EM Forster was born on January 1, 1879, at London, to Edward Forster (Eddie) and Alice Forster (Lily) into a family of artistes.
Edward’s father, stepbrother and uncle all made their careers in painting or drawing. His uncle, John Whichelo, had also received the title of ‘Marine Painter to the Prince Regent’.
Edward’s grandfather, a drawing teacher, died when Forster’s mother was 12. However, his grandmother, Louisa, survived him for over 40 years.
His father, Eddie, an architect by profession married Lily in early 1877. After the wedding the couple took up a house near Marylebone. By the year-end Lily was expecting a child. However, the baby died at birth. She became pregnant for the second time. This time she delivered a baby boy on January 1, 1879. The happy couple registered the baby’s name as ‘Henry Morgan Forster’. Two months later, they took the baby to East Side to be christened at Holy Trinity church on the common.
An interesting thing happened on their way to the church. The verger asked Forster Sr what would he like the child’s name to be.
Forster Sr, absentmindedly, gave his own name ‘Edward Morgan’. The verger wrote it down. When they all reached the church, the clergyman repeated the verger’s question.
To this, Lily’s mother, who was holding the child at the lent, merely pointed to the paper in the verger’s hand.
To Lily’s astonishment, she heard the child being christened ‘Edward’. After this fiasco, there were anxious discussions, but at the end it was decided that ‘Edward’ he must remain.
Not long after Forster’s birth, his father’s health began to fail. He developed a chronic cough and was constantly catching cold. Maimie Synnot (Forster Sr’s aunt) recognized the symptoms as consumption, a family disease, and she insisted on proper medical attention. However, Lily was too inexperienced to be alarmed. Soon, Forster Sr’s health deteriorated. The doctors, who were not very hopeful, recommended sea-air. Lily took her husband to Bournemouth. There they took a furnished house and Maimie Synnot came down to nurse him and support Lily in her trouble. But, despite all the nursing, Forster Sr died on October 30, 1880.
The blow shattered Lily. It left her grieving and bewildered and conscious that Edward’s family secretly half-blamed her for
the tragedy. She felt lonely and unwanted. Her only hope for the future was with her baby.
At this time of sorrow, she found support in Maimie. From time to time Maimie stayed with Lily. And whenever they parted, Lily kept in touch with her and poured out her misery in long letters.
The one main binding factor between Lily and Maimie was the baby. He was their lifeline and their hope for the future. However, this constant hankering by Lily and Maimie colored his own sense all through his childhood.
For most of 1882, Lily wandered aimlessly from one friend’s house to another, intermittently searching for a home for her own. Maimie wanted Lily and the baby to live with her, but Lily wanted to be independent. Little Edward was a demonstrative child, prone to violent passions of love and fury, and Lily was accused of spoiling him.
At last, some time in autumn, Lily succeeded in finding a house. "I do believe I have at last found a house," she told Maimie. Lily ‘raved’ about ‘Rooksnest’ (the new place) and Maimie too approved of it. Lily moved in with the baby in March the following year (1883). She had hired the house for only three years, and once or twice she decided it was too lonely and they must leave. However, before long, she fell in love with the place. And indeed it was a charming house, with its rosy brickwood, its ancient vine, and its steep-pitched roof, pierced by dormer windows, snooping down at the rear, in an odd way, almost to the ground. Forster evoked the house and his love for it in his work Howards End and wrote later: "The house is my childhood and safety. The three attics preserve me. Only a little of my passion and irrationality was used up in Howards End."
At the age of 15, when he was a depressed schoolboy at Tonbridge, he looked back nostalgically to ‘Rooksnest’ and made a sentimental inventory of its rooms. His house was surrounded by paddock and apple trees and in the front was a pond, which Lily had drained and which became known as ‘Dellóle.’
Childhood
Edward was taken as being ‘delicate’ in the family and for the first year or two his mother took him off to Bournemouth for the winters. Lily’s overt concern for Edward’s health was probably due to the horror of having lost her husband so young.
