Wendy Moffat's A Great Unrecorded History Frank Kermode's Concerning E.M. Forster

...on one's response to Bast," Kermode writes, arguing that not only did Forster fail artistically in creating Leonard, but that he did not even recognize his failure...

...In the hope that he would find material that would help him complete A Passage to India, he had taken on a temporary position as secretary to the maharaja of Dewas, a small kingdom in central India...

...Moffat, not surprisingly, is uneasy with this episode and skirts around it with recourse to rather Edwardian phrases like "the murky world of English-colonial relations" and "this tragic, muddled world...

...Forster, who was over seventy years old at the time, could not have been further from their approach to writing and masculinity...

...In the menacing and seedy hypnotism sessions that Maurice undergoes in a desperate effort to change his sexual orientation or in the encounter at the British Museum between Maurice and Alec, we see for the first time in Forster's work some sense of twentieth-century urban life, with individual solitude magnified by a surrounding anonymous public...

...The narrator concludes that Eustace is suffering from a nervous breakdown, and only Eustace's friend realizes the truth: the boy has been visited by Pan...

...Live in fragments no longer...

...These novels adhere closely to realism and stick to resolutely heterosexual plots, focusing on educating their central characters to recognize emotion as a necessary supplement to propriety...

...Set in the hot, dusty town of Chandrapore, A Passage to India contrasts the initial certainties of the English characters with the strange, and sometimes terrifying, realm that they are attempting to rule...

...So, Helen, who sleeps with Leonard, bears his child, and exiles herself to Germany, returns at the end of the novel with the fire gone out of her, willing to accept that her ideas about helping the poor were wrong all along...

...In spite of this divide, however, the novel begins a correction course halfway through the narrative by bringing together the widowed Henry and Margaret as a couple...

...Leonard changes jobs, gets fired from his new firm, and discovers, even as he is facing destitution, that his old company has renegotiated its financial situation and is doing very well...

...While there is much that is impressive about these early novels, especially their depiction of a claustrophobic society obsessed with social norms, there is also something programmatic in how they push their protagonists toward understanding...

...Forster centers these conflicts around the house that gives the novel its title and that serves as a symbol for England, posing the question of who will inherit it...

...As a result, Maurice becomes more a novel of love denied than of love fulfilled, closing not with Maurice and Alec together but with Maurice and Clive parting...

...It could almost be the England depicted by Jane Austen, were it not for the occasional appearance of motor cars and words like "socialism...

...This middle-managerial literary taste would extend even into the postwar years, when British publishing was full of works in translation and a rather wide range of fiction in English...

...Almost a century ago," Moffat writes, "Forster dedicated Maurice to 'a happier year.' Perhaps that time is now...

...Forster seems to have inverted this relationship, finding art unsatisfactory even as he found fulfillment in life...

...The English tourists go on a picnic, exchange a series of comments about the commercial value of the trees and the death of pagan deities like Pan, when everyone except Eustace is struck by a sudden, inexplicable panic...

...The problem with this interpretation is that Forster wrote little about homosexuality, even in private, and then not very well...

...It is part of the battle of life," he responds when charged with indifference by Helen...

...I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now," Maurice says to Clive, momentarily bringing to life the relationship that he and Clive could not have and for which the arrangement with Alec is, ultimately, only a substitute...

...The book gives us an account of two relationships, the first an unsuccessful one between Maurice and his Cambridge friend Clive and the second between Maurice, now a London stockbroker, and Alec Scudder, a gamekeeper at Clive's country house...

...After accompanying Aziz on a trip to the Marabar caves, she accuses him of molesting her, setting the Indians and the English fully against each other...

...He teaches creative writing at the New School and is currently completing a narrative nonfiction book on contemporary India...

...There were many lectures and essays, often varying widely in quality, and there was even some science fiction...

...The creative impetus, when it came, involved both a sexual breakthrough and a willingness to veer away from his liberal certainty about the significance of the individual...

...Moffat's biography does not fully convey how embedded Forster was in upper-class mores, but it is a shortcoming pointed out by the English critic Frank Kermode in a recent work...

...The story is narrated by an unnamed man who is part of a group of English vacationers in an Italian town and who detests a pale, languid boy named Eustace...

...A brief stint of teaching at the Working Men's College in London had put Forster in contact with men who were often impoverished but intellectually ambitious, and his new novel attempted to make room for this underclass...

...The result was a nightmarish confusion that Forster left out of The Hill of Devi (1953), his nonfiction account of India, but that is the subject of an essay, unpublished in his lifetime, called "Kanaya...

