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:
‘It’s the way people like us don’t talk’ · Andrew Motion’s Boyhood
Maximum Assistance from Good Cooking, Good Clothes, Good Drink · Auden’s Shakespeare
At Tate Britain · William Blake
‘Disgusting’ · Frank Kermode remembers William Empson
Nutmegged · The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 by Martin Amis.
Our Muddy Vesture · Frank Kermode watches Pacino’s Merchant of Venice
First Pitch · Marianne Moore
Nothing for Ever and Ever · Housman’s Pleasures
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