The queerness of E M Forster

From Business Standar July 3rd 2010

A good biography is itself a kind of a novel. Like a classic novel, a biography believes in the notion of a “life” — a life as a triumphal or tragic story with a shape, a story that begins at birth, moves on to a middle part, and ends with the death of the protagonist

—Cynthia Ozick: Art and Ardour ,1983 Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory

—Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81)

Biographies of writers are interesting only insofar as they illustrate the work, and to do this effectively requires a discursiveness on the part of biographers that makes them take an imaginative leap beyond formal records.

Not to do so would be to gloss over the lies and silences at the heart of everyone’s lives that would hardly tell us of the man within and/or what made him tick. Because most biographies (especially ours) end up as hagiographies, of lives too good to be true, and few last. Not only are most of us distrustful of exemplary lives in the heroic sense, but certain subjects seem, over time, to be more or less interesting because of the frame of interpretation, the cultural baggage changes. Wendy Moffat’s EM Forster: A New Life (Bloomsbury, Special Indian Price Rs 999) would enjoy a longer life for two reasons: first, A Passage to India has established Forster as the most popular literary novelist here; second, because “connections” between “people, nations, heart and head, labour and art” that were Forster’s great themes are of perennial interest here as well as everywhere else in this age of globalisation.

The book is in two parts — “Grown Up Man” and “Happiness Can Come in One’s Natural Growth” — with a Prologue that sets the tone of the whole book: “Start with the fact that he was a homosexual.” But the question that Moffat asks is why after the publication of A Passage to India in 1924, Forster never published another novel although he lived to be ninety. In 1970, or perhaps a little later, he confided that “I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more, but sex prevented the latter”. This has been taken as an expression of regret but Moffat takes it as a kind of relief probably because Britain was still very intolerant of gays and Cambridge could well have asked him to “pack up”. (After all, William Empson, who was to become one of the great literary critics with his work Seven Types of Ambiguity, was expelled from his Cambridge college and from the town itself in 1929 for possessing a packet of contraceptives in his rooms!) So much for Oxbridge tolerance.

Whether homosexuality is a part of our DNA is still an open question, but the mother’s dominant influence in early childhood has something to do with the way we grow up. Forster’s early life was, to use an American expression, “zipped up”. He was brought up very much under his mother’s thumb that, no doubt, gave him a sense of security and a smattering of bourgeois mannerisms, but nothing else besides. To a large number of Indian students who were always welcomed to his rooms at King’s College, the overwhelming impression that they carried was Forster’s “solicitousness” (“Call me Morgan”) which many mistook for an easy familiarity and an invitation for a return visit.

But what comes through from his diaries that are filled with such observations as “the bodies of men drying off after bathing in the Thames” is that Forster was unsure about the direction of his own life and that he remained till the age of 37 “a closet homosexual”. All that changed in 1917 when he was posted to Alexandria with the Red Cross, free from the constraints that were imposed by Cambridge. After an affair with a soldier, he fell in love with a tram conductor that finally ended in bed. Moffat has pieced together this part of Forster’s life from bits of a letter which reads like a poem: “Dear Morgan/I am sending you the photograph/I am very bad/I got nothing more to say/...My love to you/My love to you/My love to you/Do not forget ever your friend.” “Only connect”, the yearning epigraph to Howards End provides a clue to Forster’s silence despite his extraordinary gift for writing fiction of great humanity, warmth and humor. At the end of A Passage..., we have the melancholy sight of Aziz and Fielding, friends of different races and cultures, riding into the sunset along different paths. Since all novels have a strong autobiographical content, though “with experience totally transformed”, could this parting of ways be taken as a search for a love that dare not speak its name? Sex certainly provided a glue to Forster’s inner life. He embraced London’s gay subculture no holds barred and makes no secret that he was quite happy with unconventional arrangements: first, with a stocky taxi driver and then a very long relationship with the policeman, Bob Buckingham, to whom he gifted a small part of his will.

Biographies always leave some questions unanswered about the silences that we keep only to ourselves. Moffat could have been a little more courageous about the contradictions of Forster’s inner life, friends with some of the leading intellectuals of the time but intimate only with working class men with whom he couldn’t possibly have any life of the mind?