Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshop: Professor Santanu Das, 'E.M.Forster and Mohammed El Adl: leads, clues and muddles'

1 November 10:30 to 12:30
History of the Book Room, English Faculty

Registration for this event is now closed.

Join us for the first Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshop of Michaelmas Term 2024, led by Professor Santanu Das (All Souls College)

Transcript of a letter from El Adl, in E. M. Forster’s hand.

Transcript of a letter from El Adl, in E. M. Forster’s hand

Between 1922 and 1929, E.M.Forster intermittently composed a ‘letter’ to his Egyptian lover ‘Mohammed El Adl, who died aged about twenty three: of consumption’. The Bloomsbury novelist and the Arab-Egyptian tram-conductor famously met in Alexandria in 1916 and had the ‘most beautiful affair’ even though, in the middle of the liaison, El Adl decided to get married and have a child whom he named ‘Morgan’. By May 1922, both father and child were dead.

Starting with material from the Forster collection at King’s College Cambridge – a tram-ticket, photographs, letters, snippets from the locked diary – we will, in the workshop, closely investigate Forster’s extraordinary letter as he tries to rescue the ‘real’ El Adl as much from oblivion as from ‘my love for him’ and ‘all these words’. Is such a thing possible? ‘It is just the chance, the faint chance’, Forster notes ruefully, ‘that I am still just able to write “you” instead of “him”’. How does this living quarrel between ‘you’ and ‘him’ affect questions of form and style? Why are intimate, often physical, details – El Adl’s smile, arousals, irritations, rebuffs – so vital to Forster’s project? What particular risks, emotional and ethical, does the lover-as-memoirist run? If time permits, we will also connect the letter to his novel A Passage to India (1924), completed soon after El Adl’s death, and a paper he presented to the Bloomsbury ‘Memoir Club’, and explore the boundaries between letter, essay, memoir and fiction.

Mohammed El adl

Mohammed El Adl

Santanu Das is a Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at All Souls College, University of Oxford. He is the author of Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature and India, Empire and First World War Culture: Writings, Images and Songs. He is currently completing a book for Cambridge University Press provisionally called Intimate Forms: Archive, Experience and the Making of Modern Literature and editing the Oxford Book of First World War Colonial Writing.    

 

Please note that this event is ONLY open to current members of the University of Oxford. Workshop places will be allocated on a first come, first served basis with priority given to members of the English Faculty. Places will be confirmed one week before the event.

Tea/coffee and cake will be served during the workshop.

This event will take place in the St Cross building on Manor Road (more information). Attendees are advised to wear face coverings while indoors and to use an LFT prior to the event.