[0:01]I'm quite sure I'm not a great novelist because I've only got down onto paper really three types of people. Um the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be. Edward Morgan Forster, known to his friends as Morgan, but to the public as EM Forster, was born on the 1st of January 1879 in Marylebone, London. He's born into a Victorian world and he's marooned with his mother very early from his father's death before he was two. He was educated at Tonbridge School in Kent, and he hates it. He he hates public school life. And then King's College, Cambridge. Well, of course, he was blissful and then he began to realize that he was, as we would now call it, gay, but he would have called it in his mind other. And that he would never have the conventional life of 9-to-5 work, and marriage, and children. He went on to become one of England's most respected and loved novelists, writing among other titles, Howard's End and a Passage to India. He was also a short story writer, an essayist, a biographer, and a libretist. It was Cambridge that first set me off writing, and in this very room, where I now am. There was at one time my tutor, a man called Wed, and it was he who suggested to me I might write. He did it in the most informal way, he said in a sort of drawling voice, I really don't see why you shouldn't write. But I remember him once ticking me off for writing him rather bad letters. I'm not a writer at all, and um, he told me that this was silly that I whenever I picked up my pen, it suddenly became awkward and I became a different person, and he said I mustn't do this. And explained that all you have to do is pick up your pen and you write what you think, which he certainly succeeded in doing, but I never did. As you know, uh his father died when he was young, he wasn't yet two. And he lived in a very close relationship with his mother, and claimed to have been unhappy in school. But actually there's no evidence, it was a retrospective unhappiness. He had a lot of aunts, and so he has all of these elderly ladies who have shaped his life, including the most important one aside from his mother, Mary Ann Thornton, who when she dies, leaves him a great legacy of 8,000 pounds that liberates him. And as a result of that, uh he's he can go to Cambridge, and he can also sort of dither about and figure out who he is and write for a living. He wrote only six novels, five of which were published during his lifetime. The sixth, completed in 1914, Morris, remained hidden away until the change in the law on homosexuality in 1967. It was eventually published after Forster's death in 1971. And anyone who's cared to read my books will see what a high value I attach to personal relationships, and to tolerance. I think tolerance was easy to him. I think it was upsetting because he was upset by things that happened in the world, I think very much so, possibly from the distance of Cambridge, I don't know. But he, I remember very well him getting very upset and angry about America's foreign policy, for instance, which he detested. And indeed he wouldn't allow his books to be filmed because it would almost inevitably involve American money and he certainly didn't want that sort of invasion. He wanted to hold back as much as possible, and in fact, the American ambassador was asked to dinner at high table one evening by the Provost, and Morgan told me that he wasn't going to go. His novels are known throughout the world. But if you haven't read them, you'll probably have seen a film or television adaptation of at least one of them.
[4:47]During Forster's lifetime, he would not allow any of his novels to be made into films, and a lot of people had tried, but he never agreed. And then after he died, uh we decided we wanted to try and make the room with a view and so we we were actually invited up to King's College to meet the executors, and so Ismail and I, uh went to Cambridge and what they had they wanted to see us about was are making passes to India. Which had not been made at that point. And we said, well, that'd be wonderful, but at the at that very moment, playing in in theaters in London was Heat and Dust. And uh we didn't want to make another British Raj movie of that kind, we we wanted to make a room with a view, and uh the executors at King's College were not at all that pleased. And they said, uh why would you want to make that little novel in, uh I mean, when when you could have a passage to India, why do you want to do that that little book? Yes, it's pleasant and nice and we said, well, we just do, that's what we want to do. Turn over. A Passage to India did get made, not by Merchant Ivory, but by David Lean. And play back.
