Barbara Rosecrance
FORSTER'S COMRADES
The news about Forster's sexual preference has been out for
some time, and revision of his reputation is conspicuously underway.
Not only the curious ambiguity of those sad young men, but the most
fundamental aspects of Forster's themes and style are now revealed, say
some recent critics, as the expressions of private predilections, private
fantasies. Thus, says Samuel Hynes, Forster made "out of self–
deprecation, transference, and evasion, a personal and functioning
style." Cynthia Ozick goes further, asking, "does it devalue the large
humanistic statement to know that its sources are narrowly personal?"
to which she responds without qualification, "yes." Clearly Ozick's
indictment extends beyond the declaration she is criticizing, Forster's
well-known statement that he hoped he would have the guts to betray
his country rather than his friend, .. friend " redefined by the posthu–
mous revelations of
Maurice
and of P.N. Furbank's excruciatingly
truthful biography. Ozick's comments imply a major devaluation of
what has been regarded as Forster's stock-in-trade, his liberal ideology
and eclectic humanism. Furthermore, if these principles are being
questioned by special definitions of the idea of humanism, then the
meaning of the fiction is bound
to
be reexamined. How are we now to
'.':valuate the calls for passion and wholeness, for engagement and the
sanctity of personal relations that reverberate through the novels? What
effect do the publications of
Maurice,
the homosexual short stories, and
Furbank's biography have on our understanding of the other novels?
Attempts to defend
Maurice
as a work of art seem to me uncon–
vincing. Samuel Hynes puts it succinctly when he observes that in
Maurice
Forster "has sacrificed all of the qualities that make his work
interesting-the ironic tone, the distance, the humour, the touches of
shrewd wisdom, the style." This is a great deal to sacrifice, but as
Forster himself said elsewhere, absence implies presence: we may look
to the other five novels with some assurance that they are not devalued
by the failure of
Maurice.
To Ozick's dismissal of Forster the humanist,
we may reply that it is the work, not the biography, that has usually
