A Room With a View - In Santa Croce with no Rough Guide

"If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting both for us and for her." (Mr Bebe to Lucy Honeychurch in E.M. Forster's A Room With A View

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The timeline isn't just muddled, it makes no sense at all. I visited Florence in 1997, waking up in a hotel on Via Fiume to the news that Diana had died. This caused a bizarre argument with my then American girlfriend - I was serving on the Royal Yacht Britannia at the time and there was a real chance that I would be recalled from my three weeks of leave, and have to cut our European trip short. We didn't need to, and we left Florence with sweet memories of gelato ice cream, the view from the Belvedere, and dinner in sight of the Bell Tower. I first read E. M. Forster's partially Florentine novel, A Room With A View, in 2001, and my earlier visit had given me a vivid sense of the scene where Lucy Honeychurch spent a morning wandering around the interior of Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore. Except, after recently watching Merchant Ivory's sparky adaptation of the novel for the very first time, I was puzzled to find this scene taking place in the Basilica di Santa Croce. Quite the swap, I thought. Or perhaps it was that permission to film inside Duomo di Firenzi had not been granted? I picked up the novel to check and realised that my initial reading had imagined it completely wrong. The scene was, indeed, set in Santa Croce. 

Rather than blushing, I began to enjoy the Proustian slipperiness of it. In a novel awash with misunderstandings - not just of other people but especially of the self - it seemed fitting that my own memory had egotistically fixed Lucy's visit inside the location I knew best. Did I even imagine myself gazing on Giotto's ascending saints, frescoes that I'd never even seen? Either way, to paraphrase the chapter's title, I was 'In Santa Croce with no Rough Guide'. 

Thomas Cole, View of Florence from San Miniato (1837)

I also decided to reread the novel. What struck me was just how gloriously funny and light it was. There are dabs of seriousness - particularly when Forster turns his sights onto the ridiculousness of the Edwardian class system: for me, the thematic binary of the novel is how kindness clashes with class. But rereading through the prism of the film and also of not relying upon my clearly muddled memory of the city, made for a very satisfying experience. 

Merchant Ivory and the ultimate spoiler, using the film's final scene as the poster 

Two things intrigued me, the first being, how we are to regard the character of Cecil Vyse? There is no doubt that he is the story's fool, a pompous and ridiculous man who inhabits a dry, fusty intellectual world bereft of passion and sex. My first reading of the novel conjured up images of that other bookish eunuch, Middlemarch's Edward Casaubon. George Emerson brutally skewers Cecil: 

"He is the sort who are all right so long as they keep to things - books, pictures - but kill when they come to people."  

The film soften Cecil's edges, though and comparisons to Casaubon are revealed as harsh. Daniel Day Lewis is too good an actor to play a cypher, and so he brings a majestic pathos to the portrayal. The most memorable scene in the film follows on from Lucy breaking off her engagement with him. The moment isn't in the novel but it conjures up an adage, that if you are going to get dumped make sure you do it in your own house or outside. Cecil, slowly putting on his boots at the foot of Lucy's stairs and beginning to tie his laces, is heartbreaking.      

Poor Cecil

The second thing that struck me again involved misremembering (once is misfortunate, twice begins to looks like carelessness). This time it involved the mixing up of Beethoven. My favourite of the German's piano sonatas is Piano Sonata No.21, the Waldstein. And if you'd asked why, I would have told you that I first sought it out and grew to love it after reading of Lucy Honeychurch playing it in Forster's novel. Even after watching the film, and rereading the novel, I was still hearing the Waldstein. However, this is not what Forster has picked out for his heroine to play (first my close reading takes a hit and then my close listening). Instead, what I should have been paying attention to is the much more ambitious - certainly to perform - Piano Sonata No.32.      

The barely-catch-your-breath breeziness of the earlier sonata is such a rush, and although clearly a challenge to play well, is an instant joy for the listener. Piano Sonata No.32 though is a different matter, a challenge for both performer and listener. However, since discovering my second faux pas, I've been listening to it daily. I might not have the requisite bath in which to listen - I'm reliably informed that this is the best place to soak up the Sonatas - but I think that I am now beginning to both appreciate its depths and complexity. 

In particular, a moment around two and a half minutes into the second movement, the Arietta, finds a sad and resigned procession of notes suddenly resolving towards an airy and tender lightness that can't help but remind me of Swann's realisation of la petite phrase. That I also have found myself cueing up one of my favourite pieces of music ever, Debussy's Suite Bergamasque, as the bars of the Beethoven close out - the Frenchman almost seems to be alluding to the German's stimmung - means that something is beginning to stick.    

Later Beethoven - always annoyed

These mistakes should make me wince. That they don't - I find the relocation of Lucy's morning a fascinating commentary on the unreliability of memory, and the mixing up of Sonatas mean that I've paid greater attention to a difficult piece of music - is an amusing readerly complement to Lucy's own misreadings. And besides, Daniel Day Lewis is giving no truck to exactness when he asks us to look much more sympathetically at Cecil. 

Indeed, the novel also suggests that real life isn't about detail and correctness but rather experience, and God knows, Covid is giving us far too much of the former and not enough of the latter. To return to Florence sometime in the future, to walk a hundred yards east from Santa Maria towards Santa Croce, is a must. My memory will still, no doubt, play tricks on me, or even reveal further embarrassments, but it will be a joy to begin to match and mismatch and discover, once again, words, music and experience.