Developing the Heart: E.M. Forster and India

By Nigel Collett

Both a refection on India's history and a biographical retelling of Forster'stravels there in the early 1900s, this book delves into the past to better understand the impact certain events and people had on his writing, allowing readers to watch as Forster matures over time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: City University of Hong Kong Press
• Release date: Apr 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9789629376390

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To Martin Sheppard, who inspired me to write this story

They go forth […] with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds, and undeveloped hearts. And it is this undeveloped heart that is largely responsible for the difficulties of Englishmen abroad. An undeveloped heart — not a cold one.

– E.M. Forster, Abinger Harvest

(London: Edward Arnold, 1946), p. 5.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

Although Edward Morgan Forster lived to the age of ninety-one, he had within the first half of his life both established and abandoned a position as one of the great novelists of the English language. After A Passage to India was published in 1924, he wrote no more novels. Yet, the reviews, articles, broadcasts, and short stories that he continued to publish until the 1960s are proof that this was not because his muse deserted him. Instead, it is clear that something prevented Forster from writing another novel, and, at least since the publication of P.N. Furbank’s official biography of the writer in 1977,¹ it has been generally accepted that this was because he could no longer reconcile writing stories about heterosexual characters with his own homosexual orientation. It is also now generally accepted that Forster’s sexual awakening came about due to the love, sex, and friendship that he found in Indians and their country. It is Forster’s Indian relationships that are the subject of this book.

India fulfilled Forster and gained him a maturity he had not hitherto found in England. In 1906, when India brought to England (and then to Forster) the young Syed Ross Masood, Forster had his first real experience of falling in love. Masood was the first man to whom he ever declared himself, and when Masood went home to India, Forster followed him there in 1912. It was in India, at the age of thirty-three, that Forster came face to face with the realities of sex. The libido then awakened in him, until then almost dormant, could never subsequently be put to rest. Later, during his second visit to India in 1922, he experienced what was probably the only promiscuous, gratuitous sex of his life. What Forster found in India drove him to seek explanations for, and solutions to, what he saw as the problem of his homosexuality.

Through love and sex, as is often the case for homosexual men, Forster also found friendship. By the time he reached India, he already held strong views about the value of friendship, but these were expanded and moulded by what he came to see as the Indian way of friendship, as well as by the relationships he formed with a very large number of Indian men. Forster’s Indian friendships gave flesh to his liberal beliefs and informed his view that loyalty to a friend transcended any loyalty to crown, state, or nation. The Indian friends he made were transgressive in all ways: they were, at least until 1947, when independence levelled the field, subjects of the Empire, the ruling class of which Forster was a member; they were of races and colours discriminated against and despised by many of his countrymen; and they were of faiths, Islam and Hinduism, considered barbarous by his Christian co-religionists. His Indian friends were his beliefs made concrete, and they were vastly important to him.

Forster revealed just how much importance he placed in friendship in his essay What I Believe, penned in 1939 in the darkening days of war. He wrote: Where do I start? With personal relationships. Here is something comparatively solid in a world full of violence and cruelty.² He went on, famously:

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life […] I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country […] Love and loyalty to an individual can run counter to the claims of the State. When they do — down with the State, say I.

It would be false to claim that it was only India that had given him this belief, for it was a view of the world that he had imbibed initially during his time at King’s College, Cambridge. In 1924, he wrote to his friend Malcolm Darling to express this: King’s stands for personal relationships, and these still seem to me to be the most real things on the surface of the earth.³ It would not be false to claim, however, that it was India that opened his heart to friendships with men of all races, classes, and religions. India drew him into ever-widening circles and enveloped him in a warmth of friendship that he did not find easily at home.

The East, Forster came to see, had a different approach to friendship. Indians in particular, he thought, held it in greater regard than did Englishmen. He put it this way in 1921 in his article, Salute to the Orient!: So if we say of the Oriental, firstly that personal relationship is most important to him, secondly, that it has no transcendental sanction, we shall come near to a generalization as is safe.⁴ The friends Forster made in India remained close to his heart, and he did not cease to make friends with Indians until his very last years.

Love for Indians brought Forster a deep love of their culture and country. In this, he was again transgressing, not perhaps as much as in his sexual affairs or in his social contacts, but more publicly, for he made no bones about his appreciation of Indian culture. His contemporaries disagreed. Most Englishmen were largely ignorant of anything Indian and regarded the little they knew as indecent or barbaric. Forster developed a deep understanding of Indian art, sculpture, and architecture, and wrote and broadcast about them for much of his life.

