TABLE TALK

A First—without a star

DENIS BROGAN

I was about thirteen when I borrowed from Rutherglen public library a book by an un- known author, E. M. Forster, whom I at

first took to be a youngish woman. I read Howards End with great pleasure and profit,

but about two thirds of the way through the book, I decided that it was not a woman's book after all and that it was far more inter- esting and important than any novels written by a living woman (I still preferred Jane Austen). I began hunting for other bookshy

this Mr Forster. They were few but all were good, although none so excellent as Howards End. I read shorter pieces, and like a great many young people of both sexes I became a fan. I welcomed A Passage to• India in

1924 but found it in some ways off-putting, probably because I had suddenly become a devout Proustian and tended to assess all modern fiction against a Proustian scale. Forster was not Proust; he was not Joyce; he was not Gide. On the other hand he was not Virginia Woolf and he was not D. H. Lawrence. And if there was nothing much (as I thought, and still think) to be said for Virginia Woolf, there was, at times, some- thing to be said for D. H. Lawrence. To stop this probably boring personal assessment of my literary education, E. M. Forster was, to use a Cambridge classification, a First— without a star.

Why no star? I suppose it was partly due to the meagreness of the Forster output; partly because I didn't like Bloomsbury (of which I knew little or nothing at first hand), partly because only two of Forster's books really lived on in my memory and, to some

degree, in my emotions. A Passage to India made me wonder about the justice of the `no

star', for it came out when I was at Balliol and most of my friends, even or indeed especially those whose families had provided servants for the Raj, were bored with or ashamed by the history of British rule in India; it was a mark of the naivety of Rhodes scholars and other colonials that they be- lieved in the Empire, and especially in the Indian Empire. For these colonials it was what a schoolbook in Scotland had told me it was—'the brighest jewel in the crown'; but

as was made plain, it was a possession of the British crown. To think otherwise was to be a reactionary and probably a fool.

So, much as I had enjoyed A Passage to India, it didn't make me want to go to India and the thought of the les was more absurd than abhorrent. I remembered the chilly reception given at Balliol to a St Catherine's Day recruiting speech by Sir Michael O'Dwyer (soon to be assassinated by an Indian nationalist). For the lesson of A Pas- sage to India was, it appeared, `East is East and West is West'. And after all, the novel ends on a note of failure. East and West can't meet, for long or deeply. Even Forster obviously found Indians trying, as he found the British official class boorish and philistine. It was no wonder that Forster felt at home in the Mediterranean lands, even in Egypt, more so than he had done in India. No one was less poisoned by imperial pride. If he could give only two cheers for democracy, he couldn't give one, even, for honest and well-intentioned imperialism. Like so many Englishmen, Forster was won, seduced and illuminated by Italy—or even by Alexandria, although the Alexandrian culture was a de- based or incurious one for a man of letters.

I was not shocked or really upset when a vigorous Indian polemical writer attacked me with great vivacity for my praise of A Passage to India and my conventional deni- gration of Kipling, who, Mr Chaudhuri told me, was worth ten Forsters. Kipling had been born in India; one of his native languages was Urdu; he knew more about India than Forster ever did or ever could. It was only the English who took Forster's India seriously. I was shaken, but Mr Chaud- huri had a point. Perhaps Forster's India was insufficiently studied, and lived in, to be part of the real life of India? The Indians could see themselves in Kipling's India (and especially recognise the faults of Indians). And my mind was even more clouded when I read The Hill of Devi and Mr Ackerley's Hindoo Holiday. And when finally I got to India, I decided that everybody was right, that 'India' was a highly ambiguous term. But, re-reading Forster's books, I concluded that 'India' Included Forster and Ackerley and Kipling and Chaudhuri. So I have just re-read, with profit, A Passage to India, and learned with pleasure that if has sold nearly a million (paperback) copies. Possibly the improvement in British manners, even busi- ness manners, may owe something to the irony with which Forster studied his country- men.

Is A Passage to India better or worse than Howards End? Of course A Passage is more Interesting'. It deals with the first serious cracks in the authority of the British Raj. The Hindu magistrate not only dismisses the charges against Dr Aziz but he has to, for Miss Quested lets the side down by with- drawing her charge. Dr Aziz becomes the innocent victim of a cause célèbre and is alienated from his English friend and mentor, indeed from the political and social structure imposed by the imperial power. So Aziz 'goes native' and if Fielding doesn't quite go British, he is no longer automatically on the 'native' side. It is a real political dilemma for everybody. The passage is reversed. The Hill of Devi is fact not fiction—but what is fact when you are dealing withe ambiguities of the Indian civilisation which British rule is increasing, not simplifying?

I have been in India since I first read and re-read A Passage to India and I know far more Indians than I did then. Yet the 'lesson' of the Indian theme is not clear today to me. But Forster did not, I think, expect or want the kind of clarity an American or Swedish sociologist or technical expert would seek.

So I have in the past week read both the main books with delight, but with much more understanding when I have to contemplate the fate of the half-German, half-British Schlegel sisters in Howards End. Forster can see and feel for both sides of the Schlegels. He can feel for the blindness and deafness of the Wilcox family; and the adjustment of Margaret Schlegel to the closed, untruthful but in some ways admirable male Wilcoxes represents another side of human relations. `Only connect'. Easier said than done, for Margaret Schlegel can't or won't connect with Leonard Bast. There is, in the treatment of poor Leonard, too complete despair about his possibilities. Leonard was 'badly edu- cated', picking up scraps of irrelevant know- ledge, seeking eagerly for the right thing to read, the right music to hear. I felt a malici- ous temptation to dwell on what a young Fellow of King's had told me of Forster's sense of blasphemy when he discovered so many intelligent, handsome, adequately edu- cated young men who preferred Mozart to Beethoven. (There is some not altogether flattering revelation in being told that the Schlegel girls always went to hear Beet- hoven's Fifth Symphony when it was per- formed in London. One is tempted to ask `and so what?') Fashions in the arts, in ideas, in social graces or defiance of them, always change. Sometimes one feels that Forster was 'tiresome': but how seldom! One can think of great Cambridge figures of his age (i.e. in the golden age before 1914) who pro- voke far more scepticism, more hostility, more dislike. Till a few years before his death, E. M. Forster was physically young, amiable. bland, outgiving. He was a great figure of an enlightenment stopped in its tracks by 1914. And of course his very long life enabled him to be, as well as to play, the sage. He was a very enlightened mandarin indeed, not so passionate nor so credulous about causes (or so despairing about human destiny) as was Bertrand Russell, but one who restored faith in the life of reason.