THE
NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
E.M.
Forster, Middle Manager
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21692
visited in November, 2008
The BBC Talks of E.M.
Forster, 1929–1960
edited
by Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes, and Elizabeth MacLeod
Walls, with a foreword by
P.N. Furbank
University of
Missouri Press, 477 pp., $59.95
1.
In
the taxonomy of English writing, E.M. Forster is not an
exotic creature. We
file him under Notable English Novelist, common or garden
variety. Still, there
is a sense in which Forster was something of a rare bird.
He was free of many
vices commonly found in novelists of his generation—what's
unusual about
Forster is what he didn't do. He didn't lean
rightward with the years,
or allow nostalgia to morph into misanthropy; he never
knelt for the Pope or
the Queen, nor did he flirt (ideologically speaking) with
Hitler, Stalin, or
Mao; he never believed the novel was dead or the hills
alive, continued to read
contemporary fiction after the age of fifty, harbored no
special hatred for the
generation below or above him, did not come to feel that
England had gone to
hell in a hand-basket, that its language was doomed, that
lunatics were running
the asylum, or foreigners swamping the cities.
Still,
like all notable English novelists, he was a tricky
bugger. He made a faith of
personal sincerity and a career of disingenuousness. He
was an Edwardian among
Modernists, and yet—in matters of pacifism, class,
education, and race—a
progressive among conservatives. Suburban and parochial,
his vistas stretched
far into the East. A passionate defender of "Love, the beloved
republic," he nevertheless persisted in keeping his own
loves secret, long
after the laws that had prohibited honesty were gone.
Between the bold and the
tame, the brave and the cowardly, the engaged and the
complacent, Forster
walked the middling line.
At
times—when defending his liberal humanism against
fundamentalists of the right
and left—that middle line was, in its quiet, Forsterish
way, the most radical
place to be. At other times—in the laissez-faire coziness
of his literary
ideas—it seemed merely the most comfortable. In a letter
to Goldsworthy Lowes
Dickinson, Forster lays out his casual aesthetics, casually:
All I write
is, to me, sentimental.
A book which doesn't leave people
either happier or better than it found them, which doesn't
add some permanent
treasure to the world, isn't worth doing.... This is my
"theory," and
I maintain it's sentimental—at all events it isn't
Flaubert's. How can he fag
himself to write "Un Coeur Simple"?
To
his detractors, the small, mild oeuvre of E.M. Forster is
proof that when it
comes to aesthetics, one had really better be
fagged: the zeal of the
fanatic is what's required. "E.M. Forster never gets any
further than
warming the teapot," thought Katherine Mansfield, a
fanatic if ever there
was one. "He's a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot.
Is it not
beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain't going to be no
tea." There's something
middling about Forster, he is halfway to where people want
him to be. Even the
compilers of The BBC Talks of E.M. Forster, an
exhaustive collection of
broadcasts between 1929 and 1960, find it necessary to
address the middlebrow
elephant in the room:
Forster,
though recognized as a
central player in his literary milieu,
has been classed by most cultural historians of this
period as secondary to
Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, or T.S. Eliot...relegated not
quite to the lesser
lights of modernism, but perhaps to the "middle lights,"
if we might
invent this term.
Conscientious
editors, they defend their subject fiercely and at length.
It feels
incongruous—never was there a notable English novelist who
wore his status more
lightly. To love Forster is to reconcile oneself to the
admixture of banality
and brilliance that was his, as he had done himself. In
this book that blend is
perhaps more perfectly represented than ever before.
Whether that's a good
thing or not is difficult to say.
At any rate,
what we have here is a
four-hundred-page selection of the
talks Forster delivered over the wireless. The great
majority of them were
about books (he titled the series Some Books); a
quarter of them
concern—and were broadcast to—India and its people.
Scattered among the
remainder is a miscellaneous hodgepodge of topics that
tickled Forster's fancy:
the Great Frost of 1929, the music of Benjamin Britten,
the free wartime
concerts given in the National Gallery, and so on.
The
tone is resolutely conversational, frothy, and without
academic pretension
("Now you have to be cool over Yeats. He was a great poet,
he lived
poetry, but there was an element of bunkum in him." "What
is the use
of Art? There's a nasty one"), the sort of thing one can
imagine made T.S.
Eliot—also broadcasting for the BBC during this
period—sigh wearily as he
passed Forster's recording booth on the way to his own.
