It is devilish difficult to criticize society & also create human beings. Unless one has a big mind, one aim or the other fails before the book is finished. I must pray for a big mind, but it is uphill work—!

—E. M. Forster, letter to Edward Garnett

How did E. M. Forster manage to elude the Nobel Prize in Literature? He published his last novel, A Passage to India, at the age of forty-five in 1924 and died at the age of ninety-two in 1970. He must have been passed over, then, no fewer than thirty or forty times. Not winning the Nobel Prize put him in a select little club, Tolstoy, Henry James, Chekhov, and Proust being among its most distinguished members—rather a more select club, when one thinks about it, than that comprised by the winners. Still, one wonders, did Forster think much about it?

No mention of the Nobel Prize is made in P. N. Furbank’s E. M. Forster, A Life¹; nor does the subject arise anywhere in the new two-volume edition of Selected Letters of E. M. Forster.² True, Forster’s work is relatively unmarked by the rather strenuous thinking on the cosmic level that Nobel Prize committees seem traditionally to favor. Yet E. M. Forster has long held a special place in the hearts of English-speaking readers. He is the novelist par excellence of modern liberalism, and during a period when the liberal point of view has been ascendant. If he had won the Nobel Prize, it would scarcely have been a surprise. On the contrary, it is rather surprising in retrospect that he did not.

The complicated truth is that E. M. Forster was probably better off without the Nobel Prize. It would have been unseemly, even slightly unbecoming to him, a man who made something of a specialty of claiming so little for himself in the way of literary aspirations. But aspirations are one thing, reputation another. Forster’s reputation has never been other than high. Even today it sails in the literary stratosphere. The most consistent note in the often strident criticism of David Lean’s recent film version of A Passage to India, for example, has been that Lean betrayed the richness and subtlety of Forster’s novel. What has been almost universally judged to be a poor film has thus redounded to Forster’s posthumous standing.

Not that this standing required much in the way of reinforcement. Apart from his attempt to write a homosexual idyll in the posthumously published novel Maurice, Forster’s work has received no serious attacks, and his reputation has remained oddly inviolate. During his lifetime it appeared that the less he wrote, the higher his reputation rose. In 1955 Percy Lubbock is supposed to have said to Forster, “It’s too funny your becoming the holy man of letters. You’re really a spiteful old thing. Why haven’t people found you out, and run you down?” To which Forster is said to have replied, “They’re beginning. But they haven’t truly begun; or if they have they are certainly taking their time about it.” “Holy man of letters” continues, for the most part, to fit the general perception of E. M. Forster today.

Forster is a novelist best read young. I first read him in my early twenties and was greatly moved by him. He did not seem a genius, but very perceptive, wise, and sensitive in a way that made one feel slightly brutish and insensitive in one’s own perceptions. There are certain writers whom we value less for their brilliance than for the fact that they seem rather like ourselves, except that they possess virtues we admire but feel lacking in ourselves. George Orwell is such a writer: one does not consider him a genius or a profound thinker; what one admires—even envies—is his ability to cut through cant to grasp the chief points about a book, or an event, or an argument in a manly and no-nonsense way. Forster once made a not dissimilar point in writing about Samuel Butler’s Erewhon in an essay entitled “A Book That Influenced Me”: “I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our own particular path than we have yet got ourselves. . . . You are being influenced when you can say, ‘I might have written that myself if I hadn’t been so busy.’” Forster himself was just such an influence on many a youthful student of literature. One did not quite think one could have written his books, but he had, as he put it, “gone a little farther down our own particular path than we [had] yet got ourselves.” I. A. Richards, perceptively, put it rather differently when he noted that Forster’s “real audience is youth, caught at that stage when rebellion against uncomfortable conventions is easy because the cost of abandoning them has not been counted.”

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I have called E. M. Forster the novelist par excellence of modern liberalism, but I am not the first to have done so. Lionel Trilling did it as early as 1943 in a critical study that over the years has immensely aided E. M. Forster’s reputation. As Trilling allowed in a preface to the second edition of this book, his study had “benefited by the special energies that attend a polemical purpose.” Trilling had been attacking American writing for what he deemed its “dullness and its pious social simplicities,” and against this he now posed Forster’s “vivacity, complexity, and irony.” Like many of those writers Trilling had attacked, Forster was a liberal, but a liberal with a difference—he was a liberal, in Trilling’s view, “at war with the liberal imagination.” Forster was of the liberal tradition yet at the same time would have nothing to do with its simple solutions, its crudities, its sentimentality, and its earnest belief in rationalism. In other words, without losing his idealism neither did Forster lose his head; never for a moment did Forster settle for received opinions and indeed, according to Trilling, he even “refuses to be conclusive.” Forster possessed—a crucial element, this, for Lionel Trilling—“moral realism,” which Trilling defined as not only “the awareness of morality itself but of the contradictions, paradoxes, and dangers of living the moral life.”

Apart from his doctoral dissertation on Matthew Arnold, Lionel Trilling wrote no other work of sustained advocacy like his E. M. Forster. His advocacy was not without qualification, yet advocacy it was, pretty much straight-out and fullblown. The book’s opening sentence reads: “E. M. Forster is for me the only living novelist who can be read again and again and who, after each reading, gives me what few writers can give us after our first days of novel reading, the sensation of having learned something.” In his qualified manner Trilling remarked that “surely the Greek myths made too deep an impress on Forster,” yet he goes on to compare such a relatively thin Forster novel as Where Angels Fear to Tread with Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh and Henry James’s The Ambassadors—surely an instance, as the English say, of over-egging the pudding. Even Forster’s flaws are judged raisins in the pudding. If Trilling grants that The Longest Journey is the least well-formed of Forster’s novel’s, well, “the responsive reader can be conscious not of an inadequate plan or of a defect in structure but rather of the too-much steam that blows up the boiler.” Howards End, according to Trilling, “is undoubtedly Forster’s masterpiece”; it is “a novel about England’s fate.” At the close, the bugles are brought out, and the final sentence in E. M. Forster reads: “He is one of those who raise the shield of Achilles, which is the moral intelligence of art, against the panic and emptiness which make their onset when the will is tired from its own excess.”

Although Lionel Trilling’s book about Forster was published after Forster’s work as a novelist was complete, it appeared, even in its second edition, before the novel Maurice was made public and well before the appearance of P. N. Furbank’s biography or the edition of Selected Letters. Trilling does not go into Forster’s politics in any detail, except to say that, from his university days on, Forster’s was to be an appeal from the Left to the Liberal party and to the middle class. In Trilling’s book the word “homosexual” is never mentioned. There is nothing either trivial or silly in the book; it contains much elegant and subtle criticism. Yet my guess is that if Lionel Trilling knew now what the rest of us know about his subject, he would either not have written his E. M. Forster or have written a very different book.

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The relation between biography and criticism remains one of the unexplored literary subjects of our day. Ideally, the biography of a writer will chronicle the conditions and explain the travail under which his books—the reason for our interest in him to begin with—were written. Ideally, we come away from having read a literary biography with a widened appreciation of a writer and a deepened understanding of his work. Ideally, after the biographer is done, misunderstandings are cleared up, light is cast into corners where hitherto shadows had clung, lucidity emerges triumphant, and we have another fair and sunny day in the Republic of Letters. Ideally. In reality, the results of modern literary biography, given its penchant for psychological and sexual revelation, are rather murkier. Often where before we had an admired writer, once modern literary biography has done its work we are left with a little pile of secrets revealed. Almost invariably the effect of these revelations does not work in the writer’s favor; usually he comes away looking smaller and meaner and less than we thought him beforehand. The only writers I can think of who have come through their trials by literary biography more or less intact are Samuel Johnson, Henry James, and Anton Chekhov; Tolstoy, the only universal genius among modern writers, one tends to admire even for his weaknesses, which somehow make this gigantic figure seem more human. But generally degradation is the result, even when the biographer is favorably disposed toward his subject. This is the way it works, and there is no reason to think it will soon change.

P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster’s biographer, is indisputably well-disposed to his subject. Forster himself was favorably disposed to a biography that would tell his life in full. While working on his own biography of his teacher and friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Forster told another friend, the writer J. R. Ackerley, “I wish I could get one written about me after I die, but I should want everything told, everything, and there’s so far so little.” Furbank has evidently taken this as his marching order. He is a biographer with no serious interest in Freudian or other doctrinal psychology. He cites no wound, he speaks of no bow; the carpet of his biography has no strong or subtle figure playing through it. Like Sergeant Friday on the old Dragnet television program, he is after “just the facts, ma’am.” And it is facts he sets out, one after another, in over more than six hundred pages.

Yet one fact emerges over and above all others—the fact of E. M. Forster’s homosexuality. It is a towering fact, one so central to his life as to color almost all the rest. Until reading P. N. Furbank’s biography and, more recently, his and Mary Lago’s finely edited Selected Letters, although I had assumed that Forster was a homosexual, I had no sense of how significant his homosexuality was to his life and work. Not that homosexuality is ever negligible or trivial—certainly it cannot have been when, in England, one could have gone to prison for it—but in Forster’s case I even thought his homosexuality possibly of literary advantage. It lent him, I felt, a certain detachment; it set him outside the battle of the heterosexes, and perhaps gave him a small but real advantage in chronicling the emotional entanglements between men and women. Or so I felt.

Certainly there is nothing one can construe as overtly homosexual about E. M. Forster’s novels. Apart from Maurice, there are no homosexual characters in any of the five novels upon which his reputation rests. Nor is there any animus against women; and indeed as often as not his female characters are genuine heroines. One could not hope to argue that some of his characters are, in effect, got up in drag, as is sometimes true of Proust’s characters, for this simply is not so. Can it be, though, that while Forster’s novels are in no way patently homosexual, the impulse behind them is homosexual? But then what does it mean to say that the impulse behind a body of work is homosexual? Might the answer to that question be found less in the work than in the life?

About that life nearly everything is now known. The English are supposedly famous for their reserve, but English writers, particularly in this century, are becoming quite as famous for their candor. In the circle of Bloomsbury, of which E. M. Forster was a fringe member, so-called “truth-telling” was a matter of principle and an article of faith. Hence Forster’s willingness to have everything about his life known. He kept diaries. He wrote a vast number of letters, in most of which he set no brake on his feelings. He was not in the habit of practicing small deceptions. (The larger deception of his homosexuality was forced upon him.) Although he wrote neither autobiographies nor memoirs, he shows up in the autobiographies and memoirs, diaries and journals, of a great many other writers. No dearth of material here, and no lack of willingness on his biographer’s part to set it out for public display.

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E.M. Forster was descended from those intellectually-minded, evangellically-inspired, communally living figures known as the Clapham Sect—so-called because of their having settled in the village of Clapham.³ Among the Clapham Sect were such illustrious names as Wilberforce, Macaulay, Stephen, and Whichelo. Forster’s connection was through his aunt, Marianne Thornton, about whom he later wrote a domestic biography and who claimed herself to be the last survivor of the sect. His father was an architect, his mother briefly a governess before marriage. Fortunate in his forebears, E. M. Forster was unfortunate in having lost his father, to consumption, when he was but a year old. An only child, he was raised by his mother and a host of aunts in a household that was fatherless and brotherless.

