E. M. Forster was a member of the Bloomsbury Group—writers, artists, and philosophers living in London who helped shape the modernist movement of the first half of this century. Forster was born in London, but was raised in the countryside of Herforshire. While studying at King’s College, Cambridge, he became deeply interested in cultures other than his own and later traveled widely. In 1912 he sailed with two friends to India where his observations and experiences provided him with the materials from which he later created his highly acclaimed novel A Passage to India (1924), the book to which he refers in the first paragraph of 「My Wood.」 His fiction often dealt with the effects of social conventions on the natural course of human relationships. Forster’s other major novels are Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), A Room With a View (1908), Howards End (1910), Maurice (1914). Forster acquired a well-deserved reputation as a social and literary critic, as well as a short story writer.
「My Wood」 is part of Forster’s 1936 Essay, Abinger Harvest. In this essay, Forster explains the effects produced by owning property. With wit and humor, Forster suggests that purchasing land may not bring the uncomplicated happiness we might expect.
A few years ago I wrote a book which dealt in part with the difficulties of the English in India. Feeling that they would have had no difficulties in India themselves, the Americans read the book freely. The more they read it the better it made them feel, and a cheque to the author was the result. I bought a wood with the cheque. It is not a large wood—it contains scarcely any trees, and it is intersected, blast it, by a public footpath. Still, it is the first property that I have owned, so it is right that other people should participate in my shame, and should ask themselves in accents that will vary in horror, this very important question: What is the effect of property upon the character? Don’t let’s touch economics; the effect of private ownership upon the community as a whole is another question—a more important question, perhaps, but another one. Let’s keep to psychology. If you own things, what’s their effect on you? What’s the effect on me of my wood?
In the first place, it makes me feel heavy. Property does have this effect. Property produces men of weight, and it was a man of weight who failed to get into the Kingdom of Heaven. He was not wicked, that unfortunate millionaire in the parable, he was only stout; he stuck out in front not to mention behind, and as he wedged himself this way and that in the crystalline entrance and bruised his well-fed flanks, he saw beneath him a comparatively slim camel passing through the eye of a needle and being woven into the rob of God.[1] The Gospels all through couple stoutness and slowness. They point out what is perfectly obvious, yet seldom realized: that if you have a lot of things you cannot move about a lot; that furniture requires dusting, dusters require servants, servants require insurance stamps, and the whole tangle of them makes you think twice before you accept an invitation to dinner or go for a bathe in the Jordan. Sometimes the Gospels proceed further and say with Tolstoy that property is sinful; they approach the difficult ground of asceticism here, where I cannot follow them. But as to the immediate effects of property on people, they just show straightforward logic. It produces men of weight. Men of weight cannot, by definition, move like the lightning from the East unto the West, and the ascent of a fourteen-stone bishop into a pulpit is thus the exact antithesis of the coming of the Son of Man.[2] My wood makes me feel heavy.
In the second place, it makes me feel it ought to be larger.
The other day I heard a twig snap in it. I was annoyed at first, for I thought that someone was blackberrying, and depreciating the value of the undergrowth. On coming nearer, I saw it was not a man who had trodden on the twig and snapped it, but a bird, and I felt pleased. My bird. The bird was not equally pleased. Ignoring the relation between us, it took fright as soon as it saw the shape of my face, and flew straight over the boundary hedge into a field, the property of Mrs. Henessy, where it sat down with a loud squawk. It had become Mrs. Henessy’s bird. Something seemed grossly amiss here, something that would not have occurred had the wood been larger. I could not afford to buy Mrs. Henessy out, I dared not murder her, and limitations of this sort beset me on every side. Ahab[3] did not want that vineyard—he only needed it to round off his property, preparatory to plotting a new curve—and all the land around my wood has become necessary to me in order to round off the wood. A boundary protects. But—poor little thing—the boundary ought in its turn to be protected. Noises on the edge of it. Children throw stones. A little more and then a little more, until we reach the sea. Happy Canute.[4] Happier Alexander![5] And after all, why should even the world be the limit of possession? A rocket containing a Union Jack, will, it is hoped, be shortly fired at the moon. Mars. Sirius. Beyond which… But these immensities ended by saddening me. I could not suppose that my wood was the destined nucleus of universal dominion—it is so very small and contains no mineral wealth beyond the blackberries. Nor was I comforted when Mrs. Henessy’s bird took alarm for the second time and flew clean away from us all, under the belief that it belonged to itself.
In the third place, property makes its owner feel that he ought to do something to it. Yet he isn’t sure what. A restlessness comes over him, a vague sense that he has a personality to express—the same sense which, without any vagueness, leads the artist to an act of creation. Sometimes I think I will cut down such trees as remain in the wood, at other times I want to fill up the gaps between them with new trees. Both impulses are pretentious and empty. They are not honest movements towards money-making or beauty. They spring from a foolish desire to express myself and form an inability to enjoy what I have got. Creation, property, enjoyment form sinister trinity in the human mind. Creation, property, enjoyment are both very, very good, yet they are often unattainable without a material basis, and at such moments property pushes itself in as a substitute, saying, 「Accept me instead—I’m good enough for all three.」 It is not enough. It is, as Shakespeare said of lust, 「The expense of spirit in a waste of shame」: it is 「Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.」 Yet we don’t know how to shun it. It is forced on us by our economic system as the alternative to starvation. It is also forced on us by an internal defect in the soul, by the feeling that in property may lie the germs of self-development and of exquisite or heroic deeds. Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership, where (in the words of Dante) 「Possession is one with loss.」
And this brings us to our fourth and final point: the blackberries.
