The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster, 1928–1960: A Selected Edition (review)

It would surely be going too far to claim that modernist literary studies are in the midst of a radio revolution. However, one may reasonably speak of a radio renaissance, given the burgeoning critical interest in modernist writers’ involvement with radio and in the ways that the emergence of radio in the 1920s as a mass telecommunications medium and a technocultural phenomenon altered the material and ideological conditions of literary production and circulation in the early and mid-twentieth century. In their latest overview of the New Modernist Studies, Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz select two recent developments for detailed consideration—an “increasing emphasis on transnational exchange” and a growing if less pervasive concern with mass media. They argue that, while the former promises to remain a radically transformative and defining tendency, as yet “the concentration of work around mass media . . . pertains to a smaller body of publication, has been little remarked so far, and may turn out to be not the leading edge of a major trend but only a momentary convergence . . . of individual scholarly projects.”¹

It is indeed too early to predict, much less to know, how significant the conjunction of radio studies and modernist studies will be as a critical development in the broader region of the cultural studies of modernist literature. Nevertheless, two recent books, focused either in part or exclusively on E. M. Forster’s career at the British Broadcasting Corporation, evince the steady growth of the body of publication of which Mao and Walkowitz write, and should gain for it greater remark. Jeffrey M. Heath’s large, meticulously edited collection, The Creator as Critic and Other Writings by E. M. Forster,² gathers over forty unpublished essays, talks, lectures, memoirs, and memoranda that Forster wrote between the turn of the century and 1960. It also includes thirty-three of Forster’s previously uncollected and mostly unpublished BBC radio broadcasts, accompanied by detailed biographical, historical, referential, and variant notes. The notes alone, which at roughly 100 pages equal the total length of the broadcasts themselves, constitute an important contribution to the expanding scholarship on Forster and radio, and therefore on radio and British modernism in general. This book is a valuable compendium of Forster’s work across a range of non-fiction genres: a model of painstaking and pleasantly readable scholarship, it solidly supports the claim made by several critics that “it is in the unread archives and in the unexamined histories of modernist texts that scholars will recover the riches of modernist literature.”³

From this perspective, and regarding Forster’s work as a broadcaster exclusively, a more significant event is the publication of Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes, and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls’s collection, which suggests the field-altering potential, with respect to the complex relations between traditional literary culture and emergent electronic mass culture, that resides in the large and still underexplored vaults of the BBC Written Archives Centre. This volume gathers seventy of Forster’s 145 broadcasts—only four overlapping with Heath’s selection—and “makes [a] significant archive newly accessible to readers” (8). The introduction claims that “the relationship between E. M. Forster and the BBC . . . remains something of a surprise today. One might study Forster meticulously, understand his views on the individual and society, enumerate and appraise his life’s work without delving into his thirty-year career as a radio broadcaster” (1). One might indeed have done so before the appearance of this book. The tripartite purpose of The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster is to show how his “broadcasts situate Forster as one of the most poignant voices of the twentieth century,” to trace “all stages of Forster’s evolution” as a public intellectual, and to “record . . . identities that few readers of his works ever encounter” (11, 44). In other words, what Lago, Hughes, and Walls...