All through his childhood he was never allowed to go out if there was slight threat of rain. And in the mildest wind he had to be swathed in warm coats and mufflers. He imbibed the anxiety himself and right up to middle age he thought of himself as extremely frail and likely at any time to develop consumption. In fact, as he came to realize later in life, he had an extremely sound constitution.
He was a pretty child, at the age of three, with large expressive eyes. His favorite book in early years was The Swiss Family Robinson – he loved it because the boys in it were very happy.
At a very young age, a very strong emotional bond was developed between Edward and his mother. He wanted it to last forever and became fearful at any thought of alteration. This love affair made Edward’s childhood a radiantly happy one and it went on, in a sense, for the rest of their lives. Indeed, it dominated his existence and caused him much frustration in later years. Lily was an extremely possessive mother, but not an emotionally smothering one. She was something of a sister as well as a mother to Edward, and this kept a certain balance in their relationship.
Edward’s great aunt Maimie was now very old, almost 90 years. In 1887, she died leaving £2,000 to Lily and £8,000 to Edward. The interest on £8,000 was to be used for his maintenance and education and the principle amount was to be paid to him on his 25th birthday. This £8,000, he was to say later, represented his ‘financial salvation’, enabling him to travel and write. With aunt Maimie’s money Edward’s childhood became far more secure.
Pen In Hand
His writing began when he was quite young. When he was only five, he began composing stories on his own account, long stories about things that never happened, except inside his head. They had sensational titles like Dancing Bell, Chattering Hossocks, Scream, Scuffles in Wardrobe, The Earring in the Keyhole and The Adventures of Pussy Serial. In Chattering Hassocks, 50 lions and 50 unicorns sat on hassocks and the lions made speeches in favor of tolerance and liberty of opinion. His dolls, especially one called ‘Sailor Dollar’, figured in interminable narratives at this time.
When Edward was about eight, his mother engaged a tutor for him. An officious, snobbish Irishman named Harvey, a master at private school in the village. Edward worshiped him. Sometime after Harvey’s arrival, it was decided that Edward needed company of his own age; and so it was arranged that his cousin Percy, son of Lily’s brother Harcourt, would come to live at ‘Rooksnest’ and take lessons from Mr Harvey. Percy was two years or so elder to Edward. For a while they got along well, then, or so Edward thought, Percy grew tired of him, considering him too much of a baby and began to tease and rebuff him at school.
In January1890, when Edward was 11 years old, it was high time to be at school. His mother inquired at several preparatory schools and eventually settled for Kent House in Eastbourne. A small school, with 30 boys in all, and very much for the sons of gentry.
However, Edward soon discovered that the other boys cold shouldered him.
They called him ‘Mousie’ or jeered at him calling him ‘green–eye’ or ‘sucks’. He did everything to win acceptance, but in vain. He was, however, affectionate to a few boys like Henson, whom nobody liked; Waldron, his senior and a boy who resembled him.
Edward’s life at Kent was rather uneventful except for an incident of sexual abuse, which made a remarkable impact on his mind. He left in 1893 and was sent to local school called ‘The Grange’ – where his old tutor, Harvey had been a teacher.
‘The Grange’ had a reputation, it ran on Arnoldian principles, but Edward’s stay there was brief and disastrous. He returned to ‘Rooksnest’. His beloved Maimie was there, and she and his mother comforted him; then they planned to move to Tonbridge, where he would go as a day boy. The choice of Tonbridge School was a sensible, but again an ill–fated one. Edward’s two years or so in the school were probably the most unhappy in his life. Being new in the school, he was physically bullied by his seniors and overall there was an atmosphere of unkindness.
Edward was very much a ‘homely’ boy, out of his element at school and his paternal relations were very pessimistic about his future.
Youth
In 1897, when Edward was 18, he entered Cambridge. He fell in love with it. Cambridge transformed him and he always acknowledged the debt. In a way, he found himself there or at least began the process. It was a place where things were valued for what they were and not what use you could make to them.
