Most of the time life is messy. But sometimes — just occasionally — it all comes together.
I’d been reading Howards End. One of the classics I’d never got round to. Hadn’t even seen the film starring Emma Thompson, on account of it being a film starring Emma Thompson. By two-thirds of the way through I was still undecided; novels from over a century ago can be hard work, largely because of the wordiness. (Many of Dickens’s champions admitted that in the recent Charles-fest.) You know there must be something there — books don’t become classics for nothing — but it can take a bit, often a big bit, of finding. Fiction led by its characters rather than its plot often has this problem. You invest so many pages in getting to know those characters that the question of whether or not you like the book can’t be decided until near the end, when the people you’ve befriended (or befoed) tie up their stories. Or not, as the case may be. (It doesn’t have to be this way — for instance I knew from page one of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty that I was going to love it.) You don’t mind the investment of time, not really, and certainly not with a classic. You put in the work, and wait to see if it pays off.
An added encouragement this time was the novel’s famous epigraph, ‘only connect’. That’s always fascinated me, all the more as I grew into middle age and began to feel guilty at a solitary streak in my nature, a tendency not to stay in touch with people. Never a deliberate tendency — it just seems to happen like that. It was worrying, therefore, to approach the end of the novel and still feel uncertain about the (admittedly fictional) people in it. Could I really stay disconnected from a novel about connecting?
Then I went to a talk by the author Ronald Blythe, at the Open Road Bookshop in Stoke-by-Nayland. Like me he lives near the shop. He is most famous for his 1969 book Akenfield, portraying rural life in this corner of the world on the Suffolk/Essex border. The talk was about his latest book At Helpston: Meetings with John Clare, Blythe’s tribute to the 19th century poet widely seen as one of the greatest chroniclers of the English countryside. The theme emerged of Clare being perfectly content in his own company, something that Blythe said he shares. Living in a large, secluded house, he’s always asked by visitors whether he feels lonely. ‘Not at all’, he replies. He has friends, and relishes seeing them, but is also more than happy to pass time on his own. As he spoke, I began to feel less worried about my own leanings in that direction. In fact I began to feel connected both to Clare and to Blythe.
After the talk Blythe and I were introduced. I had my copy of Howards End with me, and we fell to talking about it. ‘I knew Forster,’ Blythe mentioned. ‘It was an incredible story. I was working for Benjamin Britten at the time, in Aldeburgh, editing festival programmes. One day I found a note pushed under my door inviting me for a drink at Britten’s house, signed “E.M.Forster”. It was amazing for a young man like me. We got to know each other a little. I used to help him go shopping for groceries.’
I hadn’t realised until then that Blythe was actually born in 1922; he looks in his seventies. The notion that he could have known the author of the novel whose Edwardian references were foxing me was a surprising one. A connecting one. The thought of them buying milk together in Aldeburgh, a town I visit regularly (and sometimes buy milk in), made me smile.
And later that evening, as I read a few more pages over a pint in the pub across the road (yes, a solitary pint, I admit it), the story began to come alive. It would have done anyway — the unmarried Helen’s pregnancy and the accidental death of her lover Leonard are the book’s big events, powerfully and movingly told — but the personal link, of having met a man who met the man who wrote it, added another dimension. The evening had connected me with Blythe, an author who shares my unconnectedness, and — by one degree of separation — with Forster, an author who died the year before I was born.
It’s nice when things work out.
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