Letters between Forster and Isherwood on Homosexuality and Literature
Edited by Richard E. Zeikowitz
Palgrave Macmillan
196 pages, $74.95
The Creator as Critic and Other Writings by E.M. Forster
Edited by Jeffrey M. Heath
Dundurn Press. 814 pages, $90.
The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster, 1929-1960: A Selected Edition
Edited by Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes, and Elizabeth Macleod Walls
University of Missouri Press
512 pages, $59.95
WHEN the English novelist E. M. Forster—“Morgan”—died in 1970, at the age of 91, the novel which, above all else, had cemented his literary reputation among the first rank of twentieth-century writers, A Passage to India (1924), was almost a half century old. Moreover, it was his last novel; in the intervening years, Forster had not so much renounced fiction as found he was incapable of writing it anymore. He told the public in 1958: “I somehow dried up.” Privately, he told friends he had run out of sympathy with heterosexual characters, storylines, the whole thing. Believing that for a man of letters it was “better to dribble than to dry up” (Frank Kermode’s phrase, from a recent review), he largely devoted himself to criticism. He also became, almost incidentally, one of the BBC Third Programme’s most recognized voices of cultural authority to listeners at home. He recorded just as often for the Corporation’s Eastern radio service, also known, cryptically, as “The Purple Network,” and broadcast to India (a colony until the end of World War II) and the Far East. For both services, he scripted a regular round-up of literary news (obituaries, chiefly), reviews of recent publications, and occasional puffs for old classics he liked or felt suited the times.
The whole enterprise of the Eastern Service embodied a colonial—then awkwardly post-colonial—ethos that the BBC embodied and which today would be unthinkable. In the dark years of the Second World War, Forster, living in London and experiencing the Blitz, loss, deprivation, and uncertainty very much at first hand, found himself airing scripts somewhat propagandistic in nature—though in saying this I’m adopting hindsight: such “slant” tended to go unquestioned, if not unacknowledged, in its day. Still, there is plenty of evidence of Forster as propagandist in the variety of BBC broadcasts transcribed and reproduced in two of the books here, Jeffrey Heath’s huge The Creator as Critic and the more focused BBC Talks of E. M. Forster, 1929-1960. These may well surprise those who recall Forster’s famous dictum: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”
Forster’s legacy and prominence have soared since his death, threatening to eclipse many of his Bloomsbury peers and certainly eclipsing the reputation of Joseph Conrad, say, whom Forster revered as “our greatest living novelist,” or George Bernard Shaw, called by Forster “our greatest living writer” some time later. This has chiefly been due to filmmakers’ appreciation of Forster’s deft handling of those bare necessities that unite fiction and narrative cinema: character and plot—though even Merchant—Ivory balked at the feyness of Forster’s personal favorite among his books, The Longest Journey (1907), replete with its Cambridge archaisms, its wild improbabilities, and an impossibly high mortality rate. A second reason for his posthumous ascendancy was the novel he completed in 1917 but suppressed all his life, reworking repeatedly and disseminating just to a small coterie of gay male “fellow travelers.” Maurice was first published in 1971, to be followed by a likewise suppressed body of short stories a year later, The Life to Come and Other Stories, equally full of unabashed gay subject matter. Forster had left a note on the manuscript of Maurice stating: “Publishable—but worth it?,” yet the impact of such a major writer authoring a gay romantic novel—and one with that rarity, a happy ending—is difficult to underestimate. Indeed this ending replaced a more ambivalent one in 1952, in part on Isherwood’s suggestion. One difficulty for fans of Forster is taking a position on Maurice. It widened the scope of Forster’s œuvre—but did it deepen his literary achievement? The appended note suggests the author’s own clear view—that changes in society and the law had paradoxically rendered the book historical in too many ways—and not merely quaint-historical (à la Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited), but ludicrously outmoded. By 1971, gay themes were in, but agonizing about it was way out of style. The Life to Come was another difficult book that featured many period-bound, labored exchanges, sexual and otherwise, between men. Perversely, however, what sharpened A