Untidy Old Bird

Two CHEERS FOR DEMOCRACY (363 pp.) --E. M. Forsfer--Harcourf, Brace ($4).

As any visitor to the untidy London flat might guess, it houses an old bachelor. In the sitting room, a hastily thrown coverlet drapes an obviously unmade bed. A litter of books, manuscripts and knick-knacks lines walls and floors like the twigs of a nest. Amiably at home in this cozy mess flutters a rare old bird, the dean of English letters, Edward Morgan Forster.

Seventy-two-year-old E. M. Forster is almost as rumpled and untidy as his rooms. The tweeds he wears are worn and baggy, his thinning grey hair unruly, his bushy grey mustache in need of a trim. Bony and angular, with pale, piercing eyes, he looks, as one American interviewer put it, rather "like a spare, intelligent, ruffled heron."

Nibbling the Cheese. These days, the heron is hobbled, too. In a fall last June, Forster broke an ankle, and he still keeps it strapped and limps about painfully. But the flashing intelligence and humane spirit which gave the 20th Century one of its finest novels, A Passage to India, are as unhobbled as ever.

A Passage to India appeared in 1924. After it, Forster unaccountably banked the creative fires which had blazed through five crackling good novels, beginning with Where Angels Fear to Tread in 1905. Fireside chats took their place. Mostly contemplative, critical essays and reminiscences, these were first collected in Abinger Harvest, published in 1936. Two Cheers for Democracy brings the collection up to date.

In his new chats, Forster roams freely from Beethoven's Symphony No. g and Eliot's Cocktail Party to a laughing description of how a South African houseboy once dumped a juicy platter of chicken in his lap. While demonstrating the range of his mind, he also files a minority report on the direction in which he thinks civilization is moving. Skeptical, urbane, relativistic, Two Cheers for Democracy is the report of a man who prefers to stand in the cool draft of a perpetually open mind. In an age of anxiety, he implies, more & more men are nibbling at the tempting cheese of "absolutes" and "certainties." To Forster, the only certainty is that too much certainty leads to intolerance, and intolerance leads man into bloody traps.

Judging Brutus. In his tilt with the absolutists, Forster employs one absolute of his own: moral courage. "I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. Such a choice may scandalize the modern reader ... It would not have shocked Dante, though. Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell because they had chosen to betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their country Rome . . . Love and loyalty to an individual can run counter to the claims of the state. When they do--down with the state, say I, which means that the state would down me."

Forster ranks personal relationships above the state because personal relationships rest on the claims of love; the state rests ultimately on the claims of force. The causists and "idealists" try to vaccinate the state with love. It will not take, says Forster, because "love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends, and stand among strangers in a queue for potatoes ... In public affairs . . . something much less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance."

Chins Up. Democracy deserves two cheers, says Forster, because democracy tolerates: 1) individual freedom, and 2) criticism of itself. He adds: "Two cheers are quite enough."

Democracy, laments Forster, fosters the cult of the "Average Man." This average fellow is all too seldom encouraged to chin himself on the upper reaches of the human spirit. He becomes that "charming and seductive" type of snob, the anti-intellectual snob. " 'I know what I like and

I know what I want,' says the crowd . . ." "What I like" and "what I want" turn out to be "crooners, bestsellers, electrical-organists, funny-faces, dreamgirls, and mickey-mice."

In his talks over the BBC's upper-reach Third Program, E. M. Forster has tried his best to make Britain more worthy of Cheer No. 3. "Quality," he preaches, "is everywhere imperiled . . . Those who value it, as I do, are in a vulnerable position. We form as it were an aristocracy in the midst of a democracy, and we belong and desire to belong to the democracy."

But E. M. Forster doesn't want to sound intolerant, even about a good thing like quality: "Perhaps one day everyone will want to listen to Racine. I don't think so, and I don't at the bottom of my heart hope so ... I don't take to the idea of civilization being too tidy."

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