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E. M. Forster

 
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E.M. Forster
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(born Jan. 1, 1879, London, Eng. — died June 7, 1970, Coventry, Warwickshire) British writer. Forster was born into an upper-middle-class family. He attended the University of Cambridge and from roughly 1907 was a member of the informal Bloomsbury group. His early works include Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and his first major success, Howards End (1910), novels that show his acute observation of middle-class life and its values. After periods in India and Alexandria, he wrote his finest novel, A Passage to India (1924), examining the failure of human understanding between ethnic and social groups under British rule. Maurice, a novel with a homosexual theme written in 1913, appeared posthumously. Aspects of the Novel (1927) is a classic discussion of aesthetics and the creative process. Awarded an honorary fellowship in 1946 at Cambridge, he lived there until his death.

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Biography: Edward Morgan Forster
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The English novelist and essayist Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) was concerned with the conflict between the freedom of the spirit and the conventions of society.

Educated at Tonbridge School (which he disliked intensely), E. M. Forster went on to Cambridge. His father, an architect, had died when Forster was only 2 years old, but a legacy from an aunt afforded him his education and the opportunity to travel. It was his experience of Cambridge and of travel in Europe after taking his degree in 1901 which stimulated Forster's imagination and thought and led to the extraordinary burst of creative activity which produced a volume of short stories, The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories (1911), and four novels in quick succession: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howard's End (1910).

Where Angels Fear To Tread presents a conflict between two worlds, represented by the English town of Sawston ("that hole," as one of the characters calls it) on the one hand and the Italian town of Monteriano on the other. Those two worlds are characterized by the English Herritons, seeking to buy (or, as eventually transpires, steal) the child of their dead sister, and Gino, the Italian father of the child. Linking the two is Caroline Abbott; loved by Philip Herriton and in love with Gino, she is the meeting point of one world with another. In the novel the child is killed and the Herritons leave Italy, which they had once thought beautiful. No happy resolution is afforded, unless it is that Philip Herriton does abandon his home in Sawston - and the values it represents - to make his living in London. Such endings of loss, death, and disappointment, redeemed only by the possibility of future change and the knowledge of the existence of beauty, are characteristic of Forster's fiction. And characteristic, too, are the instruments Forster uses: the settled, conventional middle-class English brought into sudden and unnerving contact with a strange and more exotic people.

A Passage to India

In 1912 Forster first visited India, and after spending the war years from 1915 to 1918 in Alexandria with the Red Cross, he returned to India in 1922 as private secretary to the maharajah of the state of Dewas Senior. India is the location for Forster's only novel set entirely out of England, A Passage to India, which, begun in 1912, was not completed until after Forster's second visit and was finally published in 1924. The conflicting worlds which Forster treats in this novel are those of the colonial English and the native Indian.

On the title page of Howard's End Forster had placed the phrase "Only connect." It is Forster's instruction to people whose most significant failure, as he sees it, is their reluctance to destroy the barriers of prejudice that have risen to divide them. This thought is also evident in A Passage to India. At the center of the novel are two characters - the Indian, Aziz, and the Englishman, Fielding - each intellectual, each aware of the traditions of his country yet largely freed from them, and each desiring to be friends. Yet circumstances, forged by inexplicable and supernatural impulses and abetted by worldly prejudice, transpire to separate them and breed a reluctant mistrust. As the novel closes, they both desire friendship: "But the horses … the earth … the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the guest house, … they didn't want it; they said in their hundred voices 'No, not yet,' and the sky said, 'No, not there."' The division between the two men is confirmed. It is the division also between their two nations; and it is the division, Forster implies, which characterized the 20th century and stems from man's failure to overcome his individual and traditional differences.

A Passage To India is generally conceded to be Forster's finest novel. The novel is essentially dramatic, the characters completely realized; and people, theme, and plot fuse into a totally convincing action. Yet although this novel suggests that Forster had acquired a complete mastery of the genre, he subsequently published no more novels. His later work - written at his home in Abinger or at King's College, Cambridge (of which he was elected a fellow in 1927 and where he resided from the end of World War II until his death) - took the form of literary criticism, biography, and general essays.

