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

Wilfred Stone

In 1957-58 and again in 1965 I had a number of interviews with E. M. Forster in the course of writing a book on him. At the time, I entertained no idea of publishing them, partly because I was busy with the book, partly because I didn't think they were worth it, but mostly because, in that same period (and before), some fifteen interviews with Forster had been published(1) and I had no desire to add to that overload. But on reading my notes today, some 40 years after the event, they seem on balance worth saving from the wastebasket.

Unlike, say, Angus Wilson,(2) I had no amanuensis to take notes while I asked questions - and Forster specifically banned tape recorders (which anyway I didn't possess). So my record consists of notes written down immediately after the interviews, as verbatim as I could make them - except occasionally when I just noted the gist. I was never at ease during these sessions (though Forster was kindness itself) since, in a word, I was ill-prepared for them. In the preceding months, family obligations, a heavy teaching load, complications of an ocean voyage, and the now-or-never constraints of a sabbatical fellowship all conspired to deliver me into Forster's presence before I had even had time to reread his novels. If many of my questions seem to deal with biography, Bloomsbury, and other nonfictional matters, that is the reason.

But here are my notes, for what they are worth.

OCTOBER 23, 1957, 6:00-7:00 p.m.

I begin by noting my own nervousness, followed by a description of Forster's rooms in King's College Cambridge (where all the interviews took place) and of his appearance and manner. Since the first issue has no literary importance and the others are covered in a hundred other accounts, I shall let the accompanying photograph (taken March 1958 and hitherto unpublished) stand for many words and cut directly to the interview itself.

WS This is a lovely room.

EMF Yes, isn't it? [Silence]

EMF [Breaking the ice] Well, how is your work coming? [Forster had agreed to talk to me on the understanding that I would undertake a work of literary criticism and not a critical biography (like my earlier book on Mark Rutherford" which Forster had read). Basil Willey, who had reviewed the Mark Rutherford book, had helped introduce me to Forster.]

WS It's just now getting under way. I've been tied up with other things through the summer and am only now beginning to shape my thoughts.

EMF Have you seen this book? [He showed me a book by D. J. Enright containing a chapter on himself and Virginia Woolf.(4) He offered to lend it to me, but I declined, since he was just now reading it himself. From here on, in a rather hit-or-miss way, I consulted my prepared questions.]

WS Do you think your own writing method has anything in common with Virginia Woolf's "tunneling process"? [This referred to a term VW uses in A Writer's Diary, edited by Leonard Woolf, but EMF apparently was not familiar with it, since he interpreted tunneling process in his own way.]

EMF I never took writing so seriously as Virginia. She was always transmuting all experiences into writing. She was always tunneling. For me writing was never that kind of full-time job.

WS In your writing, did you begin with an idea, a character, a situation - or how were your books conceived?

EMF I think with an idea.

WS In your essay on Virginia Woolf, you remark that she was not indifferent to criticism. Her diaries, published by Leonard Woolf, indicate a woman extremely sensitive to criticism.

EMF Yes, isn't that extraordinary? I was surprised to read that remark about her being furious with me in front of the London Library. I was only trying to be amusing.(5)

WS She had a sharp tongue - reminds one a little of Jane Carlyle.

EMF Yes indeed - a very good comparison.

WS I suppose the full diaries will contain a good many surprises. I wonder if they will be published?

EMF Yes, I should think they would. Leonard has them all, I believe.

WS I have been reading Roger Fry's Transformations lately and have been struck by parallels between his aesthetic theory and your precept and practice. The emphasis on "plastic" or "intrinsic" values as opposed to representational or "psychological" values (as Mauron uses the term)(6) struck me as similar to your emphasis in Aspects on rhythm and pattern, and so forth, as opposed to story.

EMF Oh, yes?

WS Yes. Also, in "Art for Art's Sake" and "Anonymity," I noted a similar emphasis - that the real artistic achievement is anonymous, that beyond the author and his worldly identity there is the art, which is an organic whole with an intrinsic, not extrinsic, value. [This was, I thought, at base a good question (and embodied ideas I later used in chapter 5 of The Cave and the Mountain), but I was aware of expressing it badly, and I had a feeling that EMF was getting bored, which panicked me a little. I thought I'd better ask shorter questions, lest I stop the conversation.]

