Hello!, wellcome to my personal web page. In this page you are going to find information about the English author E.M. Forster dealing with:
 

• His attitude as a writer towards his secret homosexuality and its consecuences on his work.
• The autobiographic nature of some of his novels' characters and the author's fear for them being regarded as a self-portrait.
• Criticisms about the cinematographic adaptations of his most famous literary works, looking mainly at their success showing the novels' original spirit.

HIS INNER CONFLICT: HIS HOMOSEXUALITY.
 
 

Fustrated relationships.

    It is obvious that Forster's relationship with sexuality was very determined by the education he received during his childhood. Being a child he lived in a familiar atmosphere inordinately dominated by the mother figure, due to his father's early death, and this had, no doubt, an irreversible influence on his fustrated virility.

    Maybe, it is a consequence of this Forster's personal characteristic the fact that in his novels we can hardly find examples of harmonious sexual relationships and that, on the contrary, there is a great quantity of fustrated ones, as it happens between Lucy and Cecil in A Room With a View or between Agnes and Rickie in The Longest Journey.

    Not even the homosexual relationships between Maurice and Clive or Maurice and Alec Scudder in Maurice are affectively armonious, though the ending -as the writer also recognised- is relatively happy, because all this seems to be the result of Forster's deliberate purpose rather than the ending the novel would demand by itself.

    All seems to indicate that the author was unable to offer in his novels a positive intersexual relationship,where there was a perfect integration of its two basic constituents: the physical and the spiritual. The sexual relationships of his narrative don't do other thing but to reflect the pessimistic theory which proclaims that the human being is unable to mantain successful relationships with the rest of the people.

    The homosexual relationship / love - which is the main topic of Maurice - is also present is several of his previous works, but only in a simbolic way or, in other cases, in an ambiguous one, as it happens, for example, in The Story of a Panic, where the friendship between Genaro and Eustace seems to exceed amply the limits of a normal friendship between men.
 
 

 Maurice: his most personal novel.

    It is quite logical to think that Forster knew he was deceiving himself keeping people in ignorance of his homosexuality, but did he feel he was betraying the rest of gay people ? Did he really deceived them as it is stated by Andrew Hodges or his confession wouldn't have had any positive impact on the public opinion about homosexuality? Did he have no choice but to remain silent?

    The publication in 1924 of A Passage to India was considered the most important moment in Forster's literary career. It was the fifht novel of an aclaimed and respected author.The general consideration of this novel as his masterpiece and the lack of a subsequent work, will become it his narrative's testament. However, Maurice's appearance in 1971 will provoke a few shock waves, and the critic about the author that had arisen in the sixties and that seemed having started a process of decadence with the new decade, took a new urge thanks to the controversy appeared by the novel's topic: the story of a middle class young man who discovers his homosexuality.

    Anyway, in Maurice we discover, apart from the homosexual theme, all the qualities of Forster's narrative, as well as most of his interests faithfully reflected.

    Forster wrote Maurice in 1913-14 and by 1915 one of his friends who read it thought it truly moving and admirable as a sociological tract, but he thought that his virtues rather weighed down the characters. Forster had confessed to his friends how much he needed the opinions of understanding critics but, although he could not have been entely happy to be told that it was sociological rather than artistic, he also felt confident that in this book he had taken an entirely new line.

    So, if Forster had taken into account his friends' criticisms, it'd have been a matter of virtually beginning the novel again. But, no doubt, he had put so much of himself into the novel that he could not repeat that effort. It was too late. In fact, he told them how much trouble the dialogues had caused him, in particular, the carnal element.

    Likewise, this novel can be considered his most personal work because it was his own hard-won emotional experience the very heart of the novel.
 
 

FORSTER IN HIS WORKS.
 
 

    According to what we said previously, Maurice can also be considered his most personal work because as R.H. Albright says it is a mixture of reality and fiction and, in a way, we could identify the author in the two main characters. On the one hand, Clive, a kind of representation of the traditional way he had chosen to live and, on the other hand, Maurice, representing the fancied life he would have wished; and maybe, that is the reason of the happy end: it's the perfect and impossible end he'd have wanted for himself.

