But what could be the roots of suburbophobia in urban progressive people? Forster’s political inclinations were courageously advanced for his time, yet he lovingly depicted endangered humanistic values thriving quietly in the aristocratic environment of Howards End. In contemporary America the urban creative class flocks in summertime to country landscapes long beloved as havens by people of wealth, developing Forsteresque attachments to those places alongside a horror of invading suburbia. What could be at stake for them—for us? I ask of myself as much as of anyone else. What is lost for us with the suburban development of the landscape?
The answer is many things—beauty, refuge, relief from the city. I wonder, too, if social position doesn’t also play a role here, even for this more modest class. Suburbia has been cast by Hollywood as a domain barren of culture and also politically conservative. That’s a stereotype, true of some suburbanites and not of others, but it’s a widespread assumption. So there is, perhaps, a level on which suburban development says to a creative or intellectual person, “There is no place for you here.”
But my guess is that the need for a sense of transcendent providential order that beautiful country can convey is the wellspring of cosmopolitan devotion to pastoral landscapes and antipathy to suburban ones as well. Quite aside from theistic doctrine, the capacity to sense ourselves as part of something larger than ourselves, and, indeed, the need to exercise that capacity, to feed it, to keep it in play in our lives—to be in relation to dimensions of life beyond our comprehension—is an elemental part of our humanity for many of us. It was for Forster surely: I can think of no other explanation for why this atheistic progressive made of a feudal holding a symbol of spiritual health.
The problem with transcendence for progressives is that it is conservative in a profound way. I would venture that Howards End expresses a conservativism in Forster, in the sense of valuing what has accumulated over time, and the ways in which it can amount to something more than the sum of its parts, its uses, its price; a conservativism that was at odds with his progressive values yet could be expressed through a relationship to place depicted in Howards End; but only because that world was depicted as sufficiently obsolete that issues of power and status, of exclusion and exploitation, were not at play. The actual form of suburbia, in contrast, breaks up landscape into tiny pieces, spreading out indefinitely, undoing the pastoral terrain as context—as something larger than ourselves. It balkanizes an age-old archetype of providential order—much as most progressives would resist that quasi-theistic idea. The pastoral landscape is the last resort of secular humanists in search of a quiet expression of their sense of transcendence—and the suburban formation destroys that. Long-shot speculation? Well, yes. But maybe it opens a tiny chink in the mystery of suburbophobia.
It would seem that just setting foot on American soil entailed contracting the “city is bad” virus.The lecture that was on the tip of my tongue at lunch with Caroline and Kate was about the English origins of American suburbia. In Bourgeois Utopias, historian Robert Fishman identifies William Wilberforce, an 18th-century British evangelical preacher and crusader for the abolition of slavery, as the founder of the first modern suburban community, outside the farm village of Clapham, not far from London. Its pleasant environment of airy houses surrounded by lawns was an idealized country setting, in an actual working country landscape, but near enough to the city that the men could get there to work. As London grew, becoming an industrial city, it turned, in the eyes of Wilberforce and other religious people, into a cauldron of evil unsuitable for women and children: “The city is bad.”
Wilberforce’s settlement had communal spaces, but as the suburban idea became more popular these fell away. The prevailing model became the “villa,” surrounded by walls. This was a small-scale imitation of the aristocratic estate. The driving idea remained that “the city is bad,” physically and also morally: women and children should be removed to a more wholesome environment. Continental Europeans, who experienced exactly the same enlargement of their cities as well as the same cultural changes, didn’t recoil in this way at all. What Anglo-Saxons saw as vices—theater, restaurants, society, and less legitimate activities, too—they saw as attractions.
In Paris, for example, the luxury apartment building, invented for the rising industrial class, appeared along grand new avenues, such as the Champs-Élysées. Paris was the arbiter of fashion on the Continent. Suburbanization did not happen in Europe. America, however, though over half a century behind, took up the British moral loathing of cities: after all, our Puritanism originated in England. Still, the first waves of suburbanites in 20th-century America were of European extraction, descendants of immigrants who had come across the ocean for jobs. It would seem that just setting foot on American soil entailed contracting the “city is bad” virus, but then most 19th-century immigrants to America were not coming from luxury apartments on the Champs-Élysées. Many in fact were coming from peasant lives in quasi-feudal sectors of Europe, in which home ownership was beyond the reach of most.
To satisfy my suspicion that the springs of suburbophobia are lodged in a hidden relationship to providence, I have to trace back in English history past the villas to the aristocratic model on which they—unlike Clapham—were based. The villas were not imitating old landed estates like Howards End. Their model was a new aesthetic, first embraced by some in the old landed aristocracy, and then taken up in force by the new industrial capitalists, self-made men who derived their wealth not from the land on which they lived but from factories in the cities or plantations in faraway colonies.
This was an industrial-age severance of work from domestic life, breaking the direct relationship between survival and nature as we live in it. A confusing factor is that, though the industrial barons sought to overthrow the old aristocracy with free-market values and social mobility, they fervently sought to imitate the style of the old estates. On most of these work and life had been intertwined since time immemorial. But it was the newer picturesque style that appealed to the self-made industrialists.
This style was the creation of a great generation of British landscape designers who had sprung up in the second half of the 18th century; Lancelot “Capability” Brown and Sir Humphry Repton were among the most famous. These geniuses distilled the aesthetic qualities of the older estates, qualities that had evolved out from the requirements of agrarian work and of a feudal social arrangement. Lifting these qualities off their practical foundation, they created idealized facsimiles, evocative landscape romances that looked like the “real thing” but weren’t.