WS Do you think these observations are correct? Were you conscious of following Fry in any way?

EMF Quite possibly they're true. No, I wasn't conscious of following him. I knew Roger very well, of course. He used to laugh at me for always wanting to look at the picture. I used to joke with him and ask why, if' the representation didn't matter, he arranged his lines to look like recognizable people and landscapes. He would answer, "I like them better that way." [Here I felt rather dead-ended. We really hadn't tapped into any single idea beyond the surface. But I resolved to have one other little go at: aesthetics.]

WS Do you think music is the greatest of the arts?

EMF Yes.

WS Why? Is it because it is the most abstract?

EMF No, because it best expresses pure feeling.

WS Did you in writing begin from any consciously realized aesthetic theory?

EMF No.

WS [Changing the subject.] I admired your Preface to Flowers and Elephants very much.(7) [His face lit up with pleasure.]

EMF Oh, that was so long ago. I've forgotten the book.

WS I wondered if you agreed with her particular form of Platonism. It seemed to me to depend on her remaining in a state of isolation and almost dream - a rigorous detachment from life and love.

EMF I don't remember the book very much. No. I don't think I'm much of a Platonist. [This answer surprised me. I didn't think that was what I was asking.]

WS I've been interested, too, in the closeness of some of your expressed ideas to those advanced by G. E. Moore. Were you much influenced by him?

EMF Oh, he was a tremendous influence when I was here. He touched R. C. Trevelyan, Roger Fry, J. M. Keynes very deeply. But I was never very good at philosophy. I was always a little on the outside. He is still living in Cambridge, you know.

WS Yes, I learned that the other day.

WS So far as I've gone in my reading, I do detect a family likeness in Moore, Fry, and yourself. Mr. Johnstone has made something of that in his book.(8)

EMF Well, I rather think I was brought in just to fill a gap. I really was outside the Bloomsbury group. I knew and liked them, of course, but I wasn't at the center.

WS So I gather. Keynes makes that point in his memoir.(9) [At this point he asked if I would like some very sweet sherry or gin or dry or sweet vermouth. I took dry vermouth and we resumed talking. He walked with difficulty and explained about his foot: a sprain, appearing from nowhere, had persisted in that foot for over a month. During our conversation he had rested his foot on a stool. I commiserated with him about his ailment, but before the conversation got stuck on that subject (which EMF clearly enjoyed), I remembered to convey the greetings of the Hale-Whites on behalf of their son John.(10) He seemed very pleased and told me (what I already knew) that John as an undergraduate had lived in rooms directly above his and that he was now sculpturing in Italy. We resumed by talking about the various dramatizations of his books. EMF mentioned a radio script of The Longest Journey that he didn't seem to think much of. Then he spoke of the dramatization of A Room with a View.]

EMF Do you know about that?

WS Yes. [I knew about it but hadn't read or seen it.]

EMF Very good, I think. Hardly any of the dialogue is what appears in the book, I was surprised to discover, yet the play is very like indeed.

WS The coming production of Santha Rama Rau's A Passage to India must be an exciting event for you.

EMF Oh yes indeed. It's actually coming on the boards very soon, both in London and on Broadway.

WS Miss Rau mentioned in that article in Harper's Bazaar that of all your books you thought most highly of The Longest Journey. Why?

EMF [Here his full answer escapes me, but it included something like: "I put a good deal of myself into it," and "It was a kind of new experiment for me." Then he said: "But the book does seem dated today - there are a lot of things wrong with it."]

WS What, for example? Chapter endings?

EMF No, I rather think those are all right. That operatic break-up scene. It's a bit overdone for modern taste.

WS I noticed the word real used often in the book. Such as, "Stephen was never so real to me," etc.

EMF Oh yes, of course; that's the whole point of the book - illusion and reality. Remember that first scene? That is straight out of G. E. Moore.

WS Do you like Stephen Wonham?

EMF Oh yes.

WS Don't you like him and not like him?

