Only Reflect - Concerning E.M.Forster
Reviewed by Edmund White
Published New York Times: January 14, 2010

CONCERNING E. M. FORSTER
By Frank Kermode
180 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24

Aspiring fiction writers have been reading E. M. Forster’s “Aspects of the Novel” since it was first published in 1927. I can remember devouring it in 1960 or soon after; here was one of the greatest English novelists of the 20th century, the author of “A Passage to India,” divulging the secrets of the trade — or rather, expressing strong but always courteous opinions about the rival merits and methods of the important novelists of the past.

Here we first learned of “flat” (quickly sketched in) versus “round” (fully developed) characters and how every book needs some of both. Here we were told that Henry James’s decision in “The Ambassadors” to make his two chief male characters reverse positions by the end of the novel was a bad idea, a shoehorning of human vagaries into the rigors of unbending “pattern,” whereas Proust’s far better principle of composition was subject to a more fluid and spontaneous sense of “rhythm.” Forster gives as an example of rhythm Proust’s constant but never systematic or insistent return to the theme of the “little phrase,” a melody that the fictional composer Vinteuil serves up in various forms and that the characters hear at strategic moments. Forster writes of the melody, “There are times when it means nothing and is forgotten, and this seems to me the function of rhythm in fiction; not to be there all the time like a pattern, but by its lovely waxing and waning to fill us with surprise and freshness and hope.”

Sir Frank Kermode, who turned 90 last year, has written a subtle and fascinating book of criticism that obeys the delightful vagaries of rhythm more than the inflexibility of pattern. In “Concerning E. M. Forster,” Kermode sinks probes into Forster’s book about fiction (the first chapter is called “Aspects of Aspects”) and manages along the way to explore aesthetic questions, Forster’s life and Forster’s links to other writers, like Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence.

We learn that Forster would never have finished “A Passage to India” had it not been for Leonard Woolf’s prodding. Leonard was a brilliant editor, not only of his wife’s work but of the novels written by friends and the authors he and Virginia published. We read that Forster was, especially in his youth, a devoted Wagner­ian and that the concept of leitmotifs influenced his ideas about literary rhythm, though Forster felt his own rhythms were less obtrusive than Wagner’s recurring themes. We discover that Forster rejected Henry James in part because he did not want to conform to James’s practice of writing an entire novel from a single point of view and in part because Forster liked to express his own opinions about life and the world in asides to the reader — an old-fashioned practice that James avoided. ­Using as an example one of Forster’s novels, Kermode writes, “It may be allowed that in ‘Howards End’ the characters are represented as free individuals, with minds of their own, but the book contains a strikingly large amount of authorial reflection, wise sayings about love, class and culture, panic and emptiness, prose and passion, connecting and not connecting, straightforward announcements of the Forsterian way of looking at the human condition.”
The full review NYT.