eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
A major reassessment of the great English novelist
This impressive new book by the celebrated British critic Frank Kermode examines hitherto neglected aspects of the novelist E. M. Forster's life and work. Kermode is interested to see how it was that this apparently shy, reclusive man should have claimed and kept such a central position in the English writing of his time, even though for decades he composed no fiction and he was not close to any of his great contemporaries—Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce.
Concerning E. M. Forster has at its core the Clark Lectures that Kermode gave at Cambridge University in 2007 on the subject of Forster, eighty years after Forster himself gave those lectures, which became Aspects of the Novel. Kermode reappraised the influence and meaning of that great work, assessed the significance of Forster's profound musicality (Britten thought him the most musical of all writers), and offered a brilliant interpretation of Forster's greatest work, A Passage to India. But there is more to Concerning E. M. Forster than that. Thinking about Forster vis-àvis other great modern writers, noting his interest in Proust and Gide and his lack of curiosity about American fiction, and observing that Forster was closest to the people who shared not his literary interests or artistic vocation but, rather, his homosexuality, Kermode's book offers a wise, original, and persuasive new portrait not just of Forster but of twentieth-century English letters.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429935975 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 189 |
| File size: | 409 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Concerning E. M. Forster
By Frank Kermode
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2009 Frank KermodeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3597-5
CHAPTER 1
Aspects of Aspects
It is eighty years since E.M. Forster gave the Clark Lectures. His series was a great success, but not with everybody; Dr F.R. Leavis sat through all eight – audiences and lecturers had real stamina in those days – and recalled that he was 'astonished at the intellectual nullity that characterized them'. The only explanation for their 'gruesome success', he went on, was that the audience consisted largely of 'sillier dons and their wives'. As he was responsible for the teaching of English at Girton and Newnham, he claimed he was well placed to judge the damage caused among susceptible women students by the book in which the lectures were later published. It seems that even before they arrived in Cambridge their schoolmistresses had convinced them of Forster's importance as a critical theorist, especially as it was demonstrated, much to Dr Leavis's annoyance, by his differentiation of flat and round characters.
There was notoriously little love lost between Leavis, future editor of the severe quarterly Scrutiny, and members of the King's College–Bloomsbury coterie – the Woolfs, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, and so on – to which Forster belonged. Unlike Leavis, he was not a don but an independent writer, professing a highminded hedonism to which the highminded puritan Leavis might have been expected to be bleakly hostile. Yet they had more in common than appeared. Leavis's more formal and considered opinion of Forster was expressed in an essay published first in Scrutiny in 1938 and later in The Common Pursuit (1952). This essay is an exasperated tribute to the 'oddly limited and uncertain quality of [Forster's] distinction – his real and very fine distinction'. Without saying very much in detail about the novels, which he accuses of 'a curious lack of grasp', Dr Leavis congratulates Forster on the 'poise' of his art, which nevertheless 'has something equivocal in it'; his 'felicities ... involve limitations'. And he finds, in the earlier novels particularly, a characteristic 'spinsterly touch'. (This epithet is used again in the essay.) He goes on to make the necessary comparisons and limiting judgements: compared with Henry James Forster is 'only too unmistakably minor'. Howards End has an inherent weakness, a sentimentality, a lack of contact with the real (for instance, in the treatment of Leonard Bast). Leavis's dislike of the liberal culture of Bloomsbury entails some severity of judgement even on A Passage to India. But the essay ends, rather unexpectedly, with a 'parting salute': a recommendation that 'Forster's is a name that, in these days we should peculiarly honour'.
A good deal of what has been written on Forster has this shape: he irritates readers who nevertheless feel obliged, in the end, to do him honour. I think that's right, and will pay the debt of honour without ceding my right to some bouts of irritation. I do believe that Forster was an artist of peculiar distinction; excellent books have been written to prove it. But I also believe that there are reasons for dissentient judgements and some of these I shall try to express. To do so may, in the end, be a way of paying more tribute, for the causes of irritation may well be closely related to the causes of admiration.
I haven't, given my prescribed scope, been able to treat of any of the novels at any length, hoping only that some parts of them, lit from unfamiliar angles, may strike even readers learned in Forster as new and valuable. This first chapter is more panoramic than the others, the viewing point being Aspects of the Novel. In the second I'll be concentrating on Forster and music (Benjamin Britten called him the most musical of our novelists, and the point will stand looking at). In the third my eye is mostly though not exclusively on A Passage to India, the book I believe without reservation or equivocation to be his greatest.
