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E(dward) M(organ) Forster (1879-1970) |
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English author and critic, member of Bloomsbury group and friend of Virginia Woolf. After gaining fame as a novelist, E. M. Forster spent his 46 remaining years publishing mainly short stories and non-fiction. Of his five important novels four appeared before World War I. Forster's major concern was that individuals should "connect the prose with the passion" within themselves, and that one of the most exacting aspect of the novel is prophecy. "If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people—a very few people, but a few novelists are among them—are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is against such a search: organized religion, the State, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent." (Aspects of the Novel by E . M. Forster, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927, p. 245) Edward Morgan Forster was born in London as the son of an architect, who died before his only child was two years old. Forster's childhood and much of his adult life was dominated by his mother and his aunts. The legacy of her paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton, descendant of the Clapham Sect of evangelists and reformers, gave later Forster the freedom to travel and to write. Forster's years at Tonbridge School as a teenager were difficult – he suffered from the cruelty of his classmates. Forster attended King's College, Cambridge (1897-1901), where he met members of the future Bloomsbury group. In the atmosphere of skepticism, he became under the influence of Sir Jamer Frazer, Nathaniel Wedd, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, and G.E. Moore, and shed his not very deep Christian faith. After graduating he travelled in Italy and Greece with his mother, and on his return began to write essays and short stories for the liberal Independent Review. "Nothing more great will come of me," he stated in his diary. In 1905 Foster spent several month in German as tutor to the children of the Countess von Armin. In the same year appeared his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread. In the following year he lectured on Italian art and history for the Cambridge Local Lectures Board. The Longest Journey, then A Room with a View (1908) was partly based on the material from extended holidays in Italy with his mother. The first part of the novel is set in Florence, where the young Lucy Honeychurch is visitng with her older cousin Charlotte Bartless. Lucy witnesses a murder and becomes caught between two man, shallow, conventional Cecil Vyse and George Emerson, who kisses Lucy during a picnic. The second half of the novel takes place at Windy Corner, Lucy's home on Summer Street. She accepts a marriage proposal from Cecil. The Emerson become friends of the Honeychurches after George, Mr. Beebe, who is a clergyman, and Freddie, Lucy's brother, are discovered bathing nude in the woods. Finally Lucy overcomes prejudices and marries George. Forster also wrote during the pre-war years a number of short stories, which were collected in The Celestial Omnibus (1914). Most of them were symbolic fantasies or fables. Howards End (1910) was a story that centered on an English country house and dealt with the clash between two families, one interested in art and literature, the other only in business. The book brought together the themes of money, business and culture. "To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge ; the poor cannot afford it." (Howards End, New York: Trident Press International, 2000, p. 33) This work established Forster's reputation, and he embarked upon a new novel with a homosexual theme, Maurice. The picture of British attitudes not long after Wilde was revised several times during his life, and finally published posthumously in 1971. His personal life Forster hid from public discussion. Self-doubts plagued him the most in his life. "I shall grow queer and unpopular if I go on as I am now," he said in his diary. In 1930 he had a relationship with a London policeman. This important contact continued after the marriage of his London friend. Between the years 1912 and 1913 Forster travelled in India.
From 1914 to 1915 he worked for the National Gallery in London.
