The British writer E. M. Forster had sex for the first time when he was 37, in 1916, on a beach in Egypt, with a convalescent soldier, after decades of dithering and yearning. By that momentous day of “parting with Respect­ability” (his words), Forster had already published four novels (

), all of which evaded his sexual inexperience. He had written a fifth, 

, that he feared to publish because of its explicitly homosexual content. Morgan, as Forster was known to friends, willed for the book’s male lovers the idealized romantic arrange­ment and happy ending that he sought in his own life but could not pursue publicly lest he be Reading Gaoled. So Maurice was not published until 1971, the year after Morgan’s death, and, ironic comeuppance for the dream­er, it’s the least persuasive of his ­novels.

The “great unre­corded history” in the title of Wendy Mof­fat’s biography is the roundelay of sexual approaches, evasions, couplings, swap­pings, and uncoup­lings shared over the years by Morgan and his circle of homosexual (queer but not yet officially gay) friends, lovers, acquain­tances, and confidantes. “Though he burned great bonfires of ephem­era,” Moffat writes, “Morgan carefully pre­served the record of his gay life. Thousands of unpublished pages of letters, diaries, essays, and photographs tell the story of the life he hid from public view. . . . Only in 2008 were the final entries in his private diary, restricted from view since his death, opened to readers.” Moffat’s frank account of how Forster bal­anced a public self with the private self revealed in the withheld materials might seem as rude as a home invasion had the man himself not left the door ajar and gambled that someone would eventually take a boot to ­it.

The broad details of Forster’s life are familiar from previous biographies: fatherless childhood, a flowering in the moist male hothouse atmosphere of Cambridge, service with the International Red Cross in World War I, literary fame and international celebrity, time abroad in Italy, Greece, Egypt, India, and America. Moffat, an English professor at Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, views the life from the slant of sexuality, and that makes for a necessarily straitened perspective. The problem is not Forster’s sexual orientation as such, but the primacy given it. Being homosexual may have been the central fact of Forster’s life, but it’s a fact implicated in a grand filigree of facts Moffat does not pretend to convey. They’re available elsewhere. The sexual revelations here are golden and ­addictive—­and surely respectable, because ­archival.

Though late to sex, Forster made up for lost time: “By the mid-1920s, Morgan began to get the hang of the double life. In answer to a query from Joe [the author J. R. Ackerley] he totted up a full accounting of his sexual partners: 18 to Joe’s 200 or so. Morgan celebrated their variety if not their numbers.” But then, he still had a lot of years ahead of him. He moved through the 20th century in the changing company of an honor roll of gay and bisexual celebrities, among them Ackerley, Christopher Isherwood, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury gang, Siegfried Sassoon, Constantine Cavafy, W. H. Auden, Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, Glenway Westcott, Benjamin Britten, and Alfred Kinsey (why not?). Yet, he confessed, none of his “inti­mates” was “eminent.” The love of his life turned out to be a burly young British cop he met in 1930. It was in the cop’s home that he died 40 years later, attended by the man’s wife. The rules of attraction defy ­codification.

“So great and honest a writer and so humane a man” is Moffat’s judgment of Forster. One wants to believe her, though Forster emerges from this book a figure at once more complete and somewhat ­dimin­ished—­the price of ­full-­to-­overflowing disclosure. Though he may have chosen to record them, there are things about him that we never needed to know. For instance: “Riding in a carriage one afternoon, the mere thought that his wrist might brush the arm of the young Indian beside him made Morgan ejaculate into his trousers.” (The squeamish may here wince less at Morgan’s ­hair-­trigger sensibilities than at the failure of Moffat’s intro­ductory participle to brush its intended noun.) A diary entry at age 82 assures an afterlife for the day’s erection and orgasm: “The worm that never dies must have given its last wriggle this morning.” Perhaps. The man did live till 91. And oh, that worm in its salad days. When he was close to 70, on a visit to America, Forster was taken to Central Park for, in Moffat’s words, “a glorious night of casual sex.” Only connect, ­indeed.

"A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster" 

by Wendy Moffat, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010. 

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With new access to archived letters and diaries we gain a fresh perspective on E. M. Forster's private life.

Morgan's End

Eric Burns’s lapel-grabbing title does his book a disservice. The invocation of a 1956 sci-fi movie that made people wary of watermelons is at odds with his more sober judgments about how the new medium changed the country. Television did not turn us into zombies: “What we Americans learned to do as the fifties progressed was incorporate television into our lives rather than allow our lives to be controlled by it. The medium became a choice rather than a czar.”

