A long journey

I never liked E. M. Forster much. He was too preachy and prissy, too snobbish about the suburbs, too contemptuous of the lower classes. I know this is not how a review is meant to begin. You may legitimately kick off by admitting that you have a soft spot for your subject, even perhaps that you used to be friends. But reveal a longstanding dislike in your first paragraph, and the reader may reasonably wonder why the editor did not give the book to someone else.

My only excuse for this confession is that I am not alone. For a novelist, essayist and critic of such acknowledged eminence, Forster has had a surprising number of enemies. There was something about him that got people’s goat, and still does. Some people disliked him, some people disliked his books, some people disliked both. After listening to Forster’s Clark Lectures at Cambridge in 1927, F. R. Leavis denounced his ‘curious lack of grasp’ and his ‘spinsterly touch’. Ten years earlier, Katherine Mansfield made much the same point more vividly: ‘E. M. Forster never gets further than warming the teapot. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea.’ Readers and acquaintances alike have found him chilly, maiden-auntly and, Natasha Spender’s word for him, censorious.

Our greatest living critic, Sir Frank Kermode, has devoted his own Clark Lectures 80 years later to explaining (to himself, I think, as well as to the rest of us) exactly why he doesn’t really like Forster either. He doesn’t put it quite in this way, because he is a man of open mind and generous sympathies. But he does keep on returning to what is wrong with his famous predecessor. ‘Forster’, he says, ‘irritates readers who nevertheless feel obliged, in the end, to do him honour.’