More Writers on Writing

So this is my new thing, reading books by writers about writing. They’re usually short, snappy, and if I like the writer really enjoyable to read. (Best one read so far is Stephen King’s On Writing. Hands down.)

I just finished Margaret Atwood’s fun little book Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing yesterday, and now I’ve picked up EM Forster’s ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL. I read a bit of it this morning.

EM Forster was invited to come and give a series of “Clark lectures” at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1927. (The Clark lecture series is still going on, by the way.) The lectures all have to do with “English literature”, and EM Forster came and talked about “aspects of the novel” (duh) in 1927. The lectures are printed up in book-form, so that they have a very colloquial unedited feel to them, which is really fun. He was, of course, extremely well-prepared, with tons of notes and examples, etc., but his off-the-cuff remarks, and little jokes, are maintained in the text of the book I am reading. I love it. It feels like I am attending the lecture.

He takes a very informal and also unconventional approach to how he looks at “aspects of the novel”. One of the things he is completely against is putting authors into chronological order. He is against chronology, in general. I guess you could say he is against “historical context”.

Fascinating – and the way he talks about authors, divorced from their chronological moments in the time, has helped me to see some of them in a different light.

Forster says at the beginning of the first lecture:

Time, all the way through, is to be our enemy. We are to visualize the English novelists not as floating down that stream which bears all its sons away unless they are careful, but as seated together in a room, a circular room, a sort of British Museum reading-room — all writing their novels simultaneously. They do not, as they sit there, think, “I live under Queen Victoria, I under Anne, I carry on the tradition of Trollope, I am reacting against Aldous Huxley.” The fact that their pens are in their hands is far more vivid to them. They are half mesmerized, their sorrows and joys are pouring out through the ink, they are approximated by the act of creation, and when Professor Oliver Elton says, as he does, that “after 1847 the novel of passion was never to be the same again,” none of them understand what he means. That is to be our vision of them — an imperfect vision, but it is suited to our powers, it will preserve us from a serious danger, the danger of pseudo-scholarship.

Forster, help us!! We still need to be preserved from pseudo-scholarship!! You said that in 1927, it’s now 2005 … we still need you!

Forster keeps coming back to that image – of novelists throughout time all sitting in the same room, writing simultaneously. He thinks that’s a better way to study “aspects of the novel” than to look at trends, or Victorian influences, or post-war malaise influences, whatever.

An exciting way to look at literature.