Arctic Summer (2014), a biographical novel by South African author Damon Galgut, follows the British novelist Edward Morgan “E.M.” Forster during the period from 1910 to 1924, when he did not publish a single word of fiction, instead, traveling to India and the Middle East to explore his previously unacknowledged homosexuality. Drawing on historical documentation, including Forster’s own diaries and letters, Galgut painstakingly recreates the novelist’s struggle to write his masterpiece, A Passage to India. As the novel opens, Morgan Forster is onboard a ship, heading to India. He encounters Kenneth Searight, a cynical British Army officer who announces that Forster will find India a land of prolific homosexual opportunity. The year is 1912. Two years earlier, Morgan had published Howard’s End, his best-received novel yet. Shortly afterward, he began to sketch the outline of a new novel that would contain “no lovemaking,” but only “democratic affection.” It would be called Arctic Summer. But he never completed it. Morgan continued to start and abandon new works, increasingly haunted by the sense that he lacked crucial life experience. He had grown up inside an “old, powdery, frangible halo of women,” and he had struggled to come to terms with his homosexual feelings. At 34, he was a virgin “and would perhaps be virginal all his life.” His 1912 journey to India is as much a voyage of sexual discovery as geographical discovery. His principal motive for the journey is to see Syed Ross Masood, a young Indian Muslim man whom Morgan had taught Latin while Masood was living in Weybridge. At the time, Forster had confessed his love for Masood to “a locked journal,” but now he hopes to make a bolder confession. Forster is intoxicated with India. Its vastness and complexity—and his status there as a citizen of the colonial power—gradually make him feel powerful and competent in a way he has not before, although perpetually on the brink of being overwhelmed. Masood welcomes his former teacher with florid affection. The young man is emotionally open, takes a quasi-romantic view of friendship, and upbraids Morgan for his stuffiness and reserve. Taking these rebukes as hints that Masood is open to his advances, Morgan attempts to kiss him, only to receive a sharp rebuff. Masood is heterosexual. Morgan retreats into his “willed cheerfulness,” concealing deep anger and shame. After six months in India, Morgan returns to England, still a virgin, and now 34. When the Great War breaks out, Morgan volunteers to work with the Red Cross. He is sent to Alexandria, Egypt, as a “searcher,” tasked with visiting hospitals to interview the wounded for information about the missing. Morgan meets a local man, Mohammed el Adl, a young tram conductor, and they begin an “anxious but beautiful affair.” Mohammed is at least partly heterosexual—he calls Morgan’s desire “a pity for you and a disgrace”—and their sexual relationship is fumbling and occasional. However, the two men become close, indulging in affectionate caresses and childlike play. During Morgan’s time in Egypt, Mohammed marries and has a child. Later he is imprisoned during an anti-colonial uprising, and finally, he contracts consumption and dies. Throughout, he and Morgan remain friendly and affectionate. Morgan comes to feel that this simple affection and trust is more important than love or sex. “To be trusted across the barriers of income, race, and class, is the greatest reward a man can receive,” he writes to a friend. No longer a virgin, Morgan continues to struggle his way toward a publishable novel. One of his attempts, A Passage to India, seems promising to him, but he worries that it is flimsy and frivolous. In 1921, he returns to India, to serve as a private secretary to the Maharaja of the semi-autonomous kingdom of Dewas in central India. The frolicsome Maharaja does not approve of homosexuality, but he accepts that his new private secretary requires “relief,” and arranges for Kanaya, a local barber, to visit Morgan regularly. Morgan’s belief in the importance of intimacy is overthrown by the feeling of power he enjoys in his sexual encounters with his low-ranking Indian lover. Kanaya wheedles and seeks advantages from his powerful patron. In return, Morgan is rough, unkind, enjoying a sadistic thrill. Their union makes him aware of “all the force of the Empire,” and throughout this period he feels self-disgust. His experience with Kanaya complicates Morgan’s view of human relationships. Reflecting on the relationship with Mohammed which had seemed so easy and joyful to him, Morgan wonders what feelings the tram-conductor really had. He recognizes that an imbalance of power lay at the heart even of that relationship. This loss of innocence galvanizes Morgan’s writing. He returns to A Passage to India, determined now to infuse the novel with his newfound understanding of human affairs. Tender affection is possible, but power is inescapable. As he brings the novel to its final somber conclusion, Morgan feels muted triumph. Even as he presents the work to his friend Virginia Woolf, Morgan feels compelled to confess that he is “not a novelist.” He will not publish another novel in his lifetime.

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Damon Galgut

Adult

Novel

Fiction

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