E. M. Forster

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Hi, it's E.M. Forster.

Hi, it's John.

[laughs]

... to a rerun of...

We're, we're giddy today.

It's not really, uh, E.M. Forster and Iain Banks, it's me, Andy, and...

Uh, Nikki.

Yeah, Don Corleone, he's a good guy, right? [upbeat music]

"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" is attributed to EM Forster.

The rail gonna love this Friday night.

This episode of Person Place Thing was produced with Little Field and distributed by WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

This on beauty is...

She's taking the premise or like a central premise from the EM Forster novel, uh, Howard's end.

And she's taking kind of a plot device from that and then building this book on top of it.

Uh, It's the story of a family in a fictionalized Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the professor dad is a professor at like a fictionalized Harvard daughter attends.

I read this book in college.

It is called Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forrester.

I did look at the front and it was published in 1920s.

So it's a little bit obviously dated.

So this mix of a group got on extremely well.

Other members were E.M. Forster, the novelist who was known for his works like A Passage to India and Howard's End.

He was actually very closely associated with the group and, of course, shared their liberal and humanistic values.

But he was very much on the fringes.

And of course, time's moved on.

So who's still a part of this group then? So at this stage, the group includes still Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, whom she married, E.M.

Forster, Lytton Strachey, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Desmond McCarthy, and Saxon Sidney Turner.

And on the fringes of the group, people who might attend every once in a while were incredible personalities like Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson and Adrian Stephen and Adrian Stephen, the younger brother of Virginia and Vanessa.

raise the issue and one is likely to hear very quickly repeated Samuel Johnson's famous barb that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Or you might even hear, if the person's read a little bit more, E.M. Forster's famous statement that if he had to choose whether to betray his friend or his country that he, Forster, wished he had the courage to betray his country.

Forster, the famous English novelist, author of Howard's End and other important books, Forster presents the choice between friendship over country, of private over public goods, as a kind of tragic and even noble decision that one has to make.

But Forster, in some respect, has given us, I would suggest, a false dilemma.

Loyalty is a moral habit just as betrayal is a moral vice.

People who practice one are less likely to indulge in the other.

Consider the following example.

A few years after Forster made his statement at Cambridge, three young Cambridge undergraduates in the 1930s by the names of Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess.