A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster

This fascinating, especially well written life of the great English writer E.M. Forster is splendid. Its complete account of Forster's homosexuality and its signal importance to him and the picture of gay and literary English life makes this book an original one. For the Forster devotee, it is a must. It illuminates his work subtly. For the reader who doesn't know Forster, it is a telling story of art, love and friendship and the resources and recourses of a banned sexuality. There is nothing reductive about this book. It opens the subject up. It will make you want to read Forster, which is a real pleasure.

The great novelist E. M. Forster on the subject of his posthumous legacy wanted everything told. Wendy Moffat, to her credit, certainly does just that. In A GREAT UNRECORDED HISTORY, a quotation from Forster, as are all the chapter headings, Moffat draws from his journals and a "locked diary" that he kept for sixty years as well as interviews with his friends. She also includes voluminous notes and an extensive bibliography at the end of this most informative and heartwarming biography. It of course has been long known by readers that Forster's novel MAURICE and a collection of short stories THE LIFE TO COME, dealing with love and sex between men, were published at his direction only after his death in 1970. Moffat writes extensively about MAURICE. One of the most moving portions of this biography appears early when Forster-- he was called "Morgan" by friends and family"-- showed a typewritten copy of the novel to Christopher Isherwood. His eyes wet with tears, Isherwood told Forster that he found the novel "wonderful and brave." Isherwood encouraged Forster to publish the novel-- in 1928, 1948, 1951-- to no avail, however. Forster finished MAURICE before he ever touched another man-- he had his first sexual encounter when he was 37-- and certainly that is one of the saddest facts about Forster's life. Sergeant Leonard Matlovich-- discharged from the USAF for being openly gay-- said something similar in his autobiography when he remembered that he had never touched another human being until he was well into adulthood. Through the years a copy of MAURICE made the rounds of Forster's friends although T. E. Lawrence chose not to read it. The author later in his life revised the novel to give it a happier ending. In an example of life imitating art, as in the novel, Forster chose men from the lower classes as lovers. He, for example, remembered forty years after his affair with the Egyptian tram conductor Mohammed el Adl that this friendship was one of the two '"greatest things"' in his life. The two men had a single suit made for each of them to wear. It was slightly too big for Adl and a litle small for Forster. He was devastated when Adl died of consumption at the age of 23. He kept for the rest of his life studio photographs of Adl, the ticket stub from their first tram ride together and Adl's letters to him: "Do not forget your ever friend." Forster's longest relationship was with Bob Buckingham, a British policeman he met in 1930 who like Adl, married and named a child Morgan after Forster. Buckingham and his wife May-- with whom Forster became good friends in the most interesting of triangles-- were with him when the writer died in 1970. Forster's homosexuality was at the center of who he was. He essentially stopped writing fiction for publication after A PASSAGE TO INDIA, which became a best seller and made him rich, because he believed he could not write about gay characters although he would never have used the word "gay" to describe th

Wendy Moffat's new biography opens in an amateur, theatrical way - probably the opening a literary agent demanded. But after she settles down to Forster's life and portrays the ways in which Forster crept out - passively and furtively - from his mother Lily's cruel thumb, the book is readable, insightful, well paced, and often highly absorbing. His Cambridge friends, from HOM to Leonard Woolf, reveal how central were his early university experiences. Later, the sexual relationships he managed to secure show an amazing tolerance for half-requited passion. Despite his core of passivity - he provided the equivalent of a lady's companion to his own mother - he managed to write several fascinating novels, all crisp with chagrin. HOWARDS END, we learn, is a superb rendering of aspects of Forster's experience, ably recalibrated to show both his extraordinary humanity and his terror of exposure. Alive with a good blend of specifics and analysis, Moffat's biography is recommended to those wanting a fresh portrait of a classic twentieth-century novelist whose star is gracefully falling.

It's not an easy thing to write with Forster-esque humanity, humor, and acute perception in any genre, but Wendy Moffat has done it here, in a biography of all things, writing a "new life" of E.M. Forster. I have loved Forster's work for a long time, and built an image of him in my head...so it was a risk, a bit, to read a biography of him....however, i've come out of it with my love intact and deepened. Moffat builds a portrait that I think Morgan Forster would have liked: amused, humane, casting a wide net to gather in all the parts of his life that informed his work. Which is nice, considering that Forster states his own agenda as "wishing to connect up all the fragments I was born with". Of course, within his lifetime, this was not possible to do - not publicly anyway: homophobic law and vicious anti-gay attitudes in early 20th century England made it necessary for him to conceal a great many parts of himself, and in consequence a great deal of his work. Moffat situates his homosexuality where he did: right at the center of his life. From that understanding she works through his life to explain the mystery of why his last work was published in just his middle-age -- when he lived in sound mind and body much longer than that. In that seemingly barren time, we see a life teeming with connection and purpose. He was an avid patron and supporter of upcoming authors (many of them homosexual). He built a network of deep, sustaining friendships with men and women (of all stripes: mingling cab drivers and policemen with T.E. Lawrence and the Woolfs). He made quiet forays into advocacy against morality laws, and publicly defended young people endangered by them. At the same time, Forster searched for relationship and connection on another, romantic level: he wanted real affection and domestic bliss (not just sex) in a loving male-male relationship. It's great fun getting to know Morgan Forster (as Moffat calls him), and all the other luminaries and regulars who wrote to him and of him in their letters and diaries. Which is something, considering the potentially heavy, even tragic, material. Moffat has an extraordinarily light touch, a quick, connective brain, and writes beautifully fluid prose. So it's an Important Book, for sure, but one you'll finish eagerly. How wonderful that we finally get to hear from a temperate genius on a subject we seem only now (barely) ready to understand: Forster wrote, at 85, "...how ANNOYED I am with Society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal. The subterfuges, the self-consciousness that might have been avoided." Indeed.

Moffat, Wendy. "A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster Public and Private Forster Amos Lassen Wendy Moffat's new biography of E.M. Forster in one of the most compelling books I have ever read. It took her ten years to write it and she has uncovered some very interesting news about Forster. I think many of us knew that he was gay and he really wrote about it in "Maurice" but Moffat maintains that his gayness was the very essence of the man--it was through homosexuality that he lived his life but it also caused him to have a sense of pure frustration because he could not write about it due to the then values of society. We get here an intimate look at his sex life and we learn that Forster was extremely shy. Moffat states that the reason that Forster published nothing after "Passage to India" was because he was tired of having to hide who and what he was. It was not until after Forster's death that he came out as gay and that was in 1970 with the posthumous publication of "Maurice". No one really seemed to care and his literature remained cherished. Homosexuality was the center of his world and he lived as a gay man at a time when most did not and he left behind resources about his private life that he hoped would someday find an audience. Moffat used these resources to write this biography and is the first book that looks at both the public and the private man. By reading about Forster through his gay lens gives us something completely new and we are made aware that he was a social critic who was brave for his time. We also get a new and different look at gay history. Wendy Moffat is an excellent writer and this is her first book. She should be very proud, she has written a wonderful book.