Zadie Smith, Grand Union, and E.M. Forster, Howard's End: People Watching

At this moment in history, many writers/readers, even the deep introverts among us, find ourselves wistful for people we know and don’t know, for crowds, festivals, the family on the next picnic blanket at the beach, literary festivals thick with subtext, game nights, dating, and family dinners, no matter how fraught. In this post, I thought I’d share a pair of people-watching paragraphs from a couple of beloved writers, Zadie Smith and E.M. Forster, both wonderful in their language and especially sharp and meticulous in their character portraits.

Zadie Smith, Grand Union

Forster is one of Smith’s acknowledged influences, and it would be possible to do a very direct comparison by looking at what Smith does in one of her novels, On Beauty, which unfurls the material of Howard’s End and then turns it into something entirely new, a palatial, satisfying domestic/political comedy that takes on race and gender as well as class. I could write all day about On Beauty (and NW and Swing Time), but I am trying to keep a sharp focus on the paragraph here.

This first, long paragraph comes from a very short story in Smith’s bravura new collection, Grand Union. “Words and Music” takes a brief but intense look at New York through a few people, who could well be imagined or real. There’s an “I” in the story, a transparent observer, who even disappears altogether at one point to inhabit one of the characters. Mostly, though, this “I” wanders and disappears into crowds, and observes internal and external eccentricities with respect, affection, and Smith’s extreme-sports level of insightful inquiry:

Three benches along sits Abraham Lincoln. Same beard, same face, and he's got an outfit that works. It's not a costume, exactly, but the general impression is that this is basically what Lincoln would wear if he were alive today and spent his days between MacDougal, Thompson and the park. I suppose he's crazy, but he's terribly solemn and dignified and he doesn't talk to himself or to anyone. He just strides around doing his Lincoln bit. In winter, he toughs it out as long as he can but come December you start to see him in a beanie and a large pea coat and L.L.Bean snow boots and I have to say the Lincoln effect is lessened somewhat. I really feel for him then. Not only because it's cold but because the weather is stripping him of his true self and that's a terrible thing to witness. For most of the winter he looks downhearted and ashamed, like a man forced to live in a body he doesn't recognize. However, he doesn't give the impression of owning any technology or even being aware of its existence, so he is at least saved the indignity of knowing that when you google his name the first thing that comes up is What did Abraham Lincoln do that was so important? Which is like hearing seven million fourth-grade foreheads smack onto their desks at once. Then winter thaws. Out pop the daffodils and the livelier rats, though spring is truly heralded by the appearance of our President, back doing his local rounds, in his stovepipe hat and his topcoat and that flash of black silk at the throat which pulls the whole look together. He doesn't speak in spring, no more than he does in winter, but I did once hear him sing. I was sit­ting under the cherry blossoms and he walked past, his voice very low and hard to hear, but if you happened to tune in to it, wow, it was really something beautiful:

Michael, row the boat ashore, hallelujah.

Michael, row the boat ashore, hallelujah.

Michael's boat is a music boat, hallelujah.

This portrait is a view from a watcher who doesn’t even know the character’s real name or life story. It makes an intriguing contrast to other pieces of the story, which drop deep into characters or try to capture the collective emotional life of the city right before a storm. But it shares with the other pieces of the story an amazement at the dignity of our irrationality. Smith’s narrator acknowledges irrationality and then celebrates it. 

And, as always, Smith requires us to face a world in which, for example, the first search engine question about Lincoln could be, What did Abraham Lincoln do that was so important? (Hello, thinks the reader, freed the slaves! Put everything into breaking apart the most shameful and destructive institution imaginable!) But then that question is followed by a riotously informal and hyperbolic expression of indignation: “Which is like hearing seven million fourth-grade foreheads smack onto their desks at once,” a fragment that potentially expresses, at the same time, frustration with ignorance and the sense of how kids feel in the all-day-every-day-sitting-at-the-desk schooling process. The irrationality of the normal. And then that singing.  

This portrait both gives us the details of this character’s dignity and also asks, what makes a life historically meaningful, individually meaningful? (This paragraph feels especially piercing as millions of us watch medical tents going up in Central Park, file for unemployment, discover that even our dreams are now taking place on Zoom, and worry about what happens to those out on the streets with no walls between them and the virus.)

