A bio of E.M. Forster, possible breakthrough in fight against HIV
Articles for your perusal.
‘A GREAT UNRECORDED HISTORY’: A WRITER’S LIFE - AND SEXUALITY
By JANET MASLIN
c.2010 New York Times News Service
At the age of 4, Edward Morgan Forster learned etiquette from a book that was aptly titled “Don’t!”He grew up to become a figure of such excessive caution that, when asked if it was raining, he once walked slowly toward a window and answered, “I will try to decide.”
In 1911, when Forster was 32 and had lived barely a third of his life (he died in 1970, at 91), he was already experiencing “weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat - the love of men for women & vice versa.” Forster had already completed his greatest novels, “A Room With a View” (1908) and “Howards End” (1910), and would publish only one more during his lifetime. After 1924, when “A Passage to India” appeared, Forster seemingly abandoned the novel altogether.
Forster’s biographers have always had to make sense of their subject’s decision to withhold “Maurice,” his novel about homosexual lovers, for posthumous publication. (It appeared in 1971.) But none of those biographers have had either the will or the wherewithal to concentrate as closely on Forster’s sexuality as Wendy Moffat, an impressive first-time biographer who teaches at Dickinson College. In “A Great Unrecorded History,” she offers an insightful, revelatory portrait of a man who deeply resented having to hide such an important side of himself but who deemed “Maurice” to be “unpublishable until my death and England’s.”
Moffat, who refers to Forster as Morgan the way his friends did, casts intensive new light on what she calls “the mystery of Morgan’s strange broken-backed career.” She does so by drawing on Forster’s idiosyncratic diaries and letters, some of which remained unpublished until 2008, and by piecing together letters and biographies that reflect the wide range of Forster’s acquaintances. She is able to place him within a few degrees of separation from figures as diverse as T.E. Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence, Constantine Cavafy, Pete Townshend, Robert Mapplethorpe, Lincoln Kirstein and Gypsy Rose Lee. It was in the files of Alfred Kinsey, the sex researcher, that the odd and unguarded George Platt Lynes cover photograph of Forster was found.
Moffat, a vigorous storyteller, begins “A Great Unrecorded History” at a moment of high drama: when the “Maurice” manuscript arrived at the home of Christopher Isherwood in Santa Monica five months after Forster’s death. Isherwood had long known of the book and of Forster’s reluctance to let it see the light of day. Part of that reluctance was rooted in good reason: The Stonewall riots in New York were recent, and lingering Comstock laws made it potentially illegal to send a manuscript about homosexuality via the U.S. Postal Service.
As Isherwood showed “Maurice” to John Lehmann, the poet and publisher, Moffat writes, “the Bride of Frankenstein appeared.”Elsa Lanchester, who played Frankenstein’s bride on-screen, happened to live next door, and she had an “unnerving habit of appearing uninvited through hedges.” She may have had nothing to do with Forster, but tangential figures are never unwelcome in this colorful book.
After that prologue, Moffat goes back to Forster’s fraught childhood and his uncomfortable relationship with his mother.
“Lily came by her obtuse optimism honestly, and it later served her well,” Moffat writes about Lily Forster, in a deftly understated tone that, to Forster’s devoted readers, will sound apt and familiar. The thing about which his mother was most obtuse was Forster’s sexual orientation.
“I wish he were more manly and did not cry so easily,” she once said of her only son. For his part, Forster, when told that he ought to follow Andre Gide’s example and publish openly gay writing, replied: “But Gide hasn’t got a mother!”
By the time he attended King’s College, Cambridge, and made his first contacts with what would become the Bloomsbury group, Forster was well aware of his own preferences. But he was incapable of physical involvement; his affection for one friend of that era would be expressed through “long, earnest, fully clothed embraces, chaste kisses and florid talk of the Hellenistic ideal of friendship.” As that quote may indicate, “A Great Unrecorded History” sometimes veers close to violating the privacy that Forster guarded fiercely, though he made diary entries about his sexual experiences. This is no work of literary criticism, but neither is it one of gratuitous voyeurism.
