





“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.”

INTERVIEWER

How much is involved in this “solid mass”? Does it mean that all the important steps in the plot must also be present in the original conception?

FORSTER

Certainly not all the steps. But there must be something, some major object towards which one is to approach. When I began A Passage to India I knew that something important happened in the Marabar Caves, and that it would have a central place in the novel—but I didn’t know what it would be.

INTERVIEWER

But if you didn’t know what was going to happen to the characters in either instance, why was the case of A Passage to India so different from that of Arctic Summer? In both cases you had your antithesis.

FORSTER

The atmosphere of Arctic Summer did not approach the density of what I had in A Passage to India. Let me see how to explain. The Marabar Caves represented an area in which concentration can take place. A cavity. [We noticed that he always spoke of the caves quite literally—as for instance when he interrupted himself earlier to say that the characters had to pass “through” them.] They were something to focus everything up; they were to engender an event like an egg. What I had in Arctic Summer was thinner, a background and color only.

INTERVIEWER

You spoke of antitheses in your novels. Do you regard these as essential to any novel you might write?

FORSTER

Let me think ... There was one in Howards End. Perhaps a rather subtler one in The Longest Journey.

INTERVIEWER

Would you agree that all your novels not only deal with some dilemma but are intended to be both true and useful in regard to it—so that if you felt a certain dilemma was too extreme, its incompatibles too impossible to reconcile, you wouldn’t write about it?

FORSTER

True and lovable would be my antithesis. I don’t think useful comes into it. I’m not sure that I would be put off simply because a dilemma that I wanted to treat was insoluble; at least, I don’t think I should be.

INTERVIEWER

While we are on the subject of the planning of novels, has a novel ever taken an unexpected direction?

FORSTER

Of course, that wonderful thing, a character running away with you—which happens to everyone—that’s happened to me, I’m afraid.

INTERVIEWER

Can you describe any technical problem that especially bothered you in one of the published novels?

FORSTER

I had trouble with the junction of Rickie and Stephen. [The hero of The Longest Journey and his half-brother.] How to make them intimate, I mean. I fumbled about a good deal. It is all right once they are together ... I didn’t know how to get Helen to Howards End. That part is all contrived. There are too many letters. And again, it is all right once she is there. But ends always give me trouble.

INTERVIEWER

Why is that?

FORSTER

It is partly what I was talking about a moment ago. Characters run away with you, and so won’t fit on to what is coming.

INTERVIEWER

Another question of detail. What was the exact function of the long description of the Hindu festival in A Passage to India?

FORSTER

It was architecturally necessary. I needed a lump—or a Hindu temple if you like—a mountain standing up. It is well-placed, and it gathers up some strings. But there ought to be more after it. The lump sticks out a little too much.

INTERVIEWER

To leave technical questions for a moment, have you ever described any type of situation of which you have had no personal knowledge?

FORSTER

The home life of Leonard and Jacky in Howards End is one case. I knew nothing about that. I believe I brought it off.