E.M.
Forster
English author and critic, member of
Bloomsbury group and friend of Virginia Woolf. After gaining fame as a novelist,
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 in 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." (from Aspects of
the Novel, 1927)
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 later
formed 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. 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. In 1907 appeared The Longest
Journey, then A Room With a View (1908),
based partly 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." (from Howards End) The
novel 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. 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). 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. It was Forter's last novel - and
for the remaining 46 years of his life he devoted himself to other activities.
Writing novels was not the most important element in his life. In the book he
wrote: "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." 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 version of the book, but eventually David Lean was approved as director.
Forster had shared with T.E. Lawrence a dislike and distrut
of the cinema. The two last chapetrs of A Passage to
India Forster had also written under the influence of Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Later 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." (from
David Lean: A Biography by Kevin Brownlow, 1996)
Passage to India (1924) - 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 says: '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 has
claimed once that Forster knew hardly anything about India: "He just knew a few
middle-class Indians and the garden boys whom he wished to seduce."
Forster 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,
and after his mother's death in 1945, he was elected an honorary fellow of
King's and lived there for the remainder of his life. In 1949 Forster refused a
knighthood and in 1951 he collaborated with Eric Crozier
on the libretto of Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd, which was based on
Herman Melville's novel (film 1962, dir. by Peter Ustinov). Forster was made a
Companion ofHonour in 1953 and in 1969 he accepted an
Order of Merit. Forster died on June 7, 1970.
E.M Forster @ Classic Reader 27.October.2008
URL: http://www.classicreader.com/author/81/about/
MORE BIOGRAPHIES: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]…. [E.M. Forster]
Academic year 2008/2009
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Universitat de Valčncia Press