E. M. Forster


While stationed in Alexandria with the Red Cross during World War I, English novelist E. M. Forster (1879-1970) used the pen name "Pharos" for articles he wrote for the local newspapers The Egyptian Mail and The Egyptian Gazette. He took the name from the ancient lighthouse of Alexandria, and his essays were indeed beacons of peace and humane culture in the darkness of war. Back in England after the war Forster continued to use the pseudonym occasionally up until 1920 (sometimes shortened to "P"). In 1923 many of these Alexandria pieces, written in both Egypt and England, were collected in Pharos and Pharillon, an unrecognized gem of a book, beautifully handprinted, bound, and published by his friends Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press. In this new and, unfortunately, war-torn 21st century these essays—along with Forster's other works—entertain and enlighten modern readers, who yield to the charm of Forster's style and continue to find his views and perspectives relevant. At the age of thirty-one, having published four novels in six years, E. M. Forster in 1910 had achieved remarkable public success. The epigraph on the title page of Howards End, which appeared that year, has echoed ever since:
Ironically, however, in his own life Forster was painfully aware that he had not connected; he was an outsider to the passion he championed in his fiction and had come to an impasse both personally and professionally. He found himself blocked, unable to act upon his deepest feelings or to write straightforwardly about them.
In 1913-14 he diverted his frustrated sexual energy into writing Maurice. He hoped that acting out his homosexual fantasies in a private novel would mitigate his frustration and allow him to progress with the two publishable novels he had begun after Howards End. The strategy failed; the imagined homosexual passion of Maurice neither satisfied Forster's longings nor released his creativity for other writing projects. By the end of 1914 his personal crisis was subsumed in the general crisis of the First World War, and in 1915 he went to Egypt as a volunteer for the Red Cross. In Alexandria he was finally able to "connect," forging an alliance with a young Egyptian, Mohammed el Adl, who—when they met—was a conductor on the streetcar line that Forster rode to and from work. A Passage to India (1924), Forster's masterpiece and final novel, was shaped by these transformative years. In part it is a memorial to el Adl, who died in 1922 and is reflected in the character Aziz.