Volume 25, Number 15 · October 12, 1978
Character
By V.S. Pritchett
E.M. Forster: A Life
by P.N. Furbank
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 656 pp., $19.95
It has often been said that the British venerate old age. The sins of the ancient are forgiven for they have become 'characters'—a national ideal. Even the talented survive their inevitable denigration: they have freed themselves from the national obsessions with social obligation and the virtue of worry. This is true of E.M. Forster who lived until he was ninety and who had become a kind of wayward holy man by the time he was seventy: a status he would hardly have achieved in France, for example, where old age is often publicly derided. Perhaps the British cult is simply Victorian for the Victorians solemnly sought to get over youth as quickly as possible and assume elderly airs—children died like flies—and here one must note that the famous liberal, humanist, rationalist intellectuals seem to have had a gift for longevity. One can argue, of course, that they were all born whimsical and elderly; this was sometimes the impression given by Forster who was elderly when he was a boy and in many ways schoolboyish to look at when he was old: the tweed cap too small, the sleeves of the shabby jacket too short, the shoes neglected as he skipped across to King's College chapel at Cambridge to hear the Sunday singing. He looked like a whim.
Review, 4429 words
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