Passages of a Buried Life

By Paul Gray

E.M. FORSTER: A LIFE by P.N. Furbank Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 619 pages; $19.95

Novelist E.M. Forster's beginnings did not promise a happy ending. There was, first of all, a hint of early mortality. His father, a feckless architect, died of tuberculosis in 1880, less than two years after Edward Morgan was born. That left his care entirely to Lily, his formidable mother, and to a zealous battalion of female relatives and friends. They coddled him mercilessly, dressed him like a fop and spoke of him in his presence as "the Important One." Naturally, the boy grew into a man thoroughly confused about his sex and spectacularly bumbling at practical affairs. He was 30 and the author of three respected novels before he gained a clear idea of how men and women actually perform intercourse. He was uncoordinated, ineffectual and absentminded. "I never saw anybody so incapable," his mother once said, as if admiring her handiwork. In his 20s, Forster astounded a friend by stating his belief that telephone wires were hollow.

As it happened, Forster, the maladroit innocent, survived to age 91. By and large, he did so happily, as this long, absorbing biography makes clear. Critic P.N. Furbank knew Forster during the author's latter years and was eventually given access to previously suppressed papers and correspondence. Much of the material concerned Forster's homosexuality, and his whole story could not have been told without it. He was one of the great English novelists of this century, but the foundations of his art rested on a buried life.

Had he been less decorous, tentative and shy, Forster could have admitted his sexual preferences early and slipped into the fashionable demimonde. He had private money and plenty of leisure. His contemporaries at Cambridge and, later, in London's Bloomsbury circle tolerated and applauded eccentricities. But Forster never wanted notoriety or much attention at all. His retiring manner earned him the nickname "the taupe" (the mole) from Lytton Strachey. Writing his mother about a projected meeting with Henry James, the young author was comically unassuming: "I hear he likes people to be handsome and well dressed, so I shall fail all round." He even construed his repressions as an example of good manners: "However gross my desires, I find I shall never satisfy them for the fear of annoying others."

Such tensions might have destroyed him. Instead, they lent rare power to his fiction. He learned to see two distinct ways of life. One belonged to the smug, narrow, easily shocked circle populated by his mother and her friends. The other possessed his imagination: total friendship, passionate, uninhibited and free, with a like spirit. Artistically, Forster did not want to choose, to become simply a novelist of manners or a poet of pleasures. The motto of his fourth novel, Howards End (1910), captured both the dilemma and the hope: "Only connect."

Gradually, this vision moved beyond the personal and rippled out toward the cosmic. His affection for a young Indian led to a fascination with the country and to two long stays on the subcontinent. An affair with an Egyptian tram conductor taught him something else about the tenuous meetings of East and West. He got it all down in A Passage to India (1924), an unquestioned masterpiece. The novel's satiric anti-colonialism riled many; British civil servants sailing out to India threw the book overboard. Some of Forster's acid observations on the Raj were effectively challenged, but the art of the novel was beyond refutation. It sang with the poetry of its Indian settings, the hope that British and Indians could only connect. Its echoing conclusion came from the earth and the sky: the time for union was "not yet" and the place "not there."

He lived 46 more years and never wrote another novel. Furbank suggests several reasons for this long silence, including Forster's growing reluctance to portray conventional love (Maurice, his one explicitly homosexual novel, was written in his 30s and published only after his death). A Passage to India seemed to exhaust the theme that had stretched from his earlier work. Most important, Forster had exorcised most of his private demons. He began to find those friendships, physical and emotional, that he had desired for so long. One, with a happily married ex-London policeman, lasted some 40 years. He no longer needed to live in his novels. Instead, he wrote nonfiction and spoke out occasionally on current affairs. Two Cheers for Democracy (1951), a collection of political essays, was a classic expression of the detached, liberal temper. His reputation as a novelist grew as his output disappeared.

Forster knew that his private life would become public knowledge with this biography, and he may have worried about the consequences. He need not have. He shines through Furbank's narrative as a gentle and courageous man. He has received the biography that he and his work deserved, one that is iust as decent, civil and humane as its subject.

--Paul Gray

Excerpt

His links with 'Bloomsbury' had grown stronger. He had got on to friendly, if not intimate terms, with Virginia Woolf, and when her novel, The Voyage Out, was published in the spring of 1915, he reviewed it in the Daily News, hailing it as a masterpiece ... He wrote in his review: 'Human relations are no substitute for adventure because when real they are uncomfortable, and when comfortable they must be unreal. It is for a voyage into solitude that man was created.' Virginia Woolf, desperate for reassurance about her work, as she always continued to be, was profoundly grateful for his praise and from now on became very dependent on his opinion. He intrigued her as a person, too. She was impressed by his penetration and vision, and amused by the contrast between them and his old-maidish way of life. 'I saw Forster, who is timid as a mouse, but when he creeps out of his hole very charming,' she wrote ... 'He spends his time rowing old ladies upon the river, and isn't able to get on with his novel' She liked him a good deal --rather more than, in his heart, he liked her."

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