Forster: A Literary Life

BOOK reviews time he began the serious work of adapting his fiction for the stage he had already abandoned the writing of fiction in favor of writing poetry. So, as compared to the main corpus of Hardy's work, the dramatic forms but a small part. Yet as a record of Hardy's involvement with and attitudes toward the theatre, that one small part of Hardy's writerly life, Wilson's book is everything one would want. Barring the discovery of new scripts, outlines, or scenarios, the significant record of Hardy and the stage is completely told in this volume which will doubtless remain the standard, and only necessary, work on the subject. John J. Conlon The University of Massachusetts, Boston Förster: A Literary Life Mary Lago. E. M. Forster: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995. xiii + 170 pp. $35.00 ITS DIFFICULTTO KNOW what to expect in a literary biography. On which side of that uneasy dyad will the biographer come down—on the higher gossip or the lower criticism? The genre, "the literary life," presumably eschews both, being at once more circumspect and circumscribed . However, as defined by the editor of the series in which Mary Lago's study appears, its range is much wider than an individual life. It claims to offer an outline of the working lives of writers, "to trace the professional, publishing and social contexts which shaped their writing." But for Forster that is a less clear cut undertaking than it at first seems given that he was most professionally engaged when least an active writer. Thus the most important and original part of this study concerns Forster's work for the BBC, especially as that is described in the context of the history of broadcasting in Britain. Lago has previously written on this subject and she draws not only on Asa Briggs's work but on extensive work of her own in the Reading archives. This is material that is far too often ignored or glossed over by Forster scholars (Nicola Beauman refers to his broadcasting in one sentence in her copiously detailed biography). Lago deftly provides important materials for the reader of Forster's essays (many of which originated as broadcasts) and provides detailed background for, among other activities, his collaboration with Benjamin Britten on Billy Budd. She also tells a good story about the BBC itself—its origins, its various services, the birth and 225 ELT 39:2 1996 death of the Third Programme—keeping a balance between the history "out there" and Forster's career and concerns. Of course, such material is much more manageable and, at the same time, much less readily available to the reader than the extensive contextual material concerning the British in India. Lago compresses a great deal of important material in her accounts of Hindu/Muslim relations the structure of colonial administration, and the rise of nationalism . But it's a tricky story to tell, the more so if one attempts, as Lago does, a neutrality of point of view. The distinction between the salient fact and mere detail, between background and foreground blurs. It's hard to stay focused on the main narrative. This is a pity, for Lago is exceptionally well versed in this material. Her knowledge of the writings of Tagore, while not an immediate context, enables her to hear nuances in the world Forster constructs and reflects, which many another critic might miss. And some details stand out with extreme clarity, in particular the sketch of Montagu's career in India, his moral stature, but finally his failure to become Viceroy. It functions as a kind of parable for the novel's more private stories. Still, there is a very large gap between those materials and her account of the text. For that account is perfunctory at best, entirely evading or avoiding most of the critical issues that a reading of A Passage to India invites, especially an historically grounded one. Lago is far too ready to dress Forster in those well-worn liberal humanist garments (not that they are ill fitting, but they are by no means his only clothes), never troubling (not even for...