A recent opportunity to see the contemporary play Nonsense and Beauty, about Edwardian British author E.M. Forster, inspired me to return to my English major roots and revisit Howards End. Having only read this book once, two decades ago, my memory of it was nonexistent other than one of the central epigrams of the protagonist, “Only connect” being her message and aim in life.
As a young, voracious, American reader who spent a lot of my youth and young adulthood trying to read classics, I had read a great number of English novels without understanding them. The romantic idealism in Forster’s heroes resonated with me as a young man with spiritual inclinations, but I did not understand the class system or the economy that made those young women independently wealthy and able to pursue their philosophical and artistic interests, even in a patriarchal society that demanded marriage.
Upon rereading the novel, much later in life, I now see how central issues of class, economy, and imperialism are to both the novel and to much of the English classics I loved. “Only connect,” as expressed through our protagonist, is multivalent in calling for the connection of mind and heart, of one’s own responsibility to others, to seeing how others are guilty of one’s own sin and letting that recognition halt the call to merciless judgment. It is also, explicitly, the heroine’s call to connect her recognition of her idealistic liberal ideals and wealth to the brutish world of business, war, and empire upon which her wealth was built. Her Romantic family is set up in contrast to the businesslike capitalists in the Wilcoxes to critique the limits of both and then to literally marry them together, which illuminates and recognizes that these worlds were already bound up as one.
Because you cannot have plucky, independent heiresses living off their investments and having thoughtful debates about social issues and welfare without the business people who make those investments grow, who make calculated and cold decisions, who see the world as a resource to be harvested and managed.
More than a century after the novel’s publication, I am struck by how the central conflicts around liberal guilt have only continued to evolve. Forster’s anticipation of the continuing incursion of urbanism into undeveloped land and the rootlessness of people who do not own their own land, merely rent, seems to be well borne out at a cultural moment where more and more “ownership” as an experience seems reserved for the wealthy, and everyone else rents and pays a fee for access to even the technology they purchase.
Yet even this transformation of property and culture is lain on a foundation where many of us do not belong to the land on which we live, and would not know how to if we desired it, and would be penalized for doing so. We are trees balancing precariously on sawed-off trunks with no roots to hold us steady when the wind blows. But instead of turning toward the grief and horror of this condition, we direct our attention outward, in the pursuit of power over others or the longing to save others from our own suffering.
One of the most unsettling developments in Howards End is the deft and subtle ways Forster shows a young poor man’s life be absolutely destroyed by the well-meaning charitable interventions of our heroines, who ostensibly put all the blame on their antagonists the Wilcoxes for giving bad business advice and not caring for the outcomes—but the women themselves take on the young man as a project without his knowing or consent. They involve themselves in his life, blunder about without understanding his world or his heart, and lead to his ruin while they move on with their own concerns.
For the past several years, I’ve grown increasingly wary of the savioristic tendencies within me. As with so many folks in mine and prior generations, I thought to balance my confusion and guilt about my unearned privilege with a dedication in service to the uplift of those less fortunate, without considering what I actually had to offer. My first years out of grad school, working with chronically homeless and mentally ill people, showed me that I knew nothing about their world. All I had to offer were values and disciplines that made little sense to their day-to-day needs for survival. They were of greater help to each other than myself, and many only saw us because we were the gates to resources they needed.
In Forster’s England, as with today’s America, this ambivalence about privilege and inequality rest upon the trembling foundations of an empire. The urges of seeking power over others and seeking to save them are two edges on Imperialism’s blade, and together they ease the blade into those countries to carve out the resources we exploit for profit, to keep the empire running.
Of what value is the inner life when it relies upon war and profiteering to exist? And what purpose is business and commerce when there is no soul to harvest its resources and give it meaning? Is there any escape to this dialectic when it only continues and seems to grow harsher with every decade?
No wonder we become tense, vigilant, reactive toward our neighbors and families, unable to tolerate the wrong word used when it may signify discord and disagreement. Our debates become shallower and emptier of thought and reflection, merely memes and talking points thrown at each other, and a listing of words that do not connect us to each other, and companies that use our anger to sell us more things.
When I look at the world in this way, it is tempting to imagine there is the possibility of going back, of rejecting empire and its fruits, of even rejecting “whiteness” as an identity and a descriptor. And yet to what could I go back? As a person of mixed-European descent who has always lived in the United States, to “go back” into my heritage would still be an act of creation, of going forward, of curating my various histories and lineages and creating a new identity.
Increasingly I find social justice discourse to be empty wind rattling litter down the road. I see the “-ism” words strung together like a spell against cancellation, as though naming all of them without explaining what is meant is enough to convey one’s conscientiousness. I see people weaponizing their identity as a basis for the authority to gatekeep and shut down disagreement rather than engage—even when it’s coming from someone sharing that identity. I see white people telling each other that there is nothing we can do to escape our whiteness, and so no action we can take is generative, all we can do is stay lost in our self-reflective white neuroses and know that we’re failing. (And I’ve been that white person.)
We all want to connect. To belong. Few of us truly want to be harmful to others, while most of us cause hurt because we feel it is necessary to do so in the moment. I do not know how to undo centuries of empire, and increasingly I think it is a paralyzing distraction. What I want is to connect to what’s here in my life. To say hello to neighbors. To nourish and nurture the people I can touch and talk with. To water the plants and keep the floors clean.
We cannot set aside generations of trauma in an instant, but we can try to take a risk with the person in front of us today. Connect the mind and the heart. Connect one human to another. Connect to the land on which we live.