E. M. FORSTER—Lionel Trilling—New Directions ($1.50).
Some 30 years ago young Novelist E. M. Forster sat with his friend, Philosopher Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, in the palace of the Maharaja of Chhatarpur and heard the nabob cry: "Tell me, Mr. Dickinson, where is God? Can Herbert Spencer lead me to him, or should I prefer George Henry Lewes? Oh when will Krishna come and be my friend? Oh Mr. Dickinson!"
Twelve years later, Author Forster caught and fixed the echo of this cry, so absurd in its phrasing, so desperate in its need, in A Passage To India, one of the century's most sensitive and provocative novels. Last week Novelist Forster, who has never written a novel since, found himself the subject of an unexpected revival. Two of his earlier novels (Howards End and Where Angels Fear To Tread) were reissued by Alfred A. Knopf. Two others (A Room With A View and The Longest Journey) were reissued by New Directions. Novelist Forster and his work were analyzed by Columbia University's Lionel Trilling in the first important For ter study in English.
What was the reason for this sudden burst of enthusiasm for a man who has been so successfully neglected that many people did not know whether he was dead or alive?
Why the Excitement? Part of the reason, perhaps, was the recent renewal of interest in India, and the realization that Forster's 20-year-old novel, by approaching the problem through India's humanity instead of through India's politics, was far & away the most revealing book on the subject. But most of the current Forster enthusiasm was due to the realisation, which has been slowly percolating for years, that Edward Morgan Forster is probably the most distinguished living English novelist.
Trilling's book, part biography, part criticism, attempts to tell why. The heart of Trilling's book is the brilliant chapter called Forster and the Liberal Imagination, which set liberal tongues fussily wagging when it appeared in somewhat different form in the Kenyan Review last year. For this chapter is a shrewd study of the prevailing mentality—the liberal mind—and the first successful attempt to set Forster in the context of his time, to explain why Forster irritates so many people by "his refusal to be great," why he is a liberal "at war with liberalism."
Critic Trilling approaches this paradox by way of Novelist Forster's literary "manner." "That manner," says Trilling, "is comic; Forster owes much to Fielding, Dickens, Meredith and James. . . . Stendhal believed that gaiety was one of the marks of the healthy intelligence, and we are mistakenly sure that Stendhal was wrong. We suppose that there is necessarily an intellectual 'depth' in the deep tones of the organ; it is possibly the sign of a deprivation—our suspicion of gaiety in art perhaps signifies an inadequate seriousness in ourselves. A generation charmed by the lugubrious—once in O'Neill, Dreiser and Anderson, now in Steinbeck and Van Wyck Brooks—is perhaps fleeing from the trivial shape of its own thoughts."