E. M. Forster

Back at Mr. Brace’s office, he told us he was preparing a new book of essays, which would be delivered in a year or so. It was eleven years since he had last published a book, Abinger Harvest, in 1936. The new essays, entitled Two Cheers for Democracy, went to press in 1951. One essay contained the memorable words, “I believe in personal relationships. . . . I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” The book also included his lecture at Harvard, “The Raison d’Etre of Criticism in the Arts,” which touched on music only lightly. His conclusion about criticism was, as he put it, “unfavorable, nor have I succeeded in finding that it has given substantial help to artists.” He reinforced this view on another occasion in conversation: “All I want from critics is praise.”

When Mr. Brace proposed a cocktail party in his honor at the Ritz Carlton, he was visibly pleased. A large crowd, including book critics, publishing people, and authors like Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Lowell, and Jean Stafford, attended. Forster had requested only one guest, Lionel Trilling. When I introduced them, Forster’s greeting was warm: “So this is Mr. Trilling. At last I’ve met the man who made me famous.”

Having agreed to a talk under auspices that concealed, as Trilling soon discovered, a Communist Party front, Forster cancelled because, he said, he disliked deception. “If they called themselves Communist, I would have accepted. I cannot stand this pretense.” Perhaps he was remembering his experience in Paris in 1935 at the International Congress of Writers, which was under tight Communist control. Katherine Anne Porter, a delegate, wrote that Forster on that occasion was at first almost unintelligible because he paid no attention to the microphone, until at last “there sounded into the hall clearly but wistfully a complete sentence: ‘I do believe in liberty!’” The polite applause that followed, she wrote, “covered the antics of that part of the audience near me—a whole pantomime of malignant ridicule, meaning that Mr. Forster and all his kind were as extinct as the dodo.”

With Trilling’s help, I arranged for him to speak to some students at a Long Island college, where to his delight the lecture took place on a basketball court. He talked informally, mostly about his novels, and it was well received. In the question period he was relaxed and responsive until one Marxist student gave a speech while pretending to ask a question: “Don’t you agree, Mr. Forster, that under our corrupt and unjust capitalistic system . . .” and so on and on and on. Forster’s head sank deeper and deeper on his chest as the speaker droned on, and at the end when he repeated “Don’t you agree?” Forster raised his head, noisily cleared his throat, and said, “Next question?”

Afterward a rather striking and very thin woman came up and introduced herself as Martha Graham, saying she was a great admirer of his work. We offered her a lift back to Manhattan in our car, and on the drive back he enjoyed her flat Midwest accent and dry sense of humor.

During Forster’s second and last visit to America, I learned that he was collaborating with Benjamin Britten on an opera based on Melville’s Billy Budd. Britten had begun composing the score, and Forster and Eric Crozier were working on the libretto. I told Forster that the very first person to read through the manuscript of Billy Budd was Raymond Weaver, Melville’s first biographer, who had been my teacher at college. Forster was incredulous: “But I thought Constable published the book during Melville’s lifetime!” No, I explained, the author’s granddaughter, Mrs. Eleanor Metcalf, had shown Weaver the posthumous papers in Melville’s study at 104 East Twenty-sixth Street, the very room in which the author had finished writing Billy Budd shortly before his death in 1891. Constable had published the first edition, but it came out in 1924. “Is the house in which Melville died still standing?” he asked. I said I doubted it very much, but I wasn’t absolutely sure. “Can we take a taxi to 104 East Twenty-sixth Street and find out?” He was greatly excited at the possibility of finding Melville’s house, but of course when we got there, the original site and those adjoining it had been replaced by a large building. As we walked west to Lexington Avenue, he spotted the high, curved, green copper roof of the armory across the street, and pointed to it. “Doesn’t it look very much like a whale? Melville’s spirit still lives on this street!” Billy Budd had its successful operatic premiere at Covent Garden in 1951, and soon entered the repertory of major opera houses throughout the world.

Before I had yet visited London, I mentioned that because of my Elizabethan studies my image of the city was no doubt obsolete: it was based on primitive engravings showing old London bridge covered with houses, and the sites of the theaters in Southwark. He might have found this comical, but very seriously he replied: “Yes, of course. Be sure, when you come to London, to visit the spot along the Thames where the wagon tracks that went onto old London bridge are still visible, cut deeply into the earth.” I found the spot not far from Saint Mary Woolnoth on my first visit, located much lower than the elevations of the modern bridges. Of all my English friends, including writers and Shakespeare scholars, Forster alone told me about this memorable vestige of a great era.

The governors of Cambridge University had made Forster an honorary fellow in residence at King’s College in 1946. His room was located on the first staircase of the front court of King’s. Entering the court’s elegant doorway and ascending the ancient stone stairway, one found his room marked by a dirty old wooden coal bin standing outside, with the name “Forster” painted in white letters. He occupied a spacious, high-ceilinged room with tall Victorian-gothic windows. There was a grandfather clock in one corner next to a window, an upright piano beside it, and a print of Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse over a doorway. The room held many bookcases, heavy and handsome Victorian ones as well as plain modern shelving, and in the center was a freestanding mahogany bookcase that had belonged to his grandfather.

Once when I called at King’s during a publishing trip to London, he had a visitor staying with him, whose name I did not catch. It was nearing election time in the United States, and Forster was greatly concerned that Douglas MacArthur, whom he feared and detested, would be elected president. I assured him emphatically that the general would never be nominated, let alone elected, and he seemed convinced. Later I realized that the visitor, who scarcely opened his mouth, was J. R. Ackerley, editor of the Listener and a writer whose books I admired. When I called another time, I found Forster sitting in his favorite armchair, with his leg in a cast. When I asked what had happened, he replied: “Slipped in a belfry!” He had been visiting Benjamin Britten in Aldeburgh and while climbing up to the belfry of the parish church, he had broken his ankle. He now insisted that we take a walk across the campus. He supported his weight on the metal base of the cast, and used a cane. I held back when we got outside, because he started to cut across the large carpetlike lawn around which his front court and the King’s Chapel were placed, but he called out, “Come along—privilege of an honorary fellow and his guests!” Centuries of care and nurture had created a very soft carpet for the fellow-in-a-cast and his guest.

In London one day he asked me to accompany him to a memorial service for Desmond MacCarthy at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields. The hymns included William Blake’s beautiful lines:

Afterward Forster told me something I’d never known, that these verses served as an official anthem of the Labour Party. It is surely the most distinguished poem ever used by or for a political party.

Edward Morgan Forster died at the great age of ninety-one in 1970. Though I knew him only in the last years of his life, I consider myself fortunate to have been associated professionally with this remarkable man. The best obituary of him was written by J. R. Ackerley, who preceded him in death by three years. It appeared in the Observer, where Ackerley, prior to his own death, had deposited this personal testimony: “I would say that insofar as it is possible for any human being to be both wise and worldly wise, to be selfless in any material sense, to have no envy, jealousy, vanity, conceit, to contain no malice, no hatred (though he had anger), to be always reliable, considerate, generous, never cheap—Morgan came as close to that as can be got.”

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