Moffat’s overarching interests are in tracing Forster’s attitudes about sex and hypocrisy and in placing this increasingly outspoken figure within the context of his changing times. Like characters about whom he would write so superbly, he experienced an Englishman’s sensual delight in the discovery of Italian culture. But he traveled to Italy with his mother and did not experience real freedom until World War I, when he went to Alexandria, Egypt, with the Red Cross. It was in Alexandria that Forster achieved the physical breakthrough that he called “parting with Respectability” at the ripe old age of 37.
After that, he fell deeply in love with a young train conductor, experienced the breadth of gay life outside England’s confines and became capable of the observation from which the book takes its name. “I see beyond my own happiness and intimacy,” he wrote, “occasional glimpses of the happiness of 1000s of others whose names I shall never hear, and I know that there is a great unrecorded history.”
The older Forster, who wrote essays and assorted nonfiction and assumed the persona of a curmudgeonly literary eminence, became increasingly daring and sociable. His peculiar relationship with the younger, admiring T.E. Lawrence (Forster was en route to visit Lawrence on the day that Lawrence was fatally injured in a motorcycle accident) became the model for some of Forster’s subsequent friendships, many of which managed both to warm his heart and to try his patience. His longtime intimacy with Bob Buckingham, a married policeman, gave him the domesticity he had yearned for as he wrote “Maurice.”
And he spoke his mind ever more clearly. At 84, he looked back angrily on a lifetime spent in hiding. “How annoyed I am with Society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal,” he complained. “The subterfuges, the self-consciousness that might have been avoided.” Moffat casts more light on those subterfuges than has any Forster biographer before her.
PUBLICATION NOTES:
‘A GREAT UNRECORDED HISTORY
A New Life of E.M. Forster’
By Wendy Moffat
Illustrated. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 404 pages. $32.50.
Latest attempt to block HIV: Stronger vaginal gels
By LAURAN NEERGAARD
AP Medical Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Try after try to make vaginal creams that could repel the AIDS virus have failed. Now researchers are testing if a drug used to treat HIV infection finally might give women a tool to prevent it - by infusing the medicine into vaginal gels and contraceptive-style rings.
Even quick-dissolving anti-HIV films are being created, the same style now used for breath-fresheners or allergy medicines but made for fingertip application in the vagina.
Called microbicides, this kind of woman-controlled protection is considered key to battling the HIV epidemic - especially in developing countries where the virus is at its worst and women too often can’t get their partners to use a condom.
For two decades, scientists tried less powerful medications in disappointing microbicide attempts. Results from the first study to see if this new strategy works - South African women tested a gel made of the AIDS drug tenofovir - aren’t due until July.
But researchers gathering for the biennial International Microbicides Conference in Pittsburgh next weekend express cautious optimism.
“Frankly, blocking transmission of the virus appears to be a lot harder than anyone understood it would be at the beginning,” says meeting co-chair Dr. Sharon Hillier of the University of Pittsburgh and a principal investigator of the Microbicide Trials Network.
“The reason we’re not depressed in the microbicide world? We actually have learned a lot and moved on to think about potent drugs and really cool delivery methods.”
Antiretroviral drugs have revolutionized AIDS care, helping people live far longer with the virus. They’ve also successfully lowered the risk that an infected pregnant woman passes HIV to her child. So it was logical for scientists to begin testing whether swallowing an antiretroviral drug every day could protect the still healthy, both men and women, from getting infected. More than half a dozen studies of this so-called pre-exposure prophylaxis are under way among high-risk populations around the world, largely using the drug tenofovir because it tends to cause fewer side effects than many other AIDS drugs.
Even if that eventually proves protective, taking daily pills has drawbacks - systemic side effects, the risk of drug resistance, what happens if people miss a dose or share tablets with an already infected relative - that make the approach controversial.