Love, sex, friendship, and affection for the country that had made them all possible, form the substance of his last novel, A Passage to India. This was, for its time, and like his Indian relationships, a novel of transgression. Under the guise of an analysis of the failings of the British Raj and of a young woman’s search for self-awareness, the novel is, at least in part, the story of a love affair between two men, an Indian and an Englishman. In that sense, it is the story of Forster’s own predicament.

The accounts that we have of Forster’s life begin in 1977 with P.N. Furbank’s magisterial official biography, E.M Forster: A Life.⁵ They include Nicola Beaumont’s sympathetic portrait, Morgan, in 1993,⁶ and, at time of writing, have concluded with Wendy Moffat’s penetrating E.M. Forster: A New Life.⁷ Others, including J.R. Ackerley, Francis King, and Mary Lago, have written shorter studies.⁸ These biographies are unlikely to be superseded in giving a full account of his life. Yet, whilst the story of Forster’s love affair with India has been recounted before in outline, particularly in respect of his unrequited love for Syed Ross Masood and his first two sojourns in the sub-continent, the full details of how India affected his life and became fast woven into its texture have not yet been revealed. This book sets out to do this.

As a result, this book is, in effect, a partial biography, one that aims to add something that has so far been lacking in the published accounts of his life, and I make no attempt here to provide an overall account of Forster’s life nor of all the major figures in it. For instance, two of Forster’s three great loves, Mohammed el Adl and Bob Buckingham, appear in these pages only where their part in the story touches upon Forster’s experience of India. Moreover, in this partial account of Forster’s life, and as in all lives, his Indian experiences at times take greater prominence and at others fall into a minor key. Forster was not as involved with India or Indians to the same degree at every stage in his life. So in this account, there is inevitably some change of pace, perhaps even an apparent imbalance in the recounting. I make no apology for this; lives are not lived in a linear fashion.

Nor do I make any claim that this account is a work of literary criticism that seeks to assess Forster as a writer, nor is it a work of postcolonial or queer scholarship. Where I do comment on Forster’s writing, particularly in my chapter on A Passage to India, I do so merely to indicate how Forster’s love affair with India and Indians is reflected in his work. The trajectory of Forster’s Indian experiences and the nature of the relationships he formed with Indians fit him neatly, of course, into the trope of the middle-class European travelling the Empire, to seek release or exotic fulfilment with colonial subjects, something that the publication of Ronald Hyam’s Empire and Sexuality in 1991 and Robert Aldrich’s Colonialism and Homosexuality in 1993 has made somewhat commonplace.⁹ Forster was far from typical in this respect, however, for his sexual desires included the wish to be dominated rather than to dominate. He first fell in love with an Indian man far stronger and markedly more handsome than himself, one seemingly possessed of all the masculine attributes that Forster feared he lacked. He went out to the Empire not to indulge in passions forbidden to him at home, but to follow a man with whom he had vainly fallen in love in England. The sexual scales did, though, fall from his eyes in the Orient, so in this he could with truth be said to be an example of those whom Edward Said, and scholars who have followed him, have described.¹⁰ There is much more, of course, to Forster’s story than that.

Forster’s literary works have given rise to a vast critical literature, much of it with relevance to the motivation for, and the meaning of, his writing. Most of this now agrees that what prevented Forster from penning any more novels after A Passage to India was his realisation that he could no longer bring himself to disguise the way he really saw the world, or the views and emotions that flowed from that, in novels with a heterosexual theme. No other kinds of novel, of course, were permissible in his day. He hinted clearly at this in his private notes — for instance stating that he despised the way the novelist Henry James, himself a repressed homosexual, had warped his writing to disguise his sexual orientation. He said as much in a letter to Siegfried Sassoon in 1923, writing that I shall never write another novel after it — my patience with ordinary people has given out, the word ordinary here seemingly a euphemism for heterosexual.¹¹ Forster was not satisfied with what the need to dissemble had done to his creative powers and felt it was unsurprising that his novels about heterosexual life had turned out queer, as he perhaps ironically put it. After A Passage to India, he could bring himself to write no more novels.

