Transvaluing immaturity: reverse discourses of male homosexuality in E.M. Forster's posthumously published fiction

Criticism, Spring, 1998 by Stephen Da Silva

This pattern can also be seen in many of the short stories in The Life to Come. To take just one instance, in "The Other Boat," Lionel is able to experience his homosexual desires on the boat traveling from England to India, by repeating his childhood encounter with Cocoanut on another boat traveling in the opposite direction. Lionel's second meeting with Cocoanut is full of uncanny echoes of the first one. To take one sinister example: on the earlier boat, the boy Lionel had wanted Cocoanut to "play" because "he [was] the only one who fell down when he [was] killed" (LC 166). On the second boat, Lionel and Cocoanut play again, this time in the closeted space of their cabin, and once again Lionel kills Cocoanut, as in their boyhood games.

In "Arthur Snatchfold" an early morning homosexual encounter foregrounds the link between youthfulness and homosexuality. Aging Sir Richard Conway--we are told he has "grey hair"--is hemmed in by his responsibilities as a heterosexual patriarch and businessman and is depressed by the dullness and sterility of the Donaldson's home (LC 97-98). But he is able temporarily to escape these restraints in his early-morning tryst with Arthur Snatchfold in the woods. The sexual play between Conway and Snatchfold is described in terms of boyish horseplay: "[Conway] tweaked at the impudent nose [of Snatchfold]. It dodged, it seemed used to this sort of thing" (102). Horseplay, in fact, plays an important role in Forster's figuring of male homosexual pleasure--think of the constant "ragging" between Clive and Maurice (M 44)--perhaps both because "horseplay" provides a genteel way to represent physical intimacy between men but also because Forster associates realizing homosexual desire with recovering youthful pleasures. At the end of "Arthur Snatchfold," in order to preserve his safety and "go forward with his career" (LC 112), Conway has to suppress the early morning boyish pleasures he shared with Arthur Snatchfold. Significantly, we are told at the end of the story that Conway's "face" in the mirror "was that of an old man" (112). In other words, having to relinquish the youthful matutinal pleasures of homosexuality, Conway returns to being an old man living in the drab afternoon or evening hours of heteronormative culture.(39)

Apart from moving back in time at an ontogenetic level, homosexual characters in Forster's posthumously published fiction also move back in history. In particular, they tend to return to Greece. In his Commonplace Book, Forster approvingly quotes Marx's description of Greece as embodying "the social childhood of Humanity" and his description of the Greeks as "normal, healthy children.(40) It is consistent with this conception of Greece that in order to experience their childlike homosexual desires, many of the characters in The Life to Come should move back in time to Greece: In "Albergo Empedocle," for instance, Harold, who is getting ready to marry Mildred, falls asleep between "two ruined columns of the temple of Zeus" at Girgenti, which the editor tells us "are clearly the legs of a gigantic male figure" (LC 235). In this sleep, Harold discovers that he has lived in Greece in an earlier time and has "loved better too" (24-25). As Harold begins to revert to his Greek persona, the only one whom he thinks might understand him is his friend Tommy: "`Is there no, no one who understands?' [Harold cried out.] He stumbled up the passage as if he were blind and they heard him calling `Tommy'" (32). The story ends with Harold who has now completely slipped away from the modern world into his Greek past kissing his attentive friend Tommy (35). If in a psychoanalytic narrative, homosexuality represents an early stage that must be left behind in order to move to adult heterosexuality, in "Albergo Empedocle," Harold has to slip backward in time to a past life, his Greek childhood, in order to avoid the confines of compulsory heterosexuality and achieve union with Tommy.