While in Cambridge, Edward Forster continued to contribute to English literature. At Cambridge he worked, but not with much confidence; he went for bicycle rides, attended Chapel, drank coffee and played wild card games with friends after Hall. He was put up at the lodging and partly for this reason he didn’t have a friend circle, at least not a wide one. Altogether, though not positively lonely, he felt rather out of thing, ‘stupefied’ he called it later.
Meanwhile, he kept up with school and its gossip and contributed to the school magazine The Tonbridgian. One very interesting thing was that he seemed to have spent an enormous amount of time on games. There would be Picquet or Bagatelle with Mollison (one of his close friends), evenings at the Fulfils playing Clumps up Jenloins as a game of passing a penny down like the Greek torch race, and many others.
While he was studying he also started building up in the college a school of political sciences, a school for statement where the fundamental of political philosophy could be discussed in Socratic manner. Forster was a man of great zeal and goodwill. His books The Greek View of Life (1896), A Modern symposium (1905) and so on, are largely forgotten now. But there was something fatally sedentary in his thought. He was, however, a vigorous and an impressive talker, with a fate for interpreting different countries and school of thought to one another.
Well, the most significant development was in his second year, when he became friendly to a fellow undergraduate H O Meredith. He had come to Cambridge the same year as Forster and before Forster knew him he had already heard of his brilliance and intellectual arrogance. For some time, Meredith had much influence on Forster. He was restless, high-spirited and loved by the narrow-minded. He was an intellectual romantic.
But later Forster blamed Meredith for infecting all his friends with his pessimism. Forster, during his Cambridge period thought Meredith was the cleverest by far of all his contemporaries and he was not the only one who thought so.
Forster’s second year at Cambridge proved very fruitful, opening his eyes to all sorts of new possibilities and marking the beginning of several of his lifelong friendships.
College Time
Forster’s own account of his Cambridge days was that in his first year, he wasn’t sure of his clothes, in his second year he was too sure of himself, but in his third year he felt in his elements, liked by people and feeling new powers expanding his soul, though he could not really name them.
During this time he wrote a number of articles -- A Long Day, The Stall–holder, The Pack of Anchises, A Tragic Interior, which was a skit on Aeschylus. Forster got an upper second class in his tripos and Meredith got a first class. The college had enough faith in him and so renewed his exhibition. And so he and Meredith decided to stay on for a fourth year to read History.
He thought a lot as to what profession he should choose and finally took up writing as a career. By this time his short articles had earned him a certain reputation in Cambridge. Now, sometime in late 1900 or 1901, he embarked on a novel. It featured a boy named Edgar living in a town much like Tonbridge, as a paying guest to an unsympathetic aunt and uncle. Life at the local public school of Sawstone had proved too rough for timid Edgar, so he had to be removed and for the moment he was in a sort of limbo, reading poetry and day-dreaming his time away in his bedroom.
In his fourth year at King’s, Forster was elected to the Apostles. This was the most exclusive intellectual coterie in Cambridge. His election did not actually take place till the first from (February 9, 1901), but it was usual for a prospective recruit to be looked over for some months, or even a year, so one must picture the whole of his last year in Cambridge as ‘apostolic’.
By 1901, society had started discussing about sex. Homosexuality, in particular, was talked about in a spirit of free and rational enquiry. Forster, by now we can assume, knew perfectly well that he was homosexual by temperament. With his intensely prim upbringing, however and having come to manhood during the aftermath of the Oscar Wilde scandal, the thought of actual physical relations with friends seemed remote and impossible to him.
It would seem likely that partly as a result of the traumatic experience at his preparatory school the onset of puberty had brought with it very strong sexual inhibition. So much so that for much of his youth and early manhood physical sex played very little part in his conscious thoughts. In his days at Cambridge where his own sexual life was conceived, he may be pictured as living rather happily in a void where things did not need to be labeled.
Then came the time for Forster to bid farewell to Cambridge.