Eliot was very serious
about literary criticism; Forster could be too, but in
these broadcasts he is
not, at least not in any sense Eliot would recognize. For
one thing, he won't
call what he is doing literary criticism, or even
reviewing. His are
"recommendations" only. Each episode ends with Forster
diligently
reading out the titles of the books he has dealt with,
along with their exact
price in pounds and shillings.
In
place of Eliot's severe public intellectual we have
Forster the chatty
librarian, leaning over the counter, advising you on
whether a book is worth
the bother or not—a peculiarly English aesthetic category.
It's a self-imposed
role entirely lacking in intellectual vanity ("Regard me as a
parasite," he tells his audience, "savoury or unsavoury
who battens
on higher forms of life"), but it's a mistake to think it
a lazy or
accidental one. Connection, as everyone knows, was
Forster's great theme;
between people, nations, heart and head, labor and art.
Radio presented him
with the opportunity of mass connection. It went against
his grain to put any
obstacle between his listeners and himself.
From
the start, Forster's concern—to use the parlance of modern
broadcasting—was
where to pitch it. Essentially it was the problem of his
fiction, writ large,
for he was the sort to send one manuscript to Virginia
Woolf, another to his
good friend Sergeant Bob Buckingham of the Metropolitan
Police, and fear the
literary judgment of both. On the air, as it was on the
page, Forster was never
free from the anxiety of audience. His rupture from his
Modernist peers happens
here, in his acute conception of audience, in his
inability not to conceive of
an audience. When Nora Barnacle asked her husband, "Why
don't you write
sensible books that people can understand?," her husband
ignored her and
wrote Finnegans Wake. Joyce's ideal reader was
himself—that was his
purity. Forster's ideal reader was a kind of projection,
and not one entirely
sympathetic to him.
I
think of this reader as, if not definitively English, then
of a type that
abounds in England. Lucy Honeychurch of A Room with a
View is one of
them. So are Phillip Herriton of Where Angels Fear to
Tread and Henry
Wilcox of Howards End and Maurice Hall of
Maurice. Forster's
novels are full of people who'd think twice before
borrowing a Forster novel
from the library. Well—they'd want to know—is it worth the
bother or not?
Neither intellectuals nor philistines, they are the kind
to "know what
they like" and have the "courage of their convictions," though
their convictions are not entirely their own and their
courage mostly fear.
They are capable of cruelty born of laziness, but also of
an unexpected spiritual
greatness, born of love. The right book at the right
moment might change
everything for them (Forster only gave the credence of
certainty to love). It's
worth thinking of these cautious English souls, with their
various potential
for greatness and shabbiness, love and spite, as Forster's
radio audience: it
makes his approach comprehensible.
Think
of Maurice Hall and Alec Scudder, settled by their
Bakelite radio waiting for
the latest installment of Some Books. Maurice,
thanks to his superior
education, catches the literary references but, in his
suburban slowness,
misses much of the spirit. Alec, not having read
Wordsworth, yet grasps the
soul of that poet as he listens to Forster recount a visit
to the Lake
District, Wordsworth country:
Grey sheets
of rain trailed in
front of the mountains, waterfalls slid
down them and shone in the sun, and the sky was always
sending shafts of light
into the valleys.
Early
on, Forster voiced his determination to plow the middle
course:
I've had
nice letters from people
regretting that my talks are above
them, and others equally nice regretting that they are
below; so hadn't I
better pursue the even tenor of my way?
Well,
hadn't he?
2.
I've made
up an imaginary person
whom I call "you" and I'm
going to tell you about it. Your age, your sex, your
position, your job, your
training—I know nothing about all that, but I have formed
the notion that
you're a person who wants to read new books but doesn't
intend to buy them.
But
here Forster is too humble: he knew more of his audience
than the contents of
their passports. Take his talk on Coleridge of August 13,
1931. A new Collected is out, it's a nicely printed edition,
costs only 3/6, and he'd like to talk to
us about it. But he senses that we are already sighing and
he knows why:
Perhaps
you'll say "I don't want a
complete Coleridge, I've got
'The Ancient Mariner' in some anthology or other, and
that's enough. 'The
Ancient Mariner' and 'Kubla Khan' and perhaps the first
half of
'Christabel'—that's all in Coleridge that really matters.
The rest is rubbish
and not even good dry rubbish, it's moist clammy rubbish, it's
depressing." So if I tell you that there are 600 pages in
this new
edition, you'll only reply "I'm sorry to hear it."
