Maria DiBattista

INTRODUCTION: A Motto for Moral Diplomacy

Introduction: A Motto for Moral Diplomacy “Only connect . . .” — is there any single phrase that offers a more direct and humane method of conflict resolution? This sensible exhortation serves as the epigraph for E. M. Forster’s 1910 “condition of England” novel, Howards End, in which Forster humorously, then desperately, plots to get people, classes, and even places (rural England versus cosmopolitan London) utterly opposed in character and in values to “connect.” The moral good of human connection, the central theme of all of Forster’s fiction, is a primary article of his humanistic creed, as expounded with great urgency and yet a certain wistfulness in his 1938 essay “What I Believe.” “I realize,” he confesses,“Only connect . . .,” the epigraph of Forster’s Howards End , offers itself as a model of moral diplomacy. The efficacy of genuine human connection — whether it takes the form of creative action or of decent human relations — in containing and civilizing force is an idea that informs the novel’s conception of what constitutes and ensures civilized life. Forster regarded propriety and convention as expressions of force and so applauded any assault on conventional feeling as an act of moral heroism. This essay introduces the third installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means”: it explores and indeed extols the moral efficacy of connection in containing force and resolving conflicts, but it also contemplates the obstacles to connection, which Forster dramatizes with his characteristic honesty.

Peace by Other Means:: Symposium on the Role of Ethnography and the Humanities in the Understanding, Prevention, and Resolution of Enmity Part 3

Introduction: A Motto for Moral Diplomacy “Only connect . . .” — is there any single phrase that offers a more direct and humane method of conflict resolution? This sensible exhortation serves as the epigraph for E. M. Forster’s 1910 “condition of England” novel, Howards End, in which Forster humorously, then desperately, plots to get people, classes, and even places (rural England versus cosmopolitan London) utterly opposed in character and in values to “connect.” The moral good of human connection, the central theme of all of Forster’s fiction, is a primary article of his humanistic creed, as expounded with great urgency and yet a certain wistfulness in his 1938 essay “What I Believe.” “I realize,” he confesses,“Only connect . . .,” the epigraph of Forster’s Howards End , offers itself as a model of moral diplomacy. The efficacy of genuine human connection — whether it takes the form of creative action or of decent human relations — in containing and civilizing force is an idea that informs the novel’s conception of what constitutes and ensures civilized life. Forster regarded propriety and convention as expressions of force and so applauded any assault on conventional feeling as an act of moral heroism. This essay introduces the third installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means”: it explores and indeed extols the moral efficacy of connection in containing force and resolving conflicts, but it also contemplates the obstacles to connection, which Forster dramatizes with his characteristic honesty.

Peace by Other Means

Introduction: A Motto for Moral Diplomacy “Only connect . . .” — is there any single phrase that offers a more direct and humane method of conflict resolution? This sensible exhortation serves as the epigraph for E. M. Forster’s 1910 “condition of England” novel, Howards End, in which Forster humorously, then desperately, plots to get people, classes, and even places (rural England versus cosmopolitan London) utterly opposed in character and in values to “connect.” The moral good of human connection, the central theme of all of Forster’s fiction, is a primary article of his humanistic creed, as expounded with great urgency and yet a certain wistfulness in his 1938 essay “What I Believe.” “I realize,” he confesses,“Only connect . . .,” the epigraph of Forster’s Howards End , offers itself as a model of moral diplomacy. The efficacy of genuine human connection — whether it takes the form of creative action or of decent human relations — in containing and civilizing force is an idea that informs the novel’s conception of what constitutes and ensures civilized life. Forster regarded propriety and convention as expressions of force and so applauded any assault on conventional feeling as an act of moral heroism. This essay introduces the third installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means”: it explores and indeed extols the moral efficacy of connection in containing force and resolving conflicts, but it also contemplates the obstacles to connection, which Forster dramatizes with his characteristic honesty.

The G-String Murders (review)

The G-String Murders may be one of those instances when it is quite fair to judge a book by its cover. This claim is more complicated and less snooty than it initially may sound. The art of the alluring cover might reasonably preoccupy a fi rst time mystery writer best known for the faux refi nement of her stripping act. In a letter to her editor on this very subject, Gypsy Rose Lee, with her headliner’s eye for glint, wonders if the dust jacket for her debut fi ction might feature “a picture full length of a stripper? Semi nude. The G-string actually silver fl itter (very inexpensive, that fl itter business). And a separate piece of paper pasted on a skirt, like birthday cards, you know? The customers can lift the skirt, and there’s the G-String sparkling gaily. It is strictly gag business but it might cause talk” (241). The cover-gag is tawdry, and Gypsy knows it, but she also knows what attracts customers. Her idea never materialized, but the spirit behind it survives in the last word of the novel—publicity. The G-String Murders is, if nothing else, the work of someone who knows her business. In this instance, the business is burlesque. When the novel was published in 1941, the back cover carried this endorsement by Janet Flanner: “Here is the living portrait of burlesque with assorted deaths thrown in.” Flanner, an avid reader of detective fi ction and one of the fi rst Americans to read and appreciate Simenon, also knew her business. She doesn’t oversell the book’s mystery element, since she recognized, as did Gypsy, that the its primary appeal was its insider’s account of the world and the people of burlesque. Gypsy sharpens the mystery à clé angle by making herself the fi rst person narrator and principal character of her own mystery, playing fast and loose with the facts of her own biography much as a publicity director might have advised. Perhaps the modern novel, which so often made the fi rst person narrator a semi-transparent alter ego for the author, gave her the idea. Gypsy had read the modernists. She even lived with them at a time, renting a room and bringing a measure of bourgeois order and domesticity to 7 Middagh Street, the famous brownstone in Brooklyn that, between 1940 and 1941, was the haven for a group of established and emerging modernists—W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Jane and Paul Bowles, Carson Macullers, and Gypsy’s friend, George Davis. Gypsy apparently felt as much at home in American and continental modernism as she did on the burlesque stage and in fact imported her highbrow learning as comic embellishment for her lowbrow (to put it nicely) act. Rachel Shteir, in her informative and appreciate afterword, explores and comes to endorse this public image of Gypsy as a “strip tease intellectual.” She points to the way Gypsy exploited “the titillating tension between books and stripping” (217) in her signature number, which eventually became the center of her Follies act. Among the lines she quotes are these: