Passages re: A Passage to India

I didn't think to look up these contemporary reviews of E.M. Forster's A Passage to India until after we discussed it last week, but I trust you'll still find them worth your time.

First up, here is The Guardian's take:

Review A Passage to India By E. M. Forster London: Edward Arnold. Pp.325. 7s. 6d. net C. M. Fri 20 Jun 1924 13.22 EDT

The first duty of any reviewer is to welcome Mr. E.M. Forster's reappearance as a novelist and to express the hope that the general public as well as the critics will recognise his merits and their good fortune; the second is to congratulate him upon the tone and temper of his new novel. To speak of its "fairness" would convey the wrong impression, because that suggests a conscious virtue. This is the involuntary fairness of the man who sees.

We have had novels about India from the British point of view and from the native point of view, and in each case with sympathy for the other side; but the sympathy has been intended, and in this novel there is not the slightest suggestion of anything but a personal impression, with the prejudices and limitations of the writer frankly exposed. Mr. Forster, in fact, has reached the stage in his development as an artist when, in his own words about Miss Quested, he is "no longer examining life, but being examined by it." He has been examined by India, and this is his confession.

There can be no doubt about the principal faculties which have contributed to its quality: imagination and humour. It is imagination in the strictest sense of the world as the power of seeing and hearing internally, without any obligation to fancy - though Mr. Forster has fancy at his command to heighten the impression, as in his treatment of the echoes in the Marabar Caves. "Even the striking of a match starts a little worm coiling, which is too small to complete a circle but is eternally watchful." To speak of his characters as being "well drawn," would be crude; they draw themselves, and mainly in their conversation. More remarkable even than his vision is Mr. Forster's power of inner hearing; he seems incapable of allowing a person to speak out of character, and Dr. Aziz strikes one as less invented than overheard. Equally pure is Mr. Forster's humour. His people, British or native, are not satirised or caricatured or made the targets of wit; they are simply enjoyed.

The story is, essentially, that of the close contact of East and West in the persons of Dr. Aziz, a Moslem, assistant medical officers of the Chandrapore Hospital, and Mr. Fielding, principal of the College. In all the other characters the contact is governed by conventions - official or would-be sympathetic - but in them it is as close as blood itself allows. So far as affection is concerned they are friends, so that the interplay of East and West is along the very finest channels of human intercourse - suggesting the comparison of the blood and air vessels in the lungs; but the friendship is always at the mercy of the feelings which rise from the deeps of racial personality.

The action of the story is provided by outsiders; two travelling Englishwomen, one elderly, the mother of the city magistrate, and one, Miss Quested, comparatively young, who becomes for a time engaged to him. The one has a natural and the other a theoretical sympathy for the country and its people.

As the guests of Dr. Aziz they make an excursion to the Marabar Caves, where Miss Quested loses her head and accuses Aziz of having insulted her - a series of minor accidents lending plausibility to what was, in effect, an hallucination. Aziz is arrested, and East and West rally round their prejudices and conventions, though Fielding believes Aziz to be innocent, and breaks with his own order to support him.

At the trial, before a native magistrate, Miss Quested withdraws her accusations and Aziz is acquitted; but in the following turmoil Fielding, against his will, is true to his blood in sheltering Miss Quested, and he and Aziz drift apart. "Why can't we be friends now?" he says at the end. "It's what I want. It's what you want." But India answers: "No, not yet...No, not there."

Thus we are left with the feeling that the blending of races is a four-dimensional problem. In his presentation of the problem Mr. Forster leans, if anywhere, towards his own race in his acute sense of their difficulties, but not more than by the weight of blood; and, again, fairness is not the word for his sensitive presentation. It is something much less conscious; not so much a virtue as a fatality of his genius. Whether he presents Englishman or Moslem or Hindu or Eurasian he is no longer examining life, but being examined by it" in the deeps of his personality as an artist.

And here is what the New York Times reviewer thought of the novel:

August 17, 1924: "A Passage to India" by E.M. Forster

There are some novelists who creep into public esteem rather imperceptibly, and Mr. E.M. Forster is one of these. Already he has his rather small group of valiant disciples (at random one thinks of Mr. Leonard Woolf, Mr. Hamish Miles and Miss Rebecca West) who proclaim his merits with an insistence that would be provoking if there were not ample cause for the enthusiasm. A single reading of "A Passage to India" settles the question. Mr. E.M. Forster is indubitably one of the finest novelists living in England today, and "A Passage to India" is one of the saddest, keenest, most beautifully written ironic novels of the time. Saying so much one is forced to say much more, for Mr. Forster's quality is unique. In some respects it is like caviare, but not because one must cultivate a taste for it. It is difficult to conceive of any tastes being dissatisfied with "A Passage to India" unless it be fire-eating, gouty, retired Anglo-Indians now residing in Tunbridge Wells and kindred places.