Still—600
pages makes one think.
The first half of
Christabel—how
perfect that is, and how it makes one
laugh. A mix of empathy and ventriloquism fuels the comic
engines of his
novels; here in the broadcasts it's reemployed as sly
technique, allowing
Forster to approach the congenital anti-intellectualism of
the English from an
oblique angle, one that flatters them with complicity.
Here he is, up to the
same thing with D.H. Lawrence:
Much of his
work is tedious, and
some of it shocks people, so that we
are inclined to say: "What a pity! What a pity to go on
about the
subconscious and the solar plexus and maleness and
femaleness and African
darkness and the cosmic battle when you can write with
such insight about human
beings and so beautifully about flowers."
Have
you had that thought? Don't worry if you have, so has E.M.
Forster. Still, it's
a mistake:
You can't
say, "Let's drop his
theories and enjoy his art,"
because the two are one. Disbelieve his theories, if you
like, but never brush
them aside.... He resembles a natural process much more
nearly than do most
writers...and one might as well scold a flower for growing
on a manure heap, or
a manure heap for producing a flower.
It's
a gentle correction, but a serious one, aimed
democratically at both listener
and speaker. And like this, pursing a gentle push and
pull, iron fist hidden in
velvet glove, Forster presses on in his determined,
middling way. He's
educating you, but surreptitiously, and unlike the
writings of his childhood
hero, Matthew Arnold, it never feels painful. The
leggerezza of his prose
lightens every load. Speaking on June 20, 1945, Forster
outlines Arnold's more
muscular approach:
One of his
complaints against his
countrymen was that they were
eccentric and didn't desire to be anything else. They
didn't want to be better
informed or urbane, or to know what is great in human
achievement. They didn't
want culture. And he flung at them another of his famous
accusations:
Philistines. The Philistine is the sort of person who says
"I know what I
know and I like what I like and that's the kind of chap I
am." And Matthew
Arnold, a Victorian David, slung his pebble bang in the
middle of Goliath's
forehead.
Forster was no
pebble slinger. For
him, not only the means but also the
aims were to be different. It really didn't matter to
Forster if a fellow had
read Yeats or not (he is consistently sentimental about
the unlettered:
peasants, sailors, gardeners, natives). But to deny
Yeats, because he
was not to your taste, or to deny poetry itself, out of
fear and
incomprehension—that mattered terribly. The only
philistinism that counted was
the kind that deforms the heart, trapping us in an
attitude of scorn and fear
until scorn and fear are all we know. On February 12,
1947, recommending Billy
Budd, Forster finds an unlikely ally in Melville:
He also
shows that...innocence is
not safe in a civilization like ours,
where a man must practice a "ruled undemonstrative
distrustfulness"
in order to defend himself against traps. This "ruled
undemonstrative
distrustfulness" is not confined to business men, but
exists everywhere.
We all exercise it. I know I do, and I should be surprised
if you, who are
listening to me, didn't. All we can do (and Melville gives
us this hint) is to
exercise it consciously, as Captain Vere did. It is
unconscious distrustfulness
that corrodes the heart and destroys the heart's insight,
and prevents it from
saluting goodness.
Undemonstrative
distrustfulness is what Lucy Honeychurch feels toward
George Emerson, what
Phillip Herriton feels in Italy, what Maurice Hall feels
for his own soul.
Forster nudges his characters toward a consciousness of
this weakness in
themselves; they do battle against it, and win. They learn
to salute goodness.
Sometimes this is achieved with delicacy and the illusion
of freedom, as it is
in A Room with a View; at other times, in
Maurice, say, happiness
arrives a good deal more dogmatically (though no less
pleasurably). But it is
always Forster's game by Forster's rules. In radio,
though, each man's
consciousness is his own. There are no Lucy Honeychurches
to play with—only
nameless, faceless listeners whose sensibilities can only
be guessed at, only
assumed.