EMF Oh, I don't like some of the things on the surface, his rudeness, for example.

WS Isn't Rickie a little prudish in repudiating Stephen for drinking? Well, perhaps prudish isn't the word.

EMF We must remember the enormous difference between the manners of that day and this. No, I don't think Rickie is prudish, really. Agnes is the prudish one.

WS Cambridge at the turn of the century must have been an enormously exciting place.

EMF Oh yes indeed. Especially to me, coming up from a dull little school. [At this point EMF began to hunt for pamphlets and a scrapbook containing a miscellany of reviews and undergraduate writing (by himself and others). He also showed me a copy of James McConkey's The Novels of E. M. Forster, just published by the Cornell University Press. He then asked if I had seen all of his books and writings I needed. I said no, that I needed to gather a complete bibliography.]

EMF Oh, it's being done - by Oliver Stallybrass, a former Kingsman, now at the London Library. I will see you get a copy when it's finished.

WS I hope it will be complete, contain everything. [I was here fishing for some hint of the unpublished novel, and other unpublished material, that I had heard - from Noel Annan and others - existed.(11)]

EMF I rather suspect there will be some items left out.

WS Why the long gap between Howards End and Passage? The war?

EMF Yes, mainly. I had begun a book on Samuel Butler after Howards End but the war interrupted it.

WS Will you ever finish it?

EMF Oh, I had thought of doing so many times, but I don't think the interest in Butler is any longer great enough. He's not much read now, is he?

WS I think not. But I've just read Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited. [I mentioned a professor at Stanford, a New Zealander named Colin Hutton, who had recently made a pilgrimage to the Erewhon Valley.] What was the nature of Butler's influence on you?

EMF Well, I've written all that someplace. I brought Butler into A Room with a View. It's his commonplace books(12) and people that really influence you.

WS In your piece appearing some years back in the New York Times Book Review entitled "Cocoanut & Co: Entrance to an Abandoned Novel,"(15) editorial mention was made of an unpublished novel. Does such a novel exist? I have heard others speak of it as well. [At this his face clouded a little. He seemed a bit resentful and wondered where I had received the information but did not press me for an answer.]

EMF Yes, I have such a novel. [At this I dropped the subject, hoping to ask at a later meeting if I might read it. This was, of course, the "homosexual" novel, posthumously published as Maurice.]

At this point the discussion began to wind down. He mentioned my Mark Rutherford book, remarking that he did not much like Mark Rutherford (I'd have been surprised if he had!) and commenting that he once knew Mabel Marsh and Sophia Partridge, friends of Hale White in his old age. I asked where G. Lowes Dickinson used to live at King's and we spoke briefly of his just-appeared article in the London Magazine entitled "De Senectute," dealing with his thoughts on turning 80.(14) He then showed me a book by William Plomer entitled Museum Pieces and asked if I'd seen it. I said no and he insisted I borrow it. He asked how long I was staying in England and seemed pleased when I said until May. "You must come and see me again," he said. He took my address, promised to send the Stallybrass bibliography when he received it, and accompanied me to the landing. We shook hands - the softest hands I think I had ever held! I felt somewhat dissatisfied with the interview, since I had stayed fearfully far from the novels, but I was reassured by his warmth and cordiality.

NOVEMBER 6, 1957, ABOUT 5:30-6:00 p.m.

The purpose of this visit was to pick up Oliver Stallybrass's checklist of EMF's works, which EMF had informed me by postcard had arrived. I asked about his foot and EMF replied: "The doctor thinks it is gout but is not quite convinced because it is not painful enough!" I was about to leave when EMF asked me if I had any further questions. I was caught off-guard and came up with some rather old chestnuts.

WS Can you say anything more about Moore's influence?

EMF I got what I got from Moore indirectly. I never had any formal philosophy and don't think I ever read Principia Ethica. Most of the Moore I absorbed I got through H. O. Meredith.(15)

WS In reading about Keynes's enthusiastic response to Moore, I wonder if he didn't, consciously or unconsciously, influence most of your Cambridge generation.

EMF Very likely.

WS What Cambridge people influenced you most strongly?

EMF G.L. Dickinson. Also Wedd - who used to occupy these rooms.

