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

by Wendy Moffat

  Morgan and Lily would live at Rooksnest for the next decade. Once there had been a hamlet and farm called Rooksnest, but those had disappeared, and now the name attached like a ghost to a two-story gabled house with plain windows and broad chimneys in the center of the roof and at one end. There was nothing particularly grand or historical about the house. To Morgan, whose first proper piece of writing was a memoir of the house, composed when he was fifteen, its very ordinary Englishness made it seem mystical, tied as it was to a past that was rapidly being eroded by the growth of suburban London. The walk to the village was about a mile. In the meadow beside the house was an ancient wych-elm in which people of the distant past had pressed boars’ fangs into the bark, little “votive offerings of people who had their toothache cured by chewing pieces of the bark.” Next door was the Franklyn farm, where there were ponies and children to play with, and a barn full of sweet straw to hide in. The kitchen garden was big enough to be hard work. Lily adapted the lawn for tennis. She and Morgan lived with two domestic servants—one for indoors and one for out. There might have been a moat, so socially isolated was their little household. Years later Forster immortalized the house, and the feeling of the house, in a novel. He called it Howards End.

  In Howards End the house is haunted not by a literal ghost but by a sort of genius loci. Eddie’s ghost, if it walked at all, signified a lost world that might

  have supplanted or at least balanced out the “haze of elderly ladies”—the aunts and great-aunts, Victorian matrons who formed the only circle of friends with whom Lily felt comfortable. The lost world, Morgan came to understand, was an unspoken world, not only male but homoerotic. When he was in his mid-seventies, preparing a biography of Marianne Thornton, Morgan thought back on the oddities that he had stubbornly gleaned from Eddie’s short life. There was the unusual interest in aesthetics, fashion, and the decorative arts, the kind of pursuit au courant with Oscar Wilde and his set at Oxford. In facing marriage, Eddie was described as “not wild like L[ily] but as befitted his seven more years all aglow with happiness and having looked ‘things’ steadily in the face . . .” Things? Why did the milk-livered Ted Streatfeild accompany the couple to Paris? Why had Aunt Monie worried that Eddie “won’t be too old maidish to walk you down the Boulevard Italienne at night”? Then there was the strange companionship, akin to an informal adoption, between his dashing young uncle Percy Whichelo and an older military gentleman. In retrospect, Morgan thought “the implication was obvious.” It was not merely wish fulfillment to see the root of his homosexuality in his family’s past.

  At Rooksnest, Lily Forster established the domestic pattern that would last the rest of her life: she and her boy against the world. She never remarried. Mother and son lived alone on a delicate reef of interdependence. A formal photograph taken when Morgan was five suggests the balance of power. The picture looks mid-Victorian though it was taken thirty years later. Wearing a little velvet suit with lace cuffs and collar, Mary Janes and stockings, his long hair cascading down his back, Morgan appears as an androgynous little Lord Fauntleroy. Though he is stout, Lily is shielding him as if he’s delicate. She stands behind him, not yet thirty, still dressed in mourning, her long hair pulled back in an elegant coil of plaits. Steadying him with her right hand, his mother looks down at him adoringly. But Morgan—with wide blue eyes—faces the camera directly with the attitude of an odalisque.

  Aunt Monie had given Morgan the “deplorable” nickname “The Important One,” and it had grown less and less ironic over the years. He was accustomed to being the center of attention, but oddly this didn’t translate into narcissism. Because he was intensely filial and intensely sensitive, Morgan felt the weight of his role as Lily’s reason for living. He was a solemn little boy, often very still. He watched with interest the delicate dance women must adopt to be heard by men. He became in effect Lily’s lady companion.

  So close were he and Lily that their identities seemed to merge. He parroted her habit of cosseting and her intense interest in the exquisite proprieties of social standing and social etiquette. To his two dolls, Sailor Dollar and Sailor Duncan, he told long, complicated stories about what could and shouldn’t be done. One afternoon when Morgan was five he and Lily settled down to play “our usual game at Bézique. M. had S. Duncan stuck under his arm, which a good deal interfered with his play. At last he said so gravely ‘I am having such a miserable time with this doll. Do you think he would mind much not learning the game?’”

