Jane Austen's oeuvre ends at six novels because she died. E.M. Forster wrote six novels, then lived another 46 years after writing his last, A Passage to India (1924). You can attribute the loss of all the books he might have written to the cost of the closet. After Forster finally found sexual love with a man, Andrew Holleran notes, "Forster said he stopped writing because he no longer wanted to write about love between men and women; Kermode says it was because he lost his power of imagination."
The Kermode in question is Frank, whose new short book, Concerning E. M. Forster, looks almost exclusively at the author's work. In the latest Gay & Lesbian Review, Andrew Holleran critiques it alongside Wendy Moffat's A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster that looks primarily at the man's life. Holleran summarizes, "Moffat describes Forster’s private life without relating it much to his novels; Kermode describes his fiction without connecting it to his sexuality."
For months I've been in a fever of anticipation for Moffat's biography (on sale next week), of which Holleran writes,
Moffat covers all this in a way that makes the book hard to put down. She sets out to tell the story that Forster could not—what he referred to as “a great unrecorded history”—and has written the engrossing tale like a novelist... A Great Unrecorded History is particularly moving to a gay reader: the narrative of this man’s long life (Forster died at 91) contains things unique to Forster and things any gay person will recognize—his relationship with his mother, his long period of celibacy, his first love, his attraction to working-class men, the remarkable way in which he was kept in Bob Buckingham’s marriage. Moffat’s book is sympathetic. She charges Forster with misogyny at one point but only briefly; otherwise, she says, a friend of Forster’s “put it beautifully” when he said Forster believed “that the true history of the human race was the history of human affection.”
Yet for anyone who loves Forster's novels, the Kermode's study of the work also sounds appealing, especially when Holleran says it "reads like a conversation with a favorite professor."
Read Holleran's full essay and buy the Moffat.
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