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97 CHAPTER THREE Forster’s Crisis The Intractable Body and Two Passages to India, 1910–22 I know what I want and will epitomize it. I want greater freedom for writers, both as creators and as critics. In England, more than elsewhere, their creative work is hampered because they can’t write freely about sex, and I want it recognized that sex is a subject for serious treatment and also for comic treatment. —Forster, Abinger Harvest1 By 1910, at age thirty-one, E. M. Forster had published many short stories and four novels, in a brief span of six years.2 Yet at this point of high acclaim and expectation, Forster hit a block. Between 1910 and 1924—when he published A Passage to India, his most successful but last novel—there remained an unexplained gap in his novelistic career, a peculiar silence, a knotty difficulty that seemed to stymie this strangely promising writer. In 1911, he tried (unsuccessfully) to write plays, and he began a new novel, Arctic Summer (which he never finished). Hoping to recharge his energies, in 1912 he traveled to India and returned in 1913 to begin A Passage to India. But after having drafted eight chapters, he came to a standstill, halted—rather like Adela Quested—by a resurgence of the unspeakable at the mouth of the Marabar Caves.3 In 1914, Forster wrote some short stories explicitly about homosexuality (which he later burned) and Maurice (published posthumously, in 1971). During the First World War, he worked in Egypt for the Red Cross (1915–18) and had his first sexual experience and love affair (with Mohammed el Adl, an Egyptian bus-conductor who died after his experiences in a colonial prison). But Forster’s efforts to continue “the Indian novel” brought despair. From England in 1919 he wrote to Siegfried Sassoon, “Abysmal depression all today. . . . While trying to write my novel, I wanted to scream aloud like a maniac.”4 He resumed Passage after his second Indian trip (1921–22) but could not complete it until 1924. This fourteen-year gap in Forster’s published fiction thus frames another gap (1914–22) in the writing of his last novel, itself structured around a central gap—the mystery of the caves—echoing in its very form the hiatus that underwrote it. What produced this crisis? How did it shape what he did write? Biographers have cited the “paralysis” of the success of Howards End (1910);5 Forster’s difficulties with his mother, with whom he continued to live; his “idleness, sexual frustration and sense of ineffectiveness”; and dissatisfaction with the limiting form of the heterosexual bourgeois romance.6 But as his letters and diary make clear, Forster understood that it was not sexual frustration but the inability to write about that frustration—something publishable about dissident sexuality and desire—that preoccupied him and produced his sense of ineffectuality. The unspeakability of love between men (and of the body more generally) and the urge to craft a poetics and politics that overcame it lay at the heart of both his crisis and his subsequent writing. A Passage to India, Forster’s most powerful novel, must then be understood in the context of this crisis. The result of intense authorial frustration and revisions , it was finally produced by the years of reflections on the very questions that obstructed its author’s capacity to write. In those intervening years, Forster wrote voluminous letters, travel reports from India and Egypt, journals, and unpublished fiction that have been generally neglected by Forster scholars. Written in part as self-conscious rehearsal for a future novel, these interim writings both dwell on the concerns that produced Forster’s crisis and constitute the effort to find a solution. Addressing broader questions about literature, social Forster’s Crisis 98 justice, and ethical action, they center on three related concerns: (1) how could his writing explore same-sex desire and emotional fulfillment in a climate of severe prohibition and surveillance;7 (2) how were domestic proscriptions on alternative sexualities systemically connected to imperialist prejudices about nonwhite races; and (3) how as a writer could he participate politically in the public sphere regarding matters at home and abroad—that is, how could his writing make a difference or act to intervene and impel positive social change? In this chapter, I read Forster’s Indian letters, journals, Maurice, and travel and other writings from 1910 to 1922 to trace Forster’s concerns with the sexual and racialized body...

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