What originally began as an inclination grew into a firm resolution as his sexual and emotional experiences at last began to fulfil the second half of his life, a period when, at a very late stage, he at last found love. What caused his life to develop in this way, and what made it impossible for him to continue to dissemble in print, were the experiences that flowed from his exposure to Indians and to India itself. The writing of A Passage to India represented the closure of the door on this process. In it, he worked out his love for the Indian with whom he had fallen in love eighteen years before. The same-sex love story which the novel shallowly but effectively concealed from his contemporaries was, in those repressed times, as far as he was able to go to express his true feelings. After that, there could be no further revelations of his self.

This interpretation of A Passage to India as a discreet novel of samesex love is not, of course, either an original or unique reading of the text. D.H. Lawrence had spotted the novel’s homoerotic theme on the publication of the novel in 1924, and he roundly criticised Forster for hingeing your book on a very unsatisfactory friendship between two men!¹² After that, recognition of what Forster was up to in the novel seems to have gone to ground for another seventy or so years, with criticism of the novel focusing on its other major aspects: the political and social failings of the Raj; the application of Forster’s liberal consciousness to the situation in India; the spirituality of Indian civilisation set against the materialism of the West; the impossibility for a western mind of ever grasping the reality of the Orient and in particular Hinduism; the yearning of the human soul to connect with its fellows; and so on. In the 1990s, however, a small number of commentators started to focus on the relationship between the novel’s two male protagonists, the English schoolmaster Fielding and the Indian doctor Aziz, as the key element in the story, even, perhaps, its concealed real purpose.

This began in 1996, when Parminder Kaur Bakshi, in his Distant Desire: Homoerotic Codes and the Subversion of the English Novel in E.M. Forster’s Fiction, argued that homoerotic love rather than political critique formed the major theme of A Passage to India.¹³ In the same year, the feminist writer Teresa Hubel proved to be of similar mind. In her Whose India? The Independence Struggle in British and Indian Fiction and History, she attacked Forster for his treatment of his female characters, whom she regarded as ciphers, saying that in this novel homoeroticism erodes any influence the female principle or the female characters might have and going on to say that Forster saw women as part of the "enemy camp […]. A Passage to India is a novel principally about men […] a narrative in which it is almost impossible to discern any perspective but a western perspective or any gender but the masculine gender."¹⁴

Some queer scholars accept these views. In E.M. Forster: Passion and Prose, Arthur Martland says much the same from the gay male perspective.¹⁵ Martland expands upon the clues found in the novel by extracting elements which Forster deleted from his earlier drafts, such as lines that included queer things coming out about Aziz’s reputation and Aziz playing a queer game. His research discovered that Forster initially gave Fielding a history of close friendships in England where he had friends of his own type, including a partnership with a soldier, with whom he had served in the armed forces and had set up house with on the edge of Dartmoor to receive backward youths. Martland also points out that the poets quoted by Aziz wrote poems containing images of adolescent boys, cupbearers, and symbols of divine love. In 2006, Antony Copley, in Gay Writers in Search of the Divine, his penetrating study of the link between Forster’s sexuality and his spirituality, mentions D.H. Lawrence’s comment, quoted above, about A Passage to India, but does not dwell on the idea.¹⁶ In the entry on Forster in the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture, John Forde focuses on what he calls the suggestively homoerotic relationship between two men.¹⁷

However, this view is still not that of the mainstream, either among scholars of literature or of queer theory. It is not one that has been profered by any of Forster’s major biographers, although Wendy Moffat hints that she recognises it in her Prologue, where she talks of Forster’s later homosexual stories as a darker, sexier iteration of the unrealized friendship between Dr. Aziz and Mr. Fielding.¹⁸

