Word: forster
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first novel (Where Angels Fear to Tread) appeared only four years after the death of Queen Victoria. A Passage to India, his last and most famous, was written in 1924. Though in later years he wrote essays and criticism, there were only five novels all together. Yet when E.M. Forster died last week at 91. he had been for half a century England's most elusive and illustrious man of prose letters. It is still almost impossible to talk about the modern novel without mentioning his name...
Literary scholarship-which Forster loathed because it reduces writing to a rational rubble of themes and trends -will no doubt have little trouble in assigning Forster's influence and renown to sensible causes and perspectives. Forster grew up, after all, in comfortable upper-middle-class circumstances (Tonbridge school; King's College. Cambridge; an inherited income of ?8,000 a year). His confrontations of plot and apparent symbolism at first seem to fit easily enough into the new century's dramatic reaction against the massive structures and stifling legacies of Victorian England: passion and beauty v. respectability...
...Forster's genius lies precisely in the impossibility of stuffing his books into literary boxes, however labeled. He strove to maintain a free and, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. d;sinterest-ed view. More than any other novelist, he is proof that to become a significant writer, a man must be neither an idea machine nor a recording angel, but a human voice sounding with its own shifting intonations in the ear and heart of the reader. Describing the peculiar discrepancy between apparent message and feeling in Forster's novels, Lionel Trilling observed: " 'Wash...
...Forster is, in fact, a very unsatisfactory fellow when it comes to hortatory confrontations between vice and virtue. As simple-minded symbols on any side of any argument, his characters are simply not to be relied upon. For one thing, he often kills them off highhandedly. For another, they change sides right in the middle of the symbolic drama, or behave with maddening inconsistency in other ways. Mercurial and emancipated, Dr. Aziz in A Pas sage to India at first seems to come on as a stereotyped native victim of senseless prejudice. He is a victim. But he also proves...
...Forster had traveled in India and served for six months as private secretary to a maharajah. He was angry about colonialism. But in A Passage to India as elsewhere, he was circling toward the kind of contradictory, radical perceptions that can best be glimpsed obliquely and with reservations. He suspected that the barriers between the races -and between East and West-might prove to be impenetrable, though he characteristically went on insisting that the effort should be made...