E. M. Forster: A New Life, Wendy Moffat, Bloomsbury, 404pp, £25

Wendy Moffat’s subtitle, A New Life, refers both to Forster’s belated sexual liberation and to P. N. Furbank’s Life of 1978. The work followed the course of Forster’s secret life as a homosexual in Victorian and Edwardian England with a friend’s sympathy and a critic’s awareness that he was writing about an artist. Furbank was intensely interested in the personal and social details of Forster’s late-developing but long love-life – anonymous, open, casual, committed, serious, grubby, romantic, friendly, platonic, sado-masochistic – and was the first biographer to use the private diaries. If he showed a lack of distance in failing to damn Maurice, both in his Life and the Penguin introduction, he never concentrated on sexuality but showed every aspect of what Henry James, praising Balzac, called ‘the creature in his circumstances’. Moffat, however, seems fascinated by physiological details of Forster’s sexuality, thereby coarsening and simplifying the life. Of course biographies get rewritten from time to time but they ought to revise or significantly expand the story. This one does not. It lacks the range, tact and wit of its predecessor.

Moffat can be assertively metaphorical: Forster’s lust is a ‘green fuse’, and Jim Ackerley’s Boat Race party ‘exaggerated radical chic’ as well as ‘an Agatha Christie novel run amok’. She can be clumsy, writing of ‘a portrayal of rather inexact lovemaking between Maurice and Alec’. She can be sentimental, as in her comment on the romantic and sexual affair with an Egyptian tram-conductor, Mohammed el Adl, which Forster related calmly and straightforwardly, with characteristic feeling for the personal life and history, to his confidante Florence Barger:

… considering the relation from outside, I imagine it is indeed worthy to be thought about; it is such a triumph over nonsense and artificial difficulties: it is a sample of the other triumphs … of which we hear nothing through the brassy rattle of civilisation so called … When I am with him smoking or talking quietly ahead … I see beyond my own happiness … glimpses of the happiness of 1000s of others whose names I shall never hear, and I know there is a great unrecorded history.

Moffat rewrites this: ‘beneath history as the official record of the powerful, was a transcendent alternative history that only a softened heart could glean’, and the gloss is unnecessary and distracting.

There are a few errors: it is not true that the Mechanics Institutes always concentrated on vocational education; it was not Philip Herriton who offered financial support to Agnes and Gerald, who do not appear in Where Angels Fear to Tread; the undesirable villas in A Room with a View were only nicknamed Cissie and Aggie.

Moffat shows too little critical concern with the books. She tells us what F. R. Leavis and Virginia Woolf thought of Forster’s Clark lectures, Aspects of the Novel, but not about its roots in his novels, like the deprecatory ‘Yes, oh dear yes, the novel tells a story’ or his handy distinction between flat and rounded characters, illustrated by Jane Austen’s Lady Bertram, a flat character who turns out to be round when she is jolted by her son’s illness into expressing strong feeling and gets up from her sofa, to surprise us, like Philip Herriton, Cecil Vyse and Charlotte Bartlett. Moffat quotes Forster’s comment on Lady Bertram’s ‘moral outlook’ (in his commonplace book) and his plan (in a letter) to make Philip’s improvement ‘a surprise’ but makes no connection with the lively book on his craft.

Eudora Welty famously said that when women went out of Forster’s work the comedy did too, and it is a truth worth pursuing, particularly in the homosexual stories and Maurice. (Lack of humour is not their only defect.) Forster said he knew he was not a great novelist but we do him and literature a disservice if we fail to discriminate between his success and failure. I cannot think of another novelist who could write fiction as original, startling and subtle as A Passage to India and as crude, sentimental and incompetent as Maurice or some of the tales in The Life to Come, especially the facetious title-story. Like some earlier Victorian novels, The Longest Journey and Where Angels Fear to Tread resolve plot and solve problems by melodramatic deaths, but A Room with a View and A Passage to India are economical with magic, realistically particular and lightly mythopoeic, plumbing psychic and social depths.