[6:07]Forster mistrusted movie makers. The film rights were only sold after his death. Lean then spent 18 months writing his script and had to be vetted by the guardians of Forster's masterpiece, the Fellows of King's College, Cambridge. I did the script and uh they were very polite and they asked me to come along after having read it for lunch. And uh I was just about to start on the fish, and they started in on me and I said I'd wish you'd waited until the sweet. And uh they were very, very nice indeed, and uh after about two hours, they were very kind, just gave it their blessing. Forster's one of the very few Englishmen that understood Indians and it was this deep understanding of Indians that made him write a book that that um that was able to delve into the the into the psyche, the Indian psyche, as it were. I wouldn't be ashamed for Forster to read the script. I think I stuck with his characters and on the whole, given the limitations of time, I mean, one's doing one's doing something in two hours, book that thick. But there is one of his novels you might not have heard of. The Longest Journey, written in 1907 when Morgan was in his late 20s. A semi-autobiographical novel that sets out clearly the premonitions that Forster had about the future of his own life. The longest journey for him was the journey to being a fully developed adult. And the longest journey, the book, is very much a young man's book. It's about how a child grows up to become a man. So the opening scene. The cow is there," said Anso, lighting a match and holding it out over the carpet. No one spoke, he waited till the end of the match fell off. Then he said again, "She is there, the cow, there, now.
[8:21]You have not proved it," said someone, "I have proved it to myself." Which is so wonderful and actually in some ways the best scene in the book. When you have the undergraduates at Cambridge talking about whether the cows exist if you can't see them. is a parable of what is life going to become. Now, for Forster, life should have been uncivilized, it should have been primitive, it should have been everything that his life wasn't. To me, The Longest Journey is a book about civilized values, in other words, uncivilized values. And the journey is will we ever achieve that? And the answer is no. All his early novels were um dealing primarily with with heterosexual relationships, although there are very intense friendships between men, you know, as indeed there there were and are um in in life. Um the sort of relationships that critics describe now as homosexual relationships, these very, you know, very intense male bonds that happen, you know, within institutions like universities, particularly Cambridge when there were only men taking degrees in those days. So in The Longest Journey, you have the the the scene with the university friends, which is, you know, incredibly intimate. I like best one that's not very popular, perhaps called The Longest Journey. I think there I got nearer to putting down what I'd got inside me and wanted to say. In The Longest Journey, which Forster thought of as his most autobiographical novel, I think, or or the one he felt closest to and and said he liked most. People have read it very autobiographically. The central character in that, Rickie Elliott, um has a a terribly sad life where he really gets diverted from what seems to be his true calling, which is to write and it seems typical of Forster suggesting that people get sort of distracted in in their life from what's important to them. And I think when an author has been as popular as Forster first started out as, and then as he became with Howard's End and then years later with a Passage to India, this secret little book almost was what gave him the most pleasure. It wasn't written for an audience, it had really rarely found an audience. The Longest Journey is an painful elaboration of the undeveoped heart in the process of developing. And then we see its gradual development over the next four novels, this undeveloped English heart. And absolutely, there's this tremendous sense of truthfulness and sincerity, and perhaps because he did not have a conventional family that he invested so much in his friend. His famous saying that you'd put his friend before his country. Forster wrote, I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betray my country and betray my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. Um it's an important quotation, isn't it? And I think one that that we do well to remember nowadays and and it's also to to know and important to remember Forster's stand on, you know, how relationships between people are more important than that. On one hand it goes back to early 20th century ideas of friendship, very much prevalent in Cambridge. At the same time, it also I think, satisfies a certain lack in him because of his essential loneliness. And that's very much there in The Longest Journey. You know, you say that Forster's long journey, it can also be Forster's lonely journey. It was very clear that it had been autobiographical set at Cambridge and with the same kinds of camaraderie that he had had there.
