Good afternoon everybody. I am very pleased to have been invited by Sekai O Miru Kai to talk to you about the twentieth century British novelist E. M. Forster. I want to emphasize straightaway that I am not at all an “E. M. Forster expert” but just somebody who enjoys reading his novels and essays, which I first came across when I was 16 or 17 and studying “A level” English Literature at a college in Tonbridge, the same town in Kent where E. M. Forster was sent to a small boarding school consisting of just 30 boys. Sensitive and homesick, Forster didn’t really fit in and had a miserable time being bullied and humiliated by the other boys.
Tonbridge is very close to Tunbridge Wells; those of you who have read – I mean read, not seen the film – those of you who have read Forster’s novel, A Room With A View, will remember that Mr Beebe, the friendly vicar, first heard Lucy Honeychurch play the piano at an event in Tunbridge Wells and that,
“his composure was disturbed by the opening bars of [Beethoven’s] opus 111.”
I know even less about Beethoven than I know about E. M. Forster, but opus 111 is said to be a challenging piece of music for any amateur pianist to play, even if she only plays the first movement, as Lucy Honeychurch did in Tunbridge Wells. The American pianist Robert Taub has called Beethoven’s opus 111,
“a work of unmatched drama and transcendence … the triumph of order over chaos, of optimism over anguish.”
The Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel commented of the second movement that,
“what is to be expressed here is distilled experience” and “perhaps nowhere else in piano literature does mystical experience feel so immediately close at hand”.
As well as being a novelist, E. M. Forster was an amateur musician who could play the piano tolerably well and who had a deep and abiding interest in Beethoven. Forster also helped the British composer Benjamin Brittan with the libretto of his opera Billy Budd. In Forster’s novels we often find a musical quality. Benjamin Brittan, said that Forster was “our most musical novelist” and so we must be alert for little phrases or even single words that are repeated at certain points through the narrative of a particular novel – and these words and phrases often point to an “unmatched drama and transcendence”, a “triumph of order over chaos” and we sometimes find in Forster’s novels a sense of the mystical to be “immediately close at hand,” a sudden sense of “drama and transcendence” breaking through the surface of bourgoise life. Optimism sometimes, but by no means always triumph over anguish, as it ultimately does for Lucy Honeychurch in A Room With A View.
But, before I say anything more about the six novels that E. M. Forster wrote, I want to talk a little about who E. M. Forster was, to give you some background about the man and his view of life and of other writers. After that I want to look very briefly at each of his novels in turn, to give you a brief outline of the stories they each tell – if only because, as E. M. Forster said in a lecture at Cambridge, and wrote in his book, Aspects of the Novel, “Oh dear, yes, the novel tells a story”.
So, first of all, what is the story of E. M. Forster?
Forster was only known to the general public as “E. M. Forster”. His family and friends called him by his middle name, Morgan. His first name was actually given to him by mistake because his parents planned to name him “Henry” after his great great uncle Henry Thornton and also after his father, Edward’s brother Henry, who had died when his father was eighteen. At the baptism however, E. M. Forster’s father, Edward, absent-mindedly wrote his own name on the piece of paper that the vicar read from at the baptismal font and so “Henry” Morgan Forster was accidentally baptized as “Edward Morgan Forster” and was called Morgan to avoid confusion.
It would not be the only time in his life that E. M. Forster was given the wrong name; in January 1908 E. M. Forster paid a visit to the great American novelist of a previous generation, Henry James, now in his seventies, who lived in the lovely town of Rye on the East Sussex coast. The old man was a little confused and thought E. M. Forster was G. E. Moore the philosopher – an easy mistake to make since they were both young men, both had an initial “E” in their name and both had graduated from Cambridge. E. M. Forster was too polite, or too shy to correct the mistake. After all, this was the kind of “muddle” that Forster was well used to and that often makes an appearance in his novels and other writings. Lucy Honeychurch spends most of her time in a muddle in A Room With A View and very nearly makes a mess of things; but that is not to say that A Room With A View is a muddled or messy novel at all. In fact, the only thing that Forster claimed not to be muddled about was art, and his own works of art, his six novels, show a very fine sense of internal order and clarity so that it is no surprise to discover Forster telling an American audience that:
“Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don’t believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art’s sake.”
