E. M. Forster’s centenaries
ON THE OCCASION of the fiftieth anniversary of A Room with a View, originally published in 1908, E. M. Forster sat down to imagine the extended life of his novel’s heroes. “Here we are in 1958”, he wrote in the Observer, “and it occurs to me to wonder what the characters have been doing during the interval … Lucy must now be in her late sixties, George in his early seventies.” Did they achieve happiness? Newly married, they had been promised as much at the end of the novel. Since then, the reader now learns, a world war had broken out and, with a home in the countryside no longer counting among the possibilities for their class, the couple had settled in London. The next war saw George imprisoned in Italy and Lucy’s little flat in Watford bombed. While “the loss of her possessions and mementos was complete”, her memory of their shared life abroad survived. George, too, held it close: after his release during the collapse of fascist Italy he travelled to the Pension Bertolini in Florence, where, in the novel’s central event, he had met his wife many years before. “And George set out – as I did myself a few years later – to locate the particular building”, Forster continued. “He failed.” With the pension remodelled, only the view now remained. Lucy, homeless in London, was glad of the news: “It was something to have retained a View.”
By a slim margin, Forster, who died in 1970 at the age of ninety-one, never reached the fiftieth anniversary of his last novel, A Passage to India. What would have become of Adela Quested and of Dr Aziz? Forster appears to have been less eager to speculate about their fictional lives. In the years after publication, he was repeatedly asked what precisely had taken place in the Marabar Caves, which is never disclosed to the reader: “a tremendous crisis happening”, as the critic Edward Said put it, “but you can’t tell what it is.” In a similar vein Forster exclaimed many years later to William Plomer, possibly exasperated: “When asked what happened there, I don’t know”. Now, at the novel’s centenary, we are left to answer these questions for ourselves. Were Adela and Aziz caught up, after the novel’s closing, in the fall of the British Empire? What can the novel still offer? How does it hold up in today’s world?
Forster, I am sure, would have wanted to be here for it. Yet, while he had a penchant for centenary celebrations, he might still have warned us off those questions. He knew that these occasions can be a tricky business. In a piece he published in the Egyptian Gazette in April 1916, he reflected on the tercentenary celebrations of Shakespeare’s death. The paper had been informed by the British Residency in Cairo that, despite the war, the occasion had to be marked. In “a distracted and divided world”, Forster wrote, the tercentenary celebrations
