Alexandria: A History and a Guide

Pharos and Pharillon

©2003-2009  Rob Doll

Both of these belles lettres classics sparkle with the joie de vivre radiating from the only surviving photograph of  Forster from his time in Alexandria.  It is an unusual image: he is cheerful, emanating relaxed sensuality and general physical well-being.  He looks healthy and happy, his hair curled from swimming and the sea air.

He had reason to be happy.  He was living an independent and active life.  His work in military hospitals, while often painfully sad, was meaningful and absorbing.  He had a variety of friends and acquaintances, including intellectual peers among the English and the cosmopolitan population.   Among these was the poet C. P. Cavafy, whose career would later be launched in the English-speaking world by Forster.

Furthermore, by 1917, at the age of 38, he had finally ended his prolonged sexual repression.  If  Cavafy showed him some of his homoerotic poems at this time, Forster would have found in them a reflection of his own real experience.  No longer would such things be mere wish-fulfillment fantasies of an unachieved ideal, as his own novel Maurice had been just before the war.

Most importantly, Morgan Forster was in love.  It was a love that was requited and returned, but it was a secret, a taboo love, a homosexual liaison across generations, across boundaries of race, religion, nation and class.  The experience would have a profound effect on his life and his writing.

Yet perhaps this mud of Egypt was working in his mind,
and but for Egypt would not have been in it.

Forster, "Shakespeare and Egypt"
(The Egyptian Gazette, 21 April 1916)