The Riddle of E. M. Forster

...O. Meredith, Bob Trevelyan, and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson), but in his fourth year was elected to what Furbank describes as "the most exclusive intellectual coterie in Cambridge"-the "Apostles," also known as the "Society...

...one quality continually belied another, and he always retained an almost porous receptivity to new experience and alien people...

...Nevertheless, the man who said that "keeping calm and cheerful is one of one's unshakeable functions" did go on-traveling to India once again and twice to America, writing essays and reviews and short-stories and heaps of letters, and reflecting on "the difficulty of living in the universe...

...Above all, E. M. Forster was unique in not submitting to that bugaboo of the modern artist-an attitude of permanent disenchantment...

...However, this time there was also bitterness and anger at Forster's criticism of Britannia's international dealings...

...Forster's refusal to desist from the moral acts of self-definition and self-evaluation made him that rare entity, a truly unsealed identity...

...The molly-coddled Morgan also was deeply in love with his mother, as little boys often are...

...His prescription of earthly redemption as it is voiced in -4 Passage to India—"kindness, more kindness, and ever after that more kindness"-is, admittedly, a limited and even parochial one, but it will fail to move only those who prefer grand acts to small, daily charities...

...When his father died less than a year later, he and his mother went to live at "Rooksnest" in Stevenage, an idyllic country house replete with apple trees and a pond in the front yard...

...It had to do with the fact that, to a rather special degree, he lived the imaginative life and, whether in company or in solitude, was attending to imaginative impressions...

...His avoiding official postures enabled him to find comradeship and occasional sexual gratification among men of a different class...

...Everyone is against me except Squire and Sworder...

...The tone of the Society's meetings was determinedly abstract...

...He died as he wished, "in an odour of sanctity," in his bed, early on the morning of June 7, 1970...

...One does not have to be a strict Freudian to find in this feminization of the young Forster the seeds of his later, mostly inactive homosexuality...

...If Forster never compromised his native and surprisingly dark powers of empathy, he never allowed them to overwhelm a purposeful engagement with mundane matters either...

...Forster's experience was the classically dismal one of the sensitive, ungainly youth set loose in a den of brawny Philistines, the full terrors of which have been paid memorable tribute in George Orwell's essay, "Such, Such Were the Joys...

...Forster's "mouldy old mother," as the writer and editor J. R. Acker-ley once referred to her, died in 1945...

...And yet, as Furbank himself admits at the very close of his diligent explorations, E. M. Forster resists our understanding...

...In fact, the "certain balance" was no balance at all...

...It is filled with revealing anecdotes and first-hand reminiscences, culled from friends and relatives of Forster's...

...The novel was received with the usual high praise...

...The reader learns much, and still the riddle of personality remains...

...Indeed, what one comes away with from this book is a renewed sense of the ineffable as an element in human affairs...

...he lived with and catered to Lily until her death...

...Although he continued to duck the role, he did become increasingly involved in issues of state, and he won new admirers among the rising literary generation that included Auden, Isherwood and Spender...

...After Cambridge Forster's life took on a distinctly old-world configuration...

...Forster gives the impression of someone who has not yet found himself...

...The book was a departure from his previous works-the "last Englishman," as D. H. Lawrence called him, had ventured at last from the tea-table-and it indicates both the expansiveness of Forster's political sympathies and his intensely personal, humanistic vision./) Passage-resulted from his friendship with Masood, an Indian intellectual, which had led to Forster's visiting India and serving for a period as secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas...

...He read Pater, disapprovingly —"dead or wounded flesh gives Pater the thrill he can never get from its healthiness"-and Keats' letters, reveringly: "He has seized upon the supreme fact of human nature, the very small amount of good in it, and the supreme importance of that little...

...There, Morgan was surrounded by doting (and doddering) females-a "haze of elderly ladies," he later called them-and as a result was a somewhat elderly child, given to prissy fears and advanced sentiments...

...He will not add up to the sum of his parts: "One could imagine, knowing him, that he had a 'secret.' It is a sentimental notion, but one that occurred to many of his acquaintances...

...During these years Morgan acquired his distrust of groups and his belief in the individual gesture...

...Furbank's assessment of the damage is rather sanguine: "All the same, it was not the sort of mother-son affair which leads to tragedy...