Passage to India—Forster’s pronounced liberal politics—was missing when he handled homosexual themes. These reservations notwithstanding, I readily concede that Forster’s influence on gay male literary style and fashion has been immense—from his disciple Isherwood’s embrace of the device of “teatabling” (skipping over the seismic event, to loiter on the trivial or domestic one) to David Leavitt, America’s foremost Forster standard bearer. Many of Leavitt’s novels and stories contain references, both subtle and overt, to Forsterian plots, characters, and books. One always hesitates to point out Forster’s shortcomings, because the author did that himself, pushing self-deprecation to new limits. That said, these three new volumes of correspondence, criticism, private journals, lectures, occasional pieces, broadcasts, and even poems (but don’t hold your breath!) reveal that—in private especially, or among those he knew well—Forster felt assured of his literary worth, judging it, for instance, better than that of George Eliot, whom he classed as a “moralist,” not a novelist. She got off easy compared to Henry James. James had possibly irked Forster by failing to recognize him correctly once in Rye. Whatever the reason, by 1905 Forster was arguing that James “leaves us with a feeling of depression, when he leaves us with any feeling at all.” By 1931, he would argue to Cambridge undergraduates that James’ “characters fall into a few types, and are constructed on meager lines… He seems to me our only perfect novelist, but alas it isn’t a very enthralling type of perfection.” His “method was to glance at daily life as little as possible, and shut his ears against a sentence before it ended.” A broadcast from 1932 remarks that James was remembered, “if at all, as a novelist.” Ouch! Forster thought himself a seeker after truth, and, as Jeffrey Heath points out in the vast editorial apparatus provided in The Creator as Critic, the term “truth” haunted every genre he wrote in. Isherwood, who sustained a 35-year epistolary relationship with his mentor, commented in 1947 that Forster “demanded the truth in all his relationships.” It helped that he liked it when the truth hurt a little. When Forster sent out drafts of works in progress—usually the gay stories—a certain masochism attended the process. He would exhort his addressees to handle them, or him, roughly. Isherwood, naturally, couldn’t easily oblige, describing the title character of Maurice, for instance, as “one of the few truly noble characters of fiction.” In response to Isherwood’s American novels, though, the best Forster could muster was tepidness. He noted some “disappointments and difficulties” with The World in the Evening (1954). To Down There on a Visit (1962), he responded abruptly: “I didn’t come off with your book”; “I didn’t want Christopher or his variants to guide me through a book by you any more. … I want a yarn less conditioned by him. I had other reservations.” His respect for Isherwood’s English novels had been fulsome, especially for The Memorial (1932). He probably found Isherwood’s later experimentation with “autofiction” self-indulgent. By 1962, he could summarize the way their paths had diverged this boldly: “There is a part of me, of my literary and personal character, which is very far from what you are and stand for.” The Forster–Isherwood correspondence illustrates how their relationship gradually waned through the 1950’s and 60’s. It stopped entirely in 1966; frustratingly, perhaps because of Forster’s outspokenness concerning the two previous books, there is no record of Isherwood sending him A Single Man (1964), his one U.S.-period masterpiece. The tapering off had begun so much earlier; back in 1939, Forster admitted: “I don’t seem to want to write letters to you.” He could be direct. Zeikowitz’ book does add significantly to what we knew of their interactions, though a good deal of the material was already available in the two extant volumes of Forster’s correspondence, edited by Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank, Forster’s official biographer, in 1983 and 1985 respectively. Sadly, in some respects Zeikowitz’ judgment of the letters proves questionable. If, as he claims, the Auden–Isherwood drama The Dog beneath the Skin was “not really a political play,” he might tell us what it was instead. And there’s a truly unfortunate gaffe when, in 1944, Forster wrote from London to Isherwood in California that “most people mind V.2 less than V.1.” The comment clearly refers to the ongoing wartime assaults on the city’s civilian population by airborne “doodlebugs” or rockets. Hitler’s grim weapons of last resort came in two versions, V.2 superseding V.1. But, bizarrely, Zeikowitz