Edward Morgan Forster
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A profile
Sharla Bazliel
May 2, 2014
In November of 1906, a neighbour dropped in for a visit at the Weybridge home of novelist E.M. Forster and made an unusual enquiry. Would anyone be willing to act as Latin tutor to a young Indian man about to go up to Oxford? Certainly, a curious Forster, known to friends and family by his middle name Morgan, said immediately. The young Indian man who turned up on his doorstep a few days later happened to be Syed Ross Masood, whose grandfather had founded the Anglo-Oriental College (today known as Aligarh Muslim University). Tall and strikingly handsome, "he looked, and sounded, and smelt like a prince." Morgan, on the other hand, was 27 and a virgin, and already a fussy, worried man, old before his time who lived with his widowed mother in the suburbs "where his life seemed to consist of an endless round of tea parties and amiable, empty conversations mostly with elderly women."
And now here was this exotic creature Masood, with whom the anxious homosexual Morgan couldn't help but fall in love. There had been a "friendship" before at Cambridge but nothing came of it. "He could not refer to his condition, even in his own mind, with too direct a term; he spoke of it obliquely, as being in a minority. He himself was a solitary." Maybe with Masood things could be different. But the heterosexual Masood, despite being prone to effusive "oriental" declarations of love and affection, does not reciprocate his feelings. Yet a deep friendship remains and it is Masood who insists Morgan must visit him in India and then write about it. Thus begins Artic Summer, a fictionalised account of how over a period of 11 years Forster came to write his greatest work: A Passage to India.
"It became clear to Morgan that his novel might turn on an incident of some kind, which would play itself out in a courtroom... It had become more and more troubling to him, in a personal, discomfiting way, that these two classes seemed to regard each other with suspicion and contempt... This crack, this deep divide, would run through his book. Two nations, two distinct ways of doing things, were in endless friction with each other. And it was everywhere obvious. The conflict was in him and around him and wanted to be worked out on the page."
Making full use of the material Forster left behind-his novels and diaries, including a non-fiction guide to Alexandria-South African writer Damon Galgut charts the complete graph of the writer's private and complicated sufferings: His love for Masood, his work for the Red Cross in Alexandria during World War I where he begins a long, satisfying relationship with Egyptian tram conductor Mohammed el Adl, and his time spent working as the private secretary to Tukojirao Rao III, the eccentric senior maharaja of Dewas. Galgut's novel, which could have easily descended into farce-buggery in the colonies-is much more than the story of the writing of a novel. Artic Summer is a masterful exploration of the nature of love and power and of friendship that endures beyond time and race.