In
the anxiety of this unfamiliar situation, a comic
novelist, with his natural
weakness for caricature, is apt to assume too much. The
broadcasts suffer from
empathic condescension: Forster is unconvinced that we
might also, like him, be
capable of a broad sympathetic sensibility. Recommending
two memoirs, one by
Sir Henry Newbolt (patriotic, public school adventurer
with "a touch of
the medieval knight about him") and another by Grant
Richards (a "gay
and irresponsible" fin-de-siècle journalist who "loves
Paris with a
fervour"), he predicts two camps of readers, split by
sensibility, unable
to understand each other:
Mr Grant
Richards is a very
different story. The title he has given his
memoirs proves that: he calls them Memoirs of a
Misspent Youth.... Like
Sir Henry Newbolt he is a friend of Rothenstein and was
fond of birdsnesting,
but those are the only bond between them.... The
atmosphere of the book one
might call Bohemian, and if you find yourself in complete
sympathy with Sir
Henry Newbolt you won't care for Memories of a Misspent
Youth, and vice
versa.
There
is an element of the nervous party host in Forster; he
fears people won't speak
to each other unless he's there to facilitate the
introduction. Occasionally
his image of the general reader is almost too general to
recognize. Who dreads
philosophy so much they need easing into Plato like this?
The word
Plato has rather a boring
sound. For some reason or other
"Plato" always suggests to me a man with a large head and
a noble
face who never stops talking and from whom it is
impossible to escape.
Who's
(this) afraid of The Magic Flute?
It's a lovely book,[1] I implore you to read it, but
rather unluckily it's based on an opera
by Mozart. I say "unluckily" not because the opera is bad,
it is
Mozart's best, but because many readers of the book won't
have heard of the
opera, and so won't catch on to the allusions. You'll have
to be prepared for
some queer names.
No
one reading these words, perhaps. On the other side of the
class and
educational divide—a line that so preoccupied Forster—it's
easy to forget what
it's like not to know. Forster was always thinking of
those who did not know.
He worries that simply by having this one-way conversation
he pushes the Alec
Scudders in his audience still further into the shadows.
Frequently he asks the
(necessarily) rhetorical question "And what do you think?"
We can be
sure that Eliot, in the next booth over, never asked that.
But isn't there a
point where empathy becomes equivocation? Can't you hear
Henry Wilcox, fuming:
"Good God, man, it's not what I think that matters!
I'm paying my
license fee to hear what you think!"
Henry
would want a few strong opinions, the better to repeat
them to his wife and
pass them off as his own. Forster does have strong
opinions to offer. At first
glance, they seem the sort of thing of which Henry would
approve:
I like a
novel to be a novel. I
expect it to be about something or
someone.... I get annoyed. It is foolish to get annoyed.
One can cure oneself,
and should. It is foolish to insist that a novel must be a
novel. One must take
what comes along, and see if it's good.
But
halfway through that paragraph Forster has given Henry the
slip.
In the
foreword to this volume,
P.N. Furbank calls Forster "the
great simplifier." It's true he wrote simply, had a gift
for the simple
expression of complex ideas, but he never made a religion
of simplicity itself.
He understood and defended the expression of complexity in
its own terms. He
was E.M. Forster: he didn't need everyone else to be.
Which would appear the
simplest, most obvious principle in the world—yet how few
English novelists
prove capable of upholding it!
In
English fiction, realists defend realism and
experimentalists defend
experimentalism; those who write simple sentences praise
the virtues of
concision and those who are fond of their adjectives claim
the lyrical as the
highest value in literature. Forster was different.
Several times he reminds
his listeners of the Bhagavad Gita and in
particular the advice Krishna
gives Arjina:
But thou
hast only the right to
work; but none to the fruit thereof; let
not then the fruit of thy action be thy motive; nor yet be
thou enamoured in
inaction.
Forster
took that advice: he could sit in his own literary corner
without claiming its
superiority to any other. Stubbornly he defends Joyce,
though he doesn't much
like him, and Woolf, though she bemuses him, and Eliot,
though he fears him.
His recommendation of Paul Valéry's An Evening with M.
Teste is
representative:
Well, the
very first sentence is
illuminating. "La bêtise n'est pas
mon fort." Stupidity is not my strong point. No it wasn't.
Valery was
never never stupid. If he had been stupid sometimes, he
would no doubt have
been more in touch with the rest of us, who are stupid so
frequently. That was
his limitation. Remember on the other hand what
limitations are ours, and how
much we lose by our failure to follow the action of a
superior mind.
Forster
was not Valéry, but he defended Valéry's right to be
Valéry. He understood the
beauty of complexity and saluted it where he saw it. His
own preference for
simplicity he recognized for what it was, a preference,
linked to a dream of
mass connection. He placed no particular force behind it:
And it's Mister Heard's[2] sympathy that I want to stress. He
doesn't write because he is learned
and clever and fanciful, although he is all these things.
