Problem: What do biographers do when they encounter a fact that contradicts the biography's "story"? Hopefully, they will be honest.
Sometimes, they are not.
Biography: Moffat, Wendy. The Unrecorded History. Straus and Giroux, 2010.
Moffat's biography The Unrecorded History is technically well-written.
The problem is not the writing. The problem is that Moffat slides all
available evidence into a single pattern. The result is a Forster who is
neither as complex nor as interesting as the Forster revealed through P.N. Furbank's biography.
Moffat focuses on Forsters' relationships. Among the many relationships that she details, she presents two--with
Mohammed and with Bob Buckingham--as absolutes. She more often than not
"tells" the relationship story without "showing" quotes from either
journals or letters. She is the equivalent of the good girlfriend who
defends her best friend's relationships, even when he isn't so sure of
them himself.
With Mohammed, she cannot withhold a slightly critical voice--but that
is entirely due to Forster himself. Forster worried about the gap
between him and his "lover" in terms of race, class, and philosophy. He was never sure if he was
taking advantage or being taken advantage of. He also worried that he
and Mohammed did not perceive "relationship" in the same light.
Moffat ignores these doubts, downplaying them whenever they rise to the
fore. After Mohammed's death, Forster wrote out their history together.
He was typically self-analytical and unswervingly truthful. In one of
the most shearingly honest pieces ever written by a human being (other
than C.S. Lewis), Forster writes to the dead Mohammed:
I wish I could distinguish more clearly between us, but it was always
difficult, and now you are not here to correct me when I think of you
not as you are but [as] I should like to think you . . . I am
professionally a writer and want to pay you this last honour, although
there is much that you will not understand, and some things that you
will not agree with . . .
I could not find this letter in Moffat's biography. Whenever Forster questions his relationship
with Mohammed, she argues that he is a man tortured by doubts, not a man
reflecting honestly on a rather odd affair. While reading Moffat's
account of Forster-Mohammed's relationship, I could never shake the
uneasy impression that Forster made the entire thing up. Yet while
reading Forster's letter (in Furbank's biography), Forster's very doubts
led me to conclude, "Yes, this happened. It was real." It is Forster's
astringent, self-aware voice that convinced me. In Moffat's hands,
Forster turns into someone far more clueless about himself than every person connected with Forster understood him to be.
Moffat extends this same interpretation of Forster to his relationship with Bob Buckingham. She wants to sell the story that Bob Buckingham and Forster were (1) lovers; (2) the love of each other's lives.
Forster was consistently cagey about Bob Buckingham, who would have had far more to lose than Mohammed if Forster had
played out a romance in public (or through letters). Moffat works hard
to maintain that the relationship was a great romance because . . . I'm
not sure why. I have a feeling that the reason is connected to Moffat's
desire to see Forster more as an angsty Heathcliff than an objective
Darcy. Or to her need to sell Forster as a man thwarted by society's
rules when, in fact, he was the beneficiary of his social class--and
knew it. (Forster wasn't the type of man to turn life's imperfections
into his raison d'etre and he tended to avoid, or to sternly remonstrate with, people who did.)
Bob Buckingham was a cop who was bisexual or open to any experience that would improve his lot in life or
a warm-hearted, physical guy who never thought of himself as Forster's
gay partner despite the equivalent of locker-room high jinks. He did
marry after meeting Forster and by all accounts had a robust physical
relationship with his wife. Although one of Forster's friends attempted
to sabotage the Forster-Buckingham relationship by informing the wife,
May, that Forster was undermining her marriage (by taking Bob about with
him so much), the attempt went nowhere, mostly because May's attitude
was that
Bob hanging out with another man was better than Bob hanging out with
another woman.
In his typically scrupulous manner, Furbank suggests that there may have been no ongoing physical relationship at all. Furbank is not being prissy or inhibited or homophobic.
He is honest and non-judgmental about Forster's homosexuality as well
as Forster's various relationships throughout his biography's 585 pages.
He presents the option because he is a honest historian who cannot
ignore the accumulated evidence, the lack of evidence, and Forster's personality.
And the evidence is that no one knows exactly what the relationship was
between Forster and Bob Buckingham. Forster was highly self-analytical
but also capable, as he admits, at creating scenarios that he wished to
be true. He presented himself and Bob as partners to his Bohemian
friends but so elliptically that one is left with the impression that
Forster wanted his friends to believe that Bob and he were lovers, not
that they actually were. (Or, rather, he wanted his friends to believe
whatever they wanted to believe without Forster having to say anything
at all, which seems most likely.)
 |
| Forster had the wonderful capacity to immerse |
| himself in experiences without judgment-- |
| yet he was a shrewd judge of people and |
| events: not the kind of man to be conned. |
When presented with outside evidence--Forster's wry self-analysis, for
instance--that contradicts her pattern, Moffat fudges, even going so far as to cover up material that might undermine her narrative.