And again,
“A work of art, we are all agreed, is a unique product. But why? It is unique not because it is clever or noble or beautiful or enlightened or original or sincere or idealistic or useful or educational — it may embody any of those qualities — but because it is the only material object in the universe which may possess internal harmony. All the others have been pressed into shape from outside, and when their mold is removed they collapse. The work of art stands up by itself, and nothing else does. It achieves something which has often been promised by society, but always delusively. Ancient Athens made a mess — but the Antigone stands up. Renaissance Rome made a mess — but the ceiling of the Sistine got painted. James I made a mess — but there was Macbeth. Louis XIV — but there was Phedre. Art for art’s sake? I should just think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our muddling race has produced.” (Art For Art’s Sake)
But I have digressed. Let’s move on with the story of who E. M. Forster was before saying anything else about his view of things…
Edward Morgan Forster was born in London on 1st January 1879 and died in Coventry on 7th June 1970 at the age of 90. He was born into a respectable, upper middle class family at the height of the British Empire. Queen Victoria had been proclaimed Empress of India. The Zulu Wars were being fought in south Africa and the Second Afghan War was being fought in Afghanistan. God was definitely still an Englishman, and even if the tide of faith was ebbing and upstart nations such as Germany were beginning to assert themselves, Britain was still a Christian nation which had built an empire on which the sun did not set. But although E. M. Forster came from a family of 19th Century evangelical Christians – and we can sometimes see that influence in his novels – he was not himself religious in the traditional sense nor was he an imperialist or a militarist; indeed, in World War One, he was a conscientious objector who worked in a British army hospital in Alexandria, Egypt. He also sympathized with the cause of Indian independence and lived long enough to see the break up of the British Empire and he died in 1970, the year that saw the break up of the Beatles, an event which, for many young people was far more significant than the break up of the British Empire.
E. M. Forster was born in 1879, the year that Oscar Wilde arrived in London to launch his brilliant career as an aesthete, an advocate of art for art’s sake, a poet and playwright. Wilde married in the mid 1880s and had two children. He lived a flamboyant but essentially respectable family life in public, but was seduced by a precocious, openly homosexual 17 year old boy called Robert Ross. This was at a time when homosexuality was not only illegal but also the most unimaginable taboo, something too horrifying to be mentioned in polite society, something which deeply affected E. M. Forster’s life an art, as we shall see.
E. M. Forster was 16 when Oscar Wilde was prosecuted and sent to prison for “gross indecency”. At his trial Wilde spoke of “the love that dare not speak its name”.
Charles Gill (prosecuting), asked: What is “the love that dare not speak its name?”
Wilde replied:
“The love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art, like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo… It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as “the love that dare not speak its name,” and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.”
Forster also valued the kind of friendship between men that is symbolized by the friendship of David and Jonathan in the Bible. In his second novel, The Longest Journey, Forster writes about this kind of friendship:
“… so strong it is, and so fragile. We fly together, like straws in an eddy, to part in the open stream. Nature has no use for us: she has cut her stuff differently. Dutiful sons, loving husbands, responsible fathers – these are what she wants, and if we are friends it must be in our spare time. Abram and Sarai were sorrowful, yet their seed became as sand of the sea, and distracts the politics of Europe at the moment. But a few verses of poetry is all that survives of David and Jonathan.” [The Longest Journey, p. 60]
When Forster died in 1970, it had been ten years since Penguin Books had successfully defended the publication of the full, unexpurgated version of D. H. Lawrence’s notorious novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which dealt frankly with another kind of love that dare not speak its name, love across class boundaries. At the Lady Chatterley trial, E. M. Forster had acted as one of the witnesses for the defence, arguing that the novel had “very high literary merit.”