...He was unpopular and wrote abject letters home: "I feel utterly wretched, I would like to come away...

...His formerly well-lit personality was temporarily submerged: "He had become muted and subfusc, timid and buttoned-up in manner, with a queer pedantic trick of speech...

...In 1890, when Morgan turned 11, he was yanked out of his gentle and indulgent environment and thrust into English boarding schools, first at Kent House and then at Tonbridge School...

...Furbank's E. M. Forster: A Life (Harcourt BraceJovanovich,618pp.,$19.95)isas exemplary a literary biography as one could wish for-informative, suggestive and a pleasure to read...

...When Lawrence went at him to change his whole existence, to become more alive, Forster asked: "How do you know I'm not dead...

...Following this early outburst, Forster wrote only one other novel: A Passage to India appeared in 1924 when he was in his mid-40s...

...Forster's response to its purely theoretical debate— the kind he was to portray with great humor in The Longest Journey-was marked by the novelist's impulse to embody rather than to formulate: "Arguments, to me, are only fascinating when they are of the nature of gestures, and illustrate the people who produce them...

...But he preserved the slightly macabre sense of humor that was so integral a part of his apprehension of the world...

...The author was by now a bona fide celebrity, honored as a writer and respected as a thinker...

...Monie," as she was nicknamed, had taken a benefactress-like interest in Lily Forster even before she married into the family, and now evinced the most obtrusive interest in the son, upon whom she eventually settled a tidy inheritance that freed Morgan from ever having to earn his daily bread...

...and since his circle included a large percentage of writers and other professional observers, their material offers greater access to shadings of character than a less habitually watchful group would have provided...

...He woke up one day shortly afterward and found himself repeating, "I cannot go on, simply cannot," and "surely she will give up being dead now...

...There Forster not only made several important and lasting friendships (H...

...Lily was an extremely possessive mother, but not an emotionally smothering one: there was a coolness and briskness -something of the sister as well as of the mother, one might say-in her feelings for Morgan, and this kept a certain balance in their relationship...

...Since the Society's "brethren" remained active even after they had left the university, Forster came into contact with Leonard Woolf and Lytton Strachey, and eventually established a guarded friendship with the queen of Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf...

...Yet by the age of 32-in an astonishing six years-he published four acclaimed novels, including the masterful Howard's End...

...He worked at his fiction and became a tutor to a strange, feudally-run family in Germany...

...E. M. Forster was born in 1879 to Lily (Wichelo) and Edward Forster, an architect...

...For the many demure facts of Forster's biography bear, at best, an oblique relation to the forceful and incautious imagination that produced Howard's End and A Passage to India...

...Registered as "Henry Morgan" and baptized as "Edward Morgan," Forster entered the world in a muddled fashion that set the pattern for a lifetime of muddled beginnings...

...He traveled extensively in Italy with his mother, where he was enamored of the "Southern" temperament, abounding in sensuality and accessibility...

...It would re-emerge again at Cambridge, slowly, with a luster not apparent at first acquaintance...

...He was, as Christopher Isherwood describes him "the anti-heroic hero, with his straggly straw moustache, his light gay blue baby-eyes and his elderly stoop...

...He deliberated the burning questions from a position of radical humility...

...She had her own ideas about child-rearing: "At Monie's insistence, he wore his hair in curls to his shoulders and dressed in Little Lord Fauntleroy suits with lace collars...

...Unlike other little boys, though, he never seems to have fallen out of love with her...

...One of these, a policeman by the name of Bob Buckingham, became the mainstay of Forster's old age, in spite of the fact that he was married...

...His style was that of a Victorian-exhibiting a somewhat fusty regard for entrenched civilities-but his insights were fresh and his interests unexpected...

...His evolving political thought is too quickly dismissed as classically (and ineffectively) liberal because he was so resolutely unattracted-in politics as in art-to the flashy and the linear, and because of the margin of error he always drew, next to each of his ideas...

...The half-solicitious, half-detached attitude that Furbank refers to was the lure fixating him at an inappropriate level of involvement with Lily, so that he was not able to effect lasting romantic-sexual attachments...

...The most important elderly lady was Marianne Thornton, Morgan's paternal great aunt, a wealthy, independent-minded spinster...

...Cambridge made him an Honorary Fellow and he went to live there, a sort of holy man of letters...