A Room with a View - E. M. Forster [11]
“What will he write next?” Woolf wondered, at the close of her 1942 essay. Forster lived until 1970, but aside from Maurice, which came out the year after his death, he published no more novels. He told an interviewer in 1959 that it was his “one regret”:
I somehow dried up after the Passage. I wanted to write but did not want to write novels. And that is really too long a story. But I think one of the reasons why I stopped writing novels is that the social aspect of the world changed so much. I had been accustomed to write about the old-fashioned world with its homes and its family life and its comparative peace. All that went, and though I can think about the new world I cannot put it into fiction (Stape, E. M. Forster: Interviews and Recollections, p. 39).
His first four novels had been published in what writer Elizabeth Bowen called “a sort of glorious rush” between 1905 and 1910 (he was thirty-one when Howards End came out), and the result is indeed a kind of concentrated worldview, not inflexible but highly specific, and soon to be overshadowed by the catastrophic events of World War I, which would define a new generation. Woolf recognized it; she noted that “Mr. Forster is extremely susceptible to the influence of time. He sees his people much at the mercy of those conditions which change with the years. He is acutely conscious of the bicycle and of the motor-car; of the public school and of the university; of the suburb and of the city” (Wilde, p. 43). On the subject of time and transition at the turn of the century, Forster was in good company. Thomas Hardy had portrayed the fatal pressures of approaching modernity in his last novel, Jude the Obscure, published in 1896. Joseph Conrad, in Heart of Darkness (1902) and Lord jim (1900), drew out the moral ambiguities of a colonial system about to collapse under its own weight. H. G. Wells, building on his science fiction of the 1890s, took as his theme the decay of traditional England and the potential failure of Victorian-inflected notions of progress in works such as Tono-Bungay, published in 1909. These writers, along with John Galsworthy, George Gissing, Henry James, and others, were instrumental in laying the groundwork for the innovations of style and content that would characterize high modernism, and Forster, who had a foot in the modernist door, was a key player in that literary transition. The liberation of the spirit that he so ardently espoused and cultivated in his characters would soon materialize into a liberation of form, albeit chiefly in the fiction of others.
For Forster’s readers—those who have traveled widely in his novels —A Room with a View has a different kind of value. The appeal of Lucy’s experience in Italy has not faded. Her overtures toward a broader view—of Florence, of art, of her fellow travelers—still capture the essence of an age of transition, not only on a historical scale but also in individual terms, as childhood ends and adult life, independent life, begins. And so the Italy of the novel has become a kind of tourist destination in itself. To be in Santa Croce with Lucy and the Emersons is to feel on the cusp of discovery—of the merits of Giotto’s tactile values, perhaps, but more important, of some unknown quality or capacity in oneself that may, with the right encouragement, come to fruition.
Radhika Jones is a freelance writer and editor, and a Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Jones also wrote the introduction and notes for the Barnes & Noble Classics editions of two novels by Charles Dickens, Great Expectations and David Copperfield.
PART I
1
THE BERTOLINI
“THE SIGNORA HAD NO business