Old Lucy

Last night I read in The Burlington Magazine – in a carved wooden chair under the high vault and faded frescoes of the Querini Stampalia library – an essay about E. M. Forster, the aesthete English writer; his friendship with the painter, art historian and critic Roger Fry; and Old Lucy, the first version of the novel which was in due course to become A Room With A View.

(I ought to confess here that I have an inordinate, altogether unreasonable fondness for E.M. Forster.

This is due in part to his aesthetic sensitivity (like mine, really), in part to the familiarity of his life story (he repeatedly escaped the stuffiness of the first world to be in beautiful and unruly third world places like India and... Italy), and in part to the extrovert beauty of his prose; but most of all on account of a memory of the extraordinary effect which his Passage to India had on me on first reading, many years ago.

I was then a poor student at the National Normal University in Taipei by day and a teacher of English by night. My life was miserable. I lived in a messy, crowded, expensive, polluted, ugly city, on a lousy income, working and studying 18 hour days, and dealing for the most part with people who had no interest in anything but commerce. My life was almost entirely devoid of pleasure and beauty, I was constantly sleep deprived, and I kept repeating to myself, “surely, this is not what this is all about; surely, it cannot be”.

And then the Passage to India – I am not sure how it fell into my hands, or when I found the time to read it – simply knocked me out. One morning I simply found myself unable to venture out into the street. The novel’s beauty made my soul so tender, so delicate, so shimmering with otherworldly glow that – I simply could not face the world. And I didn’t. I locked the door; pulled down the curtains; turned off the phone; and for three days I lived on whatever remained in the fridge, by turns reading and -- whimpering to myself. After three days a classmate came to look me up, to see whether I was still alive. Gradually, she nursed me back to life).

So, you see, on account of that experience, whenever I come across an essay about Old Forest, I simply have to read it.

And so I did last night.

*

Now, back to the essay.

You will recall that the way A Room with a view now stands, it is a story of English enthusiasts of Italian art in Florence; its hero is an Adonis-like railway clerk; and the story is a love story in which the passionate Lucy chooses passion for this passionate Adonis over her earlier commitment to a refined but passionately reserved art professional connoisseur. Italian art and everyone’s passion for it hang in the background as decoration (as ancient Egypt or Renaissance Verona may in other works); but though they are sometimes used as a litmus test of the heroes’ sensitivity and intelligence, they are no more important than that. The story is a rather conventional love-story-cum-moral-conundrum and it could have been set in almost any other setting. (And has been over the centuries). Really, the Room, except for its resolution, can easily be mistaken for a story of the morally upright Jane Austen or George Eliot.

(Incidentally, you know of course that the reason why George Eliot was so darnedly morally upright in her novels is precisely because in real life she was – not. Which is just the opposite of Old Forest, actually).

Now, according to the Burlington article, the original version of A room with a view -- Old Lucy E.M. referred to it later – was in fact a much more interesting book. Instead of the formulaic Jane Austen/ George Eliot love-versus-moral-dilemma of the final version (yawn) the first draft was actually a fresh and original novel, setting out to treat a heretofore novelisticly untreated real life problem.

Its hero was a young art lover and its plot was his struggle with his relationship to art. It went like this: art’s beauty drew him towards others with similar interest, but these others were all turning out a disappointment. On the one hand, there were the amateurs who were more or less mindlessly following their chosen bossy guidebooks (whether Baedeker or Ruskin), and whose conversations, while invigoratingly enthusiastic, were – well – (shall we say) – “uniformed” (so as not to say: dumb). On the other hand there were the professionals – the art historians we would say today – the Bernhard Behrensons and Roger Fries – who were engaged in far more complex, far more intellectually sophisticated debates regarding art, but who chose to limit these very debates to the mind-numbingly narrow issues of attribution and dating which also disappointed: they seemed to miss entirely precisely that which made art worth pursuing to the hero – one’s psychological response to it.

Now, Old Lucy’s hero, a brainy fellow named Tancred (later renamed less pretentious and more English, “Arthur”, the name change being an important foreshadowing) was – like Old Forest one suspects – inclined to reject both these approaches. He felt turned off by his art-minded friends and at first thought that his response to the call of art should be to become an artist himself. But Leo Tolstoy’s essay What is art? and Lucy, who in the first draft does not fall in love with him (nor does he with her) convinces him in the end to give up that ambition since art fails to increase interconnectedness among men. (Which is of course a point thoroughly illustrated by his social encounters with art lovers in Florence). Whereupon Arthur leaves Italy, his future a question mark.

There.

No love story.

An internal drama – conflict and resolution – of a sensitive and intelligent man, yes, but – no sex-appeal. A real life conundrum, but one that has nothing to do with either parentage or finance or muscle or gonads. An intelligent woman heroine, yes, but one who neither sweeps one off his feet nor swoons herself – a woman as an intellectual foil.

How refreshingly original. Just the sort of novel no one ever seems to write.