He writes because he
knows of our troubles from within and wants to help with
them. I wish he wrote
more simply, because then more of us might be helped.
That, really, is my only
quarrel with him.
3.
Occupying
"a midway position" between the aristocrat's memoir and
that of the
bohemian, Forster recommends As We Are, the memoir
of E.F. Benson
("The book's uneven—bits of it are perfunctory, but bits
are awfully
good"). He finds one paragraph particularly wise on "the
problem of
growing old" and quotes it:
Unfortunately there comes to the
majority of those of middle age an
inelasticity not of physical muscle and sinew alone but of
mental fibre.
Experience has its dangers: it may bring wisdom, but it
may also bring
stiffness and cause hardened deposits in the mind, and its
resulting
inelasticity is crippling.
Is
it inelasticity that drives English writers to religion
(Greene, Waugh, Eliot),
to an anti-culture stance (Wells, Kingsley Amis, Larkin),
to the rejection of
accepted modes of literary seriousness (Wodehouse,
Greene)? Better, I think, to
credit it to a healthy English perversity, a bloody-minded
war against cliché.
It's a cliché to think liking Chaucer makes you cultured
(Larkin and Amis
defaced their college copies of The Canterbury
Tales); a commonplace to
think submission to God incompatible with intellectual
vitality. Then again
it's hard to deny that in many of these writers a
calcification occurs, playful
poses become rigid attitudes. Forster feared the sea
change. In the year
Forster finished broadcasting, in the same BBC studios,
Evelyn Waugh submits to
an interviewer interested in his "notable rejection of life":
Interviewer: What do you
feel is your worst fault?
Waugh: Irritability.
Interviewer: Irritability
with your family? With strangers?
Waugh: Absolutely everything.
Inanimate objects and people, animals, everything....
Forster
worked hard to avoid this fate, first through natural
inclination and then,
later, by way of a willed enthusiasm, an openness to
everything that itself
skirts perilously close to banality. He did not believe in
the "rejection
of life," whether for reasons of irritability, asceticism,
intellectual
fastidiousness, or even mystical attachments. He quotes
approvingly a
discussion, from the novel The Magic Flute, between
Jesus and Buddha:
"Lord
Buddha, was your gospel true?"
"True and
False."
"What was
true in it?"
"Selflessness and Love."
"What false?"
"Flight
from Life."
In
the wartime broadcasts in particular Forster gets into
life, though with
difficulty: one senses in more peaceful times he would
have left the public speaking
to those more suited to it. Passing H.G. Wells in the
street in the early
Forties, Forster recalls Wells
calling
after me in his squeaky
voice "Still in your ivory
tower?" "Still on your private roundabout [carousel]?" I might
have retorted, but did not think of it till now.
During
the war Forster got onto his own roundabout, broadcasting
mild English
propaganda to India, ridiculing Nazi "philosophy" from the
early
1930s onward, attacking the prison and police systems,
defending the Third
Program, speaking up for mass education, the rights of
refugees, free concerts
for the poor, and art for the masses. Recognizing that
"humanism has its
dangers; the humanist shirks responsibility, dislikes
making decisions, and is
sometimes a coward," he was anyway determined to hold
faith with the
"failed" liberal values so many of his peers now jettisoned:
Do we, in
these terrible times,
want to be humanists or fanatics? I have
no doubt as to my own wish, I would rather be a humanist
with all his faults,
than a fanatic with all his virtues.
Forster, an
Edwardian, lived
through two cataclysmic wars, watched
England's transformation from elegant playground of the
fortunate few to the
mass factory of everybody. And still he kept faith with
the future. In the
greatest of his broadcasts, "What I Believe," a much
longer piece
absent from this volume, he sympathizes with our natural
reactionary instincts,
but doesn't submit to them: "This is such a difficult
moment to live in,
one cannot help getting gloomy and also a bit rattled, and
perhaps
short-sighted." As our present crop of English novelists
gets rattled,
Forster's example begins to look exemplary.
On
Forster's centenary, again in the same studio, another
notable English novelist
good-humoredly recognizes his own U-turn, motivated by gloom:
Interviewer: In 1964...you
said you felt that British culture was the property of
some sort of exclusive
club and you'd always bitterly resented that fact; I get
the impression from
certain things you've written recently that you now resent
the fact that it's not the property of an exclusive club any
longer....
