Heresies and Heretics

by George Watson

  In 1939 he added a hundred-odd pages to his Oxford Book of English Verse, bringing the anthology down to the armistice of 1918 and the tragic death of his only son. In a new preface he remarked that he had spent his later years with the young and tried to learn their ways, but Modernism still stumped him. He was at a loss to know what to do with a vogue for morose disparagement, for sneering at things long by catholic consent accounted beautiful or for hanging rags on a clothes-line, as he put it, ‘without benefit of laundry’; and he defiantly uttered the name of Agincourt three times. In letters he was even blunter, dismissing ‘the T.S. Eliot game,’ dubbing Virginia Woolf a precious lady and jeering at G.M. Hopkins as a hothouse darling with no ear for verse. He felt he had outlived his day.

  All that is sad to tell, and it warrants for Q no easy ride back to fame. As he knew, he had little to say by the 1930s to the school of English he had founded in 1917. That was its fault, not his. The way was cleared for I. A. Richards and others who saw little virtue in patriotism after the long nightmare of the Western front and openly welcomed the Franco-American thing. They would never have acknowledged Q’s achievement or noticed it. Science now looked like a master and a model, not a partner; many by the 1930s admired the October Revolution; some became traitors. As the only professor of English in Cambridge Q dutifully if reluctantly supported their requests for promotion and funds. In February 1936 Richards asked him to write asking for extended leave to teach Basic English in China at the invitation of the Rockefeller Fund, and in March Q supported F. R. Leavis in a successful application for a teaching post at Downing College, as he had supported him earlier for his First in English. Q’s private thoughts, meanwhile, remained largely private. In December 1940 he wrote to a friend about how indignant he was that Logan Pearsall Smith, in Milton and His Modern Critics, should have fallen for a myth that the denigrators of Milton represented the Cambridge school of English, being old enough to know better. Richards and Leavis were no part of the audience he knew, and they claimed to speak for an age he did not forgive or understand.

  Q was right to be puzzled. No illiterate peasant from time past was ever more credulous than a twentieth-century intellectual faced with an ideology, and to prefer to a parliamentary constitution a Bourbon-style royal autocracy, as T.S. Eliot did, or (like Ezra Pound) a Mussolini dictatorship, or (as many did) the indiscriminate savagery of Stalin’s Russia was beyond all condoning and all sense. The age was determined to believe that political choices are severely linear, Left to Right, which is as plausible as believing the earth is flat or that phlogiston, as scientists once believed, accounts for the inflammatory element in physical objects. Q felt helpless before such fatuity. ‘Weave a circle round him thrice,’ wrote Coleridge, and Q may often have felt tempted to answer the call.

  ____

  Arthur Quiller-Couch mourned the passing of a better age and died in May 1944, a few weeks before the landing in Normandy. The next day Helene Hanff came upon his obituary in the New York Times and read it with a sense of shock. There was a portrait, too, and she studied his controlled, weather-beaten face, as she called it, and puzzled over the headline. It read QUILLER-COUCH, ANTHOLOGIST, DIES AT 80. That implied he was famous above all for the Oxford Book of English Verse. So she added it to her reading list and studied his features again with loving care. ‘I felt suddenly lost, with Q gone.’ Then she mused a little. ‘He’s not gone,’ she told herself, and gazed at his writings ranged with due dignity in her Manhattan apartment; she folded the obituary and laid it inside the Art of Writing, a book written by a stranger that had changed her life. It discoloured there and withered, but not the memory of him.

  21. E.M. Forster

  The most defatigable of English novelists, somebody once called him, and it is true that after A Passage to India in 1924 E.M. Forster published no novels for the rest of his life. Maurice, which was considered scandalous, had to wait till after his death in 1970.

  On the other hand he never seemed exhausted, though he was in his eighties when I knew him, a gentle presence living in King’s College, Cambridge as a quietly observant and civilising influence. The college had just given him an honorary luncheon for his eightieth birthday, which was in 1959, and he had presented them with a precious hand-printed book by William Blake. He owed a lot to his college, where he had once been a Victorian undergraduate and where he spent almost the last twenty years of his life, and he knew it. I was sometimes, but not always, convinced that they knew how much they owed to him.

