E. M. Forster

Earth takes five of his ten planets, fire three, and a single one each in air and water. Four of the ten were retrograde. This chart holds no closed figure of any kind. The record says Forster wrote A Room with a View, Howards End and A Passage to India, then published no more novels in the last forty six years of his life, and that Maurice, written in 1914, appeared after his death.

Mercury sits square Saturn at eight hundredths of a degree, the tightest contact here, and the reading is thought meeting doubt: self-criticism, difficulty being understood, and a mind that treats its own uncertainty as evidence of stupidity when it is usually evidence of care. A novelist who published three major novels and then nothing for forty six years, while keeping a finished one unpublished, is the subject that reading was waiting for, and both of its first two clauses land.

What the record does not say is why, and the chart cannot supply it. A book written in 1914 and published fifty six years later was withheld for reasons the record leaves out, and there is a difference between a man who could not satisfy himself and a man who judged the conditions wrong. The first is in the reading above. The second is a fact about a period, and self-criticism is not the only thing that keeps a manuscript in a drawer.

The Moon sits at an awkward angle to Mars at a tenth of a degree, need and drive colliding, with its sign certain at twenty one degrees of Aries. The Sun sits in quiet contact with Jupiter at fifteen hundredths, growth without much friction: opportunity arriving through being well thought of, which for three novels still in print is the reading this record confirms most easily. Mercury, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were the four retrograde planets. He died at Coventry on 7 June 1970, at ninety one. Pluto stood in easy contact with its own natal place at seven hundredths of a degree that day, a contact shared with everybody born within a few years of him, and the Moon sixty degrees from that same Pluto at eleven hundredths. The Moon was new and eleven per cent lit.