8th May
In May 1922 he was thinking about death and the contemporary novel. In a letter sent to Cambridge don Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson he argued that novelists had to 'recapture their interest in death, not that they ever had it much’. His own troubling feelings about death (Mohammed [his lover in Egypt] is dying yet I don’t care a damn so far. My mother’s death would probably shatter me, but probably because of the alteration caused in my habits’) seemed to him to need 'mopping up by the novelists’. More attention to love and affection, and less to 'the developments of character’, would help. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 8 May 1917)
