Cambridge Authors

In March 1918 he was thinking about the dehumanising effects of war. While working for the Red Cross in Alexandria, Egypt, during the First World War, Forster had a relationship with Mohammed-el-Adl. He wrote to his confidante Florence Barger about his anxiety for news of his lover under 'the shadow of tragedy’. 'The trouble is to get at these people’, he wrote. 'They are so insignificant, the army just shovels them around like dirt.’ He thought bleakly about the effects of battles and bureaucracy: 'Will the war leave nothing in the world but a card index?’ (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 23 March 1918)

In March 1945 he was thinking about the death of his mother. In a letter to Bob Buckingham he admitted that 'the shock is worse than I expected’. Struggling to explain why, but realising that, 'being a writer’, he ought to try, he suggested that 'it has to do with the greatness of love and one’s own smallness’. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 13 March 1945)

In March 1912 he was thinking about patriotism. In a letter to Malcolm Darling he became irritated by the example of the Suffragette Christabel Pankhurst, and wondered whether anyone thought about the national good before their own wishes. He characterised this with irony as an 'elderly' attitude -- he was only 33 at the time. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 12 March 1912)

In March 1915 he was thinking about Maurice, the novel he had recently finished. In a letter to his friend Edward Dent he said that he was relying on his friends to give him confidence that he had really created something 'absolutely new'. He wrote to Dent that only the American poet Walt Whitman had got close to the same personal and emotion territory. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, Maurice was not published in his lifetime. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 6 March 1915)

In February 1966 he was thinking about why he stopped writing fiction. In a letter to the literary critic Wilfred Stone, he addressed the 'very reasonable question’: 'Why did I stop writing fiction after The Passage [to India] came out?’ He wrote that despite 'racking my brains’, he could not think of an answer, except that 'the fictional part of me dried up’. His activities in wartime propaganda, he thought, suggested that his creative side didn’t lapse entirely. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 18 February 1966)

In February 1953 he was thinking about the Queen. Having visited Buckingham Palace to be invested as a Companion of Honour by Elizabeth II, he wrote to Mary Eleanor Whichelo about the experience. 'All went well’, he wrote, in their ten minutes together. 'She was quite an ickle [i.e. little, written as if said in a childish voice] thing, very straight and charming’, and 'much better at the chat than I was’. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 14 February 1953)

In February 1930 he was thinking about poetry and Christianity. In a letter to Robert Graves about his poem The Testament of Beauty he tried to identify some aspects of Christianity that eluded him, and which the poem seemed to restate. Christ as found in the Gospels 'has never been loved by me’, he wrote, but 'Christ restated, with the nature withdrawn and the gestures and accent altered’ – as The Testament of Beauty offered – could move him more. A key bit for Forster in Graves’s work was 'where you speak of the soul returning the body’s loving’: perhaps here he found something that mattered a great deal to him (an emphasis on feeling, and the personal) that traditional Christianity seemed to lack. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 1 February 1930)

In February 1930 he was thinking about poetry and Christianity. In a letter to Robert Graves about his poem The Testament of Beauty he tried to identify some aspects of Christianity that eluded him, and which the poem seemed to restate. Christ as found in the Gospels 'has never been loved by me’, he wrote, but 'Christ restated, with the nature withdrawn and the gestures and accent altered’ – as The Testament of Beauty offered – could move him more. A key bit for Forster in Graves’s work was 'where you speak of the soul returning the body’s loving’: perhaps here he found something that mattered a great deal to him (an emphasis on feeling, and the personal) that traditional Christianity seemed to lack. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 1 February 1930)

In January 1924 he was thinking about a change of government. In a letter to his friend G.H. Ludolf he wrote about Ramsay Macdonald, the first Labour Prime Minister: 'I want Labour to be in power if only for a little – it will teach them a lot and teach the country a lot – knock away some of the snobbery that seems to me so much more harmful than this or that political opinion’. He confessed to a worry about the Labour attitude towards individual liberty, and related an anecdote from a friend that the prospect of a move to Downing Street was causing chaos in the Macdonald household. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 27 January 1924)

In January 1915 he was thinking about risk, and gloom. Having finished Maurice, and knowing that prevailing attitudes about homosexuality meant it could not be published, he asked the novelist Forrest Reid if he would read it. Forster worried that 'it might put a severe strain on our friendship, which terrifies me’. More brightly, he noted that he had been much cheered by meeting D.H. Lawrence at a dinner party. He found him 'extraordinarily nice’, and described him as 'a sandy haired passionate Nibelung’ (in Wagner’s Ring cycle of operas, a Nibelung is a dwarf). (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 23 January 1915)