On beauty

Musical man

Concerning E.M. Forster. By Frank Kermode. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 180 pages; $24. Weidenfeld & Nicolson; £14.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster. By Wendy Moffat. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 416 pages; $32.50. To be published in Britain by Bloomsbury in June as “E.M. Forster: A New Life”; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

THE works of Edward Morgan Forster have become popularly associated with the lush cinematography of Merchant Ivory—and Helena Bonham Carter in a corset. Two new books about him may send readers back to the original novels with renewed zest. The first is a critical appreciation by Sir Frank Kermode, who, at 90, is one of the grand old men of British literary scholarship. The second, by Wendy Moffat, digs to the root of Forster's private self.

When asked to give the Clark Lectures at Cambridge University in 2007, Sir Frank chose Forster as his subject. Forster himself had delivered the Clark Lectures in 1927 on “Aspects of the Novel”. By then he was no longer a publishing novelist, despite the success he had enjoyed with “A Room with a View”, “Howards End” and his final masterpiece, “A Passage to India”, which came out in 1924. Forster would live on until 1970, a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, publishing essays and criticism. But as a novelist he was silent.

Towards the end of his life, Forster explained in his unpublished diary why he had given up on the novel: “I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more, but sex has prevented the latter…how annoyed I am with Society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal.” Forster was never going to be a reckless homosexual like Oscar Wilde. Until the first world war, and an encounter at the age of 38 with a soldier on a beach near Alexandria, he was painfully virginal. He eventually found happiness in a ménage à trois with a married policeman and his wife. But he was never drawn to bohemianism either in sex or in art.

Unlike others of his generation, who broke the mould of literary form by experimenting with modernism, Forster's genius was quieter. Both as a writer and as a moralist, he regarded the exploration of abstract forms and ideas as dubious, valuing messy humanity instead. A belief in compromise, tolerance and kindness underpinned his liberalism. Some regarded this as woolly thinking—a famous Cambridge critic, F.R. Leavis, believed his Clark Lectures were characterised by “intellectual nullity”. But the Forster in both these books comes across as covertly sophisticated. If his novels have not got the self-conscious “art” of Henry James, it is because Forster wished to connect with the vagaries of human experience rather than to create a separate aesthetic universe.

He was not, however, anti-art. Sir Frank expounds on the importance of music in Forster's work, including the use of literary leitmotifs that run through his novels like musical themes. Forster loved Richard Wagner and felt an affinity with Marcel Proust, a writer for whom musical phrasing was a paradigm both for art and for life. He wrote the libretto for “Billy Budd” by Benjamin Britten, a British composer who called him “our most musical novelist”.

Would Forster's imagination have been liberated if he had been able to write openly about homosexuality? Sir Frank is not convinced by “Maurice”, his one novel about same-sex love, which was published only after his death. Its central relationship, between an upper-middle-class man and his working-class lover, has been described as sentimental, its happy ending dismissed as wish-fulfilment. Although it does not achieve the depth of “A Passage to India”—a book that was inspired, at a tangent, by Forster's intense, romantic friendship with a Western-educated, upper-class Indian, Syed Ross Masood—Ms Moffat, nevertheless, makes a persuasive case for its significance.

Sir Frank is affectionate, but not uncritical. He finds unpleasant snobbery, for example, in Forster's treatment of Leonard Bast, the pathetic clerk with literary aspirations in “Howards End”. Forster was, perhaps, more compassionate in life than he was in art. The man who emerges from Ms Moffat's biography is ineffably human.