  Learning the game seemed to be the key to living life. The whole of the world appeared as a set of rules, to be negotiated with care if you were not powerful. There seemed to be ways to earn a little safety. At the age of four, Morgan told his mother he “would much rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.” At other times, it seemed that however much one tried, who you were was determined by whether you could adequately act a part. But both his anachronistic dress and his extremely sensitive manner made him seem “half a girl,” Lily complained. “I wish he was more manly and did not cry so easily.” Once, when he was mistaken for a girl by a servant, he was told to go back and correct the misapprehension. Dutifully, he returned and announced, “I’m a little boy.” “Yes, miss,” was the reply.

  He was clever. By the age of four, he discovered that he could read. Thereafter he fiercely defended his interior life, commenting to Aunt Monie’s maid that it was “[t]iresome to be interrupted in my reading when the light is so good.” Learning to read opened a vista into a separate life—a life apart from Life, which he figured in a piece of juvenile fiction as a “secret place.” Here it was possible to slow things down to consider them, to magnify feelings, to roll them around in the brain, to hone the strange interior truths of being and feeling. In later years, he crystallized these insights into a very funny, very sad essay he called “Notes on the English Character.” “It is not,” Morgan wrote there, “that the Englishman can’t feel—it is that he is afraid to feel.” The essence of English character is to “measure out emotions . . . as if they were potatoes.” Even as a young boy, Morgan was both trapped in the English character and a connoisseur of its vagaries. When he was only four, he spent days earnestly studying an etiquette book for children. The book was titled Don’t!

  He became a keen pupil of different kinds of knowledge. There was the bilingualism of women, their private talk and their careful, vicious, oblique wielding of social power. And there was dream knowledge, a magical, incantatory way to discover what is already known to be true. In Maurice, he would write, “Maurice had two dreams at school; they will interpret him.” The wishes that acted upon, or acted for, the passive Morgan were centered on affection for men. The warm, diffuse, disembodied yearning for connection and intimacy that appeared as a voice calling out in the dark, and the panicky, miserable jolt of fear when the yearning became embodied in any way. Thinking about things was relatively safe. Touching was not.

  So Morgan persisted in trying to figure himself out in a kind of vacuum. His earliest self-knowledge was sexual and tinged with homoerotic hunger. At Rooksnest, this island where there were no men, he sought the company of Ansell, a neighboring garden boy, confiding in him and relishing his unknowing touch. Decades later, in his fifties, Morgan recorded the memory in his undated “Sex Diary.” “We built a little house between a straw stack and hedge, and often lay in each other’s arms, tickling and screaming.” When he was eleven, the incantatory voice spoke to him at the scene of his father’s death:

  [W]e all went to Bournemouth. There I remember a queer moment. I stood looking out of the sitting room at the deserted road and thought “It all depends on whether a man or a woman first passes.” From the right came a gentleman with a brown moustache. I was much relieved . . . This is the first conscious preference that I recall.

  The relief may have been conscious, but the queerness felt fateful. That he was attracted to men, Morgan had already known without knowing for some time.

  At Ro
oksnest he soon outstripped Lily’s capacity to tutor him and outlasted the patience of their housemaid, Emma, who turned in her notice after being imperiously instructed in botany, astronomy, cology—“about shells”—by a five-year-old. Lily turned to the village of Stevenage, where a pompous young Irishman named Mr. Hervey ran a mediocre day school he grandly called “The Grange.” She commissioned Mr. Hervey not only to teach the boy, but to assist him in masculine activities like climbing. Morgan instead used the trees to masturbate:

  I used to hang on the branches, wind my legs about the curve and draw myself up and down. After a long time there would be a nice feeling between my legs, followed by tiredness, when I stopped and slid . . . Once I had the feeling when my tutor stood by—he was supposed to teach me climbing. He said laughing “How he kicks about!” I said to myself “You little know!”

