Literary biography suffers from a chronic identity crisis. Working with methods that are plainly unscientific and from motives that are inevitably open to question, most biographers wonder at many points whether their enterprise qualifies as a creative art, or a more prosaic historical craft, or a scandal. And literary biography, in treating the murky realm where art and life mingle, invites even more intense self-doubt. Is it an especially high creative tribute, or an especially scandalous affront, to try yoking aesthetic achievements with the mundane details of a writer's personal life? The answer to the quandary is presumed to depend on how the biography is executed, but the truth is that the confusion transcends technique. For perhaps the most unsettling—and alluring—feature of the undisciplined and interdisciplinary form is that it is, almost by definition, bound to be a mix of art, craft and scandal (unless it is pure hagiography, in which case it is religion).

The muddled nature of the genre contrasts sharply with the strident nature of the debate about it. Henry James characterized the quarrel as “the eternal dispute between the public and the private, between curiosity and delicacy,” and Janet Malcolm's foray into Plathography is the latest evidence of the deep-seated antagonism: like a siren Sylvia Plath invites exposure, while Ted Hughes stands as the embodiment of defensive reserve. As Ian Hamilton writes in his three-century tour of struggles among writers, executors and biographers, “sometimes, arguing about biography is like arguing about abortion or capital punishment: minds tend to be made up before you start. There are revealers and there are concealers. The agents of reticence have no truck with the agents of disclosure.” And both sides concur in a stark conception of the enterprise as a struggle between the pursuer and the pursued.

[In Keepers of the Flame] Hamilton does not present himself as an agent of disclosure, though as the biographer of Robert Lowell and (abortively) of J. D. Salinger, he has the pedigree of an especially zealous revealer. After all, first he tackled a confessional poet, who invited invasive scrutiny. Then he tried to flush out the most reclusive of writers. But Hamilton felt burned by his previous aggressive pursuits, not unlike Malcolm, whose experience with portraiture got her in trouble (the license she took in her account of Jeffrey Masson landed her in court). Hamilton was disheartened by his probing of Lowell, whose dramatic troubles inevitably entailed more “pathography” than he had expected. And his efforts to expose Salinger's life were utterly daunting. They embroiled him in a lawsuit over copyright violation that led to tighter restrictions on the use of unpublished material.

The lesson that Hamilton draws, however, is rather different from Malcolm's moral. She chose partisan alignment on the side of reticence, championing taciturn Ted Hughes against the snoopers and making an iconoclastic cause out of it. Her book began by diagnosing the dirty secret of the genre: it all comes down to the ignoble biographer trying to “peep through the keyhole” vs. the noble subject pulling down the shades.

Hamilton aims for lower-key detachment, wryly surveying many examples of wrangling. He doesn't take sides, and he sees Malcolm's purportedly dirty secret for what it really is: an enduring stereotype. Biographers have long been suspected, and suspected themselves, of mixed motives, and their subjects have always been understandably uneasy about exposure. The spirit of Hamilton's approach is studious (though not at all dry). Are there, he wonders, patterns to be discerned in the ongoing quarrels over the genre through the centuries—“Boswellism versus Romanticism, Victorianism versus Stracheyism”? “Or was it—is it—all to do with human nature, a matter of competing vanities and envies, deadlocked special interests, cash?”

The aim of Hamilton's undertaking is hard to resist: to transcend the polarized conceptions of the genre, which have obviously done little to help its development. The most remarkable feature of his gallery of quarrelers is the way that it undermines the stark opposition between high-minded, defensive biographee and low-minded, intrusive biographer. His survey is full of ironies to confound, or at least complicate, each side's categorical views. And all of the examples of biographical drama make short shrift of any notion of a documentable “total picture.”

The Boswellian school, in which agents of disclosure first staked a claim to respectability, was never quite the sturdy institution it seemed. Its allergy to “panegyrick” was justified by the compassionate and exhaustive quality of its intimate intrusion into personal life. The biographer was to be high-minded and intrusive. That the compassion had a tendency to reveal “complicated virtue,” in Johnson's words, and was therefore a source of controversy, wasn't a great surprise. The real vulnerability of the Boswellian approach was less its irreverence than its unreliability, which was clear from the start.