The watching “I” honors “Abraham Lincoln” without sentimentalizing him. The narrative view is both distant and intimate, and the paragraph gets a lot of energy from the contrast between the bright, informal diction and the man whose truest self seems to be caught in the past. There’s a sense of movement here too in the passage from habitual time into the pain of winter and then back to spring again.  

E.M. Forster, Howard’s End

In an early moment of Howard’s End, E.M. Forster plunges into the youngish Helen Schlegel’s sudden, and short-lived, passion for Paul, the son of a family that has bewitched her. The book is an investigation of class as much as anything. But Helen, at an impressionable moment, finds herself swept up in the attitudes and way of living of her hosts, a family she and her sister met while traveling in Germany. Forster’s also writing with both authority and intimacy, though in this case very closely inhabiting the character:

Before Paul arrived she had, as it were, been tuned up into his key. The energy of the Wilcoxes had fasci­nated her, had created new images of beauty in her responsive mind. To be all day with them in the open air, to sleep at night under their roof, had seemed the supreme joy of life, and had led to that abandonment of personality that is a possible prelude to love. She had liked giving in to Mr. Wilcox, or Evie, or Charles; she had liked being told that her notions of life were shel­tered or academic; that Equality was nonsense, Votes for Women nonsense, Socialism nonsense, Art and Lit­erature, except when conducive to strengthening the character, nonsense. One by one the Schlegel fetiches had been overthrown, and, though professing to defend them, she had rejoiced. When Mr. Wilcox said that one sound man of business did more good to the world than a dozen of your social reformers, she had swallowed the curious assertion without a gasp, and had leant back luxuriously among the cushions of his motor-car. When Charles said: "Why be so polite to servants? They don't understand it," she had not given the Schlegel retort of: "If they don't understand it, I do." No; she had vowed to be less polite to servants in the future. "I am swathed in cant," she thought, "and it is good for me to be stripped of it." And all that she thought or did or breathed was a quiet preparation for Paul. Paul was inevitable. Charles was taken up with another girl, Mr. Wilcox was so old, Evie so young, Mrs. Wilcox so dif­ferent. Round the absent brother she began to throw the halo of Romance, to irradiate him with all the splen­dour of those happy days, to feel that in him she should draw nearest to the robust ideal. He and she were about the same age, Evie said. Most people thought Paul hand­somer than his brother. He was certainly a better shot, though not so good at golf. And when Paul appeared, flushed with the triumph of getting through an examina­tion, and ready to flirt with any pretty girl, Helen met him halfway, or more than halfway, and turned towards him on the Sunday evening.

The voice silkily gives us its barely concealed, splendidly detailed indignation against the kind of attitudes that value only money and power, dismissing art, literature, justice, and the humanity of those without money and privilege (Mr. Wilcox would not have spent five seconds watching Abraham Lincoln). But it’s slyly done – Forster’s narrator is commenting pretty freely, but mostly implicitly. There’s an understanding that Helen has lost her head over this family and its unequivocally confident and dismissive approach to everything she and her family has always valued.

One of the things that seems so great here is that the paragraph is pretty much all abstract ideas and emotions, but so full of the specifics that make up the recklessly keen insights and mixture of amused indignation and affection of the narrator (yes, Forster and Smith would do well at the same dinner table, and I, for one, would love to hear them gossip).

There’s something of an assumption of shared values of writer, narrator, Schlegel family, and reader, a certain intellectual snobbery which is also probably correct (oh, any reader of this piece who has made it this far, don’t you also believe in Art and Literature and Equality?)

The irrationality here is not that of character so much as of youth, when we want to be swept away and discover new worlds and fall in love, and we build up an emotional case to make it all possible. We see Helen in her delight and abandonment: “When Mr. Wilcox said that one sound man of business did more good to the world than a dozen of your social reformers, she had swallowed the curious assertion without a gasp, and had leant back luxuriously among the cushions of his motor-car.”

But we’re not really encouraged, intensely as we’re inhabiting her, to feel her emotions or to refrain from perceiving that she is about to get into some kind of trouble with Paul. We know, before they ever meet, that they are going to give in to that desire to be swept away by new people into new worlds, at least a bit, and that it’s a terrible idea. The book thinks so, and we do too, and so here comes trouble. Fiction! Other people and other people’s troubles! How we revel in them.

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