WS I am conscious in your writing of a consistent, stable sensibility relatively unchanged from past to present. Can you think of any major fluctuations in feelings or attitudes? [This was a question born of desperation. I think I was cribbing from a comment Elizabeth Bowen had made.](16)

EMF No. But there were some political changes. I was pro-Boer War for a time and then changed.

WS Gide said he abjured politics because politics was fraught with fraud. Were you apolitical for similar reasons?

EMF No. English politics have less fraud than French. I would say because of their essential futility. It's preposterous to read Gaitskell's answer to Macmillan on the economy on the same page as Sputnik!

WS I was much interested in your letter to Juliall Bell before he went off to the Spanish War - and the activist/quietist question generally. I wonder if the ideal of l'homme engage is much in vogue today? I rather think that that kind of heroics doesn't much appeal to today's - postwar - generation, and what you offer is perhaps closer. [I felt on most uncertain ground here!]

EMF Do you think so? I hope so. That's interesting. [Said with serious emphasis.] Is there in the U.S.A. today a cult comparable to the angry young men over here?

WS Perhaps James Dean, the "rebel without a cause"?

EMF I think that youth worship is rather the dominant characteristic there. [With that, things tapered off and I made my way to the door.]

JANUARY 10, 1958, 2:00-3:15 p.m.

I first returned the envelope of pamphlets he had loaned me, the book of newspaper cuttings, and the Stallybrass checklist. In this session I mainly asked prepared questions, but first EMF offered tea and spent a few minutes in preparing it. I remarked that I was glad to see him on his feet again. (He had to walk out the door and across the hall to get water for the tea.) He brought up (Howard Overing) Sturgis. I had mentioned Belchamber in a note to him earlier.

EMF No, I don't think I was influenced by him, though there are some similarities between Sainty and Rickie. [He mused over the facts that he read Belchamber in 1904 and that The Longest Journey didn't appear until 1907, but nothing came of these musings.]

My notes on this meeting show only the gist of EMF's replies to my sometimes lengthy questions. I am therefore amplifying the record sufficiently to make the conversation intelligible.

WS Was [G. Lowes] Dickinson the editor of, or only a contributor to, The Independent Review? [In reply EMF produced a first issue of the journal from which I copied down the names of the editorial board. Edward Jenks was the editor.](17)

WS I can't get over the feeling that The Longest Journey ought to have been the first book you wrote. Can you tell me something about when your books were begun and how long you worked on them?

EMF The Longest Journey wasn't the first. A Room with a View was the first begun, then I laid it aside. I talk about that in The Hill of Devi. With Passage, I wrote as far as Fielding's tea party in 1912. I took the manuscript with me to India in 1921, but I couldn't write in India.

WS Were you consciously working in a Wellsian (or anti-Wellsian) manner in "The Machine Stops"?

EMF Yes.

WS In 1919 did you have a regular position as drama critic for the Athenaeum?

EMF No. I'm surprised to hear that I did much drama criticism.(18)

WS Who is the G. H. L. of the dedication to Alexandria?

EMF George Ludolf.

WS Where can I find out something about Syed Ross Masood, to whom you dedicated Passage?

EMF I can't think.

WS Who is the L. H. C. S. to whom "Anonymity" (the pamphlet) is dedicated?

EMF Laurence Shuttleworth.

WS Why did you change publishers from Blackwoods to Arnold?

EMF They didn't think I was good enough.

WS Why did you not reprint "Albergo Empedocle" in your story volumes?

EMF I didn't think it was good enough.

WS Was it difficult lecturing to the Working Men's College? Did you feel you had to tailor your remarks to suit an uneducated audience?

EMF No, not at all. [He mentioned T. S. Eliot's lectures on Dante to a similar audience.]

WS Where does the epigraph ". . . Only connect" come from?

EMF I invented it. I made it up. [Said with a little chuckle.]

WS Do you have a copy of your essay "The Influence of Climate and Physical Conditions upon National Character"?

