A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster Read Online Free PDF Page A

painstakingly revising and adding chapters. He commissioned two wondrously named lady typists—Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Snatchfold—to copy the contraband manuscript in pieces, to protect them from the novel’s secrets. He carefully kept track of each copy of the typescript, requesting that the chosen reader return it to a safely neutral location—usually the Reform Club. Late in old age, when he was almost eighty-five, Forster reflected on the cost of this lifetime of effort: “How
annoyed
I am with Society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal. The subterfuges, the self-consciousness that might have been avoided.”
    There was great hope in
Maurice
. But even in 1960, when he penned an author’s note to the novel, Morgan was unsentimental about its future. On the face of it, conditions for gay men looked to be improving in England at long last. Six years before, a government committee led by Sir John Wolfenden had begun to deliberate on whether to revise or repeal the laws against “homosexual offenses.” In 1957, the Wolfenden Report recommended measures to partially decriminalize consensual sex between adult men. But while he had hoped as a young man that “knowledge would bring understanding” about homosexuality, late in life Forster realized that the change in public attitudes in his long lifetime had merely shifted from “ignorance and terror to familiarity and contempt . . .” Clear-eyed and somewhat bitter, too, Morgan could not imagine a world as utopian as his novel, even in the distant future. He lamented that homosexuality “can only be legalised by Parliament, and Members of Parliament are obliged to think or appear to think. Consequently the Wolfenden recommendations will be indefinitely rejected, police prosecutions will continue, and Clive on the bench will continue to sentence Alec in the dock. Maurice may get off.”
    He was right that the legal changes came painfully slowly. In July 1967, when Morgan was eighty-eight, the Sexual Offenses Act was finally passed. Sex between men who desired each other, were alone in a house, and over twenty-one was legalized—provided that neither of the men was in the armed forces or the merchant navy. And, in a final fillip, the new law applied only to men living in England and Wales.
    Isherwood and Lehmann knew they were breaking a magic circle of private readership. Sharing the manuscript of
Maurice
had been a kind of covenant among Forster’s closest friends for decades. Now this secret would be open for everyone. Like Prospero breaking his staff at the end of
The Tempest
, Isherwood hoped to shatter the spell that had kept the silence about Forster’s homosexuality for so long.
    They knew they risked offending, even exposing, some of Forster’s surviving friends. But Isherwood also felt righteous, that his incautiousness was a badge of honor. He complained to Lehmann that Forster’s British literary executors were stymieing his work by giving him shoddy copies and quavering about giving permission to print Forster’s frank and reflective author’s note in the American edition. He made much of the contrast between his sincerity and what he perceived to be the stuffiness and reticence of Forster’s friends in England. For Isherwood, shepherding Forster’s gay fiction posthumouslyinto print was both a sacred trust and a political adventure. He believed that publication would give Forster a second life as a pioneer of gay writing. Publishing
Maurice
was part of his long campaign to celebrate sexual freedom and repudiate homophobia and hypocrisy.
    That Forster’s reputation as a giant of twentieth-century literature and the father of liberal humanism had accrued in part from decades of hiding his homosexuality was an irony not lost on Isherwood’s circle. They were only too happy to use this goodwill to legitimize what one friend called “a kind of pro-homosexual strategy.” The American writer Glenway Wescott—whose lover Monroe Wheeler