  An early edition of Blake was worth thousands, even tens of thousands, but then possessions never meant a jot to him. A watercolour by Thomas Girtin hung unregarded on his stairs, and his books and silver, when they were sold after his death, were largely unremarkable, though I bought some out of affection. The silver dish I still possess is badly scratched, and the books plainly for use rather than show; and a tiny book-label reading ‘This book belongs to E. M. Forster’ is usually all that distinguishes them, since he seldom marked what he read. As his effects were cleared for sale it was noticed that some books lacked any mark of ownership, so a few spare labels were used and the remainder destroyed. His copy of Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, for example, edited by her widower Leonard in 1953 as a discreet selection from the enormous, indiscreet manuscript she had left at her suicide a dozen years earlier, stands unmarked on my shelves, and a richly bound and gilded copy of Tennyson’s In Memoriam which once belonged to Forster’s father had presumably been in the family since before he was born. As for clothes, he usually looked like an odd-job man, and the task of persuading him to appear on the stage of Covent Garden opera-house in December 1951 at the first night of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd, for which he had written the libretto, proved a difficult one, since he never mastered the principle that a white tie goes with tails. (In the end, he appeared before a fashionable audience in a black tie). Things altogether meant little to him. He preferred people.

  He watched them, as I suspect he had watched and listened all his life. He was forever Forster, forever paying attention. It was hard to believe he had ever belonged to the Bloomsbury group or any other group, and he figures in their writings only as an occasional presence. As to the classic question ‘Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ he might truthfully have answered ‘I was.’ When you showed her what you were writing, he once told me ruefully, she would tell you what she thought. ‘One felt the better for it, but not the happier.’ He once described the Greek poet Cavafy, whom he had known in Egypt, as standing at a slightly odd angle to the universe, and that might have been said of him too: not defiantly eccentric, but marked out by a refinement of talent and an accident of sexual orientation as unentitled to full membership of the human race. It was not something to flaunt. You are what you are.

  It was above all his modesty that impressed. Lionel Trilling once told me soon after he had written his excellent little book on Forster in 1944, at the height of the second world war, that he had deliberately made no contact with him as he wrote. At that time Trilling had never been to Europe. When Forster visited New York after the war, Trilling took him to the best restaurant he could afford as a tribute to his genius, but sensed that Forster felt a little oppressed by the splendour of the place. Later he took Forster back to his Manhattan apartment to meet his wife Diana, where there was a pram in the hall and a reassuring absence of splendour, and the evening went better. In her autobiography The Beginning of the Journey, years later, Diana recalled how Forster cradled their ten-month-old infant in his arms and ‘comforted him so tenderly that I wished that I could engage him as the baby’s nurse.’ The only shadow in their friendship was when Forster expressed amazement that Trilling should think the names of Margaret and Helen Schlegel in Howards End echoed those of the heroines of Goethe’s Faust. ‘It never crossed my mind,’ I remember his saying. So Trilling added a footnote to a reprint apologising for the error.

  He spent his life, by choice, on the sidel
ines. As a day-boy at Tonbridge School in the 1890s, he used to tell, he got out of games by being allowed to go cycling in the Kentish countryside, which suggests a liberal headmaster, and he was the last man on earth to be a team-player. He had been unhappy there, but being unhappy at school is more or less compulsory among artists, and I suspect he was unhappy with himself. In 1897 he went to Cambridge, which made him, and he never doubted it had, though he always urged the young to do something daring with their early lives, as he had once done, travelling widely in Italy, Egypt and India. Cambridge called him back in 1945 in his late sixties when his mother died, and though he always remained a traveller he never wanted to live anywhere else. The young there loved him because he was lovable and because he was famous, and called him Morgan. The middle-aged could be less welcoming. King’s in the last years of his life was trying to warm up the dying embers of Victorian Marxism and convince itself it was the latest thing, and there were always those who thought him a fuddy-duddy and some who candidly said so.

