A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster
Page 42
64 “demanded more practical subjects”: Fieldhouse, A History of Modern British Adult Education, 31.
65 He remained a romantic: Week-Day Poems was the title of Meredith’s collection, published in 1911. He based his poems on the experiences of the men he taught in the Working Men’s College, and on the streets of London. He wrote poems titled “The Motor-Bus,” “The Bank Holiday,” “Wages,” “In the Parks,” and “Seen in a Railway Station.” The Poem “Ages of Man” begins:
We children in our crowded home
Had little food to eat,
Our breeding was the right to roam
And scavenge in the street;
My brothers died, my sister died,
And I grew all accurst,
With pigeon breast, with surly pride,
With hunger and with thirst.
65 “a horror of people”: HOM to Bertrand Russell, July 1903, quoted in Furbank, E. M. Forster, I:140.
66 “I’ve made my two discoveries”: EMF, Diary, Dec. 31, 1904, KCC.
66 “I think I am dead”: HOM to Maynard Keynes, April 1906, quoted in Furbank, E. M. Forster, I:141.
66 “something unimagined, indefinable”: Forster, “The Road from Colonus,” The Machine Stops, 78.
66 “depressing thing to look”: EMF to J. T. Sheppard, n.d., KCC; quoted in editor’s introduction to Forster, A Room with a View, x.
67 “to advocate sanity in”: Forster, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, 96.
67 “the woman of today”: Forster, “Pessimism in Literature,” in Thomson, ed., Albergo Empedocle, 135.
67 Lucy thinks she is safe: EMF to Robert Trevelyan, Oct. 28, 1905, Lago and Furbank, eds., Selected Letters, I:83.
68 “I do not resemble”: EMF, Diary, Dec. 13, 1907, KCC.
69 “little bit of ivory”: Deirdre Le Faye, ed., Jane Austen’s Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 323.
69 “question I am always discussing”: EMF to George Barger, July 27, 1899, Lago and Furbank, eds., Selected Letters, I:31.
70 “Each time I see those Greek things”: EMF, Diary, March 13, 1904, KCC.
70 “I’d better eat my soul”: EMF, Diary, March 21, 1904, KCC.
71 He was not interested in being a “case study”: Grosskurth, The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, 19.
71 “an idea for an entire novel”: EMF, Diary, July 18, 1904, KCC.
72 “the heart of our island”: Forster, The Longest Journey, 126.
72 “The fibres of England”: Ibid.
72 “gray and wiry” grasses: Ibid., 125.
72 As antiquities go: Forster, “Author’s Introduction” to The Longest Journey (1960), lxvii; The Longest Journey, 125.
72 “the whole system”: Forster, “My Books and I,” ms., KCC.
73 Morgan called this feeling: Ibid.
73 “nothing—still one”: Forster, “Author’s Introduction” to The Longest Journey (1960), lxvii.
73 “pull at a pipe”: Ibid.
73 “caught fire up on the Rings”: Ibid.
73 “In that junction of mind”: Ibid., lxvi.
73 “that the English can be”: EMF, Diary, Sept. 12, 1904, KCC.
74 “I created, I received, I restored”: Forster, “Author’s Introduction” to The Longest Journey (1960), lxvii.
74 the Cambridge . . . “which I knew”: Ibid., lxviii.
74 “Figsbury Rings became”: Ibid., lxvii.
74 “I walked out again ”: EMF, Diary, Sept. 12, 1904, KCC.
74 “great wisdom”: Ibid.
75 Twice more, on Monday: Ibid.
75 “Charles Sayle wipes his glasses”: Forster, “My Books and I,” ms., KCC.
75 With reluctance, years later: Forster, “Author’s Introduction” to The Longest Journey (1960), lxvii–lxviii.
76 “because he would have been”: Forster, “My Books and I,” ms., KCC.
4: “THE SPARK, THE DARKNESS ON THE WALK”
77 “we have got a house”: EMF to Robert Trevelyan, Aug. 25, 1904, Lago and Furbank, eds., Selected Letters, I:61n.
77 “small and somewhat suburban”: EMF to Dent, Oct. 1, 1904, KCC.
77 “an inscription to the effect”: EMF to Robert Trevelyan, Aug. 25, 1904, Lago and Furbank, eds., Selected Letters, I:61n.