  Sometimes his secret life afforded a feeling of mastery over the adult world, but more often it engendered mysterious and startling surprises. Even the “fat dark” Mr. Hervey, with his hopeless little mustache, could summon powerful erotic thoughts in the boy. “Soon after Mr. Hervey came I had a dream which I perhaps added to in my waking hours: his prick, very long, filled the hall and the dining room like white macaroni and wound me up in it. I had never seen his prick, and indeed thought no one but myself had one, so the dream’s odd.”

  The retreat into his imagination as a way to explore his desire safely became a lifelong pattern for Morgan. It would be decades before he found both the intimacy and the sexual contact he craved. He arrived at this blissful state, which he called connection, through his brain rather than his body, through listening to what he knew he felt before he actually felt it in the blood.

  The world conspired with the Word to bewilder him. When he was four, Morgan faithfully told his mother he had discovered the “trick” of rubbing his prepuce “backwards and forwards.” Lily told him that was called “Dirty,” and “presently . . . ‘help me get rid of the dirty trick’ figured in my prayer.” Lily did not know this, but her invocation of Christianity was the first step in the separation of mother and son. Encountering this boundary alerted him to things that could not be said, not even to his beloved mother. All his life Morgan kept his homosexuality a secret from her. One of his friends described their delicate dance: “Morgan never came out of the closet. He wanted to protect his mother. And by the time he could have come out, there wasn’t any closet left.”

  He looked in books for ratification of his scanty sexual experience. But the “dirties” of others were sadly absent from Smith’s Classical Dictionary,

  and “concealed by drapery in the illustrations to Kingsley’s Heroes.” Fiction, and the feelings it produced, were much more satisfying.

  Felt deeply about boys in books, especially about Ernest, the priggish second son in the Swiss Family Robinson . . . I could not bear that Ernest should grow up—he was 13 I think—so the end of the Swiss Family Robinson, which takes place 10 years later, was repellent to me, and I would pretend that Ernest and the others were magicked back into being boys.

  When Lily misapprehended Morgan’s thoughts, he did not correct her. “My mother said ‘I believe Jack [third son—lively] is your favorite!’ ” He recognized that Lily, too, sought her consolations in literature. He would not be the man she wanted him to be, but she did not have to know.

  Ironically, Sunday school stories became an excellent vehicle for homoerotic fantasies. The Christ omnipresent in Victorian stained glass—the genteel, compassionate figure in every Anglican parish church—is a grown-up Lord Fauntleroy. And this Christ was introduced into steamy narratives, “long serial stories. In one of them I was Christ and led my companions about.” Morgan perfectly mirrored Edwardian preoccupations, neatly conflating imperial and Christian themes in his subsequent erotic fantasies: “sleeping with naked black man in a cave” and “converting the inhabitants of New Guinea to Christ.”

  There is no record of whether the era’s sexual scandals—the Cleveland Street scandal, which implicated the Prince of Wales’s son Albert in a homosexual brothel, or the discovery of a boy prostitution ring among British high officials in Dublin Castle—made their way to Morgan’s ears or eyes. But his fantasies comprised a queer refashioning of cultural anxieties about male friendship that were very much in the news when he was a child. Sexual issues began to ossify into law: Parliament, which had been largely silent on these private matters, now began to make them public ones, encoding the age of consent, limiting traffic in “white slavery,” and eventually criminalizing unspecified acts of “gross indecency” between men, in the Labouchère Amendment of 1885. This was the law that would send Oscar Wilde, the

  most famous and successful writer in London, to prison when Morgan was sixteen. Christian reformers, who had promoted laws to maintain social purity, now began to bewail some consequences of the public scrutiny of relations between men. All sorts of innocent actions now might be misconstrued. The new public consciousness about sexual behavior narrowed the terrain where social actions between men could be assumed to be innocent, meaningless, private, or ambiguous. One lamented, “A few more cases like Oscar Wilde’s and we should find the freedom of companionship now possible to men seriously impaired to the permanent detriment of the race.”

