Brody's Notes... The Times Of London: Sex Led To EM Forster’s End

British Novelist EM Forster  Photo By The BBC

By Brody Levesque (Bethesda, Maryland) June 6 | In today's edition of The Sunday Times of London, Arts Editor Richard Brooks reveals that the enduring mystery of why the great British novelist,  EM Forster,  failed to write any novels beyond his mid-forties has been solved thanks to a secret cache of papers in which he [Forster] confided his sexual desires.

The author, who was known to his friends as Morgan, his middle name, had written A Room with a View, Howard’s End and Where Angels Fear to Tread by the time he was 30. But his precocious talent was overshadowed by his repressed homosexuality. 

“He never had sex until he was 38, although he never had doubts — even from a very young age — that he was gay,” said Wendy Moffat, associate professor of English at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania.

Moffat has gained access to Forster’s previously unseen papers for a new biography. The documents include the “sex diary” at King’s College, Cambridge, where the author kept a room from 1946 until his death. Forster’s papers, including his “sex diary”, which had been locked away at his former lodgings at Cambridge University, indicate his creative drive was curbed after he lost his virginity to a wounded soldier on an Egyptian beach when he was 38 and met his long-term lover — a married policeman — several years later.

The author felt he could not continue to write about the heterosexual, English middle-class themes with which he had made his name.

“I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more, but sex prevented the latter,” Forster wrote.

After having sex for the first time while working with the Red Cross in Egypt towards the end of the first world war, Forster wrote in his diary about “losing R”, or respectability. Yet he had written his only gay novel, Maurice, about two young men at Cambridge and a gamekeeper, some years earlier in the early 1910s. The book was not published until 18 months after Forster’s death, however.

“Writing such a novel was a testament to Morgan’s extraordinary imagination,” said Moffat, whose biography will be published by Bloomsbury on June 14.