E M Forster and Me

Some time ago an article in one of the many newspapers that find their ways into my home, suggested that it was not only important to read, but also to re-read. The author spoke of the value one can derive from reading again, perhaps in another period of one’s life, books that have influenced or moved one in earlier days. This summer at a sale in the basement of a nearby church I picked up a new biography of one of my all-time favourite writers, Edward Morgan Forster. A Great Unrecorded History by Wendy Moffat, takes the reader back again through the fairly well-known story of Forster’s life in England and abroad. But writing in an era of greatly increased acceptance of homosexuality and having access to letters and diaries not available to Forster’s earlier biographer, P. N. Furbank, Moffat is able to penetrate more deeply into Forster’s inner life. One cannot read her book without being profoundly moved by the courage and fidelity to his own sense of who he was evidenced throughout his life by, as Wendy and all of his friends called him, Morgan. An astute social critic, he was nonetheless a person who valued human relations above ideology or personal gain.

Forster, or Morgan as I now also think of him, is one of that group of writers who have profoundly influenced me in my own journey toward greater understanding of myself in the context of life as I have known it. Finishing Wendy Moffat’s book, I embarked upon a re-reading of Morgan’s works: Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, A Room With a View, Howard’s End, and A Passage to India. I have also sent for some collections of his short stories and for a copy of Maurice, a book which he wrote in mid-life but allowed to be published only after his death because of the overtly homosexual relationship at its core. At the moment I am re-reading Furbank’s biography, many parts of which are now quite familiar to me. Looking especially through the lens afforded by Moffat’s book, many aspects of Morgan’s stories become more intelligible.

In a way I have more or less spent the summer with Morgan and in some fashion this experience has encouraged me to write my own “biography.” At so many junctures in my life I have felt under particular forms of threat, inner as well as outer, that disallowed me from speaking, even often from thinking, with complete openness and honesty. In a post-Wildian world, Morgan was under enormous constraint to keep a central feature of his being, his sexuality, hidden not only from public view, but even from his family and most of his acquaintances. Still, over time he did find people with whom he could completely share his inner self, releasing himself in this way from a terrible life of loneliness.

I have also been blessed with ever-developing friendships that have given me the space and the courage to no longer hide behind my fears. The things that I am writing now may be rarely read by any other than particular people who care about me, but none of that matters to me. I know that there is little point in writing about my life with an agenda to hide particular facts, really to be dishonest in any fashion. It is a spectacularly freeing experience to write in this way. Maybe that is one of the blessings of getting older: you know yourself better and you have a lot less to lose.

Starting Again

I have not written any posts since Mark and I came back to Toronto at the end of March. You may or may not have noticed. I was simply disinclined to do so, feeling so much less certain what I was about than I had been the year before when we returned. Then I was profoundly energized and ready for our move from what I had experienced as the desert of Croydon Rd to the pulsing energy of Bloor St and the Annex. During this past winter I had planned to continue to learn and write about the Holocaust, less as an historical event and more as a profound window into some of darker aspects of what we humans are about. In the last weeks in Puerto Vallarta, however, it became clear to me that I had flown one league too closely to the material and had become overwhelmed by its sheer horror. There was nothing more that I could say about it without myself dwelling in a space like that I had experienced immediately after our visit to Auschwitz. The process of letting it go was painful and somewhat protracted.

Back in Toronto I have more or less busied myself in ways I would be hard put upon to recall. I joined the YMCA and go over there a couple of times a week to walk the treadmill and to use the weights machines. I’ve seen a lot of documentaries at the Bloor Cinema, and etc., and etc. I’ve greatly enjoyed watching the Pan Am Games and of course, the recent ascendancy of the Blue Jays. Then there is the up-coming election and the Duffy trial and all that their outcomes portend for our future as Canadians. Events within our families have also impacted Mark and me in unexpected ways.

Like everyone my life goes on at different levels – the practical, the physical, the emotional, the social, and at times, the inner. A couple of months ago I began to experience a sense of frustration, a kind of inner itch that told me that I needed to develop some new focus in my life. But what should it be? I love to read biographies, well-written biographies such as those by Michael Holroyd, that take the reader not just into a sequence of events involving the subject, but rather into the whole context of his or her life, culture, historical period, and as much as possible toward an understanding of the multi-faceted person of whom he is writing. I have a dear friend who is developing some renown for her mystery novels. My suggestion that I write about her was met with a decided, “Oh please, no”! She did agree though that it would great for me to be engaged  in a writing project and encouraged me to find another subject. I then decided upon myself.

So for the past several weeks I have tried to dedicate some time after my breakfast to writing what I have called “A Biography of Myself.” I’m aware that when we write or speak about ourselves, we are in a way objectifying ourselves, not just being in ourselves, but looking at ourselves and our thoughts, feelings, and experiences as it were from the outside. We work with the memories we have retained and the narratives that we have threaded over time to ourselves and others about what we consider to be the central components of our beings and our histories. That is what I have been writing about.

For the most part I have been enjoying the exercise though laziness can easily kick in when it comes to this or any other task. I find that if I spend time on it in the morning, it will happen; otherwise, it’s not too likely. I began at the beginning: born in the Belleville General Hospital on August 18, 1940, the second daughter of Mary Craig Doyle and James Timothy Doyle, and so on. Then follows all that I recall from the almost six years that we lived in Belleville after I came along, on to the next four years on Renfrew Ave in Ottawa, and to the following four years in Brockville. Each section or chapter gets longer than the previous one as my memories grow more distinct. I have written about 60 pages to date and I haven’t quite left Brockville behind. Some of the material is the homely details of family and school existence and some of it is more personal to my own experiences.

Mark and I are moving in a couple of weeks to the “West Annex,” as opposed to the “South Annex” where we have lived for the past year and a bit. We have purchased a condo in a building to the left of the subway station at Christie. The next few weeks will focus a fair amount on the packing, moving, and resettling necessary to this endeavour, but I will try to keep some time to carry on with writing as I find such satisfaction in doing so.