A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (75 page)
Read A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster Online
Authors: Wendy Moffat
Tags: #Biography, #British, #Literary
Dickinson College has been my intellectual home for almost twenty-five years. It has also been the fount of most material support for this ten-year project. I would like to thank my colleagues on the Research and Development Committee and Provost Neil Weissman for money, time, and the chance to collaborate with students using Dana and Mellon funds. Dickinson students Jason Murray, Sara Hoover, and George Fitting provided valuable help and insight. Laura Harbold, now a colleague, checked quotations and obtained permissions with her usual intelligence and aplomb.
Sydelle Kramer, agent extraordinaire, saw in this project something greater than I imagined and helped me to show it to others. Jonathan Galassi has edited with the grace and patience of a Zen master. More than anyone, he has taught me how to write this book. Immeasurable care has been taken by Jesse Coleman, Jeff Seroy, and many others at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Bill Swainson loves literature and lent me his impeccable ear.
Jeff Wood, the last independent bookseller in Cumberland County, has steered me in the right direction more times than I can count.
At Dickinson there are many people who have helped me to become a better teacher and writer. College librarians, especially Chris Bombaro and Tina Maresco, have performed many miracles. Thanks also to Rafael Alvarado, Greg Berrier, Dan Buchan, Ryan Burke, Andrew Connell, Amanda deLorenzo, Brenda Landis, Pat Pehlman, Andy Petrus, Tom Smith, Chuck Steel, Brenda Steely, and Jean Weaver for years of technical support.
I would like to thank my friends for rich and challenging conversations and the freedom to explore these problems through teaching. Kelly Winters-Fazio has supported me at every step. Susan Rose, Bob Winston, Carol Ann
Johnston, Bob Ness, and David Ball have encouraged and goaded me. Sharon O’Brien knew that I could write this book long before I believed I could. Dickinson’s program at the University of East Anglia offered a home away from home in 1997 and 1998. Thanks to Jackie Fear-Segal and Allan Segal, Simon Middleton and Caroline Wade, Sophy Rickett and Robert Innes Hopkins, Margaret Homberger, Judy Homberger, and Eric Homberger (who charitably and thoughtfully read an early draft of the manuscript).
A monthlong fellowship at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale in September 2007 afforded me access to the papers of many of Forster’s American friends, the company of congenial scholars, and a generous stipend. During that time Liliane Greene graciously shared her home and heart.
I have followed in the steps of extraordinary biographers of Forster. Francis King spoke with me very early in the project. Nicola Beauman warmly reached out to me and offered useful advice. Nick Furbank shared his insight, unpublished correspondence, photographs, and audiotapes. I am grateful for their generosity.
I relied on the wise counsel of scholars and experts in a range of fields: Paul Armstrong, Karen Arrandale, Todd Avery, Michael Bernstein, Robert Caserio, George Chauncey, David Commins, Nicholas de Jongh, Ed DeLuca, Bruce Dunne, Max Egremont, Philip Eliasoph, Jay Grossman, Judith Scherer Herz, Lisa Hodermarsky, Hubert Kennedy, the late Mary Lago, Linda Leavell, David Lelyveld, Glen Leonard, Christofilis Maggidis, Jesse Matz, Ira Nadel, Peter Parker, Ted Pulcini, Jerry Rosco, S. P. Rosenbaum, Everett K. Rowson, Richard Shone, Justin Spring, Bill Thompson, Karen Van Dyck, Robyn Warhol, Jonathan Weinberg, and Glenn Willums. Betty Sams lent me a rare Baedeker. Sue Schweik lent me the talisman of Morgan’s calling card, found by her father in the pages of a book. Now it can go home again.