Not much to argue with there, even for those of us who watched test patterns on off-the-air channels during the late ’40s and early ’50s. The wonder of the motionless patterns identifying the idle channels was that they existed at all, grayish and humming, right there in our living rooms. Though the technology had been around for decades, TV sets did not become household items till the postwar ’40s. With remarkable speed, television then moved from marginal to mainstream.

The first half of Burns’s history is a scattershot survey of television’s encroachment on American life, a process that altered everything from where and when we ate dinner to how we picked our toothpastes and our presidents. He hopscotches his way across the decade, landing on an interesting trend here (television had a calming effect on persistent viewers) and an alarming one there (“the fifties were a time of frivolity . . . fads ruled”). Hula-Hoops, Pez dispensers, pedal pushers, and ponytails, he argues, distracted us from serious thought—as if a Hula-Hooper would otherwise have been reading Hegel. A Davy Crockett coonskin cap has for Burns the temporal pull of a Proustian cookie, and the audience most likely to appreciate the cascading detail in his narrative are grownups of his own advanced baby-boomer age willing to be pulled back with him to the analog America of their childhoods.

Burns, author of five other books, grants the ’50s a 

–like expansiveness; the decade seeps forward, backward, and sideways. Narrative discipline and chronology are not his strong suits, and as sociologist and cultural critic he repeatedly invites interruption. What does it mean, for example, to call the ’50s “a uniquely vexing and eclectic decade”? More vexing than the ’30s, or ’60s, or now? He thinks that the ’50s were “a fulcrum that tipped from yesterday to tomorrow,” and then makes that fulcrum do somersaults, taking us from Graham Greene’s novel 

In the second, and more coherent, half of the book, Burns revisits the effects television had on politics, religion, and the movements for civil and women’s rights. He gets to recall a cast of marvelous midcentury characters, including Senators Kefauver (crime fighter) and McCarthy (alarmist); avuncular, calculating Ike; Dick Nixon on offense and defense, Pat Nixon in her respectable Republican cloth coat, and Checkers the family dog; Amos, Andy, and, uh-oh, the politically incorrect Kingfish; über-Catholic Fulton Sheen and entrepreneurial evangelist Oral Roberts; quiz show cheater Charles Van Doren; and brave black students kept from their classrooms and threatened with violence. All found their televised way to America’s homes, and the nation was riveted. Burns’s lively retrospective glides smoothly through their stories, at about the depth of a standard TV documentary. Eric Burns is not Ken Burns, and that’s all to the good; the reader stays awake for the duration.

“Television was nothing when the fifties started, everything when they ended,” writes the sober Burns, who immediately turns into the suspect sociologist: “But with time and circumstance Americans had lost not only their initial enthusiasm for the medium; we had lost our belief in its veracity and good intentions, and for most of us, neither quality would be fully restored.” That’s a statement as worthy of a place in the serious annals of mass disenchantment as the curtain pull on the Wizard of Oz.

Within a few years of its primitive beginnings, commercial television had headed down paths of evolution and devolution that it travels to this day. The basic programming genres were set—drama, comedy, politics, news, sports, games, even competitive humiliation (

). Ahead lay proliferation, refinement, coarsening, and endlessly burgeoning fallout. This past summer, the sitting president of the United States sat within the estrogen-laced precincts of ABC’s 

, the coffee klatch as art form. The president did so willingly and could not, for once, blame his predecessor. He was merely catching a cultural wave that began as a ripple in Burns’s distant ’50s, has gathered force ever since, and shows no signs of breaking. Not even on the 

Invasion of the Mind Snatchers: Television's Conquest of America in the Fifties

 by Eric Burns, Temple University Press, 342 pp, 2010.

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“Television was nothing when the fifties started, everything when they ended,” writes Eric Burns.

NewTube

In separate books, Ted C. Fishman and Susan Jacoby both cry crisis, but in different registers of alarm. Their common theme is the disruptive effects, on nations and individuals, of the coming worldwide increase in the ranks of the aged. Fishman tends toward dispassion; Jacoby, toward exasperation. He’s a better guide to the scale of the changes; she’s more adept at making them painful and personal. Both sound wake-up calls that go on till afternoon, long after they’ve made their points. But their troubling message needs to be heard. Take it in, perhaps with a glass of aged scotch.