...As for Leonard, he receives a beating from Charles, the older Wilcox son, and dies of a heart attack...

...Henry—whose advice, while well-intended, may not have revealed his knowledge of secret consultations being carried out by the company—feels no responsibility for Leonard's situation...

...But Forster also lived in a tumultuous time— full of clashes over class, gender, race, and sexuality—that made it apparent that individuals could not always be excised from their social circumstances...

...Many of Forster's limitations came from the middle-class upbringing he never quite shook off...

...Moffat's biography gives a detailed picture of the clandestine gay scene that existed in postwar England, ranging from seedy pubs and public bathrooms to rather conventional homes, and that remained in place until the passing of a law in 1967 decriminalizing homosexuality (but with full parity with heterosexuals not achieved till 2000...

...But Forster's gay stories, some collected posthumously in The Life to Come and Other Stories, are limited in quantity, often no more than scraps, and depending, almost always, on the hierarchy between a repressed middle-class man and a virile milkman or sailor...

...When the liberal headmaster Cyril Fielding returns, years later, to ask Aziz why they can't resume their friendship, the final passage of the novel offers an answer that is the harsher counterpart to the "Only connect" message of Howards End: But the horses didn't want it...

...It was a complex arrangement, depending often on a form of patronage on Forster's part that included his buying the couple a house, and it demanded of May a willingness to put up with Forster's sense of upper-class privilege...

...O]ne's attitude to Howards End depends...

...Forster studied there as an undergraduate, and he formed a lifelong association with the university's privileged men whose lives were often sexually daring in private but utterly respectable in public...

...Forster lived with his mother until her death in 1945, careful to the very end to conceal from her the relationships he had with working-class men, and maintaining, for this purpose, a pied-à-terre in Bloomsbury...

...They contain a gentle vision of society, of characters adjusted and reconciled rather than metamorphosed, like Eustace, and this vision was to achieve its fullest expression in the novel Howards End (1910...

...His understanding of this would lead to the departure in style and vision that is A Passage to India, the only one of his novels to avoid the usual conclusion of individuals communicating with each other, showing us instead that people must often remain apart until larger political questions can be resolved...

...Pritchett...

...The limitations of Maurice and the other gay fiction seem especially unfortunate given the relationships that Forster did go on to have with working-class men...

...But even Forster's tepid references to "sharing" bodies were enough to upset his Cambridge friends, and their criticism of the homosexual theme brought the book to a halt, leaving the writer with three unfinished novels...

...Forster, according to Kermode, was unable to comprehend how rapidly the English working class was changing in the first decade of the twentieth century, educating itself to the extent that it would soon produce its own intellectuals—from Edwin Muir, the translator of Kafka, to the writer V.S...

...But Forster had no politics, preferring to focus on the individual...

...There was a strong element of fantasy driving the work, since Forster, let alone living openly with a man as did Carpenter, had yet to have sex with anyone...

...But the sexual interpretation of the story by his Cambridge friends, including the economist John Maynard Keynes, horrified Forster, and he was careful to scale back all elements of the homoerotic and the uncanny from his early novels, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), and A Room with a View (1908...

...In the 1920s, soon after Howards End, he had been lamenting a crisis in his creative powers...

...Forster by Frank Kermode Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009, 170 pp., $24 In 1953, when the first issue of the Paris Review appeared, the magazine's editors ran a long interview with the English writer E.M...

...A pacifist, he had not fought in the First World War, and his work, although dealing with gender, class, and empire, never pushed him into the foreground of the larger struggles they represented...

...The magazine was, in many ways, an expression of the exuberant, postwar sensibilities of a group of young American expatriates, who, along with their commitment to writing, were fascinated by the vigorous masculinity expressed in sports like boxing...

...This became apparent on Forster's second trip to India...

...Because Forster sounds so much like a contemporary when he speaks about the death of the novel, it seems worth pointing out that what he saw as a problem with the form of the novel was a problem created by his understanding of the form of the novel...

...This long silence, especially from someone who had produced five novels by the time he was thirty, may be the most interesting aspect of Forster's career...

...Lawrence, for instance, gloomily complained in a letter to Forster that he had "glorif[ied] those business people in Howards End...

...Not only did he represent an empire some years past its expiry date, but he never seemed to have participated in the vigor of that empire even when it did exist...

...Forster suggests that Alec is more inclined to accept his sexuality than either Maurice or Clive because he comes from a different class...

...During his stay in Alexandria, Forster met the gay poet C.P...

...Prefaced with a description of the "Edwardian taste" of the furnishing in Forster's room, the interview showcased what would become a signature element of the Paris Review—from the elaborate description of the writer's surroundings to the inclusion of a manuscript page from a work in progress...

