Volume 39, Number 9 · May 14, 1992
Oh, What a Lovely War
By Noel Annan
Howards End
a film directed by James Ivory, based on the novel by E.M. Forster
The Films of Merchant Ivory
by Robert Emmet Long
Abrams, 208 pp., $45.00
E.M. Forster was a lucky man; he was revered until the last years of his long life. Then he fell into the abyss. Critics complained that the symbolism in his novels did not harmonize with the realism of his characters; or that he failed to translate his ideas into convincing action; or never reconciled the poetic with the comic. Worse still he preached; not like D.H. Lawrence at the top of his voice, but like a governess telling his charge to attend, otherwise he would not understand what he was being taught. Never more so than in Howards End. It is his most ambitious pre-1914 novel. He asked who should inherit England, and the critics called it his greatest failure.
Review, 3064 words
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