Forster died three years after the decriminalization of homosexuality in the UK. A year after his death, Forster’s unpublished novel of homosexual love across class divisions, Maurice, written in 1913 and 1914, was published – and the world discovered that E. M. Forster, the respectable Edwardian novelist, had an altogether persona, that of Morgan, the homosexual who wrote to a friend in 1935,
“I WANT to love a young man of the lower classes, and be loved by him and even hurt by him. That is my ticket, and then I have wanted to write respectable novels.”
The first thing we notice about this quotation is the priority given to “love a young man”. The object of “love” is masculine and youthful, the tense is present (E. M. Forster was 56 when he wrote these words). “Love” and “young man” are key words, which we have already mentioned as active in the life of Oscar Wilde. The other key words in this quotation are “write novels” and “respectable.”
Forster was born into respectability. His father, Edward, had come down from Trinity College, Cambridge, and was just starting a career as an architect when E. M. Forster was born, and designed a house in West Hackhurst, Surrey for his sister, E. M. Forster’s aunt Laura. Sadly, that was the only house he designed because he died of TB when E. M. Forster was just one year old. Edward was the son of a clergyman. Edward’s aunt, Marianne Thornton, was the matriarch of the family and the pillar of the family’s respectability as the daughter of Henry Thornton (Forster’s great grandfather), one of the leading merchant bankers, evangelical Christians and moral reformers of his age, a friend and supporter of William Wilberforce, who campaigned to stop the British slave trade.
Great aunt Marianne, or Monie, looked after the finances of the family very well indeed and although she was in her mid-eighties when Edward died, she was the financial and moral authority in the family and made sure that everything was done for the best for Forster and his widowed mother.
Forster’s mother, Alice Clara (“Lily”) Whichelo, was the daughter of a drawing master and the third of ten children. Her father died when she was 12. Lily became a governess to the children of various friends of the Thorntons and that’s how she met Edward Forster. When he died, Lily and E. M. Forster lived with the elderly but dominant Marianne for a year, but Lily also had a strong will, and she used her inheritance from Edward to set up a house for herself and E. M. Forster in the village of Stevenage, in the countryside north of London. The house, Rooksnest, later became the inspiration for Ruth Wilcox’s house, Howards End in the novel of that name. For the next ten years, Rooksnest was home for Lily and Morgan and their two servants, quite isolated from the outside world, except for the visits of aunts and great aunts. E. M. Forster was the centre of attention, the whole and sole reason for Lily’s existence. [SHOW PHOTO] Here is the first photo we have of Forster and his mother and we can very clearly see how things stand, with a dominant and attentive mother and her girlish boy, her little “lady’s companion” as Wendy Moffat calls it in her biography of Forster.
So, E. M. Forster’s childhood was dominated by women, a suffocating mother and domineering aunts. After a decade at Rooksnest the Forsters moved to the house in West Hackhurst that Edward had designed for his aunt. They lived there from 1925 until his mother’s death at age 90 in 1945, although Forster also set up a base in London, and was away from home for long periods overseas, and it was overseas that Forster finally risked “parting with respectability” as we shall see.
Great aunt Marianne died in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, and E. M. Forster became a respectable young man of independent means. In the same year he went up to King’s College, Cambridge where he was invited to join an elite and secretive discussion society known as the Apostles, whose members included such well names of the future as Leonard Woolf (husband of Virginia Woolf), Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keyne, Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore (who Henry James confused with E. M. Forster when the latter visited him). Many of the Apostles, including Forster, were later part of the Bloomsbury Group along with the novelist Virginia Woolf. Many of Forster’s Cambridge friends would remain friends all his life, helping him out and protecting him when necessary.
After leaving university Forster dutifully took his mother on a tour through Italy scrupulously visiting all the sites recommended by the indispensable Baedeker guide books that reappear in Forster’s two Italian novels, Where Angels Fear To Tread and A Room With A View.
