The View from the Room

It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons. It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and close below, the Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.               E. M. Forster. A Room with a View

New York City is not Florence but it has its own distinct views.  I love this from my apartment especially in the evening when the sky is lit with pink and the light reflects off the buildings on the other side of Broadway. 

And thinking of the view and how much I enjoy its distinctly mundane aspects – the water towers, the blinded windows and flat rooftops took me back to E. M. Forster  And I started reading and was so struck with the deft slice and dice of his pen as he reveals and dissects the codes of class and behavior of the guests at the “Pension Bertolini. The snobbery and snootery of middle class Edwardian class distinctions are on full display. It starts with the view – lack thereof – and an offer of an exchange of rooms that raises issues of decorum and propriety.

Oh! the stuffiness, and layered codes of class and rigidity of manners. Forster shines a light on the the hidden and forbidden below the surface and it is delicious. The communal dining arrangements of the first evening allow for the characters to show themselves and for the themes of the novel get underway

In the opening chapter, Miss Bartlett traveling as chaperone to her young cousin Lucy complains about the rooms they have been given. Promised a view of the Arno, they have been given rooms with smells from from courtyard. And – almost as bad – the hotelkeeper is a Cockney and the meat tastes as if it’s been used for soup.  Rudely overhearing the discontent, and in a shocking breach of decorum, the tactless “socialist” Mr. Emerson offers to switch his room, and his son’s, with theirs. Later, when Miss Bartlett accepts, her determination to observe propriety prompts her to take the larger room. She explains this decision to Lucy:

Naturally, of course, I should have given it to you; but I happen to know that it belongs to the young man, and I was sure your mother would not like it.

How convenient.

The hotel guest are there for the full English Florence

Taking up Baedeker’s Handbook to Northern Italy, she committed to memory the most important dates of Florentine History. For she was determined to enjoy herself on the morrow.

The exchange of rooms sets the stage for the expansion and exchange of ideas and perspectives. Lucy’s weltanschauung is about to challenged and changed. Well – as we all know – that’s the whole point of fictional Italy. 

… yet, have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time—beautiful?” “Beautiful?” said Miss Bartlett, puzzled at the word. “Are not beauty and delicacy the same?” “So one would have thought,” said the other helplessly. “But things things are so difficult, I sometimes think.”

And so the muddles begin. 

The 1985 film (director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala ) deftly captures the novel’s opening. And of course the cast is perfect:

More room complaints. This time it’s Fawlty Towers and the view is of Torquay.