    Therefore, the main reason for the novel not being published during his lifetime was, apart from the theme, the old one of being to close to his material. It also deals with suburbanism and differences of class. Maurice is prosaically suburban, socially dutiful, rather slow of body and imagination. Clive, whom he meets at Cambridge, is the heir to a run-down country estate. He is quick and literary, and he is homosexual when he and Maurice meet at Cambridge. His friendship begins the transformation of Maurice through realisation of his own homosexual temperament and the terrible prejudices he had learnt from society. After Cambridge their relative stance is reversed and Clive decides that he is not, or no longer wishes to be, homosexual; he marries, becomes the complete squire and abandons Maurice, who cannot reverse his course with such apparent ease and deliberateness. Class consciousness, inseparable from the action-time of the story, which is 1912, enters in the person of Alec Scudder, Clive's gamekeeper, who sizes up the situation and assumes a place of his own in Maurice's life.

    So, Forster struggled long with this third part of the novel. He told Christopher Isherwood in 1914 that he had not known enough about the complexities of class to write that section to his own satisfaction. Class-consciousness was the very framework of Suburbia, but it was a cramped framework. What he then knew of class differences beyond those limits just could stimulate his imagination.

    In this way, when the candour on the subject of homosexuality was forbidden by both Society and the Law the point he wanted to talk about was also certain to frighten off every publisher: that homosexual love need not end in violence or tragedy. This was the truth of the ending that he wanted his readers to take away with them. In this happy ending Maurice and Alec simply disappear together somewhere in a still-pristine English countryside. If it had ended with a hanging or a suicide some brave publisher might be persuaded to consider it as a moral tract. But Maurice and Alec are presumibly happy in some unidentified greenwood.

    Finally, when he made the last version in 1960 he understood the consequences of the whole Victorian class system, which still controlled his life and the lives of others like him, for he saw no hope of change. Maurice, born into the respectable middle class, could get off, England's Clives would continue to be magistrates, and the Alecs would go to prison.
 

CRITICISMS OF FORSTER'S CINEMATOGRAPHIC ADAPTATIONS.
 
 

    Undoutedly, the most famous Forster's adaptations for the big screen are those carried out by the American directorJames Ivory and Indian producer Ismael Merchant.
So, nearly all of the films they have produced since they started working together in 1967 have been written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.                                                                                 .
 
 

    Apart from their work on Forster's novels, they have also worked together in other literary adaptations as Henry James' The Europeans, The Bostonians or Evan Connell's Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, but, although they come from another author, they all have in common what they're interested and attracted to:

• HOWARDS END.

    Firstly, Howads End (1992) is, in general, the best considered of their movies by the critics. In the same way that Linda Lopez considers it is Forster' best novel, Roger Ebert thinks it's also one of the best novels of the twentieth century. Likewise, Frank Maloney considers it's the best film from the trio, connecting again with Ebert who believes it's one of the best movies of the year.

    Anyway, all of them agree with Ebert when he says that it isn't an overdecorated "period" adaptation, but a film in which the people move easily through town and country homes and landscapes that frame and define them. And it is possible thanks, as Maloney remaks, to the comtemporary script which is faithful to the spirit of the novel and also to the good casting where Emma Tompson's superb performance gave her an Oscar for Best Actress.
 
 

    Finally, besides the acting, Maloney also points out the great contribution of the cinematography and the soundtrack by Richard Robbins.
 
 

• MAURICE.

                         Rupert graves and James Wilby
                       as Alec Scudder and Maurice Hall
 
 

    On the one hand, critics like R.H. Albright and Roger Elbert have also enjoyed with Maurice's adaptation (1987) because as the previous one, this movie is very well made and acted ... with an unusually strong supporting cast ...and captures its period very meticulously.

    But, on the other hand, they are not all praises because he doesn't find believable the movie's ending. This is, for him the end doesn't work due to the great class divisions in England at that time (1913) which would have evoid them from achieving a really deep relationship apart from their physical attraction, and therefore, they shouldn't finally stay together.

    At the same time, anyone who agrees with this statement should have in mind that the ending was a kind of ideal for the author, more an impossible desire than a long-lasting reality.
 
 
 

• A ROOM WITH A VIEW.

    A Room with a View was Ivory's fisrt adaptation dealing with E.M. Forster (1985) and although it became quite successful -for example, winning four Ocars- this success was not shared by all the critics.