explains them as “Forster’s abbreviations for World War II and World War I respectively.” It’s like a footnote out of Nabokov’s Pale Fire—not just unlikely, but in the realm of idiocy. The horrors of Nazism threw up difficulties more complex and just as ominous long before the outbreak of war, which Forster, like everyone else in England barring Chamberlain and a few cranks, had long grown resigned to. Isherwood was in Portugal with his German lover Heinz in 1936, where they awaited the boy’s summons back to the Fatherland: “the postman is awaited daily like an executioner.” Notoriously, he and Auden would leave Europe for the States on the outbreak of war. Forster stayed, and did his best to defend the two young writers against vocal critics. This censure was certainly informed by jingoism, homophobia, and philistinism. But no doubt George Orwell’s contempt for the pair better caught the mood of a country braced for the fight of its life than Forster’s careful defense of their flight, as well as of the position of conscientious objectors at home. If popular opinion saw their departure as jumping from a sinking ship, Forster partly understood the judgment. He noted pithily in one letter to Isherwood that “it is clearly your job to see us sink from a distance, if sink we do.” In 1939, Forster intimated that he might have joined them if urged, “but was not sure it suited you and Wystan, and have been too afraid to come since.” Forster’s pessimism about the war was ubiquitous. In 1940 he wrote: “I am sure there is hope, but want someone else to do the hoping.” Isherwood responded by sending food parcels from the land of plenty. Forster’s despair paradoxically emboldened him, however. On matters he considered essential, he was no pushover; he was described by Isherwood as “immensely, superhumanly strong.” What he couldn’t do, increasingly, was commit himself to writing books. In 1933, he told Isherwood: “It’s so long since I’ve written a book that it feels like opening a tomb.” Logically, since Isherwood too was often blocked, prolific authors especially evinced their shared contempt. The dowager-like Somerset Maugham, for instance—who would write The Razor’s Edge (1944), a scabrous novelistic assault on pusillanimous Westerners such as Forster and Isherwood taking up Eastern religions—reminded Isherwood “of an old gladstone bag, the veteran of many voyages, covered with labels. God only knows what is inside. I wish I could unpack him, but it is forbidden. He has been sealed by the customs.” Forster aged fast. “What is old age like?” he asked at 32. (He was already lamenting the intrusion of the “telephone and the bicycle, which have between them done so much to disintegrate family life.”) Fate rather cruelly gave him another sixty years to find out. By 1937, he could write: “I feel I can’t adapt myself anymore”; “I am sorry to have lived into these 1930’s… because I am not equipped to understand them.” In 1945—after the death of his mother Lily, who had often vacationed with her son—he confessed: “I partly died when my mother did, and must smell sometimes of the grave.” He had another quarter century to go. Lily’s presence in these three volumes is a constant. In 1939 Forster told Isherwood that he still planned to get to Berlin (after a decade of invitations), but could not, as his mother “thinks Hitler will cut my hand off.” On hearing the usual stories of sexual derring-do in Berlin, he wrote to Isherwood: “My life is a water-color rendering of yours: a burst water-pipe instead of a frozen radiator, cough and cold instead of clap, failure to start an article… instead of a novel, and a £50 loan to Mrs. Morgan at the garage instead of an American debt.” Forster couldn’t do Grand Guignol. By 1944, he was telling Isherwood that “we are not at the moment at our mental best in the London area.” Isherwood, eternally boyish, must have tired of his correspondent’s increasingly nannyish disposition; Forster became his mother. He could find little of merit in anything contemporary, including the unstoppable cultural dominance of film. In 1948, Isherwood sought to entice him with a movie version of A Passage to India. Forster wouldn’t consider it. FORSTER’S CHIEF WEAKNESS as a critic was a naïve identification of writers with their literary texts. Of John Dryden, Forster remarked: “as was his character, so too are his poems.” He never quite shook this simplistic view, which also led him into personal difficulties. His intuitive reading of A. E. Housman’s homoerotic verse sequence A Shropshire Lad (1896) led him to write to its author several times. “This writer is my natural food,” he wrote long after the experience, in 1928. “Did I long to be a ploughboy, or soldier’s