閱讀愛德華·摩根·福斯特 Edward Morgan Forster在小说之家的作品!!! | |||
爱德华·摩根·福斯特愛德華.摩根.福斯特1879年1月1日生於倫敦。父親是建築師，福音派信徒，強調一個人應有道德責任感。母親則比較隨和、寬容。幼年時父親去世。少年時，入肯特郡坦布裏奇學校。這是一座“公學”，在這裏的經歷使他以對英國“公學”十分反感，因為這種學校訓練出來的學生“體格發育好，頭腦也比較發達，但心靈全不發達”。
1897年進入劍橋大學國王學院學習，與新實在論哲學家穆爾和古典學者狄金遜交往，生活在一種自由主義、懷疑論、崇拜南歐和古代文明的文化氣氛中。
開始創作後，他成為英國文學史上著名的布盧姆茨伯裏派的一員，強調愛、同情、敏感、美的創造和享受、追求知識的勇氣，實際上是流行在上層知識分子中間的人文主義精神。他反對教，但不反對宗教精神。
第一次世界大戰期間，他被派往埃及亞歷山大城，在部隊中任文職。1912和1922年先後兩次遊歷印度。1946年劍橋大學國王學院聘他為榮譽研究員。1970年在考文垂逝世。
他著有《霍華茲莊園》(Howards End，1910)、《印度之旅》(A Passage to India，1924)、《看得見風景的房間》(A Room with a View)、《莫瑞斯》(Maurice)等小說，而非小說作品有《小說的幾個方面》（Aspects of the Novel），並曾經榮獲英國最古老的文學奬詹姆斯·泰特·布萊剋紀念奬(James Tait Black Memorial Prize)。現在美國文藝學院(American Academy of Arts and Letters)設立有E.M.福斯特奬(E.M.Forster Award)。
福斯特的主要成就是五部小說和一部演說集。此外還有一部雜文集（《阿賓哲收穫集》，1936）、兩部短篇小說集和兩部傳記。他的第一部小說是《天使不敢涉足的地方》(1905)，書名是蒲柏的一句詩的後半句，前半句是“蠢人們卻闖進了”。小說寫英國中産階級的宗教道德觀念,故事麯折,人物性格復雜。《最長的旅行》(1907)的主題是現象與實在（實際的存在）的矛盾。書名引自雪萊《靈魂上的靈魂》一詩，意指不自由的結合是“最令人厭倦、 最長的一次旅行”。 故事寫的是想象中的愛情與現實生活的矛盾。作者本人和一般評論都認為這部小說並不成功。《看得見風景的房間》(A Room with a View,1908)以意大利為背景，用喜劇手法寫虛偽與真實，自由、愛、音樂、意大利下層人民、自然風景等與假道學、虛情假意、傳統陋習、英國市民階層、窒息的環境之間的矛盾。
福斯特最主要的小說是《霍華茲莊園》(Howards End，1910)和《印度之旅》(A Passage to India，1924)。《霍華茲莊園》寫代表英國中産階級上層的精神和文化的施萊格爾姐妹和同一階層代表實幹、缺乏想象和傲慢的威爾科剋斯一傢之間，以及英國中産階級上層和下層之間的復雜關係。《印度之旅》是作者最後一部也是最重要的一部小說。作者在這部作品裏把“聯接起來”的思想擴大到不同的民族。
福斯特的小說屬於英國風俗小說的傳統。它的思想內容是人文主義在20世紀的反映。他以此為武器，諷刺、批評英國社會，並相信實現了“愛的原則”，社會矛盾就可以和解。作者善於描寫人與人之間的微妙關係，往往幽默而微帶諷刺。文字優美精練，常用一些象徵手法，耐人尋味。
《小說的幾個方面》(Aspects of the Novel，1927)是1927年作者應劍橋大學之請所作的一係列“剋拉剋講座”的演講集。此書與勒勃剋的《小說技藝》（1921）同為比較係統的論述小說藝術的著作。
福斯特曾發表過中篇《機器休止》(The Machine Stops,1909)。他自認這篇作品是特地為了針對一些樂觀(在福斯特着來則屬天真)的論調而寫的。故事敘述未來的社會由於對機器過分依賴後來機器發生故障，一切停頓下來，人類由於再無獨立求生的能力，遂一一死在停頓了的機器的懷裏。這篇極盡諷刺的作品，在相隔了大半個世紀的今天着來，警世觸目之處仍然不減當年。
Early years
Forster was born into an Anglo-Irish and Welsh middle-class family at 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, London NW1, in a building which no longer exists. He was the only child of Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster and Alice Clara 'Lily' (nee Whichelo). His father, an architect, died of tuberculosis on 30 October 1880. Among Forster's ancestors were members of the Clapham Sect. He inherited £8,000 (£659,300 as of 2010),from his paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton (daughter of the abolitionist Henry Thornton), who died on 5 November 1887. The money was enough to live on and enabled him to become a writer. He attended Tonbridge School in Kent as a day boy. The theatre at the school is named after him.
