Miss Avery in the Garden with the Sword: Forster and Friendship

Friendship, friend, fratribus, brotherhood: these four constantly recurring words whose meaning is at once multiple and singular reside at the core of E. M. Forster’s writing. As Montaigne wrote in “Of Friendship” and Forster echoed, most famously in “What I Believe,” “a unique and dominant friendship dissolves all other obligations.”¹ As thematic, as belief, as resonant words, this cluster goes back to the very earliest of Forster’s writings—to “Macolnia Shops,” to “The Tomb of Pletone,” to “Ansell,” and, of course, to The Longest Journey: “Rickie was thinking of the irony of friendship—so strong it is and so fragile. We fly together, like straws in an eddy, to part in the open stream. . . . He wished there was a society, a kind of friendship office, where the marriage of true minds could be registered.”² This often-quoted passage is also at the heart of Robert K. Martin’s four Forster essays, as each investigates that word, friendship, with ever-increasing subtlety and stringency.

His first, “Forster’s Greek: From Optative to Present Indicative,” a reading of the 1903 story “Ansell,” goes back to a real Ansell in Forster’s life, the garden boy of his childhood, then forward to his 1956 biography of his great aunt, Marianne Thornton, where those memories are recorded, and back again to The Longest Journey. There Ansell is now the name of the Cambridge friend whose friendship Rickie wished could be registered, the David-Jonathan couple truly wed. Robert grounds his reading in Forster’s understanding of what Whitman meant by brotherhood, “threads of manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees hitherto unknown” in order to conclude that “for Forster homosexuality can lead to a greater democracy of vision, to a violation of social, racial, and class barriers, and to men meeting again as lovers, as they once met as children” (which is the arc of the story’s narrative).³ The philologist protagonist is writing his dissertation on the optative, the verbal mood of wish fulfillment, of the hypothetical. However, by story’s end, the box of books containing that dissertation has fallen into the stream. Some are recovered, Liddell and Scott’s lexicon among them, but not the dissertation. Thus unburdened, “the scholar who studies pastoral but hates nature, who swoons over poetic shepherds but fears their modern incarnations,” can move from optative to present indicative, from the hypothetical to the real, mood and tense shifting in the narration to a continuous present, where “the narrator and Ansell are now lovers, every bit as much together as Maurice and Alec” will be a decade later (72).

The optative mood in its sense of hope, wish, or expectation lies behind Robert’s essay as well, written at the same time as he was concluding his Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry. The essay thinks through in a different key many of the ideas he was working out there. It was that book, of course, that set his career on the lift-off line and is in large measure why we are here today. Its publication also fulfilled his (still unwritten) dissertation requirement—Robert’s didn’t have to be drowned, just reimagined; indeed, one could say the same for Ansell’s. The presiding presence in both book and essay is Whitman. But what prompted Robert to write about Forster in the first place? I don’t really have the answer, but I do have a suggestion: friendship. Friendship and Whitman.

And now this little paper shifts gears, mood, and mode and enters the personal, the friendship between Robert and me, the lunches, talks, heated talks, gossip, and more talks, from the time in the early 1970s when we were colleagues and friends, and our offices were kitty-corner to each other so that wonderful talk could continue. And we talked a lot about Forster. Maurice and the story collection The Life to Come had just been published, and although we talked about them, at the start neither of us was writing on Forster. I was...