E. M. Forster: A Life. Volume Two: Polycrates' Ring (1914-1970) (review)

Abstract

88 biography Vol 2, No. 1 fossil-cabinet of history, and the man of the future, Sir Andrew Freeport , the Whig merchant who will bring about England's conquest of the world through trade as predicted at the end of Windsor Forest. That the Spectator is as free from politics as any publication of the age is, of course, worth noting. In searching for omissions, a host of second-level persons come to mind who might have been included in this volume or in the preceding Stuart Lives, but few can be argued for as essential. To me, two conspicuous omissions are John Toland, whose intellectual achievement is being more and more recognized, and the collector-scientist Sir Hans Sloane, surely one of the best known men in England in his time. The omission of Thomas Hearne and Lewis Theobald may be justified, as well as the horde of dunces immortalized by Pope, however well-known they may be. It is not the fault of the editors but of an outmoded convention shared with other recent historical studies that 1714, a most unfortunate date, is the dividing line between this volume and Stuart Lives. Nothing happened in 1714 except a change of dynasty. The watershed years, the years in which the stage is set with a new cast, are the early years of the century. If a dynastic date must be used, the death of William in 1702 would serve far better. This complaint has been made before, but goes unheeded. Cross-references in this volume to the other volumes and a good index partly compensate for this now outmoded division. G. L. Anderson University of Hawaii P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life. Volume Two: Polycrates' Ring (1914-1970). London: Seeker & Warburg, 1978. 348 pp. £7.50. P. N. Furbank's subtitle for the second volume of his biography of E. M. Förster continues his suggestion in the first volume that Forster may have been one of those whose life patterns fit Freud's account of "Those Wrecked by Success." Forster was at the height of his career as a novelist, having at last finished A Passage to India (1924) and having delivered his Clark Lectures on the novel at Cambridge (Aspects of the Novel, 1927)—to unexpected acclaim—when he told T. E. Lawrence that he found the story of "Polycrates' Ring" an allegory "more helpful than most." According to Herodotus, the tyrant Polycrates was so very lucky that his friend, the Egyptian king, persuaded him that he must give up something of value in order to REVIEWS 89 avoid tempting fate by his exceptional good fortune. Polycrates threw a valuable ring into the sea, only to discover it a few days later in a fish served for his dinner. At this, his friend left him, sure that he was doomed. It is an odd story, recording an oddly fearful view of both fate and friendship, but then Forster led an odd life, and the instinct that success might cost him his security or his genius or his friends may well explain his failure to continue his career as a novelist. Reading this volume, however, one thinks not so much of Freud's theories as of Yeats's idea of the creative mask, which allows the writer to express in literature the antithesis of his life. Forster's life seems odd because of the gradually increasing disparity between his writings and his behavior. The novels gain their power from his insistence that we must at least try to connect disparate cultures, classes, "the prose and the poetry," the seen and the unseen. His criticism is memorable for the originality of its simplicity—as Virginia Woolf noted in her diary, "Morgan has the artist's mind; he says the simple things that clever people don't say" (6 Nov. 1919)—and his gentle insistence on the virtues of tolerance and respect for individual differences . Yet for all his belief in tolerance and friendship, his own personal relations were marked by a touchy timidity and a sense οι amourpropre very dependent on middle-class Victorian conventions of courtesy. Furbank scrupulously records Forster's quarrels and difficulties in friendships as...