Only connect?

“Only connect”—that’s as much as many of us remember about E. M. Forster. (It’s true even for those like me, who read his novels in my twenties with real pleasure.) By itself, the phrase sounds trite and way too earnest, in the gag-producing vein of Richard Bach’s “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” In the context of Forster’s life and novels, though, “only connect” conveys grit, depth, and complexity. Here’s the full passage in Howards End: “Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.” It’s not a recommendation to connect with other human beings all the time—in fact, I suspect, Forster would suggest that we often have to disconnect from more superficial forms of contact—but about becoming a more whole, less fragmented person.

This past fall, I re-read Forster’s major novels with other adults in a Learning in Retirement class. Then this spring, my book-group read Passage to India together. Those reading-and-discussion experiences surprised me in several ways: by how much difference it made to learn that Forster was gay, by how powerfully he conveys the desire to connect in an authentic and truthful way, and by how brilliantly he illuminates the cultural, social, economic, and personal elements that thwart real connection. (In Howards End, he calls them the “gremlins” that always threaten order, warmth, and beauty.) Forster’s major novels turn out to be wonderful books to re-read and mull over in later life.

Between 1908 and 1924, Forster published three rich, brilliant novels: Room with a View. Howards End, and Passage to India. After that, he played the role of a public intellectual, providing modest, intelligent, often funny defenses of liberal humanism, especially individual liberty and intellectual freedom. (His trenchant essays “Two Cheers for Democracy” and “What I Believe” stood up to a recent re-reading.) He never published another novel.

(Here’s my favorite photo of Forster, looking happy and relaxed in Egypt, from N. Beauman’s biography)

It turns out, though, that Forster didn’t stop writing novels. He just didn’t feel he could publish them: what he wanted (or needed) to transform into fiction was his experience of what it was like to be gay and closeted in early-twentieth-century Britain—not a subject he felt able to treat publicly. By temperament, Forster was quiet and cautious, and though his friends knew he was attracted to men, his mother didn’t. (At least, she didn’t explicitly know, and he didn’t want to discuss it with her.) Besides, Oscar Wilde’s very public trial and imprisonment happened in Forster’s childhood, and the sodomy laws in the U.K. disappeared only towards the very end of his life.

Recent biographies of Forster discuss not only his slow, anxious attempts to act on his homosexual desires but also Maurice, the unpublished novel he wrote about growing up gay in his time—a novel that he wrote and then kept revising until close to his death. For the class I took through Learning in Retirement, we read it, and I was glad we did. Sadly, it’s earnest and clumsy–not a terrible novel, but with none of Forster’s usual lightness and little of his mean, funny satire. Yet I can see why he needed to write Maurice: he needed to imagine, as he admitted to friends, a gay love that didn’t end in tragedy. He had no incentive to publish the novel—he had money and fame already. What compelled him was creating a narrative that could sustain his hopes for his own life. (Happily, those hopes were realized, at least in part. In the latter years of his life, he had a long relationship with Bob Buckingham, a married—and probably bisexual—policeman. Over time, Buckingham, May (his wife), and Forster worked out an arrangement. In fact, Forster died with May holding his hand.

While reading Maurice was an interesting experience, I found re-reading the three major novels a delight. Room with a View is still romantic and full of compassion for ordinary people who find it hard to combat social expectations. Howards End and Passage to India are more: they’re powerful and moving. Their themes are ambitious (who owns beautiful things versus who should own them, the power of colonialism to destroy the possibility of human connection between the colonialist and the colonized). And if their plots get a trifle melodramatic, their prose is by turns funny, wise, and emotionally engaging. It’s true that Forster never figures out exactly how to reconcile his biting social satire with his serious themes. But even so, re-reading each of those novels was like eating a chocolate truffle—an intense, complex, savory experience, to be taken in small bites. No wonder they’ve all been turned into excellent films.

This time, it was Forster’s last novel, Passage to India, that moved me most. The portrait of the British in India still felt appropriately savage; the mystical edge of the novel still intrigued me; the initial plot of a young British woman coming to India to see whether she should marry a young colonial magistrate still felt insipid. But this time I could see that the real relationship in the novel is between Fielding, a liberal British teacher who stands in for Forster himself, and Doctor Aziz, a Muslim doctor accused of assault. The character of Doctor Aziz is based in part on a young Indian student, Syed Masood, who studied in England and with whom Forster fell impossibly in love. (I say “impossibly” because Masood was heterosexual.)

And that’s the relationship that gives us the haunting images of the novel’s final paragraphs. Aziz and Fielding have solved a misunderstanding between them, but the status of the British in India still looms over them. As the book ends, they are out riding, and Aziz is speaking.

     “We shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then”—[Aziz] rode against him furiously—“and then,” he concluded, half kissing him, “you and I shall be friends.”

     “Why can’t we be friends now?” said the other, holding him affectionately. “It’s what I want. It’s what you want.”

     But the horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House that came into view as they issued from the gap: they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, “No, not yet,” and the sky said, “No, not there.”

Politics doesn’t dissolve the affection between Fielding and Aziz. But there’s no social space for their friendship to play out in the world. And without that social space, their relationship can’t deepen or flourish. Acknowledging that harsh truth may have felt so terrible to Forster—as both a lover and a writer—that he simply had to stop writing novels for the public.

In some cases, it can spoil a book to know too much about the biography of an author. In Forster’s case, I found the contrary: the resonances of Forster’s life in his novels made the major novels richer, stronger, and more poignant. 

[FYI–the opening photo is of a monument to Forster near his childhood home in Hertfordshire. It was uploaded to Wikipedia by Aenenome Projectors.]