Shepherds in the Parlor: Forster's Apostles, Pagans, and Native Sons

E.M. Forster's role in the transmission of literary culture as a modernist, indeed as Cambridge's only modernist novelist of repute, has been long tempered by critical judgments that have made cultural belonging the central issue of his metier. Contemporaries and critics alike have consistently assigned him to the periphery-whether of modernism and the arts, of Cambridge and Bloomsbury, or of national and masculine culture-and have explained his placement by reference to artistic diffidence, dated politics, maternal deterrence, or sexual frustration.1 The veridical narrative of his marginality, understood metonymically as ambivalence, equivocation, irresolution, reserve, disinterest, has come to serve as the companion text to his realist fiction. Its legibility relies on the same codes that inform his novels, so that the mimesis of his fiction doubles as the mechanism to read his peripheral status. Even Forster's investment in realism as an art form is taken as further evidence of his outsider position. In the circuitry of this syllogism, the modality of realism, as it declines in aesthetic and social value, serves to corroborate his minor ranking. He is both understood and judged by the very mode he practiced. Rather than question the soundness of this narrative in the way that realism is challenged as a meaningful convention, critics instead logically conclude that Forster never realized his potential and his art never measured up to other modernists'. With his person and novels held up as transparent texts, Michael Levenson can classify the novelist, without contradiction, as "occupy[ing] an ambiguous position in the history of modern fiction," and