Boswell made no bones about his subjectivity (his quirks were constantly on display), and at least he was an energetic sleuth, willing to devote whole days to tracking down the most trivial details. The more disconcerting omen lay in Johnson's own biographical attitude, evident even in his path-breaking Life of Savage: “If it rained knowledge, I'd hold out my hands but I would not give myself the trouble to go in search of it.”

Not that a search guarantees trustworthy evidence in any case. Was Richard Savage's alleged mother, Anne Brett, really his mother? And was she guilty of the crime of which he and his biographer accused her, rejecting her bastard son? Johnson never bothered to seek out her opinion on the matter, or on any other matter concerning the obscure poet and convicted murderer that Savage had become. But even if he had, she could hardly be counted on to clear things up, as Richard Holmes points out in Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage. Brett, a reclusive widow who had by then suffered more than her share of public scandals, might well not have been a particularly credible witness. The elusive nature of truth, Hamilton observes, is hardly a recent discovery. “Witnesses … were likely to be either mendacious or gullible or both,” biographers, and even readers of biography, appreciated long ago; “letters were probably composed with publication in view and could anyway be forged; conversation was easily tailored to fit the susceptibilities of the stenographer.”

The tenets of the Romantic school, in which the agents of reticence found a collective and compelling voice, similarly portended trouble. In elevating “the idea of the poet as a type of saint, extraordinary, set apart, ablaze with mysterious sensitivities and insights,” Hamilton writes, the Romantics naturally promoted a correspondingly un-Boswellian biographical approach. They called for celebration of the creative dimensions of “the poetic character,” rather than mundane investigation of the personal character, with all its typical blemishes.

The irony was that the personal lives of the Romantics tended to be titillatingly atypical, not merely blemished but scandalous, and often on a spectacularly public scale. Whether or not poetic genius excused unconventional private morality, it seemed to encourage it—and the flaunting of it. Rather than high-minded and defensive, the biographee seemed on the offensive, and none too elevated about it. Byron, to take the most famous example, didn't pull down the shades. After The Separation (as it was called) from Lady Byron, he kept opening and shutting the door on the mysterious marital offense that had caused the rift, which of course fanned the biographers' fascination. Lady Byron was provocatively reticent (“There is no vice,” she said, “with which he has not endeavoured to familiarise me”), Byron was a coy but very public spokesman for his case from exile and readers were avid to decode the poetry. Was his sin mere infidelity, homosexuality perhaps, or worse, incest with his half-sister Augusta Leigh? As Hamilton sums up, “the Romantics mistrusted the desanctifying tendencies of Boswellism and yet, in their private conduct, they supplied the opposition with all manner of alluring docudramas.”

The tensions sound healthy enough. A little doubt about Boswellian methods of penetrating lives and a little dilution of the Romantic motive of venerating art would seem to be just the compromise the conflicted genre could use. But the next phases in literary biography's development, though Hamilton doesn't chart the way quite so schematically, did not reflect such a sensible synthesis. Instead came the deadly fat Victorian memorials and the ominously lean portraits à la Strachey, which veered toward new unbalanced extremes. The Victorian approach, with its emphasis on the authorized tome, gave the agents of reticence a bad name. Never mind capturing artistic genius, the main goal was not to betray personal foibles. The classic form of the exercise was an unwieldy mass of inoffensive documentation. The two-volume life of Thomas Hardy ostensibly written by his second wife, Florence, was a belated caricature of it. The account had been secretly written in a painstakingly plodding manner by Hardy himself.

The Strachey style, which gave the agents of disclosure a bad name, was “gleefully unauthorized,” as Hamilton puts it. Forget about capturing “complicated virtue,” the goal was to debunk eminence at all cost. Cavalier with documentation (the approach, Hamilton notes, “required someone else to have already done the legwork”), these concise portraits were unapologetically skewed. They were Strachey's answer to the bloated volumes he attacked in the preface to Eminent Victorians for “their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment and design.” In short, the old antagonism had assumed a new, and hardly more promising, permutation. Instead of presenting biographees as noble artists, the Victorian treatment had a way of unwittingly reducing them to stuffed shirts. And in exploding the notion of biographers as mere lowly scribes, the Strachey method endowed them with sweeping artistic pretensions.

