Mystery, morals and passion

LITERARY CRITICISM: COLM TÓIBÍNreviews Concerning EM ForsterBy Frank Kermode Weidenfeld Nicholson, 180pp. £14.99

IN 1972, THREE years before his death, the critic Lionel Trilling, who had published a book on EM Forster almost 30 years earlier, wrote to Cynthia Ozick about Forster’s homosexuality. “It wasn’t until I had finished my book on Forster,” he wrote, “that I came to the explicit realisation that he was homosexual. I’m not sure whether this was because of a particular obtuseness on my part or because . . . homosexuality hadn’t yet formulated itself as an issue in the culture. When the realisation did come, it at first didn’t seem of crucial importance, but that view soon began to change.”

EM Forster published five novels in his lifetime, as well as stories, travel writing and essays. One aspect of the mystery surrounding him is his silence as a novelist after A Passage to India, published in 1924. Some of this mystery was explained a year after his death, in 1970, when his novel Mauriceappeared. This was his only book that dealt explicity with homosexuality. Forster began the book in 1913 when Edward Carpenter's boyfriend, George Merrill, touched his backside "gently and just above the buttocks", as Forster described it. "I believe he touched most people's. The sensation was unusual and I still remember it . . . It was as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving my thoughts." Forster went straight home and immediately began to write Maurice, which he finished quickly, but he did not wish to publish it. He liked being considered a rock of respectable sense.

He never lost the fear, however, that he would be found out. When Percy Lubbock, who knew him well, observed to him: “It’s really too funny your becoming a holy man of letters. You’re really a spiteful old thing. Why haven’t people found you out and run you down?” Forster replied: “They’re beginning.”

Another mystery in Forster is the peculiar mixture of sheer intelligence and a sort of dimness in his essays and critical writings. Trilling, like Frank Kermode in his new book on Forster, remained uneasy about Forster’s attitude to both Henry James and James Joyce, feeling that his remark that “most of human life had to disappear” before Henry James “could do us a novel” was a failure of intelligence. Both critics were also unhappy with Forster’s inability to see the importance of Joyce.

Trilling, in his book, admired Forster's novels, while Kermode, in Concerning EM Forster, remains intrigued by them. His book is divided into two; the first part, which is formal and sharply analytical, consists of the three Clark Lectures that he delivered two years ago; the second part, which he calls "A Causerie", is looser, more ruminative and speculative about both the man and his work.

Kermode quotes Forster – "I want to love a young man of the lower classes and be loved by him and even hurt by him" – and then ponders the creation of Leonard Bast, the nearest to a working-class protagonist Forster ever created, in his novel Howard's End. He is alert to Forster's failure to allow Bast fully to live in the novel; instead Bast is mostly defined by his class and only awkwardly emerges from the confines of that definition.

Kermode makes clear that while Forster’s novels do not bear close scrutiny, they are made all the more interesting by their imperfections; they somehow rise above their own occasion mainly by the use of two ideas that have made them into uneven, tender classics. The first idea is clear enough – Forster was opposed to what Edward Carpenter called “the starving of the human heart”, and he sought to dramatise the need for personal openness and liberation in his characters and the scenes he created. The strength of his opposition arose from many things, not least his homosexuality.

The second idea is more complicated, and it may explain Forster’s antipathy to Henry James, who was, even in his ghost stories and despite his religious upbringing, a great materialist and someone who had no use for the mumbo-jumbo of religion or magic in his work. Forster believed that a work of art was a blend of realism and “magic”, and Kermode ponders that second term with acuity, admiration and suspicion.

Forster used symbolic moments in his work and filled them with mystery. He created these moments with enough force and invested them with a sort of insistent credibility that they rescue his novels, lift them out of their Edwardian torpor, or their author’s well-intentioned preaching.

Kermode writes with real insight about Forster’s use in his fiction of a system of motifs that he had learned from Wagner and other musical systems, which gave his books what Trilling called “a web of reverberation . . . a cohesion and intricacy usually found only in music”. Forster was English enough to love order and imaginative enough to love India. His novels hover in the gap between what he saw in India, the mixture of chaos and godliness, and his own plain, unconforming eye. He also loved beauty, and found it in Italy as much as in India; he longed for beauty as much as he approved of common sense. His work embodies the startling contradictions in his own make-up. He will not settle for a novel of pure realism, a slice of life. Rather he wanted his work, despite the ostensible plainness of his prose, to soar above life and to symbolise it, and at the same time to be faithful to it.

Kermode uses the phrase "creative faking" for those moments in Forster, such as the moment in the caves in A Passage to India, when mystery, suggestion and vast implication are aroused by a scene where nothing is fully explained and the possibility is allowed that something beyond life itself has entered the novel and brushed life's dullness with its wings.

Kermode quotes with approval what he believes may be Forster’s most important dictum – that art is based “on an integrity in man’s nature which is deeper than moral integrity”. Forster’s inability to fuse the moralist in himself and the passionate sense of possibility within his spirit – the distance between the plain man and the gay man in him – may have resulted in his silence as a novelist between 1924 and 1970, but the tension between the two also produced the five novels and the short stories on which his high reputation deservedly rests.

Colm Tóibín's most recent novel, Brooklyn, is shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award