E. M. Forster: Brief Lives.

Freeman, Chris

by Richard Canning

Hesperus Press. 120 pages, $11.50

As Andrew Holleran said in these pages a couple of issues ago in a review of two new E. M. Forster books, "all biographies are selective." So, what has Richard Canning, the very able British queer theorist and literary critic, selected in his highly readable biography? He does a good job of covering what we know already from the definitive two-volume P. N. Furbank biography, E. M. Forster: A Life (1977-78). But there is new information here, such as previously unpublished letters and years of BBC radio addresses. We learn that Forster was an unhappy student, at least until his university years. An important realization occurred to him during his years at Cambridge, where "they taught the perky boy that he was not everything, and the limp boy that he might be something." A limp boy himself, Forster was, of course, interested in perky boys, foreign and working-class when possible. He spent many years imagining what love and sex were like; he wrote the sex scenes in his gay novel Maurice (written around 1913; published posthumously, by Forster's friend Christopher Isherwood, in 1971) before he'd ever had sex. (He revised the scenes afterward.) Canning observes that "Forster traveled without ceasing." His chapter "England, Alexandria and Beyond--1913-24" is the best part of the book, filling in the back story of Maurice and the maturation of Forster as a man and a writer. The less persuasive material concerns Isherwood; Canning is too rushed and devotes too little time and space to the complexities of that significant friendship. E. M. Forster: Brief Lives is a good start for someone interested in a great writer. If it leaves you yearning for more, you can find it in Frank Kermode's Concerning E. M. Forster and Wendy Moffat's new, homocentric biography, A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster.