"The old trouble: things won't fit." (A Room with a View - E. M. Forster)

Member Name: frannyfortune

Product:	A Room with a View - E. M. Forster
Date:	28/07/01 (289 review reads)
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"Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time – beautiful?"

I love that. The tentative, romantic sentiment struggling to emerge from beneath the propriety and the prissiness. It sums up 'A Room with a View', really. I have no idea what Forster was hoping to say when he first started writing this book in 1902, and nor did he, apparently; his earliest notes for it end, after a list of the characters, with the wonderfully endearing question, 'Doing What?' It took him the best part of six years to answer that. What they end up doing, is embodying certain types and classes of that time, with humour, and wicked satire, but ultimately great sympathy. What Forster ends up saying, is...well, I'll try and work it out as I go along.

The first part of the book is set in Florence, where Lucy Honeychurch, a young middle-class girl, is travelling with her spinster cousin, Charlotte Bartlett, as chaperone. The book opens with Charlotte - oops, sorry, Miss Bartlett - complaining about the lack of view in the rooms they have been assigned at their pension. Two men overhearing the conversation (and I hope this doesn't shock you too much), actually take the liberty of offering them their rooms as a replacement. Imagine it! They have never been introduced, for a start, and the whole suggestion has an air of ill-breeding and almost indecency about it. Happily for all concerned, the situation is dealt with by Mr. Beebe, a clergyman from Tunbridge Wells, who just happens to be staying at the same pension, and knows all the parties concerned. The ladies get their view, without loss of propriety, and...

Can I stop writing like that now? It’s doing my head in, and I'm making a mess of it anyway. It probably sounds absolutely dire, but in fact it's utterly, tremendously wonderful. I'm not making it up, either. It's full of reverends and spin
sters, and people called Miss Bartlett and Mr. Beebe, and he really does come from Tunbridge Wells. And they really are all terribly, terribly concerned about what one should say, and what people might think, and how awful it would be if...oh my goodness! but no, they'll just brush that under the carpet, thank you very much, or at least save it to gossip about, in whispers, later.

Thank heavens for Mr. Emerson and his son George, those rude rude people who dared to offer up their rooms to make two strangers happy. It's Mr. Emerson that the earlier quote refers to, by the way. He's a widower who has tried to bring George up free from the taint of religion, as it was then, with its overbearing morality and the concept of sin. He hasn't much time for the social etiquette of the day; all he wants is for people to be happy, and he speaks his mind. No wonder he and George are semi-outcasts among the English in Florence, and at home.

"The son, who took every little contretemps as if it were a tragedy, was listening also.

'My father has that effect on nearly everyone,' he informed her. 'He will try to be kind.'

'I hope we all try,' said she (Lucy), smiling nervously.

'Because we think it improves our characters. But he is kind to people because he loves them; and they find him out, and are offended, or frightened.' "

But enough about the Emersons for now. Let's concentrate on Lucy, as she is the heroine after all. She's young, travelling in Europe for the first time, fairly naïve, but just starting to find that conventional morality doesn't always fit every occasion. She’s vacillating between the frightening and exciting feelings which her new experiences in Italy stir up, and the safe, socially-approved world of her chaperone, which is so much easier to retreat to, if things get a bit too 'real' or 'true'. In fact she's &q
uot;in a bit of a muddle", to steal a phrase which Forster keeps using.

Lucy has two catalytic experiences in Florence, both of which she tries immediately to repress. Walking alone in the city, she witnesses a stabbing in the city square, faints, and is 'rescued' and carried to safety by George Emerson. Later in their stay, on a drive out to the hills with other guests from the pension, she is again separated from Miss Bartlett, wanders accidentally into a field where George is standing, and is firmly and memorably kissed. Yes, kissed! By now you are so caught up the ethos of the book, or of the times, that it actually does seem very shocking, or at least extremely daring (and very sensual, exciting, and passionate – or was that just me?).

If one kiss seems an awful lot to make a big fuss about (and there’s a big big fuss made, make no mistake), then consider this conversation about an awfully embarrassing part of the body, which no decent person would ever mention. It’s conducted in whispers, of course.

