Two Anonymous Writers, E. M. Forster and Anton Chekhov

Abstract

E. M. Forster requires in his readers a greater personal stability than do many writers, for he appeals even in his youthful fiction to our inclination to reflect on our own experiences as well as to our wish for wholeness and wisdom. I know I didn’t discover him until I was grown-up, or thought myself so; until I was back from service in the Second World War, beginning a career, and feeling more secure in my sexual and spiritual nature than I had as an adolescent or soldier. What I found in him were a number of qualities I had responded to in my childhood and adolescent reading — fantasy, humour, compassion, a loneliness connected with both a sense of foreign places and a desire for something beyond one’s apparent grasp — all of these qualities transformed or given perspective by an authorial presence that, while it forbade the self-indulgence of my adolescent responses, permitted an understanding of the failings of specific human beings as well as of the limitations of the human condition itself. I first read Forster in my mid-twenties, a period in which a certain kind of imaginative literature can influence us for the rest of our lives; to a considerable extent the authorial presence in his fiction became (to misuse the common definition of the phrase) my second self, and so it has remained to the present day.