Cambridge Authors

In June 1923 he was thinking about translation. He wrote to George Valassopoulou, who was translating the work of the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy, who Forster much admired. He expressed pleasure that reviewers were responding so positively to the translations, and urged him to translate some more. Forster identified a rare and special quality in Valassopoulou that, alongside 'literary ability’, made him a good translator: what he called 'mental honesty’. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 18 June 1923)

In June 1927 he was thinking about Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. He wrote to her about it from Cambridge, where he was 'taking my part in the Life of the College [King’s]’, and 'not enjoying it very much’. He pronounced the novel 'awfully sad, very beautiful both in (non-radiant) colour and shape’, and noted how it combined the 'uneasiness’ and the 'excitement’ of life. He added that his mother was sure it was her best book – 'she took to it immensely’. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 5 June 1927)

In May 1917 he was thinking about love, and fear. In a latter to his confidante Florence Barger, sent from Alexandria in Egypt, he described how he had started 'an anxious but very beautiful affair’. He told her that he was glad he 'took the plunge’, because 'if you pass life by it’s jolly well going to pass you by in the future’. He noted that the decision had not frightened him, although he felt that 'if you’re frightened it’s all right – that’s no harm; fear is an emotion’. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 29 May 1917)

In May 1914 he was thinking about an artist’s relationship to life. Writing to his confidante Florence Barger he described his 'vague suspicion that the human relation comes second to something else – [but] not to the divine’. Quoting the art critic Arthur Clutton-Brock, he felt like he and other artists were 'discontented with actual experience’, and that there were 'three ways of escaping from it – morally by trying to change oneself: intellectually, by withdrawing from the stream of events, artistically, by painting, etc.’ Art was the search for something 'fuller than the eye’ could give. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 16 May 1914)

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)

In May 1917 he was thinking about war and human nature. In a letter sent to Cambridge don Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, he proposed that 'the obverse of love is not hatred but fear. Hatred is only one of the forms fear takes, cowardice being another and efficiency a third’. He thought also about what made men want to fight: 'To merge myself. To test myself. To do my bit. To suffer what other soldiers suffer, that I may understand them’. He recognised, though, that in many cases 'compulsion’ is the real reason. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 5 May 1917)

In April 1899 he was thinking about education, and his prospects. In a letter home to his mother from university, he related a conversation with his college Tutor Nathaniel Wedd. The news was that he had little chance of a first-class degree, and Wedd had been very critical of his education at Tonbridge School: too much time had been spent on repetition. Conversation turned to Forster’s future career: perhaps journalism. He ruefully wrote that 'it is rather a pit to attempt without influence [i.e., very difficult to get far without contacts], and I don’t think I shall be good enough’. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 23 April 1899)

In April 1921 he was thinking quizzically about Indian customs. While working as private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas, he wrote to Cambridge don Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson that he had seen a 'farce’ at the Palace. A husband and wife were debating the propriety of her going to see her family. 'As soon as the husband says 'I want a eunuch – at once.’ (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 10 April 1921)

In April 1934 he was thinking about hospitality. He wrote to the writer Christopher Isherwood about feeling a rather neglected guest in Virginia Woolf’s home. 'I am fed up with these two-day visits where I am left to myself’, he wrote, and put this style of hosting as ' a bit of sham modernity’. He tried to compare his own practice, but noted that he was never able to entertain anyway. He tried to compare Isherwood’s, but realised that 'you can get round that by suggesting I 'join’ you sometime somewhere’. 'Hospitality, where art thou? Gone down the general drain, perhaps.’ (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 7 April 1934)

In April 1905 he was thinking, without much enthusiasm, about teaching. Four years after graduating from Cambridge, and in the same year as he published his first novel, Where Angels Fear To Tread, Forster spent three months working as a tutor in Germany. He described his employer as 'rather disappointing’, with 'false teeth and a society drawl’. After telling his mother that he was required to be strict with the children in lessons, he wrote to her about the weather and the view: 'It’s not quite raining, and the view is woods, a farm with two chimneys, and manure’. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 4 April 1905)