E. M. Forster, the British novelist, short story writer, essayist and critic was born January 1, 1879, in London; he died June 7 1970 in Coventry, Britain.
He was born at 6 Melcombe Place, London, NW1. After completing his schooling at Tonbridge School, Kent, he went to King's College, Cambridge, where he associated with the
Bloomsbury Group. He began a close friendship with the unconventional don
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. He was also elected in 1901 to the elite secret society at Cambridge, The Apostles, which brought close ties with
John Maynard Keynes and
Lytton Strachey . He graduated with a degree in Classics and history.
In 1903 he was co-founder of the
Independent Reviewwith Goldsworthy Dickinson (1862-1932). After Cambridge he travelled for a year in Italy with his mother. In 1902 he began part-time teaching at the Working Men's College. This continued for over twenty years. In 1912 he visited
Edward Carpenter who lived openly with his working-class lover, George Merrill, in a rural cottage in Derbyshire. This became the model for the relationship between Maurice and Alec, the gamekeeper, in Forster's novel
Maurice which he began to write in 1913. In 1915 he went to Alexandria in Egypt with the Red Cross, and had his first love affair, with Mohammed el Ali, a young Eqyptian tram driver. He also came to know the poet Constantine Cavafy. He became secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas Senior in India in 1921. He sent a letter dated 26th. April 1922 to the
London Mercury magazine in praise of the poem
Ghosts by
J R Ackerley . This was the start of a lifelong friendship but for much of 1922 Joe Ackerley was often away in Paris where his sister Nancy was working for a fashion house as a mannequin. Joe Ackerley and E M Forster exchanged letters over the next two years. E M Forster became a close friend and major influence throughout his life. In fact they were distant cousins as Joe Ackerley's mother was related to the Fosters. E M Foster was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial and Femina Vie Heutreuse prizes in 1925. He returned to England for good in 1927. He became concerned with civil liberties and in 1928 he rallied public opinion to protest the suppression of the lesbian novel,
The Well of Loneliness , by
Radclyffe Hall. In 1934 and 1942 he was twice president of the National Council for Civil Liberties. He also served as president of the British Humanist Society. In 1946 he was elected a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and he lived in Cambridge for the rest of his life. He is the model for Benjamin Dexter in Graham Greene's novel
The Third Man, (1950). In 1953 he became a Companion of Honour, and on his ninetieth birthday he was admitted to the Order of Merit. His novel
Maurice was on the theme of homosexuality but was not published until after his death. It was produced as the film
Maurice by the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala team in 1987.
Maurice was number 16 of the
list of the top 100 gay books compiled in the USA in 1999. In 1999
A Room with a View was 19th. on the list of sales in the UK recorded by Whitaker Booktrack, as reported by John Ezard in
The Guardian, 23rd. October, 1999, page 3. A photograph of E. M. Forster in about 1905 when he was about 26 is shown in
James Gardiner's “Who's a Pretty Boy Then?, (1996) , page 31.
EditWork
Where Angels Fear to Tread, 1905.
The Longest Journey , 1907. A Room with a View , 1908. John Carey's Books of the Century in The Sunday Times Books, February 7, 1999, page 9. “Forster was eventually to give up writing novels because, as a homosexual, he was tired of pairing off boys with girls. But in A Room with a View he turns homosexuality to advantage by describing love through Lucy's eyes not George's. She notices the shadows on his face, his body, his social awkwardness, and we notice them with her. How successful this is, women readers must decide. But for this male reader it is among the most sympathetic accounts of a woman falling in love that has been written by a man. Forster knew, too, about love crossing class boundaries. His most intense and lasting relationships were to be with lower-class men - an Egyptian tram conductor, an English police constable. The kind of middle-class fuss that Lucy has to contend with when she chooses George was familiar to him. “ Howard's End , 1910. The Celestial Omnibus , a collection of short stories, 1911. A Passage to India , 1924. Aspects of the Novel , 1927. Collaborated with Eric Crozier on the libretto of Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd , 1951. Maurice , written 1913-14, published postumously in 1971. Dr Woolacott , 1972, published by Edward Arnold. An extract is published in The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction.The Life to Come, 1972, a collection of short stories.
