2 Morgan

E. M. Forster

A week or so after settling into Fairhaven I walked into Aldeburgh to buy food. It was still snowing but in a faint, whirling way which hid the sea and the marsh. Coming from the opposite direction, blinded like me, an elderly man was stepping it out. It was E. M. Forster, a recognisable figure even if I had never seen him before: we passed each other silently, packed snow deadening our footsteps. He walked quickly, lightly, even youthfully one might say. He wore a tweed overcoat and a flat cap. Returning about two hours later I found a page from a pocketbook thrust under the door - there was no letter-box. It read:

4 Crabbe Street,

Saturday

Dear Mr Blythe,

If you are free today and can come in for a drink, we shall be very pleased to see you.

Yours sincerely,

E. M. Forster

Bewildered, troubled by this - its unlikelihood - I went of course. Four Crabbe Street was Benjamin Britten's house. Forster let me in, shook my duffel coat before hanging it up, showed me into a room where every surface, including the piano, was littered with paper slips, and said, 'Sebastian Sprott.' They were indexing Marianne Thornton, the 'domestic biography' of the aunt whose money had given Forster financial freedom. They were gentle and charming. Indexing being part of my trade as a librarian, I made short work of that for her biography.

As we gathered up the slips Forster said, 'We eat at lunchtime', and fetched sherry and biscuits. And of course, 'What are you reading, Mr Blythe?' I should have replied Indigo, or Camus, but for some reason I answered, 'Elizabeth Bowen', causing their eyes to meet. It made me defend her, at which they too praised her. I felt shy and vulnerable, immensely hungry, and unable to explain myself. I wondered how and when to leave. At about nine Forster helped me on with my coat and said that they couldn't thank me enough for my assistance. Starving and cold, I went to the White Lion Hotel and sat by a great fire, feeling that I had failed some kind of test. But shopping in Aldeburgh the following week, Forster hurried from Britten's house to greet me. He hoped that I was looking after myself. He carried my straw fish-basket. He bought Quink in the bookshop. He hoped - felt sure - that I would not always be alone. His voice was disconcertingly youthful, his features rather foxy, although with fine eyes behind the glasses. And now we talked easily about literature and about ourselves. Thorpeness was indeed odd, though 'most interesting'. It was the moment to ask, 'How could you know I was there - a totally unknown young man hoping to become a writer?' But some rule which I couldn't understand stopped me from saying it. I wrote in my diary, 'It has begun.' 'Now the fishmonger's, did you say, Ronald?' Now the baker's on the corner. Now the observing glance.

Britten and Forster were old friends when I met them in 1955. Forster's BBC talk on Crabbe, printed in the Listener in 1941 and read by Britten and Peter Pears in California, had famously returned them to their rightful element. Morgan, as I was soon awkwardly to call him, had been present at the first night of Peter Grimes a decade earlier, when he was stunned by the glory of the music but shocked by the liberties taken with George Crabbe's devastating poem The Borough. 'Well might you warn me that the libretto departed from Crabbe,' he wrote to Eddy Sackville-West. 'I thought it did so disastrously¸ and it was so insistent both as narrative and psychology that it imperilled the opera, especially at the end.' Bit by bit I would learn that Forster's understanding of Crabbe, still a little-read genius, was profound. So what was it that upset him in Peter Grimes? It was that Ellen Orford and Peter Grimes, who had no contact at all with each other in The Borough, had become old friends in the opera, Ellen schoolmarmishly respectable, Peter helplessly the local bad lot. Crabbe could not be so elementary, so crass.

The Borough is a series of 'Letters' from Aldeburgh. Candour is their watchword. Ellen Orford makes her appearance in the twentieth Letter, Peter Grimes in the twenty-second Letter. Ellen is now an old blind widow who has been a schoolteacher but also a Hardy-like plaything of fate. A less-like Ellen of the opera could not be imagined. Her husband was a violent brute, one of her sons was hanged, another drowned. Awfulness follows awfulness in lengthy statements. Her role in the poem is of a stoic, someone whose 'senses fail not at all' and who at last comes to 'my winter calm of life'. Crabbe could have been reading The Book of Job. Ellen Orford's Letter is so terrible that the reader can barely continue. Peter Grimes's Letter shows insanity as a mercy; Ellen's sanity as a torment. The Borough is a masterpiece, as is the music of Peter Grimes. Somewhere in between the librettist Montagu Slater has taken his liberties with a shocking text.