Major writers of gay history and queer theory completely pass by this way of reading the novel.¹⁹ Rodger Austen’s Playing the Game in 1977 only mentions Maurice and characterises Forster’s other novels as being merely set out to titillate.²⁰ In Homosexuality and Literature 1890–1930, also published in 1977, Jeffrey Meyers comments that the relationship between Aziz and Fielding in A Passage to India suggests an intimacy that is never developed in the novel but later denies that Forster ever wrote about homosexual love in a heterosexual guise.²¹ Ian Young’s bibliography of The Male Homosexual in Literature, published in 1982, does not list A Passage to India among Forster’s queer works.²² This theme is also ignored in Wayne R. Dynes’s Encyclopedia of Homosexuality in 1990.²³ Similarly, Maurice figures into Patrick Higgins’s A Queer Reader (1993) as well as in Robert Drake’s The Gay Canon (1998), but A Passage to India does not.²⁴ The book is also not mentioned in A History of Gay Literature, published in 1998 by Gregory Woods.²⁵ Oliver S. Buckton’s Secret Selves (1998) picks up the reference to Walt Whitman’s poem in the title of A Passage to India but takes this no further.²⁶ Furthermore, neither Who’s Who in Gay & Lesbian History From Antiquity to World War II, published in 2001 by Robert Aldridge and Garry Wotherspoon, nor the companion volume Who’s Who in Lesbian & Gay Writing, published in 2002 by Gabriele Griffin, mentions the idea.²⁷ The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day, edited by Byrne Fone in 1998, makes no mention of the theme.²⁸ Tom Ambrose, in his 2010 study Heroes and Exiles: Gay Icons through the Ages, misses the point by suggesting that protagonist Adele Quested’s attraction in the novel to Dr. Aziz, the Indian character, a strictly taboo relationship for a British memsahib, echoes Forster’s own repressed desire for Masood.²⁹ His book focuses only on Maurice as a gay work of fiction.³⁰ Yet the interpretation that Forster imbued A Passage to India with his love for both India and Indians, and that the latter love included a samesex attraction that he had to disguise, is, I believe, correct, and it is the interpretation offered in this book.

The ending of A Passage to India is a cry of despair, but it does not reflect the very real success of Forster’s relationships with Indians and India. Both continued in the decades that followed the publication of his last novel, both continued to shape his mind and alter the course of his life. His Indian relationships held him fast until the end. This book tells the story of how those relationships developed Forster’s heart.

Nigel Collett

Malmesbury, London, and Hong Kong

December 2021

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe a very large debt of gratitude to my first publisher, Martin Sheppard, proprietor of the firm of Hambledon and London, who suggested to me in 2005 that I might like to write this book. I did not manage to do so before he sold his company and retired, but after he had, he continued to encourage me and help me with drafts of this book, and I am most grateful that he has allowed me to dedicate it to him.

I have made continual use of the three major biographies of E.M. Forster which have preceded this book, and would like here to record my thanks and acknowledge my debt to P.N. Furbank, the author of Forster’s two volume official biography, to Nicola Beaumont, and to Wendy Moffat. It is my hope that this present work will supplement their accounts of Forster’s life and shed new light on what they have written about his relationship with India. I have also relied heavily on, and have pleasure in acknowledging my indebtedness to, the work of Mary Lago and her collaborators, principally P.N. Furbank, in collecting and publishing selected letters from E.M. Forster’s correspondence and extracts from his BBC broadcasts, without which a full account of his connections with India would not have been possible.

Writing this story has been made an immense pleasure by the kindness of those who helped this research. Principal among them was the staff of the library of King’s College, Cambridge, where I spent a very happy two weeks reading Morgan Forster’s papers. I thank them for their kindness and hospitality. I also thank the staff of the British Library, the Public Record Office at Kew, and the Indian National Archives in New Delhi for their patience in handling my requests and for their guidance. Whilst in New Delhi, I stayed for some days in the very splendid Imperial Hotel and wish to thank the management and staff for making my stay such a happy one and for giving me every assistance a writer might need to write in regal peace and comfort. The staff of the British High Commission in New Delhi were most helpful in acquiring the necessary documentation for me to study in New Delhi, as was Squadron Leader Rana Chhina of the United Services Institution of India, and I thank both warmly.

Whilst in India in 2011, I had the honour of meeting Emeritus Professor Jayant Vishnu Narlikar, who hosted my stay at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, his post-doctoral physics research establishment in Pune, and who gave me an interview about Forster’s last days. I thank him warmly for that and for allowing me to publish his photograph of Morgan Forster with his family in Cambridge. I also thank him for his introduction to the surviving family of Bapu Sahib’s second wife, the Bai Saheba, one of whom, Mr Potekar, received me in Dewas, toured me around the town, and gave me the immense pleasure of taking me to see the Bai Saheba’s daughter, Ms Pudmawatai Baba Puar, who was the baby whose birth celebrations Forster records in The Hill of Devi and who was still a lively eighty-nine when I met her. I thank the Bai Saheba’s family for so warmly taking me in and looking after me so royally.

In New Delhi, I spent a pleasant few hours with the historian Professor Vishnu Nath Datta, who had, for The Butcher of Amritsar, my earlier book on Brigadier Dyer, guided me through many of the mazes involved in telling the story of the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and I am very grateful to him for relating to me the story of his friendship with Forster. I thank him and his daughter, Nonica, also a historian, for their hospitality when I visited their home. I had the honour of an interview with the Honourable Kunwar Natwar Singh, PB, IFS, who gave me lunch in the Imperial Hotel and told me of his long relationship with E.M. Forster.

