Unexpected connections

BIOGRAPHY: EM Forster: A New LifeBy Wendy Moffat Bloomsbury, 388pp. £25

‘I’D BETTER eat my soul for I certainly shan’t have it. I’m going to be a minority, if not a solitary, and I’d best make copy out of my position. There is nothing contemptible or cynical in this. I too have sweet waters though I shall never drink them. So I can understand the drought of others, though they will not understand my abstinence.” Thus wrote the 25-year-old EM Forster in his private diary in 1904, but, as a new biography by Wendy Moffat makes clear, Forster’s subsequent life was not to be quite as solitary as he feared.

Forster's central importance as a writer has been well documented in previous studies and biographies, including Nicola Beauman's excellent 1994 Morgan. Moffat concentrates on Forster's sexual life, his artistic links with other gay men and his gradual progress from abstinence and drought to the sweet waters of forbidden love. Throughout, Forster's sexuality is elucidated in the context of his own society, a time of compromise, evasion and the constant threat of blackmail and criminal prosecution, particularly in the wake of the Wilde trials. After meeting an ill and anxious Forster one day on a London street in 1922, Virginia Woolf later wrote in her diary that "the middle age of buggers is not to be contemplated without horror", but, on the evidence of this new biography, his middle and later years were not quite as horrific as she imagined.

Using unpublished private diaries held at King's College in Cambridge, Moffat brings Forster's sexual life centre stage. These diaries were preserved by Forster, fully conscious of the fact that they could have landed him in jail. One diary is dubbed, not surprisingly, The Locked Diary; another, called Incidents of War, recounts his experiences working for the Red Cross in Alexandria during the first World War. His friend Lytton Strachey rather cruelly dubbed him the Taupe, partly because of his physical resemblance to a mole, partly because he seemed to live underground emotionally and intellectually. However, in the end Forster's propensity to hide his private diaries underground has finally paid off, and Moffat provides a fascinating examination of his inner life, drawing on these honest, clear-sighted and sometimes heart-breaking journals to complete the picture. It might be argued that Moffat concentrates on the man rather than on the writings and that too much attention is paid to his homosexuality, but it seemed to me that her approach makes all the necessary connections between his novels and his inner life. After all, "only connect" was the cry at the centre of Howards End(1910), perhaps his most successful work, along with the equally celebrated A Passage to India(1924).

Edward Morgan Forster was born on New Year's Day in 1879, the son of another Edward Morgan Forster, who died young, when his only child was just two years old, leaving his 25-year-old widow, Lily, to raise their child alone. Forster's lifelong relationship with his mother was loving, intense and somewhat claustrophobic, hence the locked diary. While still in his 20s he published a series of brilliant novels, The Longest Journey(1905), Where Angels Fear to Tread(1907), A Room with a View(1908) and, most impressively, Howards End. Not surprisingly, his one novel about homosexual love, Maurice, remained unpublished until after his death. His friend Joe Ackerly urged him to publish his more openly homoerotic fiction, citing the courage of Gide in publishing such pioneering works as Corydon. Forster replied: "But Gide hasn't got a mother." Forster often chaffed under the obligation of being her son, but he cared for her for most of his life, and when Lily died, at the age of 90, in 1945, it was just as Forster was gently feeding her. He mourned her sincerely and wrote afterwards: "I partly died when my mother did, and must smell sometimes of the grave."

His crucial escape from Lily and from abstinence had already taken place in 1915, when he went to Alexandria, at the age of 37. It was here that his sexual life began – his phrase for his first sexual encounter was "parting with respectability". Soon afterwards Forster began a relationship with a young Egyptian bus conductor, Mohammed el Adl, whose subsequent marriage seemed to make little difference to their love affair (Mohammed even called his son Morgan), but the younger man died of TB in 1922. To some degree Forster's final novel, A Passage to India, is illuminated and made more elegiac by this time in Egypt and by his lost relationship with Mohammed.

Moffat then details his return to England, and his meeting in 1930 with the young policeman Bob Buckingham, who became the great love of his life. Again, as with Mohammed, soon as the affair began Buckingham married, and, here again, he gave their son the second name of Morgan. All three – Bob, his wife, May, and Forster – remained closely connected right up to the latter’s death, in 1970, with Forster buying a house and a car for them, setting aside money for their grandchildren and giving them a regular allowance.

I was struck, in Moffat’s account, by the ambiguity and outright difficulty of May Buckingham’s role in this triangular relationship. Her initial sense of hostility towards Forster, perfectly understandable, gave way to a growing respect and affection, and eventually she nursed him devotedly after a life-threatening operation. In turn, Forster was of immense emotional support to her and to Bob after the death of their only son at 29.

The other focus of the book is the network of gay artists and friends who encouraged and supported Forster’s writing, starting with the pioneering figure of Edward Carpenter and also including the poet Constantine Cavafy and younger writers and artists such as Christopher Isherwood, John Lehman, Benjamin Brittan and Peter Pears. Wendy Moffat has given us an illuminating account of an honest, touchingly self-aware man, whose writings continue to engage and influence and connect.

Éibhear Walshe lectures in the school of English at University College Cork. His memoir, Cissie's Abattoir,was published in 2009