Forster’s Writing Career As An Adult
After leaving Cambridge, Forster decided to devote his life to writing. His first novel and later the short stories were redolent of the age that was shaking off the shackles of Victorianism.
Between 1903 and 1907, a promising prospect of publication had opened up for Forster. A group of his Cambridge friends, led by G M Trevelyan had decided to launch a new monthly the Independent Review, and wanted Forster to contribute to it. Forster, like many of his friends thought the Independent ‘the herald’ of a new age.
He commented: "We are being offered something which we wanted," he said in his biography of Dickson. He made his own rules and as a writer in the Independent’s pages, he published his essay Macolnia Shops and later a number of other articles and stories.
Another interesting thing that happened was that in 1904, Forster found a flat at II Drayton Court in South Kensington. Never having lived in a flat, he didn’t really enjoy the experience and in his diary, he described with gloom what the dining room window lets him see. He wrote:
"First low houses – livery stables Calisthenic establishment, Baptist Chapel, all with cowls, which revolved and between to each other however still the air. Further away high houses – besides a row of flats I think above which appears a horrible spire, absolutely senseless and smooth save for one or two jutting windows on its slope: terminated in a coarse knob. All day the air thickened and cleared from nowhere: the house and spires go in and out of focus as if it were a magic lantern."
At London, he became a part of a group of students and some of the writers, called Bloomsbury Group. This group included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Clive Bell, etc. They would meet on Thursday nights to share drinks and views over various subjects like rejection of Victorian orthodox morals regarding religious, sexual, social and artistic matters. By 1920s the group had become quite popular among for its brilliant contribution. They were so popular that their conduct and mannerisms were discussed in public and the mannerisms were termed 'Bloomsbury'. Forster enjoyed being a part of the group and made his sincere contribution.
Forster, while adopting certain themes (the importance of women in their own right for example), from English novelists like George Meredith, broke the elaborations and intricacies favored in the late 19th century and wrote in a freer, more colloquial style. From the first his novels included a strong strain of social comment based on acute observation of middle class life. There was also a deeper concern, a belief, associated with his interest in Mediterranean ‘Paganism’, that if men and women were to achieve a satisfactory life, they needed to keep contact with the earth and cultivate their imaginations.
In an early novel, The Longest Journey (1907) he suggested that cultivation of an isolation is not enough, reliance on the earth alone leading to a genial brutishness, and exaggerated development of imagination undermining the individual’s sense of reality.
The same theme runs through Howards End (1910), an ambitious novel that gave Forster his first major success. The novel is conceived in terms of an alliance between the Schlemiel sisters, Margaret and Helen, who embody the liberal imagination at its best, and Ruth Wilcox, the owner of the house Howards End, which has remained close to the Earth for generations. Spiritually they recognize a commerce.
In a symbolic ending, Margaret Schlemiel marries Henry Wilcox and brings him back, a broken man, to Howards End, reestablishing there a link between the imagination and the earth. The book also brings together the themes of money, business and culture.
"To trust people in a luxury in which only the wealth can indulge; the poor cannot afford it."
His Visit To India
In 1912, Forster visited India. His visit was a carefree affair and the dark colors of A Passage to India were the product of later experience. Forster and Dickinson and liberals like them envisaged the independence for India. If they pictured such a thing at all, it was as a distant deal. The two friends, indeed, came to India in a mood of optimism, still believing in the power of disinterested social criticism.
Both, in their own way, had made a special study of the jingoistic public – school and business type of English man, having observed him at home meant more to witness him doing the work of empire. And no doubt they meant to twist his tail, but if so, in the name of a better England in which they still had faith.
Forster came to India in a very different spirit, less political, more tentative, and exploratory. He kept an open mind, for instance, as to whether the spectacle of poverty in India would distress him intolerably. And as things turned out it did not do so – for which he was grateful, since (so he put) what he wanted was to get to know Indians, not to think about them as a problem.
