• 1 The ideal one was Plato’s Republic of Love.
• 2 The phrase appears in his 1939 essay ‘What I Believe’; it became the title of his 1951 collection o (...)
• 3 For Rancière, democracy must find its scandalous, rebellious edge again: ‘il n’y a qu’une seule bon (...)

1During World War II, E.M. Forster delivered BBC broadcasts that met with unexpected public approval. In this ‘Second Darkness’ (Forster 1951, 14), his mild-mannered, stubborn defence of culture made him a familiar fixture, perhaps even a kind of resilient ‘beacon for democratic ideals’ (Lago et al. in Forster 2008, 39). Yet democracy for him was complex; first, he thought that it should include ‘an aristocracy of the sensitive’, ‘if that is the right word and if a democrat may use it’ (TC 82): ‘we form as it were an aristocracy in the midst of a democracy, and we belong to and desire to belong to the democracy.’ (Forster 2008, 414) Then, for him, it was only the best possible system,1 and he could only give ‘Two Cheers for Democracy’2 (TC 79). This might place him at the ‘fag-end of Victorian liberalism’ as he put it (TC 67); or his argument might resonate with Jacques Rancière’s definition of our own unstable political moment, in which the social fabric of democracy seems to be bursting at the seams.3 Rancière’s concerns may apply to Forster’s deep belief in, and mistrust of, democracy, as a political assemblage that may stoop to censorship and easily fall into the traps of fascism. For him, politics should ensure freedom but also protect art, love and a sense of place, in order to build a new commons. Interestingly enough, eco-artist Ruth Beale has recently revisited Forster’s long-forgotten 1938 pageant, in her 2011 installation/performance ‘England’s Pleasant Land: A Remake’. Beale’s interest suggests that Forster’s pageant engages with the community and the sustainable land, core questions in today’s public debate. As we shall see, urban invisibility, music and spatial (un)belonging were first explored in Howards End, calling for some kind of insurance against unemployment; in the 30s, as if the challenge to democracy required experimenting beyond fiction, Forster resorts to communal spectacles and the BBC broadcasts to uphold democracy and ‘the more intangible and intellectual commons’ (Fournier n.p.), books and music, beliefs that may be challenged after the war.

• 4 It is referred to as HE in this paper.

2Howards End was written at a time of democratic debate; in 1909, the Suffragettes began a more violent campaign for equal rights, lashing out at Churchill and Asquith, throwing bricks at the Liberal Party’s windows, and being force-fed in prison. Meanwhile, the Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George campaigned for old-age pensions and unemployment benefits (with a determination that came from his humble origins and from a desire to nip in the bud the new Labour party). His budget was passed by the House of Commons but vetoed by the House of Lords. The deadlock ended when the new King, George V, threatened to create a spate of new peers in favour of liberal reform. Faced with the prospect of democracy swamping the aristocracy, the Lords gave in; and the 1910 People’s Budget implicitly established the domination of the House of Commons over the Lords. On the surface, Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End4 holds itself aloof from such issues; there is no mention of Lloyd George’s reforms; the franchise is evoked by sympathetic young women during the luncheon given by Margaret, but her guest of honour, Mrs Wilcox, has no interest in the vote. Yet Forster does engage with agency, insurance and the distribution of the sensible in the context of the market economy.

• 5 Bill Brown is discussing Baudrillard.

5In this material turn, while the thingness of the umbrella asserts itself precisely because it is worn-out, the object is ‘shamed, obscene, passive’, intelligible only as the ‘alienated, accursed part of the subject’, to use Bill Brown’s words (Brown 49).5

• 6 ‘The increase of uncertainty is precisely due to the erosion of varios forms of social security.’

