Only Connect: The Official Quiz Book: Jack Waley-Cohen

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Like the Schlegels in Howards End, Forster was a rentier, living off a large bequest from his great-aunt. M. Forster” is not exactly a revelation—though she does quote directly from sources, including the “Sex Diary,” that Furbank paraphrased.

M.; the anti-heroic hero, with his straggly straw mustache, his light, gay, baby blue eyes and his elderly stoop.In each of these realms, he clung to freedom as a privilege, rather than demanding it as a right; he spoke of goodness rather than justice. Goodness in one compartment of life can coexist with violence and cruelty in another—a lesson that makes A Passage to Indiaprophetic of the complexity of the twentieth century’s many evildoers. Forster speaks in the voice of Bunyan’s Valiant-for-Truth, and the truth he preaches is that of the body: “love is of the body; not the body, but of the body.

If Forster strikes us as quaint, in a way that his contemporaries Joyce and Woolf do not, it is not simply because of his formal conservatism, but because he shows us, in Frank Kermode’s words, “a world in which what may now seem fairly trivial sexual gestures carry a freight of irreversible significance. S. Pritchett and Edwin Muir started life in circumstances like Bast’s, as members of the “office-boy intelligentsia.Outwardly [Henry Wilcox] was cheerful, reliable, and brave; but within, all had reverted to chaos, ruled, so far as it was ruled at all, by an incomplete asceticism. The passage that brings out this feeling most clearly is one of the most objectionable in all of Forster—the mockery of Leonard Bast’s literary aspirations in Howards End. When Forster had sex with a man for the first time, the code phrase he used in a letter to a friend was “parting with respectability. The idea that they could demand public recognition—say, by setting up house together in London—was beyond literary possibility (though Forster knew a number of established gay couples).

engenders a trance, a feeling of automatic writing, a fleeting fantasy of complete connection with Morgan’s remarkable mind and heart. Dutiful sons, loving husbands, responsible fathers—these are what she wants, and if we are friends it must be in our spare time. If individualism and the novel were doomed, it was in the same way that the old country houses were doomed—they would be justly confiscated in the name of a more equitable future.Here is how Forster, later in Howards End, apostrophizes the English countryside: So tremendous is the City’s trail! The metaphysical scope and urgency of this novel, the way it begins at the beginning—with the null echoes of the Marabar Caves, and the pantheist epiphanies of Professor Godbole—make it trustworthy in a way that even Howards Endnever quite is. Indeed, precisely because Forster does begin to address sex openly, as Austen never does, he can seem the more dated of the two. Passion has played little part in their relationship, and though they have gotten engaged they have not yet touched.