With this in mind, he quickly found himself at home in India and led the life he led anywhere, a life of mild human contact and awakened imagination. Forster had good as well as bad times. He saw the condition of the Indians and sympathized with them too. He visited many places in India. To name a few, he went to Malsood in Aligarh, Bhopal, Gwalior, Agra, Delhi, Shimla, Jaipur, Jodhpur and Mount Abu. An extract from his diary (17 March, 1913) catches his style – responsive yet self-possessed as a solitary sightseer.
He said about Mt Abu : "Mount Abu is magical wealth disorderly valleys full of moles, palms, bananas, and a lake. Walked to Dilwara temples…They were as I expected in effect, though the arrangement surprised: Standing each in a small cloisters; barbaric equestrian statues of lungs who made them in a vestibule."
Later on in 1915, he wrote The Celestial Omnibus Stories, which is not much recognized.
From 1914 to 1918, during World War I, Forster found himself in disarray. He was doubly disturbed – by the war itself and by the inadequacy of his own response to it. He felt sure that it was an unjust and unnecessary war, and so did his Cambridge and Bloomsbury friends. Forster pinned his hopes for the future, such as they were, upon friendship as the sphere where decent feelings might survive. Something of these feelings entered into his paper on Literature And The War, which he delivered to the Waybridge literary society near the year end and subsequently at the Working Men’s College. In his paper he said: "Literature doesn’t teach us that war is either right or wrong. There are questions outside our competence – but she does teach us that hatred and revenge are wrong because they cloud the spirit. It is not easy to love one’s enemies – for my own part I find it impossible – but one needn’t be proud of not loving them, and she does exhort us to that much. Love is an emotion, hatred an excitement and she is against excitement all along the lives. Such seems to me, her function in wartime. She helps us to abstain from fear and hatred as far as our small will permits. Against all such hysteria the voice of the immortal dead protests… They have become one with Urania, the muse of Divine Song, who has given them not happiness but peace."
The war and the war fever weighed on him. In May of 1975, he suffered from chicken pox.
His Poetry
He had been writing from his early years and in the early 1900s had published pamphlets of verse containing two of his finest poems including the famous Candles and Waiting for the Bus Because. It was not until 1911, however, that he felt he had perfected his true manner. The year represented a deciding time in his career.
He began publishing his verse and distributing his poems one by one to a chosen circle of readers, for them to collect in folders. About the same time, he began to write much outspokenly on the subject of homosexual love. By then his fame as a poet had began to spread and by 1917, Forster was much discussed in literary circles everywhere.
Forster returned to England at the end of January 1919. His mother berated his homecoming as a solemn occasion, wresting for the first time since his boyhood, on reading family prayers in his preserve. The gesture pleased him, and later he was to reflect that a little ritual in their life together might have helped them. He soon bound through that contrary to his hopes. Nothing much had changed in their relationship. He had imagined that his three years absence, together with his release from sexual ‘apprenticeship’ might have given him independence but far good as evil, he found himself still in her power. He loved her, knew he would not be frank with her, yet still needed her good opinion and feared to be pitied by her.
His Middle Age
In 1919-20, when Forster was in his middle age, he said :
"I see my middle age as clearly as middle age can be seen… Blaming civilization for my failure. At the end of these activities begins a great pain after which death, but I cannot realize such things… I don’t see what it is clearly, but know what keeps me from it. I am not vain, but I am sensitive to praise and blame : this is bad. Is it just the amiable journalist who can’t even write as soon as he looks into his own mind ?"
Meeting Lawrence
Forster came across T E Lawrence's (English author who played key role in Arabian colonies) Seven Pillars. When Lawrence was reciding in Doeset in 1923, under the name of T E Shaw, serving Royal Tanks Corps, he invited Forster to visit his cottage. The meeting went quite well; according to Forster, he' nearly fell to pieces before Lawrence'. Thenforward, they had good relations but Lawrence's criticism to Forster's The Life to Come, made the relations sour after some time.
