Howards End
Or, Why the Fuck You Lyin
This post contains major spoilers about the 1992 film Howards End.
Last weekend I watched Howards End, the 1992 film directed by James Ivory based on the novel of the same name by E.M. Forster. I watched it because Netflix kept putting it at the top of its recommendations for me, and it was 2PM on a Sunday, and I was sleepy, and I thought, this movie looks cozy. Everything in the first half hour of the movie feels very English and Edwardian: Helena Bonham Carter and Emma Thompson play Helen and Margaret Schlegel, two sisters belonging to a rarefied strata of early-twentieth-century Anglo-German bourgeois intelligentsia who spend a lot of time reading and going to discussion groups about ethics and helping random people that they run into or who show up at their house. At some point Margaret, who is a very practical and smart and confident 29-year-old, befriends an older woman named Ruth Wilcox (Vanessa Redgrave, what a fucking genius oh my god), who is sick with something I can tell is about to kill her. Before that, Helen, who is a dreamy and passionate and strong-willed 21-year-old, has a brief love affair with Paul Wilcox, Ruth’s youngest son with her conservative businessman husband Henry (Anthony Hopkins who is scary good at playing dudes who are deeply sinister and deeply good at hiding it).
Okay, so I can tell the paths of these people are going to continue to cross in deeper ways, but I don’t know how yet. Because, as I mentioned above, it is 2PM on a Sunday and I am sleepy, I fall asleep. When I wake up, I rewind to the spot where I was when I fell asleep, and the movie quickly cuts to a scene where Henry is sitting around a table with his three children — Charles, Evie, and Paul — and Charles’s wife. Ruth has died. She’s left a letter. The letter says that she wants to leave Howards End, the house that she inherited from her brother when he died, to Margaret Schlegel. Wow! Ruth! How generous! Henry and co. think so, too. In fact, they think it’s too generous, and they start to throw around reasons for which they should ignore Ruth’s last wishes. The letter isn’t signed! It’s not like her to leave the house to an outsider! Was she even in her right mind when she wrote this!? Before they can find a sound through-line of logic that would free them from the burden of having to fulfill their wife’s/mother’s/mother-in-law’s dying wish, Evie grabs the letter and throws it onto the fire burning behind her dad. What the fuck! Okay, so these people are going to repress repress repress all the way down. Fuck cozy, this is riveting.
I am fascinated by lying. More specifically, I am fascinated by the lies that people tell themselves that allow them to live lives that the truth would not. As a kid, I was prone to invention. I would make up stories that had no consequences except to make me seem more interesting. Of course, they did not make me feel more interesting, because I knew that they weren’t true. What mattered about these stories was that I could use them to make myself seem different than I was. None of these were all that interesting. By way of example: one time, when I was in the fourth grade, the teacher was giving a lesson on the streets that delineated the municipality in which we lived. I knew one of these streets intimately because my grandparents lived on it, but that didn’t seem, to me, interesting enough. I had to make my knowledge seem deeper by claiming that, one day, my aunt had taken me on a drive around the town limits. That had never happened, and even at the time I recognized it as an absurd potential activity for a nine-year-old and a forty-year-old, but it was what occurred to me to say after I raised my hand to share that I knew one of the streets my teacher was talking about.
When my family moved to the U.S., I had a blank canvas. I could say anything I wanted about my life before living here, and no one would know the difference. This made the exercise of invention entirely uninteresting to me. Anything could be believable to my new audience, so there was no challenge in coming up with a feasible story. My habit of invention was over. It eventually came to be replaced by a near-obsession with facts.
As a teenager, I researched my family’s history, at one point even making a family tree that spanned back a few generations. I was no longer interested in the malleability of history, but in its facts and what could be gleaned from them. I learned, for example, that my maternal grandmother’s family was from the south of Italy, when all my life I had heard her tell us that they were from the north — it was an interesting incongruence. What did she have to gain by leading everyone to believe that her family was from the north? The existence of whatever opinions she had about the people of the north of Italy versus those from the south was only revealed to me once I found out the fact that her lie was meant to erase: her family came from the Basilicata.
Recently, in conversation with my mother about whether I would be traveling to Argentina next month to celebrate the 90th birthday of this same grandmother, I said to her that since she and my dad and sister were no longer planning on going because of Covid and that neither was my brother, for the same reason, my own motivations to go were few. “It’s not like I have some sort of really close relationship with my grandmother and am dying to celebrate her 90th birthday,” I told her. My mother paused before responding and said to me, “I love how sincere you are — not with me, right now, I mean with yourself.”
It’s worth noting that this kind of clear-eyed affirmation is not very common from my mom. It felt both remarkable and true. For the majority of my conscious life — which I would argue started when I was fairly young, maybe even before I was a teenager — I have had, as I mentioned above, a near-obsession with the truth. In particular, I am interested in being honest with oneself, as much as one can be while taking into account that doing so constantly can be a bit like looking straight into the sun.