Nonfiction Works

Alexandria: A History and a Guide (1922) and Pharos and Pharillon (1923) are superficially histories and guides, as the subtitle of the first suggests. But fundamentally they present the comments of a liberal, thoughtful, and Hellenistic mind on human manners and traditions. This characteristic bent of mind is evident in all of Forster's subsequent essays.

Perhaps the most noted and influential of these is the volume of criticism Aspects of the Novel, the text of the Clark Lectures which Forster delivered in 1927. This work advances a theory of characterization and of "pattern and rhythm" in the novel. Forster asserts that characters are either flat - types or caricatures, particularly useful in comedy - or round - capable of surprising the reader, yet in a totally convincing fashion. He speculates that a sort of symphonic rhythm (the "three large blocks of sound" that make up Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, for example) may have its counterpart in fiction. These thoughts provide an illustration of Forster's own concern as a novelist. For his own characters do, in fact, range from the flattest of symbols to the complex and surprising cipher of human personality; and his own novels are sometimes built out of three recognizable parts and controlled by recurrent symbols.

Further literary essays are contained in Abinger Harvest (1936) and Two Cheers for Democracy (1951). In their impressionistic re-creation of their subjects' styles and preoccupations, and their idiosyncratic use of personal anecdote, these essays suggest the influence of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey - reminding the reader that Forster was at the center of the Bloomsbury group. A constant awareness of the progress and possible destruction of human civilization is characteristic of the finest of these essays and reveals directly what perhaps is one of the driving intellectual forces of the novels. The epilogues to "The Pageant of Abinger" in Abinger Harvest and "The Last of Abinger" in Two Cheers for Democracy voice a detestation of the increasing dominance of material values.

Firm opposition to prejudice, racism, and totalitarianism has seldom been more finely expressed than in Two Cheers for Democracy, and the long essay "What I Believe" remains the moving credo of a man who in an age of increasing uniformity insists upon the rights and sanctity of the individual and the importance of the personal life. A balance between the right of every human individual to be uniquely himself and the right of every community to organize in order to preserve that individual uniqueness is finely maintained by Forster. Because the political system in which Forster was nurtured attempts to sustain this balance, he is prepared to give it two cheers: "Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three. Only Love, the Beloved Republic, deserves that." The knowledge that the beloved republic can neither be founded by his race nor banished from its aspirations furnishes the despair and the hope which are inseparable in all of Forster's writing.

Further Reading

Rose Macauley provided an early personal appreciation of Forster's work in The Writings of E. M. Forster (1938), and a quite different though no less personal tribute is Natwahr-Singh, ed., E. M. Forster: A Tribute (1964). There are many good critical studies of Forster's work. J. K. Johnstone in Bloomsbury Group (1954) devotes a long section to an analysis of Forster's novels which has probably not been surpassed. Among the more recent serious critical studies are H. J. Oliver, The Art of E. M. Forster (1960); J. B. Beer, The Achievement of E. M. Forster (1962); and Frederick C. Crews, E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism (1962).

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: E. M. Forster
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Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan Forster), 1879-1970, English author, one of the most important British novelists of the 20th cent. After graduating from Cambridge, Forster lived in Italy and Greece. During World War I he served with the International Red Cross in Egypt. In 1946, Forster became an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge, where he lived until his death. He received the Order of Merit in 1968.

Forster's fiction, conservative in form, is in the English tradition of the novel of manners. He explores the emotional and sensual deficiencies of the English middle class, developing his themes by means of irony, wit, and symbolism. His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, appeared in 1905 and was followed in quick succession by The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howard's End (1910). His last and most widely acclaimed novel, A Passage to India (1924), treats the relations between a group of British colonials and native Indians and considers the difficulty of forming human relationships, of "connecting"; the novel also explores the nature of external and internal reality. Forster's short stories are collected in The Celestial Omnibus (1911) and The Eternal Moment (1928).

After 1928 he turned his attention increasingly to nonfiction. Notable collections of his essays and literary criticism are Abinger Harvest (1936) and Two Cheers for Democracy (1951). Aspects of the Novel (1927) is a major study of the novel and Forster's most important critical work. In 1971, Maurice, a novel Forster had written in 1913-14, was published posthumously. A homosexual, Forster had refrained from publishing it during his lifetime because of the work's sympathetic treatment of homosexuality. The story of a young man's self-awakening, Maurice treats a familiar Forster theme, the difficulty of human connection. His unpublished short stories and essays were published posthumously in Albergo Empedocle and Other Writings (1972). In all his works Forster's style is impeccable.

