Not as sweet as he seemed

There are already three biographies of E. M. Forster: P. N. Furbank’s two- volume, authorised heavyweight; Nicola Beauman’s less compendious, more engaging middleweight; and my own bantamweight, little more than an extended essay. For readers who want a coherent, psychologically penetrating, well-written account of the life, with a minimum of critical analysis, this new biography is the one that I now recommend.

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Most people would regard the writing of his novels as the dominant preoccupation of Forster’s life. But to that, most convincingly, Moffat adds another one, his sexuality, dealing with this aspect far more lengthily and frankly than her predecessors have done. Forster had already passed the age of 40 when, working as a ‘Head Researcher’ for the British Red Cross in Alexandria during the first world war, he at last found total emotional and physical satisfaction with a young Egyptian tram-conductor. But before that, he had been always obsessed with sex, having unassisted orgasms when his thigh merely pressed accidentally against another male thigh on a bus or a train, and masturbating so frequently that, when he had to undergo an operation on his prostate, his consultant told him that too much self-abuse had been the cause of his problem. Among diaries at King’s College, Cambridge that have only recently been made available to scholars is one confined solely to his sexual experiences and day-dreaming.

There has always been debate as to why Forster did not have the courage to publish his openly homosexual Maurice when it still would have been ground-breaking, instead of leaving it to be published after his death, when the passage of the years made it seem fustily and sometimes sentimentally old-fashioned.