Mary Lago

The Indian Novel

Despite occasional puzzlements, critics judged Howards End to be not only Forster’s best but ‘the most significant novel of the year’. It was ‘head and shoulders above the great mass of fiction now claiming a hearing’. It was ‘a novel of high talent — the highest’, ‘a book in which his highly original talent has found full and ripe expression’. The Standard’s reviewer declared that Mr Forster had arrived, ‘and, if he never writes another line, his niche should be secure’.1

Restoring Rabindranath Tagore

In The Reconstruction of India, published in 1930 just before the First Round Table Conference in London, Edward J. Thompson proposed measures that would in his view go far to encourage a new beginning in British-Indian relations. In a 1931 edition, published after the Conference, he explained why he had addressed the book not only to England and India but to America as well. He placed little trust in ‘the books by which the American public forms its opinions of Indian affairs’, for they gave that public a drastically distorted picture of the situation.1 Americans liked to think that in the Indian resistance to British control they were seeing their own early history repeated, and they tended to give things Indian a thick coating of romanticism. Neither in politics nor in cultural affairs was this desirable; Thompson wrote: It is intolerable that a whole field of human experience and activity, a field so vast and varied, should continue to be the home of ignorance and pedantry and brag and complacency. The main outlines of Indian legend and history and belief must become part of the normal equipment of educated men and women everywhere. The angry ghosts of nationalism and imperialism must be exorcized from the region where they have stalked so long2

The Lonely Voice

Three posthumous volumes completed the list of Forster’s new publications up to 1980: Maurice in 1971, ‘The Life to Come’ and other stories in 1972, and ‘Arctic Summer’ and other fiction in 1980.1 This last is a collection of working fragments, fascinating and very valuable for the light that they shed on the composition of other completed works. Maurice, the ‘homosexual novel’ that most of his friends knew about and many had read in manuscript, appeared before the story collection, but it was his work on the stories that inspired Forster to make one last effort to put the manuscript of Maurice into the form in which he wished to leave it to his literary executors.

The BBC Broadcasts

It would have been expecting too much for critics to agree about a novel as complex and as close to the Imperial bone as A Passage to India was in 1924. Forster understood Muslims and misunderstood Hindus. He understood Hindus but misunderstood Muslims. He was drastically unfair to Anglo-Indians. Or, he had skilfully balanced their devotion to duty against their shortcomings. Or, he was scrupulously fair to both Anglo-Indians and Indians. There is a good deal about ‘the Indian mind’ and India’s eternal mysteries. The Indians in the novel were ‘children of Nature’, or they were ‘all miserable creatures’, or they were ‘neither primitive nor uneducated’. The novel left one with ‘a sense of disappointment’ because it was difficult to know ‘what it is about; … all the details are good but the ensemble is fuzzy, or wuzzy.’ Or, on the other hand, there is ‘no silliness, no lapse, no wobbling.’1

E. M. Forster: Self and Neighbours

In the spring of 1946 E. M. Forster was one of ten BBC radio speakers invited to discuss ‘The Challenge of Our Time’. Since the time was the beginning of a momentous postwar era and the challenge was enormous, the series was intended to make radio listeners stop and think: in particular, to think ahead to what they hoped might be the future shape of the civilisation they had fought to preserve. Four scientists, two historians (Arthur Koestler being one), a classicist, a theologian, a philosopher and Forster were to consider ‘whether and how far the ills of our present world are traceable to causes in human thinking’. Was the war just concluded only a symptom of general unease about the durability of tradition? Was the nation-state consuming the individual? ‘Is there a chance of re-creating the social mould?’ What about a new synthesis? The present chaos was the dire alternative.1

The Suburban Novels

By 1894, when Morgan Forster was fifteen, Rooksnest, the house near Stevenage, Hertfordshire, had become his Arcadia, cherished in memory but unattainable. In 1894, when he began a detailed description of the house in order to fix it firmly in mind, he could not remember the act of first entering the house, but he was clear about his first memory connected with his being in and of Rooksnest: ‘playing with bricks on the drawing room floor’. They had arrived in March 1883 and intended to stay for no more than three years. They left in 1893 because the landlord would not renew their lease, in part because Mrs Forster could not make up her mind about it. In those ten years her son developed his lifelong attachment to the house, its wych-elm and meadow, and the farm beyond.