At the age of 4, Edward Morgan Forster learned etiquette from a book that was aptly titled Don’t! He grew up to become a figure of such excessive caution that, when asked if it was raining, he once walked slowly toward a window and answered, “I will try to decide.”
In 1911, when Forster was 32 and had lived barely a third of his life (he died in 1970, at 91), he was already experiencing “weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat — the love of men for women & vice versa.” Forster had already completed his greatest novels, A Room With a View (1908) and Howards End (1910), and would publish only one more during his lifetime. After 1924, when A Passage to India appeared, Forster seemingly abandoned the novel altogether.
Forster’s biographers have always had to make sense of their subject’s decision to withhold Maurice, his novel about homosexual lovers, for posthumous publication. (It appeared in 1971.) But none of those biographers have had either the will or the wherewithal to concentrate as closely on Forster’s sexuality as Wendy Moffat, an impressive first-time biographer who teaches at Dickinson College. In A Great Unrecorded History, she offers an insightful, revelatory portrait of a man who deeply resented having to hide such an important side of himself but who deemed Maurice to be “unpublishable until my death and England’s.”
Moffat, who refers to Forster as Morgan the way his friends did, casts intensive new light on what she calls “the mystery of Morgan’s strange broken-backed career.” She does so by drawing on Forster’s idiosyncratic diaries and letters, some of which remained unpublished until 2008, and by piecing together letters and biographies that reflect the wide range of Forster’s acquaintances. She is able to place him within a few degrees of separation from figures as diverse as T.E. Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence, Constantine Cavafy, Pete Townshend, Robert Mapplethorpe, Lincoln Kirstein and Gypsy Rose Lee. It was in the files of Alfred Kinsey, the sex researcher, that the odd and unguarded George Platt Lynes cover photograph of Forster was found.
Moffat, a vigorous storyteller, begins A Great Unrecorded History at a moment of high drama: when the Maurice manuscript arrived at the home of Christopher Isherwood in Santa Monica five months after Forster’s death. Isherwood had long known of the book and of Forster’s reluctance to let it see the light of day. Part of that reluctance was rooted in good reason: The Stonewall riots in New York were recent, and lingering Comstock laws made it potentially illegal to send a manuscript about homosexuality via the US Postal Service.
As Isherwood showed Maurice to John Lehmann, the poet and publisher, Moffat writes, “the Bride of Frankenstein appeared. “Elsa Lanchester, who played Frankenstein’s bride on-screen, happened to live next door, and she had an “unnerving habit of appearing uninvited through hedges.” She may have had nothing to do with Forster, but tangential figures are never unwelcome in this colorful book.
After that prologue, Moffat goes back to Forster’s fraught childhood and his uncomfortable relationship with his mother.
“I wish he were more manly and did not cry so easily,” she once said of her only son. For his part, Forster, when told that he ought to follow Andre Gide’s example and publish openly gay writing, replied: “But Gide hasn’t got a mother!”
By the time he attended King’s College, Cambridge, and made his first contacts with what would become the Bloomsbury group, Forster was well aware of his own preferences. But he was incapable of physical involvement; his affection for one friend of that era would be expressed through “long, earnest, fully clothed embraces, chaste kisses and florid talk of the Hellenistic ideal of friendship.” As that quote may indicate, A Great Unrecorded History sometimes veers close to violating the privacy that Forster guarded fiercely, though he made diary entries about his sexual experiences. This is no work of literary criticism, but neither is it one of gratuitous voyeurism.
Moffat’s overarching interests are in tracing Forster’s attitudes about sex and hypocrisy and in placing this increasingly outspoken figure within the context of his changing times. Like characters about whom he would write so superbly, he experienced an Englishman’s sensual delight in the discovery of Italian culture. But he traveled to Italy with his mother and did not experience real freedom until World War I, when he went to Alexandria, Egypt, with the Red Cross. It was in Alexandria that Forster achieved the physical breakthrough that he called “parting with Respectability” at the ripe old age of 37.
After that, he fell deeply in love with a young train conductor, experienced the breadth of gay life outside England’s confines and became capable of the observation from which the book takes its name. “I see beyond my own happiness and intimacy,” he wrote, “occasional glimpses of the happiness of 1000s of others whose names I shall never hear, and I know that there is a great unrecorded history.”
The older Forster, who wrote essays and assorted nonfiction and assumed the persona of a curmudgeonly literary eminence, became increasingly daring and sociable. His peculiar relationship with the younger, admiring T.E. Lawrence (Forster was en route to visit Lawrence on the day that Lawrence was fatally injured in a motorcycle accident) became the model for some of Forster’s subsequent friendships, many of which managed both to warm his heart and to try his patience. His longtime intimacy with Bob Buckingham, a married policeman, gave him the domesticity he had yearned for as he wrote Maurice.
And he spoke his mind ever more clearly. At 84, he looked back angrily on a lifetime spent in hiding. “How annoyed I am with Society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal,” he complained. “The subterfuges, the self-consciousness that might have been avoided.” Moffat casts more light on those subterfuges than has any Forster biographer before her.
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