comrade because of reading him?” Forster concluded that the poetry had merely addressed existing urges. Still, his pestering of Housman finally led to “an absolutely hateful” letter in response. Forster entered empathetically into the literary works he admired. As an adolescent, he briefly adopted “Peer Gynt” as a penname. This leads to an odd, deluded moment in his correspondence, where Heath speculates in a footnote that “Forster may have had Ibsen’s trolls in mind when, years later, he conceived of the Marabar Caves [in A Passage to India].” No—I suspect he had in mind one of the Indian cave complexes he had visited often on his visits to the country. He revered the “gift of mysticism” in another Englishman’s novel about the subcontinent, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, but railed against the imperialist dogmatism of Kipling’s temperament, manifest most obviously in his poetry. Wrote Forster in 1908: “I am afraid he thought that he was being manly: vitality will lead one to odd conclusions at times.” (Forster, of course, was rather immune to “vitality”). What he opposed, specifically, was Kipling’s defense of imperialism: Kipling liked the Empire, Forster opined, “because it is big and can smash up its enemies.” His bias toward empathetic readings of literature, coupled with his biographically informed view of authors and their works, produced some odd viewpoints, though there’s the occasional bulls-eye. In 1931, Forster dispatched Dryden with the words: “The very middle of the man is dead.” On the other hand, paraphrasing Samuel Butler, Forster once argued: “We are none of us personalities but bundles of instincts.” Sometimes he was able to accept a separation between authorial character and literary artifact. Of Walter Pater’s personality, for instance, Forster argued that it “scarcely prepares us for the greatness of his books,” a judgment that might apply to Forster, too. He was dubious of Wilde’s insistence on the autonomy of Art and accused Wilde of triviality. In 1921, he announced without elaborating: “However much we condemn the way in which Wilde was treated as a man, we do not think him great as a writer.” In one of Heath’s bigger finds, a set of transcripts of lectures given to the English faculty at Cambridge in 1931 entitled “The Creator as Critic,” Forster observed that Wilde was “such a mixture of the shoddy and the fine.” Once again, he did not elaborate. These lectures find Forster grappling with his clear sense that his own fiction-writing career was over, and that what energies he had left must be channeled elsewhere. He dwelt on Coleridge’s career, surely because of its similar trajectory to his own. In the end, however, he refuses to attribute much imaginative power or significance to the critic. To call a critic a creator, he jibes, would be “like calling everybody ‘colonel.’” Likewise, “critics never have improved authors and never will.” Forster’s pantheon was select and consistent. As a critic himself, he was, as P. N. Furbank put it, “the great simplifier.” Three authors helped the most in his discovery of his literary style: Samuel Butler, Jane Austen, and Marcel Proust. This was quite different, though, from assessing literary “greatness” more widely. The greats, he thought, were Dante, Gibbon, and Tolstoy. He also had a negative canon: in one broadcast, he censured Augustine’s Confessions, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and everything by Carlyle. Forster could be somewhat snobbish and also silly. In a 1937 lecture, apparently to undergraduates, he spoke at length of Proust’s curiosity as the seedbed of his genius. Then he added: “Many of you will have read Proust, but those who haven’t—I am not going to recommend him. He will not help you in what I suppose to be your problems, he will take up too much of your time, and you have not much time. He represents an age which has just closed, an age of private lives, and I think that’s even more remote from you than is the prewar age.” Conversely, his literary round-ups for India were sometimes packed with the most bizarre recommendations, such as a biography of the corrupt, fraudulent cult Catholic novelist Frederick Rolfe (a.k.a. Baron Corvo). Sometimes Forster acknowledged the weirdness of the whole exercise, telling his Indian listeners in 1947 apropos Stefan Zweig: “I don’t expect Europe means very much to you.” But through the war, his broadcasts abroad took on a didactic character: “Literature and Democracy are natural allies,” he declared. At the start of the conflict, he announced that “this war is partly a battle of books against bonfires.” In 1943, recommending some staples of the German canon, he added that Nazis “ban German