Bibliography

See his selected writings, ed. by G. B. Parker (1968); his selected letters, ed. by M. Lago and P. N. Furbank (2 vol., 1983-84); biographies by D. Godfrey (1968), C. J. Summers (1987), and N. Beauman (1994); studies by G. H. Thomson (1967), O. Stallybrass (1969), P. Gardner (1973), P. J. Scott (1983), and P. Gardner, ed. (1984).

Quotes By: Edward M. Forster
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Quotes:

"Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism."

"At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity."

"Failure or success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle."

"Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon."

"As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take this examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider."

"Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible."

See more famous quotes by Edward M. Forster

Wikipedia: E. M. Forster
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Edward Morgan Forster

E. M. Forster
Born Edward Morgan Forster
1 January 1879(1879-01-01)
Marylebone, London, England
Died 7 June 1970 (aged 91)
Coventry, Warwickshire, England
Occupation Writer (novels, short stories, essays)
Nationality English
Writing period 1901–70
Genres Realism, Symbolism, Modernism
Subjects Class Division, Gender, Homosexuality
Signature

Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970), was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy and also the attitudes towards gender and homosexuality in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect".

Contents

Early years

Forster was born at 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, London NW1, in a building which no longer exists. His father, an architect, died when Forster was only a year old. Among Forster's ancestors were members of the Clapham Sect. As a boy he inherited £8,000 from his paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton, daughter of the abolitionist Henry Thornton, which was enough to live on and enabled him to become a writer. He attended Tonbridge School in Kent as a day boy. The theatre at the school is named after him.

At King's College, Cambridge, between 1897 and 1901,[1] he became a member of the Apostles (formally named the Cambridge Conversazione Society), a discussion society. Many of its members went on to constitute what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, of which Forster was a peripheral member in the 1910s and 1920s. There is a famous recreation of Forster's Cambridge at the beginning of The Longest Journey.

After leaving university he travelled on the continent with his mother. He visited Egypt, Germany and India with the classicist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson in 1914. When the First World War broke out, he became a conscientious objector.

Forster spent a second spell in India in the early 1920s as the private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas. The Hill of Devi is his non-fictional account of this trip. After returning from India, he completed his last novel, A Passage to India (1924), for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

After A Passage to India

Arlington Park Mansions, Chiswick

In the 1930s and 1940s Forster became a successful broadcaster on BBC Radio and a public figure associated with the British Humanist Association. He was awarded a Benson Medal in 1937.

Forster developed a friendship with Bob Buckingham, a policeman, and his wife, May, and included the couple in his circle, which also included the writer and arts editor of The Listener, J.R. Ackerley, the psychologist W.J.H. Sprott, and, for a time, the composer Benjamin Britten. Other writers with whom Forster associated included the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the Belfast-based novelist Forrest Reid.

From 1925 until her death in March 1945 the novelist lived with his mother Alice Clare (Lily) in West Hackhurst, Abinger Hammer, finally leaving on or around 23 September 1946.[2] His London base was 26 Brunswick Square from 1930 to 1939, after which he rented 9 Arlington Park Mansions in Chiswick until at least 1961.[3][4]

Forster was elected an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge in January 1946,[3] and lived for the most part in the college, doing relatively little. He declined a knighthood in 1949 and was made a Companion of Honour in 1953.[3] In 1969 he was made a member of the Order of Merit. Forster died in Coventry on 7 June 1970 at the age of 91, at the home of the Buckinghams.[3]

Novels

The monument to Forster in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, near Rooks Nest where Forster grew up and on which he based the setting for his novel Howards End. The area is now known as Forster Country.

Forster had five novels published in his lifetime. Although Maurice appeared shortly after his death, it had been written nearly sixty years earlier. A seventh novel, Arctic Summer, was never finished.

