Snobbery is to be sniffed at
By Harry Eyres
Published: July 31 2010 00:56 | Last updated: July 31 2010 00:56
A meeting a few years after I left university gave rise to a sharp pang of regret. The meeting happened at a diplomatic gathering in Rome and was with a girl I thought I vaguely recognised. When we got talking we realised we had both been at the same educational establishment half a dozen years earlier. I had been studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Elisabeth had been working as a server in the college hall to earn some pocket money while doing a course in English as a foreign language.
She was charming, beautiful, intelligent, all the things you could want anyone to be; we got on very well (I thought, at least) and she was firmly attached to someone else. The pang of regret was twofold: not only had I missed a possible friendship, but I had been so pigheadedly stupid and snobbish that I had never thought of passing the time of day with someone on the other side of the shiny metal counter.
I had been a snob, perhaps above all an intellectual snob, and intellectual snobbery has form at Cambridge. I was reminded of that recently when I went back to my old college to do some research on the people who once upon a time would have been called “college servants”.
I interviewed various gardeners, porters, bedmakers and others and was struck not just by the richness and depth of their personal stories but by how much I had missed out on when I was an undergraduate. We undergraduates, who thought, if not that we owned the place, at least that it existed for our benefit, were the interlopers. Most gardeners, porters and bedmakers were from Cambridge families, established in the Fenland capital for generations. We on the other hand were just passing through.
But far from resenting our arrogance, or presumption of privilege, they bore witness to warm relationships on either side of the supposed upstairs-downstairs divide. One elderly bedmaker recalled enjoyable banter, cups of tea and even punt rides shared with undergraduates. On the whole, bedmakers characterised their relationships with undergraduates as quasi-maternal, but one admitted to decidedly non-maternal feelings when she saw one of her “boys”, a Jordanian prince with whom she got on famously, dressed in full ceremonial regalia. Most strikingly, I found that it was often bedmakers who were the first to notice signs of distress and disturbance in overwrought students; maybe one or two had saved lives.
EM Forster lived at different times of his life in Cambridge, a bastion of the intellectual elite if ever there was one: honorary fellow and famous novelist, member of the Bloomsbury group and of Cambridge’s intellectual secret society, the Apostles. But he was never an entirely comfortable insider. For a start there was his homosexuality, expressed in the novel Maurice which he decided would only be published after his death. He disliked his public school, Tonbridge, and the system it represented. His early romances, Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View, pit Italian passion and naturalness against English repression, snobbery and sheer lack of joie de vivre.
Forster’s creed was liberalism. In What I Believe, having begun by stating “I do not believe in Belief”, he professed his reluctant faith: “Tolerance, good temper, and sympathy – they are what matter really.” Forster’s tolerance and sympathy famously extended to the people and religion of India in his last novel, A Passage to India, published in 1924.
The test of Forsterian liberalism is surely how much sympathy (not just tolerance) is shown to the outsider, the underdog, the Other. The crux comes in his penultimate novel, Howard’s End, and concerns his treatment of the insurance clerk who aspires to the cultured life, Leonard Bast. Bast, according to the haute bourgeoise intellectual Margaret Schlegel, has in his head “husks of books, husks of culture”. Or in the prissy-sounding verdict of the omniscient narrator, he was “one of the thousands who has lost the life of the body and failed to reach the life of the spirit”.
Forster, in other words, treats Bast abominably. He makes him weak and unattractive, and ensures that he comes to a pathetic and ironic end, crushed under a falling bookcase, full of the culture he could never quite reach. As Frank Kermode, writing with undiminished grace and acuity at 90, points out in his recent book Concerning EM Forster: “Forster was probably incapable of providing a fairer account of Bast, for in general he saw the poor as different from ‘us’.”
Forster, the greatest English liberal of his day, was undone by snobbery. When John Maynard Keynes, until then firmly homosexual, took up with and married the Russian dancer and actress Lydia Lopokova, Forster was among those Bloomsburyites who disparaged the brilliant and vivacious ballerina. He did at least live to express his regret: “How we all used to underestimate her.”
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