...I don't think people will have patience to write that sort of thing any more...

...In fact, by the time of his interview, Forster was no longer producing much fiction, and the first question his interviewers had for him was why he had not finished the novel Arctic Summer—a book he had been working on since 1909 and that he would, in spite of living for nearly two more decades, never complete...

...The crisis of the novel is therefore precipitated not by a boorish colonial like the magistrate Ronny Heaslop but by his fiancée, the well-meaning Adela Quested, who is visiting from England and strikes up a friendship with an Indian doctor named Aziz...

...But although Forster's response toward men from other races was remarkably humane, and even warm, his sexual liberation through subjects of the empire was more complicated than Moffat is prepared to concede...

...The novel begins by emphasizing this, showing us how a sudden, impulsive engagement between Helen and Paul, the younger Wilcox son, is broken off when Paul dispenses with his momentary passion and chooses the more hard-headed reality of a colonial career in Nigeria...

...In Forster's earlier conception of the novel, he had planned to show the incident in the caves— perhaps just a kiss, given the Edwardian conventions Forster stuck to—but the final version breaks away from such a realist approach, refusing to show us what happens so that the reader of the novel is left very much in the position of the English in India: unable to know what the truth is and held hostage forever by the mystery of the Marabar caves...

...In an appreciative essay on Proust, Forster had written that what mattered to the French writer "was not life, which he had found unsatisfactory, but art, which alone makes any meaning out of life...

...Henry, feeling expansive as he becomes attracted to Margaret, confides to the sisters that Leonard's insurance company is about to crash...

...Siddhartha Deb is the author of the novels The Point of Return and An Outline of the Republic (Ecco...

...Kermode's book is essentially a collection of lectures given at Trinity College—part of the same series of lectures that Forster delivered in 1927 and that became his critical work, Aspects of the Novel—and its heterogeneous nature can sometimes make it difficult to pick out clear lines of argument from the lectures...

...Naipaul or V.S...

...It is the misfortune of Leonard, who has struck up an uneasy acquaintance with the sisters, to serve as a foil for the reconciliation of the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels...

...Kermode believes that it was impossible for men of Forster's social stratum to take questions of poverty seriously, unless they were driven to do so by a commitment to left politics...

...There is another way of looking at Forster, which is to begin by acknowledging that he wrote little fiction of note after his initial creative outburst...

...Forster saw the novel as a form particularly suited to expressing this struggle between the individual and the society around him or her...

...The sisters pass on the information and Henry's advice that the clerk find employment elsewhere as soon as possible...

...This may indeed have had something to do with his fear of English homophobia, but it seems to have been shaped far more by the limitations of his approach to the novel...

...But Forster could not see this, and his portrayal of Leonard reveals, for Kermode, typical upper-class condescension: "Bast is what such people might have expected—uneasy among the rentiers, a vulgar pianist, his head 'filled with husks of books, culture—we want him to wash out his brain,' as Margaret Schlegel says...

...it makes a great fuss over love affairs and social nuances...

...Moffat's book is excellent in detailing how Forster gradually abandoned his inhibitions, coming to see himself as part of "a great unrecorded history" of gay men, and how, through his relationship with El Adl, Forster began to develop a critical attitude toward his race and class...

...Although still avoiding the "very poor"—who were to be approached, as the narrator of Howards End comments, only by "the statistician or the poet"—the novel inserts into its predominantly wealthy cast the figure of the poor clerk Leonard Bast...

...But if Alice precipitated a double life for Forster, so in some ways did Cambridge...

...Although the novel is old-fashioned in its constant attention to manners and conversation among the English upper classes, there are also moments where it feels remarkably modern...

...Forster managed, under these circumstances, to settle into a relationship with a married London policeman called Bob Buckingham, apparently with the knowledge of Buckingham's wife May...

...But Forster, at least, understood that this world was a creation of the brute power asserted by the English...

...I don't think he so much as mentions Thomas Mann, or Robert Musil, any more than Kafka...

...Throughout, he struggled with his writing, first putting aside Arctic Summer, and then A Passage to India, which he had begun after his first trip to India...

...Then, after a visit to Edward Carpenter, a socialist who lived openly with his working-class lover, George Merrill, Forster began Maurice, a novel about the love between two men from different classes...

...The reason is the same sentimentality that came to limit Forster as a writer, and which here takes the form of his determination to write a novel with a happy ending...