Hence the need for topical protection, too. Women already make up half of the more than 33 million people worldwide living with HIV, and most of the new infections in hardest-hit sub-Saharan Africa are among young women.
“I have in fact so little to offer them in terms of HIV prevention that I sort of tear my hair out,” says Dr. Salim Abdool Karim of the Centre for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
He led the pending tenofovir gel study, his ninth microbicide study since 1994. “It must take a certain level of perseverance to want to stay in this field.”
In those years, scientists discovered that cells on the vaginal surface aren’t big targets of HIV, yet the virus somehow fairly quickly penetrates to a much more susceptible second layer. Monkey studies show a small population of “founder” cells apparently reproduce in that spot for a few days before the virus is ready to spread, Hillier says. Drugs like tenofovir block HIV’s replication in the already infected, suggesting they’re a good try for that window period, she explains.
And tenofovir concentrates in vaginal tissue at far higher levels via a gel than a pill - with little spread of the drug elsewhere, easing side-effect concerns, adds Karim.
His study recruited 900 HIV-negative heterosexual women to test whether tenofovir gel, applied up to 12 hours before intercourse and again within 12 hours afterward, lowered the risk of infection.
While awaiting his results in July, the U.S. National Institutes of Health is funding the next step: Researchers now are recruiting up to 5,000 healthy women in several African countries to use either vaginal tenofovir gel - daily rather than timed around intercourse - or daily pills containing the drug. It’s the first comparison of the two strategies.
Taking a lesson from contraception - that more choices equal more usage - researchers are developing other potential tenofovir methods, too: A quick-dissolve tenofovir vaginal film, with less mess to be completely invisible to the partner. Vaginal rings that could ooze tenofovir into the vagina over a month. And for gay men, a rectal tenofovir.
Health workers should be thinking now about the challenges should any of these attempts work, Dr. Regina Osih of the University of Witwatersrand will tell next week’s microbicide meeting. Access is a big question in already overburdened regions - as is how often users would need HIV testing to be sure the protection’s working.
---
EDITOR’s NOTE - Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.
‘A GREAT UNRECORDED HISTORY’: A WRITER’S LIFE - AND SEXUALITY
By JANET MASLIN
c.2010 New York Times News Service
At the age of 4, Edward Morgan Forster learned etiquette from a book that was aptly titled “Don’t!”He grew up to become a figure of such excessive caution that, when asked if it was raining, he once walked slowly toward a window and answered, “I will try to decide.”
In 1911, when Forster was 32 and had lived barely a third of his life (he died in 1970, at 91), he was already experiencing “weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat - the love of men for women & vice versa.” Forster had already completed his greatest novels, “A Room With a View” (1908) and “Howards End” (1910), and would publish only one more during his lifetime. After 1924, when “A Passage to India” appeared, Forster seemingly abandoned the novel altogether.
Forster’s biographers have always had to make sense of their subject’s decision to withhold “Maurice,” his novel about homosexual lovers, for posthumous publication. (It appeared in 1971.) But none of those biographers have had either the will or the wherewithal to concentrate as closely on Forster’s sexuality as Wendy Moffat, an impressive first-time biographer who teaches at Dickinson College. In “A Great Unrecorded History,” she offers an insightful, revelatory portrait of a man who deeply resented having to hide such an important side of himself but who deemed “Maurice” to be “unpublishable until my death and England’s.”
Moffat, who refers to Forster as Morgan the way his friends did, casts intensive new light on what she calls “the mystery of Morgan’s strange broken-backed career.” She does so by drawing on Forster’s idiosyncratic diaries and letters, some of which remained unpublished until 2008, and by piecing together letters and biographies that reflect the wide range of Forster’s acquaintances. She is able to place him within a few degrees of separation from figures as diverse as T.E. Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence, Constantine Cavafy, Pete Townshend, Robert Mapplethorpe, Lincoln Kirstein and Gypsy Rose Lee. It was in the files of Alfred Kinsey, the sex researcher, that the odd and unguarded George Platt Lynes cover photograph of Forster was found.
