I KILLED E. M. FORSTER: AUTHOR
CONFESSES
http://www.geocities.com/soho/exhibit/6747/confess.htmlvisited
in November, 2008
This article was
written by author Noel Purdon (noel.purdon@flinders.edu.au)and recalls an experience he had with EM
Forster
towards the end of his life through asking Forster to read
his first novel. The
article, along with others by the same author, appears at
wordarchive.com. Noel Purdon also has a homepage,
http://sites.netscape.net/purd0/homepage
YES, AT LAST it
can be, it must be told. My
conscience has haunted me for many years, and the
revelations about Salieri and
Mozart have struck at my very heart. Inspired by a reverie
which I fell into
during the film of A Passage to India, I have decided to
make as clean a breast
about it as is possible for someone who dribbles on his
shirts at lunch.
As the echoes
of whatever Judy Davis was doing to
herself in the Marabar Caves reverberated around the
cinema aisles, I dissolved
back to the balmy Cambridge evening where it all began.
Start the ripples,
editor, and think of Merchant Ivory.
We were chasing
each other, and at this stage Nick
was in front. Nick, who was at Pembroke and even more
infantile and gifted at
talking in strange tongues than I, were playing
water-bombs .I was negotiating
a particularly tricky corner between King’s and Cat’s when
there was a terrible
crash and rather a lot of water. A small old thing in
baggy trousers and dowdy
tweed coat picked itself up. Its cloth cap had fallen off,
and a tuft of white
hair stuck up like a cocky’s comb on its bald head. I
helped it adjust its
spectacles. It was clearly shaken, and could only wheeze
and gasp like Mole.
‘Gosh, I’m awfully sorry,’ I breathed, and sped to catch
up with Nick, who hid
his plastic bag of Cam water as we crossed Trumpington Street.
‘You know who
you just ecraysed at King’s?’ he
enquired.
‘Erasmus?’ I
suggested.
‘Close. That’s
E. M. Forster.’
‘That doesn’t
look like E. M. Forster. E. M.
Forster’s tall, and has a moustache.’
‘That’s E. M.
Forster, you mongol,’ said Nick‘ and
you nearly drowned him on certifiably dry land.’ I ran back.
‘Are you really
E. M. Forster?’
He looked as if
I might be about to knock him over
again.
‘Ah,ah, yes,’
he hastened to agree.
I introduced
myself.
‘I lived in
Florence,’ I explained pertinently. ‘I
read A Room with a View. In my room there. I had a view too.’
A wild look had
come into his eye; I could tell that
he was impressed.
‘I’m
Australian,’ I added. He seemed to find this
believable as well, and he was still smiling strangely as
he toddled off.
These were
heady days. The next week I accicentally
knocked Prince Charles off his bicycle on Garrett Hostel
bridge; I fled with Germaine
Greer across Midsummer Common to avoid the procters
because she wasn't wearing
her gown. In revenge, Germaine felt me up during my paper
on The Taming of the
Shrew, so that my odd yawps and writhing would discredit
me in the English
Faculty’s eyes, and prepare the way for Germaine’s own
triumphant exegesis. I
even coached Clive James in saying ‘G’day’.
But I was
restless, unfulfilled. As the young Joyce
had managed to twitch a bit of Ibsen’s mantle blue on his
nascent head, and
Lowry had made do with Nordahl Greig, I required a Great
Artist.
My plan was
simple. Eschewing the temptations of
punts, Grantchester honey and LSD parties, I retired to my
rooms and emerged
three months later with a novel. It was a searing
narrative of adolescent
passion and funny goings-on at night in a Jesuit college
in Mantova just after
the war. Structured as it was on a grid of references to
the number seven
(seven sacraments, seven days of the week, seven deadly
sins), and climaxing
with an architectural odyssey involving Giulio Romano, it
made The Name of the
Rose look like a work of careless naturalism. The first
part was ingenious, the
second beautiful, and the third abominably clever -though
I suppose one day
I’ll be accused of plagiarising that idea as well.
Some months
later, after luring Iris Murdoch to my
rooms on the pretext of Trinity Hall’s best port and
discovering that she was
more politely interested in the grog than my stunning
prose, I wrote to
Forster, reminding him of our close encounter, and
describing my opus in choice
Italian as a novella. His reply was prompt; it came, not
from King’s, but
(ominously enough in view of the fact that it was
flattened during the war)
from Coventry.
Salisbury
Ave.,
Coventry
CV3 5DA
5 Feb 1970
Dear Mr.
Purdon.
Thank you for your
letter. Unluckily my sight is very bad. Is your novella
typed? If it is, I will
ask one of my friends here if they could read it to me.
Yours
sincerely,
E. M.
Forster.
Of course it was
typed, the silly old bugger. What did he think I was? A
beginner? And off it
went. Winter became spring, with the daffodils and
suicides that the English
are so good at. We sat around in our studies being languid
and plotting to
betray Britain. (If you’ve ever seen Another Country
you’ll know how this is
done). We read Das Kapital loudly with the windows open,
and proclaimed our
love of Anthony Blount’s taste in Renaissance nudes
without a single response
from the Soviet Embassy.
Then, on the 20th of
April, came the crucial reply:
Dear Mr.
Purdon,
My friend, and I have
read your novella with much interest but not I am afraid
with much pleasure.
That was to be expected since I am very humanist in my
outlook and it was
impossible to be enthusiastic either about Aurelio or his
surroundings.
All of it
is well written but I did particularly admire the
description of the dead
priest and the fly. It was masterful and terrifying and
went straight to the
point. What however is the point of the whole? It was
difficult to tell since I
am not knowledgeable about the seven sins and have no
insight into Catholicism.
The opening
section was particularly puzzling since I could not decide
what you were aiming
at. There is no doubt that the writing is of a high order.
I am glad to have
had the opportunity of reading it. I hope the effort will
find a more
appropriate reader and that the work will gain success. It
may be going into
problems which my friends and I do not share or understand.
The
expedition to the Palazzo del Te’ was also impressive but
I could not see it as
a general symbol. I will return your manuscript when the
Easter rush is over.
Yours
sincerely,
E.M.
Forster
The last signature
trails away. What a typical Forsterian touch, all the
stuff about the friends!
One imagines the poor old man, his mind already blown by
chapter three,
insisting on their being by him at all times. ‘Only
connect,’ he must have
murmured to them. The rest was silence. Forster shuffled
off the mortal on the
7th of June. Salieri-like, I lurked behind the pillars in
King’s College
Chapel. Only my intimates knew, and I fobbed them off with
life subscriptions
to The New Left Review and promises of jobs in Australia.
Heartless? Perhaps.
But think what I spared him: the embarrassment over
Maurice, the snide
homophobic critics of The Life to Come. No, God chose him
to work through me,
and me through him, even though he had that dreadful laugh
and that terrible
wisp of punk hair. I have the posthumous quotes all
prepared for the back of my
dust-jacket, and very nice indeed they will look in
Helvetica Bold. I think I
shall avoid ‘particularly puzzling’ in favour of ‘writing
of a high order’ or
the judiciously culled ‘work will gain success’. No. The
gem is surely:
‘Description of the dead priest and fly...masterful and
terrifying and went
straight to the point’ There. I can rest with that. And at
last my conscience
is eased, because I like to think that whatever I did to
him, he died smiling.
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