And indeed there were differences. On older estates, as they had evolved over time, the cow pasture came up to the house, separated from it, perhaps, by only a small formal garden. Villages inhabited by the people who worked the land were located where they had originated in the mists of time. Fields fell out in formations that had, in some instances, first been laid out in prehistoric times. In the new facsimiles, terrain was artificially harmonized and eyesores removed, cows and rough pasture put at a distance at which they are pretty, a lake created where it would improve the composition, fields tailored to visual pleasure, too, less ideal elements excised or made over.
Indeed, in one famous case a whole village was removed, because it spoiled the view from the great house. The style was called picturesque, a word that in itself conveys separation, a frame: “picturelike”—not a farmer’s term, certainly, but it was entirely suitable for estates that were not in themselves the source of their owners’ wealth but principally built for pleasure.
Is not the phobia, at bottom, a fear of exposure to the truths of modern times that finds a quiet, sub rosa expression in the language of feelings about landscape?Indeed, pictures literally were the models for the idealizing aesthetic, in particular swooningly romanticized pastoral scenes by the French painter Claude Lorrain.
The villas, the first stabilized model of English suburbia, were, in turn, small-scale imitations of the facsimile estates. Each villa was a compartmentalized landscape, strictly separate from the realm of work. The picturesque aesthetic was miniaturized by British horticulturist John Claudius Loudon. An ocean of such tiny walled landscapes spread out inexorably, enveloping the old countryside, extensions of the ever enlarging industrial cities of England: the gray force that was approaching Howards End. The breakup into miniature units destroyed the continuousness of the natural world and the long evolving relationship of people to it, as evoked by Forster.
This destruction of a world in which work and life are intertwined in an ancient landscape overtly animates Forster’s antipathy to suburbia in Howards End. He seems to be saying of the modern world, “We need something else, we had something else, and whatever that is we can’t live without it as full human beings,” and then he cooks up a mysterious world of pigs’ teeth in the wych elm and an imbedded relation to nature with its origins in the mists of time, without noticing that he was embracing a remnant of feudalism. Are not we latter-day American suburbophobes of a piece with Forster? Maybe we need something more, too, but don’t have a way to define it in our political and social universe.
Is not the phobia, at bottom, a fear of exposure to the truths of modern times that finds a quiet, sub rosa expression in the language of feelings about landscape? Forster created a place-language that arose out of a visceral sense that the ancient country of England was good and suburban development was bad. I am no scholar of English attitudes, but it seems likely to me that this structure of feeling had been in the cultural air for some time before Forster brilliantly expressed it in his novel. The social history of our landscape is very different, but it seems likely that in our reaction against suburbia there are strands of the Fosteresque contradictory thirst as well.
Over here in America, Andrew Jackson Downing developed both architectural forms and garden designs for suburban Americans: he is regarded as the founder of landscape architecture in the United States. His first book, which drew heavily on Loudon’s designs, was published in 1841. He was a passionate democrat. He hoped his standardized designs for suburban houses—the Italianate, the Gothic, the Bracketed—would bring to the common man a dignity long denied him.
He also believed in large urban parks for a similar reason. His partner was Calvert Vaux. Downing died very young, in an accident. After Downing’s death Vaux entered a partnership with Frederick Law Olmsted, a landscape designer who became famous for his large pastoral urban parks. Olmsted was also a passionate democrat. On a trip overseas he was impressed by the picturesque aesthetic developed for the English estates, but was repelled by the social inequity of the aristocratic system.
With Vaux he designed Central Park in New York in which a picturesque environment was open to all. Olmsted adored the natural landscape, but one could actually argue that, hero today to urbanists and suburbophobes alike, he was a great suburbophile and in fact had a hand in inventing the archetype. Indeed, he laid down the suburban ideal in the creation of Riverside, Illinois, on the outskirts of Chicago, a rolling landscape created from scratch on the flat prairie, planted with quantities of imported trees and bushes and laid out with winding roads that unfolded scenes in the most pleasing, seemingly pastoral way—a creation as severed from the continuous providential world of working country as could be. Toward the end of his life, he lived in Brookline, a rich early suburb of Boston. Brookline is famous for resisting annexation but Olmsted did not see cities and suburbs as opposed but rather as necessary to each other. He did not design Brookline but he admired the qualities that had evolved there of comfortable houses on grassy leafy plots with railroad access to dense central Boston.
Olmsted did not hate cities. He understood that cities, with their economic and cultural dynamism, were essential to the age and sought to civilize them—perfect them—with parks, and also suburban outskirts that provided relief from density. Still, suburbophobe that I am, I have to laugh at the fact that Olmsted not only was a suburbophile but made significant contributions to the suburban aesthetic. I laugh because of the way this embrace of suburban ideals collides with the sacred structure of feeling with regard to cities and suburbia among urbanists and country lovers alike: myself, for example. I laugh because these attributes are so indelible in myself: at the fact that, for all my earnest efforts to unmask old structures of feeling and to reimagine the contemporary landscape in a forward-looking way, it remains that if I were to climb the beautifully refurbished steeple of the village church and, looking down the valley, see McMansions there, I would suffer.
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From The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape. Used with permission of Counterpoint Press. Copyright © 2019 by Suzannah Lessard.