  At about the same time that Mr. Hervey appeared, Aunt Monie finally died at the age of ninety. Morgan had been dutifully taken to visit her in her last illness, but he did not recall it. The “arrival of the news” came by the kind of circumlocution that he and Lily were beginning to develop:

  I knew that [Aunt Monie] was ill, and one gloomy afternoon I was walking with my mother towards our home . . . I asked her how Aunt Monie was, and she replied, in the strained tones then thought appropriate to the subject of death, “She is better.”—“Is she well?” I asked. “She is” came the solemn answer and I burst into tears. They were composite tears . . . I cried because crying was easy and because my mother might like it, and because the subject was death.

  At her death, Monie left him a bequest larger than Eddie had left for his young family, to be devoted to Morgan’s education. And almost immediately, Lily sent him away to school. It was time he grew up and entered the world.

  Going away to school meant both separation from Lily and harsh induction into a new world of uncompromising masculine conventions. He was supremely ill-suited to the public school ethos, with its hierarchies of power and its emphasis on manly sport, and he quickly came to hate it with a fervor he sustained into old age. The Kent House school in Eastbourne, to which he was sent in 1890, was small and relatively enlightened by the standards of the day. There were only thirty boys attending and the headmaster was a bit of an egghead, well-meaning but obtuse when faced with a very sensitive boy. Morgan was painfully homesick, and snubbed by most of the other boys, who called him “Mousie.” They were immune to his intellectual charm. School subjected him to all sorts of indignities—the public bathing was a special humiliation. One of the boys announced, “Have you seen Forster’s cock? A beastly little brown thing,” and in one stroke he both learned the word and felt the sting of being thought repellent.

  Most of all, going off to Kent schooled Morgan in the art of detachment. During his second term there, to his great relief, he was excused from playing games, and allowed to walk along the Downs for exercise. There he encountered a pedophile. It was a momentous event in the boy’s education but not for the reasons one might expect. Morgan began his Sex Diary to trace his origins as a man and a writer, certain that his homosexuality was the central fact of his being. More than forty years later, the details of the encounter with the pedophile were etched in his mind.

  It was March 1891, and patches of snow still clung to the hills. Setting out over the Downs, Morgan encountered a man of forty or fifty—“large moustache, pepper and salt knickerbockers suit, deer stalker cap, mackintosh on arm”—near the summit, ostentatiously pissing into a gorse bush.

  Having concluded he spoke to
me, I forget how, then walked me aside and made me sit between some gorse bushes on the mackintosh. He sat on my left—then undid his flies, I forget how soon, and told me to take hold of his prick. “Dear little fellow . . . play with it . . . dear little fellow . . . pull it about.” I obeyed with neither pleasure or reluctance. Had no emotion at the time, but was startled at the red lolling tip (my own prepuce covering the gland even at erection) and was startled when some thick white drops trickled out. He rapidly lost interest in me, asked me where I lived (“Hertfordshire”) and offered me a shilling (“no thank you”). He didn’t try to handle me and I went off quietly.

  The encounter with the pedophile did not fundamentally damage Morgan. Nor did it have much “effect on [his] development” since he “connected it with no sensations of my own.” But leaving the man raised the complex moral question of whether he should tell anyone about his experience, and here the tension began to mount in the young boy. “Going down hill I became upset and thought how if I had accepted the 1/- I would have hurled it into a patch of snow.” He decided to write to Lily about it.

  As the event became public property, it magnified and hardened in predictable ways. Lily consulted her rector’s wife, and advised on the tone Morgan should take in reporting the circumstances to his headmaster, Mr. Hutchinson. “By this time,” Morgan wrote in his Sex Diary, “I was in another mood, hard and important.” He decided to adopt a manly air, and to approximate a manly metaphor for what had occurred. “You know your bowels sir” [Morgan asked.] Mr. H said he did, and I described how this man’s bowels were diseased. This conversation took place near a fireplace in the dining room. It was followed by another equally disconcerting for Mr. H, as we walked down to the Police Station to report the matter.”