Introduction: The Elusive Forster

Abstract

When he published the life of his friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Forster commented on the difficulty of what he had been trying to do. He had wanted, he said, to render the ‘uniqueness’ of Dickinson.¹ If that was difficult in Dickinson’s case, it is still more so in his own. With Dickinson, we are made to believe, there was a golden thread running through everything he did and thought: he had aligned himself with a particular tradition — that of Plato and the Platonists — and his career was to be understood as a long attempt to remain true to the insight of that tradition through the unpropitious circumstances of his time. Forster had no such single and identifiable allegiance. He was, as he himself confessed, a fragmented being. ‘My defence at any Last Judgment’, he once wrote, ‘would be “I was trying to connect up and use all the fragments I was born with.” ’ ²