As Hamilton drily points out, there was a less auspicious permutation yet to come, the one that is now standard: “a plodding sleuth—armed with a Stracheyesque contempt for old habits of decorum and respectfulness: well, he might turn out to be the worst development of all.” Yet the usefulness of his book is precisely that it doesn't progress toward an indictment of that all too familiar incarnation of the genre; the pedestrian examples of it aren't worth the trouble. Hamilton also steers clear of a culminating statement of anything so grand as his own “philosophy” (beyond the practical tip in his foreword to hold off on a full portrait until the writer has been dead fifty years). But the gist of the approach that he favors can be discerned from his interest in a rarer but recurrent sort of case. His wryness gives way to warmth when he describes biographers whose careful sleuthing is informed by a creative impulse that seems attuned to the subject's own creative approach, or at least aspires to take account of it in a way that isn't reductive. In other words, where a kind of synergy, rather than antagonism, is at work.

Hamilton's examples show that such a course isn't smooth by any means. In fact, the spirit that guides it is a remarkably demanding one: empathy, which aims at understanding rather than clinical explanation. Such an effort entails delicacy about aesthetic intentions, not merely curiosity about psychological symptoms. And it demands tireless methods and tactful motives, never a natural combination and currently a very unfashionable one. Methodologically, the empathetic approach depends on finding and working with as much immediate evidence, and original texture, as possible—which is precisely what prevailing protocol makes difficult. In the wake of Salinger's suit against Hamilton, biographers are now restrained by law from quoting from unpublished documents, except with permission. And if permission is denied, the only recourse is to paraphrase in a spirit that, according to the legal doctrine of “fair use,” must not be too faithful to the original. As for careful motives, the empathetic biographer doesn't begin by presuming that any amount of material is likely to be a smoking gun, in particular where questions of artistic creativity are concerned. Again, that means bucking biographical convention, which is to aim for a dramatic exposé.

Sheer doggedness and delicate empathy are inevitably in some tension, even when a biographer is dealing with the most congenial, accessible subject. Sometimes, in fact, an accommodating biographee can be especially taxing. Thus poor James Anthony Froude, Carlyle's biographer, endured agonies in his efforts to live up to his subject's fierce standards of candor, which Carlyle clearly wanted applied to himself, no matter the costs. Thanks to the heaps of material that Carlyle had made available, Froude knew all about Carlyle's cruel treatment of his wife (“blue marks” on her arms); his worshipful affection for Lady Ashburton, whose circle he had joined; his impotence; and his terrible self-recriminations after Jane Carlyle's death. “These things were communicated to me, and I was to be Carlyle's biographer,” Froude wrote in distress. “What was I to make of them? It was so weird, so uncanny a business that the more I thought of it the less I could tell what to do.”

Of course, as Hamilton's book has by now amply shown, biographees can hardly be counted on to encourage complicated empathy (which need not, in fact rarely does, issue in conventional admiration: Froude was pilloried by many who saw his “demonic” portrait not as deeply tragic but as slanderous). Yet even here, appearances can be deceiving. In closing, Hamilton pauses over the currently hot troublemaker, Ted Hughes, and shows that he isn't, or hasn't always been, quite the adamant agent of reticence whom Janet Malcolm describes.

In Hamilton's astute version of the saga, Hughes has in fact played a constructive, even encouraging role in the biographical boom occasioned by Sylvia Plath. His reputation as an inhibiting presence misses an important part of the story. Hamilton persuasively credits Hughes with acknowledging that “his own loathing of biography ought not to be imposed on [Sylvia Plath].” An appreciation of her radically confessional art, Hughes saw, demanded an approach very different from the hands-off treatment that he felt his own much more impersonal style entitled him to insist on. Plath's poetry depended heavily—perhaps totally—on a sense, as he put it, “of the incidental circumstances or the crucial inner drama that produced it.” In other words, Hughes himself has embraced, however ambivalently, the notion that an empathetic sense of the art should help guide standards of disclosure about the life. It was this recognition, not simply a need for money, that impelled him to publish editions of Plath's letters and journals. Though they have been attacked for what they omit, they are also remarkable for what they leave in.

