Word: author
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...battalion of female relatives and friends. They coddled him mercilessly, dressed him like a fop and spoke of him in his presence as "the Important One." Naturally, the boy grew into a man thoroughly confused about his sex and spectacularly bumbling at practical affairs. He was 30 and the author of three respected novels before he gained a clear idea of how men and women actually perform intercourse. He was uncoordinated, ineffectual and absentminded. "I never saw anybody so incapable," his mother once said, as if admiring her handiwork. In his 20s, Forster astounded a friend by stating his belief...
...happened, Forster, the maladroit innocent, survived to age 91. By and large, he did so happily, as this long, absorbing biography makes clear. Critic P.N. Furbank knew Forster during the author's latter years and was eventually given access to previously suppressed papers and correspondence. Much of the material concerned Forster's homosexuality, and his whole story could not have been told without it. He was one of the great English novelists of this century, but the foundations of his art rested on a buried life...
...Cambridge and, later, in London's Bloomsbury circle tolerated and applauded eccentricities. But Forster never wanted notoriety or much attention at all. His retiring manner earned him the nickname "the taupe" (the mole) from Lytton Strachey. Writing his mother about a projected meeting with Henry James, the young author was comically unassuming: "I hear he likes people to be handsome and well dressed, so I shall fail all round." He even construed his repressions as an example of good manners: "However gross my desires, I find I shall never satisfy them for the fear of annoying others...
...introduction to his collected stories John Cheever recalls a crusty, idiosyncratic editor at The New Yorker. But, adds the author, "since the men he encouraged ranged as widely as Irwin Shaw and Vladimir Nabokov, he seems to have done more good than anything else." Cheever may be the only person in the world who would mention these writers in the same sentence. There are many who would not mention Shaw at all. Alfred Kazin's massive study of American fiction, On Native Grounds, has no room for the author. Edmund Wilson's definitive survey, Classics and Commercials, gives...
...which is fine with the author, who shuttles between Switzerland and New York. At 65, he cherishes few illusions. "I am," he says simply, "a product of my times." Shaw spent five decades writing big movies and novels (The Young Lions, Lucy Crown) and unprofitable short fiction, because "in a novel or a play you must be a whole man. In a collection of stories you can be all the men or fragments of men, worthy and unworthy, who in different seasons abound in you. It is a luxury not to be scorned...