77 “a field full of dropsical chickens”: Ibid.
78 Like Adam in the garden: EMF to Dent, Oct. 1, 1904, KCC.
78 “quite pretty in some ways”: EMF to Robert Trevelyan, Aug. 25, 1904, Lago and Furbank, eds., Selected Letters, I:61n.
78 a “sorry bit of twaddle”: Forster, “Three Countries,” in The Hill of Devi, 291.
79 “I knew not nor”: Forster, “My Books and I,” ms., KCC.
79 “almost with physical force”: Forster, “Three Countries,” in The Hill of Devi, 290.
79 “fundamental objection to the story”: Snow Wedgwood to Laura Forster, April 27, 1906, in “Editor’s Introduction” to Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread, xiii.
79 “had not realised the solidity”: Gardner, ed., Commonplace Book, 15–16.
79 “ability to expand or contract”: Ibid., 12–13.
79 He defended the novel: Robert Trevelyan to EMF, no date, quoted in Where Angels Fear to Tread, 150–51.
80 “The object of the book”: EMF to Robert Trevelyan, Oct. 28, 1905, quoted ibid., 149.
80 “My life is now straightening into”: EMF, Diary, Dec. 31, 1904, KCC; Furbank, E. M. Forster, I:121.
80 “twenty-five is the boundary”: EMF, Diary, Dec. 31, 1904, KCC.
80 “Growing old is an emotion”: Forster, “De Senectute,” 15–16.
81 To “keep the brutes”: EMF, Diary, Dec. 31, 1904, KCC; Furbank, E. M. Forster, I:122.
81 His sojourn in Nassenheide: EMF to ACF, April 4, 1905, KCC; Lago and Furbank, eds., Selected Letters, I:66–67.
82 “indifferent false teeth & a society drawl”: Ibid., 67.
82 “How d’ye do, Mr. Forster!”: Forster, “Nassenheide” in Jeffrey M. Heath, ed., The Creator as Critic, 207. The essay was written in 1954.
82 “the country is unthinkably large”: EMF, Diary, April 8, 1905, KCC.
82 “very clever, but most unattractive”: EMF to ACF, July 8, 1905, KCC; Lago and Furbank, eds., Selected Letters, I:81.
82 “Fools rush in”: Alexander Pope, “Essay on Criticism,” III:177.
82 “settled into contentment”: EMF to Arthur Cole, July 7, 1905, Lago and Furbank, eds., Selected Letters, I:78. Cole, a musicologist, had been Malcolm Darling’s best friend at King’s.
83 “Artists now realise that”: Forster, “Pessimism in the Novel,” in Thomson, ed., Albergo Empedocle, 135; EMF, Diary, Feb. 27, 1906, KCC.
83 “The writer who depicts”: Forster, “Pessimism in the Novel,” in Thomson, ed., Albergo Empedocle, 144–45.
83 “astonishing glass shade”: Forster, Howards End (Abinger), 171; EMF, Notebook Journal, Dec. 13, 1907, KCC.
83 “To know and help”: EMF, Notebook Journal, June [n.d.], 1905, KCC.
84 “I know I am not”: EMF to Robert Trevelyan, Oct. 28, 1905, Lago and Furbank, eds., Selected Letters, I:83.
84 “I never was attached”: Shelley, Epipsychidion (1821), ll. 149–59.
85 “owes something to my”: Forster, “Author’s Introduction” to The Longest Journey (1960), xxvii.
85 “just where he began”: Forster, The Longest Journey, 35.
85 “foresee[s] the most appalling”: Ibid., 80.
85 “You are not a person who”: Ibid., 81.
85 “marriage is most certainly”: Forster, “Pessimism in the Novel,” in Thomson, ed., Albergo Empedocle, 136.
86 “Doubt whether the novel’s”: EMF, Notebook Journal, March 26, 1906, KCC.
86 From his very first drafts: Forster, The Longest Journey, 141.
86 The reviewers of The Longest Journey : Tribune, April 22, 1907, in Gardner, Critical Heritage, 66; Daily News, May 3, 1907, in Gardner, Critical Heritage, 73; Standard, May 14, 1907, in Gardner
, Critical Heritage, 83.
86 “only students of the Master’s Juvenilia”: EMF to Dent, no date, late April 1907, KCC; Lago and Furbank, eds., Selected Letters, I:87.
