E. M. Forster
The Art of Fiction
No. 1
Interviewed by P. N. Furbank & F. J. H. Haskell
“That is not all of Arctic Summer—there is almost half as much of it again—but that’s all I want to read because now it goes off, or at least I think so, and I do not want my voice to go out into the air while my heart is sinking. It will be more interesting to consider what the problems before me were, and why I was unlikely to solve them. I should like to do this, though it may involve us a little in fiction technicalities . . .”
So said E. M. Forster, addressing an audience at the Aldeburgh Festival of 1951. He had been reading part of an unfinished novel called Arctic Summer. At the end of the reading, he went on to explain why he had not finished the novel, which led him to mention what he called “fiction technicalities.”
Following up on Mr. Forster’s Aldeburgh remarks, we have tried to record his views on such matters as he gave them in an interview at King’s College, Cambridge, on the evening of June 20, 1952.
A spacious and high-ceilinged room, furnished in the Edwardian taste. One’s attention is caught by a massive carved wooden mantelpiece of elaborate structure holding blue china in its niches. Large, gilt-framed portrait-drawings on the walls (his Thornton ancestors and others), a Turner by his great-uncle, and some modern pictures. Books of all sorts, handsome and otherwise, in English and French; armchairs decked in little shawls; a piano, a solitaire board, and the box of a zoetrope; profusion of opened letters; slippers neatly arranged in wastepaper basket.
In reading what follows, the reader must imagine Mr. Forster’s manner, which though of extreme amenity is a firm one: precise, yet nonetheless elusive, administering a series of tiny surprises. He makes a perpetual slight displacement of the expected emphasis. His habit was to answer our questions by brief statements, followed by decorative asides, often of great interest, but very difficult to reproduce.
INTERVIEWER
To begin with, may we ask you again, why did you never finish Arctic Summer?
E. M. FORSTER
I have really answered this question in the foreword I wrote for the reading. The crucial passage was this:
“ . . . whether these problems are solved or not, there remains a still graver one. What is going to happen? I had got my antithesis all right, the antithesis between the civilized man, who hopes for an arctic summer in which there is time to get things done, and the heroic man. But I had not settled what is going to happen, and that is why the novel remains a fragment. The novelist should, I think, always settle when he starts what is going to happen, what his major event is to be. He may alter this event as he approaches it, indeed he probably will, indeed he probably had better, or the novel becomes tied up and tight. But the sense of a solid mass ahead, a mountain round or over or through which [he interposed, “in this case it would be through”] the story must somehow go, is most valuable and, for the novels I’ve tried to write, essential.”