E. M. Forster Interviews and Recollections Also edited by J. H. Stape AN E. M. FORSTER CHRONOLOGY E. M. FORSTER Interviews and Recollections Edited by J. H. STAPE Visiting Professor in English Clliba University, Japan M St. Martin's Press Selection and editorial matter © J. H. Stape 1993 Softcover reprint of the hardcover Ist edition 1993 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published in Great Britain 1993 by TIiE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Hbundmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world This book is published in Macmillan's Interviews and Recollections series. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-12852-5 ISBN 978-1-349-12850-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-12850-1 First published in the United States of America 1993 by Scholarly and Reference Division, ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-07961-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data E. M. Forster: interviews and recollections / edited by J. H. Stape. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-312-07961-1 1. Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan), 1879-1970-Interviews. 2. Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan), 1879-1970-Biography. 3. Novelists, English-20th century-Interviews. 4. Novelists, English-20th century-Biography. I. Stape, J. H. (John Henry) PR6011.058Z6536 1993 823'.912-dc20 [B) 91-48150 CIP Contents Preface viii Acknawledgements xi A Note on the Text xvi Forster's Life: A Chronology xvii INTERVIEWS AND RECOLLECTIONS Part I Forster Observed 1 , A touch of real and rare distinction' W. F. Reddaway 3 Travels in Italy and Austria E. J. Dent 4 The Diaries of Siegfried Sassoon 7 'Aesthetic or social reformer?' Beatrice Webb 13 Paris, 1935 Katherine Anne Porter 14 A PEN Luncheon Storm Jameson 16 At the London Library Sir Harold Nicolson 17 West Hackhurst, 1945 Sir Malcolm Darling 18 Notes on a Friend William Plomer 19 Moments with Morgan Forster Rose Macaulay 23 Tea in Cambridge Robert Craft 24 Part II In Conversation 27 A Conversation with E. M. Forster Angus Wilson 29 E. M. Forster on his Life and Books 38 Part III Bloomsbury 43 The Diary of Virginia Woolf 45 Morgan at Ham Spray Ralph Partridge 52 v vi Contents Morgan Gerald Brenan 52 , As near to a Good Man as any' Frances Partridge 54 Great Friend David Garnett 56 Part IV Among Friends 63 Morgan Comes to Tea Naomi Mitchison 65 Meeting E. M. Forrest Reid 71 Lunch during the Munich Crisis Christopher Isherwood 73 At Joe Ackerley's James Kirkup 74 Some Reminiscences May Buckingham 77 Memories of E. M. Forster Lady Faith Culme-Seymour 80 Part V Encounters with Forster 89 Meeting' an old and valued author' Robert Giroux 91 From Avignon to Paris with E. M. Forster Alan Helms 98 Encountering E. M. Forster James McConkey 99 'Meetings which are not precisely personal' Eudora Welty 102 A Dinner, a Talk, a Walk with Forster Glenway Wescott 104 Mr Forster of King's Sandy Campbell 112 Part VI On Stage 125 Watching Billy Budd Stephen Spender 127 A Late Debut Frank Hauser 128 Remembering E. M. Forster Santha Rama Rau 132 Part VII At King's 153 Forster's Library A. N. 1. Munby 155 The Strangeness of E. M. Forster Simon Raven 156 The Later Years 1. P. Wilkinson 161 Forster's Eightieth Birthday Luncheon Sir Malcolm Darling 180 Contents vii Part VIII Pen Portraits 185 'Independent, Cantabrigian, and a bachelor' Frank Swinnerton 187 Raising the Shield of Achilles Willillm Plomer 189 Orpheus and Morgan Charles Mauron 193 Kingsman Mollie Panter-Downes 196 Part IX Forster Remembered 207 Memories of Morgan Evert Barger 209 A Personal Recollection Mulk Raj Anand 217 Three Cheers for E. M. Forster V. S. Pritchett 221 E. M. Forster (1879-1970) Stephen Spender 225 Morgan Forster Remembered Lord Annan 228 Index 231 Preface Not long after Forster's death in 1970, Glenway Wescott predicted a 'God's plenty' of Forster memoirs as 'he has entered importantly into the legendry of Now'. In the event, although there is no penury of material for a kaleidoscopic view of Forster's life and activities, that prediction has proved slightly over-optimistic. Any compilation of memoirs of a writer's life is necessarily a matter of compromise between an imagined ideal and the realistically achievable. For the writer still in living memory, it is perhaps even more so. The ambition to avoid hagiography and to select material so as to present a 'faithful' overview while avoiding repetition ought to be a conscious aim. There is, then, the nature and extent of the published recollections, with their