86 “least popular of my . . . novels”: Forster, “Author’s Introduction” to The Longest Journey (1960), lxvii.
87 “cut off from HOM”: EMF, Notebook Journal, June 22, 1906, KCC.
87 “the bodies of men”: Ibid.
87 “you can hardly see”: EMF to ACF, Aug. 31, 1906, KCC.
87 “There is a whole new street”: EMF to ACF, Aug. 29, 1906, KCC.
87 “wearing a sweeping blue gown”: Ashby, Forster Country, 105.
87 “no escape from Table d’hôte”: EMF to Dent, Oct. 3, 1906, KCC; Lago and Furbank, eds., Selected Letters, I:85.
88 “pride and arrogance”: Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, quoted in Metcalf and Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, 100.
89 “highest position a ‘Native’ ”: Lelyveld, “Macaulay’s Curse,” 1.
89 “wrapped up the shivering”: Furbank, E. M. Forster, II:329.
89 “All that splendor”: Lelyveld, “Macaulay’s Curse,” 15.
90 whom he regarded as “poor fellows”: Furbank, E. M. Forster, I:144.
90 “sonorous and beautiful voice”: Ibid., 143.
90 “the vast self-confidence”: Beauman, Morgan, 183–84.
90 “Oh dear, I do”: Furbank, E. M. Forster, I:143.
90 “Masood gives up duties”: EMF, Notebook Journal, Dec. 24, 1906, KCC.
90 Their friendship seemed to: See Kidwai, ed., Forster-Masood Letters.
90 “Centuries may pass, years”: Masood to EMF, Nov. 22, 1908, in Kidwai, ed., Forster-Masood Letters [no page]. Also KCC.
90 “measur[ing] out [his] emotions”: Forster, “Notes on the English Character,” Abinger Harvest, 6.
91 “There never was anyone”: Forster, “Syed Ross Masood,” in Two Cheers, 292.
91 “We like the like”: EMF, Notebook Journal, Aug. 15, 1907, KCC.
91 But his life remained: EMF, Notebook Journal, Dec. 31, 1907, KCC.
91 “pigging it”: EMF to Dent, n.d., late April 1907, KCC.
91 “The home-sickness and bed-sickness”: EMF, “AE Housman,” ms., KCC. This essay was composed around 1950.
91 “unspoilt and alive”: EMF, Notebook Journal, April 11, 1907, KCC.
91 “I realized the poet”: EMF, “AE Housman,” ms., KCC.
92 “Mr. Forster fastens himself”: Times Literary Supplement, April 26, 1907, in Gardner, Critical Heritage, 67.
92 “the sudden death rate”: Morning Post, May 6, 1907, in Gardner, Critical Heritage, 79–80.
92 “It was the Taupe”: LS to Leonard Woolf, Jan. 26, 1906, in Levy, ed., The Letters of Lytton Strachey, 95.
92 “The morals, the sentimentality”: LS to Leonard Woolf, May 2, 1907, ibid., 126.
92 “things in [your novel]”: Furbank, E. M. Forster, I:150.
92 “I have been looking”: EMF to Robert Trevelyan, June 11, 1907, quoted in editor’s introduction to A Room with a View, xiii.
92 Five years had passed: Stallybrass, ed., The Lucy Novels, 3.
93 “Oh mercy to myself”: EMF to Robert Trevelyan, Sept. 12, 1907, quoted in editor’s introduction to A Room with a View, xii.
93 “Sir, I hesitate to address you”: EMF to Robert Trevelyan, postcard June 10, 1908, quoted ibid., xii.
93 “Never heard of it”: Forster, A Room with a View, 125.
93 “I will escape from the sham”: Forster, “Howard Overing Sturgis,” in Abinger Harvest and England’s Pleasant Land, 118.
94 These Edwardian novels: EMF, Diary, Dec. 31, 1907, KCC.
94 In mid-January 1908: EMF, Diary, Jan. 16, 1908, KCC.
94 “a really first class person”: EMF to Dent, Feb. 10, 1908, KCC; Lago and Furbank, eds., Selected Letters, I:92.
94 “I felt all that the ordinary”: Ibid.
94 “effectively bald”: EMF to ACF, Jan. 17, 1908, KCC.
