For several decades EM Forster was involved in a love triangle with a policeman and his wife – an unconventional arrangement in which the novelist found happiness
EM Forster … the motto 'only connect' applied as much to his private life as to his novels. Photograph: B Gaye
For 40 years, EM Forster and the policeman Bob Buckingham were in a loving relationship. Buckingham was 28, Forster 51, when the two met. They shared holidays, friends, interests, and – on many weekends – a domestic and sexual life in Forster's Brunswick Square flat. But this was a relationship in which there were three people. In his memoir My Father and Myself, Forster's great friend JR Ackerley wrote that the problem of the girlfriend was "all too liable to be found in the lives of normal boys … Since women could not be excluded they had to be admitted ... the Ideal Friend could have a girl or wife if he wished, so long as she did not interfere with me. No wife ever failed to interfere with me." The same was true for Forster, but the wife who "interfered" in his life – Buckingham's wife, May – also became his friend and nursemaid. Perhaps this is not so surprising for the writer who valued personal relationships above all else, and for whom the motto "only connect" applied as much to his private life as to his novels. Who else but Forster could end up becoming firm friends with his lover's wife, and godparent to her child?
It's easy to see why Buckingham's vigour and toughness were attractive qualities for Forster. As a child, he was cast in the role of the "delicate" boy, always wrapped up and fussed over by his mother Lily, and always with half an eye on the farm boys next door. At Tonbridge Prep School, where the motto was "Perish every laggard, and let us all be men", Forster was, predictably, badly bullied. Even at Cambridge, where he discovered real camaraderie and love between men, Lytton Strachey christened him "the Taupe". A "real" man, bluff, beefy and beautiful, was evidently irresistible
His relationship with Buckingham was not his first with a policeman: he'd already enjoyed a brief dalliance with Harry Daley, who was, for the Bloomsbury set of the 1920s and 30s, something of a celebrity young tough. Daley regularly entertained Ackerley, Duncan Grant and Forster at the Hammersmith Section House, treating them to bacon and eggs and boxing matches. Forster also had a fling with a bus driver named Arthur, which ended after Arthur's wife kicked up a stink. Forster wrote to Ackerley: "It is not my policy, even were it within my power, to break up homes." Of the affair, he noted in his diary: "Coarseness and tenderness have kissed one another, but imaginative passion, love, doesn't exist with the lower classes."
Full story at The Guardian
It's easy to see why Buckingham's vigour and toughness were attractive qualities for Forster. As a child, he was cast in the role of the "delicate" boy, always wrapped up and fussed over by his mother Lily, and always with half an eye on the farm boys next door. At Tonbridge Prep School, where the motto was "Perish every laggard, and let us all be men", Forster was, predictably, badly bullied. Even at Cambridge, where he discovered real camaraderie and love between men, Lytton Strachey christened him "the Taupe". A "real" man, bluff, beefy and beautiful, was evidently irresistibleHis relationship with Buckingham was not his first with a policeman: he'd already enjoyed a brief dalliance with Harry Daley, who was, for the Bloomsbury set of the 1920s and 30s, something of a celebrity young tough. Daley regularly entertained Ackerley, Duncan Grant and Forster at the Hammersmith Section House, treating them to bacon and eggs and boxing matches. Forster also had a fling with a bus driver named Arthur, which ended after Arthur's wife kicked up a stink. Forster wrote to Ackerley: "It is not my policy, even were it within my power, to break up homes." Of the affair, he noted in his diary: "Coarseness and tenderness have kissed one another, but imaginative passion, love, doesn't exist with the lower classes."
Full story at The Guardian
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