7The would-be Olympian Henry Wilcox and the giant Porphyrion belong to the same opaque system, whereas Forster seems to be calling for a different kind of insurance altogether. For the side effect of global companies is increased vulnerability for the expendable at home. The plot relies on a tangle of coincidences bringing together Leonard, the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels; this might seem heavy-handed, were it not a fable about social vulnerability. Henry Wilcox’s careless, indirect piece of advice (the Porphyrion may smash) makes Leonard sink from relative safety to precariousness. As an ordinary man, Leonard Bast has no access to information, no way of knowing whether the advice is sound or not. The reluctant Bast takes a job at a bank with a reduced salary and is soon made redundant, while the reinsured Porphyrion sails on splendidly. The brief scene in St Paul’s, where Margaret admires the cathedral and fails to see Leonard, connotes the instant social invisibility of the destitute clerk. Guillaume le Blanc links precariousness to the collapse of forms of ‘social security’, meaning social systems, work and addresses, both as a spatial direction (when one loses one’s home and address), and as the way one is addressed, or becomes invisible: ‘[l]a remontée de l’incertitude est précisément liée au délitement des différentes formes de sécurité sociale’6 (le Blanc 72).

• 7 Since Lionel Trilling and Daniel Born, Forster has been read in terms of liberal humanism (or for B (...)
• 8 ‘The slippage caused by viral speech . . . between the textuel layers of enunciation.’ Laurent Mell (...)

8Leonard’s plight, as he begs money from his relatives, points to the absence of a social protection net.7 For Stuart Sillars, Howards End is ‘a remarkably contemporary book, concerned with issues insistent and immediate when it was written’ (Sillars 33). Metaphors like ‘Panic and emptiness!’ (HE 46) recall the writers who influenced Lloyd George, such as Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (a close friend of Forster’s) and Edward Carpenter (it was after a visit to Carpenter that Forster started writing Maurice). Above all, the text recycles Charles Masterman’s 1902 From the Abyss, where the eponymous abyss is for Kuchta a ‘figurative grave, marking poverty as a state of social nonexistence’ (125). The famous liberal disclaimer, which has so often been held against Forster as bourgeois liberalism, ‘We are not concerned with the very poor’ (Forster 1985, 58), might therefore be read as an ironic preterition, a sign of what Laurent Mellet calls ‘les déplacements de la parole contagieuse [. . .] entre les régimes énonciatifs du texte’ (2012, 121).8 Such callousness may be ascribed to Henry Wilcox, who feels no guilt when the Porphyrion remains ‘safe as houses now’ (191), to Helen, who sends money to Leonard but does not try to see him again, or to Margaret herself, who is wont to discuss how money should be spent on the poor but stands safely on her own island of secure money, as she herself acknowledges. Forster’s text, on the other hand, relies on ‘vulnerability as a dynamic form’, calling for welfare and the ethics of care as defined by Jean-Michel Ganteau: ‘To work with vulnerability, so as to build an ethical model in which good and the good life depend on attention to the other, responsiveness to the other, solicitude to the other, and practical help of the other.’ (Ganteau 11) The concern for a better democracy cannot be ascribed to one character, it is conveyed by the overall narrative structure.

• 9 We may add that on March 19, 1910, Forster met with a friend back from Nigeria, who told him of vil (...)
• 10 Moby-Dick is one of the texts celebrated by Forster in his 1927 Aspects of the Novel, before it was (...)
• 11 Laurent Mellet comments on the formlessness of the British landscape congealed by the speed of moto (...)
• 12 As Elsa Cavalié shows, she jumps from the car but in the end refrains from making a scene.

