Any follower of literary blood sports should take a look at a review in the Weekly Standard, a conservative American magazine. You can find it on a site called Arts & Letters, which my son obligingly bookmarked for me. The present edition — at least I suppose it is the present one, not that it matters, since I understand that you can use the internet to summon articles from the vasty deep of time past — features the review, by Joseph Epstein of Sir Frank Kermode’s 2007 Clark Lectures devoted to E. M. Forster. Forster’s own book, Aspects of the Novel, had its origins in the same Cambridge lectures.
Epstein has armed himself with a two- barrelled shotgun, one barrel for Kermode, the other for Forster, whom he admits to having admired in his youth.
Kermode is gunned down first as a timid and conventional critic, incapable of offering anything but received opinion. We are reminded how quickly he abandoned his editorship of Encounter as soon as its ultimate source of funding (from the CIA) was revealed. Some may think this honourable, and certainly I doubt, given Sir Frank’s immense distinction, if it would have occurred to many of us that ‘he vacated his editorship faster than a preacher with an underage boy departing a bordello under police raid’.
Epstein explains Kermode’s ‘timidity’ by his struggle to break through the English class barrier. Consequently, he has always been careful to ‘sit on the right side of the fence’. Well, perhaps, though it may be that as an American Epstein’s view of the English class barrier is just a bit out-dated — and was so even when Kermode was a young man. After all, one can think of academics rising from what used to be called ‘humble backgrounds’, who shattered that barrier and continued to lay about them with zest and indignation.
Having had his fun with Kermode, Epstein directs the other barrel at Forster, the liberal hero. Bloomsbury, he tells us, may have laid great emphasis on the importance of personal relations, but it set a pretty poor example of how to conduct them. ‘It would be difficult, not at all incidentally, to find a group of people who betrayed one another more — sexually and in other ways — than the Bloomsbury Group.’ This is splendid stuff, despite the ugly repetition of the word ‘group’, though one might add that they don’t seem to have taken the sexual betrayals to heart; all part the great game of personal relations, as it were.
Epstein has the usual go at Forster’s remark about how, faced with the choice, he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country rather than his friend. Orwell dealt with that line long ago, rather more effectively. All the same, Forster raised a real question worth discussing rather that dismissing out of hand, one indeed which a few years later was to give Elizabeth Bowen the theme for that very fine novel, The Heat of the Day. The question of betrayal or treason is more complicated than appears at first sight. One’s natural response is denial, American liberals refusing to admit that Alger Hiss had indeed been a Soviet agent.
Then it’s the turn of the novels, those half-dozen delicate works which have had Forster hailed ‘as the great writer he most distinctly isn’t’. Epstein now suspects that his own youthful admiration for them derived from his ‘ardent desire to be among the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky’ whom Forster extolled, claiming that there was ‘a secret understanding between them when they meet’ — a line inviting the old sneer, ‘takes one to know one’. Epstein, soured perhaps by discovering that the novels are not what he once thought them, lets loose again: ‘There is much evidence that in life, if not in his novels, Forster was insensitive, inconsiderate and schmucky.’ Perhaps he was; Simon Raven called him a mean old thing when refused what he euphemistically called a loan. But of course this has nothing to do with the novels. Dickens was a bad husband. So what?
Apart from enjoying Epstein’s attack, uninhibited in the manner of 18th- century Grub Street, and delivered without regard for any literary equivalent of the Queensberry Rules, I find that my opinion of Forster’s novels is now no higher than his. When, not long ago, I re-read A Passage to India, I was irritated by the author’s partiality. So I nod my head in agreement when Epstein declares that ‘Forster, in the way he designed his novels, was playing with loaded dice.’ Quite so, I say, and yet, here I pause. I thought them marvellous when I was young. Can I be sure my judgment now is wiser than my judgment was then? Have the novels deteriorated, or have I?
Comments