Pn Furbank

Battle versus work

  • Arctic Summer

    E. M. Forster

    Hesperus, pp. 87

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Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

The Whitbys themselves, however, visit Tramonta, and Martin, struck by the physical likeness of a figure in the fresco to Clesant March, writes in his journal, ‘Very moving: warriors about to fight for their country and faith’ — surprising himself with the remark, ‘So little resemblance did it bear to his usual art-criticism.’

The vision of the claims of action and loyalty stays with Martin and is reinforced by a devastating contretemps. One evening, on a whim, he invites their chauffeur Aristide to come to the cinema. A fire breaks out; there is a rush for the exits; and Martin finds himself in the street, hardly knowing how he has got there and having made not the slightest attempt to help Aristide, who is lame. It brings home to him, with horror, that he is a physical coward. Wryly he gives thanks that his wife Venetia is not a ‘womanly woman’, who might forgive his lapse but never forget it. By the time that he meets Clesant March again, Martin has already come to see the surly young Englishman in a new light.

These opening pages are masterly, and what intense pleasure it gives to be renewing acquaintance with that unique prose-style, a style incomparably swift and economical, in which the briefest casual conversation turns out to be an event, and in which the narrative phrasing, in its unobtrusive way, is almost continually and inventively witty.

‘The higher mountains will soon be hidden,’ said Venetia, who was in great good humour, and unusually civil to natural objects.

(Perhaps only Henry James is Forster’s rival in this particular talent.)

When Forster gave a reading from the work at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1951 he said:

That is not Arctic Summer — there is about half as much of it again — but that’s all I want to read, because now it goes off, at least I think so, and I do not want my voice to go out into the air while my heart is sinking.

Where he thought that it ‘went off’ was in the sketching-in of Clesant March’s home existence. He seems to have realised the weakness even at the time of writing and began a substantial revision. There was also, he would say, a more practical reason why the novel was never finished. It was that for once he had not decided what his major event was going to be; he lacked the sense of ‘a solid mass ahead’. All the same, one has the strong feeling that it could have been a masterpiece.

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