9Forster’s conception of democratic ethos also questions the logic of Empire. Paul, who regularly vanishes to Nigeria, is the embodiment of the obverse of democracy—a seductive but utterly hollow young man, a slave to propriety who may perform unseen violence in Africa, and whose brief insensitive rejection radically alters the course of Helen’s life. Jameson takes Forster’s text to task for failing to engage properly with the hidden side of the Wilcoxes’ trade in Nigerian rubber, introducing the theme of Africa without portraying natives.9 But Forster’s anti-colonial strategy becomes more compelling if images are not considered in isolation but connected, perceived as a network. The map ‘looking like a whale marked out for blubber’ (120) in Henry’s office vaguely echoes Heart of Darkness and gestures towards Moby-Dick,10 connoting not the white man’s burden but the white man’s plunder. In fact, the indictment of colonial exploitation abroad is repurposed as Forster attacks colonial appropriation at home, for the Nigerian rubber reappears in the guise of motor-car tyres that flash through the countryside, raising ominous clouds of dust that settle down everywhere, polluting the villagers’lungs. Kuchta calls the process the ‘suburban colonization of the countryside’ (126). Andrew Thacker has shown that the Wilcoxes’ accidents—Mr Wilcox’s collision with a horse and cart, or Charles’s smashing of a little girl’s cat11—their speeding tickets and Charles Wilcox’s callous comment that the villagers should learn and tar the roads, echo contemporary debates and governmental inquiries, placing the novel firmly within ‘new geographies of modernity’ rather than mere ‘sentimental ruralism’ (Thacker 37). Though Margaret ultimately colludes with such motorised, mechanised capitalism,12 Forster seems to consider those posh motorcars as agents of the appropriation of the land (a theme that reappears in the pageants), creating a new kind of risk society and ignoring the democratic demands of the locals, overruled as hopelessly backward.

• 13 For Henry, the dismissal is just ‘the shoe pinching in places’, and one should not worry neurotical (...)
• 14 They collect houses ‘like tadpoles’, a boyish image of greed.
• 15 Incidentally, Mr Wilcox takes Margaret to Simpson’s, a posh restaurant known for its meat, whereas (...)

10Therefore, the metaphor ‘safe as houses’ (HE 191), which Henry Wilcox uses to deny his responsibility in Leonard’s case,13 is significant. Forster, like the Schlegel sisters, does hold the likes of the Wilcoxes accountable, and locates the tension between democracy and capitalism in real estate. For Henry Wilcox owns several locations, such as Oniton, the eponymous Howards End, the flat opposite the Schlegels’ home in London, Ducie Street with its posh drawing-room accommodating thick leather armchairs, as if a motor car had spawned. Such places seem part of an endless collection14 which never allows their owner to properly inhabit any of them. Houses and flats remain empty, abandoned because ultimately, in the eyes of the Wilcox men, no satisfactory value can be attached to them: Oniton turns out to be in the wrong part of Shropshire (whatever that may mean), Howards End is not fashionable enough and is let, the flat and Ducie street are given up. Like the map of Africa, the smell coming from a slaughterhouse that mars the splendid Ducie Street is a sign that odours of exploitation are hard to get rid of.15 The text stresses the rootlessness of cumulative capitalism, from the sweeping tide of coins that has come to signify Christmas to the nomadic Henry Wilcox, compulsively switching houses.

• 16 In 1909, Forster’s short story ‘The Machine Stops’ (a technological dystopia that foreshadows the I (...)
• 17 For Peter Bailey, Forster belittles Leonard Bast as a marginal mimic with a grey life. For Kim Shir (...)

13Half buried below the city,16 Leonard tries to transmute his dwelling by wrapping it up in culture, but the democratisation of knowledge fails to yield instant benefits. Leonard transposes Ruskin’s mellifluous prose, ‘Let us consider each of these characters in succession; and first (for of the shafts enough has been said already), what is very peculiar to this church, its luminousness’ (61), into the dull, ‘Let us consider each of these characters in succession; and first (for of the absence of ventilation enough has been said already), what is very peculiar to this flat, its obscurity’ (62). Language is no magic wand. The point here is not to be as patronising17 as the Schlegel sisters (who relish Leonard’s night outing in pursuit of Nature and poetry, but will not listen to whatever he has to say about books), but to stress that democracy begins with a room of one’s own, and that cultural capital—however much Forster, who taught at the Working Men’s college for twenty years, may have trusted books and art, and believed that the highest values could be transmitted—is not enough in a semi-basement. Stuart Sillars points out that the books praised by Leonard, such as E.V. Lucas’s Open Road, are but ‘a second-hand, middle-brow relocation of experience’ (Sillars 40); meant for armchair travellers, they fail to offer the way back to the earth Leonard longs for. Leonard’s downfall is a distant consequence of rural exodus; the underfed clerk is trapped in the city, while the Wilcoxes, with their ‘civilization of luggage’ and their pre-Twitter clipped language of ‘telegrams and anger’ (54) may paradoxically purchase country housing as well as city housing.