The Fame
Forster is well-known for A Passage To India, 1924. The story depicts the complicated reaction to the British Raj and has been called "a classic on the strange and tragic fact of history and life in India". The book converted his literary reputation, and that too despite writing relatively few novels, Forster has been acknowledged as one of the 20th century’s greatest writers. The novel concerns the colonial occupation of India by the British, but cedes the position as a political tract to explore the friendship between an Indian doctor and British school-master during the former’s trial on a false charge.
His A Passage To India was a great success. He was enjoying the success and fame, but it also disturbed him and he did not quite know what to do with it. "Have pains in my heart, so that I may not be able to carry vegetables home to Waybridge," he noted in his diary (August 31, 1924) "Too much good luck, and too late. I cannot live up to it."
This novel was the last that Forster published during his lifetime. His fears that this would be his last novel proved correct and the remainder of his life was devoted to a wide range of literary activities. For several years he took a firm stand against censorship, involving himself in the work of PEN (An Association of Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, Editors and Novelists) and the NCCL (National Council for Civil Liberties), of which he became the first president.
In 1927, he delivered the Clark lecture at Cambridge, printed the same year as Aspects of Novel; his tone in there was, in his own words 'informal indeed talkative', and they contain the celebrated comment, 'yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story'. His lectures were a success and so King’s offered him a three-year fellowship. And later, in 1946, it went on to offer Forster an honorary fellowship and a permanent home. In 1928, The Eternal Moment, a volume of pre-1914 short stories, whimsical and dealing with the supernatural, was published. He wrote two biographies Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1934) and Marianne Thornton (1956).
The Buckinghams
Forster met Bob Buckingham, a policeman at a party in 1930. Soon, a great friendship and a somewhat controversial relationship took place between them. Forster found an admirer and an affectionate friend in Bob. Bob also became a part of the Forster household and a loyal companion to Forster. The fact whether they were homosexuals or not remained ambiguous. But Bob, and later his family, played a vital role in Forster's life.
The bliss of the perfect friendship was broken when Bob mentioned his girlfriend May Hockey, a nurse by profession. Forster was disturbed by the prospect of Bob getting away from him and marrying May. Though he took the matter very gracefully, it was not easy for him to let go of Bob's attention. This created heated arguments between the young couple sometimes. Bob still devoted his free time to Forster and May sometimes felt insecure. He went to the extent of asking May to leave the room if he needed privacy with Bob.
The roughness of the relations was smoothened in 1933, when May gave birth to Robert Morgan, Forster's godchild. Forster was delighted to be the godfather of Bob's child. He was very much attached to the child. Forster even developed a good opinion about May and used to take care of her when she was detected of having tuberculosis in 1935.
Death Of His Mother
The most important relationship of his life was with his mother. They were very close and shared a unique bond. In 1944, Forster suffered the loss of this very relationship. Lily, 90 years of age, was very sick and could sense her end nearby. She was bedridden and once she called Forster and told him, "I shan't be long with you." He replied, "But your love will." The very day she died while he was feeding her.
Revisited India
When Forster revisited India, he got involved in trying to get India independent. In 1948, at the ripe old age of almost 70, Forster suffered from acute depression. A number of factors contributed to it, but the main ones were – Forster felt unproductive and was living from hand to mouth, intellectually.
A Light Incident from His Life
In 1951, a small, but memorable incident happened at Aldeburgh. Forster was going to the parish church when he fell and broke his ankle. It was quite a serious fracture. With his foot in cast, he was forced to use crutches. But, he couldn’t use them. He wanted to walk soon as he was feeling very useless. He was also annoyed at the specialist and neglecting his advice, he asked a person called Mary Buckingham, with whom he was living at that time, to get him a boot to be worn over his plaster. However, when the boot was bought, he couldn’t get his foot inside it. This made him furious and in his anger he threw the boot at Mary.
Forster had assembled a new collection of reviews and essays under the title of Two Cheers For Democracy and this he published in November of 1951, gaining a particularly enthusiastic and admirable reception.
