e.m. forster

In the 20th Century, one of the criticisms of Forster's novels was their lack of tauntness and toughness. People died willy-nilly (Longest Journey). In the tradition of Jane Austin, he wrote domestic stories. His characters lived in a world where the slightest decision, made unfeelingly, could bring them much pain and sorrow (Where Angels Fear to Dwell, Room With a View, Howard's End, Passage to India). Or the oddest gift, also made on a whim, could change one's world (Howard's End, Maurice). Often his characters were presented at first unformed, undecided about life, certainly not connecting to anything. What life taught them was not always easily understood by themselves or by others. If his whimsy upset his critics, his desire to find truth in relationships, to consistently try to understand the hit and miss, the muddle-ness of life, endeared his novels to readers.

There were only five novels published in his lifetime, four coming in a burst in the Edwardian years early in the 20th century, set among the British middle class of the day, wealthy, educated, well-travelled. At the end of this period, around 1913, he wrote the secret novel Maurice, about a young man of this period who discovers his attraction to men. It's very existence could have caused criminal problems, and he only shared it with a few trusted friends. He returned to this novel in the early 1960s, towards the end of his life, re-writing the ending. In was published in the early 1970s, following his death. In the 1920s, he wrote his Indian novel, Passage to India. He left numerous stories, some fantasies, a few attempts at continuing fiction, many essays and reviews. But he never wrote another novel in his very long life.

He was a Victorian who shared parlours with other Victorians who were nursing modernism in literature. He was gay in an English world that sent Oscar Wilde to jail in the 1890s, and where Edward Carpenter, a correspondent of Walt Whitman, lived with his lover and wrote about the third sex, Uranians. A great music lover, he wrote the libretto of Britten's opera, Billy Budd. I met a musicologist once who was a student in the 1950s at Cambridge. He knew Forster, and described the writer's love for listening to music with students. Others who knew him at the time have remarked about his sensitivity and focus on selected folk, and his increased ability in old age to express hurt feelings and sometimes hard judgments on old friends.

Preceding the Jane Austin movie binge, Forster's books were set to movies in the 1980s and 1990s and probably helped to enlarge his reading audience.

Zadie Smith, the young English novelist (White Teeth), gave the 2003 Orange Wood lecture in London recently. Her topic was EM Forster's Ethical Style: Love, Failure and the Good in Fiction. It is reprinted in the Guardian under the title, Love, Actually. At first, Smith is confessional, admitting her delight at reading Forster at the age of eleven. By the time she had grown up and entered the academic world, she felt she had to stifle those early childish responses. As a novelist, though, she found herself returning to her earlier consideration of Forster. The lecture moves through this personal consideration of the value she found in Forster's writing.

His style, she now thinks, reflects his moral world. The unformed person/protaganist of his novels was, in her words, the bearer of

An "undeveloped heart" [that] makes its owner "march to their destiny by catchwords", living not by their own feelings but by the received ideas of others...There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right. The lesson of the comic novel is that our moral enthusiasms make us inflexible, one-dimensional, flat. It is a lesson the comic novelists must internalise as well. They, too, require educated hearts to do their work and avoid caricature; they must understand not only what the brain knows, and what other people know, but also what love knows.

Love, in the modern age, if not in our even more cynical post-modern era, is tricky business, sort of like writing about pets as characters. It is sentimental, the passions we assign to earlier ages, an emotion that makes us uncomfortable in a novel.

Central to the Aristotelian inquiry into the Good life is the idea that the training and refinement of feeling plays an essential role in our moral understanding. Forster's fiction, following Austen's, does this in exemplary fashion, but it is Forster's fiction that goes further in showing us how very difficult an educated heart is to achieve. It is Forster who shows us how hard it is to will oneself into a meaningful relationship with the world; it is Forster who lends his empathy to those who fail to do so.