Aspects ofjhe Novelist

His enduring fame illustrated some upside-down law of literary reputations. His first novel (Where Angels Fear to Tread) appeared only four years after the death of Queen Victoria. A Passage to India, his last and most famous, was written in 1924. Though in later years he wrote essays and criticism, there were only five novels all together. Yet when E.M. Forster died last week at 91. he had been for half a century England's most elusive and illustrious man of prose letters. It is still almost impossible to talk about the modern novel without mentioning his name.

Literary scholarship--which Forster loathed because it reduces writing to a rational rubble of themes and trends --will no doubt have little trouble in assigning Forster's influence and renown to sensible causes and perspectives. Forster grew up, after all, in comfortable upper-middle-class circumstances (Tonbridge school; King's College. Cambridge; an inherited income of -L-8,000 a year). His confrontations of plot and apparent symbolism at first seem to fit easily enough into the new century's dramatic reaction against the massive structures and stifling legacies of Victorian England: passion and beauty v. respectability and ugliness (Where Angels Fear to Tread), personal freedom v. conventional success (The Longest Journey), cultivation and simplicity v. the strangling encroachments of industrial wealth (Howards End). Most important, in taking up the issue of colonial oppression and racism in British India, Forster, with remarkable foresight, was the first to sound what became the most troubling political and moral issue of our times.

Yet Forster's genius lies precisely in the impossibility of stuffing his books into literary boxes, however labeled. He strove to maintain a free and, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. d;sinterest-ed view. More than any other novelist, he is proof that to become a significant writer, a man must be neither an idea machine nor a recording angel, but a human voice sounding with its own shifting intonations in the ear and heart of the reader. Describing the peculiar discrepancy between apparent message and feeling in Forster's novels, Lionel Trilling observed: " 'Wash ye, make yourselves clean,' says the plot, and the manner murmurs, 'If you can find the soap.' "

Forster is, in fact, a very unsatisfactory fellow when it comes to hortatory confrontations between vice and virtue. As simple-minded symbols on any side of any argument, his characters are simply not to be relied upon. For one thing, he often kills them off highhandedly. For another, they change sides right in the middle of the symbolic drama, or behave with maddening inconsistency in other ways. Mercurial and emancipated, Dr. Aziz in A Pas sage to India at first seems to come on as a stereotyped native victim of senseless prejudice. He is a victim. But he also proves to be arrogant: an Indian Moslem, he is as indifferent to the concerns of Hindus as they are to his own.

Forster had traveled in India and served for six months as private secretary to a maharajah. He was angry about colonialism. But in A Passage to India as elsewhere, he was circling toward the kind of contradictory, radical perceptions that can best be glimpsed obliquely and with reservations. He suspected that the barriers between the races --and between East and West--might prove to be impenetrable, though he characteristically went on insisting that the effort should be made.

Forster rejected the customary methods of ranking novelists by greatness or arranging them according to their effect on their times. Instead, in Aspects of the Novel, he imagined all the novelists of the past 200 years scribbling away in matched pairs around a table in a chamber as big as the British Museum reading room. Samuel Richardson with Henry James (for "tremulous nobility"); H.G. Wells with Charles Dickens (as "humorists and visualizers"). Forster in his various aspects could be paired with many in that room. With James, because he had James' grasp of the profound moral and emotional stakes that can change hands in outwardly frivolous situations; with Jane Austen, because he shared her skill at domestic comedy; with D.H. Lawrence, because in his own way he proclaimed the importance of passion.

He had modest hopes for fiction as a shaper of men and history. He saw the creative imagination as a mirror, an instrument of learning and reflection that does not change the march of worldly events. The mirror image will not change, he thought, unless human nature alters. If, against all odds, that happens, he wrote, "it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people --a very few people, but a few novelists are among them--are trying to do this." Forster was one of them.

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