E. M. Forster: A life - Softcover

Furbank, Philip Nicholas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192812637 ISBN 13: 9780192812636

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1979

Synopsis

P. N. Furbank has fashioned a major biography of E. M. Forster, the renowned author of A PASSAGE TO INDIA, ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL, and other notable books of this century, drawing for the first time on Forster's diaries, personal correspondence, and other sources to produce an intimate portrait of a gently imposing figure in public glare and, until now, in private shadow.E. M. Forster's death in 1970 signaled the undertaking of two of his final the publication of his self-suppressed, homosexual novel, MAURICE, and the release of all of his papers to P. N. Furbank for the purpose of writing a full biography without reservation or limited disclosure.Furbank has divided this work into two chronological sections. The first part, "The Growth of the Novelist, 1879-1914," covers the first thirty-four years of Forster's life and details his childhood surrounded by doting female relatives (his father had died); his unhappiness at public school and his pleasure at Cambridge; his travels to Italy and Greece, where his serious writing began; his early novels and the startling success of HOWARD'S END that launched him toward fame; his early awareness of his homosexuality; his writing of MAURICE, based on longing rather than reality; and, in 1914, the emerging threat of war.The second part, "Polycrates' Ring, 1914-1970," carries Forster from age 34 to his death at 91; takes him from Alexandria and service with the Red Cross during World War I; to his first abrupt sexual encounter and a more enduring relationship with a young Egyptian; and to his embarking on a HISTORY AND A GUIDE to Alexandria. A year or two after the war he went to India as secretary to a maharajah, and on his return completed A PASSAGE TO INDIA, begun and set aside before the war, and won great acclaim and undoubted fame.Forster's sexual and social "emancipation", through the help of J. R. Ackerley and other younger friends in England, followed, as did his emergence as an active public figure -- polemicist, broadcaster, and President of the National Council for Civil Liberties. In his happy old age at Cambridge, he produced three books, an opera libretto, and a remarkable short story.Furbank's restrained objectivity and meticulous honesty have created a world that no longer exists. Forster is at last clearly seen as a whole -- complex, understandable, yet with an aura of mystery that, despite full revelation, defies total comprehension. At the end, he was very human -- and very touching.

About this title

About the Author

P. N. FURBANK is Professor Emeritus at the Open University.

Review

In 1933, with all his novels written but nearly 40 years of life ahead, E. M. Forster mused on his future biography: "I should want everything told, everything, and there's so far so little." P. N. Furbank, a friend of Forster in his eighties, has indeed told everything, sharply but sympathetically, and there is enormous sadness and strangeness in the "so little" that there is to tell. Coddled, fatherless child in an all - female Victorian household, Morgan grew up to be the "freakish and demure" ineffectual stereotype, but wrote a handful of surprisingly vigorous and influential novels that brought him fame - fame that increased with "every book he didn't write." Terribly timid and thoroughly homosexual, he lived an idle "life of mild human contacts and awakened imagination": some travel, some speechmaking and conference-sitting, less and less writing, many intense friendships, a few brief love affairs (an Egyptian bus conductor, a palace barber in India, a sailor), but a sex life lived mostly in fantasies, some of them written into unpublishable "indecencies" and the posthumous Maurice. Though Furbank remains admirably restrained and non-sensationalizing, Forster's preoccupation with his thwarted sexuality - in letters, diaries, and conversation - becomes the dark major chord. "However gross my desires, I find I shall never satisfy them for fear of annoying others. . . . If I could get one solid night it would be something." A literary lion, a social mouse; the contrast is both pathetic and funny, and Furbank quietly allows both sides to emerge - in Forster's hopeless weekends with impatient D. H. Lawrence ("Why can't he [Forster] take a woman and fight clean to his own basic, primal being?"), in his passive drift from the lost family manse to rooms at Cambridge or friends' homes ("I see my furniture everywhere, my home nowhere"), in his decades of buddyship - confessing his passion only near the end - with a married policeman. This is not a biography-with-criticism, and Furbank steers clear of the books except for obvious parallels with the life and descriptions of unpublished work. It therefore hasn't the impact of an Edel or Bate life-and-works. But it is hard to imagine a fairer, shrewder, more gracefully compassionate evocation of such a long, pinched, intensely inactive life. (Kirkus Reviews)

Thanks to the success of the recent film version of his Howards End, Forster is experiencing a resurgence of popularity. Furbank's 1978 two-volume portrait, which is here combined into one, is generally considered the definitive biography. As LJ's reviewer stated, Furbank's "chief virtue as a biographer lies in his thoroughness, clarity, and attention to detail" (LJ 9/15/78).
(Library Journal)

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1979
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0192812637
• ISBN 13: 9780192812636
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 648