This is a sad little book in spite of the blurb which says it could be Forster's best. The prose is always as beautiful and deeply felt as ever, the descriptions, especially of the English countryside, really call to you, but Rickie's struggles to give meaning to his life seem feeble and therefore unengaging. Even when he has actually thrown off the stultifying influence of his small minded wife, by taking to the road with his newly discovered half brother, he knows he is not going to be able to keep it up. Even though he sees her as his wife in name only, for some reason Forster says this only makes her hold on him more powerful. He is repeatedly described as a failure and this is most powerfully represented in his disability. He has a lifelong limp.
Rickie is in fact a victim hero of the kind which has become much more common in our era. As such one can't help feeling that he is a vehicle for the author's own self pity: misunderstood and undervalued by everyone around him, yet unable to reach across the isolation that cuts him off, his stories are the only means by which he can express his spiritual life - but nobody gets them, nobody wants them. He is not robust enough to press on with his vision in the face of this indifference, so he capitulates to their limited bourgeois outlook. Forster makes him a little too abject in this.
In this he is hampered by his unrealistic expectations of love and marriage. He believes he ought to idealise his new wife Agnes, as he clearly has idealised the memory of his dead mother. The trouble is this stops him seeing either of them as a real human being. It hands power in their relationship to his wife, whose spiritual life falls so depressingly short of Rickie's own. Rickie's ideals weaken rather than strengthen his ability to deal with reality. The failure of their marriage is powerfully conveyed by the neonatal death of their only child, following which they appear to abandon all sexual relations.
Forster's homosexuality seems to undergird some of the scenes in the story. In general women are a bad influence: there's a comic scene – I'm sure it's intentionally so – early on where Rickie and his circle of Cambridge friends are spouting callow philosophy in his college room. Suddenly a healthy, beautiful and confident young woman – Agnes – bursts in. One by one the young men all creep ignominiously away, completely unable to cope. I think most male undergraduates would react in exactly the opposite way.
Then there's Rickie's extravagant reaction to the news that his father has slept with another woman to produce his half brother: Rickie faints clean away, overcome by the thought of his father's existence as a sexual being. It's even worse when he later discovers that his half brother is in fact the offspring of his mother's affair with another man: this is a betrayal of the worship with which Rickie has honoured her all his life. I can't help feeling there's a deep disgust with female sexuality underlying all this.
So of the leading female characters, Agnes betrays Rickie's spirituality, his mother betrays his idealisation of her, and Mrs Failing, an eccentric aunt who has a veto over Rickie's finances, controls and manipulates everyone and is thoroughly malicious. Better keep away from women altogether, EM!
Interestingly, especially in our shallowly agnostic days, Rickie believes in God. In one scene he prays in agony of soul. Yet he also believes it is wrong of him to do this. It seems that it is bad form to pray over one's personal life, that God ought not to be engaged with our sufferings. This is very different from what I expect of Christianity, which I take to be about connecting our lives with God at all levels. I think this follows very directly on from the Incarnation: God and humanity are now bound together. It is almost as if the attraction for Rickie (and Forster?) is that God is not involved, that he needs God to be completely outside his daily experience, a sort of unmoved point beyond the morass in which everything turns out to be muddle and compromise. God must not be part of this shabbiness! It's bad enough that his mother and his wife turn out to be deeply imbued with it.
Two other reference points outside the morass are Rickie's friend Ansell and his half brother Stephen. Without wishing to discredit them as living creations of Forster's, they are also types. Ansell keeps out of the morass because of his rigorous (even if occasionally stupid) intellectualism: he will not do anything unless there is tight chain of reasoning to support it. He will not spout platitudes that cannot be rationally justified, in fact he will say all manner of confrontational things because he sees his propositions as inescapably logical. Stephen on the other hand is completely animal. He never does anything except by instinct and only acts for the gratification of his own desires. He is not beholden to any scheme of morality or principle or duty. He just does whatever he wants and if he doesn't like you, he biffs you. There is a kinship between them: both have an integrity, a wholeness, about them according to their lights and neither can stand any form of sham.
So if Stephen is the animal man and Ansell the intellectual man, Rickie is the spiritual man - the word "spiritual" is attached to him many times in the course of the story. And that is his problem: it involves him in being neither one thing nor the other, torn in different directions, without the ability to focus that these other two men display. He is trying to be open to life, but he carries a burden that makes life impossible to deal with. Like Christians, he is an alien and a stranger on the earth.
In the end, EM relents from persecuting his hero. Rickie triumphs – but in a small way which he gains no benefit from and doesn't even know about. He rescues his brother from under the wheels of a train, pushing him off the rails on which he is sprawling in drunken oblivion. As a result he himself is fatally injured and dies in agony – that limp that has always dogged him prevents his escape from the train. Rickie feels no sense of heroism about the rescue. He went out to look for his brother tired and disappointed with life, knowing that he would soon be sucked back into the morass, feeling that it all means nothing: "the whole affair (of living) was a ridiculous dream." He sets about the rescue wearily, from a mechanical sense of duty, and tries to save his own life in the same tired spirit – but too late. But in a tiny detail in the final chapter there is at least one good outcome from this miserable end: someone decided to build a bridge over the railway. There will be no more deaths, like the death of the child who was run over by a train earlier in the story.
The other modest vindication is that Rickie's unwanted stories, the work which has been his spiritual gift back to the world, finally find a publisher. It's all messed up, with a former colleague - a hypocritical schoolmaster - and Stephen the half brother fighting over the profits: but Rickie's work has finally come into fashion after he is dead. He has at last moved on from his victim status. The last trace of his life is in his art.
20 January 2017
