Abstract
Two years ago, a young American writer living in London remarked to me how wonderful he thought it was to be living at a time when E. M. Forster was alive. Believing that Forster, though almost ninety, would still be pleased at such recognition, I arranged for the young writer to visit him at his Cambridge rooms so imaginatively provided by the Fellows of King’s, his old college. Afterward my American friend told me that in the course of their conversation, Forster had inquired whether he had ever been to Greece: to which he replied no, that it seemed impossible (on account of those Colonels) to go now. Forster said: ‘One recalls instants in Greece which were beautiful though the country even then was embedded in muck. Somehow one’s dearest memories are of situations which, if one saw them in a wider context, were always in muck.’
From New York Review of Books, 23 July 1970, p. 3.
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Notes
Forster and Spender met in January 1933; Spender wrote to Christopher Isherwood about the occasion: ‘he is so shy it makes one feel embarrassed’, Letters to Christopher, ed. Lee Bartlett (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, [1980]) p. 57.
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© 1993 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Spender, S. (1993). E. M. Forster (1879–1970). In: Stape, J.H. (eds) E. M. Forster. Interviews and Recollections. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12850-1_45
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12850-1_45
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