" 'Stomach. He warned Miss Pole of her stomach – acidity, he called it – and he may have meant to be kind. I must say I forgot myself and laughed; it was so sudden. As Teresa truly said, it was no laughing-matter…I tell things so badly, but you see what a tangle we were in by this time, all on account of S. having been mentioned in the first place.' "

Right. Back to England, for the second part of the book. Suddenly, Lucy is back home, and being proposed to by Cecil Vyse (who? Well, that's how the reader feels too), with her mother and brother peeping out of the window. Cecil is the type of bloke you want to kick, unless perhaps you are the type of bloke that Cecil is, and probably even then, actually. He announces their engagement by coming in to tell her family in Italian 'I promessi sposi', and not surprisingly, they all just stare at him. No, he&
#39;s not Italian. Yes, he is a twonk. Yes, her family are less than thrilled, but go along with it.

Poor Cecil. The first time he kisses Lucy, he feels he has to ask permission in a very long-winded and pretentious manner. And then his glasses fall off as he's attempting to do it. He would be ok if he wasn’t so insufferably smug, and a snob with it –

"As you well remarked this morning, 'There are some fellows who are no good for anything but books'; I plead guilty to being such a chap, and will not inflict myself on you."

Compare that to George, here: "Choose a place where you won't do harm – yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine."

Phwooar. Don't you like that? I want to stand in a place for all I am worth, facing the sunshine. I rarely achieve it, but it sounds like a good enough aim in life to me.

So, people, it's up to you. Cecil, or George? George, or Cecil? Actually, it's not up to you at all, of course, it's up to Lucy and Mr. Forster, who finally found what he wanted to say after six years, describing it in the interim as 'bright and merry', 'toshy, but one trusts inoffensive', and finally, when it was completed, 'bilge – though I remind myself that I've a feverish cold'. Poor Mr. Forster. I think it's his best book; well, I don't know if it's his best book or not – it's the one I like the best, though, without doubt.

I think it's about the conflict between what is proper and what is right. About what we think we ought to want and what we do, actually want. About the 'muddle' almost everyone has, trying to live their lives on different levels and trying to please different people. They're all muddled. They're all playing the game of "I'm not who I think I am, I'm no
t who you think I am, I'm who I think you think I am." (that's from A Very Clever Sociologist, Who I Can’t Remember, But Someone Will Know). Except the Emersons, of course.

I'm dying to get back to Mr. Emerson. All the characters are gorgeous, but he’s my favourite. When I say the others are gorgeous – well, they're not, always, or even often, in what they do; but just as you start to loathe one of them, their glasses fall off, or you learn something, or suspect something about them, which makes them all-too-human, and you can’t really dislike them altogether - in fact you start to warm to them. Take Charlotte Bartlett, for instance. Prudish, manipulative, small-minded, gossipy and martyrish. But you can't really read a chapter entitled 'How Miss Bartlett's Boiler was so Tiresome', and still bear her a grudge. I realise that Mr. Emerson's character is almost certainly written in the same style of part-condemnation and part-approval, but I’ve never noticed the condemnatory bit, personally. He starts the novel off, with his crude but well-meaning offer of rooms, and for me, he finishes it. This is from him, again, and it makes my hair stand on end.

" 'Now it is all dark. Now Beauty and Passion seem never to have existed. I know. But remember the mountains over Florence and the view...You have to go out cold into a battle that needs warmth, out into the muddle that you have made yourself...Am I justified? Yes. For we fight for more than Love or Pleasure: there is Truth. Truth counts, Truth does count.'

'You kiss me,' said the girl. 'You kiss me. I will try.'

He gave her a sense of deities reconciled, a feeling that, in gaining the man she loved, she would gain something for the whole world...He had robbed the body of it's taint, the world's taunts of their sting; he had shown her the holiness of direct desire. She 'never e
xactly understood,' she would say in after years, 'how he managed to strengthen her. It was as if he had made her see the whole of everything at once.'

Last words - this is one of the very few – no, make that the only, until I think of another – book that I love that has been made into a film which I thought did it proud. More than proud, conceited in fact. Appallingly big-headed. As I think E. M. Forster should have felt after writing 'A Room with a View'. But didn't.

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