#54: E M Forster

Tamsin Greig as Vashti in The Machine Stops © BBC

The BBC blurb for their recent audio production of E M Forster’s short story The Machine Stops annoyed me. It said:

In 1909, E M Forster took a break from linen suits, big hats and unrequited love among the upper classes and wrote a story which predicts…globalisation, the internet, Zoom, algorithms, social isolation and climate crisis.

I assume the linen suits and big hats is a reference to Forster's other novels, such as A Room with a View, A Passage to India and Howards End. I feel the blurb dehumanises a group of people because of their social status and unwontedly dismisses the talent which Forster showed in his other novels.

The Machine Stops is indeed uncharacteristic for Forster in being science-fiction. It is the story of Vashti, who like most other people lives underground with all reality mediated by The Machine, so she never experiences nature directly. One day her son Kuno returns to persuade her to visit him above ground.

More familiar territory for Forster was indeed the early twentieth century worlds of Howards End or A Room with View, in which cultures and families collide and people work out how to respond.

The BBC blurb implies that Forster’s concerns in these other stories were lightweight because they were about the upper classes, who wore different clothes to us. It makes me wonder if the person who wrote it has read any of his novels or appreciated the depth of his characterisations. For example Lucy, in A Room with A View, is a young woman who has been taught how to respond to experiences before they have happened to her. She accepts the aesthete Cecil as a future husband and has to learn in the short period of her engagement — backwards, as it were — whether he really suits her. Helped by George, who she meets in Florence on holiday and who kisses her twice before she has time to think about it, she gradually learns that he does not, and breaks off the engagement. 

Moving on to Howards End, the novel shows what can happen when people of different backgrounds and beliefs are thrown together. The dying Mrs Wilcox’s pencil-scrawled bequest of the house to the Bohemian, literary Margaret Schlegel brings the Schlegel sisters together with the materialistic Henry Wilcox and his conventional family. At the same time, bank clerk Leonard Bast tries to implement his literary learning in his financially straitened life. He meets the Wilcox and Schlegels with partly hopeful, partly disastrous results. 

The novel also shows the power of a house and a location in nature in bringing people together and helping them feel at home in the wider, emotional and even spiritual sense of the phrase. 

Discounting these sympathetic and profound portraits because most of the people were comfortably off, as the BBC blurb seems to do, is prejudice. It does not encourage the sharing of human experience, one of the novel’s achievements.

Forster did not believe in responding to events through already-worked-out schemes of judgement — ideologies or prejudices. To illustrate this I will go back to Lucy in A Room with a View, who has just dumped Cecil. But she is denying her own nature by pretending that she does not love George:

(She was one of) the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catchwords.

Catchwords: White privilege. Homophobia. Levelling up. Such shorthand should not replace proper thinking, as Orwell warned in Politics and the English Language:

When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning.

An extreme post-modernist might claim that all language consists of catchwords, in that it is a common currency invented by society which implements power relations and has an uneasy relationship with reality. On this reading, Lucy would only be swapping one ideology for another in rejecting Cecil for George — and the novel shows us this is not true. He is right for her, for her true self — which includes her physical responses. The 1985 Merchant Ivory film captures very well the stultifying effect of conventional responses and the truth in one’s immediate responses — it is Lucy’s pert, unconsidered replies, outbursts of laughter and anger where she is most herself, where something can happen. And this is to do with the body, as Forster says in the novel.

To return to The Machine Stops. Bodily ‘intelligence’ is something Vashti has forgotten how to use in that short story, as she becomes very anxious when travelling and has forgotten to relate to others face-to-face. When The Machine breaks down, Vashti and Kuno have to learn how to experience the world first hand in the short time left to them.

The BBC blurb says that Vashti and Kuno are brought ‘to the realisation that mankind’s only future is in shared humanity and a connection to nature’. Not so far from Forster’s other novels then, linen suits notwithstanding.