Forster’s aunt, Marianne Thorton, used to refer to him as the “Important One.” Freud said that a man assured of his mother’s love will be a conqueror; he did not say what became of a man who had all his mother’s love and much of that of his other female relatives into the bargain. E. M. Forster was brought up with the most gentle and generous concern for his well-being, never punished, always catered to, not allowed to go out into the rain, swaddled in scarves and sweaters—in a sound English word, he was mollycoddled. He was always a dutiful and good son who on more than one occasion had to establish his independence from his mother—she lived to be ninety. In later years he addressed his letters to his mother as Mummy and signed them Poppy.

Convinced by his mother that he was fragile, quite spoiled by the elderly ladies among whom he had grown up, a bit of a prig with preternaturally adult interests in music and church architecture, Forster by the time he went off to Tonbridge School as a day boy had acquired all the characteristics essential to the perfect victim of schoolboy bullies. Bullied he was; fearful throughout his schooldays he remained, a slender boy with sloping shoulders and a receding chin who walked with his eyes cast down and who had a physician’s letter excusing him from taking part in games. (He would get his own back at such schools in his description of the muscular and insensitive Christianity of the Sawston School in his novel The Longest Journey.) Years later, in the Spectator, he would write: “School was the unhappiest time of my life, and the worst trick it ever played me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.”

Cambridge was the true beginning of life for Forster. It meant freedom from his home, freedom from schoolboy bullying, freedom to strike out for himself intellectually and spiritually. At Cambridge, where skepticism mingled in the air with oxygen, he shed any lingering shreds of Christianity he might have retained. He was never drawn to the character of Jesus; nor did the high premium Christianity placed on pain and suffering in any way appeal to him. He read classics at King’s College; among his tutors were Nathaniel Wedd and the great academic snob Oscar Browning. He came under the influence of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, who combined in his teaching and in his person Hellenism and liberalism. Mousy though he remained—Lytton Strachey gave him the nickname taupe (i.e., mole)—his mousiness no longer prevented him from making friends or from having his merit recognized.

In his last year at Cambridge he was elected to the Society of Apostles, the select coterie of intellectuals whose leading figure was then G. E. Moore and whose membership included Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes, and Strachey. Election to the Apostles was a great event in Forster’s life, in effect tying him permanently to Cambridge. While he much enjoyed the friendship of the Society of Apostles, he must have enjoyed even more the implied validation of his intellectual quality. “Someone told me, many years ago, that I was amusing, and I have never quite recovered from the effects,” he once wrote to his friend Robert Trevelyan. Neither did he ever quite recover from the effects of being elected to the Apostles, which gave him unshakable confidence in his intellectual ability.

E. M. Forster’s intellectual ability was not of the ordinary kind. He never felt he had any commanding power of abstract thought. He never felt the passion of the scholar, though in later years he was commissioned by Dickinson to edit the Dent Classics edition of the Aeneid and lectured at workingmen’s colleges on the Italian Renaissance. His were the powers of serene observation, often oblique but usually telling. He had quiet wit and a lyrical streak and imaginative sympathy. He had a lucid mind and had early acquired a prose style of unobtrusive elegance that permitted him to state profound things with simplicity. In Forster, intellect united with sensibility, and their tethering in tandem produced the artist that, at Cambridge, he knew he would become.

At Cambridge, too, Forster, according to his biographer, realized that he was a homosexual. Before he had arrived there his sexual experience, to put it softly, was limited. His exceedingly prim upbringing had seen to that; as a child his member was referred to by his mother as “his dirty.” When he was a young boy there had been an incident with a stranger in a deerstalker’s cap. P. N. Furbank, striking the chilling modern biographical note, writes: “It is true, he rediscovered masturbation when he was 15 or 16, and it was henceforth always to play a large part in his life. . . .” Forster himself allowed that it wasn’t until he was thirty that he was quite clear about the mechanics of fornication.

To be sure, there was no shortage of homosexual practitioners in and around Cambridge. Lytton Strachey was a very enthusiastic homosexual; Keynes was mildly famous for his adventures in the line that Mencken once termed “non-Euclidian sex”; and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Forster’s mentor, was someone whose notion of a jolly good time was to have young men stand upon him with their boots on, a fact missing from Forster’s biography of Dickinson but not from Dickinson’s autobiography. Forster did have a rather chaste affair—embraces and kisses—with a handsome fellow Apostle named H. O. Meredith, who had had love affairs with girls and who later married. P. N. Furbank describes the influence of this relationship on Forster in the following terms:

But if H.O.M. was the initiator, it was Forster for whom the affair counted most. For him, it was immense and epoch-making; it was, he felt, as if all the “greatness” of the world had been opened up to him. He counted this as the second grand “discovery” of his youth—his emancipation from Christianity being the first—and for the moment it seemed to him as though all the rest of his existence would not be too long to work out the consequences.

Still, the time was the turn of the century; the Oscar Wilde scandal was much in the air; and Forster was by temperament a cautious young man. When he left Cambridge he knew he was a homosexual, but it was not clear what he was prepared to do about it.

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A poet, an old Russian proverb has it, always cheats his boss. E. M. Forster, who would grow into a poetic novelist, was under no such compulsion, having been spared the need to work by an inheritance of £8,000 left him by Marianne Thornton. He worked at various jobs over the years—a lecturer, a tutor to a German family at Nassenheide, a cataloguer at the National Gallery, secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas, a “searcher” for the Red Cross Wounded and Missing Bureau in Egypt in World War I—but these were as much as anything to give him something to do and make him feel a part of the life around him. He traveled with his mother to Italy, which he later described as “the beautiful country where they say ‘yes,’ and the place ‘where things happen.’” Between the time he left Cambridge and the beginning of World War I he wrote five and published four novels: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room With a View (1908), Howards End (1910), and Maurice (written in 1914, published in 1971).

