Some Interviews with E. M. Forster, 1957-58, 1965 - British novelist

EMF Ford is not one of the secrets: It referred to Ford the Elizabethan dramatist, not Ford Madox Ford. Beaumont is another Elizabethan dramatist mentioned.

WS In your recent, new Introduction to Journey, you say "the spirit of anti-literature" often jogged your elbow while you were writing it. Would you explain what you meant by that spirit? Why did you encourage this imp of anti-literature - or didn't you?

EMF In those immature days I enjoyed the idea of doing flattering imitations of literature. [I didn't understand this answer, but I didn't pursue it.]

WS What decided you to write Alexandria? I think it is a remarkable book, and remarkably interesting, yet it is very unlike your previous writings. Was it born of a renewed interest in history during the war years? Or simply of your interest in Alexandria?

EMF I was there and was interested in the place.

WS One continually hears about an unpublished novel written sometime after Passage, and lately the anonymous reader of my manuscript for the Stanford Press noted that he had heard rumors of a novel written within the past 10 years or so. Can you shed any light on these matters?

EMF No statement.

WS Was Angels in any way influenced by James's Ambassadors?

EMF I felt no conscious influence from The Ambassadors, That plot was a late nineteenth-century formula.

WS Do you like The Spoils of Poynton?

EMF I like Spoils very much. Sometimes there is unnecessary niggling in the book though.

I had a total of 53 questions, but these were the only ones I got to in any formal way.

NOTES

1 For a list see B. J. Kirkpatrick, A Bibliography of E. M. Forster, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985) E7. By far the most illuminating of these interviews is P. N. Furbank and F.J.H. Haskell, "The Art of Fiction," Paris Review 1 (Spring 1953): 28-41. To the list should be added K. W. Grandsden, "E. M. Forster at Eighty," Encounter 12 (Jan. 1959): 77-81, and an interview with Peter Orr at King's College Cambridge on 9 Dec. 1961 recorded for the British Council and available on tape in "The Art of the Novelist," series 497, 498, 499, and 929.

2 "A Conversation with E. M. Forster," Encounter 9 (Nov. 1947): 52-57. See p. 52.

3 Religion and Art of William Hale White ("Mark Rutherford") (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1955).

4 The book was The Apothecary's Shop: Essays on Literature (London: Secker, 1957). The chapter is entitled "To the Lighthouse or to India?" 169-186. EMF must have liked it, for it praises him over Virginia Woolf, but one wonders whether he would have liked the racism implicit in Enright's statement: "We know that natives are always trying to rape white women . . ." (177).

5 See A Writer's Diary, Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth, 1953) 243. On the "tunneling process," see p. 61. I had in mind VW's statement on "how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters."

6 Charles Mauron, the author of The Nature of Beauty in Art and Literature (1927) and Aesthetics and Psychology (1935), labored to make analogies between painting and fiction, literature and psychology He was an important influence on EMF. See Stone, The Cave and the Mountain (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1966) 102.