The Importance of Being Decent

In January 1939, as Europe was convulsing to the rhythms of what George Orwell would call ‘the tom-tom beat of a latter-day tribalism’, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and E. M. Forster were gathered at Waterloo Station. It was a solemn occasion. Auden and Isherwood were about to leave the country of their birth for the United States, where, several months later, Auden would compose ‘September 1, 1939’, the ominous poem in which he would look back on ‘the low dishonest decade’ he had just lived through, and tremble at the one to come. Auden and Isherwood attracted much criticism for their decision to leave England at so crucial an hour, yet Forster refused to abandon his friends. As he bade them farewell at Waterloo, he told them that it was now their duty to ‘keep away’ and ‘see us sink from a distance’. It would be his duty, he continued, ‘to face a world which is tragic without becoming tragic myself ’.

When Forster spoke those words he was in his sixties. He had published no fiction for over a decade, partly because of his ‘weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat – the love of men for women & vice versa’. What he had wanted to publish was the kind of work in which ‘two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows’, yet he did not feel able to risk the obloquy that would have followed. He did, however, continue to write on that theme in private. There were numerous short stories, there was the novel Maurice, published posthumously in 1971, and dedicated ‘to a happier year’. And there were great swathes of criticism, essays and broadcasts. The first collection of these had been published in 1936 under the title Abinger Harvest; the second would not appear until 1951. Yet at the moment Forster stood in solidarity with his friends on that January day at Waterloo, he was already at work on the pieces of which the volume would be composed, already addressing himself to a world that looked increasingly tragic. That volume would become Two Cheers for Democracy. Now long out of print (the most recent edition was published in 1970), it was initially to be called The Last of Abinger, yet Forster changed his mind on the grounds that he did not really want to record the last of anything, and because the new title – offered as a joke by a young friend – appealed to him. It seemed to strike an appropriate note of cautious optimism. ‘Human life is still active, still carrying about with it unexplored riches and unused methods of release,’ he writes in the preface: ‘The darkness that troubles us and tries to degrade us may thin out. We may still contrive to raise three cheers for democracy, although at present she only deserves two.’ So: ‘Two Cheers for Democracy’. As I suspect is true of others, I had encountered the phrase (and felt slightly sniffy about it) long before I had read the book in which it appears. I had read and enjoyed Forster’s novels in my teens, but – for reasons not altogether clear to me now – I hadn’t read a word of his non-fiction. It wasn’t that I expected something dry or solemn, and I knew that Kingsley Amis was not being fair when he dismissed him (quite amusingly) as a ‘cheerless crap’. Forster’s non-fiction was simply a blind spot, and would remain one, I am ashamed to say, all the way through my undergraduate degree in English. The moment of introduction came in the early days of my doctoral research. I was working on the radical writing of the 1640s, and had been told that Forster had written a piece to mark the tercentenary of Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), collected in Two Cheers for Democracy. With no very great sense of excitement, I called the book up at the Bodleian and dutifully trudged off to see what he had to say. It would be overstating things to describe what followed as a revelation, but it was something like a gradual process of awakening. The piece on Areopagitica was interesting enough, but what captivated me was the range and tone of the other essays and broadcasts that made up the book. Here was a figure who offered much of what I felt was missing from my academic life – and much of what I loved of life in general. Where those around me seemed interested largely in becoming specialized and establishing themselves as grand figures in their field, Forster was roaming, understated, modest, unemphasized. He became my companion. From now on, my days roosting in the Bodleian would be leavened by a spell in the pub with Two Cheers for Democracy. And if I went for a drink in the evening, Forster would come along too. I carried him everywhere. And as I read and reread him on the many subjects covered in his book, I came to realize that I was encountering elements of a personality that were present in the personalities of those I knew, and loved, myself, and were perhaps not so pronounced in my own person as they might have been. Forster was calm, curious, sane, gentle, amused, ordinary. And I, gentle reader, was being edified. One of the first things to strike me was Forster’s sense of commitment – both to his subjects and to his readers, and to the relationship between politics and the arts. The pieces in the book, written over a period of fifteen years, are arranged thematically rather than chronologically, and are grouped into two broad sections. The first part of the book, ‘The Second Darkness’, concentrates on the political and social questions relating to the Second World War, including anti-Semitism, the nature of tolerance, censorship and liberty. The second, ‘What I Believe’, is more various, and features pieces on not looking at pictures, on writers and poets, on our second greatest novel, on his library, on place – and, of course, on belief. So far, so various – yet almost all the pieces share a commitment: to the importance of curiosity, to the value of noticing, to the language of politics (‘liberty . . . is connected with prose’), to the political intelligence of the arts, and – perhaps above all – to the importance of being decent. Here was an individual who was able to formulate views that were the product of humility, clear-sightedness, generosity, honesty, humour, sanity (Isherwood remarked that Forster was ‘saner than anyone else I know’), and who was determined to articulate them at a time when many other writers and intellectuals were either silent about, or complicit with, the threat of National Socialism. Certain of these qualities could, of course, be found in his fiction, but here they were present in a more emphatic way. In the first of ‘Three Anti-Nazi Broadcasts’, for example, he tackles the idea, much discussed at the time, that National Socialism was about purification, was a ‘revolution of the soul’. ‘This sounds all right,’ he replies, ‘but why does the soul always require a machine-gun?’ Elsewhere he concedes that ‘Tolerance is a very dull virtue’, but notes that it is all that we have to build a civil society; and when he finds tolerance threatened or weakened by belief, he opens an essay on the subject (‘What I Believe’) by stating: ‘I do not believe in belief. But this is an age of faith, and there are so many militant creeds that, in self-defence, one has to formulate a creed of one’s own.’ In the same piece, democracy is to be praised because it does not tend to produce ‘that unmanageable type of citizen known as the Great man’. In his place, ‘It produces instead different kinds of small men – a much finer achievement.’ Forster liked to call such people his aristocrats, by which he meant those who could be numbered among ‘the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky’, and whom he characterized more expansively as follows:

They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke. I give no examples – it is risky to do that – but the reader may as well consider whether this is the type of person he would like to meet and to be . . .

It is not just the sentiments that are appealing here, but the temperament from which they flow. ‘He’s strong because he doesn’t try to be a stiff-lipped stoic like the rest of us, and so he’ll never crack,’ said Isherwood, and it was that sense of his strength that appealed to me; that, and Forster’s related commitment to the value of the modest, the everyday, the small, the seemingly negligible. Size – a sense of proportion and decorum – was important to him, and his example shows why it should be important to us, too; how it can help us to register the glory of the ordinary, the imperfect, the compromised. ‘No one can spend his or her life entirely in the creation or the appreciation of masterpieces,’ he writes in ‘Art for Art’s Sake’, and time after time in this collection we are encouraged to consider the importance of looking elsewhere and everywhere, and at the things we cannot do or have not done. In the elegiac piece that concludes Two Cheers for Democracy, ‘The Last of Abinger’, Forster presents us with some extracts from a diary that reveal his deep affection for place, his sensitivity to the beauties of the turning world and his sense of its sadness. In this lovely meditation, he searches for meaning in the English countryside; resolves to learn the names of all the fields in the parish; wishes he had talked more to old men; writes of how his heart beats to the importance of nature; swiftly wonders if it is proper to feel that way; records being visited by ‘the sense of a world that asks to be noticed rather than explained’. It is a sense that fills the pages of this extraordinary volume: a book that is itself sensitive, considerate, plucky, and that stands as the record of a figure who was able to face a world that was tragic without becoming tragic himself.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 44 © Matthew Adams 2014