Remarkable though this is as sheer literary productivity, it scarcely seems to have been at the center of Forster’s life. That he was a commercially successful, critically honored, and quite famous novelist seemed not to have much mattered to him, either. What was at the center of his being, what did matter terribly to him, appears to have been a relentless yearning, and the haunting feeling of missing out on life.

Although E. M. Forster is generally thrown into that literary group known as Bloomsbury, he was in fact never more than peripheral to it (his name is usually tossed in to lend it additional prestige). True, he attended many of its Thursday-evening sessions, but when things got going he usually departed in time to catch a train to Weybridge or West Hackhurst where he lived a quite suburban existence with his mother among the dowdy and genteel. Leonard Woolf, though he respected Forster’s artistry and was fond of him—his wife Virginia depended on Forster’s approval for her own work—always thought him “a perfect old woman.” At twenty-five, Forster summed up his life in his diary as “now straightening into something rather sad & dull to be sure . . .” and resolved, among other things, on “more exercise: keep the brutes quiet”; not to “shrink from self-analysis, but don’t keep at it too long”; to “get a less superficial idea of women”; and not to “be so afraid to go into strange places or company, & be a fool more frequently.” Later he would write erotic homosexual stories “not to express myself but to excite myself.” Even after the bountiful success of Howards End, he noted: “Good luck has been good to me hitherto but the future is doubtful.”

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If the grand discoveries of Forster’s life were the shedding of Christianity and the realization of his homosexuality, the grand event of his life was a love affair with an Egyptian tram conductor in Alexandria named Mohammed el Adl. He had earlier been in love, though nothing physical came of it, with a Muslim Indian named Syed Ross Masood; it is owing to Masood that Forster made his first visit to and established his lifelong connection with India. Apart from a brief fling later with a London bus driver, and another with an Indian servant in Dewas, the final love of his life was with a policeman, who later married, named Bob Buckingham. All Forster’s loves cut through class lines—through and downward. Did sex and politics commingle for Forster? Were his interclass, interracial loves expressions of his liberalism conducted by other means?

What is rather sad about Forster’s love affair with Mohammed el Adl is how little it took to make him happy. They struck up a conversation on the conductor’s tram. Forster began to ride it daily; the conductor soon refused to collect his fare. Forster proposed they meet at night. They went sometimes to Mohammed el Adl’s room, sometimes to Forster’s flat. The Egyptian was very dark and his presence shocked Forster’s landlady, which made meeting there any longer impossible. One night Forster, bursting with sexual excitement, put his rather inept moves on the tram conductor and a scuffle ensued, in which the former hurt his hand and the latter his eye. (“The idealist, I have noticed,” wrote Somerset Maugham in his story “The Human Element,” “is apt to be imprudent in the affairs of the flesh.”) When Forster again raised the prospect of their going to bed together, Mohammed el Adl replied, “Never, never!” Once he asked Forster, “Do you never consider that your wish has led you to know a tram conductor?” Eventually he gave in to Forster’s urgent requests. As Forster wrote to Florence Barger, his confidante in England about this affair, “Wish I was writing the latter half of Maurice. I now know so much more.” And: “My luck has been amazing.”

“It isn’t happiness,” Forster wrote, “it’s rather—offensive phrase—that I first feel a grown-up man.” The year was 1917; he was thirty-eight years old. His letters about his relationship with Mohammed el Adl are gushing. He is immensely pleased with himself for having set fear aside and taken the courage to have plunged into this relationship: “The practical difficulties—there is a big racial and social gulf—are great: but when you are offered affection, honesty, and intelligence with all that you can possibly want of externals thrown in (including a delightful sense of humor), you surely have to take it or die spiritually.”

A political element was also involved, and so to Florence Barger Forster writes: “It seems to me that to be trusted, and to be trusted across the barriers of income race and class, is the greatest reward a man can receive, and that even if the agreement is not attained, even if he goes to Cairo and forgets me, I shall not have failed; and that other people are winning similar victories elsewhere: you and I, too, are winning one.” It is difficult to disentangle the kinds of emotion he feels—to know where sexual love leaves off and politics begin, where politics leave off and sexual love begins: “I have never had anything like this in my life—much friendliness and tolerance, but never this—and not till now was I capable of having it, for I hadn’t attained the complete contempt for civilization that provides the necessary calm.”

When I say politics, when I say liberalism, I mean both words in a special sense. E. M. Forster’s were essentially the politics of liberation, his the liberalism of personal emancipation. Edward Shils, a connoisseur of the various shadings of modern liberalism, refers to Forster’s as “emancipatory liberalism.” Where traditional, progressivist liberalism has always been interested in the manipulation of social and economic institutions toward the end of what it construes to be greater social justice, emancipatory liberalism wishes to change existing institutions and attitudes in order to widen the margin of personal freedom, of sentiment and impulse. The two are of course finely enmeshed, and one of the grave problems of contemporary liberalism is that its adherents do not feel themselves permitted to order their politics à la carte: they want a redistribution of income, they also get the campaign to legalize marijuana; they want an enlarged interpretation of civil liberties, they have to take the lesbian wing of feminism.

Yet the importance of this love affair to E. M. Forster can scarcely be overemphasized. In a perhaps mysterious yet undeniable way it seems to have freed him, both as a writer and as a man. He became a good deal less—in a word I have seen used by Edmund White—“closetty.” He had always been a utopian for love, and now, however fleetingly, he had actually experienced something of the love he had hitherto been confined to lauding. He had thought himself dried up as a novelist, but in 1924, fully fourteen years after the publication of Howards End, he completed A Passage to India. Until now it might have been said that his literary reputation had been melting away; A Passage to India solidified it—indeed, set it in marble.

