Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,7

was always sending shafts of light into the valleys.” Early on, Forster voiced his determination to plow the middle course: “I’ve had nice letters from people regretting that my talks are above them, and others equally nice regretting that they are below; so hadn’t I better pursue the even tenor of my way?”

Well, hadn’t he?

2

I’ve made up an imaginary person whom I call “you” and I’m going to tell you about it. Your age, your sex, your position, your job, your training—I know nothing about all that, but I have formed the notion that you’re a person who wants to read new books but doesn’t intend to buy them.

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