• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4050 0

repaid in his own way by writing a biography of her in the 1950s), and, having published a few articles in Cambridge journals, he had begun to entertain the idea of becoming a writer. A tour abroad therefore seemed an appropriate way to spend his first year out of school, a kind of gestation period before life began in earnest. The Forsters departed at the beginning of October, and it was immediately apparent that it would not be a perfect trip. In a letter to his friend Edward Dent, dated October 22, 1901, Forster wrote that the journey had got off to a “devilish start”: “wrong tickets, unexpected arrival in Paris, sick headaches, quarrelling, lost luggage” (Selected Letters, vol. 1, p. 47). Eight days later, writing from Florence, he mentioned a muddle over their rooms: “We have been here three days, and very comfortable, but my mother hankers after an Arno view and a South aspect, so we are not stopping” (Selected Letters, vol. 1, p. 48). Would-be writers, apparently, are not immune to the inconveniences of travel—which is a pity for them, but a stroke of luck for literature.

Forster did not in fact do much writing in Italy. He was hampered not only by typical beginner’s doubts about his talent, but also by physical setbacks. Early in the winter of 1902 he fell on the steps of St. Peter’s and broke his arm. The image of this impressionable young man prostrated on the very threshold of aesthetic achievement, injured for the sake of art appreciation, is almost too comically Forsterian to be believed, but the accident was serious enough that for a time he learned to write with his left hand. When the arm healed, he went to Naples, where, according to his biographer P. N. Furbank, he first conceived the idea for what he would refer to as his “Lucy” novel (E. M. Forster: A Life, p. 91). Its basic scheme was recorded in a note:

Who? Lucy Beringer. Miss Bartlett, her cousin. H.O.M. Miss Lavish Miss Dorothy & Miss Margaret Alan. Where? Florence, Pension Bertolini Doing What?

The final question remained on hold. Forster went on to Sicily, and later that spring, in Ravello, was struck with the idea for what was to be one of his first published stories, “The Story of a Panic,” an account of a tourist picnic disrupted by the god Pan that leads to the unlikely spiritual liberation of one member of the party. (Liberation of the spirit would also become a hallmark of Forster’s work.) But the “Lucy” novel continued to germinate; he brought it with him out of Italy like a souvenir and continued to work on it, on and off, while completing Where Angels Fear to Tread and The Longest Journey.

When A Room with a View was published in 1908, it was on the whole well received, as the two previous works had been. The Nation took it as a sign that “Mr. Forster has earned the right to serious criticism” (quoted in Gardner, p. 111), and The Spectator agreed: “Mr. Forster’s new novel is not only much the best of the three he has written, but it clearly admits him to the limited class of writers who stand above and apart from the manufacturers, conscientious or otherwise, of contemporary fiction” (Gardner, p. 118). Forster himself was not entirely satisfied. He wrote with only faint praise to his friend Dent, “I feel myself that it comes off as far as it goes—which is a damned little way—and that the character of Lucy, on which everything depends, is all right” (Selected Letters, vol. 1, p. 95). In a letter written to a critic in France in 1910, he referred to the novel dismissively as a “slight sketch of bourgeois life” (Selected Letters, vol. 2, p. 117), adding that his recent work, Howards End, was more ambitious. Virginia Woolf, assessing Forster’s oeuvre in 1942, expresses the opinion of most of his critics—both his contemporaries and our own—when she writes that Howards End and A Passage to India “mark his prime” (quoted in Wilde, p. 46). Certainly they are novels with a larger scope: Howards End (1910), with its examination of class relations in England, offers Forster’s sense of where the country was headed from within, while A Passage