• 18 ‘C’est dans la terre anglaise que Forster veut puiser l’énergie nécessaire à la construction d’une (...)

14If democracy begins with housing, the novel offers a resolution which is at best a compromise. With its beautiful garden and surrounding fields, Howards End (the radiating house studied by Elsa Cavalié)18 encapsulates Englishness and a sense of belonging; it is bequeathed by Mrs Wilcox to Margaret, a late Christmas present that has no legal value but that has all the aesthetic, sensuous and spiritual value in the world. Margaret, in the end, creates a small common place, bringing together a broken Henry Wilcox (whom she has married), and her sister with her son, Leonard’s illegitimate child—but Leonard himself has been killed (by Charles, the German sword, and by the bookcase that falls over him). The ending recreates spiritual transmission and the link with the house and the earth. But the common ground (with its symbolic crop of hay) is tentative, and already threatened by the encroaching rust of London in the distance.

• 19 Ayako Yoshino and Bartie speak of ‘pageant fever’ or ‘pageantitis’ (Bartie 2018, n.p.).
• 20 Beyond commodified nostalgia, the pageants raise money for familiar places and reflect upon them.
• 21 Forster’s tree motif appeared in his short stories and in Howards End, where the wych elm is the gu (...)

16Pageants were a popular entertainment in Edwardian England,19 which vanished with World War I but returned in the 20s and 30s; for Michael Woods, such popular entertainment was both democratic (performing the local/national past) and conservative (upholding a local version of apolitical history, confirming inequalities). Forster’s foray differs both from such ‘pageant fever’ (Bartie 2018, n.p.) and from modernist revisions like T.S. Eliot’s 1934 urbanised, Christian The Rock and Virginia Woolf’s ironic 1941 deconstruction of the historiographic pageant in Between the Acts. Forster’s 1934 ‘Abinger Pageant’ and 1938 ‘England’s Pleasant Land’ are ‘participatory village rituals’ that appeal to the community (Esty 84): as usual, the local people sang, danced and performed in the self-reflexive pageant. But Forster goes a step further, designing more immersive, site-specific performances. The ‘Abinger Pageant’ was set in the Rectory Garden, and the spectators were directed to look at the rolling downs. For ‘England’s Pleasant Land’, Forster used the semicircle of trees, the landscaped gardens and country house of Milton Court, as a generic country house and grounds. This crucial design made both church and country-house a common place, a biosystem rather than an abstract metonymy of England.20 In the first pageant, a fund-raising event helping to restore the local church, Forster sweeps from the Saxons and Normans or the Puritans and Cavaliers to the Victorians, and pays lip service to clichés (the tree of Royalty, the tree of the church, and Forster being more attuned to the church as a building than a creed, the Canterbury pilgrims) in order to switch to a more rhizomatic democratic impulse. The narrator, a mere ‘woodman’, is just a ‘recorder’, a ‘participant in an ongoing conversation’, implying a ‘mutual investment of tellers and listeners in discerning value in lives lived and establishing social and personal ethos’, to use Pollock’s definition of oral history (Pollock 146). Forster mingles religious hymns, folk songs like the blacksmith’s ‘Twankydillo’, and music specially composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams, with a roll call of local toponyms and families, stressing commoners rather than great names: ‘Edser, Smallpiece, Longhurst, Overington, Etherington, Jelly, Tickner, Harrison, Cumper, Hoad, Lane, Cole, Wood, Carpenter, Stone, Evershed, Dewdney, Tidy, Wordsfold, Snatchfold; and the great name Evelyn from Wotton.’ (1936, 345) Straying from the scenario, he also opens the pageant to the non-human, the sheep at the beginning and ending, and above all the trees. The main historical character, the diarist and gardener John Evelyn, is given no speech, but made to plant a tree,21 the very tulip tree we (the readers, performers or audience) are watching. One of the press reviewers at the time, in The Spectator, aptly noted the uncharacteristic absence of battles in the pageant ‘between 1066 and today’, presumably not ‘because the promoters of this pageant are exceptionally pacifist, but because they have discovered so many other things in the past local life of their beautiful district which are more characteristic and interesting.’ (Spectator 10, in Bartie n.p.) Forster was indeed a pacifist, but he was also waging a battle, seeking, if not a proto-Parliament of things in the manner of Bruno Latour, at least to integrate the trees within the democratic display as part of the common ground. They are not just timber for ships, fodder for the forge, cleared for pasture. The leitmotif ‘the trees are growing, the trees are cut down’ (Forster 1936, 340, 345) calls for balance in the interaction: ‘but the trees are growing all the time, and we shall end with the planting of a tree’ (345). The ‘Woodman’, an ‘organicist metaphor of the enervated Nietzschean epigone’ of history for Stuart Christie (94), is the proper steward of the land, because he is a woodcutter who actually takes care of the woods as well. The perlocutionary performance is cautionary, calling time on grand projects, houses, ‘flats, arterial roads, by-passes, petrol pumps and pylons’ (Forster 1936, 351), reading urbanisation as an environmental crisis threatening the natural and cultural heritage of the woodlands.