[12:35]And it was a memorial really to his own life and to this high point of his past because it then became a memorial to one his hopes, the other to his fears, and I think to a lost world that when he was involved in it in 1907, when he published the novel, he was of two minds about it. I mean, the the glory of Cambridge and the miniature world that he thought it was, and then he was torn by the growing realization several years after having left Cambridge that in fact, this fantasy of Cambridge as a world in miniature was actually completely an illusion. He couldn't take his place in the world that was meant for a Cambridge man, and that he had fit in so well at Cambridge. But the rest of his life, with his burgeoning sense of homosexuality, was not going to fit into the world. He sees friends like Hugh Meredith, the first person he really was in love with and seems to have had some kind of erotic fumbling with, although what it was was not clear. Hugh Meredith marries, has children. All these people around him are leading conventional lives, however camaraderie, however much their camaraderie was strong at Cambridge. And he sees that he can't do that, and so I think the autobiographical element is a kind of prophecy of failure of not fitting in. He would always be an outsider, he'd always be left field, and that must have been very painful for any young man. I mean, it's fine nowadays, nobody cares, but then people wanted to conform. I mean, you know, the public school ethos was that you conformed. It's a book about unconformity, not non-conformity, but unconformity, and it's about Ricky being unhappy in his own skin. He doesn't see that within about 15 years, I think, from the time he graduates Cambridge, he will find a new set of friends. Some from Bloomsbury, but then also a whole set of gay men with whom he can feel more himself. And he never quite leads a completely happy life. I mean, one of the touching things in The Longest Journey is the point at which he describes the love of a man and a woman, really, who find each other in life and know that they are right for one another, and that they're going to go through The Longest Journey locked in one another's arms. And he soon realizes that that's not for him, it's not going to happen. But even once he becomes a happy gay man in the later 20s and then into the 30s, even the men to whom he does become attached, are also attached elsewhere. You could say Ricky and Forster are one. It's a cliche to say this, but the fact that Ricky was lame is a you know, an image of what Forster had by then discovered about himself that he was gay. The lameness of Ricky Elliott is in some way, well, it's an inherited condition. And so I think the idea of the inherited flaw and the fear of passing it on pushes the people in the main characters, Rickie, in The Longest Journey, into a series of unhappy relationships that are really compromises with what his inner being perhaps is telling him to do.
[16:13]I think if you fear that this is something that you will pass on, even if you're not going to procreate and have children, perhaps it's something you fear letting out into the world. It's also a great falling off from the kind of camaraderie of Cambridge where this was not seen as a personal failing or as a kind of elemental failing. You're not fearing to pass this on because you live in this miniature world in which all of this is fine.
[16:51]And so as soon as you leave this world, this protected world, you're thrown up against the fact that the real world doesn't necessarily have a place either for the intellectual or the homosexual or the creative person, that you really have to fit in somewhere differently. I should say immediately that it's quite difficult reading The Longest Journey now because you have to read it in the context of being gay, not just being completely impossible to be despised.
[17:34]It was after all, when he wrote it, it was only 20 years after the Oscar Wilde trial. But actually illegal. You would have gone to prison. So it's very hard for us now, post the 60s, to read the novel in the same way. So you have to have a lot of imagination and read it as it was written in 1907. And when you think about the prophetic nature of the autobiography in The Longest Journey, what's remarkable is that it's not exactly what happens to Rickie Elliott.
[18:07]But Forster too becomes a tutor. He tutors Latin for Sayed Ross Masood, who becomes one of the mainstays of his life, this Indian man who is in England, who comes to him seeking Latin lessons, and it becomes a very different kind of friendship. I think the thing about Masood that's so wonderful is that Forster thinks that being gay is this terrible secret that he finally reveals to Masood. And Masood says, I know, uh but it doesn't make any difference to him. It it's it's not, it doesn't have the same valence for him, and it's just not of interest to Masood. Right, and and so once Masood says, you know, we'll be great friends. It's fine. And so I think it's it's layers and layers of understanding what human intimacy could be. But even in small ways, that's a kind of fulfillment of the humdrum that he fears, the the decline from what Rickie Elliott's promise had been. And then during World War I, he takes on mundane tasks. He goes to work in the National Gallery, and then he also then goes up to Alexandria to work for the Red Cross. And it's when he first sees the soldiers all sort of unconsciously bathing on the beach that he has his first great revelation, and that's where he has his first sexual experience, too. He's almost 40, so that's quite belated, not just by contemporary standards, but he felt belated as well. He writes quite explicitly in both his diaries and in letters to friends. In one such letter to George Barger's wife, Florence, it's to her that he first writes about losing his virginity at the age of 37 in Egypt, what he calls in his letters to her, parting with respectability. Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I have parted with respectability. I have felt the step would be taken for many months. I have tried to take it before. It has left me curiously sad. Because he keeps using that phrase, parted with our, parting with respectability. One from the first time he has sex on a beach in Egypt with with an unknown man, to other times that he has sex. So it becomes a kind of wonderful code word. And while still in Egypt, he meets Muhammad El Adel. They meet on the tram, in Muhammad's a tram conductor. And uh like most of the Forster encounters that are really wonderful and surprising and human. It it comes with a series of um mistakes and and misapprehensions and potential humiliations that sort of blossom into real friendship. And then gradually, as he is invited into Muhammad's living space, and then invited, uh to sort of be beside him on the bed, he opens the possibility that it would be a sexual relationship. And Muhammad is, is is neither repelled nor particularly, I think, attracted by that. I don't think he thought of himself as gay particularly. But he really did admire Forster and love him and he and this was sort of something that his love wanted, and so he went along with that. And I and I it was revelatory for Forster, I think in a lot of ways. Like most um Egyptian men, Muhammad marries and has children and names his eldest son after Forster. They're separated by the fact that Muhammad is, is, um, conscripted into military service. And then, uh when Forster comes back, he discovers that El A has tuberculosis and is dying, and he stays with him. He nurses him in his final illness and he stays with him, sleeps on the floor. Um it it actually reads a lot like, um, the AIDS epidemic in certain kinds of ways. The kind of tenderness and and care and hopelessness of the of the final, um, weeks of Muhammad's life. And Forster has to go back, so he leaves before Muhammad dies, he doesn't see him die. When he gets back to England, because of the way the post works, he ends up with these sort of ghostly posthumous letters. By the time he gets Muhammad's final letters, which are at King's, he he, um, he knows that he's already dead. And those are extremely, um, poignant and and powerful. Muhammad ends the last letter, my love to you, my love to you, my love to you, it's sort of a, almost, you know, Keatsian, beyond the grave, kind of feeling. She obeyed and crept into his arms, only this time her grasp was the stronger, her heart beat louder and louder, as the sound of his grew more faint. He was crying like a little frightened child, and her lips were wet with his tears. And in fact, in something like Longest Journey, I think he's actually experimenting well before he's he's lived his life, um, with the prospects of what his future life might be. So when he has this strong identification with Rickie Elliott, and when Rickie marries, I think in important ways, he's thinking through should I marry? And this is in the context, first of all, of most of his Cambridge friends by that time sort of settling off domestically into marriages. He he tries it out in fiction, and and he's not he's not hard on Agnes actually. I think Agnes is not the villain there, and he discovers that it would be a terrible thing to do. So it's it's as if in working through in his imagination, he can work through possibilities. Well, Forster had made the decision or subconsciously made the decision not to do what so many of his friends did, which was marry their friends' sisters.
[24:37]Um he was always going to be, as we used to call it, a confirmed bachelor. Forster's often seen as um an an iconic liberal figure, and um I think that has a lot to do with his involvement with the Bloomsbury group. And what Bloomsbury I think particularly stood for was a kind of freedom and experiment, partly freedom and experiment in art, trying to think of new ways of of writing novels or or poems or new ways of doing philosophy. New ways of painting, but but also new ways of living, trying to live, you know, free of some of the class prejudices and and and other prejudices. They didn't always succeed, of course, but but they were certainly very frank about sexuality. He writes an essay also about his uncle Willy in the early 20s. These are essays written for the memoir club, the Bloomsbury memoir club, a group of Bloomsbury figures, Forster, Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Maynard Keynes, other people, Lytton Strachey, who get together and write essays about their lives, and they strive to be as open and as honest as they can be.
[25:51]So this is also another venue, another place in which Forster is writing very frankly about sexuality. He is out, as we would call it, to all of these people. So in this memoir that he writes for the memoir club about his uncle Willy, he quotes a letter that Willy wrote to another member of the family, worrying that Morgan, surrounded by all of these elderly ladies, is developing what Willy calls Austinch airs. But his favorite novelist was Jane Austin, the most, you know, conventional, bourgeois, heterosexual novelist. So we cannot just chart Forster on a gay axis. You know, when he's writing it, that's where he learns his craft. So there is life, but there's also literature.
[27:11]Howard's End to me is a very, very profound book. It's the great novel about London. It's great about, as he says, only connect personal relationships. Only connect. That was the whole of her sermon, only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer, only connect, and the beast and the monk robbed of the isolation that is life to either will die. I suppose the most famous phrase of forces is the phrase only connect that he used as an epigraph for Howard's End, his novel of 1910.
[28:01]Um and what that seems to speak to is a lot of important things in his work, I think, but particularly a sense that that people aren't connecting with each other. That there's something to do with the way they're living, particularly in England and particularly in the middle classes. that isn't right, that they're not engaging with each other, not really relating to each other. And there was a scene in which which was, you know, surrounded, um, it had these words in it, and it was the sort of only connect scene. So when we were doing it, we were really conscious that this was, you know, the important scene, and, um, and it was cut. Why don't we hear that famous line about only connecting?