varying authority and quality, and the prosaic task of gathering material with its attendant practical difficulties, some of which have proved insurmountable: permission fees stipulated for some pieces were beyond budget; repeated requests for rights to reprint others went unanswered; some persons who knew Forster declined an invitation to write about him or thought they had already sufficiently had their say. But beyond such predictable disappointments lie inherent structural problems related to the character and temperament of the particular individual whose life is a matter of public interest and curiosity. And there are those common to the remembering imagination - inexactitude, ex­ aggeration, sheer invention. While annotations might discreetly address the latter problems, the former go with the territory. Thus, even as the various witnesses to Forster's life on offer here should provide new insights and confirm or alter received ideas about his character, some skewing of the picture is unavoid­ able. Forster himself was a shy and guarded, if not a retiring individual, and some protection of his personal life from the enquiring public or academic eye became ever more necessary to him as his fame grew. There was, moreover, the fact of his homo­ sexuality, a secret that shaped and determined so much in his life viii Preface ix and work, but an increasingly open secret as he aged and as public attitudes, and the law itself, altered. Late Victorian by upbringing and education, elusive by nature, forced into a double life by the morality of the time, Forster, more than many, was pressured into becoming a cautious revealer of himself. Even close friends, perhaps, often saw mostly or only what he per­ mitted them to see. This is hardly to suggest that he was a performer, putting on a public mask to suit the friend, the visitor or the occasion, but that both inner compulsion and outward demand made him an individual whose deepest recesses re­ mained private and inaccessible. The organisation of the recollections gathered together here attempts thematic coherence while being roughly ordered chronologically. The opening section focuses on Forster as individual and as writer as recorded in extracts from diaries and in letters of contemporaries. 'In Conversation' allows Forster to speak about himself and his work in his own voice. The volume's mid-section centres on facets of Forster's involvements with friends and other writers, especially with Bloomsbury, while also fOCUSing on his connections with opera and the theatre and on his long association with King's College, Cambridge. The closing section, grouping together full-length portraits and obituary appreciations, presents Forster seen, as it were, in the round, from the vantage point of retrospect and evaluation. There are disappointingly few impressions of Forster at the early and most important period of his life as a writer, the years 1901-14, those of his most fertile creative phase. And there are further frustrating gaps: many of those closest to him - and his high valuation of friendship makes this a particularly significant lacuna - have left no record of their friendship, and the fact of his living to great age and thus surviving so many of his acquaintances and intimates no doubt accounts for some recollections remaining unwritten. Those few that do reflect on the younger man are not always exempt from the tendency for the carapace of fame and experience to shut out the earlier, more immediate view. In a sense, the public and established personality takes hold of and moulds the 'recollection' of earlier days. Still, however long and whatever the composition of a wish-list for further memoirs, those whose lives have either deeply or glancingly touched Forster's own offer valuable and x Preface frequently penetrating insights about him and his experience. The extant evidence, even if not quite 'God's plenty', leaves enough to sift through. In the end, that a central enigma remains is neither unexpected nor inappropriate to a writer whose subtle analyses of human foible and achievement always urged an awareness of the intractably unknowable and unobservable, that dimly apprehended, undefinable space lying 'beyond' that he so much insists upon in A Passage to India. Acknowledgements The editor and publishers should like to thank the following for their kind permission to use copyright material: Lord Annan, for his 'Remembering Morgan Forster'. Mr Malcolm van Biervliet and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, for unpublished material by Sir Malcolm Darling.