Blacberries are not plentiful in this meagre grove, but they are easily seen from the public footpath which traverses it, and all too easily gathered. Foxgloves, too—people will pull up the foxgloves, and ladies of an educational tendency even grub for toadstools to show them on the Monday in class. Other ladies, less educated, roll down the bracken in the arms of their gentlemen friends. There is paper, there are tins. Pray, does my wood belong to me or doesn’t it? And, if it does, should I not own it best by allowing no one else to walk there? There is a wood near Lyme Regis, also cursed by a public footpath, where the owner has not hesitated on this point. He had built high stone walls each side of the path, and has spanned it by bridges, so that the public circulate like termites while he gorges on the blackberries unseen. He really does own his wood, this able chap. Dives in Hell did pretty well, but the gulf dividing him from Lazarus[6] could be traversed by vision, and nothing traverses it here. And perhaps I shall come to this in time. I shall wall in and fence out until I really taste the sweets of property. Enormously stout, endlessly avaricious, pseudo-creative, intensely selfish, I shall weave upon my forehead the quadruple crown of possession until those nasty Bolshies come and take it off again and thrust me aside into the outer darkness.
Questions for Comprehension and Consideration
1. What are the four effects Forster describes as resulting from his purchase of the wood? Explain briefly some of the details Forster uses to explain each of these four effects.
2. In the opening section of the essay, Forster describes the response of Americans to a book he wrote. Why does he emphasize the reaction of Americans? What relationship does the opening paragraph have to the rest of the essay?
3. Forster uses many allusions (references to works or events outside the essay itself) to explain his ideas. Research several of these allusions and explain how these contribute to the central idea of the essay. (For example, in the second paragraph Forster refers to the Gospel of Matthew, 19:24, and to Leo Tolstoy’s views on property.)
4. In the fifth paragraph, Forster begins with specific examples from his own wood and his response to it and ends with generalizations. As he moves from the concrete to the abstract, his tone changes. Analyze the change in tone and explain how Froster uses personal 阿experience as a way to exemplify his general thesis concerning the effects of ownership.
5. In this essay, Forster uses his own experience with ownership to generalize about society’s materialism. Do you consider yourself materialistic? In what ways? Do you consider it a positive or negative trait in yourself or others? Think of something you have purchased after wanting it for a long time. In an essay explain the two or three main ways in which owning this item has affected your life.
[1] See Matthew, XIX, 23-24. (Then Jesus said to His disciples, 「Assuredly, I say to you that it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. And again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.」
[2] Son of Man Jesus Christ
[3] See 1 Kings, XXI, 1-8. (Now Naboth the Jezreelite had a vineyard in Jezreel, beside the palace of Ahab king of Samaria. And after this Ahab said to Naboth, 「Give me your vineyard, that I may have it for a vegetable garden, because it is near my house; and I will give you a better vineyard for it; or, if it seems good to you, I will give you its value in money.」 But Naboth said to Ahab, 「The Lord forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my fathers.」 And Ahab went into his house vexed and sullen because of what Naboth the Jezreelite had said to him; for he had said, 「I will not give you the inheritance of my fathers.」 And he lay down on his bed, and turned away his face, and would eat no food. But Jezebel his wife came to him, and said to him, 「Why is your spririt so vexed that you eat no food?」 And he said to her, 「Because I spoke to Naboth the Jezreelite, and said to him, 『Give me your vineyard for money; or else, if it please you, I will give you another vineyard for it; and he answered, 『I will not give you my vineyard.』 」 And Jezebel his wife said to him, 「Do you now govern Israel? Arise, and eat bread, and let your heart be cheerful; I will give you the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite.」 So she wrote letters in Ahab’s name and sealed them with his seal, and she sent the letters to the elders and the nobles who dwelt with Naboth in his city.
[4] Canute (Cnut) (c. 995—1035) King of England, Denmark and Norway. He invaded Scotland in about 1027, and conquered Norway in 1028. His emire broke up after his death.
[5] Alexander III of Macedon (356-323B.C.) the Great king
[6] See Luke XVI, 19-28 (「There was a certain rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and fared sumptuously every day. But there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, full of sores, who was laid at his gate, Desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table. Moreover the dogs came and licked his sores. So it was that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died and was buried. And being in torments in Hades, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. Then he cried and said, 『Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.』 But Abraham said, 『Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted and you are tormented. And besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, so that those who want to pass from here to you cannot, nor can those from there pass to us.』 Then he said, 『I beg you therefore, father, that you would send him to my father’s house, for I have five brothers, that he may testify to them, lest they also come to this place of torment.』 」)