At King's College, Cambridge, between 1897 and 1901, he became a member of a discussion society known as the Apostles (formally named the Cambridge Conversazione Society). Many of its members went on to constitute what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, of which Forster was a peripheral member in the 1910s and 1920s. There is a famous recreation of Forster's Cambridge at the beginning of The Longest Journey.
After leaving university he travelled in continental Europe with his mother. He visited Egypt, Germany and India with the classicist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson in 1914. By that time, Forster had written all but one of his novels. When the First World War broke out, he became a conscientious objector.
Forster spent a second spell in India in the early 1920s as the private secretary to Tukojirao III, the Maharajah of Dewas. The Hill of Devi is his non-fictional account of this trip. After returning from India, he completed his last novel, A Passage to India (1924), for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.
After A Passage to India
Arlington Park Mansions, Chiswick
In the 1930s and 1940s Forster became a successful broadcaster on BBC Radio and a public figure associated with the British Humanist Association. He was awarded a Benson Medal in 1937.
Forster developed a long-term loving relationship with Bob Buckingham, a married policeman (his wife's name was May), and included the couple in his circle, which also included the writer and arts editor of The Listener, J.R. Ackerley, the psychologist W.J.H. Sprott, and, for a time, the composer Benjamin Britten. Other writers with whom Forster associated included the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the Belfast-based novelist Forrest Reid.
From 1925 until her death at age 90 on 11 March 1945 the novelist lived with his mother in West Hackhurst, Abinger Hammer, finally leaving on or around 23 September 1946. His London base was 26 Brunswick Square from 1930 to 1939, after which he rented 9 Arlington Park Mansions in Chiswick until at least 1961.
Forster was elected an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge in January 1946, and lived for the most part in the college, doing relatively little. He declined a knighthood in 1949 and was made a Companion of Honour in 1953. In 1969 he was made a member of the Order of Merit. Forster died of a stroke in Coventry on 7 June 1970 at the age of 91, at the home of the Buckinghams. Forster was a humanist, homosexual, lifelong bachelor.
Novels
The monument to Forster in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, near Rooks Nest where Forster grew up and on which he based the setting for his novel Howards End. The area is now known as Forster Country.
Forster had five novels published in his lifetime. Although Maurice appeared shortly after his death, it had been written nearly sixty years earlier. A seventh novel, Arctic Summer, was never finished.
His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), is the story of Lilia, a young English widow who falls in love with an Italian man, and of the efforts of her bourgeois relatives to get her back from Monteriano (based on San Gimignano). The mission of Philip Herriton to retrieve her from Italy has features in common with that of Lambert Strether in Henry James's The Ambassadors, a work Forster discussed ironically and somewhat disapprovingly in his book Aspects of the Novel (1927). Where Angels Fear to Tread was adapted into a film by Charles Sturridge in 1991.
Next, Forster published The Longest Journey (1907), an inverted bildungsroman following the lame Rickie Elliott from Cambridge to a career as a struggling writer and then to a post as a schoolmaster, married to the unappetising Agnes Pembroke. In a series of scenes on the hills of Wiltshire which introduce Rickie's wild half-brother Stephen Wonham, Forster attempts a kind of sublime related to those of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence.
