Tea in Cambridge

Abstract

October 27, 1961 Cambridge. Tea with E. M. Forster in his rooms at King’s College. Several times the conversation grinds to a stop, each of them agonizing because Forster’s silences are so acutely critical. Each time, moreover, it is Forster who artificially resuscitates the talk, with questions such as: ‘Did you come on the two-thirty-six train?’ When Tolkien’s¹ name comes up, he says ‘I dislike whimsicality and I cannot bear good and evil on such a scale. But surprisingly I liked Thomas Mann’s The Holy Sinner.² Mann always knew a great deal, of course, but his other books were so heavy.’ Don Quixote is mentioned, and Forster says, ‘I never reached the end of it, did you?’ — and though obviously I did not, I wonder if I would admit it if I had. He talks about meeting Tagore in 1910, and about a trip to Uganda,³ this prompted by a question of mine concerning an object on his table, a smooth white box with wires attached to the base, like a jew’s-harp. ‘The natives played these instruments as they worked on the roads’, he says. ‘They cut the telephone wires for “strings.”’

From Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, 1948–1971 (New York: Knopf, 1972) p. 124.