EMF No. I think the copy is lost. Buckle probably inspired it.(19)

WS Did Lytton Strachey ever see the piece "Strivings after Historical Style" that you wrote for Basileona?(20) Did Strachey influence you in writing such things as "Cardan" anti "voltaire" in Abinger Harvest?

EMF No, but my history tutor liked it. "Voltaire" may owe something to Lytton, but not "Cardan." That's too early.

WS Do you know who wrote the anti-jingoist poems in Basileona "The Higher Patriotism" anti "The Chosen Race"?

EMF No.

WS To what degree would you say your books are imaginative reconstructions of real places and people? Somewhere you declare that the author is simply a liar, must be, when asked if he puts real people in his books and says yes. Do you reaffirm that statement?

EMF They are reminiscences of real people, not actual portraits.

WS Mr. Stallybrass attributes an article on G. K. Chesterton to you on the basis of style alone. Is this the article? [I have no record of what I showed him, but it was probably EMF's review of The New Jerusalem by Chesterton that appeared in the Dec. 4, 1920 Nation, pp. 344, 346, under the title "The Untidy Gentleman."]

EMF Yes.

WS What occasioned the libel suit that followed publication of "A Flood in the Office," which was withdrawn from Abinger Harvest after initial publication?

EMF The review mentioned a pamphlet in which one Nile engineer attacked another over some technical matter and he was sued in Egypt. The plaintiff won, so the republication of the piece in Abinger Harvest became libelous - became automatically "radioactive."(21)

WS It is tempting to compare your ceasing to write novels and Matthew Arnold's ceasing to write poems after he was about 30, and turning to social criticism. Arnold felt guilty about not being "in the world" - a philistine world he felt he should help to "civilize." Would you say that your leaving off novel-writing had anything in common with this?

EMF Very interesting. No. I don't think so. I don't know. Perhaps the breakdown of the home as it once was has partly caused the split. Of classes too.

WS As you look back on your life, what do you think has been your greatest contribution?

EMF Can't answer.

WS What is the title of the unpublished novel? When was it written?

EMF [Musing] Let's concern ourselves with the published work. There's nothing shocking about the title!

WS Sets of opposites in your work can be multiplied enormously - Sawston vs. Italy, professional vs. amateur, organized vs. muddle, city vs. country, the individual vs. the official, bigness vs. littleness. Am I right in assuming that you are not just posing rights against wrongs, sheep against goats, but reminding us of complexity, of aspects of life that need joining?

EMF In Howards End I tried to strike a balance. [EMF expanded on this, but my notes shed no light.]

WS In reading your review of Stella Kramrisch's "The Art of India" - which you entitled "The World Mountain" - I was particularly moved. I felt that here was a metaphor, a symbol, which could serve admirably to explain much of your work. The world mountain - on the outside is all the complexity and mess of human history and society - at the cave-like core is the individual alone with his god, whatever that god may be. The Hindu illustration fits, not because you are essentially Hindu in belief, but because the Hindu illustration is free of dogmatism and allows that freedom of the imagination and spirit you need for your vision of human life - a kind of primal inner and outer, the knowable and the unknowable. Also, there is room (in this image) to leave the inner cell and return to the world, not as a final gesture, but repeatedly, out and in, again and again. Is there anything in this picture that strikes you as valid?

EMF It's a good image, but one could strain it too much.(22) [At that, after a few formalities, we called it a day.]

MAY 14, 1958

I had no questions and answers for this meeting. I came in without a previous engagement and wrote up my memories of the meeting afterward. Forster had not answered a May 1 note I had written him, and since I wanted to return Plomer's Museum Pieces, I used this excuse to drop in. A student was there but left presently. Forster was very cordial. I first asked him if he would consider writing an article for Sequoia, a Stanford undergraduate literary magazine I had partly fathered, and gave him a copy of the Winter 1958 issue. I told him the editor had asked me to ask EMF to contribute if I knew him well enough by now. He replied, "Well. I should, hope you felt you knew me well enough!" I don't recall whether he declined on the spot or not; but nothing of EMF's ever appeared in the magazine.

I asked him if he would identify the people in The Modern Symposium by G. Lowes Dickinson. He did and I wrote the names in the front of my book. Then I asked him if there was an original for Mrs. Wilcox or Mrs. Moore. He thought quite a long time and then said, "No, I don't think so."