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As for the nature of Forster’s reputation, it was that of a supreme artist who was also a grand humanitarian. He was a man on the side of art and the downtrodden, the great guru and exemplar of personal relations, the leader of the group he himself designated as the “aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky.” In the 1930’s he became a man to have at political conferences and an indispensable signatory at the bottom of political petitions. He became a figure in the International PEN Club, a professional civil libertarian, a cheerleader from the Left sidelines who could say, as Forster did from the platform of the International Writers Congress in Paris in 1935, “I am not a Communist, though perhaps I might be one if I was a younger and braver man, for in Communism I can see hope.” When Philip Toynbee reviewed Forster’s collection of political and literary essays, Two Cheers for Democracy, he entitled his review “Too Good for This World,” a title not meant to be taken the least bit ironically.

After A Passage to India, Forster wrote no more novels. He turned more and more to literary journalism. He wrote a nonfiction book on India, The Hill of Devi; he gave the lectures that resulted in Aspects of the Novel; he wrote the biography of his aunt; he wrote a libretto for Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd. His social circle was almost entirely homosexual. Among his closest friends were Christopher Isherwood, J. R. Ackerley, and William Plomer. He became something akin to the homosexuals’ Tolstoy, with King’s College, Cambridge, where he lived from 1946 on, his Yasnaya Polyana. (“Tennessee Williams got up too late to reach Cambridge,” he wrote to Isherwood. “[Gore] Vidal arrived and I wish he hadn’t, as I disliked him a lot.”) The fame and money that came with A Passage to India, he wrote to Florence Barger, “leave me cold,” adding, “my daily life has never been so trying, and there is no one to fill it emotionally.” Virginia Woolf, who could cast one of the coldest eyes in the business, wrote apropos of him, “The middle age of buggers is not to be contemplated without horror. . . .” At fifty he entered into the final love affair of his life with the policeman Bob Buckingham.

To his circle of friends Forster has long been, in P. N. Furbank’s words, “a symbol and a hero.” Now such feelings about him spread well beyond friends. The thesis-hunters pestered him for interpretations of his novels and requests for interviews. He was much in demand as a lecturer. He turned down various honorary degrees, including one from Oxford. He also turned down a knighthood, though in 1953 he did accept a Companion of Honour, noting after receiving it that if the Queen had been a boy he would have fallen in love with her. On his eightieth birthday W. H. Auden sent him a telegram that read: “Old famous loved yet not a sacred cow.” Yet a sacred cow was precisely what he had become, for idolization had set in in earnest. Even a hard little number like Dorothy Parker praised him lavishly. Perhaps no man in our time has been more honored not only as a writer but, as P. N. Furbank notes, “for personal goodness and sanctity.”

In the history of modern literary reputations, E. M. Forster’s is in every way an extraordinary case. No writer put forth fewer claims for himself. Modesty seems to have been his stock in trade, extending even to his personal appearance. Gerald Brenan was only one among many people who commented on his prim, rather old-maidish aspect. William Plomer called him the very reverse of a dandy: “Incurious fellow passengers in a train, seeing him in a cheap cloth cap and a scruffy waterproof, and carrying the sort of little bag that might have been carried in 1890 by the man who came to wind the clocks, might have thought him a dim provincial of settled habits and taken no more notice of him.” Or, as V. S. Pritchett once put it, “he looked like a whim.”

As dull as Forster looked, just that bright could he be. One did not often pull that cloth cap over his eyes. In the literary realm, certainly, not very much got by him. Edward Gibbon and Jane Austen were among his most favored authors, and, like them, he could be subtle and sharp. In contradistinction to the Rupert Brooke legend, for example, as early as 1915 he wrote to a friend of the sonnets on which Brooke’s reputation was based: “They were inspired by his romantic thoughts about war, not by his knowledge of it.” He had the English gift of tying common sense to aesthetic sense. Thus, on the subject of Proust and jealousy, he writes: “He and ‘life’ are not identical here, life being the more amiable of the two, and future historians will find that his epic of curiosity and despair almost sums up you and me, but not quite.” He strikes me as dead on target on Virginia Woolf, about whom he notes: “She is a poet who wants to write something as near to a novel as possible.” On Virginia Woolf’s feminism he is also quite sharp, writing: “She was sensible about the past; about the present she was sometimes unreasonable.” But then his soft liberalism takes control: “The best judges of her feminism are neither elderly men nor even elderly women, but young women. If they . . . think that it expresses an existent grievance, they are right.”

Yet, as Lionel Trilling wrote, the “total effect” of Forster’s criticism “is not really impressive.” For one thing, the authority of much of it rests upon his standing as a practicing artist; for another, though he gave criticism its due for having educational and cultural value as well as for exposing fraud and pretentiousness, he was dubious about its ability to help an artist to improve his work, for criticism, he felt, “cannot help him in great matters.” He himself appears to have been little influenced by criticism of his own work, for he believed he had taken his own measure quite as accurately as anyone was likely to do. Writing to the critic Peter Burra in 1934 he noted: “I have been looking at my books lately, partly on account of your article. I think A Passage to India stands, but the fissures in the others are considerable.” “In fact,” he wrote to Robert Trevelyan when he was only twenty-six, “my equipment is frightfully limited, but so good in parts that I want to do with it what I can.” That is a very astute judgment, and one that leaves a most interesting question in its trail: what did E. M. Forster do with his literary equipment?