Fishman is a cool-headed observer, whether as journalist, demographer, or sociologist, and has done a prodigious amount of research. He piles on the facts and figures, from the biological to the economic, the transnational to the domestic, and leaves the worst of their possible consequences to our extrapolating imaginations. Five of his 10 chapters have a geographic focus, on aging populations in two American cities—upscale Sarasota, Florida, and downscale Rockford, Illinois—and in the nations of Spain, Japan, and China. (Several chapter titles even manage to put a smiley face on the dour demographics: “Señor Moment: Spain’s Discovery of Age,” “Japan, Land of the Missing Son.”) Each geographic chapter is headed by attention-grabbing demographic data specific to the region. Thus, there will be 66 million Americans over the age of 65 in 2025. There were 167 million Chinese over the age of 60 in 2009, and the estimate is for 438 million in 2050; indeed, China in 2025 “will be home to one-fifth of the world’s population, but home to one-fourth of all people over 65.” By 2050, Spain is projected to have a higher proportion of people over 65—37 percent—than any other country in the world.

How will nations so configured, with declining birthrates, sustain their economic status and prevent crippling fissures in their societies? Where will they find the resources, psychic and financial, to attend to the new numbers of the aged, and on what haphazard landscape of homes, hospitals, hospices, asylums?

Fishman’s geographic chapters are interlaced with others reflecting on various aspects of aging. There is, for example, a universal sequence to how we age physically, and Fishman summarizes it deftly, decade by decade, in a dozen pages that may leave you gone fetal on the floor. Our bodies destroy themselves daily at the molecular level (“We begin to die while still in the womb”) in their progress from the pulled muscles of age 30 to the slack, papery skin and dementia of 80. But the inevitable deterioration doesn't necessarily hasten death. Thanks, if that’s the word, to stubborn genes or the holding-pattern powers of medicine, the ancient mad may one day number countless millions around the world.

Buried deep in Fishman’s book is an inspired subhead, a backhanded (backsided?) homage to the columnist Thomas L. Friedman: “The World Is Flatulent.” The page is a nice example of how the macro-minded Fishman can also narrow his range, here to foresee a future of better bathrooms for the aged: “Toilets will sport stylish handrails, lift and drop on command, and even spray water in places that older people have a hard time reaching. And because the physical effects of age befoul the air, the toilet deodorizes its bowl, its user, and the room.” Well, that’s something.

Little about the gassy world to come leaves Susan Jacoby composed. She derides the myths we’re fed about aging in favor of what to her is the evident reality. She skewers Americans’ fashionable tendency to deny age and postpone death with a lifestyle cocktail of scientific advances, chemical procedures, Pilates, vegetables, and no desserts but their just deserts. She dismisses the psychobabble that calls old age “a time of placid contemplation” or tells the aged they’re not getting older, just wiser and happier and freer. She’s a secularist and an atheist, and she counters arguments that push the nobility of suffering and oppose what she calls “rational” suicide.

Jacoby makes an essential distinction between the “young old” and the “old old.” It’s the young old (among whom, at 65, she counts herself) who write books about the privileges of old age and the new opportunities for finding fulfillment by embracing every claptrap mantra and junk promise that society pitches. The higher wisdom of the moment routinely makes a distinction between chronological age and “real” age. Real age is now what you and your lifestyle will it to be. Real age sends those fond-hope and fat-chance birthday assurances that 70 is the new 50. Yet for every paragliding 80-year-old there are legions of immobile others, pressed to submission by disease or the stony weight of madness.

Chances are the young old won’t be cheerleaders for longevity when they cross the line to join the old old, the shuttered, stumbling, ailing, diapered, defecating, delusional, and adrift old. And it’s the likely growing number of the latter that alarms Jacoby. Madness is much on her mind: “The most important thing Americans need to know about dementia is how many of the old—nearly half of those over 85—are affected. The prevalence of Alzheimer’s doubles in every five-year period over age 65. These statistics cannot be cited often enough.” Science is apparently not close to a cure for dementia, even as scientific, medical, and public health advances keep us alive the extra years that put us at increasing risk for the condition. America is not prepared—and not preparing—to cope with a great population of devastated minds.

