EM Forster Part I

Forster is not one of my favourite novelists but I’ve read most of his works and been interested in him.  He is one of the best known English novelists of the 20^th century, but although he lived to be very old, he did not write that many novels and gave up novel writing after his best known work, Passage to India.   He was born in 1879 in London, the child of an architect.  His family were solidly middle class and he was descended from the Thornton family, who were members of the “Clapham sect” a social reform group within the Church of England.  They were liberally minded, but devoutly religious and were involved in the abolition of slavery.

Morgan inherited their seriousness and social conscience.   His great Aunt Marianne Thornton was part of this reformist group and she left him £8000 which was enough to give him a comfortable private income, so that he did not have to work or find a profession.

His father died when he was a baby, and he and his mother then moved out of London to a house in the country just outside Stevenage.  He loved the house and the countryside, and it became the model for Howards End, the large farm house in his novel of the same name.   He went to school in Tonbridge and then went on to Cambridge.. where he was very happy and had found his milieu.   He was part of the “Apostles” a literary and philosophical discussion group.  He had the liberal principles of his Thornton ancestors, but was not religious.  Many of his Cambridge friends went on to form the Bloomsbury Group of Avante garde writers and artists.

Forster was gay, but he grew up in a very repressive middle class household and came to manhood in the 1890s, just after the Oscar Wilde scandal.  It was more than ever difficult to be a homosexual at that time. 

He was at Cambridge from 1897 to 1901, and realised his sexual feelings were not heterosexual. He fell in love with a young Indian man whom he was tutoring in Latin, who later became the inspiration for his novel A Passage to India, about the friendship between an Englishman and a young Indian doctor, Aziz.   

He travelled in Europe with his mother after graduating and he began to write novels and essays.. But he did not feel able to put his repressed desires into actual life.  He realised that he was never likely to marry and as a result he was especially close to his friends, since he would never have his own family.

He and his mother lived in Surrey and he wrote his first novels.. and was involved in promoting liberal causes.  He opposed censorship and when the War broke out in 1914 he became a  conscientious objector.

His first novel was “Where Angels Fear to Tread”, a story of a young English widow, Lilia, who goes on holiday to Italy and falls in love with a young man there.  Her family are horrified and send out Philip, her brother in law, to try and stop the marriage.  He finds Italy more charming than he expected and he fails to persuade her.  Lilia marries her Italian, Gino, and has a baby by him, but dies.  Her relatives are scandalised and feel that they must rescue the baby from his irresponsible Italian father and bring him up as an English gentleman. Caroline, Lilia’s friend also feels that the child must be rescued.

Philip, with his sister Harriet is sent off again.. to take the baby.  

He knows that the family don’t care about the child personally, and are too cool and repressed to love him.. And when he meets Gino, he realises that although he is feckless, he loves his son.

The theme of the novel is of Italian emotionalism as opposed to the repressive cold British nature.  Philip knows that Gino is not a very admirable character but he is capable of love and feeling.   However,  Harriet who hates Italy, sticks to the family’s plan and decides to  kidnap the baby.. But as they escape, the child is killed in a carriage accident. Gino and Philip bond, and Harriet has  a mental collapse after the plan has gone wrong and resulted in tragedy. Philip is drawn to Caroline, but she tells him that she is in love with Gino. 

This novel has a similar theme to that of his last work Passage to India.. The repression and coldness of the English middle class, and the freedom and emotional openness of other cultures such as the Italian or Indian.  However it also shows the problems of some of Forster’s writing.  He was not very good at conveying sexual passion and was apt to throw in a lot of melodrama into his work which sometimes did not fit well with his Jane Austenish framework.    Philip ends up with an unfulfilled life, and Caroline’s sudden falling in love with Gino is unconvincing….

It’s been said that one reason he stopped writing was because he knew he could not convey heterosexual passion, but it wasn’t possible for him to write freely of homosexual love