The Creator as Critic: and Other Writings by E.M. Forster.

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

This collection prints a wide range of E.M. Forster’s hitherto-unpublished non-fiction writings. It includes talks, lectures, essays, memoirs, and even the texts of BBC broadcasts. Some of the material dates back to his undergraduate days, but it also includes such curiosities as his 80th-birthday college speech.

The Creator as Critic is clearly directed toward dedicated specialists for whom every word of a distinguished author is potentially valuable and ought to be made available. These writings have therefore been meticulously and lovingly edited by Jeffrey M. Heath, who gives detailed accounts of the manuscripts, records variant textual readings, explains all allusions, and adds any information that might conceivably be considered relevant. The outcome is a mammoth volume in which some 200 pages of text swell to over 800 pages in all.

Inevitably, readers will discover considerable fluctuations in quality as they move from piece to piece. Thus two essays produced for an undergraduate competition display evidence of extraordinarily wide reading, intellectual sophistication, impeccable writing skills, and an overall grasp of the subject that current instructors would be lucky to encounter once in a lifetime in a contemporary university. On the other hand, drafts of a series of lectures delivered to undergraduates a generation later are embarrassingly thin. The aura of “Bloomsbury” hangs over much of it, and his jottings about sex experiences in Alexandria and elsewhere, however one may regard these, will hardly enhance his literary reputation. Yet the informative, informal, and poised BBC radio talks strike exactly the right note—and, for Canadians, put the contemporary CBC to shame.

Obviously such an edition requires a full scholarly apparatus, and it has been admirably supplied here, following Oliver Stallybrass’s procedure for the Abinger Manuscript Edition. General readers are likely to be put off by both price and format; however, if they came expecting new material offering a literary experience of the calibre of A Passage to India, Howards End, or the best of Forster’s known writings, they would be disappointed in any case. These writings are better left to the expert attention of the academics.