This is the beginning of E. M. Forster’s immensely productive period in which he wrote five novels and published four of them.
- Where Angels Fear to Tread, set in England and Italy, was published in 1905,
- The Longest Journey, set in England, was published in 1907,
- A Room with a View, set in Italy and England, was published in 1908,
- Howards End, set in England, was published in 1910,
- Maurice, finished in 1914, but not published until after his death.
During his most productive period of novel writing, Forster also visited Egypt and India in 1914 and began to write his sixth novel, A Passage to India, but set it aside until he returned to India after the end of the First World War. A Passage to India was published in 1924, and after that he wrote no more novels. We will talk about why he stopped writing novels a little later.
So, in 1914, on the eve of World War One, E. M. Forster was 35, had written five of his six novels and had started upon his sixth; the early novels deal with human relationships in a way that any reader of Jane Austen would be familiar, and all of them have to do with the need for humans to break through all the rules of respectable society and “only connect” with one another in truth and in love, to wake up and live passionately, to tap into that power of transcendence which Beethoven expresses in opus 111 and which Lucy Honeychurch experiences when she plays Beethoven on the piano and secondly by crossing a class boundary to marry the man she loves; and yet, for all the insight into human relationships, E. M. Forster, at the age of 35, had never dated a girl, and though he had fallen in love with one or two young men, including the17 year old Syed Ross Masood [PHOTO], an athletic Indian boy of wealthy background who came to England to study at Cambridge, and who E. M. Forster later visited in India, E. M. Forster was still a virgin and only vaguely aware of how it was that babies were conceived.
Let’s turn now to each of the novels. To make things easier, I will offer a 100 or 150 word introduction to each novel.
1. Where Angels Fear To Tread, published in 1905, here it is in 100 words:
The recently widowed Lilia Herriton goes on a tour of Italy with her companion, Caroline, leaving her young daughter, Irma, in the care of the Herritons. Lilia falls in love with Gino, an Italian. Philip Herriton is sent to “rescue” Lilia but finds her married and pregnant. Caroline wants to rescue the baby. Philip and Harriet Herriton go to Italy to buy the baby but Gino won’t sell it so Harriet steals it. As the Herritons escape their carriage turns over in a storm; the baby is killed and philip’s arm is injured. Gino attacks him but Caroline reconciles them. [100 words!]
2. The Longest Journey, Forster’s second novel, published in 1907, is the only one that has not yet been turned into a film, perhaps because it is the most difficult, and yet most autobiographical, of them all. The critic Lionel Trilling described the novel “as perhaps the most brilliant, the most dramatic, and the most passionate of his works” (E. M. Forster, 1944). Forster liked it the best of all his novels in spite of its faults. Here it is in 150 words:
Rickie Elliot is lame and lost his parents in his teenage years. He goes up to Cambridge, where, like Forster himself, he finds sympathetic friends, especially Ansell, a grocer’s son. Elliot wants to be a writer. He is attracted by Agnes Pembroke, the conventional but beautiful sister of a schoolmaster friend and protector, and by her athletic fiancé Gerald, who had bullied him at school.
Gerald dies in a football accident. Rickie gets engaged to Agnes although Ansell disapproves. On a visit to his aunt Mrs Failing in Wiltshire, Rickie discovers he has an illegitimate half-brother, Stephen Wonham. Stephen is unaware of the relationship. Agnes doesn’t want Stephen to know Rickie is his brother. Rickie suffers breakdown, fails as a writer, marries Agnes and becomes a schoolmaster at his brother-in-law’s school. He sinks into a world of petty jealousy, increasingly aware of Agnes’s failings. Their only child, a daughter, is born crippled and dies. Stephen suddenly arrives. Agnes thinks he wants to blackmail them. Offended, Stephen disappears. Rickie discovers that Stephen is the son of his beloved mother, not his father. Rickie and Stephen are reconciled. Rickie is killed by a train while rescuing the drunken Stephen. [150 words!]