Henry and co. burn the letter and move on with their lives. Some time later, Henry runs into Margaret, who asks him if he might be able to give a hand to this guy who’s come to her asking for help; his name is Leonard Bast. She’s kind of coy about it, which I guess is what ladies in the early 20th century had to do to get men to listen to them (hahaha who am I kidding sometimes ladies still have to do this), and he doesn’t want to give up any of his money, but he deigns to tell her that the insurance company Leonard works for is about to go under, and that he should leave his job. Margaret tells that to Leonard, and he takes the advice, and then it turns out that Henry was wrong!! The company is fine, and now Leonard can’t find a job because no one wants to hire someone who is unemployed. Fuck.
Margaret seems very committed to working this connection, though, like she knows her trust fund (or whatever people had back then) is gonna run out one day. She goes to lunch with Henry and Charles and his wife Dolly and very unsubtly tells Henry about her housing situation, and Henry is sort of like… ah, yes, I had no idea, let me help you, yes… like he’s about to get some sort of absolution from having ignored Ruth’s one last dying wish to leave Howards End to Margaret, but really deep down I think he wants to fuck Margaret and I am pretty sure Margaret thinks so, too.
Turns out Margaret and I were both right, because like two scenes later Henry is showing her a house (“showing her a house”) and after a series of insinuations very abruptly says “I’m asking you to be my wife.” What in the hell?? But Margaret is very practical so obviously she’s like, ah… yes… and kisses him. It’s worth noting here that Henry is approximately 26 years older than her and, you know, he looks like a 55-year-old man did in 1910.
So they get engaged, and then they host a big wedding party for Evie. The party looks amazing: long tables covered in white cloth under gazebos, lots of sunlight, walnut Thonet chairs around the tables, big silver punch bowls, little cakes serving as centerpieces. Wow. Almost makes me want to get married. Anyway, at some point Helen shows up with Leonard and his wife Jacky and is like, Margaret, how dare you get engaged to a man who would ruin another man’s life and never take responsibility for it! We have to help these people! And Margaret at first is like, man dude what the fuck can you chill, but then she’s like, okay come on guys go ahead and eat, there are lots of little cakes everywhere anyway, help yourself. And then… twist!! Jacky sees Henry and is like, HENRY IT’S ME JACKY REMEMBER ME, and all the wedding guests are like… uhhh? We are uptight Edwardian people we don’t do melodrama, and then Henry literally RUNS AWAY!!! When Margaret finally corners him in a room in the house, he confesses (while turning his face and covering it, by the way! Like a damn moose who thinks if he can’t see you then you can’t see him. SMDH) to having had an affair with Jacky (who was sixteen at the time!!!!) while he was married to Ruth. He is very ashamed and scared and even angry and then Margaret just… forgives him. Good for you, Margaret. Except: how are you going to deal with the fact that you are living with a serial coverer-up?? (Let’s recap: so far and as far as we know Henry is living in denial of: 1. His affair with Jacky, 2. His having screwed over Leonard Bast, and 3. His having ignored his wife’s dying wishes.)
In an exchange with Arabella Kurtz, published in Harper’s with the title “Lives by Omission,” J.M. Coetzee questions the common assumption that it is impossible to keep secrets secret. He suggests that there might be people who lead perfectly happy lives having buried their history, that there are repressed people who might never see a therapist about it because for them, repression has worked. The piece concludes: “Is everyday life not bursting with examples of people who have forgotten what it is not convenient for them to remember, and who prosper nonetheless? I would like to believe that there is one or another eye that sees all, that transgressions do not ultimately go unpunished. But a voice keeps asking: Is that really so?”
IS THAT REALLY SO!!! Because it sure as shit seems like Henry is about to go unpunished. After that wedding scene a bunch of stuff happens that is pretty riveting but not worth recounting for my present purposes. Watch the movie, I recommend it. At the end, Henry seems about to meet an early death from illness, and, because she is his wife, Margaret will finally inherit Howards End. Ironic! Haha! See, Henry, what Ruth intended to happen is happening anyway, despite your lies! I understand that this is the point of the movie (and maybe of the novel it’s based on? I have not read it but let me tell you it flew onto my list for this year with a quickness), that underlying the whole fiction is a belief that the arc of individual histories bends toward cosmic justice.
But there’s another moment, earlier in the movie, that I find to be much more revelatory about the consequences of denial and self-deception. Helen, pregnant thanks to a brief moment of passion with Leonard Bast (I told you lots of stuff happens, this movie is also kind of long), comes back to England from Germany, where she’s been living for at least the length of her pregnancy, and needs a place to stay for one night before she travels back. Margaret is like, Henry, Howards End is empty, there is no one there, can Helen please spend one single night there? And Henry is like, NO! HELEN IS AN ADULTERER! She will not stay at any house of mine! Margaret insists, at one point even asking Henry why he can’t forgive Helen for participating in adultery when he himself had cheated on Ruth with Jacky.
But, Margaret, dude, that’s exactly why he can’t forgive her!! He can’t even forgive himself, because that would require admitting to wrong-doing in the first place! He has lived a life of torture and guilt and shame at his own hand. That might not be cosmic justice, but it’s the worst punishment I can imagine.