[29:09]And he's quite a wonderful writer and watching, and so what wonderful at writing women's characters, of which, you know, there are, you know, very few or just characters full stop, but particularly women's characters, and their, um, and getting inside that psychology, he was brilliant at. What Forster said after he'd written Howard's End in 1910, he spoke of the the weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat, the love of men for women and vice versa. And it's a very odd statement that, I think, isn't it? Um partly because it's not clear what the, um, the can and the may are saying. I mean, the is it that he has the technical facility to to write about love between men and women, um but he doesn't really feel like writing about that anymore. You know, as when as when you say I may or I may not do something, or is he saying that it's the only subject that he is allowed to write about, that that social conventions, and the literary conventions of the day, the legal conventions, too, will will permit. It is a world of Jane Austen, you know, man meets girl, they get married, but it's regularly invaded by what I'd call Lorenian impulses, that the man actually is attracted to his wife's previous partner.
[30:46]That suddenly that previous boyfriend dies. Nothing like that would happen in Austen. The longest journey is is Laurentian. It's writing about all the things that Lawrence wrote about before Lawrence did. It's about the primitive, deeper side of all of us which Suburbia suppresses. And that Rickie never experienced, apart from fleetingly. I think what happened to him was that once he'd discovered his sexuality or or sort of come to terms with it, he was uh you know, very excited by us and and determined to live it to the to the fullest. And he really did, you know, with with very um attractive and exciting lovers and and he was very happy writing about his physical encounters, uh in the famous lock diary, which um no one was allowed to see. One of the things is is called The Locked Diary and it's because it describes a a fairly large leatherbound book with a a lock and a hasp and a key, uh in which he, uh kept a diary for a good bit of his life, and including a a subsection which he labeled a sex diary. So that once he begins to actually have sex and think about sex in a particular way, he he sort of quaries out a a separate section of the book to to pick up and record those intimate thoughts, which are to do with his sexuality and his sexual activity. He wrote a lot of erotic short stories for his own pleasure. He writes about this in his diaries too, and in 1922, he's had a very difficult time for over a decade between the time he publishes Howard's End and is working on a passage to India, but not making very good progress. He on the side writes Morris, which is a kind of fant a fantasy, a fulfillment of a fantasy of a sexual relationship, a very frank one that he dedicates to what he calls a happier year. As if he can see that this kind of relationship, a happy relationship between two men is possible, but it will happen at some future time. So he's willing to write about sexuality, even when he's not willing to publish it.
[33:14]But in 1922, he looks at this pile of erotic stories that he has written over the years, and he burns them. Now, not because, he writes in his diary, he is ashamed of them for their contents, but because they've created a wrong channel for his pen, and they've blocked him artistically, he thinks, from somehow continuing his progress on a passage with the novel that becomes a passage to India.
[33:46]But he doesn't burn all of his stories because he keeps Morris. But he didn't publish it. He couldn't publish it at the time because it would have been, um, charged with with indecency and and could have got him sent to prison. Um but even after homosexuality was decriminalized, he still didn't publish it and he was criticized much later in life for not doing that. It was only after his death that Morris was published and then filmed. And when I re-read Morris, I thought, you know, this is still a very relevant kind of story. And in a way was the the reverse of the coin of a room with a view because it was again about young people who were living a kind of muddled lie of their lives.
[34:47]And um I thought this this would be this would have some meaning for people now.
[35:02]Dearest Florence, R has been parted with and in the simplest, most inevitable way, just as you hoped. I am so happy, not the actual pleasure but because the last barrier has fallen. I wish I was writing the latter half of Morris now. I know so much more. It is awful to know the thousands who go through youth without ever knowing. I have known in a way before, but never like this. My luck has been amazing. And once he burns these stories, he begins another series of them, which were also published posthumously, as Morris was. One of them is called The Life to Come, and it too is a story of an erotic relationship between two men. And in some ways maybe his relationship with Buckingham's wife was deeper than his relationship maybe with Buckingham or equally important, and she also felt so very strongly towards Forster. So he's found a family that is supportive of him that he has created around him in a way, very different from the total alienation from the idea of family that he had felt in 1907. So he he died, you know, a Victorian death in some ways, right? In the company of of the family that he loved, and uh they were very tender towards him.