3. A Room With A View, was actually the first novel that Forster started writing, but he laid it aside and then revised what he had written and completed it for publication in 1908. The story in 100 words:
Lucy Honeychurch is in Florence with her chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett. They have rooms with no view. Mr Emerson offers to swap rooms. Miss Bartlett refuses. Mr Beebe, a vicar, persuades them to accept. An Italian is murdered. Lucy faints. Mr Emerson’s son, George, catches her. On a trip into the countryside George kisses Lucy. Back in England Lucy is engaged to marry the sophisticated Cecil Vyse. Lucy’s brother befriends George Emerson. When George visits he kisses Lucy passionately. Lucy breaks off her engagement and Mr. Emerson gets Lucy to admit that she loves George. George and Lucy elope to Florence. [100 words!]
4. Howards End was published in 1910. Here it is in 100 words:
Mrs Wilcox bequeaths the house she loves, Howards End, to Margaret Schlegel. Henry Wilcox ignores his late wife’s bequest. Margaret and her sister Helen want to help Leonard Bast, a poor insurance clerk. Henry says Leonard should quit. The sisters tell Leonard. Henry marries Margaret. Bast is unemployed. Helen confronts Henry with Leonard. Leonard’s wife, Jacky, recognizes Henry, a former lover. Helen gets pregnant by Leonard. Charles Wilcox, Henry’s son, attacks Leonard, who is crushed by a bookcase. Charles goes to prison. Henry admits Mrs Wilcox wanted Howards End to be Margaret’s. They live there with Helen and her child. [100 words]
5. Maurice. Forster wrote Maurice in 1913 and 1914 but did not publish it during his lifetime. The inspiration for Maurice came from a visit to Edward Carpenter and his working class companion, George Merrill, with whom Carpenter shared an openly homosexual life on a small-holding in the seclusion of the Derbyshire countryside in the north of England. Carpenter was a famous, wealthy radical romantic who rejected his own class in favour of a life close to nature, living together with the man he loved, which he could do because he did not give up his inherited income of 500 pounds a year, a lot of money 100 years ago. Edward Carpenter was supposed to have slept with the American poet Walt Whitman, and who D. H. Lawrence among others greatly admired as they shared many similar ideas.
E. M. Forster’s visit was a great success for him. He was deeply touched by a touch from Carpenter’s “comrade”, George Merrill. Forster describes what happened like this:
“It must have been on my second or third visit to the shrine that the spark was kindled and he and his comrade George Merrill combined to make a profound impression on me and to touch a creative spring. George Merrill also touched my backside – gently and just above the buttocks. I believe he touched most people’s. The sensation was unusual and I still remember it, as I remember the position of a long vanished tooth. It was as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back, into my ideas without involving my thoughts. If it really did this it would have acted in strict accordance with Carpenter’s yogified mysticism, and would prove that at that precise moment I had conceived.”[Maurice, Terminal Note]
The story of Maurice, however, does not mention this experience, and Forster deliberately created the protagonist to be athletic, handsome and a little dull, very different from himself. So here is Maurice in 100 words:
Maurice goes up to Cambridge and falls in love with Clive. Their romance is disguised as a close friendship. Maurice is sent down and works as a stockbroker. Clive invites Maurice to stay at his country estate in Penge. Eventually, Clive marries. Maurice tries to cure his homosexuality. Maurice visits Penge. Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper, climbs a ladder to Maurice’s bedroom. Alec threatens blackmail. They discover they are in love. Alec is leaving for Argentina. Maurice goes to see Alec off but Alec is not there. Maurice finds him in the boathouse at Penge, waiting for Maurice. They are reunited. [100 words!]
These, then, are the novels that E. M. Forster had written by the time he was 35 on the eve of the outbreak of the First World War. E. M. Forster did not enlist into the armed forces, but found “War Work” at the National Gallery, London. Then, in 1915, he went to Alexandria, Egypt, to serve as a Red Cross officer. His official job was a “Searcher” in the “Wounded and Missing” department. Part of his job involved sitting by the bedsides of the wounded men and taking down their stories as a way to gather evidence about what had happened to the missing soldiers.
