Volume 32, Number 13 · August 15, 1985
Only Disconnect
By John Bayley
Selected Letters of E.M. Forster Vol. II, 1921–1970
edited by Mary Lago, edited by P.N. Furbank
Harvard University Press (Belknap Press), 365 pp., $20.00
When Lionel Trilling wrote a short book of criticism about Forster's novels—one of the earliest and best—he did not know about Forster's homosexuality. The novelist in any case was still alive and so the subject could not have been mentioned. Our sexual climate has changed so quickly that it seems odd to remember this. The thing was taken for granted, of course, in his circle and in these letters to his friends, and mentioned no more frequently than sex itself would have been at a slightly earlier date. (As Philip Larkin puts it in a poem, 'Sexual intercourse began / In 1963.') A year or two earlier than that, I happened to mention the subject without thinking, in a piece on Forster's novels, and was instantly sent a very sharp missive by the great man, requiring me never to do so again.
Review, 2254 words
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