The young Benjamin Britten put what could not be said into music and orchestrated Aldeburgh's sea and climate itself. He also found in George Crabbe's pity for the victims of child labour, a commonplace in his time, a text for that 'pity' for boyhood which would so compulsively run flame-like through Britten's work, and throughout his life. Forster of course¸ having been shown the ruthless convention of the librettist in Peter Grimes, had dealt with Billy Budd, and with huge respect for Herman Melville.

That autumn I found the second edition of Forster's Alexandria: A History and Guide in the second-hand book rack near the newsagent's - 'by E. M. Forster M.A. Cantab, L.L.D. Aberdeen' and published in Alexandria in 1938. 'To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen' - Plotinus. Now it remains my conviction that this work is not less than the novels as a compendium of Forster's thinking and beliefs. I intended to get him to sign it when he next came to Aldeburgh but something told me that it would be a mistake. It had lemon-coloured hardboard covers, many maps and designs, photographs, and 218 pages. I treasure it still. Unbeknown to me at this time Forster would lecture on it at the next Festival, the one for which I would edit the Programme Book in 1956.

Its second importance for me was that it introduced me to Constantine Cavafy - the poet who stood at a slight angle to the universe when Forster lived in Alexandria. No guide to Alexandria could leave out Cavafy. So Forster included what would be my first encounter with him. 'Ithaca' I would of course have to find for myself. Forster placed Cavafy's poem between his history of Alexandria and the guide to his own exploration of it. Cavafy had died in 1933 and his presence haunts the second edition of Forster's book.

The Alexandria I knew and loved belongs to the war years. I was very happy there, in the intervals of my work, and gradually fell in love with many of her inhabitants and the whole of her past. She was then a tousled unsmartened sort of place . Hadra was still a lake, Marabout a desert island, Montazah a convalescents' paradise . it was permissible to bathe in the Friars' Pool without wearing any costume. All this has vanished with the advent of modernity and the Corniche Road, and few except myself will regret it. I realised what was coming a few years back, when I paid a brief visit and lost my way as I came out of the new railway station. What a humiliating experience for the author of the Guide . I desire to thank certain friends who are no longer alive. They belonged to many nationalities.

They included his first lovers. He was in his late thirties and Alexandria had conquered Weybridge. He dedicated 'this volume to one of them, to C. P. Cavafy, Greek by birth, Alexandrian in spirit, and a great poet. Abingdon, England.' So here is my first knowledge of Cavafy, as chosen by E. M. Forster. I read it sitting on Aldeburgh beach.

THE GOD ABANDONS ANTONY

When at the hour of midnight

an invisible choir is suddenly heard passing

with exquisite music, with voices -

Do not lament your fortune that at last subsides,

your life's work that has failed, your schemes that have proved illusions.

But like a man prepared, like a brave man,

bid farewell to her, to Alexandria who is departing.

Above all, do not delude yourself, do not say that it is a dream,

that your ear was mistaken.

Do not condescend to such empty hopes.

Like a man for long prepared, like a brave man,

like the man who was worthy of such a city,

go to the window firmly,

and listen with emotion

but not with the prayers and complaints of the coward

(Ah! supreme rapture!)

listen to the notes, to the exquisite instruments of the mystic choir,

and bid farewell to her, to Alexandria whom you are losing.

Forster was a spellbinding lecturer, the 'old Cambridge' accent, if it can be called that, the witty sadness, the glinting glasses, the admitting of his hearers into the Forsterian country.

Sitting in the Jubilee Hall on a Sunday afternoon, thanks to the clumsy volume in my bag I saw...