E.M. Forster With A View

I've been to Florence twice now, so I figured it was time to read E.M. Forster's A Room With A View while I was on vacation, a very short novel.
I found that whole lost Edwardian English world of niceness-and-propriety-at-all-costs to be excruciating. I quickly figured out that's what Forster intended, and warmed to the book. I ended up liking it very much and finding it very moving, even though it describes a world and a set of issues so very different from ours.

Here is a scene from the 1985 movie version of the novel, a very dramatic and very key scene in the novel. Our heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, becomes the unwilling witness to a murder in the Piazza Signoria. Young George Emerson rescues her.




I suppose it's inevitable to find movie versions of stories to be disappointing, but I think the Merchant Ivory team lost the whole thread of the story in the period costumes and magnificent setting.
In the novel, the scene takes place at twilight. Lucy has just bought a set of photo reproductions (significantly all of famous nude paintings considered disreputable by respectable Victorian English opinion). The anonymous man is murdered during a quarrel over money, very much as the movie shows us. Lucy in the movie is very much as I would imagine, but George in the novel is very different from the poised figure in the movie. In the novel, he is very young, and much more visibly lower class (certainly far below Lucy's social station). George in the novel is indeed very gallant as he is in the movie, but much more shaken and anxious. He throws away the photos much more impulsively in the novel, and his tone with Lucy as he tries to explain that something has "happened" to both of them is much more anxious and even desperate. George is just as fresh and uncertain as Lucy is. The whole novel is about the two of them "coming of age," leaving behind the fancies of youth for the much graver matters of adulthood. The murder in the Piazza is the beginning of that process for both of them.

Aesthetics (personified by Florence and Italy) plays a very large and challenging role in the novel. The English tourists and ex-pats are very proud of their erudition and taste in matters of art, and yet Forster describes their living quarters as dark, cramped, and even tasteless. The Reverend Mr. Eager, rector of the English church in Florence (where I attended evensong on my last visit), is a ferocious Pharisee in the novel, a ruthless enforcer of social norms, and frightfully bigoted despite his fluency in Italian. The other cleric, the Reverend Mr. Beebe, is quite a bit more liberal and approachable, but is in the end, just as committed to enforcing social convention as Reverend Eager. Their tastes in art run to very "safe" mediocrities like Alessio Baldovinetti, and others perceived at the time as "safe" like Fra Angelico. Giotto is just tolerated, while Donatello and Michelangelo are unspeakable (precisely because they arouse strong emotions, especially sexual ones).
The Beautiful for them, and for conventional English society, is a retreat, a refuge from the mess (and the demands) of life. Forster makes it clear that all of these people miss the point of Florence and of its art. Art is not supposed to be an escape from life and its demands, but a portal back into them, a way of returning to life with eyes refreshed and opened a little wider. Lucy and George do figure this out on their own. They get to the heart of the matter by trial and error in a way that all of the erudition and pedantry of their fellows completely misses.

The other thing that I found so remarkable about the story is Forster's generosity toward almost all of his characters. Even cads are granted their moments of sympathy and genuine feeling. Lucy's awful supercilious fiance Cecil Vyse acts unexpectedly nobly, and we feel real sympathy for him when Lucy breaks their engagement.


A badly decayed painting of the Nativity by Alessio Baldovinetti in Santissima Annunziata in Florence whose background landscape plays a large role in Forster's novel.

ADDENDUM:

Here is one of my favorite paragraphs in the whole book:

The Piazza Signoria is too stony to be brilliant. It has no grass, no flowers, no frescoes, no glittering walls of marble or comforting patches of ruddy brick. By an odd chance -- unless we believe in a presiding genius of place -- the statues that relieve its severity suggest, not the innocence of childhood nor the glorious bewilderment of youth, but the conscious achievements of maturity. Perseus and Judith, Hercules and Thusnelda, they have done or suffered something, and, though they are immortal, immortality has come to them after experience, not before. Here, not only in the solitude of Nature, might a hero meet a goddess, or a heroine a god.

The Speech

In case you missed it, here is the President's speech at Tuscon last night, probably his best yet.




While the President and other speakers quoted Scripture generously in their speeches at the memorial service, I thought of the conclusion of Albert Camus' The Plague which is worth quoting in full:

Dr. Rieux resolved to compile this chronicle, so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done to them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.
Nonetheless, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be of one final victory. It could only record of what had had to be done. and assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive to their utmost to be healers.
And indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.

Rhetoric and Violence

So maybe we can't draw any straight lines between the violent rhetoric coming from the far right and any particular violent act, but things like this really make me wonder.










Is there really any left equivalent of this? Sure, there were very insulting things said about Bush and Cheney, comparing them to Hitler and Mussolini (and to Dr. Strangelove and Sauron which should give us pause about how literally these comparisons were meant to be taken), but hunting licenses and targets? The Obama-Hitler comparisons (like the one illustrated above) strike me as in deadly earnest and meant to be taken quite literally. The left questioned Bush's legitimacy (as did a lot of people after the 2000 Election), but calling him an alien who should be overthrown by violence if necessary?
Right wing radio jocks call for the violent overthrow of the government routinely. Glenn Beck says the same thing ever so implicitly without ever saying so openly.
The last left wing extremist group to call for the violent overthrow of the government (and to act on it very violently) were these people, The Symbionese Liberation Army:




The SLA last dominated the headlines almost 40 years ago. The surviving members are now entering their dotage. There really hasn't been anything quite like them on the left since, not even the so-called "eco-terrorists."

The SLA got outclassed and out-slaughtered by a whole lot of people on the extreme right over the last 4 decades. We all remember Timothy McVeigh. Some of us remember the inhabitants of Elohim City and the many Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma state troopers killed by those folks in the 1980s.

In the demands for civil discourse in politics following a horrendous act of violence that may or may not be politically motivated, I'm not buying the moral equivalency between left and right arguments.

And We're Back

... back from the land of rum, sugarcane, bananas, and tourists.

Home to cold snowy New York and the land of baseball, hotdogs, apple pie, and random gun violence (I'll say!).


I had a wonderful time. I had a great time with Michael, enjoyed the sunshine and warm weather, loved the night sky full of stars (saw the Milky Way for the first time in decades), saw dolphins, frigate birds, tropical fish, and iguanas. The tropics are beautiful, but I wouldn't want to live there. I'm glad to be home.





I suppose most people when they see frigate birds riding the trade winds think of Reggae and steel drums.

I think of this, but then, I'm strange.

On Vacation

Off on vacation with Michael. See ya'll in 10 days! Play nice with each other.
This is our first real vacation together in 3 years.










Comments are off until I get back. Talk amongst yourselves. I just don't want to shovel all that spam out when I get back.

"Peasant Christianity"

For your homework while I'm gone, read this essay by Simon Barrow on the meaning of Christmas. Some of you might find it very refreshing. In a nutshell, Constantine did the Christian Faith no favors.

You might also enjoy his comment on the Archbishop of Canterbury's Christmas sermon. I must confess that I did not read that sermon, but then, I haven't taken much interest in anything the Archbishop has to say for a long time now.

Hat tip to Thinking Anglicans.

Happy 1/1/11 Everybody!

Caspar David Friedrich, Village Landscape in Morning Light (The Solitary Tree), 1822

Time for another trip around the sun.


According to Dr. Oliver Sacks this morning, old dogs are supposed to learn new tricks. Our brains are always growing and adapting until we are dead, and even in the face of terrible injury.
So now I have no excuse for not learning another language at age 53.
"Live as though you will die tomorrow, and learn as though you will live forever."