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Evelyn waugh once remarked that most writers, even quite good ones, have only one or two stories to tell. The exceptions are the truly major figures: Balzac, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, James, Conrad. But E. M. Forster, I don’t think many would wish to dispute, is not among their number. He was a one-story man. His is the story of the undeveloped heart. He told it four different times, then set it in India and told it again. In this story a character—an English man or woman of the middle class—is placed in a crucial situation, a crucible of the spirit as it turns out, where his or her heart either develops or permanently stultifies. This crucible invariably entails a confrontation with the primitive, or the pre-literate, or the déclassé. In all Forster’s novels culture is pitted against spirit, mind against feeling. It takes no deep reader to recognize that the author, though himself a habitué of the concert hall and of suburban teas upon English lawns, is on the side of spirit and feeling.

A paradigmatic E. M. Forster story is “The Road from Colonus,” a tale written when he was in his twenties. In it a group of English travelers are touring by mule in Greece. Mr. Lucas, the oldest member of the group, comes upon an enormous plane tree near a rather squalid Greek house. The center of the tree is hollowed out, and from it water flows, which irrigates and makes fertile the land below. The tree is a shrine from which little votive offerings hang. The sight of the tree stirs Mr. Lucas, who climbs into its hollow, the water flowing about him. In it he feels overpoweringly the urge to live. “To Mr. Lucas, who, in a brief space of time, had discovered not only Greece, but England and all the world and life, there seemed nothing ludicrous in the desire to hang upon the tree another votive offering—a little model of an entire man.” He feels himself utterly at peace—“the feeling of the swimmer, who, after long struggle with chopping seas, finds that after all the tide will sweep him to his goal.”

At which moment his daughter and the remainder of the party of English travelers arrive. They exclaim over the beauty of the tree, the crude little Greek dwelling, the entire scene. But Mr. Lucas “found them intolerable. Their enthusiasm was superficial, commonplace, and spasmodic.” When Mr. Lucas announces that he plans to remain there, to stay as a guest in the house of the Greeks, his daughter and the members of the party humor him. For himself, he believes that “in that place and with those people [the Greeks who live in the house] a supreme event was awaiting him which would transfigure the face of the world.” But of course he cannot be permitted to stay in any such place. In the end he is dragged off, brusquely set upon his mule by their guide. It is not to be.

In the second part of the story Mr. Lucas and his daughter are back in England. He is complaining about the disorderly behavior of their neighbor’s children. She has just received a parcel from Athens containing asphodel bulbs, wrapped up in an old Greek newspaper. It happens that the newspaper carries a story about a small tragedy that occurred in the province of Messenia, where a large tree blew down in the night and crushed to death the occupants of a nearby house. It is of course the same tree and the same house from which Mr. Lucas had been forcibly removed. Now, in England, he is not much interested in the story. His daughter remarks upon what a near miss they have had. Had he stayed in the house as he wished, he might well have been killed, too. But Mr. Lucas is scarcely listening. Instead he rambles on about his neighbors and composes a letter of complaint to their landlord. “Such a marvelous deliverance,” says his daughter, “does make one believe in Providence.” But in fact Mr. Lucas had to all intents and purposes died the moment he had been dragged away; his heart had shriveled from that very moment and from that very moment, too, he had been consigned to live out his days in middle-class English suburban sterility.

To dwell on “The Road to Colonus” a bit longer, one grants Forster his concluding point: yes, it would have been better to have died happy, even that very night, in the rough-hewn Greek house, feeling oneself in touch with the spirit of the world, than to live out one’s days a grumbly, grousing old man. That is conceded. What is less easy to concede is the validity of Mr. Lucas’s mystical experience in the tree and the wisdom of the Greek family, who, however squalid the conditions of their lives, had never lost the gift of living in nature and hence had retained the secret of the art of life. Clearly, Forster hated middle-class life, the sterility of its culture, the aridity of its relationships, but all he could pose against it was the superiority of those who, through whatever accidents of geography or social class, eluded it.

For an otherwise remarkably subtle novelist, E. M. Forster could be remarkably crude in his divison of characters into those who either were or were not in touch with life. In the middle were those characters whose personal drama—supplying the drama of his novels—revolved around the question of on which side they would fall. Like many another artist and intellectual of his day, Forster suffered the condition known as horror victorianus; in his novels villains and villainesses are, not very far under the skin, uneminent Victorians: people who believe in progress, empire, the virtues of their social class. As he presents them they are not so much cardboard as metallic; they continually give off sharp pings of their author’s disapproval.

Nor did Forster have great powers of invention. All his novels are marred by unbelievable touches. Rickie Elliot in The Longest Journey falls in love with his wife-to-be when he sees her being passionately kissed by her fiancé; a bookcase topples onto the pathetic culture-hungry Leonard Bast in the crucial scene in Howards End; Lucy Honeychurch is kissed by George Emerson in a field of spring flowers in Italy, which is noted by a female novelist who later publishes a novel reproducing the scene, which causes a scandal that in turn forces the action in A Room With a View; a carriage crashes, killing a kidnapped infant in Where Angels Fear to Tread; characters regularly die on the instant (“Gerald died that afternoon,” is an inspissated but not anomalous sentence in a Forster novel). I do not mean that such things don’t happen in life, which provides the trickiest plots of all, but in Forster’s novels there is a herky-jerky quality to his plots. If one of the things masterful novelists do is to make the unpredictable seem inevitable, in Forster the unpredictable tends to be expected, which is not at all the same thing. Max Beerbohm’s reaction to Howards End, the first half of which he thought “beautiful and delightful,” might be pressed into service as a general judgment on nearly all E. M. Forster’s novels:

I felt as though I had been taken up for an air-joyride by an “ace” aeronaut, and had mounted high and far, seeing far below me a charming conspectus of things as they are, and had immensely enjoyed the sight, until suddenly the machine began to jerk and wobble, and I looked at the ace, and his face had turned pale green, and his jaw had dropped, and I said, “Is anything the matter?” and he gasped “Yes, I’m afraid I—,” and at that moment the machine gave a nose-dive, and, a few sickening moments later, I and my trusted pilot were no more.

