Paris, 1935

Abstract

Mr Forster sees so clearly the damage that Olympic Games, or any other form of commercialized, politicalized sport, does to everybody concerned I cannot help but hope that he sees through all those Cultural Fronts by now, too. We were nearly all of us taken in at least once. So it was one crowded, dusty evening, June 21, 1935, in Paris, that Mr Forster appeared before a meeting of the International Congress of Writers. You can read about it in Abinger Harvest.¹ I distrusted the whole thing for good reasons and attended only on the one evening when Mr Forster was to speak. At that time, the Communists were busy dividing the whole world into two kinds of people: Fascist and Communist. They said you could tell Fascists by their abhorrence of culture, their racial prejudices, and their general inhumanity. This was true. But they said also that Communists were animated solely by a love of culture and the general good of their fellow man. Alas, this was not true.

From ‘E. M. Forster’, The Days Before (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952) pp. 116–17; repr. in The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990).