THE LASTING INFLUENCE OF E.M. FORSTER

 

E.M. Forster led a long adventurous life around the world. For all that his literary output is surprisingly short, though relegated largely to three masterworks of the early 20^th century, A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924), along with a handful of short stories, essays and three other novels (one published posthumously). His influence, however, is far reaching. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has delved into even one of the three pillars of his literary career and, yet, perhaps because so much has been borrowed from him, Forster the writer is something of an enigma as a person.

He led a cosmopolitan life throughout Europe, writing extensively about Florence, India and a vast amount of essays on Egypt. Then, in 1948 he took a trip through the Grand Canyon with a burro.

But his gaze toward the places he visited was never blinded by his position as a well-endowed Englishman in a strange land. His writing speaks to a larger investment to the class struggles and political struggles often out of the view of expats. A Passage to India offers a strange early view of not only how the British view their subjects in India but how that view is returned. Wilkie Collins did approached this national introspection roughly a half-century earlier with his brilliant The Moonstone but Forster would not stay on the outside to look in.

Nor was he blind to the class struggles in his own native country and Howards End, by painting subtle contrasts, is not only a commentary on England’s class division but also an awakening to the often well-meaning but hopelessly simplistic aid societies. Helen and Margaret, the sisters central to the narrative, often engage in spirited debates about the insufficient aid to England’s downtrodden. But their compassion is rejected by the object of their attention, Leonard Bast, a working-class Londoner. Henry Wilcox, a widower and now much older-fiancé of Margaret, and inheritor of the titular estate, interferes with their attempt to help Bast and advises them that the insurance company in which Bast is employed is about to go under. In an attempt to help but not understanding the mechanisms of the system and the class system they are fighting, the sisters advise Bast to leave the company. He does so and takes a lower-paying job elsewhere, is then fired and reduced to begging only to find the insurance company he worked for was by no means in danger of bankruptcy. The sisters feel terrible but do not know how to help and Wilcox washes his hands of responsibility.

Forster knew all too well that there were no easy answers to societal problems. He also knew that simplistic labels were not only useless but dangerous (part of his point). Henry Wilcox is old-money with a myopic outlook that old-money breeds. He is outspoken against suffragists and is later revealed to have had a mistress while married to his late wife. But his bigotry and obtuseness is never exaggerated to the point of a “statement”, devolving the character into a caricature. Instead, Forster paints him as a man constantly in pain, hurting at a family and a legacy falling apart, facing loneliness and old age. This was much his attitude toward Cecil Vyse in A Room with a View, the self-absorbed intended for the protagonist Lucy Honeychurch. His final scene, in which Lucy breaks off the engagement, find shim never shouting or threatening, but accepting the decision of a liberated woman.

Indeed, few male writers wrote so well about the sentiments of women wanting to break free from societal chains. Likely, Forster understood them so well because, as a gay man, he too wanted his voice heard. Literature, like most of the arts, has long provided a refuge as well as a voice to the silenced from Walt Whitman to Tennessee Williams. Forster understood the suffragist movement because he knew more movements for justice would come from it later. In a bittersweet fulfilment his last novel, Maurice, which he began in 1913 and then put aside for fear of social retaliation, about the upbringing of a gay man in Edwardian England, was finally published in 1971, the year after his death to a world that was becoming  more and more a world where more and more people were finally finding their voices.