The Man Behind the First Passage

By Paul Gray

Edward Morgan Forster might now be remembered as an Edwardian novelist of great promise and slender accomplishment. Two acts rescued him from such oblivion. He wrote A Passage to India (1924), a novel that not only surprised friends who thought he had dried up as an author but also made him world famous. And he lived for 91 years, well beyond such contemporaries as James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. To a remarkable degree, Forster ensured his claim on posterity by outlasting it.

No one could have predicted such longevity for the infant Forster, least of all his formidable mother Lily. Her first baby had died at birth. The second, born on New Year's Day in 1879, survived, but his father was dead of tuberculosis 22 months later. Lily and a clutch of female relatives and friends conspired to keep young Edward from all harm; they mercilessly spoiled him, referred to him as "the Important One" in his presence and left him unprepared for the schoolboys who later called him "Mousie" instead.

The coddled, shy young man had a better time of it at turn-of-the-century Cambridge. Forster left King's College with middling degrees in classics and history and with the reluctant realization, after four stimulating years of intellectual fellowship, that he was homosexual. A legacy from a deceased aunt made job hunting unnecessary, which probably spared the world some comic encounters. For Forster at that period seemed qualified to do nothing but stumble and dream.

On a postgraduate tour of Italy with his mother, he sprained an ankle and broke an arm. Lily was forced to bathe her incapacitated son, to her evident enjoyment. She wrote a relative: "He looks 1 splendid now I do him." Forster accepted such smothering care without open complaint. Indeed, he shared the feeling that he was an incompetent in worldly matters. During his 20s, he astonished a friend by stating his belief that telephone wires were hollow. Not even the publication of his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), could persuade some acquaintances that he had grown up at last. "His novel is really not good," lamented a friend of one of his aunts. "I very much hope he will turn to something else, though I am sure I don't know what."

Neither did Forster, who kept on writing, driven by appreciative reviews and inner necessity. In varying forms, The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908) and Howards End (1910) all constituted a subtle rebellion from the tyranny of his mother and her circle, the comfortable middle-class English world of suburban villas and careful class distinctions. Against such strangulated values, the son set a fictional vision of the free discourse he had enjoyed at Cambridge, coupled with the warm sensuality he had glimpsed during travels in Italy and Greece.

"Only Connect" was Forster's epigraph for Howards End, a plea to unite civilized ponds with subterranean wells of feeling. Unfortunately, he had no exact idea until age 30 of how men and women made love, a defect that Author Katherine Mansfield tartly noted in Howards End: "I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella."

Forster then wrote Maurice, a homosexual novel, but knew he could not publish it; it appeared posthumously in 1971. His private life gradually grew less restrictive.

He made two visits to India, drawn there by his affection for a young Muslim he had tutored in England. Working for the Red Cross in Egypt during World War I, he finally shed his timidity and had a physical affair with a man. These tentative meetings of West and East ultimately led to A Passage to India.

His remaining 46 years were largely happy, although he wrote no more novels. Life finally gave him the satisfactions he once had to imagine in fiction. People joked that Forster became more renowned with every book he did not write.

Yet he spoke out vigorously against censorship and in favor of civil liberties. His best-known statement during these years caused controversy: "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friends, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." The distinction between friends and fellow citizens is, as some have pointed out, too facile. But Forster's insistence that ideals can grow only through individual acts of sympathy and caring was typical of his character, his books and his long, gentle life.

--By Paul Gray