42
PAH..TISAN REVIEW
One problem remains - how are we to take the fairy-tale resolution
of the novel? How seriously are we to take this as any kind of solution
or culmination? Max Beerbohm, who loved the first part of the book,
was scornful of the rest. No doubt he thought it sentimental, much too
willed. This is an understandable point that admirers of the book can
accept without suffering, since they are so delighted with the intelligence
of the book as a whole. This is particularly true of Americans, whose
novels can never resemble
Howards End
in the slightest, and who can be
as uncritical of the book as they are of the English countryside at its best.
The novel is a lovely shapely object, a triumph of brilliant plotting and
human sensibility that well disguises the fact that the savage reality of so–
ciety has escaped it.
This has occurred to English readers and observers. An American
feeling about
Howards Elld,
inspired by Lionel Trilling's influential little
book on Forster (1943), is that the novel is a genial, beautifully propor–
tioned work of art that American literature should envy. In the intro–
duction to the 1964 edition of his book, Trilling proudly noted that his
book had positively made Forster in America. He added:
I have no doubt that I was benefited by the special energies that
attend a polemical purpose . To some readers it will perhaps seem
strange, even perverse,
to
have involved Mr. Forster in polemic, but I
did just that - I had a quarrel with Ameri can literature at the time it
was established, against what seemed
to
me its dullness and its pious
social simplicities I enlisted Mr. Forster's vivacity , complexity, and
irony. It was a quarrel that was
to
occupy me for some years; from the
title of the introductory chapter of this book I took the name of my
first volume of essays, The Liberal Imagination. The occasion of that
cultural contention no longer exists , at least not in its old form, but
it was an event of some importance in my intellectual life , and I
would not wish
to
interfere with what I said in the course of it.
The "dullness and pious social simplicities" Trilling "quarrelled" with
in American literature of the time surely could not have referred to such
powerful talents as William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, John Dos Passos, Edmund
Wilson - and a host of others. What bothered Trilling was not Ameri–
can literature but his own now discarded American radicalism, especially
among his fellow members of the New York intelligentsia who had been
disabused by Stalinism and were slowly but unmistakably making their
way to the intellectual "neoconservatism" that has become a striking
mode among New York children of East European immigrants, born in
the first years of the twentieth century, who since the 1940s have become
