Word: forsters
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Novelist E.M. Forster's beginnings did not promise a happy ending. There was, first of all, a hint of early mortality. His father, a feckless architect, died of tuberculosis in 1880, less than two years after Edward Morgan was born. That left his care entirely to Lily, his formidable mother, and to a zealous 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...
...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...
...been less decorous, tentative and shy, Forster could have admitted his sexual preferences early and slipped into the fashionable demimonde. He had private money and plenty of leisure. His contemporaries at 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...
...Instead, they lent rare power to his fiction. He learned to see two distinct ways of life. One belonged to the smug, narrow, easily shocked circle populated by his mother and her friends. The other possessed his imagination: total friendship, passionate, uninhibited and free, with a like spirit. Artistically, Forster did not want to choose, to become simply a novelist of manners or a poet of pleasures. The motto of his fourth novel, Howards End (1910), captured both the dilemma and the hope: "Only connect...
...conductor taught him something else about the tenuous meetings of East and West. He got it all down in A Passage to India (1924), an unquestioned masterpiece. The novel's satiric anti-colonialism riled many; British civil servants sailing out to India threw the book overboard. Some of Forster's acid observations on the Raj were effectively challenged, but the art of the novel was beyond refutation. It sang with the poetry of its Indian settings, the hope that British and Indians could only connect. Its echoing conclusion came from the earth and the sky: the time...