On E. M. Forster
Marshall, Rachelle
On E. M. Forster Reviewed by Rochelle Marshall FEW BOOKS give as much pleasure as one written by a skilled and subtle writer about another such writer, especially if the book is not only a...
...With Allen Matusow he edited "The Truman Administration: A Documentary History," published this year by Harper & Row...
...Stone explores Forster's problems and successes as an artist while simultaneously weaving in an al most continuous discussion of Forster's social and political values...
...JAMES l. STERN is a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin...
...Nevertheless England did survive...
...Stone indicates that Forster was on Goebbels' list of persons to be exterminated if the Nazis were victorious...
...There is no question but that the intuitive links between the eighty-sevenyear-old English writer and the California professor are strong ones...
...Like the best of the writers on racial subjects who came after him, Forster showed that domination of one group by another causes a more hideous kind of damage to the oppressor than to the oppressed...
...The book reaches a climax with the magnificent chapter on A Passage to India, the work which, one suspects, moved Stone to undertake his eightyear effort...
...His "little phrase" suggests that sanity itself is precious, that choice between extremes is not necessary, and that simple decency is neither soft nor woolly-headed but perhaps the only position which-in the long run-will work...
...From start to finish," Stone explains, "his problem has been the accommodation of his nearer to his farther vision . Only once, and in a work of art, does he accomplish it...
...In his approach to Forster in the rest of the book Stone is humorous, often irreverent, and occasionally sharply critical...
...That work, A Passage to India , is undoubtedly one of the great works of social protest of our time, not only antedating the more subtle of the American novels on race prejudice but also exploring the psychological and social ravages of imperialism...
...RACHELLE MARSHALL is a free lance writer...
...On E. M. Forster Reviewed by Rochelle Marshall FEW BOOKS give as much pleasure as one written by a skilled and subtle writer about another such writer, especially if the book is not only a work of scholarship but a labor of sympathetic understanding...
...THE REVIEWERS ROBERT SKLAR is an assistant professor of history and American studies at the University of Michigan...
...Stone's summing up of the esthetic meaning of the book has a separate, almost hypnotic beauty of its own...
...Considering the historic barbarisms that have been committed in the pursuit of highminded goals, and that today, in this country, men with the noblest of intentions are coolly risking the extinction of hundreds of thousands of human beings, Forster's seemingly modest values are uniquely sane...
...Wilfred Stone, a professor of English at Stanford, worked for eight years on his critical study of E. M. Forster, spending a portion of this time in Cambridge with Forster...
...Stone summarizes their philosophic context when he says...
...These negative phrases add up to a positive credo, one that was forged and tested during the grim 1930's and 1940's when Forster must have been continually reminded that if all Englishmen adopted his stand there might no longer be an England to behave decently in...
...At least four times in this long and varied book Stone quotes a phrase from Two Cheers for Democracy in THE PROGRESSIVE which Forster credits the survival of civilization to "the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky...
...Forster obviously accepted this solution, perhaps because there was no alternative...
...But obviously Stone first approached this study with three items of equipment: a broad knowledge of English prose and poetry, a highly developed skill as a cntlc, and, above all, the mind and heart of a humanist for whom the problems of present-day civilization are of deep concern...
...In the chapter on Passage, Stone is no longer simply the judicious critic but a man whose critical sense, sharpened to a fine edge, only serves to heighten his emotional, intellectual, and esthetic responses to what has obviously been one of the major literary experiences of his life...
...As Forster has done before him, Stone has written a book that is a pleasure to read, informative and stimulating, and that is also about making moral choices-or, even more important, perhaps, about how to think about making moral choices, in the world we live in today...
...tolerance and balance, sensitivity and common sense, and a loathing for everything dogmatic...
...But even at his most critical he seems to be saying, silently, "Still, this is the man who wrote A Passage to India...
...The style of [Forster's] sermon always reflects those qualities about which there can he for him no compromise...
...JOHN F.e...
...He is the author of a forthcomng study of F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Last Laocoon," to be published by Oxford University Press in the spring...
...This is followed by a detailed examination of Forster's work, with Stone devoting an entire chapter to each of Forster's novels...
...HARRISON, who grew up and studied in England, is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin...
...he describes the origins of the intellectual influences that affected the young Forster and then proceeds to a far-ranging discussion of these influences themselves, at Cambridge and afterwards in London, where Forster had "one foot" in the brilliant Bloomsbury group which included Lytton Strachey, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the art critic Roger Fry...
...The design of Stone's book is basically chronological...
...His success also makes this analysis of Forster's work meaningful to many be sides those who are students of English literature...
...But where Stone's study reaches its height is in its revelation of how much book is...
...this is why Stone is able not only to extract the riches from Forster's work but to process them through his own highly attuned system in such a way that they reach the reader with an immediacy that may have been lacking before...
...He also interviewed dozens of those who are now virtually landmarks of contemporary English culture...
...Consequently, The Cave and the A-fountain is a rich mixture of two major elements, esthetics and social philosophy...
...WILLIAM McCANN edited the paperback, "Ambrose Bierce's...
...Stone devotes a long chapter to Forster's theory of esthetics, which, without being pedantic, includes a discussion in depth of the novel as art...
...The two symbols, the cave and the mountain, in Stone's title could be said to parallel the two aspects of Forster himself-the artist who sought to make his writing reveal the essence of what lies beneath and beyond human experience, and the humane dealer in the stuff of immediate human problems...
...Passage involves not only "connections between peoples, classes, and races," but also "connections in time and in space, connections between ultimate beginnings and the here-and now...
...Until A Passage to India was written, Stone says, Forster was unable to reconcile in his work his highly abstract esthetic vision, his belief in traditional, individualist values, and his concern for the immediate condition of humanity...
...PRISCillA ROBERTSON, a former editor of The Humanist, is teaching a seminar at Harvard on European social history during the Nineteenth Century...
...The effective ness with which Stone unites these two themes into a carefully designed pattern makes his study fascinating to read...
...Stone offers a solution that reflects his own affinity for the non-dogmatic, Forsterian attitude: "It is a contradiction for which there is no logical solution, only an existential onenamely, the acceptance of the contradiction itself as .an ironic fact of life...
...If there ever was such a conscious compromise on Forster's part, he is nevertheless today the embodiment of the civilized man, who refuses to become an absolutist, who will not use barbarous tactics even against barbarians, who will not justify violence and bloodshed, and who will never be absolutely sure that a particular cause is the only right one...
...BART BERNSTEIN teaches history at Stan· ford University...
...These mild adjectives, totally lacking in any suggestion of the heroic or of the crusading spirit, are nevertheless heavy with implication...
...Stone comments: "Forster has bet on this survival and his mission has been to keep it civilized...
Vol. 30 • December 1966 • No. 12
