Only connect

Only connect is the motto Maddie Schwartz adopts for her newspaper column, a phrase she lifts from E. M. Forster's novel Howards End and transforms into a personal creed. In a speech before an erudite group of Presbyterians, she quotes the full passage: "Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer." The quotation is not mere decoration; it is the intellectual foundation of her entire project as a columnist, the principle she invokes to explain what her writing is for and why it matters.

The Column as Instrument

Maddie presents her column as embracing all aspects of life and celebrating all people, a claim that echoes Forster's injunction to live whole rather than fragmented. She deepens the metaphor by invoking Baltimore's own invention of the Ouija board, noting that she wrote about the heirs to that fortune the previous year. She then identifies herself with the planchette, the little plastic piece on which one balances one's fingers and, perhaps subconsciously, guides toward the answers one desires. The image is striking in its humility and its ambition: she is the instrument, the conduit, the tool through which readers find what they seek. "I am telling you the stories you want to hear, answering your questions. I am your instrument. Without my readers, I have no purpose." The column, in this framing, is not self-expression but service, a channel between the public and the answers they crave.

The Speech and Its Audience

The speech is delivered to a Presbyterian group, and Maddie's satisfaction afterward is telling: she sits down to thunderous applause and takes a sip of wine, reflecting that the best thing about talking to Presbyterians is that they serve alcohol at lunch. The moment captures the gap between the high seriousness of her stated philosophy and the practical, even wry, pleasures of her actual life. She is at once the earnest apostle of connection and the pragmatic professional who appreciates a good lunch. The applause confirms her performance, but the wine reminds her, and the reader, that she is also performing.

The Limits of Connection

Yet the motto carries a darker undertone when set against Maddie's actual circumstances. The speech is a public triumph, but it is also a refuge. When troubling thoughts invade, she writes a cheery seven hundred fifty words about her latest adventure in the Rotunda parking lot, or digs into her past, revisiting the time she was fondled at the Pikes Theater, a memory that now seems almost innocent. She returns at suitable intervals to the Tessie Fine story and her role in it. This is what she does, this is her life, a life of her choosing. She writes about herself, telling herself it is because she has done her time writing about others, but in her heart she knows she is always writing about herself, that the only story she could ever know is her own. The confession undercuts the Forsterian ideal: she preaches connection, but her writing is ultimately solipsistic, a circling back to her own experience.

The motto thus becomes ironic in her hands. Forster's "Only connect" is an exhortation to bridge the gap between the inner and outer life, to unite prose and passion in a way that exalts both. Maddie's version, for all its eloquence, is a way of managing her own fragments, of keeping the past at bay by turning it into column material. The planchette that guides others toward answers is also, perhaps, a way of avoiding her own. The final question she poses to herself, "Where am I, Maddie Schwartz?" suggests that the instrument of connection has not yet connected her to herself. The motto remains an aspiration, a promise she makes to her readers but cannot fully keep for herself.