E. M. Forster, in his demure way, is as unexpected a double agent as the dramatic Hughes. His case, so unlike the bitter Plath debate—and the many biographical battles that preceded it—beckons as a model for the genre. The man who swore by “tolerance, good temper and sympathy” can perhaps remind an embattled enterprise of the underrated power of those virtues as a guide to modulated and yet vivid portraiture. And in fact, that's just what Forster's example does, in a typically unheroic Forsterian way. His perspective on literary biography, and his fate at its hands so far, is decidedly mixed. The great quarrel at the core of the enterprise, he knew, won't end in perfect harmony. But rather than worry over the disharmonies (worry, he warned, is “terribly insidious,” for it tempts the victim to simplify in search of peace), he welcomed them.

Forster lived and wrote like an agent of reticence. He was a painfully shy man whose life was almost a paradigm of retreat, whose fiction was notably circumscribed and who in his critical writing condescended to biography as merely “a serious form of gossip.” He understood the interest in all kinds of information about the “surface personality,” but he believed that the “lower personality,” the creative self, remains elusive. What cannot be encompassed, Forster emphasized in his essay “Anonymity: An Inquiry” (from which his new biographer, Nicola Beauman, takes her epigraph), is the aesthetic power of the artist and his art. Biography “teaches us everything about the book except the central thing, and between us and that it raises a circular barrier which only the wings of the spirit can cross.”

After his death, however, Forster was revealed as an agent of disclosure. He left mountains of letters, and then within those letters did the opposite of censor; he made sure, when he changed a phrase, that the original formulation was still legible. Not because he thought there could be a total picture, but because he knew there couldn't be. “We don't know what we are like,” he wrote in “What I Believe”; “We can't know what other people are like.” But his skepticism about the “self” as an “entity,” very fashionable now, didn't preclude a leap of faith in that self. He expected curiosity, and left plenty of clues. There also remained a manuscript of an unpublished novel, Maurice, which was plainly autobiographical in its revelation of homosexual desires, as well as various stories on similar themes. “When I die and they write my life,” Forster announced, “they can say everything,” a motto that became an epigraph for his biographer P. N. Furbank, whom he authorized and then left completely to his own devices.

Forster's conversion is obviously atypical among writers; cavorting followed by a posthumous cover-up is the much more familiar pattern. But his attitudes are unexpected on a more personal level as well. This proponent of Romantic veneration of art (“the entry of Heaven” was the way he described the moment of supreme aesthetic experience) had a decidedly un-Romantic, even prosaic perspective on himself as a writer. “You can gather,” he wrote matter-of-factly to a friend, “that I know I am not a real artist. … In fact my equipment is frightfully limited but so good in parts that I want to do with it what I can.”

And this defender of Boswellian curiosity about life led a remarkably narrow, unadventurous existence, most of it with his mother. Until he was 30, Forster claimed, he had only the vaguest ideas about sex; he had his first real affair at 38, with Mohammed el Adl, a tram conductor, in Alexandria. It was only at the age of 45 that he dared arrange an apartment in London, so that his life away from his mother needn't be constrained by the last train home. He spent time in India as well as Alexandria, but the primary drama of his creative career lies in its very premature closing. He published the first of five novels in 1905 at the age of 26 and the last in 1924 when he was 45. In the forty-six years that remained after A Passage to India appeared, he published no more fiction. (Maurice, his sixth novel, was written in the interlude between Howards End, which was published in 1910, and A Passage to India, but it only appeared posthumously, in 1971.) He took to writing criticism and established only slightly greater independence from his mother; he continued to live a remarkably discreet and undramatic life until his death in 1970.

Forster seemed to have set himself up for precisely the sort of biographical treatment he said was a “curse”: the most common kind, which “concentrates our attention on the relation between a writer's life—his surface life—and his work.” After all, here was a “lower personality,” an artistic self, that presented a modest and workmanlike pose—the opposite of a forbidding, grandiloquent Genius. What's more, that lower self had left the most titillating, untranscendent clues about its main mystery. The early silencing of the creative personality, as Maurice and Forster's unpublished stories also on homosexual themes suggested, was bound up with the late unfolding of the sexual personality. And if the rest of the evidence about the “surface personality” wasn't exactly fast-paced, it had a good literary pedigree. Forster's Bloomsbury friends, too, were a graphomaniac crowd; their relevant letters and memoirs were ample and artful.