culture. We don’t.” Forster fell for only one culture other than India’s—that of Italy. Inevitably, references to that Axis power are conspicuously absent. He did manage to ask of India in 1943, however: “Don’t you agree that the Japanese are odd?” He called Japan “treacherous and pitiless and insolent … a totalitarian terror” worse than Germany. In fact, these volumes reveal that Forster may have had a rather deep-seated and longstanding hostility toward the German language and national character, if not its literature. After he and his mother Lily toured the German-speaking Italian Tyrol region in 1902, Lily wrote: “German is hopeless and we do not take to Germans.” Still, on the same tour, Forster equally railed against some U.S. warships docked in Naples: “Odious Americans! Why is it not possible to defend one’s country without being offensive?” In the context of World War II, there’s a single but pointed instance of Forster’s habitual humanistic disposition deserting him, when he argued in a broadcast that households in the Third Reich probably did not feel sorrow on hearing of their young dead. I’ve hinted at reservations concerning Heath’s editing, but sometimes The Creator as Critic is frustrating because of his scrupulousness. There are trenchant footnotes for almost every line. Many offer beguiling (sometimes also exasperating) suggestions as to links to other texts. There’s one clear howler: the much-traveled, much admired Victorian painting The Light of the World couldn’t have been by the writer Leigh Hunt; it is the work of William Holman Hunt. But Heath’s notes, and a couple of chapter-length appendices full of interesting ideas, generally prove rich and revealing. It’s just that they are secreted almost randomly at different points in the book, itself so heavy that attempting to follow claims and clues can be frustrating. Heath’s principles of selection feel more arbitrary, though admittedly I haven’t scoured the archive material that isn’t here. But he gives us the first part of what seems an important new autobiographical fragment from the 40’s, “A Surrey Ramble,” only to claim it rambling and repetitive, and then cut it off. Thankfully a series of travel pieces on Italy by the young Forster, “Sentimental Essays” (1902), are here in full. One, “Via Nomentana,” contains a lively account of two young Roman lads engaged in Platonic horseplay (the quotes at the end are from Plato’s Lysis). Between the lines, Forster’s erotic feelings and aspirations permeate all too evidently, yet in an unforced, undramatic way that eluded him when he tried similar scenes in fiction: They had their arms round one another’s necks, as English youths have, and were not mawkish, and when they unlocked and sparred and charged into one another, as Hooligans do, they were not Hooligans. Leaning over the parapet I looked down … to behold that which is not as old as the hills but as old as the ancient world—that which flashed forth in a moment in David and Jonathan but first shone as a beacon in ancient Greece, proclaiming to barbarians that human affection need not be confined to the home circle or extended to the harem, for “a friend was the best possession of all,” and “the possessions of friends were common.” There are other glimpses of Forster’s interests in straight men and their bonding with one another. Among the most moving is in “Incidents of War,” a piece about his volunteer work at a hospital in Alexandria, Egypt. He quotes a letter from a soldier at the front, stating simply: “All the boys what I mated with is dead.” In a 1920’s piece on “Swimming in the Sea,” he found his prose going somewhat adrift: “It is only an accident that connects swimming with nudity: similar to the accident that connects darkness and sex.” Forster experienced a number of great passions, not all of them unanswered. There was a highly cultured Egyptian tram conductor and, later, an English policeman. He would tend to regret or despair over his entanglements, however. Of the stronger desires that left him feeling silly, he could be forthrightly dismissive; a liaison with Charlie Day he later called “an illness, not an affair.” An important find here is a private reflection entitled “Sex,” dated between the 1920’s and the 1960’s—Forster evidently revised and added to it. From it we learn much about the origins of his shame concerning sexuality. Lily had taught him his willy was “dirty”; at school, his own penis was described by other boys as “a beastly little brown thing.” He grew up thinking his penis would melt in the bath if the prepuce was drawn back. He knew he had “felt deeply about boys in books,” but did not connect this to sexual feelings until seduced, aged twelve, by a middle-aged