Forster regarded himself as an artist. Unpublished or uncollected material is still turning up in impressive quantities, and a fairly large proportion of it consists of criticism of one kind or another, but he believed that criticism was of almost no use to art and artists. His own art was fiction, but he said firmly, in a broadcast of 1944, that 'the novel ... has not any rules and there is no such thing as the art of fiction'. This remark needs qualifying: he was proud of his own work as an artist. He understood what Virginia Woolf was trying to do and knew that she also was an artist, though with a 'method' different from his own. As to criticism, he not only wrote piles of it, mostly in the form of reviews, short essays and occasional lectures or memoirs read to friends, but was capable of dropping his usual persona, the mild, intelligent, undemanding conversationalist, and of treating unworthy opposites with chilling contempt. Oswald Mosley, Edward VII and his biographer Sidney Lee are scorned, though with less severity than Hilaire Belloc and Gauguin and John Middleton Murry and Christian missionaries. Christabel Pankhurst suffers the kind of justice she would have preferred to ignore ('very able, very clever, and very unpleasant', thought Forster, though he 'agreed with most of her remarks'). A.E. Housman, for whose poems he had a deep affection, he made unsuccessful attempts to cultivate – Housman lived for many years in Trinity, five minutes away from King's College – but he had no luck; he neatly summed up the great man's 'combination of unamiability and creative power'. Of a novel by the French statesman Georges Clemenceau – whose prowess as a novelist may have been great in the immediate post-war years though, I suppose, no longer – he offered a test of lifelessness: 'Pinch the book where you will, and it does not move.'
With Henry James the quarrel was more polite but also more important. Forster respected James, but judging by the number of occasions on which he expressed his disappointment with James's work his heart wasn't really in it. He could bear some of James's earlier work but he drew the line at What Maisie Knew ('I haven't quite got through her yet, but I think I shall: she is my very limit – beyond her lies The Golden Bowl, The Ambassadors and similar impossibilities') and he regarded The Sense of the Past as the only tolerable specimen of late James. In short, he might be described as habitually unreceptive to James. When he was twenty he read Portrait of a Lady and commented, 'it is very wonderful, but there's something wrong with him or me: he is not George Meredith' (Meredith was venerated at the time, though rejected later). When he visited James at Rye the great man mistook him for somebody else – for G.E. Moore as it happened – which may or may not have softened the blow.
What repelled him in James was the lack, as Forster saw it, of solidity and of character, and the preoccupation with what James took to be the art of fiction, with 'pattern', what James would call 'the doing' – a fanatical attachment to the treatment of the subject rather than to the material Forster regarded as the basic novelistic substance, the rendering of bourgeois life. Forster did not disapprove of experiment – one could argue that, in their ways, his own novels are all experimental – but he found the Jamesian experiments bloodless and without savour. 'What did he mean by art? Well, something that doesn't interest us much now, and that's why he's so neglected.' This judgement was made in 1931, but catches Forster's permanent discontent with James. 'He seems to me our only perfect novelist, but alas, it isn't a very enthralling type of perfection.' So with Virginia Woolf: he admired her innovations but strongly defended his own practice against hers. We need to remember that although his writings on fiction were voluminous they were also, for the most part, occasional, and he was under no obligation to provide systematic comment on his contemporaries. Still, it does seem odd that he has little or nothing of interest to say about many of them, including his near contemporary Ford Madox Ford, who was not only a very good novelist but a fertile theorist, respected by the avant-garde. Forster didn't have much interest in the avant-garde as such, though on occasion he praised the work of individuals associated with it.
But the main opponent, the acknowledged master who departed so wilfully from the tradition as he believed it should be properly understood, was James. Given that he represented an attitude to fiction more or less diametrically opposite to Forster's, he provided a necessary target in Aspects, and the work that had to suffer the lecturer's quietly charitable dissection was one of the 'impossibles', The Ambassadors. Forster gave it more attention than any other novel, except possibly Gide's Les Faux-Monnayeurs, though the intention in that case also was hostile.
Part of the case against James in Aspects is made by allusion to a painful and famous disagreement between James and H.G. Wells. This quiet but momentous quarrel had its origin in an article James wrote in the Times Literary Supplement in 1914 on the younger generation of novelists. In 'The New Novel', he surveyed at some length the contemporary state of fiction (though without allusion to Forster) and lamented the defective art of a great many industrious practitioners. His principal targets were Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells. These were writers he could not dismiss out of hand, but he complained that neither was interested in what he liked to call the 'doing'.
Objecting to James's remarks on his work and Arnold Bennett's, Wells attacked James in Boon (1915), a book that was more a collection of squibs than a novel. He accused James of creating lifeless characters and sacrificing everything to the demands of artistic unity. 'The thing his novel is about,' said Wells, 'is always there. It is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string.'
James wrote Wells what in the circumstances was a friendly letter. He had remarked in his essay on what he called the absence of 'interest' in Wells and Bennett, and now spoke for his own interest: 'I hold that interest may be, must be, exquisitely made and created, and that if we don't make it, we who undertake to, nobody & nothing will make it for us.' Wells replied that he had a natural horror of 'dignity, finish and perfection'. He felt that James's contrary views had too much influence, and choosing to be a journalist rather than an artist, he thought it right to challenge James's attitude and maintain his own kind of 'interest'. James's response, wounded but courteous, ends with a famous declaration: 'It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance ... and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of the process.'
