The Love that Dared Not Speak its Name

That’s not to deny the magnitude of Moffat’s study. Its achievement is the rigour of the argument that Forster’s sexuality — and what he did with it — is fundamental to what he did write,what he didn’t,and what he wrote but chose not to publish. However,Moffat will be faulted for her sweeping assumption (and her publisher’s advertisement) that she’s breaking new ground,that she’s placing Forster’s homosexuality before the reading public as if for the first time. It’s true that she generously acknowledges her indebtedness — especially to P.N. (Nick) Furbank’s authorised biography,E.M. Forster: A Life (1977),but more of that later — and makes insightful use of her access to Forster’s private papers,especially his “Sex Diary”. Where this eminently readable volume falls short is in reducing almost everything else that defined Forster,thereby rushing to connect the logical dots without comparably accommodating the literature itself. Literary biographies are not the best place to interpret literature,but Moffat appears to have come to the project with a pre-determination to Forster worship which clouds her judgment and insight,notwithstanding the wealth of new details in this book.

Forster’s contribution to civil and political liberalism is undeniable. He craved the demise of the England he was born into and the prudery and hypocrisy of an “Englishness” that,as poignantly showed in his greatest work,could never allow an inter-racial friendship to self-sustain. A Passage to India is quite an honest damning of the colonial edifice and — aside from the shattering of class in his long affair with married policeman Bob Buckingham — must be read into the other great love of his life,Mohammed el Adl,an Egyptian tram conductor. Yet,like Edward Said’s Orientalism (incidentally indispensable for reading Forster),where the momentous project is ultimately defeated by Said’s falling prey to the same error that he set out to expose and explicate,Forster’s failure was in the eyes of his own ideals. He couldn’t publish Maurice in his lifetime,and wrote no novel after Passage to India was published in 1924 (Maurice was written earlier) partly because of his assessment of the times,partly because of his intractable wimpishness.

But that’s not what Moffat would like to consider. So she presents a partial truth as the only key to explaining Forster’s fictional silence post-Passage,although he built himself as essayist,critic and broadcaster. He was done with writing about men and women,and the one honest subject couldn’t be printed. True,Forster’s England,unlike Isherwood’s Weimar Berlin,wasn’t the place for Gustav von Aschenbach; even in 1952 the first copy of the Maurice typescript was hand-couriered by a set of trusted gay men from Cambridge to Isherwood in California to slip past the Cold War witch hunt of “disloyal”,“unpatriotic” homosexuals on both sides of the Atlantic. England finally decriminalised homosexuality — the same law that had got Oscar Wilde when Forster was 16 — in 1967. Three years later Forster would be dead. That the inability to publish his real subject silenced Forster is true. But there was much more.

Moffat’s insistence on this single-track causality also guides her valorisation of Maurice. Apparently,nothing Forster wrote earlier should count since here he was his most candid. Well,ethically,that holds; but not aesthetically. Forster himself never thought much of the literary merit of Maurice; to him,its political wonderland of a happy ending to the story of passionate,deep love between two men was enough. Otherwise,Maurice in the Forster corpus would be Lady Chatterley’s Lover in D.H. Lawrence’s: his worst book,a testament to the fact that it’s not subject but craft that redeems a book.

Moffat shows Forster as a long unacknowledged saint of gay writing while sounding like an apologist for his pronounced misogyny. While hiding his homosexuality from society and family (that is,his overbearing mother widowed when he was three),he was never in the closet among friends and England’s “underground” intellectual circles,right from his student days at King’s College,Cambridge,through Bloomsbury and beyond. None of this remained secret once the publication of Maurice broke the public silence. Even the “Sex Diary” was amply and ably studied by Furbank; and it has been no secret that Forster first learnt of how men and women had intercourse at the age of 30,and that his first full sexual experience was with a soldier in Alexandria when he was 37.

Sex and sexuality did affect Forster,profoundly. He was born at the pinnacle of Victorian England and even after he wrote Maurice,a very Edwardian diffidence made him publicly lie by omission about his homosexuality. Moffat might have looked at another recent book on Forster — Frank Kermode’s Concerning E.M. Forster that looks at the man and his era. Deep within,Forster also loved the England he despised. And he knew that his time,society,social class — those who still lived on a generous inheritance from a great-aunt — were irretrievably ebbing. So he saw the pointlessness of writing the way he did. Maurice itself — where the word for having sex is “sharing” — is ridiculously dated. Any Forster revisionism must keep that in mind.