FORD / FORSTER: NOVEL / NUVVLE

E. M. Forster's Clark Lectures for 1927 were published as Aspects of the Novel that year. Ford reviewed the book for The Saturday Review of Literature (17 December 1927) under the title 'Cambridge and the Caboodle' and skewered Forster as a critic while still praising him as a novelist, especially as the author of A Passage to India. He sees Forster making no distinctions between good novels and mediocre fiction. Moreover, he is appalled by Forster's notion that history plays no part in the development of the novel. As he showed in his own The English Novel from the Beginnings to the Death of Joseph Conrad (1929) the novel has a history, and an incisive critic can distinguish between authentic fiction, 'Novels', and inauthentic fiction, which Ford called 'Nuvvles'. Forster's villains – Henry James and James Joyce – are Ford's heroes, and Ford shows precisely what is heroic about their fiction. He is convinced that as an unthinking critic Forster has done a disservice to the art of fiction as a whole and thereby demeaned himself as a novelist.