Other literary forms
E. M. Forster (FOR-stur) wrote six novels, one of which (Maurice , 1971) was published posthumously because of its homosexual theme. He also wrote travel books, essays, reviews, criticism, biography, and some poetry. Together with Eric Crozier he wrote the libretto for the four-act opera Billy Budd (1951), adapted from Herman Melville’s famous work.
Achievements
As a novelist of rare distinction and one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, E. M. Forster enjoyed international recognition and received many literary awards and honors. In 1921, as private secretary to the maharajah of the Indian state of Dewas Senior, he was awarded the Sir Tukojirao Gold Medal. The publication of A Passage to India (1924) brought him much acclaim, including the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1925. In 1927, he was elected Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and he delivered Clark Lectures at Trinity College. In 1937, the Royal Society of Literature honored him with the Benson Medal. In 1945, he was made Honorary Fellow, King’s College, Cambridge, where he remained until his death in 1970. In 1953, he was received by Queen Elizabeth II as a Companion of Honor. Between 1947 and 1958, several universities, including Cambridge, conferred on him the honorary degree of LL.D. In 1961, the Royal Society of Literature named him a Companion of Literature. He attained the greatest recognition when, on his ninetieth birthday, on January 1, 1969, he was appointed to the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II.
Biography
Edward Morgan Forster was born in London on January 1, 1879. He was the great-grandson of Henry Thornton, a prominent member of the Evangelical Clapham sect and a member of parliament. His father, an architect, died early, and he was brought up by his mother and his great-aunt, Marianne Thornton (whose biography he published in 1956). He received his early education at Tonbridge School, but he did not like the public school atmosphere. His bitter criticism of the English public school system appears in his portrayal of Sawston School in his first two novels, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and The Longest Journey (1907). From Tonbridge, Forster went on to the University of Cambridge—thanks to the rich inheritance left by his aunt, Marianne Thornton, who died when he was eight—where he came under the influence of Goldworthy Lowes Dickinson (whose biography he wrote in 1934) and quickly began to blossom as a scholar, writer, and humanist.
After graduating from King’s College, Cambridge, Forster traveled, with his mother, to Italy and Greece in 1901. His first short story, “Albergo Empedocle,” was published in 1903. Between 1903 and 1910, he published four novels, nine short stories, and other nonfictional items. His travels to Greece and Italy led to his depiction of life in those countries as being less repressive than life in England. During World War I, he served as a volunteer with the Red Cross in Alexandria, Egypt. His stay there resulted in Alexandria: A History and a Guide (1922) and Pharos and Pharillon (1923). His two visits to India, the first in 1912 in the company of Goldworthy Lowes Dickinson and the second in 1921 as private secretary to the maharajah of the state of Dewas Senior, provided him material for his masterpiece novel A Passage to India (1924) and The Hill of Devi (1953). With A Passage to India , Forster’s reputation was established as a major English novelist of the twentieth century. He made a third visit to India in 1945 to attend a conference of Indian writers at Jaipur. He then wrote, “If Indians had not spoken English my own life would have been infinitely poorer.” He visited the United States in 1947 to address the Harvard Symposium on Music Criticism at Harvard University and again in 1949 to address the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Though Forster stopped publishing fiction after 1924, he continued to produce significant nonfiction writing to the end of his life. In a statement at the beginning of B. J. Kirkpatrick’s A Bibliography of E. M. Forster (1965), Forster said: “The longer one lives the less one feels to have done, and I am both surprised and glad to discover from this bibliography that I have written so much.” He died on June 7, 1970, at the age of ninety-one. Throughout his life he kept his faith in liberal humanism, in the sanctity of personal relationships, and, above all, in individualism. His charismatic personality and his personal warmth have led many people to believe that the man was greater than his books.
Analysis
All of E. M. Forster’s best-known and most anthologized stories appeared first in two collections, The Celestial Omnibus, and Other Stories and The Eternal Moment, and Other Stories . The words “celestial” and “eternal” are especially significant because a typical E. M. Forster story features a protagonist who is allowed a vision of a better life, sometimes only momentarily. Qualifications for experiencing this epiphany include a questioning mind, an active imagination, and a dissatisfaction with conventional attitudes. The transformation resulting from the experience comes about through some kind of magic that transports him through time—backward or forward—or through space—to Mt. Olympus or to heaven. Whether or not his life is permanently changed, the transformed character can never be the same again after a glimpse of the Elysian Fields, and he is henceforth suspect to contemporary mortals.