Following the outbreak of World War I, Forster joined the Red Cross and
served in Alexandria, Egypt. There he met the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy, and published a selection of his
poems in Pharaos and Pharillon
(1923). His conversations with wounded soldiers he recorded in his diary. In 1921 Forster returned to India, working as a private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas. The land was the scene of his masterwork A Passage to India (1924), an account of India under British rule. The two last chapters were written under the influence of Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It was Forster's last novel – and for the remaining 46 years of his life he devoted himself to other activities. In the novel he said: "Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence. Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend." Moreover, writing about "the love of men for women & vice versa" was not the most important element in Forster's life; already in 1910 he stated in his notebook, known as "the Locked Diary," that he was wary of the subject. A Passage to India. Adela Quested visits Chandrapore with Mrs Moore in order to make up her mind whether to marry the latter's son. Mrs Moore meets his friend Dr Azis, assistant to the British Civil Surgeon. She and Adela accept Azis's invitation to visit the mysterious Marabar Caves. In this trip Mrs Moore nearly faints in the cave and goes mad for an instant. Adela asks Azis, "Have you one wife or more than one?" and he is shocked. "But to ask an educated Indian Moslem how many wive he has – appalling, hideous!" She believes herself to have been the victim of a sexual assault by Azis, who is arrested. Adela is pushed forward by his frieds and family but she admits that she was mistaken. "Something that she did not understand took hold of the girl and pulled her through. Though the vision was over, and she had returned to the insipidity of the world, she remembered what she had learnt. Atonement and confession – they could wait. It was in hard prosaic tones that she sais: 'I withdraw everything.'" Mrs Moore dies on the voyage home at sea. "The heat, I suppose," Mr Hamidullah says. Azis has changed his liberal views. "We may hate one another, but we hate you most. If I don't make you go, Ahmed will, Karim will, if it's fifty-hundred years we shall get rid of you; yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then' – he rode against him furiously – 'and then,' he concluded, half kissing him, 'you and I shall be friends.'" The novel's title derives from Walt Whitman, but the American poet's celebration of the opening of the Suez Canal as bringing together East and West is qualified by Kipling's assertion that 'ne'er the twain shall meet.' The Nobel writer V. S. Naipaul dismissed the novel as "utter rubbish". After Forster's
death his literary executors turned down approaches from Joseph Losey,
Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, and Waris Hussein, to make a feature
film adaptation of A Passage
to India. Eventually David Lean was approved as
director. At that time, Lean was in self-imposed retirement, following
the critical failure of Ryan's
Daughter.
The score was composed by Maurice Jarre. Not to upset the distributors
"with too much weird music," Lean insisted that the score was written
with a minimum of ethnic instrumentation. Like T. E. Lawrence,
Forster had a dislike of the cinema and refused to sell film rights to
his books, fearing that the meaning of a novel could be destroyed by
changing the story for the masses. (Ironically, today
he would not be as widely known as he is without film adaptations of
his books.) Lean was criticized that he produced
his own vision of India, not Forster's. He also changed the ending of
the story, defending himself: "Look, this novel was written hot on the
movement for Indian independence. I think the end is a lot of hogwash
so far as a movie is concerned. It's highly symbolic." (David Lean: A
Biography by Kevin Brownlow, New York: A Wyatt Book for St. Martin's Press, 1997, pp. 682-683) Miss
Quested was made more sympathetic than she originally was. Lean thought
that Forster didn't care for her, but she is the one who sets the story
in motion. Forster's antipathy toward film industry began to change when he visited Hollywood on the invitation of Christopher Isherwood. He went to a studio, where Little Friend (1934), adapted for the screen by Isherwood and Margaret Kennedy, was under work, and later had to admit: "I have often thought about it and described it to other people without interesting them. It is a milieu – so energetic, friendly and horrible. . . . Every film I ever see will now appear incredibly good." (Filming Forster: The Challenges in Adapting E.M. Forster's Novels for the Screen by Earl G. Ingersoll, Fairleigh Dickson University Press, 2012, pp. 14-15) However, after an unfortunate experience with the war documentary A Diary for Timothy (1945), directed by Humphrey Jennings, his view turned sour again. Forster wrote the script for this meditation on Britain's future. The film conveys his liberal humanism, but when it was released he was disappointed to discover that the changes he had suggested had been ignored. Throughout his life, Forster wrote literary criticism. He
contributed reviews and essays to numerous journals,
most notably the Listener.
