Read ”

My Wood

 ” by E. M. Forster 

Is there a serious deeper message in Forster’s essay, a point Forster tries to make? If so, what is it? Does he do this in an effective manner in your opinion?

You probably have something you value highly. Do you feel the same about it as Forster about his property? How important is it for you to own things?

Write at least one full paragraph.

MyWood

by E. M. Forster (1879-1970)

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 check to the author was the result. I bought a wood with the

check. It is not a large wood–it contains scarcely any trees, and it is intersected,

blast it, by a public foot-path. 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 robe of God. 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. 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 as 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 flight 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 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! Happier Alexander! 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 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

moneymaking or beauty. They spring from a foolish desire to express myself and

from an inability to enjoy what I have got. Creation, property, enjoyment form a

sinister trinity in the human mind. Creation and 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. Blackberries are

not plentiful in this meager 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

has 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 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.

(1926)

First published in 1926, E.M. Forster’s “My Wood” appears in the collection

Abinger Harvest (1936, reprinted in 1996 by Andre Deutsch Ltd.).