stranger. The man coerced Forster into masturbating him to climax, and then offered a tip of a shilling. This was greeted by a prim, very Forsterian refusal: “No thank you.” His erotic temperament was drawn to violent extremes. It is in “Sex” that he describes wanting to love a tough young working-class lad, to be loved but also to be hurt. He connects this masochistic aspect in his character to some very extreme sexual acts, including coprophilia, which he nevertheless disavows. Forster’s own erotic nature, combined with a suppressed hostility towards the crowd of women who brought him up, could lead Forster into misogyny. He notes in “Sex” that “I have never tried to turn a man into a girl, as Proust did with Albertine, for this seemed derogatory to me as a writer.” The sense is that the character, or model for the character, would be the one being demeaned. It’s a fascinating comment from one who wrote so well about women’s perceptions and needs. There are eleven poems here, which won’t change Forster’s own view that he was “not a poet.” They are largely unpublished, and several were evidently written simply to arouse the author sexually—a little like Auden’s “The Platonic Blow.” Two, “A Soldier of the Devil’s Own” and “Vulcan and Adonis,” are dated 1961 but may well have been written much earlier. In the first, a soldier sets about corrupting a ploughboy but ends up skewered for his pains. The second finds both young men masturbating in a forest, alone; they then couple, reaching “realms beyond the powers of speech”: They wrestle demigod and god, Adonis is anally raped by Vulcan, and predictably learns to enjoy it: He bursts, he lets himself be burst, These verses are suggestive evidence of how inextricably Forster connected sexual pleasure with the enactment of a strong power scenario. It may be cheeky here to note that he conceded when broadcasting on Samuel Butler that he had “the sort of mind which likes to be taken unawares.” Yes, but taken where? Forster seems to have viewed radio broadcasting as a necessary evil. He told Isherwood in 1932 that it was “worse than schoolmastering,” but, if so, he tolerated it for a long time. He worried about the inevitable invisibility of the listener, and also about the intellectual level he adopted. He insisted on the ephemeral, trivial nature of his recommendations, too—in a world in which he felt all fiction, and possibly all literature, was facing a death sentence. In 1937, he argued that “no serious person [today]has the time to be a great writer. … I wonder indeed whether there will be any more literature.” It is odd, on reflection, that the Heath and Lago broadcast transcripts overlap somewhat; taken together, they still don’t provide all the available material. It does seem that two academic “teams” have been involved in rival projects here rather than collaborating, which is a shame. Forster had, after all, given permission for some of his broadcasts to be transcribed for inclusion in Two Cheers for Democracy, and many others appeared in the BBC magazine The Listener. Mary Lago is not only a Forster scholar of standing; she has also written a study of Forster’s radio career. Her notes are accordingly persuasive and well-honed. It must be said, though, that much of what Forster said over the airwaves was not as compelling as his written work. It’s worth citing here just a couple of his more bizarre claims. Forster was almost unique in finding Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer superior to Huckleberry Finn (“rather journalistic and uneven”). He also thought somehow that Twain had anticipated James Joyce—not necessarily a good thing, as he characterizes the Irishman as “vindictive” and “soured,” his writings “obscure and uncompromising.” Forster was clear that he wanted “a novel to be a novel,” not music, to which Joyce aspired. The most apt final word comes from Forster’s contribution to a Third Programme series encouraging people to “sound off,” entitled “I Speak for Myself” and aired in 1949. Forster characteristically opened his show by noting that the very idea of speaking for oneself “means … the power to realize that other people also speak.” He read and enthused over other people’s speeches and writings more than most authors do. Characteristic was his suggestion at the outset of World War II that listeners prepare themselves by reading (or rereading, as he had done) something distant, yet entirely appropriate—Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Richard Canning’s most recent book is Brief Lives: Oscar Wilde
Till Vulcan lubricates his rod
Jumps on Adonis from behind
And puts it through his tender rind.
Accepts young Vulcan’s liquid fires
And not unrecompensed expires.
