Ten from E. M. Forster

In my recent Q&A interview about The Folio Club I named a few favorite authors, including E. M. Forster—from whom I now offer the following ten quotations for you to ponder and enjoy.

• Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

• Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

• The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died and then the queen died of grief is a plot.

• Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.

• The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

• The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.

• The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

• The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.

• I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man’s pleasure when they come a cropper.

• At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.

Romy’s Snowfall... and Mr. Hollywood

In the past few days, many friends have told me of their experiences with last week’s big snowstorm, but only one—Folio Club contributor Romy Ashby—could turn a day of slush and snow into this. Enjoy!

Folio Club Q&A

The literary website Molossus has published a Q&A interview with me, all about The Folio Club: its first issue, concept, contributors, and overall identity. My thanks to David Shook for his intelligent questions and kind interest.

E. M. Forster and J. D. Salinger

What do E. M. Forster and J. D. Salinger have in common? Not a whole lot, one might think, but there are a few interesting parallels. Both men were new year’s babies, exactly forty years apart: Forster born on January 1, 1879, and Salinger on January 1, 1919. Both men lived to the age of ninety-one, passing away in 1970 and 2010 respectively. For authorial identification, each used his first and middle initials rather than his first name; each achieved major success as a novelist by his early thirties; and each became one of the most celebrated writers of fiction in the English language. And both men famously stopped publishing fiction in their mid-forties—but there the paths diverge, for unlike Salinger, who chose to remove himself from the public sphere, Forster continued to publish nonfiction, including biographies, essays, and frequent book reviews, and became a familiar, rather avuncular figure to the British public as a BBC radio broadcaster. Can you imagine Salinger with his own “book talk” on radio? Well, actually, I can—but in a different time and place, in a different life.

One other interesting parallel: Forster is often said to have “abandoned” fiction in midlife but he didn’t entirely; he went on to write a book’s worth of audacious short stories, he meticulously revised the first few chapters of an unfinished novel, and, most importantly, he continued to fine-tune, on and off for a half century, his novel Maurice, which, like the stories, could not be published in its author’s lifetime due to its homosexual theme. All of these works were left for posthumous publication; their relative merits and appropriate place in the Forster library have been debated, but their significance—to both their author and to those of his readers who cherish them—can’t be denied.

So, then, you ask, what is the parallel with Salinger? Works awaiting posthumous publication, likely to be disparaged and argued over and perhaps only fully embraced decades after their already long-deferred arrival? But, you say, this is mere speculation. We don’t know what, if anything, lies in the as-yet-undisclosed Salinger archives.

Ah, I reply, what is this “we”? Speak for yourself. What I know, and what I have already said, is more than enough.

Image: James Wilby and Hugh Grant in the excellent film adaptation of E. M. Forster's Maurice. Here they contemplate their desperate desire for more books by J. D. Salinger.