2 - E. M. Forster in the Streets

Summary

By the time hostilities broke out across Europe, E. M. Forster had stopped writing. In the preceding decade, four novels had appeared under his name in almost as many years. However, by the summer of 1914, Forster had just finished a novel that proved unpublishable, Maurice, and had been stuck for some time on another, his last, which would only see the light of day ten years later as A Passage to India. ‘Civilisation as it topples carries my brain with it,’ the novelist jotted down in his diary on 1 August 1914. A few months later: ‘I find it even less possible to finish novels since the war than before it.’ By the end of the conflict, Forster would quietly admit to Siegfried Sassoon that he still suffered from writer's block. His unfinished ‘Inferior’, a short story about two officers handing out cigarettes in a military hospital, was itself ‘an inferior story’, the novelist confessed to the poet. ‘It's not that I’m off writing, but I can't any more put words between inverted commas and join them together with “said” and an imaginary proper name.’ Instead, Forster dedicated his first war year to work of a more practical nature, cataloguing paintings two days each week at the National Gallery in London and serving as one of its night-time watchmen on the look-out for air raid fires.

Just like E. M. Forster, many other modernists recorded a struggle to write during, and about, the First World War. Ford Madox Ford felt himself unable to ‘evoke pictures of the Somme […] as for putting them – into words! No: the mind stops dead.’ In 1917, Margaret Anderson left a page of the Little Review blank to represent the conflict; Henry James had likewise admitted two years earlier, in an interview with the New York Times, that he found it ‘as hard to apply one's words as to endure one's thoughts’, famously adding that ‘the war has used up words’. Taken together, the doubts Forster, Ford, Anderson and James articulated are consistent with a larger moment of epistemological crisis prompted by the conflict. Across divides of class, gender and nationality, from the trenches in No Man's Land to the home front, contemporaries grappled with the question of how to put the war into words.