  He stood far outside such enthusiasms. He had spent his creative life in the Edwardian glow of liberalism, and most of his fiction was written while Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith and Lloyd George were prime ministers. Howards End (1910) is a very Asquithian book with its call to reconcile the classes and to unite business with the arts. ‘Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted.’ That meant nothing to advanced thought in the Sixties, though in the end Forster was proved right. Advanced thought had tried to revive the class war, and the class war did not happen. In fact hardly anyone now wishes it had. Marx was a bad moralist and a worse prophet. But then the state of mind that would want a class war, or any kind of war, can only be contemplated in retrospect with awe and fascination.

  In an iron time like the Sixties he grew inured to condescension and would hit back in the mildest of tones, without venom. He was the gentlest of heretics. ‘You must face the facts, you know,’ someone once told him, to which he gently returned: ‘How can I, when they are all around me?’ That might stand as an epitaph on everything he wrote. The theme of the endless complexity of moral choices is there in the first novel, which was the first Forster, by the merest chance, I ever read. In Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) the meddlesome benevolence of English visitors to Italy ends in disaster and the accidental death of an infant; the hero, Philip Herriton, conscientiously returns to the Italian father to tell him the tragic news, and the Italian on a sudden impulse twists his broken arm till he screams. That sets a pattern for his later novels, where meaning well often means making worse, though you may have to travel the world to discover it. The English are too deeply dedicated, in that view, to good intentions; impulse too is an inescapable part of existence, and he who desires but acts not (as Blake put it dangerously) breeds pestilence.

  ____

  That, oddly enough, sounds like D.H. Lawrence. In 1960 Forster became famous for defending Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in a much publicised court action for obscenity. The two novelists are often seen as antithetical, but it is hard to see why. Both were preoccupied with widening the English consciousness through a knowledge of other lands – ‘What do they know of England who only England know?’ as Kipling put it – and Forster was more accomplished than Lawrence in rooting passion, or the lack of it, in a credible social world. His England lives. Margaret Schlegel is among the most fully realised Englishwomen in the fiction of her century, and it is important to realise in Howards End that her family is cosmopolitan and has German roots. Nor does Forster hector, as Lawrence does, or fall into the trap of hero-worship or longing for a leader. He was too canny for that.

  Lawrence was slightly younger than Forster and died in 1930, in his mid-forties, before Stalin or Hitler were famous or infamous. There can be no saying what he would have thought of them. There is no doubt, however, what Forster thought. He was horrified by the new world of the Thirties, but his horror was expressed in a puzzled distaste rather than in a call to arms. War had no charms. Nor had dogmatic ideology. ‘I do not believe in Belief’ was his celebrated opening to What I Believe, which first appeared in the New York Nation in July 1938, in abbreviated form, and was revised in Two Cheers for Democracy a dozen years later.

  The trouble with Belief, with a capital B, is that it offers only simple alternatives like God or atheism, Left or Right. Forster felt himself a survivor of a better world. When people were called black or white, he called himself pinko-grey. To be an atheist, he protested in 1955 in Twentieth Century, is merely crude. If you call yourself a liberal, people say ‘You can’t be: only Socialists and Tories.’ What he really is, he concludes, is a humanist, even if the word only provokes a bored withdrawal. He dreaded all religions, at least when they become powerful: ‘Absolute power which believes itself the instrument of absolute truth corrupts absolutely,’ he wrote, perverting a famous aphorism of Lord Acton. For so long as people prefer ideas that excite to ideas that are true, the humanist case will lack a hearing, elbowed out; and he felt elbowed out.

  ____

  He did not end his days a failure, however, or see himself as one. It amused him to be mistaken, as a novelist, for C. S. Forester, given his ignorance of naval matters, and he was fond of telling how someone at a literary gathering, on hearing him addressed as Morgan, innocently asked if he were Mr Charles Morgan. He made a virtue of not being a public figure, sat silently in common rooms grateful for any company, and charmed audiences on a platform by pretending he did not know how to lecture. Those who heard his Clark lectures in Cambridge in 1927 on Aspects of the Novel recall the gentle amiability of his performance, which restored faith in that annual event after the fiasco of T. S. Eliot’s nervous attempt in the previous year. The lectures became the most widely read book about fiction between the wars.

