Word: forster
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Seventy-two-year-old E. M. Forster is almost as rumpled and untidy as his rooms. The tweeds he wears are worn and baggy, his thinning grey hair unruly, his bushy grey mustache in need of a trim. Bony and angular, with pale, piercing eyes, he looks, as one American interviewer put it, rather "like a spare, intelligent, ruffled heron...
Nibbling the Cheese. These days, the heron is hobbled, too. In a fall last June, Forster broke an ankle, and he still keeps it strapped and limps about painfully. But the flashing intelligence and humane spirit which gave the 20th Century one of its finest novels, A Passage to India, are as unhobbled as ever...
...Passage to India appeared in 1924. After it, Forster unaccountably banked the creative fires which had blazed through five crackling good novels, beginning with Where Angels Fear to Tread in 1905. Fireside chats took their place. Mostly contemplative, critical essays and reminiscences, these were first collected in Abinger Harvest, published in 1936. Two Cheers for Democracy brings the collection up to date...
...chats, Forster roams freely from Beethoven's Symphony No. g and Eliot's Cocktail Party to a laughing description of how a South African houseboy once dumped a juicy platter of chicken in his lap. While demonstrating the range of his mind, he also files a minority report on the direction in which he thinks civilization is moving. Skeptical, urbane, relativistic, Two Cheers for Democracy is the report of a man who prefers to stand in the cool draft of a perpetually open mind. In an age of anxiety, he implies, more & more men are nibbling...
Judging Brutus. In his tilt with the absolutists, Forster employs one absolute of his own: moral courage. "I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. Such a choice may scandalize the modern reader ... It would not have shocked Dante, though. Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell because they had chosen to betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their country Rome . . . Love and loyalty to an individual can run counter...