Publishing the whole of E.M. Forster
Christopher Hawtree
E.M. Forster was a prolific writer. This is no fanciful assertion. It is all too often forgotten that between 1905 and 1910 he published four novels whose complexity and wit find only the dimmest echo in the soft-focus, prettily-clothed, oh-so-clean film versions which producers imagine were the Edwardian era; and these novels were part of an output which, during those years, also included a collection of short stories and sufficient journalism to fill a volume, all of it fuelled by the most restless urge to travel ever known in a resident of Weybridge.
And this is far from being a full summa- ry. He attempted plays, made a start on novels that did not gel, was an industrious letter-writer and kept a diary, the latter (post-1910) section of which is still under seal for fear of upsetting those pictured within who fondly recall 'dear Morgan'.
This legacy becomes all the more com- plex when one considers Forster's later work. Here is one of the century's major figures (aged only 25 when he wrote Where Angels Fear to Tread), and yet in the couple of decades since his death there has been a curiously ad hoc approach to presenting his work to the public.
Not that this is how it seemed in 1972, when close on the heels of Maurice came The Life to Come, a volume of stories only one and a bit of which were previously known (and only to readers with access to 'My wig was going rather thin on top.' old copies of Temple Bar and the Listener). This collection carried on its spine 'Volume
8', for it was to be part of an Abinger Edition whose shape was already mapped out and in the charge of Oliver Stallybrass, an industrious freelance man-of-letters who had worked at the London Library and compiled the index to Orwell's essays (themselves now in need of a new edition). The Abinger Edition proceeded at a fine pace: like Rupert Hart-Davis, Stallybrass
displayed a far greater energy than that of the sluggardly American academics who were taking decades over such tasks as the Yale volumes of Johnson and Boswell; moreover, he had an eye for presentation so that the books could be read as well as studied, something which can hardly be said of the Cambridge Lawrence and Con- rad whose margins are littered with a num- ber every five lines; and if Stallybrass made some mistranscriptions in The Manuscripts of Howards End, he did not deny it and issued a list of corrections, taking all the more trouble over a fascinating volume which shows the evolution of A Passage to India. By now the Edition had included such diverse works as Where Angels Fear to Tread, the essays of Two Cheers For Democracy and that curious biography of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson.
And then Stallybrass chose a railway-line upon which to die, something said to have been prompted by King's College not elect- ing him to a Fellowship in order to contin- ue the work; in any case, such an end could not help but bring to mind the death of Rickie in The Longest Journey, a novel to which Stallybrass had yet to turn his atten- tion, but which, happily, found an excellent editor in Elizabeth Heine: her work on this, The Hill of Devi and the fragments gath- ered as Arctic Summer is a major contribu- tion to the study of a man so often almost wilfully misrepresented as impossibly tweedy.
Even so, one cannot help but think that it would have been a better tactic to defer this, for the publishers Edward Arnold had by now lost that eponymous individuality and been shunted from conglomerate to conglomerate, the remains of a general list eased to one side in favour of the educa- tional market: the five novels were in the can (with all the subsidiary rights therein) and, well, such things as a planned four vol- umes of uncollected essays could go hang.
In the meanwhile, Forster's pre-Great War journalism was available only in America under the title Albergo Empedocle and a two-volume edition of highly-selected letters appeared from Collins whose eccen- tric presentation was made all the worse for myriad mistranscriptions; perhaps most interesting was his Commonplace Book, first published by Scolar in a fine centenary facsimile (a few names masked) and then in an edition by Philip Gardner which illuminates those later years which are hurriedly covered in the biography by P.N. Furbank.
Such things rarely excite widespread attention, but a new edition of B.J.
Kirkpatrick's Bibliography only emphasised
the truth of a remark in the preface which Forster contributed to the 1965 edition: The longer one lives the less one feels to have done, and I am both surprised and glad to discover from this bibliography that I have written so much.
It is now high time that the Abinger Edition was continued, along with other volumes of letters (and, one day, diary). If a complete edition is prohibitive, then there is at least a highly viable one in both sides of his gossipy correspondence with Christopher Isherwood. And if such things as Forster on Cowper and Edward VII (to pick two excellent pieces at random) are not as obviously lucrative, then enough funds must have by now accrued from those willing to pay to see Helena Bonham- Carter's lips and Simon Callow's — no, the pen cannot bring itself to describe such things: suffice it to say that film producers have baulked at adapting The Longest Jour- ney: if only they knew that, hidden as an appendix to the Abinger Edition, is a delet- ed nude scene, then there might be a stam- pede for the rights.
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