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West's human Wells is a man who haphazardly blunders into a career as a novelist. Wells the novelist does not fare very well in West's narrative. West refers to Wells's "dogged persistence in writing his particular brand of socially functional, if aesthetically inexcusable, book" (p. 131). He speaks of his father as a "publicist, ideas man, and propagandist first and foremost, and only incidentally the novelist" (p. 333), and as "the novelist who had lacked the patience to learn his business properly" (p. 356). It is a shame that West's effort to set the record straight concerning Wells's personal life did not extend to revising the myth of Wells the bad novelist. This is particularly odd because West rightly puts his finger on his father's talent to mimic, so much so that West even recounts how Wells's literary career got started by his imitation of J. M. Barrie's formula for writing a salable short piece (p. 208). Much of Wells's literary talent was exerted in the direction of mimical revision, a radical revision of specific works and specific literary patterns for the purpose of at once showing the fictional genre to be exhausted and, in this revelation, somehow managing to breathe new life, new meaning, into the exhausted form. However defective West's book is concerning Wells the artist, it is a useful contribution concerning Wells the man. The chronological scheme of events as they are presented in the book is a mite jumbled, even irritatingly so, which produces unnecessary repetitions; but on the whole the work offers engaging reading and thoughtful reconsideration. William J. Scheick University of Texas, Austin 2. E. M. FÖRSTER: WRITER OF LETTERS E. M. Förster. Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, Volume One 1879-1920. Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank, eds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press (Belknap Press); London: Collins, 1983. $20.00 Students of E. M. Forster and of contemporary literature have long been awaiting a collection of his letters. A writer who impresses as much by the quality of his personality and sensibility as by his books, we felt, could not but be a writer of interesting and provocative letters. They would, we hoped, expose us still further to a delightful personality, delightful precisely because Forster is idiosyncratic and sui generis at the same time that he is sensitive and sagacious. From this point of view the letters do not disappoint. They are full of opinions and observations that 82 are sometimes wise, sometimes witty, always pithy, always illuminating about the man, his work, his life, his friends, his universe, and his times. Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank have meticulously edited the letters, and the contents are of great value for Forster scholars. The limitation of the current selection (soon to be followed by another volume, 1921-1970) is the fact that it is just that—a selection. Students of the early fiction—four classic novels from 1905-1910—will be disappointed because all of Forster's observations about it would have been useful to them. It is hardly conceivable that a writer so obsessed with his vocation as writer would have had so little to say about his fiction when he was writing it as we have in the documents reproduced here. One is somewhat disturbed, therefore , and dissatisfied because of what must have been left out, especially if one judges by the quality of other Forster letters excerpted at points in the notes but which are not included in full in the main text. The quite interesting letter of 5 May 1905 to Robert Trevelyan, printed in A Garland for E. M. Forster (H. H. Anniah Gowda, ed.), which reveals Forster's interest in Swedish literature and gives some details about his short stories, has not, for example, been reproduced here. Forster, it seems to me, is a writer as important in his way as James, Lawrence, Joyce, Conrad, and Woolf are in theirs, and the complete correspondence of these writers is currently available or being made available. Mary Lago's register of the complete letters will take up some of this slack, when it is finished and...

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