LITERARY CRITICISM

Radio reviews

GORDON BOWKER

Jeffrey M. Heath, editor THE CREATOR AS CRITIC And other writings by E. M. Forster 844pp. Dundum Press. £45 (US $90). 978 1 550025224

Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes and Elizabeth Macleod Walls, editors

THE BBC TALKS OF

E. M. FORSTER, 1929-1960 463pp. University of Missouri Press. $59.95; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £40.95. 978 0 8262 1800 1

E. M. Forster by Feliks Topolski (1962) 

Behind most published writings lie hinterlands of notes, drafts, corrected proofs, forgotten prose pieces, diary entries and letters - relics and records of lives and works in progress, which often offer valuable leads to biographers exploring creative processes and scholars searching for figures in carpets. The Creator As Critic contains some 350 pages of previously uncollected Forster material (some hitherto unpublished), and 400 pages of editorial notes, attempting thereby to satisfy both scholar and general reader. The Forster pages are a mixture of lecture notes, essays, radio broadcasts, and memoirs (including a fine one of Cavafy), spanning most of his adult life, and encompassing literary interests from Dryden to Hemingway. The notes afford an illuminating subtext to this absorbing if heterogeneous assemblage.
The volume of BBC Talks includes a selection of Forster's contributions as the Corporation's chief book reviewer between 1930 and 1960. As a pioneer broadcaster and advocate of high culture, he was influential in the creation of the Third Programme (which expired just two months before his own death in 1970). His microphone manner echoes the relaxed cadence of his fiction, and some scripts make valuable additions to essays already available in Abinger Harvest, Two Cheers for Democracy and the posthumous Prince's Tale - lectures on Wordsworth, Austen, Hardy and Twain, for example, and reviews of Wells, Huxley, Koestler and Orwell, which help trace the trajectory of English fiction of the 1930s and 40s.
Together these collections give us Forster both meditative and critical, the balance favoring work done after 1924, the publication year of his final novel, A Passage to India. The Creator As Critic offers early essays on literature, remembrances of Rome, and recollections of childhood, but nothing by way of notes or drafts to reveal the novelist in action. On the other hand, intimations and reflections of his pre-war fiction are there in his gentle mockery of the "beauties" of Italy, the poignancy of his diary as a wartime Red Cross orderly, and his interest in the evolving personality inspired by reading Walter Pater and Samuel Butler, especially The Way of All Flesh. It was Butler, he reveals, from whom he took his humanistic outlook, and who, with Jane Austen and Proust, influenced him most as a writer. In Forster's case, the additional subtext of repressed homosexuality requires decoding. Here some interesting clues are on offer - essays on youthful sexual encounters, on men he found attractive (he preferred the 'rough lower-class type"), and passing references to "Dadie", "Goldie", Roger, Duncan, Lytton and Maynard - fellow Cambridge Apostles, a taste of whose philosophical discourse can be sampled at the opening of The Longest Journey.
A number of mysteries surround Forster which these books help unravel. Why did he stop writing novels after 1924? As a contemporary of D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and
Virginia Woolf, what was his relation to Modernism? In lectures at Cambridge in the 1940s, he addressed Wilde's assertion that criticism can be creative. Forster depicts the act of creation as an unconscious dreamlike process, as against criticism, which requires conscious effort - a key distinction, which, he claims, escaped Wilde. His chief example was Coleridge, an undistinguished poet until he took the opium which transformed him into the creator of "Kubla Khan" and "The Ancient Mariner". As the same drug began to destroy the creative impulse he turned to the philosophy which gave us Biographia Literaria. The death of the creator proclaimed the birth of the critic. In addition to Coleridge (creator turned critic), Forster cites Henry James (creator as self-critic) and Joyce (creator incorporating criticism into his fictions). His own case he ignores.
The idea that Forster abandoned fiction for criticism simply because he dried up is only partly true. He suggests as much in a 1958 interview included in The Creator As Critic:
"I had been accustomed to write about the old-fashioned world with its homes and its family life and its comparative peace. All that went, and though I can think about it I can't put it into fiction". But he also alludes darkly to "other reasons". His biographer P. N. Furbank tells how he grew bored writing about heterosexual relationships, wanting instead to explore homosexual life and feelings, which the climate of the times forbade. (Maurice, his one gay novel, was published posthumously.) After 1924, he confined himself to writing short "indecent" stories for  private circulation, one of which, "Dr Woolacott", he considered "the best thing I've ever done and also unlike anyone else's work". Forster therefore became a creative writer restricted to reflecting critically on the creations of others. In an essay on "Pornography and Sentimentality" he hints at the apprehension this situation engendered: "Objects of loving are numerous, and those who do not sympathize with the artist's passion will be repelled by it".
Some consider Forster too conventional to merit "a place in the Modernist movement (it's difficult to imagine Joyce or Lawrence broadcasting along respectable Reithian lines). Others see him as a bridge between Victorian and modem sensibility, only taking a tentative step towards the world of the unstable consciousness with A Passage to India, before withdrawing to the sidelines. Writing about different literary generations, he noted the "scientific curiosity" of younger writers and their learning from Freud about the disjointed self, and from Einstein about time-space mutability. Forster the critic, however, preferred poetry to science. With literature, he wrote, "it is better to keep to metaphors, and to analogies with natural states".
The radio talks remind us what an accomplished and sometimes idiosyncratic broadcaster Forster was. An epitaph to Lytton Strachey (a close friend) tells us he was "clever" and "malicious" yet "amusing" and "affectionate". An obituary of D. H. Lawrence (a quarrelsome friend) reveals a strange preference for The Plumed Serpent - "to my mind his finest novel". Elsewhere, he waxes satirical when the Catholic poet Alfred Noyes, who, having campaigned vigorously to have Ulysses suppressed in Britain, succeeded in overturning a Vatican ban on his biography of Voltaire. "We may congratulate Mr. Noyes for having won a battle for British freedom."
Forster's reactions to Joyce reveal his ambivalence towards Modernism. In Aspects of the Novel, while greeting Ulysses as "the most interesting literary experiment of our day", he also found it "a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud ... a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell". Later, in his Cambridge lectures, he was admiring Joyce's evident "emotional kinship" with Shakespeare in the "Scylla & Charybdis" episode of the novel. In a broadcast in 1944, he applauded Harry Levin's critical introduction to Joyce for revealing its author as "an artificer of words" whose "work tends to twist away from fiction towards music". Forster, however, wanted novels to be "about something and someone though he accepted that Joyce was perfectly entitled to write as he pleased.
His following talk raised the question "Is the Novel Dead?". Forster decided it was not, while acknowledging that some of the best fiction of the younger generation had followed Joyce, Lawrence and Woolf into the realms of poetry and incantation. The question of how his own work - had he continued producing novels - might have been influenced by such trends is left hanging. How he fared as a critic is well demonstrated by both these engrossing collections.