EMF-alx2

	At the age of thirty-one, having published four novels in six years, E. M. Forster in 1910 had achieved remarkable public success. The epigraph on the title page of Howards End, which appeared that year, has echoed ever since:
Ironically, however, in his own life Forster was painfully aware that he had not connected; he was an outsider to the passion he championed in his fiction and had come to an impasse both personally and professionally. He found himself blocked, unable to act upon his deepest feelings or to write straightforwardly about them.

In 1913-14 he diverted his frustrated sexual energy into writing Maurice. He hoped that acting out his homosexual fantasies in a private novel would mitigate his frustration and allow him to progress with the two publishable novels he had begun after Howards End. The strategy failed; the imagined homosexual passion of Maurice neither satisfied Forster's longings nor released his creativity for other writing projects.

By the end of 1914 his personal crisis was subsumed in the general crisis of the First World War, and in 1915 he went to Egypt as a volunteer for the Red Cross. In Alexandria he was finally able to "connect," forging an alliance with a young Egyptian, Mohammed el Adl, who—when they met—was a conductor on the streetcar line that Forster rode to and from work. A Passage to India (1924), Forster's masterpiece and final novel, was shaped by these transformative years. In part it is a memorial to el Adl, who died in 1922 and is reflected in the character Aziz.

Mohammed el Adl: click to see entire photo.