The urge to transgress, to violate a subject's sense of propriety in portraying him, is the temptation that Janet Malcolm claims always lies in some form at the heart of the biographical enterprise. And yet that is exactly what Forster's three main chroniclers—Furbank focusing on the life, Lionel Trilling on the work and now Nicola Beauman attempting both—have tried to resist. The success of the first two is a refreshing reminder that Boswellian interest in daily details isn't all low-mindedness and that concern with creative intentions isn't all high-mindedness. That the middle route, balancing curiosity about life and delicacy about art, is inevitably a muddle, as his latest portraitist proves, is just what Forster would have predicted.

With Trilling and Furbank, Forster got the best of two biographical worlds more or less as he prescribed them. Furbank's E. M. Forster: A Life (1978) offered Boswellianism at its best, a reliable and intimate picture of the man, marked by moral realism and a comic touch, full of truths but with no claim to the Truth. And Trilling's study, published in 1943 before Forster had become well known, was aesthetic scrutiny stripped of veneration. Central to his understanding of Forster's vision was an emphasis on his “refusal to be great,” which could be irritating but was also illuminating. His work, Trilling argued, was the product of an imagination that aspired to liberation at the same time that it embraced limitation. In that ambivalent process, Forster comprehended something the triumphalist, untragic “liberal imagination” could not fathom: “the idea of good-and-evil.”

Furbank and Trilling each crossed the line between life and work but kept their priorities clear and didn't aim at a synthesis. But what about attempting a more complete harmonizing of the hardy antagonisms of the genre? The idea of life-and-work, it perhaps should come as little surprise, is harder for the biographical imagination to fathom. So hard, in fact, that literary biographers tend to be blissfully unaware of the difficulty. The prevailing attitude is confidently cavalier—just cram in some plot summaries and quote reviews, or else play the match game, identifying real-life counterparts of fictional characters. To her credit, Beauman takes some trouble to reflect on how she plans to carve out a place for herself between her predecessors.

She doesn't fudge her straddling role, she intends to make it her focus: “I learnt a good deal about Forster the man, indeed more than I needed to know. And I learnt a good deal about critical method,” she explains in her introduction. “About Forster the novelist there was a strange reticence.” She proposes to “describe the unfolding of his creative development,” warning that “the meticulous chronicling of day-by-day events would be relevant only insofar as it illuminates the inner life.” And she empathetically promises to do it in the conversational, informal, intuitive spirit of her subject.

But it quickly becomes clear that Beauman has too blithe a faith that her eager collaborative spirit can surmount all obstacles. She doesn't quite know what to make of Forster's emphasis on a firm barrier between the inner, creative life and the “upper personality” that “does things like dining out, answering letters, etc.” She has a stake in ignoring his dictum, and yet she also intermittently invokes it. What she doesn't do is thoughtfully challenge Forster the critic's whimsical formulations about “the lower personality [as] a very queer affair,” subject to no conscious forces. Yet the trickiest task of empathy is to know when not to listen to the upper self precisely because it can be out of touch with the creative personality.

Both her predecessors were alert to the need for careful second-guessing. Forster, Furbank remarked, was superstitious about the sources of his literary success; his “ordinary self” had a willful lack of desire to scrutinize the “lower self” too closely. It was as if he thought that by casually waving attention away from that strange creature, he could protect the gift he never quite trusted he deserved. But in fact that lower self, as Trilling saw, had its own, far from diffident voice. If Forster the man made his creative drive seem magical, as all such gifts are to some extent in their origins, Forster's writings reveal it very purposefully at work. “Guiding his stories according to his serious whim,” Trilling wrote,

Forster takes full and conscious responsibility for his novels, refusing to share in the increasingly dull assumption of the contemporary novelist, that the writer has nothing to do with the story he tells and that, mirabile dictu, through no intention of his own, the story has chosen to tell itself through him.

Trilling's emphasis on control is a message to literary biographers, too, to reconsider a dull assumption of their genre. To hypothesize about the unconscious causes of creative gifts, that favorite biographical pastime, is bound to be less interesting than trying to make the richest sense of the consequences of those gifts. Yet Beauman can't resist the diagnostic habit, and shows less zest for analyzing imaginative purposes or processes. Without quite noticing it, she ends up devoting as much attention to the unfolding of Forster's sexual development as to his creative development. The two, in fact, become somewhat blurred.