Thanks to the following people who granted me interviews: David Adkins, Tyringham MA and NYC (June 30, 2002; Aug. 21, 2002; Dec. 6, 2002), Gwyneth Barger, Lenox MA (June 27, 2002), Mollie Barger, Hampstead (July 24, 2001; June 26, 2009), Gary Haller, New Haven CT (June 28, 2002), Eugenie Rudd Fawcett, John Fawcett, Donald Fawcett, and Jim Fawcett, Tyringham MA (June 29, 2002), the late Mary Jackson, Los Angeles (Aug. 6, 2002), Bruce Kellner, Lancaster PA (March 14, 2003), Mary D. Kierstead, Tyringham MA (June 29, 2002), Francis King, Kensington (July 20, 2001), Bernard Perlin, Ridgefield CT (Sept. 30, 2001; Sept. 23, 2007), George
Tooker, Hartland VT (Sept. 28, 2001), Mark Lancaster, Jamestown RI (Feb. 24, 2007), Ed DeLuca, NYC (Sept. 25, 2007), Jon Anderson and Philis Raskind, Weston CT (Oct. 10, 2007), John Connolly and Ivan Ashby, Rosemont NJ (Oct. 5, 2007), George Lynes II and Jane Lynes, NYC (Oct. 11, 2007), Angela Hederman, NYC (Oct. 12, 2007), Don Bachardy, Santa Monica (Nov. 5, 2007), Jensen Yow, Califon, NJ (Nov. 20, 2007), Nick Furbank, London (June 6, 2008, June 24, 2009). Correspondence with Norman Coates, Lord Kennet, the late Mattei Radev, Mark Lancaster, and Tim Leggatt was illuminating. Thanks, too, to Barbara Roe and Kevin Greenback at the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge, for information about Malcolm and Josie Darling; to Karen Kukil and Barbara Blumenthal at the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College; to Shan McAnena at the Naughton Gallery, Queen’s University, Belfast; to Rick Frederick at the McNay Museum, San Antonio; to Wendy Hurlock Baker at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art; to Manuel Savidis at the Cavafy Archive; to Michael Spick at the Sheffield City Archives; and to Jeremy Megraw at the Photographic Collection of the Billy Rose Theater Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Special thanks to Pat Belshaw, Mark Lancaster, and the Buckingham family, for sharing photos and private memories.
Archival research at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale (Lynes, Wescott, Wheeler), Columbia University Archives (Trilling), Durham University Archives (Plomer and Morris), the Huntington Library (Isherwood), King’s College Modern Archives (Buckinghams, Dickinson, Forster, Sprott, Strachey), and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center (Kirstein, Martinez) and the Ransom Center for the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin (Ackerley, British Society for Sex Psychology, Darling) was made immeasurably more pleasant by the help of the librarians and archivists, Timothy Young, Patricia Willis, Nancy Kuhl, Sue Hodson, Andrew Grey, Jacky Cox, Rosalind Moad, Charles Perrin, and Thomas Staley. Thanks to Brad Meade and Dr. Brad Goff for the chance to look at remarkable paintings. At King’s Patricia McGuire knows everything and has done much more than she was asked to do. At crucial times Rachel Malkin, Lucy Kaufman, and Pat Fox were my eyes in archives afar; I thank them.
Thanks, too, for the assistance of staff at Amherst College, Bryn Mawr College, University of California at Berkeley, University of California at Los
Angeles, University of Chicago, Columbia University, University of Georgia, Hamilton College, University of Texas at Austin, Huntington Library, Washington and Lee University, and Yale. Also, Professors William Kelly Simpson and Gary Haller at Yale, Catherine Anne Johnson and the Kinsey Institute, John Stevenson, the Whitney Museum, DC Moore Gallery, Berkshire Historical Society, Berkshire Eagle, Tobin Gallery, Brandywine Museum, David Leddick, Cornelia Gilder, Alice Truax, Larry Simpson, James Seidel, Frank Lorenz, Bill Roberts, Andrew Patterson, Jay Satterfield, Peter Nelson, and Dennis Bitterlich. I am also grateful to Nicholas Jenkins, Lincoln Kirstein’s literary executor, for permission to read the Lincoln Kirstein Papers.
I am indebted to so many people, not only for the help and kindness they showed me but also for the freedom they afforded me in telling what is, at least in part, their story too. I have endeavored to be accurate and to be true. Any errors in this book are my own.
A long time ago, three extraordinary teachers taught me to think and to write. This book belongs to the memory of Richard Sewall, to Martin Price, and especially to my mentor and friend Alice Miskimin.
Writing this life evolved in the circle of my large and loving family. Archie and Fritz have been good company. My brothers, Gabe and James, my sisters, Lynn and Catherine, and my sisters-in-law, Nancy and Molly, have been a great support. My grandmother Jean’s presence is with me always, though she did not live to see this to the close. All the parents—my mother, Anne, my father and stepmother, Donald and Gwen, and my in-laws Barbara and Tracy—have looked forward to new chapters with the kind of eager anticipation that makes a writer want to keep going. I owe much of my sense of the texture of Forster’s England to my dad. And one of the particular pleasures of this long journey has been to watch my daughters, Lucy and Emma, develop into beautiful writers, whose own passions and ideas have become enmeshed in my work. Donald Kaufman, to whom the book is dedicated, is the love of my life.
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