Zadie Smith: Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

But here Forster is too humble: he knew more of his audience than the contents of their passports. Take his talk on Coleridge of August 13, 1931. A new Collected is out, it’s a nicely printed edition, costs only three shillings sixpence, and he’d like to talk to you about it. But he senses that you are already sighing, and he knows why:

Perhaps you’ll say “I don’t want a complete Coleridge, I’ve got ‘The Ancient Mariner’ in some anthology or other, and that’s enough. ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ and perhaps the first half of ‘Christabel’-that’s all in Coleridge that really matters. The rest is rubbish and not even good dry rubbish, it’s moist clammy rubbish, it’s depressing.” So if I tell you that there are 600 pages in this new edition, you’ll only reply “I’m sorry to hear it.”

Still-600 pages makes one think.

The first half of Christabel -how perfect that is, and how it makes one laugh. A mix of empathy and ventriloquism fuels the comic engines of his novels; here in the broadcasts it’s reemployed as sly technique, allowing Forster to approach the congenital anti-intellectualism of the English from an oblique angle, one that flatters them with complicity. Here he is, up to the same thing with D. H. Lawrence:

Much of his work is tedious, and some of it shocks people, so that we are inclined to say: “What a pity! What a pity to go on about the subconscious and the solar plexus and maleness and femaleness and African darkness and the cosmic battle when you can write with such insight about human beings and so beautifully about flowers.

Have you had that thought? Don’t worry if you have; so has E. M. Forster. Still, it’s a mistake:

You can’t say, “Let’s drop his theories and enjoy his art,” because the two are one. Disbelieve his theories, if you like, but never brush them aside… He resembles a natural process much more nearly than do most writers… and one might as well scold a flower for growing on a manure heap, or a manure heap for producing a flower.

It’s a gentle correction, but a serious one, aimed democratically at both listener and speaker. And like this, pursuing a gentle push and pull, iron fist hidden in velvet glove, Forster presses on in his determined, middling way. He’s educating you, but surreptitiously, and unlike the writings of his childhood hero, Matthew Arnold, it never feels painful. The legerezza of his prose lightens every load. Speaking on the twentieth of June, 1945, Forster outlines Arnold’s more muscular approach:

One of his complaints against his countrymen was that they were eccentric and didn’t desire to be anything else. They didn’t want to be better informed or urbane, or to know what is great in human achievement. They didn’t want culture. And he flung at them another of his famous accusations: Philistines. The philistine is the sort of person who says “I know what I know and I like what I like, and that’s the kind of chap I am.” And Matthew Arnold, a Victorian David, slung his pebble bang in the middle of Goliath’s forehead.

Forster was no pebble slinger. For him, not only the means but also the aims were to be different. It really didn’t matter to Forster if a fellow had read Lawrence or not (he is consistently sentimental about the unlettered: peasants, sailors, gardeners, natives). But to deny Lawrence, because he was not to your taste, or to deny poetry itself, out of fear and incomprehension-that mattered terribly. The only philistinism that counted was the kind that deformed the heart, trapping us in an attitude of scorn and fear until scorn and fear are all we know. On the twelfth of February 1947, recommending Billy Budd, Forster finds an unlikely ally in Melville:

He also shows that… innocence is not safe in a civilization like ours, where a man must practice a “ruled undemonstrative distrustfulness” in order to defend himself against traps. This “ruled undemonstrative distrustfulness” is not confined to business men, but exists everywhere. We all exercise it. I know I do, and I should be surprised if you, who are listening to me, didn’t. All we can do (and Melville gives us this hint) is to exercise it consciously, as Captain Vere did. It is unconscious distrustfulness that corrodes the heart and destroys the heart’s insight, and prevents it from saluting goodness.

Unconscious distrustfulness is what Lucy Honeychurch feels toward George Emerson, what Philip Herriton feels in Italy, what Maurice Hall feels for his own soul. Forster nudges his characters toward a consciousness of this weakness in themselves; they do battle against it and win. They learn to salute goodness. Sometimes this is achieved with delicacy and the illusion of freedom, as it is in A Room with a View; at other times, in Maurice, say, happiness arrives a good deal more dogmatically (though no less pleasurably). But it is always Forster’s game by Forster’s rules. In radio, though, each man’s consciousness is his own. There are no Lucy Honeychurches to play with-only nameless, faceless listeners whose sensibilities can only be guessed at, only assumed. In the anxiety of this unfamiliar situation, a comic novelist, with his natural weakness for caricature, is apt to assume too much. The broadcasts suffer from empathic condescension: Forster is unconvinced that we might also, like him, be capable of a broad sympathetic sensibility. Recommending two memoirs, one by Sir Henry Newbolt (a patriotic, public-school adventurer with “a touch of the medieval knight about him”), and another by Mr. Grant Richards (a “gay and irresponsible” fin de siècle journalist who “loves Paris with a fervour”), he predicts two camps of readers, split by sensibility, unable to understand each other:

Mr. Grant Richards is a very different story. The title he has given his memoirs proves that: he calls them Memoirs of a Misspent Youth … Like Sir Henry Newbolt he is a friend of Rothenstein and was fond of birdnest ing, but those are the only bond between them… The atmosphere of the book one might call Bohemian, and if you find yourself in complete sympathy with Sir Henry Newbolt you won’t care for Memories of a Misspent Youth and vice versa.

There is an element of the nervous party host in Forster; he fears people won’t speak to each other unless he’s there to facilitate the introduction. Occasionally his image of the general reader is almost too general to recognize. Who dreads philosophy so much they need easing into Plato like this?

The word Plato has rather a boring sound. For some reason or other “Plato” always suggests to me a man with a large head and a noble face who never stops talking and from whom it is impossible to escape.

Who’s (this) afraid of The Magic Flute ?

It’s a lovely book, [19]I implore you to read it, but rather unluckily it’s based on an opera by Mozart. I say “unluckily” not because the opera is bad, it is Mozart’s best, but because many readers of the book won’t have heard of the opera, and so won’t catch on the allusions. You’ll have to be prepared for some queer names.

No one reading these words, perhaps. On the other side of the class and educational divide-a line that so preoccupied Forster-it’s easy to forget what it’s like not to know. Forster was always thinking of those who did not know. He worries that simply by having this one-way conversation he pushes the Alec Scudders in his audience still further into the shadows. Frequently he asks the (necessarily) rhetorical question “And what do you think?” We can be sure that Eliot, in the next booth over, never asked that. But isn’t there a point where empathy becomes equivocation? Can’t you hear Henry Wilcox, fuming: “Good God, man, it’s not what I think that matters! I’m paying my license fee to hear what you think!”