“The two overwhelming problems of real old age in the United States today,” Jacoby writes, “are health, which generally worsens over time, and the tendency of all but the richest Americans to grow poorer as they grow older.” The most crippling side effect of prolonged illness is often impoverishment, and that reality will not abate as years are added to lives. Science may one day cure diseases that today are intractable, she acknowledges, but faith in a future redeemed by science must not keep us from doing what the old need now, such as expanding Medicare to help cover “the open-ended care of those who may live for years with Alzheimer’s.”

Jacoby wears her New Yorker’s passion on every page and her liberal politics on almost as many. She wants “a new intergenerational contract that covers social welfare needs for Americans of all generations,” and she would “tax all income, including that of people over 65, at a level necessary to maintain the kind of social safety net that exists in every other developed country—which would include comprehensive health insurance for the young as well as benefits for the old.” Amid the current fierce divisions over health care in this country, her proposals are below the level of the quixotic.

A doomed agenda, then—unless, Jacoby suggests, America’s aging, privileged boomer generation can be persuaded to come to the rescue and use its shortened breath to demand it. To the confluence of developments explored in her book—the medical advances that delay death but may not soon cure the ailments that ravage the extra years, the bankrupting costs to individuals of coping with extended life that is no more than half-life—add one that might have a disproportionate effect. As the charmed boomers come up against the limits of the immortality they had assumed for themselves, they may decide to conclude their lifelong litany of demands with an insistence that old old age and death, if they do have to occur, treat their cohort with due deference and at minimal expense.

In the end, at the end, living and dying both earn their clichés. The dice are rolled, the wheel is spun, and some of us are lucky, and some not. It alters nothing to rail against the roster of reasons why, whether a divine plan, planetary alignment, or bum genes. Does age at least bring wisdom? (Another myth, Jacoby says.) The evidence is mixed. When Verdi was almost 80, he wrote 

and set his librettist’s final lines—life is a farce and makes fools of us all; laugh last and you laugh best—to music that itself whirls and laughs. When Sophocles was near 90, he wrote 

, and his chorus sang that anyone who wants a long life is a fool; not to be born is best, but next best is to die as soon as possible. Amen to them both.

 and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center. 

"Shock of Gray: The Aging of the World's Population and How It Pits Young Against Old, Child Against Parent, Worker Against Boss, Company Against Rival, and Nation Against Nation" 

"Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age"

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How will nations with large numbers of aging and declining birthrates sustain their economic status and prevent crippling fissures in their societies?

The Old Story

The crisis in American education—prenatal to postdoctoral—may be the nation’s longest-running soap opera. It’s hard to remember a time when there wasn’t hand-wringing about what was going on at one educational level or another. An acronymed army of councils and commissions and such thrives on stoking our unease and risks anaesthetizing our attention. How bracing, then, to hear a single voice as literate and reasonable as Andrew Delbanco’s. His message in 

 may be little more encouraging in the end than that of the furrow-browed alarmists, but it’s delivered with the high civility and spacious reach of the educational ideal he ardently defends.

Delbanco, a much-lauded scholar and teacher of American literature and culture at Columbia University, makes no arguments that other clear-eyed observers of American higher education have not. What commends his book is its richness of reference and its willingness to charge colleges and universities with lapses that should sow insomnia among administrators. “One generalization, I think, applies across the board: There is a sense of drift,” he writes. And after describing the ethical knottiness of the more selective institutions’ admissions policies, he observes, “The stark fact is that America’s colleges … have lately been reinforcing more than ameliorating the disparity of wealth and opportunity in American society.”

To a remarkable extent in so slim a volume, Delbanco acknowledges, if only glancingly, the universe of possible contemporary realizations of the word “college,” including those that exist nowhere but in the ghost precincts of computer programs. His fondest association of the word is with the undergraduate education characteristic of the nation’s liberal arts institutions: four-year residential colleges that are not part of universities—a Carleton College or Wellesley College, for example, as distinct from Yale College or Harvard College—“where most students study subjects that are not narrowly vocational.”

Such institutions, “virtually unknown outside the Anglo-American world,” barely register on the numerical margin even in America, where they enroll some 100,000 students. Measure that number against community college enrollments exceeding six million and a total undergraduate population of about 18 million.

