More by Forster

BOOK REVIEWS 1. MORE BY FÖRSTER Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, Vol. II, 1921-1970. Eds. Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985. $20.00 Calendar of the Letters of E. M. Forster. Comp. Mary Lago. London and New York: Mansell, 1985. £28.50 E. M. Forster, Commonplace Book, ed. Philip Gardner. Stanford Univ. Press, 1985. $35.00 E. M. Forster, The Longest Journey (The Abinger Edition), ed. EUzabeth Heine. London: Edward Arnold; New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985. $69.50 It is heartening that so many of the primary materials in the Forster Archive at King's College, Cambridge and from Ubraries elsewhere are being published for the benefit of the educated public and of scholars alike. In the volumes of the Abinger Edition of E. M. Forster, relevant unpublished or uncollected materials have appeared, which is again true for 77ie Longest Journey. We now have Selected Letters in two volumes and a scholarly edition of the Commonplace Book. The reader should also consult the account by Michael Halls (the modern archivist at King's CoUege), "The Forster Collection at King's: A Survey" in a cunent E. M. Forster special issue of Twentieth Century Literature (31, Summer-Fall, 1985). Halls indicates that the major reserved item still unpublished is Forster's Locked Journal (1909 to 1967); there are apparently no plans for its publication at present, though a xerox copy for the years 1907 to 1947 may be consulted at King's. I understand that delays are likely in assembling further volumes in the Abinger Edition, and there is some question as to whether the great number of uncollected articles and reviews will be collected in the edition, some of them among Forster's finest work as essayist and critic. With the appearance of The Longest Journey in the Abinger, aU the novels except Maurice are now accounted for. This book, of course, does exist in a modern edition, although as Philip Gardner points out in "The Evolution of E. M. Forster's Maurice" (E. M. Forster: Centenary Evaluations, edited by Herz and Martin), there is a distinct need to establish for it a definitive text (there are no immediate plans to include it in the Abinger). To the extent that they are available, the manuscripts for the novels have been consulted and where appropriate reprinted in usable form, either as Appendices to the given volume or as a supplementary volume to the novel in question. The Indian Journal, the bulk of the Indian conespondence, and a previously unpublished memoir, "Kanaya," appear in the Abinger The Hill of Devi; and the novel fragments and some remaining short stories (some in truncated form) comprise the Abinger Arctic Summer and Other Fiction. The Forster scholar cannot but be grateful for the materials that are now available to him in responsibly edited editions. With the publication of the second volume of the Selected Letters, we now have incontestable proof, I feel, that Forster is one of our major letter writers. His expertise and charm as a letter writer come as no surprise in view of his development after 1924 into a personable, responsible, and rhetorically Eersuasive essayist, who had important things to say to a public that respected im and who said these things engagingly. Whatever regrets we have for the disappearance of a major novelist, we can yet recognize the considerable 311 importance and influence of Forster, the writer of discursive prose. Because of their pertinence and shrewdness, the letters serve in part to restore Forster to his role of sage that he occupied until his death, when the revelations about his aggressive homosexuality caused some aspects of his private and public life to be seen with a new and pejorative focus and caused the integrity of his intellectual position in some quarters to be questioned. The same profundity and the same charismatic quality, evident in the essays, dominate the letters. There is even some reason to think that we are closer to the man in his letters (and in his Commonplace Book) than in his essays. As letter writer Forster in effect illustrates the truth of his observation in the Commonplace Book: "it...