Forever Forster: Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970)

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2003 by Watson, George

Somebody once called him the most defatigable of English novelists, and it is true that after A Passage to India appeared, in 1924, E. M. Forster published no novels for the rest of his life. Maurice, which was considered scandalous, had to wait till after his death.

On the other hand he never seemed exhausted, though he was in his eighties when I knew him, a gentle presence living in King's College, Cambridge as a quietly observant and civilizing influence. The college had just given him an honorary luncheon for his eightieth birthday, which was in 1959, and he had presented them with a precious hand-printed book by William Blake. He owed a lot to his college, where he had once been a Victorian undergraduate and where he spent almost the last twenty years of his life, and he knew it. I was sometimes, but not always, convinced that they knew how much they owed him.

Even forty years ago an early edition of the poet Blake was worth thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, but then possessions never meant a jot to him. A watercolor by Thomas Girtin hung unregarded on his stairs, and his books and silver, when they were sold after his death, were largely unremarkable, though I bought some out of affection. The silver dish I still possess is badly scratched and the books plainly for use rather than show, and a tiny book-label reading "This book belongs to E. M. Forster" is usually all that distinguishes them, for he seldom marked what he read. As his effects were cleared for sale it was noticed that some lacked even a mark of ownership, so a few spare labels were used and the remainder destroyed. His copy of Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary, for example, edited by her widower Leonard in 1953 as a discreet selection from the enormous, indiscreet manuscript she had left at her suicide a dozen years earlier, stands unmarked on my shelves, and a handsomely bound and gilded copy of Tennyson's In Memoriam which once belonged to his father had presumably been in the family since before he was born. As for clothes, he usually looked like an odd-job man, and the task of persuading him to appear on the stage of Covent Garden opera house in December 1951 at the first night of Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd, for which he had written the libretto, proved a difficult one, since he never mastered the principle that a white tie goes with tails. (In the end, he appeared before a fashionable audience in a black tie). Things meant little to him. He preferred people.

He watched them, as I suspect he had watched (and listened) all his life. He was forever Forster, forever paying attention. It was hard to believe he had ever belonged to the Bloomsbury group or any other group, and he figures in their writings only as an occasional presence. As to the classic question "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?" he might have answered "I was." When you showed her what you were writing, he once told me ruefully, she would tell you what she thought. "One felt the better for it, but not the happier." He once described the Greek poet Cavafy, whom he had known in Egypt, as standing at a slightly odd angle to the universe, and that might have been said too of him: not defiantly eccentric, but marked out by a refinement of talent and the accident of sexual orientation as unentitled to full membership of the human race. It was not something to flaunt. You are what you are.

It was his modesty that impressed. Lionel Trilling once told me soon after he had written his excellent little book on Forster, at the height of the Second World War, that he deliberately made no contact with him as he wrote. At that time Trilling had never been to Europe. When Forster visited New York after the war, Trilling took him to the best restaurant he could afford as a tribute to his genius, but sensed that Forster felt a little oppressed by the splendor of the place. Later he took Forster back to his Manhattan apartment to meet his wife Diana, where there was a pram in the hall and a reassuring absence of splendor, and the whole evening went better. In her autobiography The Beginning of the, journey, years later, Diana recalled how Forster cradled their ten-month-old infant in his arms and "comforted him so tenderly that I wished that I could engage him as the baby's nurse." The only shadow in their friendship was when Forster expressed amazement that Trilling should think the names of Margaret and Helen Schlegel in Howards End echoed those of the heroines of Goethe's Faust. "It never crossed my mind," I remember his saying. So Trilling added a footnote to a new edition, apologizing for the error.

He spent his life, by choice, on the sidelines. As a day-boy at Tonbridge School in the 1890s, he used to tell, he got out of games by being allowed to go cycling in the Kentish countryside, which suggests a liberal headmaster, and he was the last man on earth to be a team player. He had been unhappy there, but then being unhappy at school is more or less compulsory among artists, and I suspect he was unhappy with himself. In 1897 he went to Cambridge, which made him, and he never doubted that it had, though he always urged the young to do something daring with their early lives, as he had done, travelling wide in Italy, Egypt and India. Cambridge called him back in 1945, in his late sixties, when his mother died, and though he always remained a traveller he never wanted to live anywhere else. The young there loved him because he was lovable and because he was famous, and called him Morgan. The middle-aged could be less welcoming. King's in the last years of his life was trying to warm up the dying embers of Victorian Marxism and convince itself it was the latest thing, and there were always those who thought him a fuddy-Buddy and some who candidly said so.