Where Angels No Longer Tread

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They look like ordinary students, the dozen or so sitting around the table in my Grand Tour seminar: a couple of freshly shorn boys, the rest girls with hair spritzing out of cloth-covered rubber bands carefully twisted around buns intended to appear careless. They drink coffee-machine cappuccinos and eat Snickers candy bars and bring their notebooks to class and open them and even write in them and look back at me when I look at them and appear interested, are even bright seeming, not merely seeming, are bright, attentive, conscientious, courteous. I am the kind of teacher who believes in the evolution of mankind and so therefore believe that every future generation one-ups the generation that floundered before it.  I scoff at colleagues who lament the collapse of civilization and human intelligence and what’s gone wrong with the youth of today and instead trust youth implicitly, stare into especially the things I don’t get with hopes that more scrutiny will teach me a thing or two about why they are being shaped the way that they are shaped toward the inscrutable future that is shaping them. But yesterday I taught Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread and must confess that these torchbearers of tomorrow threw me for a loop.

For those who do not know Forster’s story, it concerns a confrontation of Italian values with British values over who gets to raise the baby of a British woman who dies in childbirth after foolishly running after and marrying a much younger Italian farmhand.  The boy-widower, Gino, is deeply devoted to his baby-son and will raise him on sunshine and fruits picked fresh from the garden—a simple, charmed, life in nature, his upbringing uncomplicated by ambition and pretention and the need to be anyone other than who he is.  But the menacing family of the dead mother, not even her family, but her first dead husband’s family, has decided that they must rescue the baby from a life among barbarians and send him to Eton to have a proper education and place in civilization.  The family descends on Gino.  Fights ensue and escalate until the baby is killed in a carriage wreck. As in his more popular A Room with a View, Forster glorified Italy as a “return to Arcadia”—and was certainly rallying for the tragically misunderstood Gino, who represents Rousseau’s “natural man”—honest, simple, capable of love, real feeling and passion. Meanwhile the wooden Brits are utter hypocrites, whose only motives in wanting this unknown child is to save face and reinforce obsolete values that keep them alienated from themselves.

When I teach this novel, I usually get a passionate debate, a neat fifty-fifty maybe, those who sympathize with Gino and get Forester’s call for a simpler more honest life; those who intelligently see through Forester’s personal prejudice and consider that he is creating a false polemic:  the natural simple, the civilized hypocrite. Maybe education is not a bad idea for the baby.  But even that latter group is moved by the observation of the mediating Caroline on page 95 when she looks at the infant sleeping on his dirty rug and recognizes that they are fighting for an idea rather than a child, that they are disregarding that this infant has its own soul and destiny, feelings, autonomy, an intricate unfolding of moment to moment life and the best one can offer the unfolding of another is “a kiss and a prayer.” 

So, what’d you think? I toss out to my pert group, pens poised, ready.  Wasn’t this a compelling read? Weren’t you just anguished for the fate of this child from page one?

“It was dramatic” someone offered.

“It was good,” another. No one seemed truly excited about the book, truly impassioned by Forster’s call to simplicity.

I read out a few key passages hoping to stir a little more discussion: Don’t you all know a Harriet—someone who over-educates herself to appear self-important, but the education does not serve life?”  They nodded. Yes, they’d known Harriets. So?

I pulled the trump passage, the baby on the dirty rug. This reverence for the mysterious being-ness of another.  Had they heard of the Procrustean Bed, the myth of Procrustes…a variation of the square peg in the round hole motif?  The British educational system as a Procrustean Bed, the child’s arms and legs cut off to fit an existing form? Had there been moments in their lives when they’d encountered Procrustean Beds…things that just didn’t fit, that rubbed against them and thus inspired them to fight for a larger reality?

One student offered that she’d wanted to be an art major, but her father had told her she would never make a living doing art and should get an MBA.

Perfect! I responded.  And how did you deal with this?

“Well, of course my father knows best. Plus he’s funding my education. I’m a business major.”

Two or three piped up in defense of their classmates that they all knew they would have to “pay their dues”, work at something they might not enjoy for several years--anything, really--and then retire at 50 to live the dream.

What dream? I wanted them to name.

They stared at me.

Not one of you wants to live on a commune?  Not one of you wants a sustainable garden? Not one of you has some burning passion you want to devote your life to…that goes against the grain of the existing culture? Or what your parents want you to do?

"I'm in Italy because my mother loved her study abroad experience. I don't see anything wrong with allowing parents to guide us. They have experience. They know better. Rebellion never works. It's just rebellion."

 They squirm a little.  They look out the corners of their eyes at each other. They are silent.

More out of politeness than passion, one of the shorn-headed boys offers:  “I’ve thought it would be nice to live an agrarian life. Maybe an organic farm. I play music. I do art.  I mean I can see why a gay writer like Forster would think rural life good for the soul, and why he would fantasize about a hot Italian man working in the field with muscles rippling. But I want a wife and kids and enough money to support them.”

Whose to say you can’t support your wife and kids on the commune?

“Oh, that’s right” (he’s growing a little sarcastic). “I’m going to meet my wife at Woodstock. The commune’s going to be HER idea.” His classmates laugh.

Another polite student comes to my rescue: “Well, I guess it’s a matter of deciding what we really mean by 'needs'.  What are real needs? What are culturally induced needs?"

Brava, Brava--I rally, too enthusiastic maybe. I am thrilled. I am excited.  This conversation is going somewhere after all. But at precisely the minute I believe I can steer the conversation back toward key passages in the novel, the electricity goes off and the room turns pitch dark.

It is raining heavily outside. Thunder, the incessant drone of downpour.  “This is awkward,” one of the kids calls out to me from the dark.  We wait for a moment in silence thinking there will be a reprieve, a sudden re-dawning of the lights. When no electricity seems forthcoming, I pull remembered contingencies from my hat:  Why did Lilia run off with Gino in the first place? What about British culture is Forster indicting here, or here or here?

Now I cannot even make out their faces.  The dark grows darker. The storm crashes on.

Please, please think about that baby on the dirty rug. That passage on page 95.  The kiss and a prayer, I say before dismissing them with a kiss and prayer.

This is the last month of the last semester that I will teach the Grand Tour seminar. I sit in the dark for a long while after my students have left considering the timing of my obsolescence and the inscrutable future that is beckoning them.