There was a feeling that over the last decade, he had somehow managed to keep his nerve better than most of his contemporaries and his reviewers were all praise for him.
He was a grand old man of letters by now and was expected to receive national honors. A year or two before, he had been offered a knighthood but he had refused it, telling his friends that ‘it wasn’t good enough for him’.
In 1952, however, he was approached by the Palace with the offer of a Companion of Honor. The award was announced in the New Year’s Honors for 1953. It was quite a lengthy audience in the course of which the Queen said how sad it was that he had published nothing for so long, upon which he politely corrected her.
On another occasion he was informed by Oxford that an honorary degree was to be bestowed on him and that he should present himself to receive it on a particular day.
He considered the tone of this presumptuous and replied that he must refuse the honor, since it would not be convenient for him to be in Oxford over that day
An Old Forster
In January 1859, Forster was 80 and to mark the occasion King’s College organized a large birthday luncheon in the College Hall, attended by more than a hundred guests including friends, relatives and writers.
Meanwhile, Forster’s health began failing him. Once he collapsed and was rushed to the hospital. He was suffering from a blood deficiency and his life was in danger. It took him two months to recover and return to normal. He was able to go visiting and travel and during the next year or two he went on several foreign holidays.
By 1964, his sight began to weaken, he had gone deaf in one ear, which troubled him as he couldn’t enjoy music and he could no longer play the piano. With age, his passion for giving grew. He was continually finding occasions to help friends and made several large public benefactions. He gave several thousand pounds to Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge towards making of a Greek sculpture. When the London Library asked for gifts from its members and well-wishers to be auctioned, Forster donated the manuscript of A Passage To India. It fetched £6,500, then a record price for a manuscript.
He was rich by his own modest standard and true to his principles. He was troubled by money and did not wish for more. Forster counted himself happy, loved, cared for, sought after, and despite witnessing several deaths of friends around him, he still had more.
But above all this there was one grief in his life -- the tragedy of his godchild, Robert Buckingham. Robert had grown into a young man of much character. He was gentle, intelligent and strong-minded. He had resisted all attempts from Forster to uproot him from the working class and had chosen to be a plumber. He married and had two sons. He and his wife Sylvia were greatly attached to Forster. Then in 1961, Robert suddenly fell ill and he was diagnosed to be suffering from the Hodgkins Disease. Rob never recovered from it and died in 1962 leaving behind a bitterly grieving Forster.
Forster’s Death
On January 7, 1970, at Bob and May Buckingham’s Coventry home, Forster died holding May’s hand. Since he had said that he didn’t want a cremation, Bob decided that a ceremony should be arranged with music played at the chapel; remembering Howards End.
Edward Morgan Forster, popularly known as E M Forster, was one of the most influential writers of his time. However, he is not a novelist for the modern reader. His sublime humor, rich, descriptive, and classical references requires a patient reader who seeks them out. But his writings and the way he deals with it will definitely lead you to read some of his very famous works. Although Forster had many a problems since childhood, he refused to accept pessimism in his life or works and this very quality made him one of the most prolific writers of the mid-20th century.
Values of truthfulness and kindness shaped Forster’s later thinking. And it is by his later novels that Foster is remembered and these are best seen in the context of the preceding romantic tradition.
Each of Forster’s work show his finesse in writing. Forster’s main concern was that individuals should connect the prose with the passion, and that was the most exciting aspect of his writings.
January 1, 1879 E M Forster born.
1880 Forster’s father, Edward Forster died.
1883 He and his mother shifted to ‘Rooksnest’ in Stevenage.
1887 His great-aunt Marianne Thornton died, leaving him £8,000.
1893 Joined Tonbridge School as a day boy.
1897 Joined King’s College, Cambridge to study Classics and History.
1900 Wrote light articles in King’s college magazine, Basileona. Became friendly with Lytton Strachey and E J Dent.
1901 Elected to the ‘Apostles’. Went to Italy, including Sicily, with his mother for best part of the year.
1902 Wrote his first story, The Story of a Panic (Published 1904). Started holding Latin classes at the Working Men’s College.