EditBibliography
Stephen Adams, (1980), “The Homosexual as Hero in contemporary fiction “.E. M. Forster's representation of gay characters in his writing is discussed in detail.N. Beauman, (1993), “Morgan: a biography of E M Forster “J. Beer, (1962), “The Achievement of E M Forster “Tom Cowan, (1996), “Gay Men and Women Who Enriched the World “Elliman and Roll, (1986), pages 78-79.P. N. Furbank, (1978), “E. M. Forster: A life “, New York: Harcourt Brace JovanovichRobert K. Martin and George Piggford, (editors), (1998), “Queer Forster “, University of Chicargo Press, 302 pages, ISBN 0 226 50802 1.- Room for a Viewby Graeme Woolaston inGay Times, July 1998, issue 238, page 100. “This is a collection of twelve essays on E M Forster by north American academics, which they hope 'will provide insights into both the current state of queer theory and the current state of Forster criticism'. It is addressed, in other words, to a narrow readership of academics who believe there is such a thing as 'queer theory', which is to be distinguished from the now almost traditional field of 'gay and lesbian studies'. “
“Forster deserves better than to be the plaything of academics interested only in talking to each other. “
- Detour through deviance ends at a camp siteby Edward Neill in The Times Higher Education Supplement, 31st. July, 1998, page 22. “Contributors like Gregory Bredbeck, Eric Haralson, Christopher Reed, Joseph Bristow and Judith Scherer Herz develop such nuances, tracing debts and differences among Henry James , Edward Carpenter and Whitman, links and lesions with the Cambridge Apostles, and conscious structural similitudes and affinities with as well as (finally) distance from and distaste for Wagner (whose anti-Semitism is refused and refuted by Forster). “
“In other essays Debrah Raschke notes Forster's rejection of the ascetically aesthetic, Christopher Lane forbids sentimentalised versions of a queerness that may be felt to secrete its own master-slave dialectic (truly Hegel is everywhere), especially as Forster liked low-life lovers. Tamera Dorland describes the quasi-misogynistic investment in a '(M)other' figure who, it seems, is merely a secreted or encrypted version of an internalised self-reproach. There is a quite uproarious essay by Yonatan Touval on the abusive relations of coloniality, involving rumours of a 'famously queer' viceroy, his wife's lover, and the consequent awarding of Kashmir to India, which could have lawyers reaching for their briefs. These discussions naturally include extensive references to novels likeThe Longest Journey,Howard's End,A Passage to India, and the rather underratedMaurice. “The book is at once more nuanced and more probing than its title might suggest. However, even if, finally, all this (mainly male) gazing at Forster's queerness does not work to suspend all scepticism by everyone over the final value of his work, at the very least it does nothing to queer his pitch. “
- Pseuds warninga letter to the editor from Penny Tucker inThe Times Higher Education Supplement, 7th. August, 1998, No. 1344, page 13. “Why do you commission book reviews from people who believe that any amount of pretentious nonsense is acceptable, providing that it is written badly enough? Edward Neill's review ofQueer Forster(THES, July 31) was crammed with parentheses, forced alliteration ('the macho-ised proponents of a masculinist modernism prone to mug anything effeminate' '), dreadful puns ('a camp site' as George Piggford pleasantly puts it, whose camp sightings may include camp citings of the pious and the platitudinous') and ugly jargon ('positively valorised') and bespattered with inverted commas and dropped names ('trulyHegel is everywhere) (my emphasis). Will you stop it if I threaten to send these gems toPrivate Eyefor their 'Pseuds Corner' column? “
Arthur Martland, (1999), “E. M. Forster: Passion and prose “, Swaffham: GMP, 235 pages, ISBN 0 85449 268 2 (paperback).Breaking the codeby Francis King inGay Times, August, 1999, issue 251, page 79. “The chief value of this excellent book is that it demonstrates how Forster's homosexuality was an integral part of everything of consequence written by him - something that could not be said of Henry James. Since, where the general public was concerned, Forster was determined, even in extreme old age, to keep his homosexuality under lock and key, it could only speak out to the reader in code. It is in deciphering this code that Martland is particularly helpful. “ “Heterosexual critics all too often take the view that to stress, as Martland does, that Forster's homosexuality was omnipresent in his work is in some way to rob it of its universality. As Martland rightly points out, those who take this view are, in effect, saying that homosexual art must always be second-best and homosexuals creatively inferior. But - to name only one instance -Michelangelo's obsession with the beauty of the male body in no way detracts either from his 'universality' or his genius. “
David Medalie, (2002), “E. M. Forster's Modernism “, Palgrave (Macmillan). Paul Elliott Russell , (1994), “The Gay 100 “.Claude J. Summers, (1983), “E. M. Forster “, New York: Frederick Ungar.
EditPress cuttings
Naipaul derides novels of Forster, 'a nasty homosexual'by Paul Kelso inThe Guardian, 2nd. August, 2001, page 5. “EM Forster has long been considered a master of modern English fiction with his sentimental view of India and gentle satires on the pretensions of the colonial classes. But according to Sir Vidia (VS) Naipaul, novelist and mischievous chronicler of the Caribbean colonial experience, Forster was a sexual predator more interested in seducing garden boys than revealing the truth about India. Naipaul, who has a new novel out next month, also labelled Forster's most famous work, A Passage to India, 'utter rubbish' in an interview with the Literary Review, published today. In it he derides Forster and his friend, the economist John Maynard Keynes, as homosexuals who exploited the poor and those in their power for sexual gratification. “