Battle versus work
P. N. Furbank ARCTIC SUMMER by E. M. Forster Hesperus, £6.99, pp. 87, ISBN 1843910616 The great popular success of Forster's Howards End, published in 1910, meant that he was under pressure to set to work on a new novel, and in the following year he did so, but in a mood of self-doubt. He told himself it was wrong to force oneself to write; that before attempting a new work he always felt he needed to reappraise his own existence; that (as he noted in his diary) he was weary of 'the only subject that I both can and may treat — the love of men for women and vice-versa'. He was suffering moreover from a superstitious sense that success didn't suit him and that he might 'go smash'. Nevertheless an idea came to him. Howards End had turned on the antithesis between death and money; he now envisaged a novel opposing battle to work, and he drafted a number of chapters before his first visit to India, returning to it fitfully later. It was an excellent idea of the Hesperus Press to reprint these opening chapters (first published in the Abinger edition of 1980). Several conflicting drafts exist, but they have chosen what is, rightly, known as the 'main version'.
The work was to have two main protagonists. Martin Whitby is a cultivated, intelligent, progressive civil servant in his early thirties, who desires from life a long, cool 'arctic summer' in which there will be time to achieve something socially useful. He is married to a rather simple-minded Newnham Fabian, who holds that what the world needs is 'tidying'. They are en route for Italy when we first meet them, and in Basle Whitby is nearly swept off a crowded railway platform, being rescued by the prompt action of a young Englishman, Clesant March. March, an officer cadet, is a stiff, unimaginative public-school type, with extravagant ideas as to the chivalry owed to women. He has come to Italy, knowing nothing whatever about the country or its art, to inspect a certain fresco in a Renaissance castle (Tramonta), with which he has a family connection; but the Whitbys, with their knowledgeability and kind offers of guidance, fidget him to such a degree that he quarrels with them and gives up his enterprise in disgust.
The Whitbys themselves, however, visit Tramonta, and Martin, struck by the physical likeness of a figure in the fresco to Clesant March, writes in his journal, 'Very moving: warriors about to fight for their country and faith' — surprising himself with the remark, 'So little resemblance did it bear to his usual art-criticism.'
The vision of the claims of action and loyalty stays with Martin and is reinforced by a devastating contretemps. One evening, on a whim, he invites their chauffeur Aristide to come to the cinema. A fire breaks out; there is a rush for the exits; and Martin finds himself in the street, hardly knowing how he has got there and having made not the slightest attempt to help Aristide, who is lame. It brings home to him, with horror, that he is a physical coward. Wryly he gives thanks that his wife Venetia is not a 'womanly woman', who might forgive his lapse but never forget it. By the time that he meets Clesant March again, Martin has already come to see the surly young Englishman in a new light.
These opening pages are masterly, and what intense pleasure it gives to be renewing acquaintance with that unique prosestyle, a style incomparably swift and economical, in which the briefest casual conversation turns out to be an event, and in which the narrative phrasing, in its unobtrusive way, is almost continually and inventively witty.
'The higher mountains will soon be hidden,' said Venetia, who was in great good humour, and unusually civil to natural objects.
(Perhaps only Henry James is Forster's rival in this particular talent.) When Forster gave a reading from the work at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1951 he said:
That is not Arctic Summer — there is about half as much of it again — hut that's all I want to read, because now it goes off, at least I think so, and I do not want my voice to go out into the air while my heart is sinking.
Where he thought that it 'went off was in the sketching-in of Clesant March's home existence. He seems to have realised the weakness even at the time of writing and began a substantial revision. There was also, he would say, a more practical reason why the novel was never finished. It was that for once he had not decided what his major event was going to be; he lacked the sense of 'a solid mass ahead'. All the same, one has the strong feeling that it could have been a masterpiece.
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