• 22 Esty recalls that Forster had complained of the fad for pageants, with their staple recipe of ‘Drui (...)

18‘England’s Pleasant Land’ was performed in 1938, with ‘unrehearsed blessings’ like a ‘lovely flock of white pidgeons’, though ‘[n]aturally it rained’ (Forster 1940, 8); it was published in 1940 by the Hogarth Press and a fair number of copies were sold. It has left a very, very faint cultural trace; elements from Vaughan Williams’s music score worked their way into his fifth symphony; the pageant itself has briefly emerged in Ruth Beale’s work in 2011 and in 2015 as the Ambridge Pageant performed in the Archers, BBC 4’s popular radio programme. The pageant is no masterpiece. For Esty, the hideous clock offered by the villagers to the Squire is the only bit of onion in the salad,22 when ‘the unexpressed time of modernity asserts itself’, and breaks ‘timeless pastoral vision’ (Esty 83). But Forster’s pageant actually tosses into the salad a controversial version of history, under the guise of smooth linearity. To use Siewers’s concept, Forster maps the landscape as an ‘ecosemiosphere’ (Siewers 33), where nature and culture interact and are constantly rewritten by undemocratic manipulation. This happens through a series of paradigm shifts. It begins with the Domesday Book, laying down boundaries and replacing common law with official record: ‘The Recorder sits at a rough table upon which the Domesday Book is placed. The characters pass before him, and are allotted their shares in the England-that-is-to-be’ (Forster 1940, 18). Though this is presented as the birth of ‘England’s Pleasant Land’, coming into being through the reconciliation of Saxons and Normans, the lingering sense of segmentation makes the eighteenth-century pun of the two silly ladies (Domesday/Doom’s Day) somehow relevant. The core of the play is the next tableau, when in 1760 the traditional Squire George is gradually won over by the intruder, Squire Jeremiah. Bent on modernisation, Jeremiah implements the new enclosure laws voted by Parliament, with the support of Bumble, the lawyer. The merry villagers dance in the background, unaware that ‘up by the Manor House their fate and the fate of the countryside is being decided’ (36), yet taking their strip is legal theft: ‘nothing can compensate a man for what his family has owned for generations’ (31). For Squire George’s daughter, enclosing the commons is not democratic: ‘No, no—those Acts are wrong. Enclosure is bad, Parliament’s wicked—’ (30). Jeremiah’s argument, that the villagers are lazy if they sing and dance, and that the ‘savage’ land should be regulated, and made profitable (34), suggests a kind of colonisation at home. The next scene briefly depicts the Agricultural Swing Riots of the 1830s, as a direct consequence of impoverishment and enclosures. The scene is stylised, the peasants are still Jack and Jill, the landowner is still Squire George and Bumble lays down the law, onomastics suggesting that the legal code blunders on, mechanical and soulless. Forster has been blamed for not anchoring the pageant in a specific place and using generic names for characters that reach across the centuries; yet it is hard to deem the argument apolitical, or to fail to see that those naïve allegories actually deny the pastoral satisfaction expected from a pageant and challenge the course of history.