Moffat, a vigorous storyteller, begins “A Great Unrecorded History” at a moment of high drama: when the “Maurice” manuscript arrived at the home of Christopher Isherwood in Santa Monica five months after Forster’s death. Isherwood had long known of the book and of Forster’s reluctance to let it see the light of day. Part of that reluctance was rooted in good reason: The Stonewall riots in New York were recent, and lingering Comstock laws made it potentially illegal to send a manuscript about homosexuality via the U.S. Postal Service.
As Isherwood showed “Maurice” to John Lehmann, the poet and publisher, Moffat writes, “the Bride of Frankenstein appeared.”Elsa Lanchester, who played Frankenstein’s bride on-screen, happened to live next door, and she had an “unnerving habit of appearing uninvited through hedges.” She may have had nothing to do with Forster, but tangential figures are never unwelcome in this colorful book.
After that prologue, Moffat goes back to Forster’s fraught childhood and his uncomfortable relationship with his mother.
“Lily came by her obtuse optimism honestly, and it later served her well,” Moffat writes about Lily Forster, in a deftly understated tone that, to Forster’s devoted readers, will sound apt and familiar. The thing about which his mother was most obtuse was Forster’s sexual orientation.
“I wish he were more manly and did not cry so easily,” she once said of her only son. For his part, Forster, when told that he ought to follow Andre Gide’s example and publish openly gay writing, replied: “But Gide hasn’t got a mother!”
By the time he attended King’s College, Cambridge, and made his first contacts with what would become the Bloomsbury group, Forster was well aware of his own preferences. But he was incapable of physical involvement; his affection for one friend of that era would be expressed through “long, earnest, fully clothed embraces, chaste kisses and florid talk of the Hellenistic ideal of friendship.” As that quote may indicate, “A Great Unrecorded History” sometimes veers close to violating the privacy that Forster guarded fiercely, though he made diary entries about his sexual experiences. This is no work of literary criticism, but neither is it one of gratuitous voyeurism.
Moffat’s overarching interests are in tracing Forster’s attitudes about sex and hypocrisy and in placing this increasingly outspoken figure within the context of his changing times. Like characters about whom he would write so superbly, he experienced an Englishman’s sensual delight in the discovery of Italian culture. But he traveled to Italy with his mother and did not experience real freedom until World War I, when he went to Alexandria, Egypt, with the Red Cross. It was in Alexandria that Forster achieved the physical breakthrough that he called “parting with Respectability” at the ripe old age of 37.
After that, he fell deeply in love with a young train conductor, experienced the breadth of gay life outside England’s confines and became capable of the observation from which the book takes its name. “I see beyond my own happiness and intimacy,” he wrote, “occasional glimpses of the happiness of 1000s of others whose names I shall never hear, and I know that there is a great unrecorded history.”
The older Forster, who wrote essays and assorted nonfiction and assumed the persona of a curmudgeonly literary eminence, became increasingly daring and sociable. His peculiar relationship with the younger, admiring T.E. Lawrence (Forster was en route to visit Lawrence on the day that Lawrence was fatally injured in a motorcycle accident) became the model for some of Forster’s subsequent friendships, many of which managed both to warm his heart and to try his patience. His longtime intimacy with Bob Buckingham, a married policeman, gave him the domesticity he had yearned for as he wrote “Maurice.”
And he spoke his mind ever more clearly. At 84, he looked back angrily on a lifetime spent in hiding. “How annoyed I am with Society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal,” he complained. “The subterfuges, the self-consciousness that might have been avoided.” Moffat casts more light on those subterfuges than has any Forster biographer before her.
PUBLICATION NOTES:
‘A GREAT UNRECORDED HISTORY
A New Life of E.M. Forster’
By Wendy Moffat
Illustrated. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 404 pages. $32.50.