1903 Went to Italy with mother and alone to Greece.
1904 Moved to Waybridge, their home for 20 years, then left for Germany as tutor in household of ‘Elizabeth’ (von Arnim) for five months; Published, Where Angles Fear to Tread.
1906 Acquainted with Syed Ross Masood.
1907 Published The Longest Journey.
1908 Published A Room With a View.
1910 Published Howards End.
1911 Published The Celestial Omnibus (Short Stories).
1912 Went to India for six months.
1913 Visited Edward Carpenter. Wrote Maurice (unpublished posthumously)
1915 Visited D H Lawrence and Frieda Lawrence. Went to Alexandria as ‘Hospital Searcher’.
1916 Became friendly with Cavafy. Wrote articles for local Egyptian journals.
1919 Back from Egypt. Visited Max Gate (home of Thomas Hardy)
January 1922 Returned from India via Egypt. Got to know J R Ackerley. Published Alexandria: A History And A Guide.
1923 Published Pharos and Pharillon.
1924 His Aunt Laura died, leaving him ‘West Hackhuorst’ in Abinger, Surrey. Got to know T E Lawrence. Published A Passage to India. Moved with mother to West Hackhourst.
1925 Took flat in Brunswick Square in Bloomsbury, for week days’ use.
1926 Gave lectures in Cambridge. Published Aspects of the Novel.
1928 Gave radio talk, the first of the many. Published The Eternal Moment. (Short Stories)
1929 Visited South Africa for four months.
1931 Visited Romania.
1932 Became friendly with Christopher Isherwood.
1934 Became first president of the NCCL. Published Goldsworthy L Dickinson (biography)
1935 Addressed International Congress of Writers in Paris.
1936 Published Abinger Harvest.
1940 Began regular talks on the BBC’s Indian Service.
1945 Forster’s mother died. Visited India for conference of All Indian PEN.
1946 Appointed Honorary Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and took up residence in Cambridge.
1947 Visited the USA for the first time.
1949 Began work (with Eric Cuozier) on libretto of Benjamin Britlen’s Bitty Budd.
1951 Published Two Cheers for Democracy.
1953 Published The Hill of Devi.
1957 Published Marianne Thonthon (biography of his great aunt). Began writing The Other Boat (story)
1960 Witnessed Lady Chatterley’s trial.
1964 Awarded the Order of Merit.
January 7, 1970 Died at the home of his friends, the Buckinghams in Coventry.
• Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905)
• The Longest Journey (1907)
• A Room with a View (1908)
(Made into a film in 1985, scripted by Ruth Prawer Jhabuala and directed by James Juary)
• Howards End (1910)
(Made into a film in 1991, directed by James Juary, starring Helena Bonham Carter, Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, Vanessa Redgrave).
• The Celestial Omnibus (1914)
• The Story of the Siren (1920)
• Alexandria (1922)
• Pharos and Pharillon (1923)
• A Passage to India (1924)
(Made into a film in 1984, directed by David Lean)
• Aspects of the Novel (1927)
• In, Eternal Moment and other stories (1920)
• Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1934)
• Abinger Harvest (1936)
• What I Believe (1939).
Development of English prose between 1918 and 1939, 1945
• Collected Short Stories (1948)
• Two Cheers For Democracy (1951)
• The Hill of Devi (1953)
• Marianne Thornton (1956)
• Maulia (1970)
(Made into a film in 1987, directed by James Juary)
• The Life to Come (1972)
• Common Place Book (1979)
• The New Collected Short Stories (1985)
• Selected Letters, 1983-1985 (2 Volumes)
• The Collected Egyptian Essay (1988)
• Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
• If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
• I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down one particular path than we have gone ourselves.
• We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
• Where there is officialism every human relationship suffers.
• One always tends to over-praise a long book, because one has got through it.
• Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.
• Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.
• In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.
• At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
• America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.
• Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through, and see those whom one lives come through.
• I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
