18th January
In January 1915 he was thinking about risk, and gloom. Having finished Maurice, and knowing that prevailing attitudes about homosexuality meant it could not be published, he asked the novelist Forrest Reid if he would read it. Forster worried that 'it might put a severe strain on our friendship, which terrifies me’. More brightly, he noted that he had been much cheered by meeting D.H. Lawrence at a dinner party. He found him 'extraordinarily nice’, and described him as 'a sandy haired passionate Nibelung’ (in Wagner’s Ring cycle of operas, a Nibelung is a dwarf). (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 23 January 1915)
