E. M. Forster's Life and his Art

By dwelling almost exclusively on Forster's homosexuality, Wendy Moffat believes that she has presented "a new life" of Forster that enshrines "a great unrecorded history" of his sexual life. In fact she adds nothing of significance to what P. N. Furbank had fully revealed (and recorded) about the author's life and sexuality in his authorized biography in 1977. What she can legitimately claim, however, is that her access to the recently released private diaries and papers has enabled her to supply more specific information, dates, and details about Forster's homosexual tendencies and sexual experiences.

Moffat's account shows that Forster's sexual life was deeply dissatisfying from the start. On meeting Ross Masood, perhaps the first man with whom he had fallen in love, he noted in his notebook on 22 November 1908: "He's not my sort, no one I like seems to be." Perhaps this remained true throughout his life. All the men he loved went on to marry and have children, and one wonders to what extent they were actually homosexual. Bob Buckingham, who remained Forster's friend for forty years, expressed his shock on learning, after Forster's death, that he had been homosexual. From all accounts Forster was a timid man who suppressed his homosexuality, unlike many of his contemporaries who were similarly inclined. This had something to do with his upbringing. He was deeply attached to his mother, and he lived with her for sixty-six years until her death at the age of ninety-one. During her lifetime he felt that he was "leading the life of a girl, so long as [he was] tied to home." Once, he said wistfully that, if his circumstances were otherwise, he would have "become a different person, married and gone to war." This was not to be, and he remained sexually unfulfilled throughout his life.

Moffat renders all this very well, but, by confining herself to this narrow aspect of Forster's life, she has pushed the writer, whom Stephen Spender described as "the best English novelist of this century," into the periphery. She does not even begin to investigate Forster's life as a writer or establish any connection between his writings and his life. One would have thought that, in view of her interest in the subject, she might have tried to tackle the widespread suspicion that Forster stopped writing novels after 1924 because he was unable to write, in the censorious climate of his time, about homosexuality, which was his real theme. Forster himself had hinted at such a possibility as early as 1911. He noted his inability to write another novel after the enormous success of Howards End. He suspected that one of the causes of his artistic "sterility" was his "weariness" with "the only subject that I can and may treat—the love of men and women and vice versa." But one must notice the important admission that he makes here. Whatever might have been his wishes, he knew that he could write meaningfully only on the permissible subject of heterosexual love.

Forster did write one homosexual novel, Maurice, during 1913–14. In "The Terminal Note" to the novel he wrote that he wanted to create an idealistically positive work on the homosexual theme: "A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise." He believed that he could do so in fiction because "in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood." It is bewildering to find Forster, who had already published four highly acclaimed novels, enunciating such a naïve conception of his art. Forster knew, as he told his friend Forrest Reid, that the success of a gay novel would depend on whether a "normal" reader would find in it "the human in the expression of gay desire." But Maurice fails on this...