Something for Everyone-Forster One Hundred Years After

Another Instance in which Tennant sees Conrad's own experiences in his actual life appears in "A Smile of Fortune," a short novel based on his voyage to Mauritius in 1888. In one way, it seems to be "a kind of long-delayed revenge" for his humiliation over Eugénie Renouf, to whose brother he had made a formal request for her hand twenty-two years before he wrote the story. In this work, he transposed the temptation to marry Eugénie into entirely different terras, "though no doubt expressing what he felt to be the esence of it, by describing the narrator's infatuation with a sensuous, slovenly girl from a disreputable home." In spite, then, of a very few cavils, we find that Tennant's "obsessive compulsion" to write a biography of Conrad and his insistence that he is not interested in criticism of the works have produced an unusually well-written portrait of a believable and fascinating person. And he has gone beyond his aims—he has included a large amount of very sensitive criticism of many of his works. His achievement consists largely of his producing a good biography of Conrad for everyone, including some penetrating assessment of his work; he is a critic in spite of himself. Bruce E. Teets, Emeritus Central Washington University 5. SOMETHING FOR EVERY0NE--F0RSTER ONE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER Judith Scherer Hertz and Robert K. Martin, eds. E. M. Forster: Centenary Revaluations . Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1982. $25.00 Centenary Revaluations, a selection of proceedings from a Forster conference at Concordia University in Montreal, May 1979, Is an Important addition to Forster scholarship and, in structural design, is a work Forster would approve of. The introduction by Judith Hertz prepares the reader for articles about Forster's politics and philosophy, his use of and relationship to literary history, and varied kinds of analyses of the novels. This sequence Is followed by Robert K. Martin's introduction to the "Writer's Panel": Elizabeth Spencer, Bharati Mukherjee, Marie-Claire Biais, James McConkey, and Eudora Welty. The volume concludes with Frederick P. W. McDowell's "Forster Criticism and Scholarship Since 1975," an update of his E. M. Forster: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him (1976). All parts are tied together with an index which appears both sensible and accurate. In its entirety, the volume is musically structured: topic leads to topic, views counterpoint other views, and the reader may either begin or conclude with McDowell's summation. Most essays are of high quality and offer something new and substantive about Forster the writer and the man. While he is being celebrated, he Is also being revalued. The proceedings indicate clearly that the conference achieved Its goals. With a volume of such scope—two introductions, eighteen essays, a writer's panel, and a summation of work to date—a reviewer can only select from the numerous inclusions. Invariably, the act of selection implies a viewpoint, reflects the reader's own interests, and, perhaps, indicates areas in which he is 62 educationally deficient. The beginning student will benefit from every essay; the specialist will find, in some essays, conclusions he has already independently arrived at, but, depending upon his perception of the elephant, should be able to learn from one or more of the views from other angles. I was most impressed by Wilfred Stone's "Forster's Subversive Individualism," P. N. Burbank's "Philosophy of E. M. Forster," S. P. Rosenbaum's "Aspects of the Novel and Literary History," Linda Hutcheon's "Music in the Critical Writings of Forster, Fry, and Mauron," Philip Gardner's "Evolution of Maurice," G. K. Das's "E. M. Forster and Hindu Mythology," and Molly B. Tinsley's "Muddle Et Cetera: Syntax in A Passage to India." Others may be more drawn to the fine essays by Robert K. Martin ("The Paterian Mode in Forster's Fiction"), John Colmer ("Marriage and Personal Relations in Forster's Fiction"), John Beer ("A Passage to India: the French Novel and English Romanticism"), Elizabeth Barrett ("Voice and Myth in Howards End"), Paul R. Rlvenberg ("The Role of Essayist Commentator in Howards End"), Ira Bruce Nadel ("Moments in the Greenwood: Maurice in Context...