Forster’s portrait of Mrs Wilcox, wife, mother and presiding genius in Howards End, just misses being sexist and sentimental but has individuality and depth, and, as Furbank noticed, is improved and complicated in Mrs Moore, whose courtesy in an Indian mosque and praise for a wasp (‘pretty dear’), is followed by her morose withdrawal of interest in love, marriage and the Marabar caves. Moffat does not savour the strangeness of such figures and events. She would not have written this book without an interest in Forster the artist but she never gets close enough to the novels, their genre or their literary context; this she mentions only generally, vaguely – even crassly, as when she asserts that Where Angels Fear to Tread is like something Henry James might have written if he had had a sense of humour.

What is remarkable is not only Forster’s achievement but also its relation to his failures. A subject dear to the heart – and body – does not guarantee artistic success, and repression, however appalling in cause and effect, can result in creative reticence, indirection and invention; (as it did in sexually suggestive scenes by the censored Victorian authors of Dombey and Son, Adam Bede and Middlemarch). Writing the uncensored Maurice, in dangerous isolation, produced mawkish gush, auto-pornography and propaganda, in contrast to the profound and reticent drama of sentimental education in novels about heterosexual love and marriage. We sympathise with what Forster called his boredom with these subjects, but this very boredom finds a creative way into the best novels, in amusing ironic nuance, when Ronnie and Adela are reconciled by ‘one of the impulses so frequent in the animal kingdom’ or in profound challenge when Mrs Moore tires of the to-ings and froings in courtship, and asks ‘Why all this marriage, marriage? … the human race would have become a single person centuries ago if marriage was any use. And all this rubbish about love…’ Mrs Moore has a more impressive apotheosis than Mrs Wilcox, but it is not conferred by simplification.

If only such friction and irony could have got into Maurice, where the treatment of affect and desire is heavy, superficial and banal, where Forster is writing to excite himself, as he said, indulging an unfortunate blend of sexual fantasy and didacticism. He was perceptive about the implications of the male friendship in The White Peacock – and might have said more about the homoeroticism of Women in Love – but did not see that Lawrence’s strength here lies in inhibition, suggestion, some relaxation of will and intellect. That which is unjust in society – and distressing for sexual-psychic life – can be good for art. This book – and, to be fair, Furbank’s too, in spite of many fine observations about the novels – does not probe the paradox of Forster’s creative process, the way in which his broad, deep vision and articulation – lucid, particular and congenial – was replaced by a generalised protest against prejudice and repression, a willed narrowing of theme.

In the Italian books, and his last novel, A Passage to India, written after Maurice, the life of repression and suppression produced powerfully implicit, clandestine, not always conscious, images of male bonding. These are amusing, like the naked bathing and horseplay in A Room with a View, or deeply serious, like the friendship and parting of Aziz and Fielding – homo-erotically suggestive and politically expansive, brilliantly dramatising the problematics of gender, class and race with that light touch which is so delightful and rare.

Forster can evade closures and fixities of conventional narrative in a way that brackets him with Woolf and Joyce: much better never to know what happened in the Marabar Caves and to leave Mrs Moore grumpy and posthumously empowered – not a ‘broken woman’, as Moffat says, but someone who dies in the nick of time to become an ambiguous dea ex machina, whose ghost inspires Adela and saves Aziz.

The integrity of this liberal, who only gave two cheers for democracy but committed himself wholeheartedly in the particulars of art, was intelligently memorialised by his friend W. H. Auden, whose artistic suppressions of homosexual detail created a strong and reticent love-poetry, knowingly suggestive but expansive. His is the Forster I do not find in Moffat’s book. The sonnet which formed a complex anti-Fascist dedication to Auden’s and Isherwood’s Journey to a War warmly praises him as a writer who is most political when most individualist, whose imagination can push beyond wish-fulfilment and self-gratification to celebrate the human heart with all its blunders, conformities, lies, cowardice and amazing capacity for change:

Yes, we are Lucy, Turton, Philip: we
Wish international evil, are delighted
To join the jolly ranks of the benighted

But, as we swear our lie, Miss Avery
Comes out into the garden with the sword.

For its time and ours, this is a marvellously compressed hommage to Forster’s apolitical liberalism and commitment, and to the strangeness of his everyday story, enthralling plots, understatement, quiet inner action, violence, enlightenment, vastation, metonymies, myths – and negative capability.

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