...But in spite of Maurice's power at capturing the despair of a person whose mind and body are committed to a course society perceives as wrong, it remains awkward in its attempt to give a happy ending to the dilemma...

...These problems are most evident in Maurice, the novel that Forster finished in the mid-twenties but kept revising as late as 1960...

...The maharaja, while generally disapproving of homosexuality, was fond of Forster and prepared to encourage and even abet the writer in his efforts to find a companion...

...He lost his father at the age of one and grew up dominated by his mother, Alice...

...For Lionel Trilling, who wrote the first full-length study of Forster, this theme of "Only connect" exemplified Forster's greatness: he had dared to make Henry an individual as opposed to succumbing to the unimaginative progres-sivism that would have rendered Henry a villain...

...Yet Forster was an odd choice for the Review...

...By the late 1930s, this had become a crisis in the form of the novel: I very much doubt whether the particular form of literature which has interested me, mainly the novel, is likely to survive...

...Forster forgot what he himself had shown so brilliantly in his last great work: that the novel is not merely the stronghold of indi-vidualism—a place for love affairs and social nuances—but that it also exists in a larger sphere where sometimes even the horses and the birds speak, telling us to abandon the fake consolation of coming together for harder truths about the world that we have made...

...H]e seems not to have read anything by Graham Greene or Henry Green, by V.S...

...the earth didn't want it...

...He was born in 1879 to a well-off family...

...Business is no good," but Trilling saw this as evidence of Lawrence's failure as an artist and of his tendency to let politics get the upper hand...

...He was, in spite of doubts, content to accept the world as it was even as he accused it of having changed so much that it had made the novel an outmoded form...

...The request not only violates the rules governing property but also ignores the fact that the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes, although belonging to the same class, have little in common...

...What is most at stake, the novel suggests, is the ability of individuals to communicate with each other: Only connect...

...Even as an artist, Forster's stature in English letters was an odd one: while widely respected for the novels he had written in the early decades of the century, he was seen as being completely cut off from the literary innovations of his time—including the modernist experimentation with form, consciousness, and language that was pioneered by his contemporaries James Joyce and Virginia Woolf...

...Yet this free-spiritedness, accompanied by a physical vitality, does not make Alec fully human, who, from his stumbling language to his clumsy blackmail attempt of Maurice, is a type figure of the lower class man as conceived by the bourgeois...

...it expresses the writer's outlook, it deals with characters and the relations between them...

...Given such a past, and in keeping with their own business instincts, the Wilcoxes naturally ignore Ruth's last wish...

...Pritchett, by Anthony Powell or Muriel Spark," Kermode writes, "[H]e knew his Proust but not his Camus...

...These limitations would take increasing hold of Forster in the very years after the publication of Howards End...

...Yet the humanization of Henry and the connection forged between him and Margaret comes at a steep price...

...That was the whole of her sermon...

...Soon after college, he traveled to Italy with his mother, an excursion that was made frustrating for him by the gap between Alice's fussy routine of "guidebook, smelling salts, and a parasol," and his own uneasy, unconsummated attraction to Italian men...

...The story represents Forster's revenge on the banality at the heart of English life as well as a keen appreciation for the erotic, uncanny forces that could be unleashed by a foreign landscape...

...This is the view taken in a new biography by Wendy Moffat, who places the writer largely in the context of his homosexuality, beginning her account with Christopher Isherwood receiving the manuscript of Maurice, the novel of gay love that Forster had not dared to publish in his lifetime...

...Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height...

...One wonders why none of this ever made its way into Forster's fiction...

...Yet it inevitably carries out a very contemporary sort of overcompensation in assuming that because we have finally liberated Forster from the closet, we can explain his career—and his silence—entirely through his sexuality...

...With his emphasis always being on the depiction of the individual, he deplored excessive attention to either aesthetics or politics in the novel, being critical of Henry James for being too obsessed with formal pattern and of working-class writers for being too politically minded to differentiate between "Ted at the table, Ed in the mine, and Bert at the works...

...This passage, long celebrated for summing up Forster's liberal vision, is not so much free indirect discourse—although it ostensibly gives us Margaret's thoughts as she attempts to make the prosaic Henry appreciate passion—as the authorial voice breaking out in a secular prayer...

...Forster spent much of the 1920s visiting outposts of the British empire, going twice to India and spending three years working for the Red Cross in Egypt...

...They run away from the picnic spot, and when they have recovered sufficiently to look for Eustace, they find him metamorphosed into a splendidly sensual creature who refuses to be confined indoors and who develops a sudden bond with an Italian fisherboy...