He was an active member of PEN, in
1934 he became the first president of the National Council for Civil
Liberties. Music was always an important part of Foster's life. He
played piano, went to concerts, wrote constantly about music, and
collaborated with musicians. Peter Burra, the writer of The Novels of E. M. Forster
(1934), called Foster "a musician who chose the novel because he had
ideas to utter which needed a more distinct articulation than music
could make." (quoten in E. M Forster and Music by Tsung-Han Tsai, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, p. 6) Benjamin Britten praised Forster for his undestanding of music. Since 1924, Forster lived in the house which his father had designed at Abinger Hammer, but after his mother's death in 1945, he was elected an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and spent there for the remainder of his life. In 1949 Forster refused a knighthood. Forster was made a Companion of Honour in 1953 and in 1969 he accepted an Order of Merit. Growing deafness robbed Foster the pleasure of enjoying music the way he used to, but in 1951 he collaborated with Eric Crozier on the libretto of Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd, based on Herman Melville's novel. Its film version from 1962 was directed Peter Ustinov. E. M. Forster died on June 7, 1970. "So Two Cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there are no occasion to gibe three. Only Love the Beloved Republic deserves that." (Two Cheers for Democracy by E. M. Forster, San Diego, [Calif.]: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1977, p. 70; first published in 1951) Forster
often criticized in his books Victorian middle class
attitudes and British colonialism through strong woman characters, but
they were not one-dimensional moutpieces for his thought. Except his
devotion to such values as tolerance and sense
of comedy, Forster was uncommitted. "For we must admit that flat people
are
not in themselves as big achievement as round ones, and also that they
are best when they are comic. A serious or tragic flat character is apt
to be a bore. Each time he enters crying "Revenge!" or "My heart bleeds
for humanity!" or whatever his formula is, out hearts sink." (in Aspects
of
the Novel, p. 111) The epithet 'Fosterian' – liberal,
unconventional,
sceptical, moral – had started to circulate since the publication of Howards
End. Forster's much quoted essay 'Two Cheers for Democracy,' originally printed in 1938 in the New York Nation and entitled also 'What I Believe,' reflected his concern for individual liberty. He assumed liberal humanism not dogmatically but ironically, writing in unpompous style and taking the stand of a mild dissident. He famously stated, "if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." (Two Cheers for Democracy, p. 68) For further reading: E. M. Forster by Lionel Trilling (1943); The Novels of E. M. Forster by James McConley (1957); Down There on a Visit: A Novel by Christopher Isherwood (1962); The Achievement of E. M. Foerster by J. B. Beer (1962); The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E. M. Forster by Wilfred Stone (1966); E. M. Forster: A Life by B.N. Furbank (2 vols., 1977-78); An E.M. Forster Dictinary by Alfredo Borello (1971); An E.M. Forster Glossary by Alfredo Borello (1972); The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary, ed. by S.P. Rosenbaum (1975); A Bibliography of E.M. Forster by Brownlee Jean Kirkpatrick (1986); E. M. Forster, ed. Harold Bloom (1987); A Passage to India: Nation and Narration by Judith Scherer Herz (1993); A Passage to India, ed. Tony Davies and Nigel Wood (1994); The Prose and the Passion: Anthropology, Literature and the Writing of E. M. Forster by Nigel Rapport (1994); Morgan: A Biography of E.M. Forster by Nicola Beauman (1994); E.M. Forster: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Jeremy Tambling (1995); The Modernist as Pragmatist: E.M. Forster and the Fate of Liberalism by Brian May (1997); Queer Forster, ed. Robert K. Martin and George Piggford (1997); Howards End, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (1998); E. M. Forster: A New Life by Wendy Moffat (2010); Filming Forster: The Challenges in Adapting E.M. Forster's Novels for the Screen by Earl G. Ingersoll (2012); Compromise and Resistance in Postcolonial Writing: E. M. Forster's Legacy by Alberto Fernández Carbajal (2014); Only Connect: E. M. Forster's Legacies in British Fiction, edited by Elsa Cavalié & Laurent Mellet (2017); E. M Forster and Music by Tsung-Han Tsai (2021) Selected bibliography:
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