Then I brought up the name of Charles Mauron. He brightened immediately and said he was glad I'd thought of him. He said he wasn't aware of any influence from Mauron in writing Aspects - that it was simply a dedication out of friendship. He said Mauron is mayor of St. Remy in France (I have since learned there are about a dozen St. Remys!), that he was of peasant stock, that he went out to Indo-China as a young man. He combined love of pictures with extreme practical sense. He was now completely blind - a man of about 50 years.

I asked him again for an explanation of why he ceased writing novels after Passage. He said the social thing was no longer a feasible subject. I mentioned Jane Austen, and that was what he clearly had in mind. He said he thought the modern world was more the subject for the poet. The immensity of its issues simply didn't allow of easy treatment in the novel. He mentioned reading recently Auden's "Ode on the Death of Freud" - which he thought very great. The novelist just can't do that sort of thing. I said I thought the epic was out today, though. He said he thought the opposite, that the materials for epic had never been so present - the immensity of the problems of the world were simply staggering - but that he thought the fault was in the absence of an audience for epic.

About this time a "lady journalist" (as he called her) came in - with an appointment. She was doing an article on Forster for the next issue of Varsity. But we exchanged a few more words.

Would he qualify in any way the critical views he expressed in Aspects? Yes, he would revise his opinion of Joyce. "Joyce is not my kind of writer, but I can see I undervalued him."

He had not read Glen O. Allen's article in PMLA on Passage.

I had to leave before much else was said, but he urged me to see him again before we left.

MARCH 8, 1965

I returned to England for almost three weeks (March 3-March 24) mainly to collect photographic illustrations for The Cave and the Mountain, now almost completed. Forster had written to say that he could not send photographs, but that if I could get over there we could have a "rummage" together through his collections. We spent the better part of a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of one week together, and I came away with copies of some 80 photographs. It was a bonanza, and Forster's generosity was beyond praise. Most of our talk was informal, but on Monday I asked him some prepared questions and jotted down answers in the usual way.

WS I notice that you make frequent references to Matthew Arnold, not only in Howards End but in a good many essays. Was he a conscious influence?

EMF Yes, he was a conscious influence.

WS "Nature" is obviously something you love - landscapes, rivers, trees, downs, etc. What kind of a nature-worshipper would you call yourself? How much do you share Wordsworth's sense of "something far more deeply interfused" in the natural environment?

EMF My attitude has changed in the last few years when I see how easily nature can be destroyed. It was once a reverential approach, occasionally mystic.

WS Of this "art business" you say: "No violence can destroy it, no sneering can belittle it." This reminds me of Arnold's claim that humanistic culture will survive because of an instinct for "self-preservation" in the race. Would you say there is an equivalence here?

EMF I'm not too clear about what I can say about our differences. I'm glad to say that we're very different.

WS Why did you make the father in The Longest Journey so hateful?

EMF It just suited the book.

WS Money - plain pounds, shillings, pence - often enters as a symbol into your writing. You use a pecuniary vocabulary much as Clapham did in its addresses to the Almighty. Money as a theme is obviously important in Howards End. Is there any special reason why money should be on your mind, one of the ideas you play with?

EMF Quite right. The issue of money is much more alarming today. Howards End is an attempt to master money.

WS Does Gerald have an original? In Journey you say that the bully and his victim never forget their first, or earliest, relations. And you have admitted to using that book, or rather certain people in it, as a "compensation device." Is Gerald such a device? Did you have a hard time at Tonbridge, or only a boring one?

EMF I don't think he has any original. I had an unpleasant time at school but not a tragic one.

WS Did you write the satiric poem called "The Higher Patriotism"(23) in Basileona? The one beginning, "I fail to see the reason why / Brittania should rule the waves?"

EMF Inquire at the College Library. [I think he prefaced this response with a "no."]

