, after the death of Lady Marchmain.

 

 Julia admiring a small turtle engraved with diamonds, present of Rex (Charles Keating) to Julia, in front of Cordelia (Phoebe Nicholls). In the background, Mr. Samgrass (John Grillo), the Oxford don who will be “hired” by Lady Marchmain to “straighten-up” Sebastian.1981 serial.

Brideshead Revisited has been debunked, and “written-down”, by some as:

“A hedonistic portrayal of aristocratic purveyors and seekers of leisure, escorted by bourgeois arrivists, swimming in a sea of by-gone belle époque, exhibiting elegant decadence as ennui supérieur and extracurricular relationships as a mark of distinction, of a seducing yet bound-to-disappear uniqueness, swallowed by the relentless dynamics of capitalism, et cetera, et cetera...”

That is how the author signing these lines would summarise the objections, and perhaps at times also the dégout, coming above all from the non-conservative milieus.

Nota bene: Such a depiction may have more to do with the 1981 serial than with the novel as such. Waugh himself confessed that the emphasis on gluttony and wines, and champagne, in the novel, had to do with the privations endured during the Second World War. The film-version, which does not sully the original text (quite the contrary), may however give the impression, in particular to those who had not read the novel as such, of an excessive display of insouciant leisure by the very-well-to-do, and of a feverish aestheticism. No one ever seems to dress gauchely in the film, not even the members of the working-class.

Such a socially-aware appraisal of the novel would be considered as not quite compatible with the definition of its theme by the author himself as:

“the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters...”¹⁴

Sebastian convalescent in a hospital run by a Catholic mission in Fez, Morocco. He has just received the news of the death of his mother, transmitted by Charles.

This is indeed a Catholic novel, and it has a theological theme‒at least one. Waugh himself hinted at the last dialogue between Cordelia and Charles, and the reference to a passage from the Father Brown detective story "The Queer Feet“, by K.G. Chesterton":

„I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.[7]¹⁵

Yet even those who despair at Waugh’s “incorrectness”, and at what they call “old-fashioned” aesthetic values, cannot fail to be at least slightly subjugated by a prose which, no forced orfèvrerie at all, carries a magic of its own, unfolding clouds of soothing incense, embracing us, promising us a red-wine, like the Burgundy eulogised in page 163, which will regenerate our hearts:

“My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.Those memories, which are my life – for we possess nothing certainly except the past - were always with me. Like the pigeons at St. Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in a little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their neck, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder; until suddenly the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning of war-time.”¹⁶

An artistry which gets enhanced by the unforced introduction of those minuscule pleasures of daily life, crowning the candour of a young-lady, and counterpointing the serendipity and arrogance of an agnostic artist who elevates himself above the other mortals, as when Cordelia explains to Charles her possible vocation to become a nun, and says:

-...But I don’t know now. Everything has changed so much suddenly.”

But I had no patience with this convent chatter. I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon. I had had my fingers in the great, succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening – of Browning’s renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo’s tube, spurned the friars, with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hair-splitting speech. 

“You’ll fall in love”, I said. 

“Oh, pray no. I say, do you think I could have another of those scrumptious meringues?”¹⁷

 

The Marquis of Marchmain (Laurence Olivier) in Venice, 1981 Serial“-It has been my tragedy that I abominate the English countryside. I suppose it is a disgraceful thing to inherit great responsibilities and to be entirely indifferent to them. I am all the Socialists would have me be, and a great stumbling block to my own party.”¹⁸ 

                                    Charles Ryder seeking new "light" in Mexico. 1981 serial.

A crucial question: Where did all that malheur come from? Where and how did all those dislikes and hatreds arise, all that intra-family turmoil, all those disaffections? Perhaps the desire to control the other one, the seeking of brutish (emotionally) power over the nearest-ones as the raison d'être, a luxurious indifference to the ways-and-means of ordinary life. It seems as if almost everyone chooses the wrong partner, the inadequate spouse. Every single marriage collapses. Even second attempts. Julia will marry a Canadian-born adventurer and truculent money-seeker, who is discovered–too late–to have been already married once, hence divorced, and hence also forced to conduct the religious ceremony almost on the sly, in a modest Anglican chapel. When she meets Charles on the ship leaving New York, years afterwards, she is a total wrack‒just about half-camouflaged.

1981 serial -You have changed, Charles. So lean and grim, not at all the pretty boy Sebastian brought home with him. Harder too.- And you are softer.- Yes, I think so… and very patient now.-And sadder too.-Oh yes, much sadder.”^{19  1}

The eldest son of the Marquis of Marchmain, Lord Brideshead, will marry a middle-aged widow with children, and it appears also past breeding-age, to the utter disgust of his father, who thus proceed to disinherit him, depriving him of the possession of the Brideshead castle, which is given to Julia.

Is it just the erosion produced by a life of leisure, breeding boredom, deviant conducts, and a blasé Weltgleichgültigkeit (world-indifference), as a sign of distinction, and separation from the “lower” classes?

On top of the role played by the two “sophisticated foreigners” (Anthony and Cara), the atmosphere at home becomes certainly unbreathable. Charles Ryder abandons the study of history at Oxford, to become a painter and thus goes to Paris. The Marquis of Marchmain never comes back from the war, “exiles” himself in Venice, with his lover, and only returns to England because a new war is approaching. Sebastian Flyte would choose Morocco as the “real” home and site of seclusion, as well as new drinking-hole. The now matured painter Charles Ryder extricates himself from a doomed marriage and an adulterous wife by going to Mexico and Central America, to find a “new light”, and, finally, his own approach to painting. Cordelia go to Spain during the Civil War, to nurse wounded combatants, on the “national side”, we assume, and will stay in that country after the military conflagration ended. “Epilogue”, early 1940s, Julia and Cordelia go to Palestine, to contribute “their part”.

Was it then that difficult to be a happy English citizen in England?

I happen to believe that this novel has not yet distilled all its wisdom, all its secrets. That they were hidden ex professo in the text, left there to await the passage of time, time alone will be asked to decode them. Perhaps a new reading, decades henceforth, will accomplish that task.

The former agnostic Charles Ryder kneels down in the chapel of Brideshead, at the end of the novel, adhering at last to Catholicism. Is that the only way to survive and look forward, when one happens to stand upon the ruins and ashes of a devastated personal life?1981 serial.

It has to do with the prevalence of the “Spirit” against “Matter”, the triumph of “Spirit” over “Flesh”:

“…a small red flame...burning anew among the old stones.”²⁰

Graham Greene, shortly after the death of Evelyn Waugh, stated that the author of Brideshead Revisited was the:

“….greatest novelist of my generation…” ²¹

Had Evelyn Waugh survived Graham Greene, he would have said the same about his colleague and friend.

1Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited, Modern Classics, Penguin, (1945), 2000, p. 17.1981 television serial Granada-Television, ITV, directed by Charles Sturridge, Michael Lindsay-Hogg.

2“Face to Face” series conducted by John Freeman, 26 June 1960.

3P. 253.

4P. 27.

5Ibid.

6PP. 44-50.

7P. 93.

8P. 93.

9P. 92.

10P. 92.

11P. 95.

12Waugh, Evelyn. "Brideshead Revisited" (memorandum). 18 February 1947. Reprinted in: Forden, Giles. "Waugh versus Hollywood" (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/may/22/classics.film). The Guardian. 21 May 2004.

13P. 68.

14Preface, IX. 1959

15P. 206.

16P. 211.

17P. 208.

18P. 89.

19P. 223.

20P. 326.

21 Stannard, Martin (2011) [2004]. "Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh (1903–06)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press. Vol. II p. 492

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.