Latest attempt to block HIV: Stronger vaginal gels
By LAURAN NEERGAARD
AP Medical Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Try after try to make vaginal creams that could repel the AIDS virus have failed. Now researchers are testing if a drug used to treat HIV infection finally might give women a tool to prevent it - by infusing the medicine into vaginal gels and contraceptive-style rings.
Even quick-dissolving anti-HIV films are being created, the same style now used for breath-fresheners or allergy medicines but made for fingertip application in the vagina.
Called microbicides, this kind of woman-controlled protection is considered key to battling the HIV epidemic - especially in developing countries where the virus is at its worst and women too often can’t get their partners to use a condom.
For two decades, scientists tried less powerful medications in disappointing microbicide attempts. Results from the first study to see if this new strategy works - South African women tested a gel made of the AIDS drug tenofovir - aren’t due until July.
But researchers gathering for the biennial International Microbicides Conference in Pittsburgh next weekend express cautious optimism.
“Frankly, blocking transmission of the virus appears to be a lot harder than anyone understood it would be at the beginning,” says meeting co-chair Dr. Sharon Hillier of the University of Pittsburgh and a principal investigator of the Microbicide Trials Network.
“The reason we’re not depressed in the microbicide world? We actually have learned a lot and moved on to think about potent drugs and really cool delivery methods.”
Antiretroviral drugs have revolutionized AIDS care, helping people live far longer with the virus. They’ve also successfully lowered the risk that an infected pregnant woman passes HIV to her child. So it was logical for scientists to begin testing whether swallowing an antiretroviral drug every day could protect the still healthy, both men and women, from getting infected. More than half a dozen studies of this so-called pre-exposure prophylaxis are under way among high-risk populations around the world, largely using the drug tenofovir because it tends to cause fewer side effects than many other AIDS drugs.
Even if that eventually proves protective, taking daily pills has drawbacks - systemic side effects, the risk of drug resistance, what happens if people miss a dose or share tablets with an already infected relative - that make the approach controversial.
Hence the need for topical protection, too. Women already make up half of the more than 33 million people worldwide living with HIV, and most of the new infections in hardest-hit sub-Saharan Africa are among young women.
“I have in fact so little to offer them in terms of HIV prevention that I sort of tear my hair out,” says Dr. Salim Abdool Karim of the Centre for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
He led the pending tenofovir gel study, his ninth microbicide study since 1994. “It must take a certain level of perseverance to want to stay in this field.”
In those years, scientists discovered that cells on the vaginal surface aren’t big targets of HIV, yet the virus somehow fairly quickly penetrates to a much more susceptible second layer. Monkey studies show a small population of “founder” cells apparently reproduce in that spot for a few days before the virus is ready to spread, Hillier says. Drugs like tenofovir block HIV’s replication in the already infected, suggesting they’re a good try for that window period, she explains.
And tenofovir concentrates in vaginal tissue at far higher levels via a gel than a pill - with little spread of the drug elsewhere, easing side-effect concerns, adds Karim.
His study recruited 900 HIV-negative heterosexual women to test whether tenofovir gel, applied up to 12 hours before intercourse and again within 12 hours afterward, lowered the risk of infection.
While awaiting his results in July, the U.S. National Institutes of Health is funding the next step: Researchers now are recruiting up to 5,000 healthy women in several African countries to use either vaginal tenofovir gel - daily rather than timed around intercourse - or daily pills containing the drug. It’s the first comparison of the two strategies.
Taking a lesson from contraception - that more choices equal more usage - researchers are developing other potential tenofovir methods, too: A quick-dissolve tenofovir vaginal film, with less mess to be completely invisible to the partner. Vaginal rings that could ooze tenofovir into the vagina over a month. And for gay men, a rectal tenofovir.
Health workers should be thinking now about the challenges should any of these attempts work, Dr. Regina Osih of the University of Witwatersrand will tell next week’s microbicide meeting. Access is a big question in already overburdened regions - as is how often users would need HIV testing to be sure the protection’s working.
---
EDITOR’s NOTE - Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.