    A proof of this is the different opinions between Nadeem A. Khan and Roger Ebert. Both of them understand that it is not only the love story of George and Lucy but it is also a criticism of the hipocrisy of that British class society as well as the defense of making choices following your heart instead of reason to change your life. But, at the same time, they have a different view of the story in the sense that while Ebert thinks that it's George who liberates Lucy (opens the window for her), Nadeem considers Lucy's final freedom means George's one.

    In any case, although both of them find enough qualities to recommend it, it is Ebert who has found deeper values. So,for example, for him it encourages us to study our feelings and achieves to make the unusual mixture of passion and thought.

    On the contrary, for Khan it misses the necessary intensity that would have been necessary for the public to feel the character's emotions.

    Finally, once again, performances and script are very well valued as one of reasons of the film's final success.
 

• A PASSAGE TO INDIA

 

    This version of E.M. Forster's 1924 novel about the tragicomedy of British colonial rule was adapted, directed and edited in 1984 by David Lean, a meticulous craftman famous for going to any lengths to make every shot look just the way he thinks it should.

    First of all we must make reference to Ralph Benner'review which is one of the most interesting we can find. This is due to the similarity he establishes between the way Lean deals with sexual moments in this movie and others of his filmography as Doctor Zhivago or Ryan's Daughter.

    At the same time, it demonstrates how much different critic's opinions can be about the same movie. In this way, Benner considers that the film's unsuccessful result is because Forster's novel is not very good stuff; but, he also recognizes that admirers of the novel will appreciate Lean's fidelity to the novel because it also maintains the mystery about the unsolved incident in the caves.

    So, it is interesting too, apart from the good performances he points out (especially of Australian Oscar nominated Judy Davis as Adela Quested, Indian Victor Banerjee as Aziz and James Fox as Fielding), his opinion about Dame Peggy Ashcroft winning an Oscar because of the coincidence at that time with her real acting in the TV series The Jewel in the Crown which had a similar plot structure.
 
 
 
 
 

Australian Actress Judy Davis

    In this way, for them it captures the atmosphere of Raj society -thecontemptuous racism of colonial British who have not wish to comprehend the mysticism and wonders of the subcontinent and brewing resentment of the Indians...

    Therefore, it is thanks to the good screenplay that the film transcends specifics of time, place and culture and becomes a meditation on human characters in all its richness and troubling complexity and not just a group of characters we inmediately forget.

    Finally, it is also amazing the photography with lots of wonderful vistas of spectacular scenery, as well as the way Adela's deepering neurotic crisis is reflected in the weather and society around her.
 
 

• WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO THREAD.

    As Roger Ebert says E.M. Forster, who did not want any of his novels made into fimls, would be astonished,no doubt, at recent Forster movie industry because "Where Angels Fear to Tread" is the fifth of his books to be filmed.
 

    Once Again, we find very different opinions about this movie:

    On the one hand, we can see how Ebert and Brian L. Johnson think that if it is not a bad film is thanks to the actors,especially Helen Mirren and Judy Davis, but it is not either a good one because it is slow in some places and over dramatic in others.

    So, from Johnson's point of view the biggest problem is that it gets rather boring in some places, and too emotional in others. He'd give a three (with reservations)on a scale of zero to five.

    On the other hand, Rita Kempley (for The Washington Post) and Frank Maloney consider that Charles Sturridge adaptation (in 1991) is a splendid and faithful translation of Forster's first novel to the screen, that he takes no liberties with the material; something that must be great for many but that can be negative for others.

    Maloney, who recommends it strongly, points out how we find again the topic taking risks during our life because nothing is worse and more dangerous than than the bystander. And Kempley explains that it is mainly a tragic satire of the British self- important and priggish worldview.

    Lastly, both of them define it as a strong actors film and, while Kempley finds Davis the high point of the film, for Maloney is Rupert Graves who gives us on of the best works of his philmography as the inefectual, but kindly, Phillip Herriton... he does so poignantly, full of love and friendship, in a moving, yet light handed, performance. Although they are also remarkable Helena Bonham Carter and Helen Mirren.
 
 
 
 

             In Intimate Relations

English actor Rupert Graves
 
 

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