Forster Biography

Book Reviews Forster Biography Nicola Beauman. Morgan: A Biography of E. M. Forster. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1993. 404 pp. £20 IN HER INTRODUCTION, Nicola Beauman tells us that she has "chosen to have a dialogue with the reader rather than at all times maintaining the strict objectivity that is the biographical norm" (2). The notion is, of course, ultimately fallacious, but Beauman certainly keeps up her side of the dialogue, speculating for instance at one point on her own methodological problems: "But do I know where I am going the biographer asks herself, the moment having come when somehow—but how?—she must convey, not merely précis, the plot, and . . . try and convey why, to her, this is one of the most perfect novels of the twentieth century" (163). Again, in the midst of describing the Kanaya episode in Dewas, Beauman steps forward for a paragraph: "Does the biographer find all this detail about lust distasteful? Well, less distasteful than uninteresting. What I do dislike are the references to slaves, the unabashed using of someone purely for physical sensation" (316). As she indefatigably follows Forster's footsteps, we hear Beauman's own views on Rooknest and Florence, Bombay and Alexandria (" *What is there to seel' I asked the present-day editor of Morgan's Alexandria," 293). The personal approach to reader and subject—Forster is referred to throughout as "Morgan," "more intimate ... than the more impersonal 'Forster' " (3)—is one thing, but it is a subjectivity which is fundamental to Beauman's whole method. To refer to "the strict objectivity that is the biographical norm" is clearly in itself problematic, but there is a middle way—a sceptical, though necessarily subjective, weighing of available evidence—between "straight reportage" and the "intuitive approach" which Beauman prefers: "[I]f one wishes to go beyond the bare fact. .. to the insight that may change our understanding of the novels... then one has to embrace intuition" (3). Indeed "intuition"—or speculation —threads its fragile way through the whole book: "could it be?" (15), "it is possible" (45), "one can imagine" (57), "could it be?" (62), "we can also suspect" (62), "it is not difficult to imagine" (63), "it is likely" (138), "a not unlikely possibility" (182), "one can imagine" (188), "we can imagine" (222)—space allows only an abbreviated list. Some moments 355 ELT 37:3 1994 of speculation are just rather pointless: in 1902 Forster and his mother are in Belgium; Proust, Beauman notices, was in Bruges at the time. If "as is likely" (there is no evidence) the Forsters visited Bruges en route to Ostend, the "two future novelists might have brushed past each other, even sat in the same cafe" (128). Other "intuitions" are more serious. Walking near Salisbury in September 1904 "Morgan," we are told, "brooded on marriage, on regeneration, on landscape" (151); "he may even, if the details were known to him, have imagined" his father's friendship with Ted Streatfeild; "perhaps" he thought of the childhood sexual episode with the man at Beachy Head. "With all this myriad of thoughts" in his head, Forster was in a "state of heightened awareness and receptivity" when he met the lame shepherd boy whom Forster would later "claim" crystallized "his thoughts about half-brothers and landscape," whereas it was really "Morgan's own frame of mind that inspired The Longest Journey, as much as sacred spots and shepherd boys" (152). But of course there is no evidence whatever that any of these thoughts were in Forster's mind. On the other hand, of Forster's own lengthy diary account of the episode, quoted by Furbank and others, only one sentence is quoted. That Forster had already outlined a plot for a new novel is mentioned briefly some twenty-five pages later, but that in this outline the half-brother was Italian, not an English shepherd, is not mentioned at all. One may want to go beyond the "bare facts," but facts that do exist should surely be fully taken account of. In her attempt to answer the question "where did E. M. Forster's novels come from?" Beauman's aim "has been to study the life in order to...