E. M. Forster Unlocked: A Review Essay

The brief but useful introduction to these volumes ends on a personal note, which, in the day of Facebook, Twitter, and the me-curriculum, is perhaps not so great a departure from protocol as it might have been some two decades ago, but it comes nonetheless as something of a surprise in the staid circumstances of a scholarly edition. In the past, editors of such tomes, like the Wilcoxes in Howards End, have tended to avoid the first-person pronoun that flourishes so luxuriantly in the Schlegel camp. Professor Gardner, genially recalling his own encounters with E. M. Forster, by then a very agèd sage, at King's College, Cambridge, concludes his labors with the hope that Forster's fellow Kingsmen in the publishing of his diaries and journals have brought the author "the satisfaction to which he is entitled." Gardner himself has certainly worked long and hard as the transcriptions published here and his edition of Forster's Commonplace Book (1986) witness, spending his own light in illuminating that of his much older frater, as Cambridge slang would have once had it.

Looked at with a cold eye, however, King's has not in the main done well by its adoptive son's legacy. The work it has sponsored or sanctioned since Forster's death in 1970 is an occasion for only two cheers—and quite measured ones at that. (For his part, he amply repaid any outstanding debts, the Merchant Ivory films of the 1980s having brought in a tidy packet to the College.) The Abinger Edition, the early volumes of which are now yellowed, began badly; and with the exception of the volumes under the care of Elizabeth Heine, they are, from the point of view of the textual scholar, a nearly unmitigated disaster. An uninformed notion of copy-text and the failure to report variants add up to a sincere but mainly amateur, even at times amateurish, effort. A fit of belated honesty has seen the more recently published volumes abandon any pretensions to scholarship, merely reprinting the hither-to received texts, with middling introductions and notes attached. The Machine Stops and Other Stories (1998), edited by Rod Mengham, is a model sans pareil of how to go about editing when you know nothing about it and lack interest in finding out.

The other major scholarly project—Forster's two-volume selected letters (1983, 1985), edited by the late Mary Lago and by P. N. Furbank—is a highly mixed bag. One would rather have these letters than not, but the venture, which came as the "Boomsbury" wave crested in the late 1970s and early 1980s, has proved premature. Too much of the biographical information that ought to have enriched the footnotes for the earlier period of Forster's life was then missing or inaccessible: relevant censuses (1891 to 1911) were closed and the large, heavy tomes at St. Catherine's House off the Strand (where index records registering birth, marriage, and death were then kept) not as user friendly as are electronic searches made from the comfort of one's desk. Palmer's Index had to suffice for access to The Times; again, it was a useful tool in its day, but nothing like what is available now. These circumstances led both to incompleteness and to wrong identifications. (One small example: the Weston whom Forster mentions to his friend and fellow Kingsman, E. J. Dent, in 1902 is certain not to be an American who studied Romance languages at Harvard, but John Cecil Weston [b. 1882], who entered King's in 1901 to read history, graduated in 1904, and died in action in France in early June 1917.)

Not a pedant, Forster was nonetheless a man who liked to get his facts straight, even if for him it was the inner life that counted. Degrees of "satisfaction" must, in the nature of things, be relative. Three works of scholarship with which he could...