Commonplace Book by E. M. Forster (review)

100Rocky Mountain Review beauty and instability of human love. He then compares Falstaff and the Wife of Bath as figures of vice and vitality who charm us with their verbal exuberance while leaving us uncomfortably uncertain of their loci loquendi (132). That Donaldson does not to his own satisfaction convert these intuited resemblances into assured evidence of genetic relationship is less important than the fact that he lends the weight of his considerable authority to legitimizing the study of influences that cannot be neatly pinned to specific echoes. The Swan at the Well immediately enriches our understanding of Shakespeare reading Chaucer. Moreover, I expect this book — and the scholarship it will inspire — to enlarge as well our ways of understanding literary influence. SUSAN BAKER University ofNevada, Reno E. M. FÖRSTER. Commonplace Book. Ed. Philip Gardner. Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1985. 372 p. This is a transcribed, edited, and richly annotated version of E.M. Forster's Commonplace Book, which was first issued in 1978 by Scolar Press, London, in an expensive facsimile edition limited to 350 copies. The story of how Forster inherited the attractive, nearly blank, folio-size commonplace book of an obscure bishop and decided to continue it is recorded in an interesting essay, "Bishop Jebb's Book," included in Two Cheersfor Democracy (New York: Harcourt , 1951). Forster was 45 when he made his first entry in the book on October 21, 1925, a year after the publication of A Passage to fndia, and he continued to do so until November 11, 1968, about two years before his death. Thus, despite his statement in "Bishop Jebb's Book" that he tends "to be non-intimate on the subjects of letters and life, and to saddle Seneca or Ibsen with anything" which he does not "quite want to say" (191), the Commonplace Book is a valuable record of Forster's intellectual, ethical, political, aesthetic, and personal concerns during the second half of his long career. As Philip Gardner points out in the introduction, "Parts of the first three-quarters of the Commonplace Book may be fruitfully set beside Aspects of the Novel and the polished essays collected in Abinger Harvest and Two Cheersfor Democracy; its final quarter, a literary, aesthetic and spiritual diary, presents a picture of Forster available nowhere else" (xiv). The picture of Forster, as it emerges here from his self-analysis, dreams, doubts, and comments on life and letters, reveals an intimate side of his mind and personality, in ironic contrast to his long-established public image of the humanist sage — liberal, serene, self-confident, gentle, kind, tolerant, demure, and idealistic. We discover a man antipathetic toward women, torn by doubts about his creative powers, haunted by the feelings of ineffectuality, displaced by war and industrialism, conscious of being drawn into lust and trivialities, preoccupied with physical decay and death, and sometimes uncharitable and malicious in his remarks on other writers. Though Forster's career after A Passage to India took a notable turn toward the writing of non-fictional prose and criticism, the awareness of the decline in his creative powers runs like a leitmotif in the Commonplace Book. A 1927 Book Reviews101 entry reveals his interest in writing a "middle-aged novel," based on first-hand experiences of his life, but the thought of "How again [to] render this readable ?" makes him abort the idea (29-30). Another entry reads: "Shaw's St. Joan and Joyce's Ulysses into which I looked today (8-1 1-30) made me ashamed of my own writing. They have something to say, but I am only paring away insincerities" (87). Again, in a 1943 entry, contemplating his friend Bob Buckingham 's plea to write one more novel, he reflects: "I am drawn into trivialities (home life) and diverted to unimportancies (Civil Liberties, B.B.C.) yet I can still write well and I am wise. . . . And my fear that — in spite of success far beyond my hopes and of a gratification far beyond most men's — I haven't fully come off, would be laid" (150-51). But he soon expresses his inability to undertake the task: "I consider my age 64, my family record of...