His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), is the story of Lilia, a young English widow who falls in love with an Italian man, and of the efforts of her bourgeois relatives to get her back from Monteriano (based on San Gimignano). The mission of Philip Herriton to retrieve her from Italy has features in common with that of Lambert Strether in Henry James's The Ambassadors, a work Forster discussed ironically and somewhat disapprovingly in his book Aspects of the Novel (1927). Where Angels Fear to Tread was adapted into a film by Charles Sturridge in 1991.

Next, Forster published The Longest Journey (1907), an inverted bildungsroman following the lame Rickie Elliott from Cambridge to a career as a struggling writer and then to a post as a schoolmaster, married to the unappetising Agnes Pembroke. In a series of scenes on the hills of Wiltshire which introduce Rickie's wild half-brother Stephen Wonham, Forster attempts a kind of sublime related to those of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence.

Forster's third novel, A Room with a View (1908), is his lightest and most optimistic. It was started before any of his others, as early as 1901, and exists in earlier forms referred to as "Lucy". The book is the story of young Lucy Honeychurch's trip to Italy with her cousin, and the choice she must make between the free-thinking George Emerson and the repressed aesthete Cecil Vyse. George's father Mr Emerson quotes thinkers who influenced Forster, including Samuel Butler. A Room with a View was filmed by Merchant-Ivory in 1985.

Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View can be seen collectively as Forster's Italian novels. Both include references to the famous Baedeker guidebooks and concern narrow-minded middle-class English tourists abroad. The books share many themes with short stories collected in The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment.

Howards End (1910) is an ambitious "condition-of-England" novel concerned with different groups within the Edwardian middle classes represented by the Schlegels (bohemian intellectuals), the Wilcoxes (thoughtless plutocrats) and the Basts (struggling lower-middle-class aspirants).

It is frequently observed that characters in Forster's novels die suddenly. This is true of Where Angels Fear to Tread, Howards End and, most particularly, The Longest Journey.

Forster achieved his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924). The novel takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj. Forster connects personal relationships with the politics of colonialism through the story of the Englishwoman Adela Quested, the Indian Dr. Aziz, and the question of what did or did not happen between them in the Marabar Caves.

Maurice (1971) was published posthumously. It is a homosexual love story which also returns to matters familiar from Forster's first three novels, such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of attending Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire. The novel was controversial, given that Forster's sexuality had not been previously known or widely acknowledged. Today's critics continue to argue over the extent to which Forster's sexuality, even his personal activities,[5] influenced his writing.

Key themes

Forster's views as a humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of personal connections in spite of the restrictions of contemporary society. His humanist attitude is expressed in the non-fictional essay What I Believe.

Forster's two best-known works, A Passage to India and Howards End, explore the irreconcilability of class differences. A Room with a View also shows how questions of propriety and class can make connection difficult. The novel is his most widely read and accessible work, remaining popular long after its original publication. His posthumous novel Maurice explores the possibility of class reconciliation as one facet of a homosexual relationship.

Sexuality is another key theme in Forster's works, and it has been argued that a general shift from heterosexual love to homosexual love can be detected over the course of his writing career. The foreword to Maurice describes his struggle with his own homosexuality, while similar issues are explored in several volumes of homosexually charged short stories. Forster's explicitly homosexual writings, the novel Maurice and the short-story collection The Life to Come, were published shortly after his death.

Forster is noted for his use of symbolism as a technique in his novels, and he has been criticised (as by his friend Roger Fry) for his attachment to mysticism. One example of his symbolism is the wych elm tree in Howards End; the characters of Mrs Wilcox in that novel and Mrs Moore in A Passage to India have a mystical link with the past and a striking ability to connect with people from beyond their own circles.

Notable works by Forster

Novels

Short stories

  • The Celestial Omnibus (and other stories) (1911)
  • The Eternal Moment and other stories (1928)
  • Collected Short Stories (1947) a combination of the above two titles, containing:
    • "The Story of a Panic"
    • "The Other Side Of The Hedge"
    • "The Celestial Omnibus"
    • "Other Kingdom"
    • "The Curate's Friend"
    • "The Road from Colonus"
    • "The Machine Stops"
    • "The Point of It"
    • "Mr Andrews"
    • "Co-ordination"
    • "The Story of the Siren"
    • "The Eternal Moment"
  • The Life to Come and other stories (1972) (posthumous) containing the following stories written between approximately 1903 and 1960:
    • "Ansell"
    • "Albergo Empedocle"
    • "The Purple Envelope"
    • "The Helping Hand"
    • "The Rock"
    • "The Life to Come"
    • "Dr Woolacott"
    • "Arthur Snatchfold"
    • "The Obelisk"
    • "What Does It Matter? A Morality"
    • "The Classical Annex"
    • "The Torque"
    • "The Other Boat"
    • "Three Courses and a Dessert: Being a New and Gastronomic Version of the Old Game of Consequences"

