His 1912 journey to India is as much a voyage of sexual discovery as geographical discovery. At 34, he was a virgin “and would perhaps be virginal all his life.” He had grown up inside an “old, powdery, frangible halo of women,” and he had struggled to come to terms with his homosexual feelings. Morgan continued to start and abandon new works, increasingly haunted by the sense that he lacked crucial life experience. Shortly afterward, he began to sketch the outline of a new novel that would contain “no lovemaking,” but only “democratic affection.” It would be called Arctic Summer. Two years earlier, Morgan had published Howard’s End, his best-received novel yet. He encounters Kenneth Searight, a cynical British Army officer who announces that Forster will find India a land of prolific homosexual opportunity. As the novel opens, Morgan Forster is onboard a ship, heading to India. Drawing on historical documentation, including Forster’s own diaries and letters, Galgut painstakingly recreates the novelist’s struggle to write his masterpiece, A Passage to India. Arctic Summer (2014), a biographical novel by South African author Damon Galgut, follows the British novelist Edward Morgan “E.M.” Forster during the period from 1910 to 1924, when he did not publish a single word of fiction, instead, traveling to India and the Middle East to explore his previously unacknowledged homosexuality.
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