Forster termed his short stories “fantasies,” and when discerning readers can determine the point at which the real and the fantastic intersect, they will locate the epiphany, at the same time flexing their own underused imaginative muscles. Perhaps “The Machine Stops,” a science-fiction tale about a world managed by a computer-like Machine that warns men to “beware of first-hand ideas,” was at the time of its writing (1909) the most fantastic of Forster’s short fiction, but its portrayal of radio, television, and telephones with simultaneous vision seems to have been simply farsighted.
Forster frequently uses a narrator who is so insensitive that he ironically enhances the perception of the reader. In “Other Kingdom,” for example, when Mr. Inskip finds it “right” to repeat Miss Beaumont’s conversation about a “great dream” to his employer, readers correctly place the tutor on the side of unimaginative human, rather than in the lineup of Dryads to which the young lady will repair. When the narrator of “The Story of a Panic” boasts that he “can tell a story without exaggerating” and then unfolds a tale about a boy who obviously is visited by Pan and who finally bounds away to join the goat-god, readers know that they must themselves inform the gaps of information. When the same narrator attributes the death of the waiter Gennaro to the fact that “the miserable Italians have no stamina. Something had gone wrong inside him,” readers observe the disparity between the two statements and rightly conclude that Gennaro’s death has a supernatural cause—that he had been subjected to the same “panic” as had Eustace, and that only the latter had passed the test.
In Aspects of the Novel (1927), Forster suggests that fiction will play a part in the ultimate success of civilization through promotion of human sympathy, reconciliation, and understanding. In each of the short stories the protagonist gets a fingerhold on the universal secret, but he sometimes loses his grip, usually through the action of someone too blind, materialistic, or enslaved by time to comprehend the significance of the moment.
If, as Forster himself declares, the emphasis of plot lies in causality, he allows the reader an important participation because the causes of transformation are never explicit, and the more mundane characters are so little changed by the miraculous events taking place around them that they are not puzzled or even aware that they occur.
“The Eternal Moment”
In “The Eternal Moment,” the stiffly insensitive Colonel Leyland, Miss Raby’s friend and traveling companion, is just such a character. While Miss Raby is determined to accept the responsibility for the commercialization of the mountain resort Vorta engendered by her novel, Colonel Leyland can understand her feelings no more readily than can Feo, the uneducated waiter who is the immediate object of Miss Raby’s search. While Miss Raby ostensibly has returned to the village to see how it has been affected by tourism since she made it famous, she also is drawn to the spot because it was the scene of the one romantic, although brief, interlude of her life. For twenty years she has recalled a declaration of passionate love for her by a young Italian guide whose advances she had rejected. This memory has sustained her because of its reality and beauty. She finds the once rustic village overgrown with luxury hotels, in one of which Feo, her dream-lover, is the stout, greasy, middle-aged, hypocritical concierge. Miss Raby, whose instincts have warned her that the progress of civilization is not necessarily good, sees that “the passage of a large number of people” has corrupted not only the village and its values but also has corrupted Feo. Observing that “pastoral virtues” and “family affection” have disappeared with the onslaught of touristry, she accosts the embarrassed peasant who had once offered her flowers. In a scene that is the quintessence of a human failure to communicate, Feo believes that she is attempting to ruin him, while she is actually appealing to him to help the old woman who owns the only hotel untouched by modernity. Colonel Leyland, who cannot bear the thought, much less the reality, of such intimate contact with a member of the lower class, gives up his idea of marrying Miss Raby. The rich novelist, whose entire life has been enriched by the “eternal moment” when she briefly and in imagination only had spanned class barriers, asks Feo if she can adopt one of his children. Rebuffed, she will live alone, able perhaps to blot out reality and relive the happiness that the memory of the “eternal moment” has brought her.
Another misunderstood protagonist is Eustace, the fourteen-year-old English boy considered a misfit by the group of tourists with whom he is seeing Italy. Listless and pampered, bad-tempered and repellent, Eustace dislikes walking, cannot swim, and appears most to enjoy lounging. Forced to go to a picnic, the boy carves from wood a whistle, which when blown evokes a “catspaw” of wind that frightens all of the other tourists into running. When they return to their picnic site in search of Eustace, they find him lying on his back, a green lizard darting from his cuff. For the first time on the trip the boy smiles and is polite. The footprints of goats are discerned nearby as Eustace races around “like a real boy.” A dazed hare sits on his arm, and he kisses an old woman as he presents her with flowers. The adults, in trying to forget the encounter, are cruel to Eustace and to Gennaro, a young, natural, ignorant Italian fishing lad, who is a “stop-gap” waiter at the inn, and who clearly understands the boy’s experience. As Eustace and Gennaro attempt to flee to freedom from human responsibility, the waiter is killed, the victim of a society which in its lack of understanding had attempted to imprison Eustace, oblivious to his miraculous change, or at least to its significance. He has turned into an elfin sprite of the woods, to which he escapes forever, leaving behind him Forster’s customary complement of complacent, nonplussed tourists.
