Queer Forster?

BOOK REVIEWS In Kipling's last collection Limits and Renewals, most of the stories, Coates argues, concern an in-group working together for healing and sanity, or trace the cost of exclusion from such a group. But the character of St Paul in "In the Manner of Men" and "The Church that was at Antioch " represents the outsider who invades and challenges such groups in the name of a new and subversive power. His "miraculous, seemingly irrational Evangel renders the past obsolete," so leading to "redemption," which is proposed as the unitary theme of the collection. Since the idea that subversion might have redemptive power is contrary to much of what Kipling had earlier written, Coates believes that these stories' success "testifies to the magnanimity of his imagination." A chapter on Jewish and Christian "cross-currents" in the contemporary story "The House Surgeon" (Actions and Reactions, 1909), and one subtitled "Kipling's Valediction to Art" on the late uncollected story "Proofs of Holy Writ," fit uneasily into the flow of the book. Some more drastic revision might have clarified the connecting argument. Nevertheless , when put together these articles add up to an impressive total, giving a useful historical framework to the texts discussed. Lisa A. F. Lewis ______________ Wallingford, England Queer Forster? Robert K. Martin and George Piggford, eds. Queer Forster. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 302 pp. Paper $16.95 WAS E. M. Forster queer? Or more importantly, is the literature of Forster the product of a queer Forster? These are the questions that the authors of the thirteen essays in Queer Forster attempt to answer, and they do so by drawing on a wealth of inspirations and theories from Henry James and Virginia Woolf to Plato and Edward Carpenter, Irigaray and Sedgwick. All academics who have studied Forster know he was a homosexual; however, the purpose of this book is to go beyond the status of his sexual orientation and delve into the queer identity that he simultaneously propagated and ignored as author and narrator. Therefore , the author of each essay attempts to address the meaning of queer, not just within the borders of queer theory and gay studies, but beyond into ethno-cultural, social, and historical studies: "We hope to offer a view of a Queer Forster, not to propose a new taxonomy and certainly not to proclaim a national hero, even of a Queer Nation, but to point to a spirit of contradiction, a queer way of being that resists all verities and 205 ELT 42 : 2 1999 that is aware of its own implication in the very values it seeks to explode. A Queer Forster who remains elusive, sharp-witted, and multifarious." The cover oÃ- Queer Forster represents just one aspect of this defining queer nature: a detail of Paul Cadmus's painting What I Believe, inspired by Forster's essay of the same title. Editors Robert K. Martin and George Piggford in their introduction discuss this connection, showing how Forster 's fluid nature in his beliefs and practices regarding sexuality and homosexuality are evident in Cadmus's Dali-esque nude couples (heterosexual and homosexual) who surround Forster in the painting. This sexual ambiguity is one of languor and acceptance, while the foundations of a dictatorial world of imposing morality crumble in the upper right-hand corner of the painting, all of which symbolize Forster's beliefs . The rest of the editors' introduction focuses on Forster's gay life and addresses the literary criticism since Forster's early days in its recognition or ignorance of his homosexuality and gay texts, and the reception of Forster after his outing with the publication ofMaurice after his death in 1970. The essays that follow the introduction continue to explore Forster 's sexual and queer ambiguity by drawing on a variety of methods, from comparative analysis to other authors to the psychological, social, and historical events which may have influenced Forster's queer nature. One example of a comparative analysis is the essay by Eric Haralson, "'Thinking about Homosex' in Forster and James." He compares and contrasts with a queer slant the sexual vitality (or lack thereof) in both Forster's and James's works. For instance, Haralson...