• 23 Astutely, Armstrong adds that ‘the obvious but unspoken analogy here is the variable contingency of (...)
• 24 I am transposing Shannon Walters’ definition of haptics and disability. For her, rhetorical touch p (...)

22But by then there were other pressing matters. In 1938, Forster and Vaughan Williams also founded the Dorking and District Refugee Committee, to help refugees from Nazi Germany. Though he is remembered for his defence of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in 1920 and for testifying in favour of an unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (and against the Obscene Publication Act) in 1960, Forster’s commitment to freedom of speech as an essential dimension of democracy was just as acute in the Thirties. The international crisis tested Forster’s detached view of politics; he had been a staunch pacifist in World War One, but Hitler’s ruthless attack on people and culture made war inevitable_. He also felt that even in England, democracy might all too easily slip into a totalitarian regime, fearing the so-called great man, the deceitful providential leader—‘No, I distrust Great Men’ (Forster 1951, 82). He saw censorship as the Trojan horse of fascism. In 1934, he became the first president of the new National Council for Civil Liberties, and passionately opposed the Sedition Bill, which condemned anyone who maliciously seduced a member of the armed forces from his duty or allegiance to the King. In October 1934, a protest march gathered 3,000 people, and Forster gave a public speech which was, according to Stephen Spender, quite eloquent. In June 1935, a shy Forster spoke on the same platform as André Gide in the opening session of the anti-war International Congress for the Defence of Culture in Paris, organised by Gide and Malraux; thousands of people attended, there were 230 speakers from 38 countries, including Aragon, Barbusse, Giono, Wells, Aldous Huxley, Brecht and Pasternak. Aware perhaps of the hidden communist agenda of Malraux and the conference, Forster did not give the speech expected by the organisers, but focused instead on ‘Liberty in England’, stressing how a seemingly innocuous violation of freedom might let in the ‘dictator-spirit working quietly away behind the facade of constitutional forms, passing a little law (like the Sedition Act) here, endorsing a departmental tyranny there’, promoting secrecy and controlling the evening news on the ‘wireless, until opposition is tamed and gulled.’ (1936, 64) For him, propaganda could easily go viral at a time when foreign governments cheated and bullied, destroyed civilians and invaded without declaring war. Instead, Forster upheld ‘Tolerance’ in an eponymous essay, well aware that prejudices and hatred also begin at home, and that ‘Tolerance is not the same as weakness’ (TC 58), because it implies an active discipline of the spirit and the soul. His democratic arguments often are characteristically oblique, as Paul Armstrong points out. In his 1939 ‘Jew-consciousness’, Forster absurdly discusses a school where all boys with sisters are ostracised, and—a tougher case—a second school where all boys with a mother are looked down on, before introducing anti-semitism as equally untenable: ‘Having been a Gentile at my first preparatory school and a Gentile in my second, I know what I am talking about’ (25).23 The joke offers a pragmatic approach to politics and ethics; as Paul Armstrong puts it, ‘Forster’s anecdote implicates the reader uncomfortably in mechanisms of social solidification that cannot simply be dismissed as a foreign aberration . . . Forster’s mischievousness suggests that deviousness may be necessary to fight power with rhetorical power’ (287). The practice of tolerance lies at the heart of Forster’s ethics of care; hence the famous opening line of ‘What I Believe’, ‘I do not believe in Belief’, or, twisting a Biblical reference, ‘My motto is: ‘Lord, I disbelieve—help thou my unbelief’ (Forster 1951, 77). Yet this is, in a way, a creed too, beginning with sensitivity and individual connection, to reshape the experience of the world: ‘And since to ignore evidence is one of the characteristics of faith, I certainly can proclaim that I believe in personal relationships’ (78). It is within this context of international upheaval and of the fascist drift of states that one must read the oft-misquoted shock formula, ‘I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country’ (78). The provocative statement is a scandal in the etymological sense of the word, a little stone meant to make one stumble and think. It is not a call to be disloyal to England, which Forster fought for through his essays and broadcasts, but a call to fight systems (like colonial rule) and war machines, and to trust personal relationship—which must uphold all sense of communality—rather than nationalism and abstract catch-words. Hating Mosley, Hitler and Mussolini’s black shirts, Forster queers politics as a reminder that there is no democracy which does not work at a metonymic level: ‘Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it. And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour’ (85). The homoerotic image widens, to suggest the kairotic contact at the root of democracy, bringing bodies together in time and space, skin against skin, allowing in turn to touch, i.e. to prompt emotion and identification.24