“Other Kingdom”
No Pan, but a Dryad is Evelyn Beaumont of “Other Kingdom.” Mr. Inskip, who narrates the tale, has been hired as a tutor of the classics by handsome, prosperous, and pompous Harcourt Worters. Inskip’s charges are Worters’s fiancé Miss Evelyn Beaumont and his ward Jack Ford. When Worters announces that he has purchased a nearby copse called “Other Kingdom” as a wedding gift for Evelyn, she dances her gleeful acceptance in imitation of a beech tree. On a celebratory picnic Evelyn asks Jack to stand in a position that will hide the house from her view. She is dismayed to learn that Worters plans to build a high fence around her copse and to add an asphalt path and a bridge. Evelyn values the fact that boys and girls have been coming for years from the village to carve their initials on the trees, and she notes that Worters finds blood on his hands when he attempts to repeat the romantic ritual. Upon hearing that Worters has obtained Other Kingdom by taking advantage of a widow, she realizes that he is a selfish person who views her as one of his possessions to be enjoyed. Broken in spirit, she apparently agrees to his plan of fencing in the copse, but she dances away “from society and life” to be united with other wood nymphs and likely with Ford, who knows intuitively that she is a free spirit that can never be possessed.
“The Road from Colonus”
While Eustace in “Story of a Panic” is a Pan-figure, Evelyn a Dryad, and Harcourt Worters a prototype of Midas, Mr. Lucas of “The Road from Colonus” is associated with Oedipus. The tale’s title is reminiscent of Sophocles’ play, and Ethel, Mr. Lucas’s daughter, represents Antigone. As do Miss Raby, Eustace, and Evelyn Beaumont, Mr. Lucas enters into a special union with nature and humankind. Riding ahead of his daughter and her friends, he finds the “real Greece” when he spies a little inn surrounded by a grove of plane trees and a little stream that bubbles out of a great hollow tree. As he enters this natural shrine, he for the first time sees meaning to his existence, and he longs to stay in this peaceful spot. The other tourists, however, have schedules and appointments to adhere to, and they forcibly carry Mr. Lucas away from the scene of his revelation. That night the plane tree crashes to kill all occupants of the inn, and Mr. Lucas spends his remaining days fussing about his neighbors and the noises of civilization, especially those made by the running water in the drains and reminiscent of the pleasant, musical gurgles of the little stream in Greece.
“The Celestial Omnibus”
More fortunate than Mr. Lucas is the boy who rides “The Celestial Omnibus” from an alley where an old, faded sign points the way “To Heaven.” After the driver Sir Thomas Browne delivers the boy across a great gulf on a magnificent rainbow to the accompaniment of music, and back home to his nursery, the boy’s parents refuse to believe his tale. Mr. Bons, a family friend, attempts to prove the boy is lying by offering to make a repeat journey with him. On this trip the driver is Dante. Even though Mr. Bons is finally convinced that the boy has actually met Achilles and Tom Jones, he wants to go home. When Mr. Bons crawls out of the omnibus shrieking, “I see London,” he falls and is seen no more. His body is discovered “in a shockingly mutilated condition,” and the newspaper reports that “foul play is suspected.” The boy is crowned with fresh leaves as the dolphins awaken to celebrate with him the world of imagination. Mr. Bons, when accosted with this world, rejected it so violently that he suffered physical pain.
In all of these “fantasies,” a gulf separates reality from illusion, and the latter is clearly to be preferred. If a person must inhabit the real world, one can bear its existence and even love its inhabitants if that person is one of the fortunate few receptive to a special kind of vision.
Bibliography
Beauman, Nicola. E. M. Forster: A Biography . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Primarily devoted to the first forty-five years of Forster’s life, when he was developing as a fiction writer. Discusses the origins of Forster’s fictional themes in his family background. Claims that his most successful years as a writer were also his unhappiest as a person because of his sexual repression and his conflicts over his homosexuality.
