He cursed his love of metaphor - some Forster metaphors - (Untrue; but then, so is most information.)

He cursed his love of metaphor…  (Ch. 8)

Just one of many ways the reader is warned to suspect, or perhaps even despise, Cecil, the heroine’s fiancée and secondary obstacle to her marrying the right fellow.

The narrator, of course, the Forster figure, loves metaphor.  See that passage about violets I quoted yesterday.  Or watch the tourists in Florence:

… the ladies bought some hot chestnut paste out of a little shop, because it looked so typical.  It tasted partly of the paper in which it was wrapped, partly of hair oil, partly of the great unknown.  (Ch. 2)

She watched the tourists [see?], their noses as red as their Baedekers, so cold was Santa Croce.  (Ch. 2)

I guess it is just possible that the last metaphor is meant to be Lucy’s – someone has just run off with her guidebook, so it is on her mind.  The narrator, though, is generally extremely intrusive, constantly correcting his characters:

The men on the river were fishing.  (Untrue; but then, so is most information.)  (Ch. 2)

The first sentence is supplied to Lucy by the similarly intrusive lady novelist Miss Lavish; the parenthetical is the narrator’s.  I have no idea what the men on the river are doing.  I didn’t see them when I was in Florence.

He also loves to pour on the rhetoric, to empurple the scene – violets, etc. – as in this description of fairly ordinary curtains that are the light that they are not quite blocking:

A poet – none was present – might have quoted, “Life like a dome of many coloured glass,” or might have compared the curtains to sluice-gates, lowered against the intolerable tides of heaven.  Without was poured a sea of radiance; within, the glory, though visible, was tempered to the capacities of man.  (Ch. 8)

Pure narrator, a bit of a smart aleck.

I only thought the narrator really overdid it one, near the end of the novel as Lucy in some sense hits bottom.  “She gave up trying to understand herself” – she gave up on Bildung – “and joined the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words.”

They [soldiers in this army, meaning almost everyone] have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue…  They have sinned against Eros and against Pallas Athene, and not by any heavenly intervention, but by the ordinary course of nature, those allied deities will be avenged.  (Ch. 17)

This was the only time I shouted to the narrator “Get out of the way!”  I wanted to see Lucy, not this stuff.  The main sin against truth here is that the narrator appears to be serious.  The metaphor in the last line of the chapter is more chilling: “The night received her, as it had received Miss Bartlett thirty years before.”  But that is because I have spent all too much time with the narrow Miss Bartlett, and know fear that Lucy really could will herself – exile herself – into that life.

But this is a jolly book, full of Italy, full of life, and everything works out; even Miss Bartlett turns out to be more alive than she seems – she has, after all, been to Italy.

A Room with a View in which Germanic English fall in love in Italy, "the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth"

Pan had been amongst them – not the great god Pan, who has been buried these two thousand years, but the little god Pan, who presides over social contretemps and unsuccessful picnics.  (Ch. 7)

That’s from E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908).  Max Beerbohm’s story “Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton,” in Seven Men (1919), includes a fine joke about the literary satyrs, with “their hoofs and their slanting eyes and their way of coming suddenly out of woods to wean quiet English villages from respectability.”  By the time Beerbohm is writing, they have become clichés.  Perhaps “become” is too generous.  When I first read Beerbohm, I understood the joke theoretically, but recently I have been reading more of the English literature of the faun, going back to Walter Pater.  They are all Paterians, aren’t they?  I’ll bet they are.  For example, although I did not mention it when I wrote about Robert Graves’s first book, it had at least one faun too many.

Paganism is infectious – more infectious than diphtheria or piety – and the Rector’s niece was taken to church protesting.  (Ch. 15)

The Forster narrator is often hilarious.  Victorian, and then Edwardian, respectability, is the enemy.  Why so uptight, you squares?

The sitting-room itself was blocked with books.

“Are these people great readers?” Freddy whispered.  “Are they that sort?”