At one point, she commits what I consider to be biographical fraud.
When Forster had
his first stroke and confessed his feelings to Bob Buckingham, Bob was
shocked and denied (1) that he knew Forster was gay; (2) that he and
Forster were lovers. Unlike Furbank (who deals with this event upfront),
Moffat moves Bob's declaration to a side note at a later period of
time, implying that Bob did not make such denials until AFTER Forster's
death.
But in fact, Bob made this denial several years earlier;
six years later, he and his wife would care for Forster during his final
days. Yet Moffat accuses both husband and wife of covering up the
truth--so much so that they come across as low-life grifters out for
Forster's money and prestige. (Even if the information wasn't learned until after Forster's death, Moffat's treatment of the event is deliberately misleading. There is a distinct lack of "transparency," which is a researcher's best friend and keeps the researcher honest: what exactly is the information's origin and context? Moffat uses a strict chronology when it suits her purpose. When it doesn't, she obfuscates.)
Those who knew and met the Buckinghams including Furbank, found the
possibility of their deliberately lying to protect themselves highly
unlikely. From all accounts, including Forster's willingness to befriend
the Buckinghams, they were honest, intelligent, unsophisticated people.
Bob especially took things at face value. His wife May was more
discerning though more likely to worry about Forster's increasing
forgetfulness than his sexual orientation.
Based on Forster's droll assessment of himself and his various
relationships, intimate and not, I rather think that he and Bob
Buckingham did exchange some physical intimacies, the type that a highly
physical good-old-boy like Buckingham would never define to himself as
"gay" since he did not seem to think that he was. (A reality ignored in
Moffat's biography is that people are far more varied in their responses
to sex and sexual identity than a label.
She also ignores that social expectations/attitudes towards male
"bonding" have changed in the last fifty to sixty years; even the
language has changed from "friendship" to "homosocial" to "bromance.")
 |
| Forster sitting next to May Buckingham |
When Forster met Bob Buckingham, he was older, wiser, tired, happy with
his circle of friends, happy to have a "consort" of sorts to take around
with him when he visited his Bohemian friends (who strike me as far
more naive than Buckingham's wife) and may have decided, "Hey, I'm a
middle-class Englishman with no desire to be a rebel and a lessening sex
drive. This works for me!"
And it did. The Buckinghams invited Forster into their home, and most of
Forster's friends accepted the Buckinghams as "good sorts". The
Buckinghams cared for Forster through various illnesses and broken
bones. May Buckingham specifically was an extremely good friend to
Forster. He was godfather to the Buckinghams' son; when the young man
died, May and Forster consoled each other. One gets the impression that
Forster preferred this middle-middle-class family to his Bohemian and
upper-middle-class friends. At heart, the guy really liked the
middle-class life, even as he critiqued it.
 |
| Forster fell in love; Masood didn't; they remained friends. By |
| his own assessment, this was one of Forster's most important |
| relationships--every relationship mattered to him. |
There are ways to reconcile or at least explain the perspectives of all
those involved. I attempted one reconciliation above. Moffat never tries
to do this or allow for it--hers is a-one-size-fits-all pattern. If
Forster stated something that fits the pattern, she accepts and reports
it; if he
later qualified or contradicted previous statements (as humans are wont
to do), she ignores or downplays his equivocation. Her treatment extends
past Forster to his friends: If what you're saying agrees with
Forster having notable, dramatic so-called "real" romances, you must be
speaking the truth. If you doubt or question those romances, you must be
afraid of speaking out.
The problem is not that Moffat is selling Forster as a gay man. He was.
And it informed his life and perspective, as Furbank makes clear. The
problem is that she doesn't accept that relationships are more complex
than one-winner-takes-all. As mentioned above, after a few chapters with
Moffat's book, I felt like I was reading a high school confessional: My
best friend luved this guy in high school, and that friend was soooo into him,
so it MUST have been, like, the biggest romance of the century.
People live on continuums, not absolutes.
Moffat wrote her biography based on "new" material. I imagine she went into the endeavor believing she would find fresh "proof" of her version of events. She didn't. Sayers wrote an entire mystery about this problem. Gaudy Night is based on the back-story of a young researcher who is unwilling to give up his erroneous theory and ends up getting fired and later dying. He leaves behind a vengeful wife, contemptuous of the entire academic establishment. In this case, I side with the academics. However, I acknowledge: the pressure to stay with one's original idea must be tremendous.
The result of not giving up that original idea, however, is sad. In the long-run, Moffat misses
out on the objective, idealistic, sensitive, friendly, self-knowing,
and wry E. M. Forster that others understood him to be--in and out of
his intimate relationships.
If you are interested in Forster, I highly recommend Furbank's biography instead.
Furbank, P.N. E.M. Forster: A Life. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
