117. A Passage to India by EM Forster

Normally in this blog I wouldn’t investigate books with quotations as titles. There are many of these, of course, tending to cluster around the early part of the twentieth century (when this titling strategy was particularly fashionable): Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. Books with quotations as titles are not usually very interesting (purely from a titular point of view), because after having uncovered the source of the quotation there is usually little else to say. But I’d like to make an exception for A Passage to India because the source of the quotation (and quotation it is) was, to me, very surprising. A Passage to India was lifted from the poem ‘Passage to India’ by Walt Whitman.

Whitman was the pioneering gay poet of the nineteenth century, and a man with an important influence on Forster’s career (a man who, Forster wrote, ‘went the “whole hog”’). Forster was of course himself homosexual and wrote several short stories with gay themes (‘The Obelisk’ being one of the most notorious, and funniest), and a novel, Maurice, none of which was published during his lifetime. Whitman’s 'Passage to India' is not explicitly homosexual in theme – it is instead a rapturous allegorical address to the voyaging soul – but in certain of its lines we get some sense of why the author of Maurice esteemed him so highly:

Reckoning ahead, O soul, when thou, the time achiev’d
(The seas all cross’d, weather’d the capes, the voyage done,)
Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim attain’d,
As, fill’d with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother found,
The Younger melts in fondness in his arms.

Consulted:
Lago, Mary: E.M. Forster: A Literary Life‎ (1995)