16th July
In July 1922 he was thinking about Thomas Hardy. He wrote to his mother about a 'simple, almost dull tea’ at the Hardy home in Dorset. The elderly novelist and poet showed him the graves of his pets. The stories of their deaths caused an irreverent reaction in Forster: 'I could scarcely keep grave – it was so much like a caricature of his own novels and poems’. The letter is an affectionate portrait of a living legend mainly bothered by 'interviewers, American ladies, and the charabancs that whirr past while the conductor shouts “Ome of Thomas ’Ardy, Novelist”’. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 19 July 1922)