“I fancy they know how to read – a rare accomplishment.  What have they got?  Byron.  Exactly.  A Shropshire Lad.  Never heard of it.  The Way of All Flesh.  Never heard of it.  Gibbon.  Hullo! dear George reads German.  Um – um – Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and so we go on.”  (Ch. 12)

The heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, is not a reader, certainly not of anything as preposterous as Nietzsche, but she is a serious amateur musician with her own Romantic Germanic tendencies.  The same character who has not heard of Housman or Butler attributes Lucy’s lapses from respectability – her “startled eyes,” say – to “’Too much Beethoven’” (Ch. 5).

Lucy and George are flung together by a pagan force more powerful than a faun – Italy, specifically Florence, and more specifically, the impulsive murders and endless violets of Tuscany.  The story of the novel is how the Englishness that surrounds Lucy interferes with the Italianness that will make her happy.

Again, although A Room with a View looks like a romance between two lively young English people who meet in Italy, they are the two German characters, the two who have experienced, George deliberately and Lucy intuitively, Bildung, thus preparing them for the radical aesthetic effects of Italy, like those violets:

From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam.  But never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth.  (Ch. 6)

Once the two characters drink from the well-head, nothing can be the same, right?  “He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves.”  I guess compared to some other treatments of the theme, I find Forster’s treatment of Italy and its Beauty superficial, but it is all in the same general realm.  And that specific scene could hardly be improved.

yet this story must be told in my own way - Eliza Fay's Original Letters from India

I read some books related to India. One of the was Original Letters from India by Eliza Fay (1816), which is exactly what it says it is.  And yet the title is deceptive.  The content of the book is almost entirely about Fay’s travels to and from India – to Calcutta, specifically – beginning in 1779 rather than her intermittent life in India.

E. M. Forster discovered Fay’s book while researching A Passage to India.  I doubt it was much help to him, given that it is from a century before his own book and is only barely, see above, about India, but he loved it, especially the flavorful, demanding voice of the author (“Eliza Fay is a work of art,” 7), a Strong Female Character if I have ever seen one, so Forster got the Hogarth Press to put his edition in 1925.

The ways of Providence are inscrutable!  But to revert to my main subject, – glad shall I be when it is concluded; for I detest matter of fact writing, almost as much as matter of fact conversation: – yet this story must be told in my own way, or not at all.  (129)

Other than the unusually eventful voyages themselves, the reason the book exists is that Fay and her husband, arriving in India, were seized by a warlord as hostages in some game he was playing with the English and French, who were currently at war.  Their captivity is described in indignant detail:

… here we lay down, comparatively happy in the hope of enjoying a tolerable nights rest; my husband being provided with a long pole to keep off the rats; but surely never were poor mortals so completely disappointed and for my own part I may add, terrified…  The rats also acted their part in the Comedy; every now and then jumping towards the beds, as we could hear; however Mr. F–  on these occasions laid about him stoutly with his pole, and thus kept them at bay; but our winged adversaries were not so easily foiled…  (135-6)

I have cheated a bit by quoting a bit that could almost come from a Gothic novel, although one with an unusually resourceful heroine.  She does faint on occasion, though.  That Gothic heroine fainting is drawn from life.  Tight clothes, I suppose.  Regardless, an extraordinary woman.  She seems to have spent much of her life working as a speculative trader in India, a high risk occupation, but she was the sort of person who relished risk.

A good part of the fun of Forster’s edition of Eliza Fay’s book is in his notes:

JOHN HARE.  How she loathes this chattering mannikin!...  We must never forget that she herself was a most trying woman, particularly on a boat, and that Mr. Hare would not have found her table manners funny, or appreciated her contempt for the violin.  (note 17, p. 276)

Or maybe this is the best note:

FOOD.  From various passages it is clear that our heroine was of the hungry type.  People who write long letters often are.  That very June “the Surgeon of an Indiaman fell dead after eating a hearty dinner of beef, thermometre being 98°”… but the warning did not deter her.  She ate and ate till the end – asparagus, pork, tunny, turtle, preserved peaches, ghi.  (note 28, 280)

Eliza Fay is my new gluttonous role model.

Page numbers refer to the 2010 NYRB reprint of Fay and Forster’s book.