Vol. 14 No. 14 · 23 July 1992
pages 9-10 | 2795 words
Evil Days
Ian Hamilton
- The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia by John Carey
Faber, 246 pp, £14.99, July 1992, ISBN 0 571 16273 8
When Henry James’s play, Guy Domville, was booed off the London stage, the embarrassed author remarked that at least some of the audience was clapping. These approvers were powerless to out-clamour the ‘hoots and jeers and catcalls of the roughs’, whose roars were ‘like those of a cage of beasts at some infernal zoo’, but for James they represented ‘the forces of civilisation’.
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Letters
Vol. 14 No. 16 · 20 August 1992
From David Jesson-Dibley
Ian Hamilton infers from his reading of John Carey’s book (LRB, 23 July) that E.M. Forster would have better served the likes of Leonard Bast by teaching at night school rather than making play with Bast’s aspirations in Howards End. Forster’s biographer, P.N. Furbank, says on page 110 of the biography: ‘Also, profiling from his Italian tour, he had begun to do some extension lecturing for the Cambridge Local Lectures Board.’ He lists the headings of Forster’s earliest course from ‘The Birth of Florentine Civilisation’ to ‘The Fall of the Republic’, adding that ‘it was a course he continued to give up and down the country for some years.’ In a footnote Furbank states that ‘in 1909 he was giving a series of University of London extension lectures on “The Renaissance at Rome”.’ Howards End was published in the following year. Such courses would have attracted Bast. Furthermore, they would have given him access to a role in Forster’s Italian novels, assuming he could have acquired the fare to travel to Florence. His wife, Jacky, had managed to raise the fare presumably for her return from Cyprus – through services rendered to Henry Wilcox?
Incidentally, those closet-Moderns Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence lectured in adult education at one time in their careers. And I am happy to report from extension lecturing experience that Bast is alive and well and still attending courses in élitist literature at such establishments as Morley College and the City Literary Institute.
David Jesson-Dibley
London SW11