But the flight up, as Beerbohm acknowledged, could be dazzling. To shift metaphors abruptly, if E. M. Forster had few cards in his hand, he could nonetheless shuffle them brilliantly. He was an astute judge of character and a potent moralist, in the French sense of the word. Of Mr. Wilcox in Howards End, for example, he writes: “But true insight began just where his intelligence ended, and one gathered that this was the case with most millionaires.” Adela Quested in A Passage to India fails to realize “that it is only hypocrites who cannot forgive hypocrisy.” Forster’s novels are studded with such small gems. Quite as much as for their action—perhaps rather more than for their action—one anticipates Forster’s aphoristic commentary upon his characters.

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In his book on Forster Lionel Trilling remarks that “in Forster there is a deep and important irresolution of whether the world is one of good and evil, sheep and goats, or one of good-and-evil, of sheep who are somehow goats and goats who are somehow sheep.” Trilling refers here to Forster’s propensity in his novels to allow good actions occasionally to derive from characters of whom he otherwise disapproves, and, going the other way ’round, to impute qualities of which he clearly disapproves to characters he clearly wishes us to admire. In the most notable instance of the latter, in A Passage to India, Forster charges Dr. Aziz, whom he otherwise wishes us to find charming, with sexual snobbery:

It enraged him [Aziz] that he had been accused by a woman who had no personal beauty; sexually, he was a snob. This had puzzled and worried Fielding. Sensuality, as long as it is straightforward, did not repel him, but this derived sensuality—the sort that classifies a mistress among motorcars if she is beautiful, and among eye-flies if she isn’t—was alien to his own emotions, and he felt a barrier between himself and Aziz whenever it arose. It was, in a new form, the old, old trouble that eats the heart out of every civilization: snobbery, the desire for possessions, creditable appendages; and it is to escape this rather than the lusts of the flesh that saints retreat into the Himalayas.

Such curious turnings in character can lend Forster’s novels verisimilitude, though sometimes, as in Charlotte Bartlett’s radical turning to the side of good in A Room With a View, it can be quite unconvincing. But Trilling is at least partially correct in averring that E. M. Forster did not resolve the question of good and evil in his novels. I say partially because, with the exception of A Passage to India, I do not believe it loomed as a large problem for him. Forster seemed not to be greatly perplexed by questions of good and evil and of the meaning of life. He thought, within his own set limits, he knew life’s meaning. As Mr. Emerson, one of Forster’s guru characters in A Room With a View says, “Passion is sanity”; and it is he who shows Lucy Honeychurch, the heroine of the novel, “the holiness of direct desire.”

The only novel of Forster’s in which obeisance to the instinctual life is not central is his most famous novel, A Passage to India. It is, interestingly enough, the novel Lionel Trilling liked least. A Passage to India, he wrote, “is the least surprising of Forster’s novels, the least capricious, and, indeed, the least personal,” though Trilling concludes that “Forster’s book is not about India alone; it is about all of human life.” Certainly, as Forster himself felt, A Passage to India is the best-made of his novels: the most elegantly written, in some ways the most filled with wise comment—it is the only one of his novels written when he was in his forties—and the most solidly organized. At the center of the novel is that grand old favorite of symbol-hunting English professors, the scene at the Marabar Caves which Forster, it transpires, allowed that he had fuddled. Of this scene he wrote to William Plomer: “I tried to show that India is an unexplainable muddle by introducing an unexplained muddle—Miss Quested’s experience in the cave. When asked what happened there, I don’t know.” Still, muddle and fuddle, the novel is an impressive piece of work.

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So long has A Passage to India held the status of a modern classic that writing about it today one feels almost as if called to comment upon The Rite of Spring or Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte. Rereading it after more than a quarter of a century, one is struck by how interesting a portrait it provides of the Indian character as viewed by Western eyes. One is also struck by its streak of unfairness. At various points in the novel it is difficult to determine which Forster felt more strongly, his love of India or his hatred of England’s presence there. He gives the Anglo-Indians very short shrift, so short that there can be no doubt about his having taken sides. “Over the Anglo-Indians I have had to stretch and bust myself blue,” he wrote to his friend E. V. Thompson. “I loathe them and should have been more honest to say so. Honesty and fairness are so different. Isn’t it a pity?” To an Anglo-Indian civil servant named E. A. Home, who criticized Forster for his harsh treatment of Anglo-Indians in the novel, Forster confessed, “I don’t like Anglo-Indians as a class. I tried to suppress this and be fair to them, but my lack of sympathy came through.”

And it came through accompanied by serious political consequences. As Beatrice Webb was to remark to Forster upon reading A Passage to India, the novel “entirely expresses our own view of the situation.” The situation, of course, was the British Raj in India. Coming at things from the other side, Paul Johnson, in Modern Times, his recent history of the past sixty years, writes: “In 1924 E. M. Forster published A Passage to India, a wonderfully insidious assault on the principle of the Raj, nearly turning upside-down the belief in British superiority and maturity which was the prime justification of the Indian empire.”