Forster's third novel, A Room with a View (1908), is his lightest and most optimistic. It was started before any of his others, as early as 1901, and exists in earlier forms referred to as "Lucy". The book is the story of young Lucy Honeychurch's trip to Italy with her cousin, and the choice she must make between the free-thinking George Emerson and the repressed aesthete Cecil Vyse. George's father Mr Emerson quotes thinkers who influenced Forster, including Samuel Butler. A Room with a View was filmed by Merchant-Ivory in 1985.
Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View can be seen collectively as Forster's Italian novels. Both include references to the famous Baedeker guidebooks and concern narrow-minded middle-class English tourists abroad. The books share many themes with short stories collected in The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment.
Howards End (1910) is an ambitious "condition-of-England" novel concerned with different groups within the Edwardian middle classes represented by the Schlegels (bohemian intellectuals), the Wilcoxes (thoughtless plutocrats) and the Basts (struggling lower-middle-class aspirants).
It is frequently observed that characters in Forster's novels die suddenly. This is true of Where Angels Fear to Tread, Howards End and, most particularly, The Longest Journey.
Forster achieved his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924). The novel takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj. Forster connects personal relationships with the politics of colonialism through the story of the Englishwoman Adela Quested, the Indian Dr. Aziz, and the question of what did or did not happen between them in the Marabar Caves.
Maurice (1971) was published posthumously. It is a homosexual love story which also returns to matters familiar from Forster's first three novels, such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of attending Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire. The novel was controversial, given that Forster's sexuality had not been previously known or widely acknowledged. Today's critics continue to argue over the extent to which Forster's sexuality, even his personal activities, influenced his writing.
Critical reception
In the United States, interest in and appreciation for Forster was spurred by (Trilling 1943) by Lionel Trilling, which began:
E. M. Forster is for me the only living novelist who can be read again and again and who, after each reading, gives me what few writers can give us after our first days of novel-reading, the sensation of having learned something.
Key themes
Forster was President of the Cambridge Humanists from 1959 until his death and a member of the Advisory Council of the British Humanist Association from 1963 until his death. His views as a humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of personal connections in spite of the restrictions of contemporary society. His humanist attitude is expressed in the non-fictional essay What I Believe.
Forster's two best-known works, A Passage to India and Howards End, explore the irreconcilability of class differences. A Room with a View also shows how questions of propriety and class can make connection difficult. The novel is his most widely read and accessible work, remaining popular long after its original publication. His posthumous novel Maurice explores the possibility of class reconciliation as one facet of a homosexual relationship.
Sexuality is another key theme in Forster's works, and it has been argued that a general shift from heterosexual love to homosexual love can be detected over the course of his writing career. The foreword to Maurice describes his struggle with his own homosexuality, while similar issues are explored in several volumes of homosexually charged short stories. Forster's explicitly homosexual writings, the novel Maurice and the short-story collection The Life to Come, were published shortly after his death.
Forster is noted for his use of symbolism as a technique in his novels, and he has been criticised (as by his friend Roger Fry) for his attachment to mysticism. One example of his symbolism is the wych elm tree in Howards End; the characters of Mrs Wilcox in that novel and Mrs Moore in A Passage to India have a mystical link with the past and a striking ability to connect with people from beyond their own circles.
