SHOULD HAVE HEEDED HIS OWN WARNING:

Gay sex spelled end of E.M. Forster's writing (Richard Brooks, 6/08/10, The Sunday Times)

THE enduring mystery of why E. M. Forster failed to write any novels beyond his mid-40s has been solved thanks to a secret cache of papers in which he confided his sexual desires.

The author did not write any novels between the publication in 1924 of A Passage To India, one of his best known works, and his death in 1970.

Now Forster's "sex diary", which had been locked away at his former lodgings at Cambridge University, indicates that his creative drive was curbed after he lost his virginity to a wounded soldier on an Egyptian beach when he was 38 and met his long-term lover - a married policeman - several years later.

The author felt he could not continue to write about the heterosexual, English middle-class themes with which he had made his name. "I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more, but sex prevented the latter," Forster wrote.

Passage is about someone freaking out after entering a dark cavern--it isn't heterosexual.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 8, 2010 6:03 PM