...Forster was writing this at a time of great turmoil, with the world about to be plunged into a great war that would make novels of manners dated, but his doubts would persist even in the postwar years and cause him to spend the rest of his life tinkering with a set of unpublished manuscripts...

...Even if Howards End is to be inherited, eventually, by Leonard and Helen's illegitimate son, this resolution seems grafted on, doing little to change the impression that the society portrayed by Forster is a particularly harsh one, centered almost entirely on wealth and power...

...It was a contradiction that would silence his creative voice...

...Whether liberal or conservative, curious or indifferent, they are aliens, nowhere more so than in the Marabar caves where, whatever sound one might make, the disconcerting echo is always "Ou boom...

...Nor, Kermode says, did he have a particularly wide-ranging aesthetic sensibility...

...The essay depicts the sexual encounters Forster had at Dewas with a barber, which degenerated from an initial impression of Kanaya as a "pretty boy," through an attempt at petty blackmail by Kanaya, into brutality on Forster's part: "I just felt he was a slave, without rights, and I a despot whom no one could call into account...

...Nevertheless, Kermode announces at the beginning that his intention is to see that Forster is "reduced in size, placed in a wider context, and occasionally scolded for not being altogether the kind of author I should have preferred him to be," and much of the scolding is directed at the way the writer failed to engage with the underclass...

...It is a superb narrative, the plain, controlled language meeting a chiaroscuro effect of light and dark, but it is also hard to read without flinching...

...It is neither the samizdat novel Moffat seems to think it is, nor "inferior," as Kermode calls it, but a book at odds with itself...

...Forster's first piece of fiction emerged out of such tensions...

...The novel has always been the stronghold of individualism...

...they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices, 'No, not yet,' and the sky said, 'No, not there.' This breakthrough, producing perhaps one of the finest novels about the encounter between the West and its Other, did not lead to a renewal of Forster's creative abilities...

...One way to approach this has been to suggest that the silence was merely a matter of appearance, and that Forster didn't stop writing fiction but merely stopped publishing it, in great part because his later work dealt with homosexuality at a time when English laws were particularly repressive...

...Cavafy, an experience that seems to have given him sufficient courage to embark on an affair with Mohammed el Adl, an Egyptian tram conductor...

...But it was not the novel that abandoned Forster as much as that he abandoned the novel...

...It demands a response from those looking back at him, an interpretation of the before and after of Forster's writing life...

...Adela eventually drops her charge against Aziz, admitting that she might have been mistaken, but she has by this time brought to surface the irreconcilable differences between the Indians and the English...

...Divided into sections called "Mosque," "Caves," and "Temple" that capture an India that is Islamic, inscrutably ancient, and Hindu, Forster's novel creates a landscape that is impermeable for the English...

...In spite of this innovation, the concerns in Howards End remain the familiar Forsterian ones of the conflict between head and heart, between propriety and emotion, between self-interest and altruism, and which are given life in the novel through the clash between the millionaire businessman Henry Wilcox and the progressive Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen...

...It looks ahead, in this sense, to his greatest novel, A Passage to India (1924...

...It requires the stifling of independent-minded women, the degradation and death of lower-class men, and, faintly but discernibly in the background, the pillaging of colonial subjects...

...He foreshadowed the dilemma of the contemporary writer in pursuing personal happiness while ignoring the structure of privilege that made this possible...

...Moffat, who tracks the writer for nearly half a century more, has little to say about why Forster stopped writing novels, taking at face value his occasional complaints that he was stifled by social norms that allowed him to write only about heterosexual love...

...Henry's wife, Ruth, who owns the house, expresses a wish on her deathbed that it go to Margaret, to whom she has taken a liking...

...His initial success as well as his continuing reputation as a writer beyond ideology—what Zadie Smith in a recent essay calls his "middle manager" position: "defending his liberal humanism against fundamentalists of the right and left"— depended on asserting the importance of the individual over political beliefs or social strife...

...It would be perfectly feasible to read this as an indictment of the English upper class—after all, Henry is "the man who had carved money out of Greece and Africa, and bought forests from the natives for a few bottles of gin"—were it not for the fact that Forster is less interested in exploring Leonard's downfall than in bringing the Wilcoxes and Schlegels together...

...Kermode writes that Forster was by this time complaining furiously of being "bored by the tiresomeness and conventionalities of fiction-form," but he was quite unclear about how he would work past these conventionalities...

...It was out of this experience that "The Story of a Panic" emerged, written rather rapidly for a writer whose future method of composition would be extremely laborious...

...the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House...

...Moffat's meticulously researched biography uncovers much that is new and interesting about the way Forster went about his secretive life as a gay man...