• 25 See Forster’s contribution to the Festival’s programme. In 1951, Forster collaborated with Britten (...)

23When the BBC was founded in 1922, the public airwaves were treated as a commons. In 1926 the Royal Charter stipulated that the BBC was to sustain civil society, promote learning and creativity. Forster was drawn to this public mission and he gave his first talk in 1928, while Hilda Matheson, the head of the Talks Section, was a staunch supporter of radio’s educational value: ‘Matheson’s concern for a more democratic approach to radio audiences spoke directly to his long interest in the Working Men’s College’ (Lago 1995, 99). Forster was a diffident speaker and his voice was not beautiful, but he made the talks sound natural, and they appealed to listeners. Whereas in 1914 Forster had seen Germany as just a hostile country and practiced pacifism, he was scared that Nazism was a regime bent on total destruction, be it of people or of culture, and he opposed appeasement (see ‘Post-Munich’, Forster 1951, 33). During the war, the broadcasts became Forster’s way of disseminating literature but also of engaging with history-in-the-making and of addressing totalitarianism—indeed, his three ‘Anti-Nazi Broadcasts’ (Forster 1951, 43) placed him on Hitler’s blacklist of people, like Woolf, who were to be killed as soon as England was invaded. Anticipating Barthes’s definition of myth, Forster states that German culture has become ‘governmental’ and has thereby been ‘falsified’ (46). He carefully distinguishes Germany, with its great literature, ‘supreme’ music and ‘eminent’ philosophy (46) from Nazism: not only has Nazi Germany ‘had to make war to its own people before it attacked Europe’ (47), but it has waged war on culture, and Forster describes the burning of books at length. In his broadcasts, on the contrary, Forster speaks of books as a performative defence of democracy: ‘We, in this war, are not likely to destroy books. Literature and Democracy are natural allies’ (Forster 2008, 159). Books might seem of little importance in the face of chaos, but for him they remained one of the touchstones of resilience, and he campaigned relentlessly for more literature on the radio, rather than less. Art was a common ground, defying darkness and anti-semitism. Typically, he opposed censorship in 1941, would not let Churchill have his pick among broadcasters; just as Vaughan Williams would not allow his music to be played on the air, Forster withdrew three of his talks, to block the BBC’s blacklist. It irked him a bit, for the piece on George Crabbe had a strong sense of place (Alderburgh), and in a whimsical swoop of inspiration he had summed up the poem ‘Peter Grimes’—a community turning against a scapegoat, perhaps a fascist drift—as an opera, ‘for my inward ear only’ (TC 191). Instead, the unspoken broadcast was printed in The Listener, sailed across the sea, and was read by Benjamin Britten. Britten did not know Crabbe, but he was from Suffolk and he was touched; he made up his mind to leave the United States and return to England, where he composed his Peter Grimes, which was performed in 1945 to public acclaim. In 1948, Britten launched the Alderburgh festival; as in the pageants, but with Britten’s supreme talent, place, music, Englishness, the community and human touch met in Alderburgh, making the festival festive indeed, to Forster’s liking.25

• 26 This was the church of Reverend Dick Sheppard, an activist for the poor, who suggested in 1931 that (...)

