21 - E. M. Forster

Summary

If we were to have all the English novelists 'seated together in a room, a circular room, a sort of British Museum reading-room - all writing their novels simultaneously', where would we place our author? One could picture him sitting between his favourite novelist Jane Austen and D. H. Lawrence, who might nettle him but whom he regarded as the 'only prophetic novelist writing today'. Aspects of both are present in the novels of Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970). From Austen, he inherits the realist comedy of manners and mode of delicate irony with which he probes under the surface of middle-class English life. But his social satire is regularly invaded by Lawrentian impulses. A passionate kiss in a field of violets connects a boy and a girl from disparate classes; a Cambridge-educated gentleman runs away with a friend's gamekeeper. 'No one seizes more deftly the shades and shadows of social comedy', writes Woolf of her friend 'Morgan', 'but the neat surface is always being thrown into disarray by an outburst of lyric poetry.' Beneath the wit and the wisdom that mark Forster's writing, and giving his novels their poignant undertow, are deep, unfulfilled longings: for a life of the senses rather than of thoughts, for an English greenwood, for some spiritual home, and, above all, for the male 'Friend' who 'never comes yet is not entirely disproved'.