about the real and the pretended

There couldn't have been a better escape from winter in Washington than reading A Room with a View.  It was this month's selection with my Classic Book Discussion Group.  I may have read it in my twenties, but the charm and wit of this novel had been superseded in my mind by the film adaptation with Helene Bonham Carter and Maggie Smith.  For one thing, it's a young book. Forster was not yet thirty when he wrote it, so although it has many layers, his touch is playful, his wit and observations very fresh.

Forster was gay but his novel Maurice, a love story between two men, wasn't published until after his death.  As Pamela pointed out today in our discussion, it's easy to see Lucy Honeychurch's "muddle" through the lens of Forster's own search for love.

He writes so touchingly about the real and the pretended - but his sense of humor is never far away. 

From the moment Lucy meets the Emersons at the pension in Florence and they offer Lucy and Miss Bartlett their rooms with the view of the Arno, a distinction is made.  Miss Bartlett sees this as a breach of etiquette – but it's a kindness they cannot decline after the Emersons have heard their complaints about their own rooms.

To the observers of propriety, generosity works as a strike against them. The other guests see Mr Emerson as unrefined, eccentric and socially beneath them.  They are not invited to join excursions to galleries and churches because “they don’t understand our ways. They must find their level."

Lucy is secretly pleased by them.  Mr Emerson is a straight shooter and a modern thinker, and when she faints and young George walks her back to the pension after the murder in the piazza,  it's not only another breach of etiquette, but a real life experience which links them.  The veneer of etiquette is stripped away and something inside her switches on.

Oh, but what a muddle! "It isn't true. It can't all be true. I want not to be muddled," she says aloud to herself.

And there's so much humor in the minor characters.  What about Miss Lavish, the literary hack, who swoops in and picks up Lucy's experience after the murder in the piazza? Her book is to be about love murder abduction and revenge and Lucy is correct in her fears that Miss Lavish sees in her the makings of the ingénue.  But Lucy is a naif, taking things in and experiencing them genuinely - having her awakening.  Forster gives us real feeling and pretended feeling, false politeness and honest self expression.

Cecil of course, is all about manners, affectation, book knowledge and feelings borrowed from books. When he sees Lucy in Rome, he is struck by a new complexity in her, which is the result of her genuine awakening with George Emerson.

The dichotomy between indoors and outdoors, rooms with view and those without is so enchantingly implemented, when Cecil tries to take Lucy off the path and into the woods.  He wonders why she's reluctant, and declares that she's only really comfortable with him in a room.

"She reflected a moment, and then said, laughing: 'Do you know that you're right? I do. I must be a poetess after all. When I think of you it's always as in a room. How funny!" His subsequent attempt at romance is clumsy, he who has “depths of prudishness in him” and their embrace is absurd – contrived.  But yet it privately disturbs him that he's unable to pull it off because “passion should believe itself irresistible.”

She encounters George outdoors again in England, for the first time since their meeting in Italy.  And because he is natural – because there is no affectation in him,  Lucy cannot help but be pleased. Even his awkwardness goes straight to her heart.

In the marvelous scene where they play tennis – involving Lucy’s brother Freddy, Cecil refuses to participate.  He has never been one for games, so that while George is trying to win, Cecil keeps interrupting by reading what turns out to the book Miss Lavish wrote in Florence.   "He had been rather a nuisance all through the tennis, for the novel that he was reading was so bad that he was obliged to read it aloud to others”.  I love the way that quoting this book is the only authority Cecil has in the conversation.

Only when Lucy breaks off her engagement to Cecil does he open a window, and when he does, poor thing, it is dark outside.  And here's another reason the novel has aged so well: when Lucy breaks it off with Cecil it is not to be with George – but to be her own person. Even though George loves her and has awakened her, she believes she must never marry.   She reflects that “the contest lay not between love and duty.  Perhaps there never is such a contest.  It lay between the real and the pretended.” 

And who could not be charmed by Mr Emerson's final words to Lucy. “I taught him to trust in love. I said: ‘ when love comes that is reality.’ I said: passion does not blind. No.  Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.”

You have to agree, it is sheer perfection!