Censorship and freedom: E.M. Forster's voice.

Abstract

At the outset of the Second World War, E. M. Forster’s essays describe the uncertainties of a time of crisis and change, in which the writer is required to rebuild civilization – a task that can be accomplished if literary creation occurs in an atmosphere of liberty.

This paper aims to illustrate Forster’s discourse on freedom of expression and censorship, through the analysis of his 1930s and 1940s talks, essays and broadcasts, in part included in the volume Two Cheers for Democracy. This collection can be inscribed in Forster’s commitment as a public intellectual, a custodian of liberal values: he leads the National Council for Civil Liberties, he fights literary censorship – see Well of Loneliness, Boy, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover cases [Furbank] – and praises Milton’s Aeropagitica.

As early as 1935, Forster had uttered the impressive words “I do believe in liberty” at the International Congress of Writers, in an address on the link between free speech and British cultural tradition, to be protected against the threat of totalitarianisms in Europe. It comes as no surprise that his essay The New Disorder (1941) is translated in the periodical Il Mese (1943) among the pages of authors who were still unknown in Italy or silenced by fascist censorship: only the inherent harmony of art – Forster states – can be an antidote to the troubles of the time.