Bredbeck, Gregory W. “Missionary Positions: Reading the Bible in E. M. Forster’s ‘The Life to Come.’” In Reclaiming the Sacred: The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture , edited by Raymond-Jean Frontain. 2d ed. New York: Harrington Park Press, 2003. Maintains that the narrative of “The Life to Come” successfully combines the two dominant topics of Forster’s fiction: homosexuality and the British experience in India.
Caporaletti, Silvana. “Science as Nightmare: ‘The Machine Stops’ by E. M. Forster.” Utopian Studies 8 (1997): 32-47. Discusses the dystopian theme in the story. Claims the story denounces materialism and conformism imposed by rigid social conventions that repress diversity, spontaneity, and creativity.
_______. “The Thematization of Time in E. M. Forster’s ‘The Eternal Moment’ and Joyce’s ‘The Dead.’” Twentieth Century Literature 43 (Winter, 1997): 406-419. Discusses how the two stories are influenced by Henri Bergson’s dual concept of time as sequential and psychological. Argues that most of the characters in the stories reflect the contrast between these two modes of time.
Eldridge, C. C. The Imperial Experience: From Carlyle to Forster . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Examines the political and social views of Forster and Thomas Carlyle, as well as the depiction of imperialism in their literature.
Furbank, Philip N. E. M. Forster: A Life . New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. In this authorized biography of Forster, Furbank successfully re-creates an authentic, intimate, and illuminating portrait of the man behind the writer and controversial public figure. The wealth of new material makes this book an indispensable source on Forster’s life, times, and work.
Gardner, Philip, ed. E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage . New York: Routledge, 1997. Critical essays on Forster’s works. Includes bibliographical references and an index.
Head, Dominic. “Forster and the Short Story.” In The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster , edited by David Bradshaw. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Head’s analysis of Forster’s short fiction is included in this collection of essays about Forster’s life and work. Some of the other essays discuss Forster’s connections to the Bloomsbury Group, Forsterian sexuality, Forster and women, and Forster and modernism.
Kermode, Frank. Concerning E. M. Forster . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. Kermode, a prominent literary critic, analyzes Forster’s work, concentrating on his six novels. Faults Forster for being less adventurous than other modernist writers, such as his contemporary Ford Madox Ford.
McDowell, Frederick P. W. E. M. Forster . Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1982. A brilliant, well-balanced, and compendious overview of Forster’s life, times, career, work, and achievement. Offers a concise and perceptive analysis of Forster’s short stories. Includes a useful chronology, a select bibliography, and an index.
Moffat, Wendy. A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Argues that Forster’s homosexuality was the core of his being, affecting the way he lived his life and creating a source of “intense frustration” because of society’s prohibition against literary depictions of gayness.
Pordzik, Ralph. “Closet Fantasies and the Future of Desire in E. M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops.’” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 53, no. 1 (2010): 54-74. Examines how Forster was able to provide implicit sexual content in this story, which was written at a time when British society repressed homosexuality. Notes how Forster depicts his characters’ relationships to social norms through the use of oppositions, such as illness/health, madness/sanity, and secrecy/disclosure.
Seabury, Marcia Bundy. “Images of a Networked Society: E. M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops.’” Studies in Short Fiction 34 (Winter, 1997): 61-71. Discusses the story as a vision of the computer revolution. Examines interrelations between technology and religious thinking in the story. Explores what happens to people when they spend much of their time connected to computer networks.
Stone, Wilfred. The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E. M. Forster . Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1966. A well-researched and scholarly book. Using psychological and Jungian approaches, Stone offers insightful and masterly critiques of Forster’s fiction. Contains a vast amount of useful information about Forster’s background, career, aesthetics, and work, as well as a detailed and illuminating chapter on the short stories. Supplemented by notes and a comprehensive index.
Thomson, George H. The Fiction of E. M. Forster . Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967. Thomson presents a critical study of Forster’s novels and short stories in terms of their symbolical and archetypal aspects. He argues that Forster’s symbols “achieve archetypal significance and mythic wholeness” through “the power of ecstatic perception” in his work. Complemented by notes and a valuable appendix on the manuscripts of A Passage to India .
Trilling, Lionel. E. M. Forster: A Study . Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1943. A pioneer study, instrumental in establishing Forster’s reputation. Trilling assesses Forster’s artistic achievement in terms of his liberal humanism and moral realism.