Notable works by Forster
Novels
* Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905)
* The Longest Journey (1907)
* A Room with a View (1908)
* Howards End (1910)
* A Passage to India (1924)
* Maurice (written in 1913–14, published posthumously in 1971)
* Arctic Summer (an incomplete fragment, written in 1912–13, published posthumously in 2003)
* Book of Love
Short stories
* The Celestial Omnibus (and other stories) (1911)
* The Eternal Moment and other stories (1928)
* Collected Short Stories (1947) a combination of the above two titles, containing:
o "The Story of a Panic"
o "The Other Side Of The Hedge"
o "The Celestial Omnibus"
o "Other Kingdom"
o "The Curate's Friend"
o "The Road from Colonus"
o "The Machine Stops"
o "The Point of It"
o "Mr Andrews"
o "Co-ordination"
o "The Story of the Siren"
o "The Eternal Moment"
* The Life to Come and other stories (1972) (posthumous) containing the following stories written between approximately 1903 and 1960:
o "Ansell"
o "Albergo Empedocle"
o "The Purple Envelope"
o "The Helping Hand"
o "The Rock"
o "The Life to Come"
o "Dr Woolacott"
o "Arthur Snatchfold"
o "The Obelisk"
o "What Does It Matter? A Morality"
o "The Classical Annex"
o "The Torque"
o "The Other Boat"
o "Three Courses and a Dessert: Being a New and Gastronomic Version of the Old Game of Consequences"
Plays and pageants
* Abinger Pageant (1934)
* England's Pleasant Land (1940)
Film scripts
* A Diary for Timothy (1945) (directed by Humphrey Jennings, spoken by Michael Redgrave)
Libretto
* Billy Budd (1951) (based on Melville's novel, for the opera by Britten)
Collections of essays and broadcasts
* Abinger Harvest (1936)
* Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)
Literary criticism
* Aspects of the Novel (1927)
* The Feminine Note in Literature (posthumous) (2001)
Biography
* Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1934)
* Marianne Thornton, A Domestic Biography (1956)
Travel writing
* Alexandria: A History and Guide (1922)
* Pharos and Pharillon (A Novelist's Sketchbook of Alexandria Through the Ages) (1923)
* The Hill of Devi (1953)
Miscellaneous writings
* Selected Letters (1983–85)
* Commonplace Book (1985)
* Locked Diary (2007) (held at King's College, Cambridge)
Notable films based upon novels by Forster
* A Passage to India (1984), dir. David Lean
* A Room with a View (1985), dir. James Ivory
* Maurice (1987), dir. James Ivory
* Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991), dir. Charles Sturridge
* Howards End (1992), dir. James Ivory
Secondary works on Forster
* Abrams, M.H. and Stephen Greenblatt, "E.M. Forster." The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2C, 7th Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000: 2131–2140.
* Ackerley, J. R., E. M. Forster: A Portrait (Ian McKelvie, London, 1970)
* Bakshi, Parminder Kaur, Distant Desire. Homoerotic Codes and the Subversion of the English Novel in E. M. Forster's Fiction (New York, 1996).
* Beauman, Nicola, Morgan (London, 1993).
* Brander, Lauwrence, E.M. Forster. A critical study (London, 1968).
* Cavaliero, Glen, A Reading of E.M. Forster (London, 1979).
* Colmer, John, E.M. Forster – The personal voice (London, 1975).
* Crews, Frederick, E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism (Textbook Publishers, 2003).
* E.M. Forster, ed. by Norman Page, Macmillan Modern Novelists (Houndmills, 1987).
* E.M. Forster: The critical heritage, ed. by Philip Gardner (London, 1973).
* Forster: A collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Malcolm Bradbury (New Jersey, 1966).
* Furbank, P.N., E.M. Forster: A Life (London, 1977–78).
* Haag, Michael, Alexandria: City of Memory (London and New Haven, 2004). This portrait of Alexandria during the first half of the twentieth century includes a biographical account of E.M. Forster, his life in the city, his relationship with Constantine Cavafy, and his influence on Lawrence Durrell.
* Kermode, Frank, Concerning E. M. Forster, (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010)
* King, Francis, E.M. Forster and his World, (London, 1978).
* Martin, John Sayre, E.M. Forster. The endless journey (London, 1976).
* Herz, Judith and Martin, Robert K. E. M. Forster: Centenary Revaluations (Macmillan Press, 1982).
* Martin, Robert K. and Piggford, George (eds.) Queer Forster (Chicago, 1997)
* Mishra, Pankaj (ed.) "E.M. Forster." India in Mind: An Anthology. New York: Vintage Books, 2005: 61–70.
* Moffat, Wendy, E.M. Forster: A New Life, (Bloomsbury, 2010). Forster may have helped the gay cause more than you think.
* Scott, P.J.M., E.M. Forster: Our Permanent Contemporary, Critical Studies Series (London, 1984).
* Summers, Claude J., E.M. Forster (New York, 1983).
* Trilling, Lionel (1943), E. M. Forster: A Study, Norfolk: New Directions .
* Wilde, Alan, Art and Order. A Study of E.M. Forster (New York, 1967).