She isn't crude or prurient. Beauman has some revealing connections to make between Forster's belated, somewhat bewildered sexual awakening and his imaginative progress. She argues, for example, that visits with Edward Carpenter, a proponent of sensual freedom, led him finally to finish A Room With a View (1908); the suicide of a friend who was probably homosexual spurred work on Maurice; Forster's sexual initiation in Alexandria freed him to define himself more as a writer and led to the resumption of A Passage to India. But too insistent an emphasis on Forster's physical and emotional desires inevitably fails to do justice to Forster's fictional designs, or to his fictional frustrations. Even though she has chosen to dwell only on the productively creative half of his life, a sense of stasis creeps in. Compared to Trilling's analysis of the sense of limitation and division that played such an important part in Forster's novels, Beauman's descriptions of the actual limitations of his life end up making his vision seem too, well, limited.

As if to compensate for the constriction, Beauman at other points lets her fidelity to the Forsterian motto “only connect” lead her far from mere “surface” facts, and she soars with intuitions born of fondness for the man and his work. Supposition overtakes perception, as she makes all sorts of dubious pronouncements about his feelings and his life. She is quite coy about her most spectacular—and very speculative—leap: she insinuates that Forster's father was homosexual. More important, she goes all silly and slack when she comes to the novels themselves:

(But do I know where I'm going the biographer asks herself, the moment having come when somehow—but how?—she must convey, not merely précis, the plot, and at the same time try and convey why, to her, this [Where Angels Fear to Tread] is one of the most perfect novels of the twentieth century, aware that if she uses hyperboles like these her ever-vigilant husband will write “truly wonderful” in the margin and she will realise that, yes, she has gone over the top. But then what vocabulary will do? …)

This can serve as an apt illustration of the obvious danger of empathy—that it becomes overweening or worshipful or both. A Forsterian spirit of a counterproductive sort is at work behind Beauman's overconfident projections about the life and her prostration before the novels. Dubbed “the Important One” in letters between his mother and his doting great-aunt Marianne Thornton during his childhood, Forster plainly inspired womanly ministrations that were well-meant but often missed their mark—and he was patient with the oppressive fussing. Beauman clucks over all the feminine clucking that her dear “Morgan” had to endure, deaf to the misplaced condescension in her own tone. Similarly, given his distrust of criticism, Forster had nothing against oohing and aahing at “the entry of Heaven.” Beauman blithely assumes that her breathless parentheses would suit him fine.

But in fact neither of those inclinations—to put up with cramping intrusions into his life, and to rest easy with reticence about art—was simple on Forster's part. He knew he could be far too patient with the demands that his women placed on his days and moods, and in his literary criticism he stood back but he rarely bowed down. Beauman recognizes, but can't quite figure out how to take account of, the uncanny tension in him between personal passivity and creative certainty. “Mystic, silly, but with a child's insight,” was the way Virginia Woolf put it; “oh yes, & something manly & definite too.”

Especially about his own creative gifts, Forster was calmly unreverential, a spirit that his biographer might have aspired to more often. “I am quite sure I am not a great novelist. Because I have only got down on to paper really three types of people,” he said in an interview:

the person I think I am, the people who irritate me and the people I would like to be. When you get to the really great writers, like Tolstoy, you find they can get hold of all types. But most novelists, including myself, are much more constricted in their imagination and their sympathy. I do not get down very much.

Forster was too hard on himself. His great gift was to see that all three kinds of people usually cohabit in a single person. Self-knowledge, self-hate and the salve for both, the hope of self-transformation (in which the unillusioned Forster put only very modest and unmilitant faith for himself, but more for his characters) make the “self” a radically shifting and multifarious thing.

Adamant agents of disclosure and agents of reticence rarely appreciate such a full picture. The exposers are blinkered because their confidence in revelation leads them to attempt a static total picture. The concealers stand in the way of scrutiny because they are convinced no total picture is possible. Both have a stake in overlooking the obvious fact that some pictures are fuller than others. And part of what makes one literary biography better than another is a biographer's recognition that the problem of certainty, of total truth, won't be solved at the end of the endeavor but shouldn't be the reason not to begin. “Though A is not unchangeably A or B unchangeably B,” as Forster commented about the elusive nature of a “Person” in “What I Believe,” “there can still be love and loyalty between the two.” Why not let A stand for artist and B for biographer? Bs don't have to love their As, or pretend that they do. But they can't be loyal even to themselves unless, while seeing their blindness, they have faith in feeling their way toward clarity, which as Forster knew is rarely the same as simplicity.