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An Analysis of The Manuscripts of A Passage to India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

June Perry Levine
June Perry Levine*
Affiliation:
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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Abstract

An analysis of the multiple versions of many of the novel's events contained in E. M. Forster's manuscript of A Passage to India increases our understanding of the published work. Examining his changes in the “Caves” and “Temple” material supports the notion that the novel is a philosophic one, whose themes were in Forster's mind from the beginning–largely as a result of his Indian experiences–but whose dramatic structure was developed slowly as he sought to create characters who would animate his ideas. Thus, the nihilistic message of the Marabar Caves–that “everything exists, nothing has value”–is substantially the same in even the earliest version, only there it is the schoolmaster Fielding, rather than Mrs. Moore, who encounters this bleak pronouncement. Since such a vision could never alter Fielding's admirable yet limited humanism in any significant respect, Forster decided to have Mrs. Moore enter the cave instead. In the published work, Mrs. Moore emerges in a dominant role as a disillusioned mystic after her earlier MS beginnings as a conventional, God-fearing Christian lady.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 85 , Issue 2 , March 1970 , pp. 284 - 294
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970

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References

1 R. L. Harrison has prepared, as his doctoral dissertation at the Univ. of Texas, an edition of Forster's manuscripts (Ann Arbor Microfilms, 1965, L3527), for which all students of Forster are indebted. Although my work on the MSS was begun, with the kind cooperation of the Univ. of Texas Humanities Research Center, in 1962, I have found it helpful in this article to use the page numbers of Mr. Harrison's edition as standard throughout.

2 Forster's holograph, which is housed in the Univ. of Texas Library, consists of what can be conveniently labeled : MS. A, written in faded green ink containing a fairly complete draft of the novel; MS. B, also in green ink, about a fourth as long as A, and apparently consisting of earlier drafts; MS. C, a typescript of about eighteen pages corresponding to a handful of pages in the printed novel; four sheets of corrections and addenda, the verso pages of MSS. A and B, containing many variant passages.

3 P. M. Furbank and F. J. M. Haskell, “The Art of Fiction,” Paris Review, ? (Spring 1953), 31.

4 Readers of the novel will recognize this quatrain as the poem Aziz plans to have inscribed on his tomb in the mosque he “some day . . . would build” (p. 19). In his notes to the Everyman edition of A Passage to India, Forster says the quatrain is from the sixteenth-century tomb of Ali Barid at Bidar (p. ii).

5 Only in the novel does “talkative” appear before “Christianity,” a late addition that many commentators have found most effective.

6 In the novel, Forster writes of the Moslem creed, “ ‘There is no God but God’ doesn't carry us far through the complexities of matter and spirit; it is only a game with words, really, a religious pun, not a religious truth” (p. 276). In the MS he had written, not “religious pun,” but “childish pun” (p. 610).

7 In MS. B, Forster writes “[The caves] have an echo. And they are polished. Professor Godbole had been thinking of one or other of these characteristics, perhaps” (p. 239). And Aziz is probably thinking of Godbole's refusal either to praise or dismiss the caves when he jeers at Hindu interest in them. Aziz's contempt for and ignorance of Hinduism run through the novel,

8 See Fielding's speculations in the novel, p. 242.

9 The Adela of Forster's MS. ? also shows a tremendous amount of hostility in the rape scene, but this facet of her personality is nowhere expanded in either the novel or the other revisions.

10 Another passage about the missionaries which is introduced into the novel but which has no forerunner at all in the drafts concerns Aziz lying abed, ill, listening to the church bells: “It was Sunday always an equivocal day in the East, and an excuse for slacking. He could hear church bells as he drowsed, both from the civil station and from the missionaries out beyond the slaughterhouse—different bells and rung with different intent, for one set was calling firmly to Anglo-India, and the other feebly to mankind. He did not object to the first set; the other he ignored, knowing their inefficiency. Old Mr. Graysford and Mr. Sorley made converts during a famine, because they distributed food; but when times improved they were naturally left alone again, and though surprised and aggrieved each time this happened, they never learnt wisdom” (pp. 100, 101).

11 Vergiftet sind meine Lieder

Wie konnt' es anders sein?

Du hast mir ja Gift gegossen

Ins bltihende Leben hinein.

Vergiftet sind meine Lieder,

Wie konnt' es anders sein?

Ich trage im Herzen viel Schlangen,

Und dich, Geliebte mein.

The poem shares certain qualities with those poems Aziz admires in the novel: chief amongst these is pathos, but the imagery of the blooming garden of life and the poisonous snakes of the heart must also have been congenial to him. Nevertheless, in Sufi poems of the type Aziz recites later in the novel, the beloved is treated far more gently.