95 James would “know better”: Ibid.
95 “Your name’s Moore”: Forster, “Henry James and the Young Men” in The Listener, July 16, 1959.
95 “More of a man”: EMF, Diary, Jan. 16, 1908, KCC.
95 The American transplant seemed: Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 110.
95 “pattern [is] woven”: Gardner, ed., Commonplace Book, 14.
95 “gutted of the common stuff”: Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 110, 111.
95 “merely declining to think”: Gardner, ed., Commonplace Book, 18.
96 “was not my own road”: EMF, Diary, Jan. 16, 1908, KCC.
5: “ORDINARY AFFECTIONATE MEN”
98 Working over the typescript: EMF, Diary, May 1, 1908, KCC.
98 “I opened Walt Whitman”: EMF, Diary, June 16, 1908, KCC.
98 “dissipate this entire show”: Whitman, “In Paths Untrodden,” in Leaves of Grass (1872 edition), 142. This edition, the first to include the Calamus poems in this form, was likely shown to Forster by Edward Carpenter, who was given his edition by Whitman himself.
98 “no more fighting”: EMF, Diary, June 16, 1908, KCC.
98 “Passage to India!”: Whitman, “Passage to India,” in Leaves of Grass, ll. 31–36.
98 “[i]dea for another novel”: EMF, Diary, June 26, 1908, KCC.
99 Morgan balanced two families: Forster, Howards End, 25, 21.
99 “the spiritual cleavage”: EMF, Diary, June 26, 1908, KCC.
99 “they desired that public life”: Forster, Howards End, 25.
100 “Your home at All Souls Place”: EMF to GLD, March 17, 1931, KCC; quoted in “Introduction” to Howards End, ix.
100 “to trust people is”: EMF, Diary, Feb. 10, 1909, KCC.
100 “a continual bubble”: Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes, 141.
101 “[H]e left me, normal”: EMF, Diary, July 13, 1909, KCC.
101 “The more I think of it”: EMF to Darling, July 16, 1909, HRC.
101 Even as he sought: Ibid.
101 “I feel that I cannot feel”: EMF, Diary, n.d., August 1909, KCC.
102 “Going home, he wrote a letter”: EMF, Diary, April 25, 1911, KCC.
102 “disgraced the college and himself”: Forster, Arctic Summer and Other Fiction, 189, 191.
102 Was going to reflect sadly: EMF, Locked Diary, Nov. 29, 1909, KCC.
102 Just before Christmas: Forster, “Notes on the English Character,” in Abinger Harvest and England’s Pleasant Land, 5.
102 “Will [his love] ever be complete?”: EMF, Locked Diary, Dec. 31, 1909, KCC.
102 Back in London: EMF, Locked Diary, Jan. 13, 1910, KCC.
103 “From Forster, member of the Ruling Race”: EMF to Masood, Jan. 14, 1910, KCC; Lago and Furbank, eds., Selected Letters, I:102.
103 “o love, each time”: EMF, Locked Diary, Dec. 31, 1909, KCC.
103 His yearning for Masood: EMF, Locked Diary, Jan. 29, 1910, KCC.
103 “After lunch in the Savile”: EMF, Locked Diary, July 28, 1910, KCC.
103 “However gross my desires”: EMF, Locked Diary, July 21, 1910, KCC.
103 “joyful but inconclusive evening[s]”: EMF, Locked Diary, Jan. 15, 1910, KCC.
103 The crisis came: EMF, Locked Diary, Dec. 29, 1910, KCC.
104 “in an awful stew”: EMF to Masood, Jan. 2, 1911, in Kidwai, Forster-Masood Letters, 62.
104 “Non respondit”: EMF, Locked Diary, Dec. 31, 1910, KCC.
104 “you devil!”: EMF to Masood, Jan. 2, 1911, in Kidwai, Forster-Masood Letters, 62.
104 “book to my own heart”: EMF, Locked Diary, Aug. 3, 1910, KCC.
104 “ Howards End [is] my best”: Gardner, ed., Commonplace Book, 203.
104 “There is no doubt about it”: Daily Telegraph, Nov. 2, 1910, in Gardner, Critical Heritage, 130.
104 “one of the handful”: Athenaeum, Dec. 3, 1910, in Gardner, Critical Heritage, 151.