Recent Books on Forster and on Bloomsbury

135 RECENT BOOKS ON FÖRSTER AND ON BLOOMSBURY By Frederick P. W. McDowell (University of Iowa) Except for Oliver Stallybrass· volume of Festschrift essays for Forster's ninetieth birthday, the books on Forster under review are much less important than those which illuminate his aesthetic and intellectual milieu. Such recent full-scale studies as Denis Godfrey's E_¡_ M1 Forster's Other Kingdom and Laurence Brander's E. M. Forster: A Critical Study fall below the mark set by Lionel Trilling, James McConkey, J. B. Beer, Frederick C. Crews, Alan Wilde, Wilfred Stone, and George H. Thomson. Any book which fails to meet the standard provided by these critics and to advance their work in some recognizable way scarcely deserves publication, let alone serious consideration by Forster scholars. But for the fact that English Literature in Transition is the scholarly clearinghouse for all work done on authors of the period I88O-I92O and for the fact that reviews appearing therein ought to take cognizance of the weaknesses to be found in substandard books, I would not carry further my discussion of either of these latest critiques. Denis Godfrey's E-1 M-1 Forster's Other Klngdom is, without doubt, the poorest treatise yet to have appeared on Britain's greatest living writer. Godfrey's failure as a critic mostly inheres in his premises. He wishes to demonstrate the primacy of the visionary impulse in Forster; the influence of the "unseen" world, the intuitive, the spiritual, the intangible upon his characters. In turn, says Godfrey, Forster values his characters to the extent that they respond to the ineffable forces which impinge upon them from within and without. Godfrey merely demonstrates, however, what any intelligent reader of Forster would be willing to grant him from the outset. In straining to establish an all too obvious point, Mr. Godfrey overlooks the paradoxical basis of E. M. Forster's art. The spiritual , the intangible, and the unseen form but one end of a spectrum that projects for us Forster's version of reality; at the opposite end is the material, the tangible, and the empirically demonstrable. In Forster's view the senses are just as important as the realm which transcends them. Godfrey cannot have understood The Longest Journey, for he misses the point made in the famous Chapter 28, that the unseen is valid only so long as it is made firm by the seen. Rickie Elliot's "currency" is false because he has placed all his emphasis upon the idea and the ideal, and has lost his soul precisely because he has lost his sense of the material world. Throughout, Mr. Godfrey operates at the level of statement and simplified idea. As a result he fails to consider the other components of Forster's fiction, such as symbolism, myth, pattern, structure, irony and style, by which it is organized. He is con- 136 cerned only in the most rudimentary way with character portrayal. His method of discourse, moreover, is the most naive and Indulgent possible for a critic to use at this stage in Forster studies: that of extended synopsis and paraphrase. Godfrey would reduce to a formula what is subtle and elusive in the fiction: the fact that the "unseen" operates to determine the worth of the characters and the importance of the situations in which they are involved. Godfrey's claims to the contrary, critics before him have been concerned with tracing "within the realism the full transfiguring range of the author's spiritual implications." All the critics I have so far mentioned have done so with greater tact and insight than Godfrey has shown. The simplicity of Mr. Godfrey's method and premises is illustrated throughout his book. He is perplexed, for example, by the implications of the Beethoven Symphony passage in Howards End and by the ambiguous presentation of India in A Passage to India, by the fact that "the universe ... is thus at one and the same time replete with significance and without any significance at all." Far from being "scarcely tenable," as Godfrey insists, such a view of the universe provides one measure of Forster's insight and wisdom. Forster has been able...