24Yet it was in London perhaps, that Howards End’s dream of a musical commons materialised, under the unexpected guise of the National Gallery’s war-time lunch-hour concerts. Forster begins his 1943 New Year’s BBC broadcast by sending his greetings ‘from the portico of the National Gallery’: ‘I don’t mean that I am actually standing in the portico. I am not standing anywhere. I am sitting in a studio, reading from a prepared script . . .’ (2008, 217) Still he goes on, as if he were actually standing in front of the National Gallery looking at St Martin-in-the-Fields,26 with the towers of Westminster in the distance, for him a promising but inadequate expression of democracy. He then shifts back to the Gallery:

• 27 Hess thought of the concerts to raise funds for unemployment musicians, who had no jobs because of (...)
• 28 Clark was influenced by Ruskin and believed that everyone should have access to art; recently, his (...)
• 29 Hess was famous for her arrangement of ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’, which she often played. A jou (...)

25Such pragmatic elements insist on the experimental, communal space of dissensus rather than on propaganda for Englishness. The idea of reinvesting and repurposing the gallery came from Myra Hess, a famous pianist who gave up a lucrative tour of the United States to stay in Britain during the war. The paintings had been taken down and hidden elsewhere, theatres were closed,27 London was under fire, the Gallery itself was about to be requisitioned for governmental paperwork; Kenneth Clark,28 the National Gallery director, instantly supported Hess’s idea. The concerts fulfilled Myra Hess’s dream of democratic music; they became the luminous upstairs version of underground shelters, a community of emotions. Forster insists on the conjunction between ‘first class music’ and a single shilling, an unheard-of entrance fee which made music available to all (actually all the performers, including Hess, received only five guineas per performance). The variegated audience was part of the democratic project, from soldiers29 and typists to the Queen sitting among the crowd; people ‘came in their hundreds’: for the first concert, Hess and Clark had expected a handful of listeners, but about 1,000 people showed up, and about 800 were let in, though regulations stipulated no more than 200 people. People could get coffee and sandwiches in the hallowed Gallery, as Forster jokingly notes. Above all, the transnational programmes went straight to Forster’s heart: Hess played Beethoven’s Appasionata for her first concert, and the ethos of equality applied to the choice of music:

• 30 Hess performed in the last but one concert, not the last one, she feared a surge of emotion would h (...)

26English and German music meet as if to enact the Forsterian principle of tolerance; he must have loved the fact that Beethoven was a favourite, whom Hess played first and last.30 Incidentally, Hess also embodied the refusal to betray one’s friends for the sake of nationalism; when the Netherlands were invaded, Hess insisted that German lied singer Elena Gerhardt should perform and she was given a standing ovation. Music testified to the strength of this spiritual democracy: ‘Meanwhile Beethoven persists, Beethoven does not flicker’ (Forster in Philip 9). Indeed, like culture, courage was a routine part of the commons; when the Blitz got worse, the concerts were moved from a beautiful room with a glass ceiling to the basement; when Myra Hess heard a flying bomb while playing a quiet piece by Schubert, she added an impromptu crescendo to hide the noise (Bosman 52); when the bomb squad came for an unexploded bomb, the concert simply changed rooms. An instance of Michael Madison’s ‘intangible commons’, the concerts brought a degree of peace and solace in the ongoing ‘storm’. In his contribution to a commemorative 1944 booklet, Forster described ‘the importance of live concerts’ for the audience in the badly damaged Gallery (Philip 9): vibrations, ‘strange filaments’, cling to the soul, as music becomes an antidote to the lethal planes: ‘the feet of birds have, as it were, become entangled in the snares of heaven’ (Forster in Philip, 10). Much to Myra Hess’s sadness, the concerts were discontinued in 1946 (Forster and Vaughan Williams signed a petition to keep them going). The trustees claimed that it would be too expensive and with so many Gallery rooms in ruins, space was needed for the paintings; perhaps we may wonder whether the concerts were not too democratic for the post-war Establishment, even at a time of solidarity and reconstruction.