Gay South African novelist Damon Galgut's life in India led him to discover E M Forster (who Brokies know as the author of Maurice). He was born during the homophobic apartheid regime.
He was intrigued by the fact that Forster was unable to complete and publish another novel between the success of Howards End in 1910 and A Passage to India in 1924. He started to write a novel entitled Arctic Summer in 1911, but abandoned it in 1912. What happened when he visited gay activist Edward Carpenter and his lover George Merrill in their secluded rural retreat inspired him to write Maurice, but he felt it was too dangerous to publish until after his death.
Forster was asked to tutor an emotionally expressive Indian Muslim student, Syed Ross Masood, in Latin before he went to study law at Oxford and fell in love with him. The success of Howards End enabled Forster to go to visit Masood during a six-week trip to India in 1912. During World War I, Forster worked for the Red Cross as a searcher in British military hospitals in Alexandria. There he fell in love with the young Egyptian tram conductor Mohammed el-Adl. After the war, Forster travelled to India to work for the Maharajah of Dewas who set up visits by Kanaya, a young court barber.
Damon Galgut felt he and Forster had in common their involvement in India, the challenges of novel writing and their sexuality. His fascination with Forster's contradictions and the complexity of his character inspired him to write his own novel Arctic Summer (2014). The book covers the period from 1912 through to the completion of A Passage of India and Masood's death. It explores how Forster got stuck and imagines how he got unstuck.
The novel follows the events of Forster's life and work at the time closely and what was already well known, such as how he lived with his smothering widowed mother till she died; his travels; the fact that the law led him to suppress his homosexuality; his fear of dying a virgin; the externalities of his relationship with Masood and Mohammed. They both married women.
Forster wrote little or nothing about the big interior emotional events of his life in his diaries. Damon Galgut insightfully imagines the most significant interactions and conversations between Forster and the raffish British officer Kenneth Seawright, Edward Carpenter, the Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy and others as well as Masood and Mohammed.
Imagining what seems to have happened between Forster and Masood on the night before Forster visits the Barabar Caves without him leads Damon Galgut to suggest how he was able to break through his writer's block and eventually complete A Passage to India including the pivotal scene in the Malabar Caves. The book is considered by many to be his greatest. Forster dedicated it to Syed Ross Massood.
Arctic Summer is full of interesting details.
It explores Forster's loneliness and silence, but during this period of life, he did come to understand himself more deeply and
understand more about other people. He said that he had lived and loved.
Damon Galgut dedicated his Arctic Summer "To Riyaz Ahmad Mir and the fourteen years of our Friendship."
