trial, she withdraws the charge, but Aziz turns away from Fielding’s friendship towards
an India without the British. Connection is not only a personal matter.
This ambitious novel in three parts, Mosque, Caves and Temple, has Forster’s
clear shaping of theme, and a fable craftily balanced on the fault-line of interracial
sexual contact and the incident of the cave. What ‘happened’ is left unclear – almost
certainly nothing. We are shown the Brahmin Professor Godbole serene amid the
festival at the Hindu temple, but Forster, a secular liberal, is indulgent towards non-
Christian mysticism, and the novel ends with gestures towards the metaphysical. The
‘ou-boum’ echo in the caves renders the Hindu sacred word ‘Om’ insignificant, even
vacuous (though this is itself a tendency of Hindu thought).
Forster may have been a ‘thesis’ novelist who lost his thesis. He had used his gift
with tact and charm, but wrote no more fiction, living in King’s, Cambridge until
- A novel completed in 1910,Maurice, has homosexuality as its subject; it was
published only after his death. Forster made BBC radio broadcasts in the Second
World War, as did a stylist from an even earlier epoch, Max Beerbohm (1872–1956).
Forster’s Aspects of the Novel(1927), ‘intellectually null’ for F. R. Leavis, has been
useful to those of more modest intellect.
Ford Madox Ford
The career ofFord Madox Ford(1873–1939) exemplifies the transition towards
modernist writing, as typefied in Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
(both 1922). Ford was grandson to the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown
and nephew to W. M. Rossetti, the brother of D.G. and Christina (see p. 280). His
father was Dr Francis Hueffer, music critic of The Times and author of The
Troubadours; Ford changed his name from Hueffer only after the war. In 1906–8, he
wrote The Fifth Queen,a picturesque Tudor trilogy about Henry VIII’s Catherine
Howard. Conrad called it ‘the swan song of Historical Romance’. In 1908, Ford
founded and edited The English Rev iew,and made liter ary history.
Number 1 included contributions from Hardy, James (‘The Jolly Corner’),
Conrad, Wells, W. H. Hudson, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, W. H. Davies,
Galswor thy and Tolstoy – ‘The Raid’, translated by Constance Garnett. Later issues
had contributions from Bennett, Yeats, Chesterton, Belloc and George Moore. Ford
also introduced Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Rupert Brooke, E. M. Forster, Lowes
Dickinson and Norman Douglas to a wider public, and published on sight a story
submitted by post, ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ by an unknown D. H. Lawrence.
Ford bridged the generations, but after the war some of these names were
‘modern’, others not. Ezra Pound, the chief modernizer of English poetry, said that
it was Ford who modernized him, by laughing at the stilted language of his third
slim volume – laughing till he rolled on the floor. Ford, half a Pre-Raphaelite, knew
where Pound’s medieval stilts had come from. Ford could now describe his Fifth
Queen as ‘a fake more or less genuine in inspiration and workmanship, but none the
less a fake’.
Ford’s best novel,The Good Soldier (1915), is a feat of narration. It uses indirect
disclosure on a subject to which it is peculiarly suited: the discovery by a seemingly
foolish narrator, John Dowell, that his wife Florence, an invalid with a ‘bad heart’, has
betrayed him with his friend Edward Ashburnham, the soldier of the title; Florence
and Edward commit suicide, and Edward’s ward goes mad. Dowell bumblingly
unwraps a many-sided horror, in Henry James’s manner, but with less tissue-paper.
FICTION 335