What alarms Delbanco is the increasing disappearance of the general humanistic education American colleges have offered from their Puritan beginnings down through centuries of curricular refinement and adjustment. (A fair criticism of the book is that it too often blurs the line between the humanistic education available at an independent college and that available at an institution such as Delbanco’s own university.) It’s an education heavily dependent on literature, philosophy, and history, and suffused with a fundamental moral and ethical dimension. It’s an education that’s communal and lateral—students (and faculty) learn from one another; for Delbanco, the importance of that practice cannot be overvalued. It’s an education that urges students to consider the great recurrent questions about their place in the world and their responsibilities to a larger community, an education that punctuates the words “How to live” first with a question mark and then with a period, and yet again, perhaps, with a question mark.

Alas, it’s not an education that answers overtly the question “How do I earn a living?”—and there the rub for the humanities and liberal arts has always been. No surprise, then, that “literature, history, philosophy, and the arts are becoming the stepchildren of our colleges.” Even at colleges embedded within elite universities, the number of humanities majors in graduating classes is shrinking. Between 1990 and 2009, for instance, the proportion of such majors dropped at Stanford from 20 percent to 15 percent, at Brown from 37 percent to 24 percent, and at Yale from 50 percent to 33 percent.

Education in the humanities is not antithetical to the sciences, which are to be embraced for their separate understanding of the natural world. But the humanities will never be the sciences, despite attempts to impose on them a scientific rigor. The humanities don’t generate new knowledge, as the sciences repeatedly do. They maintain and burnish the old knowledge, the truths about humanity that carry no date and every date, and they display that knowledge for discovery and contemplation and challenge by new generations.

When the humanities mimic the technical, they hope for—what, exactly? Delbanco cites (dismissively) a “literature lab” at Stanford “where teams of graduate students perform searches of digitized texts looking for patterns of recurrent words that signal shifts in theme or style over the long history of prose fiction.” There’s nothing new about the grim rigor; classical scholars once made entire careers of counting predigitized Greek particles (sweet that the word leads a double life in syntax and in science). May all the counters rest in unvisited tombs.

Few nonfiction book titles stand upright these days without the crutch of a subtitle, often of novella length, but Delbanco’s subtitle is almost as stark as his title. What college should be for Delbanco is in large measure what it has traditionally been, for at least a segment of colleges. What it will be is another matter, because the crises higher education faces today may be fatally destructive of precious traditions.

Delbanco worries that liberal arts education, even when suitably tweaked to meet contemporary circumstances, may not have a future. The passion of his advocacy is evident, but it’s leashed by a rueful recognition of today’s fiscal and demographic realities: the rise in tuition and other costs at colleges, and the decline in interest among matriculants. Still, he’s convinced that the current debate about what a college education should be — and for whom it should be — will benefit from the statement of “some fundamental principles that have been inherited from the past, are under radical challenge in the present, and, in my view, remain indispensable for the future.”

Delbanco sketches the evolution of the American college from its New England beginnings. He traces the emergence of the research university, in the latter part of the 19th century, as both a haven for liberal arts education — some of the most elite colleges in the country are within universities — and a threat to it, because too many university professors believe that the requirement to appear before undergraduates in a classroom is a distraction from their real work of research. He notes the changing character of student populations as colleges and universities have gradually altered their once exclusionary ways, though these ways may simply have taken new forms: “Need-blind admissions, for instance, is an admirable ideal, but it can be little more than a feel-good slogan if a college concentrates its recruiting in places like Scarsdale or Riyadh.”

He indicts the failure of colleges “to reconnect their students to the idea that good fortune confers a responsibility to live generously toward the less fortunate.” He urges that we increase the number of college teachers who are trained to teach and who welcome their time in the classroom — who believe, in short, that students are the point of college. He’s hopeful enough to wonder whether the technologies that are altering the educational landscape, often by making that landscape vanish, may also bring new opportunities for lateral learning. Might it be possible to tame the rampant technologies and harness them to a humanist’s will?

Above all, Delbanco insists that college be accessible and affordable, especially to lower-income students, for whom it may seem impossibly out of reach. He points out that the habits of mind honed by liberal arts education — a disposition to absorb, reflect, assess, argue, persuade — are prime resources of a healthy democracy. Will that lofty promise persuade students (or their parents) to incur a massive, lingering burden of debt for an education that seems a Prada purse when a canvas wallet will do? Delbanco’s suggestions to enhance affordability are feeble and familiar: “making additional expenditures for existing programs that serve low-income students, such as Pell grants and Perkins loans, and crediting some portion of college tuition as a tax deduction.”

 is an editor at large of The Wilson Quarterly.

 by Andrew Delbanco, Princeton University Press, 229 pp. 

James Morris