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.