"A Passage to India" is both a challenge and an indictment. It is also a revelation. But so intricately is this matter treated that the average reader is quite unaware of a smoldering subterranean passion in the depths of this carefully conceived study of two humanities -- indeed, two worlds -- in hopeless clash. A panorama of objective incidents and gestures is unfolded as one might unfold a carefully woven Indian carpet, and somehow the reader experiences an intense concern and despair before a situation that is both inevitable and impossible. Certain obvious words suggest themselves as descriptive of this book and among them are ''subtle'' and ''acute.'' But they are not exact enough to describe that peculiar cool, clarified exposition that seems to miss nothing and that is so impregnated with unexplainable implications. Almost imperceptibly Mr. Forster develops a character until the reader has acquired the most meticulous comprehension of the deepest channels of being.

Such a proceeding was of the utmost difficulty in "A Passage to India," for many of the characters who fit into the delicate structure of that book are Indians. It is easily understandable that mystery surrounds the East Indian, that his life is a conception peculiar to himself. Mr. Forster knows this and he conveys as much in his book. He also knows the Indian mind, and the clear shafts of his sentences pierce into it with a disturbing frequency until the reader is apt to wonder whether or not the Indian is as complicated a being as he seems to be. Yet in a last analysis he is. India remains India and no number of British civilians or army corps can hope to divert that huge, semi-supine, dreaming giant from immemorial methods of existence. Broken and factious, throbbing with antagonistic religious sects and castes, it yet remains sullenly itself in spite of the long decades of English rule. Mr. Forster makes it quite clear that it is no dream of the Peacock Throne at Delhi that holds India apart, but the congenital differences of birth as well. Here again is Kipling's old dictum that "East is East and West is West." Yet if the idea be given that "A Passage to India" is the usual type of Indian novel in which patriotic impulses heroically manifest themselves, a genuine wrong is done the author. Mr. Forster is quite aware that right and wrong may not be so easily separated; that, in fact, both sides may be right and wrong at the same time. His objective is to show modern life in India, in Chandrapore, and to do this he draws with a superb finality a group of Indians and British civil officers and women. The utmost care is shown in interlocking the various urges in this book. The result is a bewilderingly vivid presentation of life.

A mere resume of the novel gives no adequate idea of it, for the prime importance of Mr. Forster's work lies not so much in situation as in the development of a dozen apparently trivial incidents leading up to it. Odd words, single sentences, flashes of characterization, the general atmosphere which is so precisely built up -- these are the touches that set Mr. Forster apart as a novelist. It conveys no more than his modus operandi to state that the book circles about a young Indian, Dr. Aziz, who is unjustly accused of attempted assault by a hysterical English girl and who therefore serves as a hinge from which both humanities -- British and Indian -- break. Certain things become apparent as the book progresses and not the least of them is the stupidity of the British. There is no other word for it. This system of the conqueror which prevents an Indian from being a member of a white man's club, which assumes a cocksure knowledge of the Indian mind when that knowledge is based on a dull misconception, which eternally suspects and belittles -- this is the aspect of life in India which Mr. Forster brings out most clearly. A single episode may be noted as a fair exemplification of this. Dr. Aziz, calling on Fielding, the Englishman who stands by the Indians and commits the last sin by not blindfolding his judgment and sticking with the Britishers, gives the white man his collar button in a burst of generosity when that individual has broken his own. Later we find the City Magistrate, Heaslop, remarking: ''Aziz was exquisitely dressed, from tie pin to spats, but he had forgotten his back collar stud, and there you have the Indian all over: inattention to detail; the fundamental slackness that reveals the race.'' Here, in a nutshell, Mr. Forster intimates, is the attitude of the Anglo-Indian toward the native; the slackness is instantly assumed; the Britisher sees the surface and no more.

The Indian portraits are superb. Dr. Aziz, of course, is more fully drawn than the others, for he serves as that aspect of India which Mr. Forster is anxious to bring to the fore -- the educated Indian who understands British civilization, but who can never be really identified with it.

Indeed, one thing that "A Passage to India" seems to assert is the hopelessness of any agreement between India and her conquerors. Two peoples who will never mix are here, and when this is so there must always be two groups. The house will always be divided. The few points in this book which have been noted are but a tithe of the riches that may be found there. The crystal-clear portraiture, the delicate conveying of nuances of thought and life, and the astonishing command of his medium show that Mr. Forster is now at the height of his powers. It is not alone because the canvas is larger and the implications greater than in "Howards End" and "A Room With a View" that this is so. The real reason is implicit in the author's unmistakable growth, the deepening of his powers and the assurance of his technique. When Mr. Leonard Woolf states, ''Mr. Forster seems now to have reached the point at which there is nothing too simple or too subtle for his pen,'' he is expressing an exact truth. Certainly "A Passage to India" should greatly widen that rather small audience that has relished his novels in the past. And that rather small audience should congratulate itself on its acumen.

Finally, in 2014 (90 years after its initial book review) The Guardian named A Passage to India as #48 on its list of "The 100 best novels of the 20th century."