I acknowledge the authority of the Crown to quote from papers in the Public Record Office. I owe particular thanks to Ms Sarah Baxter, Contracts Adviser and Literary Estates for the Society of Authors, the authority, along with King’s College, which granted permissions from the Forster Estate. I specifically acknowledge the Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge, and the Society of Authors as the E.M. Forster Estate for granting me permission under Licence No: 20/7048 to quote from Forster’s unpublished documents in the Archive Centre, King’s College, Cambridge, and from the following published works:

A Passage to India

Abinger Harvest

Commonplace Book

Howards End

Maurice

Only Connect: Letters to Indian Friends by E.M. Forster (edited by Syed Hamid Husain)

Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, Volume One 1879–1920 (edited by Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank)

Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, Volume Two 1921–1970 (edited by Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank)

The BBC talks of E.M. Forster 1929–1960 (edited by Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes, and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls)

The Creator as Critic and Other Writings

The Eternal Moment and Other Stories

The Hill of Devi

The Other Boat, The Life to Come and Other Stories

The Prince’s Tale and Other Uncollected Writings

Two Cheers for Democracy

I also thank Dunurn Press of Toronto for permission to quote from their edition of The Creator as Critic and Other Writings, edited by Jeffrey M. Heath. Extracts from three books by Kunwar Natwar Singh (E.M. Forster: A Tribute; Profiles and Letters; and Heart to Heart) are reproduced here with permission of Rupa Publications India (also the South Asia publisher of my The Butcher of Amritsar), to whom I give my warm thanks.

I am grateful to Messrs W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., for permission to quote in the United States of America from E.M. Forster’s Maurice and The Other Boat, The Life to Come and Other Stories. I thank the Syndics of Cambridge University Library for permission to quote from the papers of Professor Vishwa Nath Datta.

I reserve my last thanks for my editor, Dr Abby Manthey of City University of Hong Kong Press, whose persistent and careful shepherding of the text and its progress through all the phases of publication has finally brought this work to life.

In the story that follows, the mistakes are, of course, my own.

NOTE ON SPELLING AND TERMINOLOGY

The spelling of Indian words and names in quotations has been left unamended. Place names are given as they were in Forster’s day. There has been no attempt at standardisation.

Forster’s style and the freedom he allowed himself at times in his use of English was peculiar to himself. In his private writing, particularly in his diaries, he used abbreviations and did not take pains to adhere to grammatical rules. No attempt has been made in this book to alter Forster’s words in the quoted passages, and, as repeated correction would be tedious to the reader, no use of sic has been made to indicate that the words in quotations are actually his. Every effort has been made to reproduce Forster’s words as he wrote them.

Those writing about same-sex love in ages before gay liberation habitually come face to face with the difficulty of describing that love in a way that is appropriate to the times lived by the characters of their story. E.M. Forster discussed his sexual orientation with few in his lifetime and cannot be said to have come out in any modern sense. Nor could he be described as living in any way a gay life. Whilst the word gay was certainly known and used before Forster’s day, there is no record that he used it about himself or others. Queer was, on the other hand, a word used by Forster, though its pejorative aspect was what he would have had in mind when he used it, and he did not use it about himself in his writings. Inversion was certainly a word used in Forster’s day, for instance by Edward Carpenter, but its connotations of a difference between the genders within and without would not have attracted Forster, who never indicated that he had internal feelings of femininity or that he wished to wear clothing of the opposite gender. Walt Whitman’s adhesiveness never seems to have stuck in England. Homosexuality was a word used by Forster in his relations to Kanaya, and homosexual was the word attached to the law reform which Forster sought to aid late in life in his private counsel to Lord Wolfenden. Homosexual was also the word used by Forster’s companion, Goldsworthy Dickinson, to describe the Maharaja of Chhatarpur. It was the word used by Forster’s friend J.R. Ackerley throughout his account of his own life, and also by W.H. Auden when writing the introduction to that account.¹ So, by default, despite the fact that fashion has nowadays changed, I use the terms homosexuality and homosexual as these seem the most appropriate for this work.

ABBREVIATIONS

GLOSSARY

LIST OF PEOPLE

The following list provides details about some of the major and reappearing characters in this book and in Forster’s life.