In Alexandria Forster began to explore the city, looking for adventure in the backstreets, in opium dens, by the sea, where he discovered,
“hundreds of young men are at play, fishing, riding donkeys, lying in hammocks, boating, dosing, swimming, listening to bands. They go about bare chested and bare legged, the blue of their linen shorts and the pale mauve of their shirts accenting the brown splendour of their bodies; and down by the sea many of them spend half their days naked and unrebuked… It is so beautiful that I cannot believe it has not been planned” [letter to Lowes Dickenson, Moffat, p. 147]
It was on such a beach at Montazah, Alexandria, in 1916, at the age of 37, that Forster met a soldier and had his first brief sexual encounter… In a letter to his female confidant, Florence Barger, Forster wrote:
“Yesterday, for the first time in my life I parted with <R>. I have felt the step would be taken for many months. I have tried to take it before. It has left me curiously sad.”
The <R> = respectability and was written to get the letter past the censor.
It was in Alexandria that Forster was finally able to cross the barriers of gender, class, age and race when he fell in love with a young Egyptian tram conductor called Mohammed el Adl. [PHOTO]
“One cold night in late january, Morgan rode back from Montazah alone in the dark. In the tram three young Egyptian conductors casually chatted, riding on the footboard. The youngest approached Forster. Would he mind standing up, so he could retrieve his coat from under Morgan’s seat? The man spoke good English, ‘charming and polite’… Discovering this genuine, bright young Egyptian – who introduced himself as Mohammed el Adl – seemed a prophetic answer to a pressing question.” (Moffatt, p. 152)
They remained intimate for the rest of Forster’s time in Alexandria, even through Mohammed’s marriage to his widowed sister-n-law’s unmarried sister. Forster was invited to join the couple on their honeymoon, but with the end of World War 1, Forster had to sail back to England.
In 1921 the Maharajah of Dewas invited Forster to visit India and serve as his secretary for six months. This gave Forster a nice opportunity to revisit India, to get to know Hindu India and to see his Mulim friend Syed Ross Massood. It also gave him an opportunity to recommence work on his Indian novel, a Passage to India. The Maharajah of Dewas had made a deep impression on Forster during his first visit to India. He paints an affectionate portrait of him in his book The Hill of Devi and elements of his character and philosophy are recreated in the character of Professor Godbole in A Passage to India.
On his way back to England in 1922, Forster visited Mohammed el Adl once more in Egypt, but Mohammed was mortally ill. Forster paid his hospital bills and helped his family. Mohammed was well enough to see Forster off as his ship sailed for England, but they knew it was for the last time and Mohammed died later that year.
Back in England Forster set to work on A Passage to India. His second visit had given him the material he needed to complete the novel, so here it is in 100 words:
Adela Quested and Mrs Moore visit India. Mrs Moore meets Dr Aziz in a mosque by moonlight. Fielding invites them to a party along with the enigmatic Professor Godbole. Aziz invites them to the Marabar Caves. Adela breaks off her engagement to Ronnie Moore. Adela panics inside a cave. Aziz is arrested, charged with attempted rape. Mrs Moore and Fielding believe Aziz is innocent. Mrs Moore dies at sea. At the trial Adela changes her story. Aziz is aquitted. Fielding marries Mrs Moore’s daughter. Aziz thought Fielding married Adela. They discover they cannot be friends while the British rule India. [100 words]
When A Passage to India was published, E. M. Forster was 46. He lived for another 45 years, wrote and published numerous essays and book reviews, wrote short stories, some of which he published and some which he didn’t, but never wrote another novel.
The reason was that he was no longer interested in writing about heterosexual relationships and could not publish anything that gave candid expressed his homosexuality.
Q&A.