Kingsley Amis: (laughing)
That's right, yes....
But
Forster was clever about even this kind of literary
insincerity:
The simple
view is that creation
can only proceed from sincerity. But
the facts don't always bear this out. The insincere, the
half sincere, may on
occasion contribute.
Lucky
for the English that this should be so! On October 3,
1932, Forster considers a
critical study of Wordsworth, a writer who, like Amis,
"moved from being a
Bolshie.... to being a die-hard." The study argues that
Wordsworth
"had a great deal to cover up," having had an affair and an
illegitimate child with a French woman, Annette Vallon,
all of which he kept
hidden. Back in England he made a hypocritical fetish of
his own Puritanism and
lived "to be a respectable and intolerant old man."
Something calcified
in Wordsworth: he ended up hating the France he'd loved as
a youth, becoming a
"poet of conventional morality" more concerned with public
reputation
than poetry itself.
Forster
too had a good deal to hide and kept it hidden; one feels
in his attention to
the Wordsworth story the recognition of a morality tale.
It is almost as if,
with the door of his private sexuality firmly closed,
Forster willed himself to
open every window. This curious inverse effect is most
noticeable in the
honesty and flexibility of his criticism. On his affection
for Jane Austen:
"She's English, I'm English, and my fondness for her may
be rather a
family affair." On a naval book that celebrates the
simplicity of the
sailor's life: "I don't know whether I am overpraising the
book. Its
values happen to coincide with my own, and one does then
tend to
overpraise." He is gently amused to learn of J. Donald
Adams's (then
editor of The New York Times Book Review) suspicion
of the recent crop
of American fiction:
The
twenties and thirties of this
century were unsatisfactory, Mr Adams
thinks, because they contributed nothing positive; they
pricked holes in the
old complacency (like Sinclair Lewis) or indulged in
private fantasies (like
James Branch Cabell) or played about frivolously like
Scott Fitzgerald.
Here's the
funny thing about
literary criticism: it hates its own times,
only realizing their worth twenty years later. And then,
twenty years after
that, it wildly sentimentalizes them, out of nostalgia for
a collective youth.
Condemned cliques become halcyon "movements"; annoying
young men,
august geniuses. Unlike Adams, Forster had the gift of
recognizing good writing
while it was still young. Enthusiastically he recommends
Rosamund Lehmann,
William Plomer, Christopher Isherwood. And it's only 1932!
He defends their
modern qualities against English nostalgia:
If they
still believe in what Keats
called the holiness of the heart's
imagination, then aren't we with them, and does it make
any difference to us
that they don't use Keats' words?
Which
reminds us of the simplest and greatest pleasure of this
volume: Forster gets
it right, often. He's right about Strachey's Queen
Victoria, right about
the worth of H.G. Wells and Rebecca West and Aldous
Huxley; right about Eliot's
"Ash Wednesday" and Russell's History of Western
Philosophy.
Sitting on a 1944 panel titled "Is the Novel Dead?"[3] he is right to answer in the
negative.
The
editors of his BBC talks, making heavy weather of it,
claim that "Forster's
talks engaged and helped shape British culture." I imagine
Forster would
have been surprised by that statement, and perplexed by
their concern for his
literary status. He thought the words "highbrow" and
"lowbrow" "responsible for more unkind feelings and more silly
thinking than any other pair of words I know." He was not
the sort to get
riled up on that subject. He was a popular novelist. Who
could say he didn't
know his craft! And not in the workaday way Somerset
Maugham knew his. There's
magic and beauty in Forster, and weakness, and a little
laziness, and some
stupidity. He's like us. Many people love him for it. We
might finish with what
Forster himself would say about these talks, what in fact
he did say:
There is
something cajoling and
ingratiating about them which cannot be
exorcised by editing, and they have been the devil to
reproduce.
But
Forster was always a little too humble, a tad
disingenuous. His talks are
humane and charming, like everything he wrote, and on top
of that, they're good
fun to read, and if not quite right for a lecture hall,
perfect for a lazy
afternoon in an armchair. The title again, for those who
missed it: The BBC
Talks of E.M. Forster. The price is $59.95.
Notes
[1] He refers
to the narrative version by
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1920).
[2] The book
recommended is The Social
Substance of Religion by Gerald Heard (1931).
[3] The other
panelists: Desmond MacCarthy, Rose
Macaulay, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Philip
Toynbee.
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