Plays and pageants

  • Abinger Pageant (1934)
  • England's Pleasant Land (1940)

Film scripts

Libretto

Collections of essays and broadcasts

  • Abinger Harvest (1936)
  • Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)

Literary criticism

  • Aspects of the Novel (1927)
  • The Feminine Note in Literature (posthumous) (2001)

Biography

  • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1934)
  • Marianne Thornton, A Domestic Biography (1956)

Travel writing

  • Alexandria: A History and Guide (1922)
  • Pharos and Pharillon (A Novelist's Sketchbook of Alexandria Through the Ages) (1923)
  • The Hill of Devi (1953)

Miscellaneous writings

Notable films based upon novels by Forster

Secondary works on Forster

  • Abrams, M.H. and Stephen Greenblatt, "E.M. Forster." The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2C, 7th Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000: 2131-2140.
  • Ackerley, J. R., E. M. Forster: A Portrait (Ian McKelvie, London, 1970)
  • Bakshi, Parminder Kaur, Distant Desire. Homoerotic Codes and the Subversion of the English Novel in E. M. Forster's Fiction (New York, 1996).
  • Beauman, Nicola, Morgan (London, 1993).
  • Brander, Lauwrence, E.M. Forster. A critical study (London, 1968).
  • Cavaliero, Glen, A Reading of E.M. Forster (London, 1979).
  • Colmer, John, E.M. Forster - The personal voice (London, 1975).
  • Crews, Frederick, E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism (Textbook Publishers, 2003).
  • E.M. Forster, ed. by Norman Page, Macmillan Modern Novelists (Houndmills, 1987).
  • E.M. Forster: The critical heritage, ed. by Philip Gardner (London, 1973).
  • Forster: A collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Malcolm Bradbury (New Jersey, 1966).
  • Furbank, P.N., E.M. Forster: A Life (London, 1977-78).
  • Haag, Michael, Alexandria: City of Memory (London and New Haven, 2004). This portrait of Alexandria during the first half of the twentieth century includes a biographical account of E.M. Forster, his life in the city, his relationship with Constantine Cavafy, and his influence on Lawrence Durrell.
  • King, Francis, E.M. Forster and his World, (London, 1978).
  • Martin, John Sayre, E.M. Forster. The endless journey (London, 1976).
  • Martin, Robert K. and Piggford, George (eds.) Queer Forster (Chicago, 1997)
  • Mishra, Pankaj (ed.) "E.M. Forster." India in Mind: An Anthology. New York: Vintage Books, 2005: 61-70.
  • Scott, P.J.M., E.M. Forster: Our Permanent Contemporary, Critical Studies Series (London, 1984).
  • Summers, Claude J., E.M. Forster (New York, 1983).
  • Trilling, Lionel, E. M. Forster: A Study (Norfolk: New Directions, 1943).
  • Wilde, Alan, Art and Order. A Study of E.M. Forster (New York, 1967).

References

  1. ^ Forster, Edward Morgan in Venn, J. & J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, Cambridge University Press, 10 vols, 1922–1958.
  2. ^ "King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge, The Papers of Edward Morgan Forster (reference EMF/19/6)". http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0272%2FPP%2FEMF%2F19%2F6. Retrieved 27 May 2008. 
  3. ^ a b c d David Bradshaw, ed (2007). "Chronology". The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521834759. http://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/34759/frontmatter/9780521834759_frontmatter.htm. Retrieved 27 May 2008. 
  4. ^ "King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge, The Papers of Edward Morgan Forster (reference EMF/17/10)". http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0272%2FPP%2FEMF%2F17%2F10. Retrieved 27 May 2008. 
  5. ^ "BBC News Website". http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/1470492.stm. 

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