Yet she found Forster the best of critics because he was willing to say the simple things clever people wouldn’t. Detecting in Forster’s handshake a shyness with smart women, Woolf ordered him to go read Defoe. He and Woolf never seemed like contemporaries. I am touched to remember how much Forster loved The Waves.

I found symbols, myth, masculine-feminine conflict, and a theory of latent class war inside the pleasures of Howards End. I liked my Bloomsbury butch-bewildered, with female sacrifices, like a senior seminar before Columbia went co-ed. I had a professor who talked about Bloomsbury and androgyny, and that professor lost me immediately. I worshipped Virginia Woolf, foolishly sent her into battle against James Joyce, failed to get Strachey’s humor, and didn’t understand J.M. It was British, gay, and upper class, everything a black American queer could want. He had put away his one gay novel, among a lot of other unpublished work, but Maurice appeared in print almost as soon as he died, with revisions suggested by his friends down through the years.īloomsbury was the rage of English departments when I was an undergraduate in the early ’70s. Forster died in 1970 at the age of 91, at the dawn of gay liberation. Forster showed Isherwood the manuscript of Maurice, and Isherwood was embarrassed for him, for his Hellenic attitudes and fig leaf vocabulary. Christopher Isherwood declared himself ready to be Forster’s disciple when they met in 1932. Forster lived out his triangle and remembered Buckingham’s grandchildren in his will. In 1930, Forster found love again, with Bob Buckingham, a policeman, and it came at the cost of having to be a witness at Buckingham’s wedding. He had two-nonwhite-great loves before the Jazz Age. Forster, Wendy Moffat tells us that Forster disapproved of the flamboyant carnation style of Wilde and Strachey. In A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. But Strachey knew Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, artists living together when Forster finished his novel in 1914, and the characters of Maurice and Alec were modeled on the poet Edward Carpenter and his working-class partner, George Merrill, who, like Ricketts and Shannon, would live together for decades, until death. Strachey told him that the relationship he depicts between Maurice and Alec was unreal: That kind of love between men never lasted. Forster that because he, Forster, was celibate, he didn’t know what he was talking about in Maurice, his novel of gay love triumphant. One hundred years ago, Lytton Strachey told E.M.

1910 novel by em forster