  To say he did not see himself as a public figure is to understate the matter. It is a question whether he saw himself at all. He saw others, and watched others. I sometimes watched him watching, so to speak, murmuring ‘Extraordinary, extraordinary’ to himself as two Alpine-looking young women – Swiss, perhaps, or Austrian – walked past us one summer in leather jackets with chamois beards in their peaked felt hats, or as a small girl with a pony-tail stood curious and amazed in front of a large, ghastly seventeenth-century painting in a public gallery representing the fragility of human life, all skulls and winding sheets, as if distantly contemplating her own fate. Short sight was however a difficulty, and he is said to have bowed gravely to the wedding cake when his friend Lord Harewood, the Queen’s cousin, married, under the impression it was Queen Mary. But then it was a natural mistake.

  He believed, as Shakespeare believed, in the primacy of comedy and the profundity of laughter, which sees further than grief. One of its aspects, known as frivolity, is supremely hard to achieve and even harder to maintain. ‘How rare, how precious is frivolity,’ he remarked in an essay on Ronald Firbank collected in Abinger Harvest (1936). ‘How few writers can prostitute all their powers. They are always implying “I am capable of higher things”.’

  Life was full of unexplained details, which kept it from being boring, at least some of the time. But then boredom, he would say, is nothing to worry about. He had stopped writing fiction in the Twenties, he once remarked, because he no longer understood the world he was living in, which for a social novelist is fatal. Before the first world war undergraduates walked arm in arm and addressed each other by their last names; now they do not walk arm in arm and address each other by their first names. What is one to make of that?

  He did not resent it. Life had been kind, at least since his freshman year, and he lived out the last quarter-century of his existence in the place he loved best, though still remembering the Italy, Egypt and India of his youth. Recalling his months in India in 1921 as secretary to a maharaja, he would muse on the frustrations of his administrative life there. ‘My job was to tell people what to do, and sometimes they did it’. That summed up his memor
y of a land and a people he found at once exasperating and adorable. But there could be little point in going back. A return to Alexandria had baffled and disappointed him: they had turned the station round, as he once told me, meaning (no doubt) that they had moved the entrance. Life can only be relived in recollection.

  ____

  It was Cambridge, after all, that had made him. The Longest Journey (1907) is perhaps the least of his six novels, though it is the most autobiographical and the one he loved most; and there the hero Rickie ‘had crept cold and friendless and ignorant out of a great public school, preparing for a silent and solitary journey,’ and the paradox was that he had found something he had neither wanted nor expected but something better.

  Cambridge had not answered his prayer. She had taken and soothed him, and warmed him, and had laughed at him a little, saying that he must not be so tragic yet awhile, for his boyhood had been but a dusty corridor that led to the spacious halls of youth.

  The capacity of places to soothe was not lost on his readers, even far way, and I remember a New York academic who had never been to England who, in his not infrequent bouts of melancholy, would reread Howards End as a balm to his spirit. The book made a notable film after Forster’s death and is said to have saved the British film industry in one of its doldrums, which would have amused him. He was not indifferent to fame. Four books appeared about him in the same year, and I once asked him if he read them all. ‘Oh yes,’ he said gently, recommending above all one by K. W. Gransden. And did he reread his own books? ‘Oh yes.’ In 1960 a play based on A Passage to India by Santha Rama Rau was performed, and he greeted it gratefully, though I thought it misrepresented the book as a nationalistic tract. He disagreed, and it was not for me to tell him what his books meant; in any case he was fond of the Indian lady who had written it. But anyone who remembers Fielding’s derision of Indian nationhood in the last pages of the book is bound to wonder. Equality can be a step down, and Forster believed that an Indian nation could only be a sad little epilogue to a glorious past, ‘last comer to the drab nineteenth-century sisterhood’ and ‘waddling in…She whose only peer was the Holy Roman Empire, she shall rank with Guatemala and Belgium perhaps!’ So Forster’s point in his greatest book was not far distant from Kipling’s glorious pageant in Kim, a quarter-century earlier, or George Orwell’s years later in his argumentative sketch ‘Shooting an Elephant,’ where decolonisation signifies a release for the coloniser rather than the colonised. The novel ends with a conversation between friends and the echoing words ‘Not yet’ and ‘Not there,’ which means soon. When India became independent twenty years later it became in the event not one nation but two – three after Pakistan broke into halves – and Forster never ceased to regret that the larger part still called itself India. But then he did not know what else it could be called.