*

Of course, Old Forrest did well to rewrite the book: the new version sold, got made into a movie, became famous, and he with it. But, in the course of rewriting it, he wrote an altogether new book, a different book, a book about different heroes and different problems. These problems are common problems, general problems. (After all, everyone experiences morally twisted passionate entanglements from time to time). Their commonplace made the book accessible and helped sell it.

But the result was also a duller book: it shunts what was central in Old Lucy into mere background decoration. And the experiences of those of us who love art but feel intellectually dissatisfied by the social encounters it offers and who are therefore rendered speechless and condemned to loneliness in the process – the theme of Old Lucy – disappeared altogether. Art, and the aesthetic experience, yet again was shown simply too marginal – a heartfelt issue to too few of us – to make a bestselling novel. So it does not get written up at all; or, if it does, it does not get published.

Bestseller or bust, I suppose.

But I won’t bore you with my novel-hate again.

*

Instead, a few words about interconnectedness.

It was of course Forster’s lifetime theme. His other novels – Maurice, Passage to India – are all about the impossibility to connect with others. Perhaps this was unavoidable in a homosexual man in Victorian times: there were tremendous obstacles to love and then, even when it did happen, to fulfillment. But Old Lucy suggests another cause of Old Forrest’s loneliness, above and beyond his homosexuality: his intellectual interests. A passionate response to beauty is rare enough; the ability to think (and talk) about it intelligently is even rarer. And the aesthetic experience is, in any case, an intensely private affair: it happens in our heads and no one else has any access to it. The urge to ask “do you feel what I feel?” is understandable, but silly: one can hardly explain well enough what one feels to hope to be understood, let alone to get an answer.

Old Lucy’s proposed answer to the problem, it seemed, was to give up art. (Take up something else instead, I suppose, something more likely to increase one’s interconnectedness: boy-scouting or rugby or Swedish massage come to mind).

I find the solution disappointing. The one I would propose, if I were asked to rewrite its ending, would be to give up on interconnectedness instead. Everything in life has a price and sometimes the price one has to pay for things is loneliness. And one just has to pay it, like one pays for a museum admission ticket, or one’s season pass to the opera.

Besides, it really isn’t such a bad price to pay: just look around and you will see.

*

Myself, I am getting better at it.

On March 1^st, at sunset, I flew in a small jet from Rome to Venice. As we flew over Tuscany, outside the window, to my left, I could see the great glistening convex mirror of the Bay of Genoa with Elba and some smaller islands in the middle – I hadn’t known they existed – and, higher up, just where the earth bent out of view, the French Alps, tiny like baby’s teeth, glistening pink in sunlight, and marching, like Hannibal’s elephants, to the sea. As we flew north, towards the wall of clouds which swathed Switzerland, and the sun sank, a different view opened, a classic scene replayed in countless paintings of The Damnation of the Fallen Angels: a clear, cream-yellow sky up top, in which there hung the evening star, as obnoxious as if it had been nailed; in the middle, an intense swirling red-orange ado of light from the sun which had just set, diffused through the vagueness of cloud-or-mist-sort-of-thing (a Turner-Sisley-kind of job – only better); and beneath, an area of darkness: a gradient wash ranging from light grayish blue up top to near-black at the bottom, something straight from Beccafumi; and cutting through it the bright silver tape of the Po falling downwards, into the night, towards Ravenna.

As far as I could tell, I was the only one on the plane paying any of this the slightest attention. Others were busy leafing through inflight magazines, playing with gadgets, watching movies, eating peanuts and flirting with stewardesses (one was good, but no contest for the scene outside, if you ask me). Now, if Old Forrest were to ask me, I suppose I would have to say that I did not feel particularly interconnected at the moment. But then, I didn’t seem to need to be interconnected: there didn’t seem much point in being interconnected with anyone who, his left cheek ablaze in the glow of the sunset yet was not paying it any attention. And if anyone were paying it attention – well, then, I would not want to disturb their reverie, would I? In fact, I was quite content in that moment and in its profound loneliness (if that is what one calls it). The pleasure and wonder of being there and gazing at it all did not require third party validation.

So my answer, you see, would seem to be the opposite of E.M.’s: I would not want to give up the inner aesthetic life for the illusion of social interconnectedness. The trick is – it seems to me – not to mind the loneliness.

*

I have written elsewhere that the aesthetic experience, like piano-playing, is a skill for which a certain degree of native talent is required but which above all requires constant practice: we must learn to notice how we feel about things. And I have also written elsewhere how such learning happens in pairs – how we need the guidance of others to help us see things; and their audience to help us describe what we see in words which we ourselves can hear and understand. But perhaps the aesthetic experience is like riding a bicycle: we need the stabilizing hand of another to help us get our bearing, learn to keep balance, to fall always forward, in the direction in which the bicycle rolls; but once we have learned it, we can ride by ourselves.

At that point, interconnection is no longer required.