Review Article: E. M. Forster's Most Recent Critics

ι*9 REV I EW ARTICLE FORSTER'S MOST RECENT CRITICS1 By Frederick P. W. McDowell^ (University of Iowa) Interest in Forster is scarcely abating, if one may judge by the appearance of four new books about him since late 1962 and of many articles in books and periodicals since late I96I. All this writing follows close upon the four books published in the period I960 to early 1962. If anything, the point of diminishing returns may now have set in for general studies about a writer whose canon, however fascinating and rich it may be in depth, is comparatively small. All the new books, even those that are relative failures, give us some new insights; yet I think we may have reached the point where the summary critique, composed in isolation from the findings of others, is no longar rewarding. Succeeding books about Forster will not easily supplant the excellent, and by now standard, accounts of Forster by Lionel Trilling, Rex Warner, James McConkey, J. B. Beer, K. W. Gransden, and Frederick C. Crews. Future critics of Forster, it seems to me, will have to consider more closely than they have yet done the conclusions of each other. Nor will future critics be able to ignore the msny excellent articles, particularly on HOWARDS END and A PASSAGE TO INDIA, which have appeared within the last few years, if they would hope to approximate the whole truth about Forster. Future studies, except for those which may have to follow the format established In a series, must, I think, work along three lines. First, the critic should consider his subject from a well-defined approach so that aspects of Forster's work, difficult to search out in a general study, will be seen more clearly. Second, the critic must also attempt to assimilate the vast body of existing commentary and build upon that rather than repeat, without acknowledgment, points previously made by others. He n. st determine, in short, those matters on which there is agreement and those cruxes upon which opinion is still divided. Third, the critic should use, for the illumination they provide, the uncollected essays and, as they become available, previously unpublished materials. At present there is a great volume of uncollected journalism which Forster's critics have not consulted extensively, possibly because existing bibliographies fail to list It. With the publication of B. J. Kirkpatrick's Soho Bibliography of Forster promised for 1965, this deficiency may be remedied. / The newest general study of Forster, Alan Wilde's ART AND ORDER: A STUDY OF E. M. FÖRSTER, uses somewhat diffidently the three approaches I have suggested above, without doing any of them real justice. Mr. Wilde consults previous critics, though he could do so more often than he does. If he does not achieve the synoptic view of Forster and his critics that is now desirable, he does not work In the vacuum that many of his predecessors did. He also makes intelligent use of some of Forster's uncollected prose. Furthermore, he establishes a rubric within which he examines Forster's work; his book thereby gains greater sense of direction than do some of the other recent studies. Wilde's thesis is that Forster continually searched for order. In his early work, according to Wilde, Forster protested against a false kind of order, he analyzed Its pernicious results, and he brought about its overthrow by the vital characters. The genuine life-energies in forceful, primitive characters like Gino Carella, the Emersons, and Stephen Wonham could then flourish and assert their beneficent 50 influence. Ultimately, however, Forster became suspicious of the natural harmonies so easily earned as a result of the promptings of uninhibited instinct. Modern life, in short, was too recalcitrant to yield readily to the sheer assertion of primal powers. In THE ETERNAL MOMENT AND OTHER STORIES, HCWARDS END,, and A PASSAGE TO INDIA, Forster became aware of the difficulty of discovering order in the modern chaos and of imposing it upon refractory circumstances. In A PASSAGE TO INDIA he discovered the abyss when Mrs. Moore is nonplussed by the echo in the caves; in what he wrote thereafter, the abyss remained as an unacknowledged presence...