One theme that surfaces subtly throughout all three periods of the correspondence is each writer’s life as a homosexual in a society where one could not openly express one’s sexual preference. During the 1930s, Forster and Isherwood were both in committed relationships with younger men of the working class: Forster with the policeman, Bob Buckingham, Isherwood with Heinz. Both situations had their complications. Isherwood and Heinz were on the run from Nazi Germany; Forster was involved with a married man. Although Bob’s wife, May, was Forster’s rival for Bob’s attention in the beginning, over the years he actually became close friends with May and an uncle figure for their son, Robin. The letters offer many clues that Bob regularly spent the night at Forster’s flat in London and refer to occasional weekend trips they took together to the continent in order to visit Isherwood and Heinz. Yet Forster and Isherwood are both reticent—in their letters at least—about intimate details. One needs to coax out details from between the lines.
Nicola Beauman maintains that Bob was “the great love” of Forster’s life.5 Although normally reserved in his letters to Bob (of which more than one thousand exist!), on the eve of prostate surgery, Forster reveals his love for Bob and the suggestion that the love is reciprocaclass="underline" “I feel gay and calm, but have an open mind as to whether I shall get through or not[.] I don’t pal-zeik-00intro 4/21/08 10:23 AM Page 3
INTRODUCTION
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say this to anyone else, but I love you too much to say anything but the truth. I don’t feel afraid of anything and it is your love that has made me be like this.”6 One catches a hint of this love in an uncharacteristically gushing remark Forster makes to Isherwood after dryly listing upcoming events on his engagement calendar: “and the evening after that will be best, for Bob comes.” Although Forster does not actually live with Bob except for the nights they spend together in Forster’s London flat and the occasional trip abroad—such as when Isherwood arranges for them to stay in the “Royalty Bedroom” when they visit him in Brussels—the letters suggest that Forster and Bob were a “couple” parallel to that of Isherwood and Heinz (who were in fact living together). Forster and Isherwood both regularly close their letters with, respectively, love to Heinz or Bob.
Isherwood never openly describes his love or affection for Heinz in his letters to Forster in the 1930s; yet it is implied in his desperate search to find a country where he could live with Heinz in safety. He envisions an ideal life with Heinz in Portugaclass="underline" “I think we might quite possibly settle in this country if we can find the right house and if Heinz can get a reasonable assurance that he will be allowed to stop here indefinitely.” The intensity of Isherwood’s bond with Heinz during turbulent times—times that eventually overpowered their efforts to remain together—is revealed in several entries Isherwood writes in his diary after they are separated. Two weeks after Heinz’s arrest in Germany, he reflects: “At first I didn’t think about Heinz at all. Or tried not to. I felt like a house in which one room, the biggest, is locked up. There, very cautiously, I allowed myself to think of him in little doses—five minutes at a time: then I had a good cry and felt better.”7 Then, from the distant perspective of five months: “Never to forget H. Never to cease to be grateful to him for every moment of our five years together. Never to cease to hope that, somehow, some day, all will be well. And yet to find a real warm decent relationship for myself—something not of the same kind, but really worthwhile.”8 After losing Heinz, Isherwood had a series of relationships—some lasting several years—
which he alludes to in his letters to Forster, but he was not to find another long-lasting relationship until he met Don Bachardy in 1953. On the other hand, Forster’s relationship with Bob survived the war and another twenty-five years until Forster’s death.
Forster’s unpublished novel, Maurice, completed in 1914, is an ongoing topic of conversation in the letters from the 1930s through the 1950s. In the spring of 1933, Forster gave Isherwood the manuscript to read. Although some of the antiquated euphemisms, such as “sharing” for “sex,” embarrassed him, Isherwood felt nothing but admiration for Forster’s brave effort.
He reflects later, “the wonder of the novel was that it had been written when pal-zeik-00intro 4/21/08 10:23 AM Page 4
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LETTERS BETWEEN FORSTER AND ISHERWOOD
it had been written; the wonder was Forster himself, imprisoned within the jungle of pre-war prejudice, putting these unthinkable thoughts into words.”9 Isherwood was honored that he was chosen to respond to it on behalf of his generation and recalls the scene where he was to give Forster his verdict on the novel—a scene that cemented Forster and Isherwood’s personal relationship. Isherwood recreates the scene: “My memory sees them sitting together, facing each other. Christopher sits gazing at his master of their art, this great prophet of their tribe, who declares that there can be real love, love without limits or excuse, between two men. Here he is, humble in his greatness, unsure of his own genius. Christopher stammers some words of praise and devotion, his eyes brimming with tears. And Forster—amused and touched, but more touched than amused—leans forward and kisses him on the cheek.”10 To Forster’s fear that the novel might seem dated, Isherwood replied, “Why shouldn’t it date?” Soon after this meeting, Isherwood proposes that Forster rewrite the ending so that Maurice and Alec, instead of separating, settle into a permanent domestic relationship. But Forster, who, after all, came of age in the late Victorian to early Edwardian era, replies in a letter: “I daren’t thus instal them, no, not even under a hay-stack.”
Five years later, Isherwood rereads the novel and gushes in admiration for his mentor and friend: “have finished ‘Maurice,’ and am in a state of reverence which even my most irreverent moments of you do nothing to dispel.” Isherwood himself was struggling with how to present homosexual characters in his fiction. Looking back at Mr. Norris Changes Trains, Isherwood realized that if he had made the narrator, William Bradshaw (Isherwood’s two middle names), openly homosexual “[t]he narrator would have become so odd, perhaps so interesting, that his presence would have thrown the novel out of perspective,” taking attention away from the title character.11 He thus opted to keep the narrator’s sexuality ambiguous both in this novel and in Goodbye to Berlin.
The young writers of the post-World War I generation resented and even hated the older generation whom they blamed for the recent horrific war. Forster, however, escaped the wrath of the younger generation and his novels were regarded as “modern.” Isherwood describes Forster’s “tea-tabling” technique, through the voice of Chalmers in his autobiographical novel, Lions and Shadows: “The whole of Forster’s technique is based on the tea-table: instead of trying to screw all his scenes up to the highest possible pitch, he tones them down until they sound like mothers’-meeting gossip. . . . In fact, there’s actually less emphasis laid on the big scenes than on the unimportant ones.”12 Forster was also respected and befriended by others within Isherwood’s circle, namely W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and pal-zeik-00intro 4/21/08 10:23 AM Page 5