PART ONE

ONE

Masood

Edward Morgan Forster was born in 1879, the only surviving child of an English architect, Edward Forster, who died in the year of his son’s birth and left his wife, Alice Clara (known in the family as Lily), to bring him up. His childhood was spent at home, cosseted by his mother and by his elderly female relatives. Unsurprisingly, he developed into a prim and quietly conventional youth who found difficulty in mixing with others. He was neither robust nor brave. Stress could reduce him to floods of tears. At school he was bullied, causing him to withdraw into himself and inculcating the quiet reserve for which he was to be noted throughout his life. ¹

Pupils at English public (fee-paying) schools are inevitably exposed to some experience of homosexual practices, but it was not until 1897, when he went up to King’s College, Cambridge, that there is any indication that Forster felt affection for anyone of his own sex. King’s was quietly known for allowing its homosexual students a greater degree of freedom than was common elsewhere at the time. It housed a semisecret discussion society, the Apostles, whose members carefully picked new entrants using criteria that included both their intellectual and physical talents. Forster was made an Apostle in 1901 and found in the society many hugely talented fellows who were homosexual or bisexual, including Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, and Lytton Strachey.² Apostles felt free to be camp, flirtatious, and promiscuously sexual, and the bolder among them were very open about their orientation and the affairs of their hearts.

This milieu opened Forster’s eyes, but as he could never be numbered among the bold in either his College or society at large, he did not experience love, either emotional or physical, in his time at Cambridge, and he was not, at this stage of his life, fully conscious that his sexual orientation was immutably and uniquely homosexual. That realisation would come later. Despite his reticence, his character made him friends among the Apostles, who had liked him for his intelligence and liberal views. He was certainly not one of those elected for any ease upon the eye — he was a plain, awkward-looking youth who would develop into an even plainer adult, and for most of his life, he would fret about what he considered his ugliness.

His closest friend among the Apostles was Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, called Goldie by Forster and other close friends, who was a King’s College don (a Fellow of the College) of a generation older than Forster’s.³ Dickinson was also homosexual, but he remained anguished and very discreet about it for the whole of his life. By the time Forster first met him, he had found the courage to publish a book titled The Greek View of Life, which was for many British youths the only guide available to anything like their own predicament until some time after the Second World War.⁴ However, Dickinson embargoed his autobiography, in which he frankly discussed his sexual orientation, for publication for forty years after his death.⁵

After going down from Cambridge, Forster remained in touch with his closest friend at King’s, Hugh Meredith, whose sexual orientation seems never to have been made explicit to others or even clear to himself, a confusion that resulted in those close to him finding his teasing frustrating.⁶ He was perhaps bisexual, and indeed he was to marry later. A handsome man, he was much desired by many male students of his generation, with some of whom he indulged in platonic relationships which tended to end in the discomfort of both parties. Forster thought Meredith very beautiful.⁷ Around the Christmas of 1902, their friendship developed into an affair that progressed as far as occasional cuddling and chaste kisses, but Meredith had a nervous breakdown in the following year and the romance, such as it was, petered out by 1904.⁸ For Forster, the affair marked a watershed; he could no longer avoid understanding his own nature. By now, he was twenty-three and had come to the unavoidable conclusion that he desired only men. This was an agonising self-revelation so secret that he confided it in his diary only by the merest hint some two years later.⁹

Apart from teaching at the Working Men’s College at Great Ormond Street in London, Forster was adrift after leaving Cambridge, unsure about what he wanted to do with his life. His temperament, intellect, and interests, coupled with the fact that his family had sufficient funds to make salaried employment unnecessary for him, best fitted him for the life of a man of letters.¹⁰ He turned to writing fiction and did so with success. After he had tried his hand at some short stories, his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread,¹¹ was published to good reviews in October 1905, and he then set to work on a second novel, the semi-autobiographical The Longest Journey.¹²

This should all have been exciting, but it did not strike Forster in quite that way, and he fretted that he had settled into what he feared was a middle-class rut.¹³ He and his mother were by now living a suburban life in Weybridge, then a small Surrey village being developed into a commuter town close to the banks of the River Thames, and his society there consisted mostly of women. His mother was his conduit to what there was of Weybridge society, and she had made friends with some of those living in the neighbourhood, including, in 1906, when they returned from India, Theodore and Margaret Morison. This was a rather grander couple than many of their neighbours. Theodore Morison had enjoyed a distinguished educational career that included membership in the Viceroy of India’s Administrative Council and culminated in membership in the Council of India, the Whitehall body that advised the Secretary of State for India.¹⁴ India had brought him