September 20, 2004
Zadie Smith on...
This weekend's Guardian Review includes the introduction to a centenary edition of Graham Greene's The Quiet American written by Zadie Smith. Though I've read neither of her two novels, I've always enjoyed her appreciations and assessments of other writers that occasionally pop up online. Here is an article based on her 2003 Orange Word Lecture "EM Forster's Ethical Style: Love, Failure and the Good in Fiction"; here she waxes nostalgic for Katharine Hepburn in the days following Hepburn's death last summer; here she responds to James Wood's attack on "hysterical realism"; here is a summer reading list from 2001. All were published in The Guardian. If you limit yourself to one, and you shouldn't, I'd suggest the essay on Forster.
An excerpt from the introduction of The Quiet American:
The hope [Greene] offers us is of the kind that only close observers can give. He defends us with details, and the details fight the good fight against big, featureless, impersonal ideas like Pyle's. Too much time has been spent defending Greene against the taint of journalism; we should think of him instead as the greatest journalist there ever was. If more journalists could report as well as Greene bringing us the explosion in the square, how long could we retain the stomach to fight the wars we do?
The devil is in the details for Greene, but redemption is also there. The accretion of perfectly rendered, everyday detail makes us feel human, beats away the statisticians, tolls us back to ourselves.
On Forster:
Forster's voyeurs are very much more layered, and are offered a great deal more empathy. The most obvious reason is Forster's own personal interest in them. Several critics have pointed to a sublimated homosexuality here; they are, to a man, unmarried and uninterested, and as such they are estranged from the romantic fictions they inhabit. They are also privately incomed in a world where most people work. They share both these traits with Forster himself. These two matters become symbols to Forster of his own ethical failure as a novelist. His homosexuality, because he could not publicly express it, in life or on the page. His independent financial security, because it made him feel that he could not understand the experience of the great majority of his fellow men. His genius lay in making these failures the basis of his ethics, consistently applying his attention to the idea of solitude, moving from this only to communities of no more than two; he famously championed intimacy over sociality, friendship over country. In his novels, he can never completely condemn his conscientious abstainers—he has a soft spot for them.
and then:
Sure, there is a lot in Forster that fails, is both cloying and banal: his Pantheism, his fetish for the exotic, his idealisation of music. The mystic will occasionally look the fool. Forster took a risk, opening the comic novel to let in the things it was not designed for; small patches of purple prose were the result. But Forster's innovation remains: he allowed the English comic novel the possibility of a spiritual and bodily life, not simply to exist as an exquisitely worked game of social ethics but as a messy human concoction. He expanded the comic novel's ethical space (while unbalancing its moral certainties) simply by letting more of life in . Austen asks for toleration from her readers. Forster demands something far stickier, more shameful: love.