Fiction and E.M. Forster 
Frank Kermode
E.M. Forster wrote a surprising amount of criticism of one kind or another, but he believed that criticism was of almost no use to art or to artists. He certainly regarded himself as an artist, and his own art was fiction, but he said firmly, in a broadcast of 1944, that ‘the novel . . . has not any rules and so there is no such thing as the art of fiction.’ This remark probably arose from his habitual disrespect for, or worry about, Henry James. The Ambassadors is given more attention in Aspects of the Novel than any other novel, except possibly Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs, though the intention is in neither case to praise or to admire; and the Commonplace Book contains mildly disparaging remarks about half a dozen more of James’s novels.
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Frank Kermode’s books include The Sense of an Ending and The Uses of Error.
Other articles by this contributor:
Writing about Shakespeare · Frank Kermode has his say
Complicated Detours · Darwin’s Worms by Adam Phillips
The Savage Life · The Adventures of William Empson
Point of View · Atonement by Ian McEwan
Flinch Wince Jerk Shirk · Christine Brooke-Rose
First Pitch · Marianne Moore
Retripotent · B. S. Johnson
Maximum Assistance from Good Cooking, Good Clothes, Good Drink · Auden’s Shakespeare
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