E M Forster: A New Life – Wendy Moffat

Incredible life.  OK book.

EM Forster is best known for his novels Howards End, A Room With a View, Where Angels Fear to Tread, and Maurice.  He published four classic books in five years, went silent for fourteen, popped up again with A Passage to India and then, despite living for more than forty years, never published another book again.  While this was obviously a big mystery at the time, it’s because heartbreakingly, he realised that he was a writer meant to write about love, but cannot write about the love he feels and knows and understands.  So while he never published anything else, he went on writing what he felt, in the hope that one day people would be more accepting and welcoming.

This is a story about what it really means to live a lie, constantly at risk of exposure and blackmail.  However, it’s not all tragedy and thwarted love. He ends up living a very happy, if unconventional life with a man (and his wife) and becomes one of the country’s most respected literary giants.  One of the most frequent criticisms of Bloomsbury is that everyone lived in their special little worlds of endless privilege, and were only able to achieve what they did because they had servants at their beck and call.  So it’s especially interesting to read about Forster’s relationship with the ‘real world’ – his long-lasting relationships were not with other artists, but with working class and even non-white men.

But there were several things that niggled me about this book.  First, there is an irritating prologue where John Lehmann is discussing publishing Maurice with Christopher Isherwood, who has inherited the rights and who pushed Forster to publish it throughout his lifetime.  It reads like John Grisham.  And then the subject is never returned to again.   You would think that after going on for 20 pages about whether it’s right or not right to publish, there might be some discussion of how it was received.

What else.  His entire childhood was boiled down to ‘he realised he was gay, and he was bullied.’  There were obvious questions that weren’t addressed.  How did a man who lived in an almost exclusively male world, apart from his controlling mother, write two such incredible female characters as Meg and Helen Schlegel?  There was just something about the whole tone that didn’t work for me.  A bit too hushed-tones, I-am-not-worthy-to-write-of-thee, oh-master.  She took a lot of what he said at face value, and I expect a bit more distance and critical analysis from my biographers.  And towards the end, there seemed to be a lot of padding which I could have done without.

Anyway, this is a fascinating life, and I’m glad I know more about him, even if I didn’t love the book itself.  It’s one of those books where your first thought is ‘I’m glad things aren’t like that anymore’ and your second is ‘well, of course they are, for so many people’.  Important reminder.