E. M. Forster's Alexandria Books

Cover of the rare 1922 first edition of ALEXANDRIA, published in Egypt by Whitehead Morris

Its utility to tourists is not what has kept Forster's Alexandria: A History and a Guide in print decades after it was written. In the tradition of Baedeker and Murray, whose guidebooks he had used and admired, Forster tried to make his own contribution to the genre useful; he provided suggested routes to the sites and sights and included small maps in the text and a large fold-out map in a pocket at the end of the book. But the user Forster seems to have imagined for his guide is not a typical tourist, someone who might need to be oriented to train schedules, money exchange, and eating customs, and might look to a guide for hotel or restaurant recommendations. There is none of this kind of practical information.

Forster assumes a reader who wants to travel through the political and philosophical history of Alexandria perhaps more than through its modern streets. The first half of the book is "A History"; the "Guide" follows almost as an immense footnote.

The book was to be published in Alexandria and—there being no other guide available in English—the plan was to take advantage of the situation in the aftermath of the war and sell it to the many British soldiers and other functionaries who were coming and going in large numbers to the hospitals and other military facilities.

However, the publishers—the Alexandria branch of the large English stationery firm of Whitehead Morris—proved extraordinarily dilatory. After receiving the manuscript at the beginning of 1919, they did not issue the book until the end of 1922, by which time the intended audience had largely dissipated. An unknown number of books were shipped to London for sale there, and the book was promoted in the spring of 1923 by a small flyer inserted in copies of Pharos and Pharillon.

The city to which Forster's book is a guide is an evocation, a city of the memory, of which only scant physical vestiges remain. The lighthouse, the library, the tomb of Alexander are rumors rather than remnants. Today, even the city that Forster saw has largely disappeared. But while he was there, this city of absence provided Forster a significant and palpable presence.

In an introduction to Michael Haag's 1984 edition of Alexandria, Lawrence Durrell wrote that "the author who was marooned here during the First World War must (one feels it) have been deeply happy, perhaps deeply in love, for his joie de vivre rings out in every affectionate line." Forster began writing the book during the last half of his stay, when he was in fact deeply in love, having found in Alexandria what he had before been able only to imagine and to evoke in fiction. He hints at this in the preface to the revised second edition of the book, which appeared in 1938: "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. . . . I desire to thank certain friends who are no longer alive, but who still inspire me by their genius and charm."

Principal among the inhabitants with whom Forster fell in love was a young Egyptian tram conductor named Mohammed el Adl; their emotional and sexual relationship lasted until el Adl's death from tuberculosis in 1922.

Forster was thirty-eight years old when he met el Adl; the deftly delivered message of liberation and passion in his early novels had brought him literary fame, but his failure to follow in his own life the philosophy he promoted in his fiction had resulted in personal and professional frustration. Mohammed el Adl changed this.

Forster signals the continuity between the two books by inserting the same Cavafy poem in the middle of each. The books share a simple past/present structure with "The God Abandons Anthony" marking the bifurcation in each. Moreover, the poem enunciates the writer's own poignant valediction to the city that had changed his life.

The title Pharos and Pharillon refers to the book's two sections. The first is named after the ancient lighthouse of Alexandria. "Under Pharos," Forster tells us in his introduction, "I have grouped a few antique events; to modern events and to personal impressions I have given the name of Pharillon, the obscure successor of Pharos," a lesser monument, which incorporated the remnants of the base of the original lighthouse. Alexandria is similarly divided into "A History" followed by "A Guide."