In Aspects of the Novel Forster seems quite pleased to see James ridiculed, and firmly awards the judgement to Wells – a disquieting conclusion in view of the philistinism of Wells's satire and the studied insolence of his replies to letters in which James, having allowed himself a mild criticism of his friend's manners, nevertheless took the trouble to explain his position, and to convey his inevitable decision to renounce any attempt to understand Wells's.
Having enjoyed the comedy of James's discomfiture, Forster declares that his quarrel with Wells has, nevertheless, 'literary importance'. The question immediately at issue is that of the rigid pattern; the hour-glass shape of The Ambassadors is achieved at the cost of 'life'. Wells had said that 'life should be given the preference and must not be whittled or distended for a pattern's sake', and Forster agrees. To James this is heresy. Bennett's novel Clayhanger, he had memorably remarked, is 'a monument exactly not to an idea, a pursued and captured meaning, or in short, to anything whatever, but just simply of the quarried and gathered material it happens to contain, the stones and bricks and rubble and cement and promiscuous constituents of every sort that have been heaped in it'. As for Wells, his procedures were tantamount to his turning 'out his mind and its contents upon us by any free familiar gesture and as from a high window forever open'. James's case against both novelists he summed up thus: 'Yes, yes – but is this all? These are the circumstances of the interest – we see, we see – but where is the interest itself, where and what is its centre ...?'
As it happens, the gifted Bennett was capable of the kind of novel that James might have approved but Riceyman Steps came too late for him to comment. (That duty was undertaken by Virginia Woolf, whose comments on Riceyman Steps are remarkably obtuse.) Bennett was capable, and knew himself to be capable, of Jamesian refinements. But he preferred to be read by the multitude, and so did Wells. The differences between, say, The Golden Bowl and anything Wells would have wanted to write are clear enough. As Wells expressed it, 'James begins by taking it for granted that a novel is a work of art that must be judged by its oneness. Someone gave him that idea in the beginning of things and he has never found it out'. For Wells it was a question of choosing between doing art and doing life. But for James doing art was doing life. He said so in the beautiful letter to Wells that ended their argument.
'My own prejudices are with Wells,' wrote Forster, who believed you could do anything with a novel, use any technical move to 'bounce' the reader, as he put it, so long as you got away with it. But what he wished to get away with was a form of the art that makes life and importance, that was, to recall his own pronouncement, 'the one orderly product our muddling race has produced'. In short he was on the side of James, but he allowed his distaste for the pattern, and the prose, and the sacrifice of realistic character to persuade him, in this instance, to disparage the force and beauty of James's art.
Forster's first four novels were written in the same years – the first decade of the twentieth century – as James's Prefaces to the New York edition of his novels. One might have expected the youthful Forster, himself searching for original ways to treat traditional forms, to be impressed by these remarkable exercises, which had such a powerful influence on later writers and critics. For example, re-reading What Maisie Knew elicited from the fluent master a full account of the genesis and maturing of his story, with special reference to the technical difficulty of making the little girl the central consciousness of the narrative. Maisie cannot be expected to possess a full understanding of her parents' divorce and subsequent behaviour ('the infant mind would at the best leave great gaps and voids'). But it is exactly here that James sees the possibilities that interest him; he likes, he says, to glory in the gap – in this case the gap between what Maisie's parents are up to and what she, with her limited knowledge and experience, can make of it; and he conceives it to be the business of art to give the reader a full sense of the affair on the information acquired from this imperfect source. He is pleased with the result: 'nothing could be more "done", I think, in the light of its happiest intention'.
I don't know whether Forster read or even glanced at the Prefaces, but it is safe to surmise that any admiration he felt for them would have been in this case quite severely qualified. His friend Percy Lubbock in his unexciting treatise The Craft of Fiction was fervently on the side of James, maintaining that a novel must have but one character entitled to a point of view; in The Ambassadors (the very book Forster chose to make his disapproval plain) that character was Strether. Forster was not impressed; James was devoted to his 'aesthetic duty', he wrote, 'but at what sacrifice! ... Most of human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel.' The characters are 'deformed', sacrificed to James's ideal. Had he set himself to develop a story of this kind, Forster would have favoured a much less oblique approach; he affirmed the author's right to express his opinions, his right, if he chose, to explain to the reader directly how, in his view, the matter appeared when looked at in its relation not to Strether or Maisie but to such other characters as he chose to use, or simply to the universe.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Concerning E. M. Forster by Frank Kermode. Copyright © 2009 Frank Kermode. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,Acknowledgements,
PART ONE,
1 Aspects of Aspects,
2 Beethoven, Wagner, Vinteuil,
3 Krishna,
PART TWO,
E.M. Forster: A Causerie,
Select Bibliography,
Index,