Books are created in history, and through the events of history is our reading of them influenced. Here it must be noted that history has dissipated much of the glory of A Passage to India, by revealing that the treatment of the Indians by the British had been nowhere nearly so cruel, indeed murderous, as the treatment of the Indians by one another, beginning with the massacres following upon independence and continuing even today with the bloody dispute between the Indian government and the Sikhs.

E. M. Forster probably never thought himself a very political writer. He tended, in fact, to think himself rather above politics, and his most famous para-political statement is that contained in “What I Believe,” an essay of 1939 included in the collection Two Cheers for Democracy, in which he wrote: “I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to chose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” On another occasion he wrote: “We who seek the truth are only concerned with politics when they deflect us from it.” To be above politics, to be seeking only truth, is ever the plaint of the emancipatory liberal. E. M. Forster, it is well to remember, was the author of a novel (Maurice) he could not publish and for the better part of his life was enmeshed in homosexual relationships he could not openly declare. The truth he sought was of a particular kind; it presupposed freedom. For him, indeed, without freedom, again of a particular kind, there could be no truth. And the particular kinds, both of truth and of freedom, were at their base political.

In a letter written from Egypt to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson in 1916, Forster described what for him was a utopian scene of hundreds of young soldiers at play at the country palace of the ex-Khedive that had been turned into a convalescent hospital. “They go about bare chested and bare legged, the blue of their linen shorts and the pale mauve of their shirts accenting the brown splendor of their bodies; and down by the sea many of them spend their days naked and unrebuked. It is so beautiful that I cannot believe it has not been planned, but can’t think by whom nor for whom except me.” He then describes a naked man attempting to pull a donkey into the water with him, and concludes,

I come away from that place each time thinking, “Why not more of this? Why not? What would it injure? Why not a world like this—its beauty of course impaired by death and old age and poverty and disease, but a world that should not torture itself by organized and artificial horrors?” It’s evidently not to be in our day, not while nationality lives, but I can’t believe it utopian, for each human being has in him the germs of such a world.

In a letter written in 1935 to Christopher Isherwood, Forster notes that a writer on sexual behavior named “Dr. Norman Haire has tittered to William [Plomer] that if my novels were analyzed they would reveal a pretty mess. . . . There are things in my earlier stuff which are obvious enough to me now, though less so when I wrote them. . . .” Such an analysis is perhaps better written by one of the Drs. Norman Haire of our day. But this much can be said: the novels upon which E. M. Forster’s reputation rests now seem chiefly screens for their author’s yearning for freedom for his own trapped instinctual life. He wrote about men and women, often commenting upon them brilliantly, yet other things must all the while have been at the forefront of his mind.

What these other things were are revealed less in the sadly sentimental novel Maurice than in a collection of posthumously published stories entitled The Life to Come. These are stories about the suppression of homosexuality and about giving way to it, about its costs so long as society disapproves of it and its pleasures nonetheless. One of them, “Dr. Woolacott,” T. E. Lawrence, to whom Forster showed it, thought the best thing he had ever written. Another, “The Obelisk,” has a touch of nastiness one would not have expected from the great proponent of personal relations. In it a husband and wife on holiday meet up with two sailors also on holiday. To make a short story even shorter, one sailor goes off into the bushes with the wife while, though we do not know this until the end, the other sailor has gone off into other bushes with the husband. It is arch and cruel, a stereotypical homosexual mocking of marriage, which is no prettier than heterosexual mocking of homosexuality. “Only connect,” Forster famously wrote in an epigraph to Howards End. Indeed.

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What The Life to Come along with the Selected Letters and P. N. Furbank’s biography all conduce to make plain is that in E. M. Forster the emancipatory liberal appears to have hidden a homosexual utopian. Ironically, the victories of emancipatory liberalism, issuing in the breakdown of censorship and with it the freedom to know and publish hitherto private facts of writers’ lives, have resulted in our having to reassess E. M. Forster’s novels radically. It is no longer possible to think of Forster as a writer who happened to have been a homosexual; now he must be considered a writer for whom homosexuality was the central, the dominant, fact in his life. Given this centrality, this dominance, it hardly seems wild to suggest that the chief impulse behind Forster’s novels, with their paeans and pleas for the life of the instincts, was itself homosexual. Given, again, all that we now know about his private life, it is difficult to read them otherwise.

In a curious way the effect of this is to render E. M. Forster’s novels obsolete, and in a way that art of the first magnitude never becomes. Filled with wisdom though all of his novels are at their peripheries, ornamented though all of them are by his lucid and seductive style, at their center each conducts an argument. E. M. Forster was essentially a polemical and didactic novelist. He argued against the sterility of middle-class English life, he attempted to teach the beauty of the passionate instinctive life. In the first instance, he wrote out of his personal antipathies; in the second, out of his personal yearnings.

Viewed from the present, it can be said that in large part Forster won his argument. An English and vastly more sophisticated Sinclair Lewis (a writer whom Forster himself admired), with a sexual and spiritual twist added, he has, in his quiet way, been one of the most successful of those who in our time have written pour épater les bourgeois. As for his teaching about the instinctual life—the sanity of passion, the holiness of desire, and the rest of it—here, too, his side, that of emancipatory liberalism, has known no shortage of victories. If, then, his writing today seems so thin, so hollow, and finally so empty, can it be in part because we have now all had an opportunity to view the progress of emancipationism in our lifetimes, the liberation that was the name of Forster’s own most ardent desire, and know it to be itself thin, hollow, and finally empty?

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¹ Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

² Edited by Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank, Belknap/Harvard University Press, Vol. 1, 1879-1920, 344 pp., $20.00; Vol. 2, 1921-1970, 365 pp., $20.00.

³ See “From Clapham to Bloomsbury: A Genealogy of Morals” by Gertrude Himmelfarb in the February COMMENTARY—Ed.