WS In your prose, you seem to have two styles. Your first, best, and prevailing style is a form of plain talk - clear, simply phrased, colloquial, like the opening of "Anonymity": "Do you like to know who a book's by?" The other is a Pateresque, or rather Dickinsonian, decorative "poetic" style (rarely used) of which a good example may be "Songs of Loveliness" in the January 27, 1920 Daily News and Leader, beginning "Loveliness and beauty are two sisters, the two divine children that imagination has created out of fact."

EMF Yes, I'd say Ruskinian. I was not conscious of turning one on and the other off.

WS Most critics don't have much praise for "The Machine Stops," yet I think it is one of your most interesting stories. What point did you want that story to make? Were you aware that Kuno's exit to the outer world images in many ways an actual birth?

EMF Yes, I think it is very interesting now too, though it's too long. The story was saying something new for me. [I think he meant he was trying out a new kind of subject.] As to the point of the story, the point is: get back to the past and what is good in the past. The story contains its own statement - the danger of getting from simplicity to mechanism.

WS I am much taken by the development of what appears to be your "ego-character" in the novels. Philip fades to Rickie to Cecil to Tibby to (jumping 14 years) to Fielding. To what degree were you, in these characters, trying on fictional roles, so to speak testing yourself, in new and different situations?

EMF I shouldn't agree to that [said EMF at mention of Fielding]. As to the other question, I didn't do it consciously.

WS You said in your Paris Review interview that you like "secrets" from the reader. Was one of the secrets that the character Ford in "Other Kingdom" bears the same name as the editor of the English Review? [Ford Madox Ford, who had published "Other Kingdom" in the magazine]. Obviously, Mr. Bons is snob spelled backwards. Do you have others you would care to confess? I think I've discovered quite a few, including puns on some of G. E. Moore's popular lines, and the amusing "rabbit" references in Howards End, but I should appreciate any clues you want to drop.

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.

7 By Constance Talbot. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927).

8 The Bloomsbury Group (London: Secker, 1954).

9 "My Early Beliefs," Two Memoirs (London: Hart-Davis, 1949) 81.

10 Dr. and Mrs. Reginald Hale-White. Dr. Hale-White was the author's grandson.

11 Noel Annan was then Provost of King's College and most helpful to me in my inquiries about Forster. We had many talks about Forster and Bloomsbury. In our first meeting, sometime in October 1957, he cleared the air by saying, "You know Forster's queer, don't you?" I did, but it was helpful to have it confirmed - even though it was not a matter I could, at that date, openly discuss in my book. (I did, however, obliquely hint at it in several places.) Annan had a poor opinion of the unpublished novel and thought I should consider myself lucky in not having to deal with it.

12 Read notebooks. It's interesting that EMF used that term, since he was keeping a commonplace book (since published) at the time.

13 Feb. 1949: 3, 31.

14 Nov. 1957: 15-18.

15 The friend to whom A Room with a View is dedicated.

16 See Collected Impressions (New York: Knopf, 1950) 123, and The Cave and the Mountain 348, 420.

17 The other members were, besides Dickinson, Francis W. Hirst, C. E G. Masterman, G. M. Trevelyan, and Nathaniel Wedd.

18 The question arose out of an impression rather than any careful checking. It turns out that of 22 Athenaeum articles in 1919, only 7 dealt with plays. Almost half consisted of pieces that found a place in Pharos and Pharillon and Abinger Harvest.

19 Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England (London: Longman, 1864). B. J. Kirkpatrick reports that the concluding 10 paragraphs are extant. See his Bibliography 107.

20 This was included in the scrapbook that EMF had shown me and let me borrow. Basileona was an undergraduate magazine.

21 The conflict was between Sir William Willcocks and another engineer in the Egyptian administration, Sir Murdoch MacDonald. Murdoch won his libel suit, so the reprinting of the article constituted a repeating of the libel. Forster and Arnold's had in the end to pay [pounds]500 as well as withdraw the piece. See P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, 2 vols. (London: Secker, 1978) 2: 211. As I remember, a copy of the original article was included in the scrapbook that EMF loaned me.

22 EMF said more than this, but this was the gist. This image grew in my imagination and became the central image of The Cave and the Mountain.

23 Swinburne had written a devastating parody of Tennyson's "The Higher Pantheism," and this may be an attempt to do the same in a political vein.

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