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

by Wendy Moffat

  A month later Morgan turned twenty-five. It was difficult to tell what he was but rather easy to determine what he wasn’t, and wasn’t likely to become. Morgan wasn’t the same son who had left Lily for King’s. He couldn’t pretend to be an undergraduate any longer. He wasn’t a gentleman. He wasn’t a published writer, or a proper academic, or a career man of any sort. He wasn’t to be like his friends Sydney Waterlow and George Barger and Malcolm Darling and George Trevelyan’s brother Robert, who, one by one, settled into marriages. Even HOM, who had broken off his engagement the summer before, and entered into a second (later aborted) plan to marry, seemed inevitably destined to be a husband. In a few years, Morgan would categorically reject his friends’ path. He would define his identity in opposition to them, writing in his journal, “I do not resemble other people.” But at twenty-five he was still unwilling to be decisive.

  From this quiet interior space in a world of fixed social rules—a world where passing the jam the wrong way at the tea table could invite a sharp glance—Morgan summoned a miraculous burst of creativity. Few artists have ever had a year like Morgan’s in 1904. In the span of twelve months, he set aside the manuscript of A Room with a View, conceived and wrote the whole of his first published novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, mapped out his second published novel, The Longest Journey, revised, wrote, and published “The Story of a Siren,” “The Eternal Moment,” “The Road from Colonus,” “The Story of a Panic,” and most of the other short stories that he would collectively publish in The Celestial Omnibus. He also began to write short stories with explicitly homoerotic themes, stories that would be published only posthumously. In her rich diary, Morgan’s friend Virginia Woolf would record each wisp of idea, every iteration of her creative thoughts, all her strategies for revision. But Morgan was taciturn on his extraordinary creative flowering. He jotted down only a comment or two on his writing process in his diary. He did not even mention when he completed Where Angels Fear to Tread, or note the day it was published.

  The years since he had left Cambridge looked like indolence or indecision, but they had been fruitful and reflective. For though his early fiction was not autobiographical in the strict sense, it worked through the three questions that had gnawed at him since his adolescence. What he was, what he would do, and how he was made up sexually were wholly intertwined. In his annus mirabilis the answer to these questions hatched all at once.

  Like Cézanne relentlessly painting and repainting the silhouette of Mont Sainte-Victoire, or Jane Austen sketching her moral vision on the “little bit of ivory” of provincial domestic life, Morgan discovered the richness and complexity of his entire oeuvre, his whole aesthetic enterprise in a single subject: the search of each person for an honest connection with another human being. Especially someone unlike himself. He would return to it again and again. He was well aware that this subject was a spiritual inheritance from the women writers who came before him, and he adopted their foundational forms as the template for his moral world. He would anchor his plots in the domestic sphere that had been so richly explored by Austen and George Eliot. He would concern himself with their themes: the right choice for a marriage, the tug-of-war between propriety and personal freedom, the moral complexities of an interior life, the pressures of a small community upon an individual’s moral actions. He would not need wide vistas. But he would redefine the old conventions. Out of the remarkable isolation of his upbringing and despite his characteristic timidity, Morgan found a way to displace the center of these time-honored plots. He would discomfit his readers by looking all around a question, asking them to identify with unlikely characters—an Indian doctor, a working-class clerk struggling for an education, a headstrong young widow who falls impetuously in love with the wrong man. He would make complicated use of the “question I am always discussing with myself”—“whether I am conventional or not.” The answer was yes and no.

  Always he was alert to the tension between the constraints he faced in his daily life and the possibilities presented by his imagination. The vision of a beautiful world, a world in which he might love and be loved by another man, beckoned to him like a mirage. He glimpsed it in 1904 when he contemplated the kouroi in the British Museum: “Each time I see those Greek things in the B.M. they are more beautiful and more hopeless . . . That wonderful boy with the broken arm—who I suppose is to be called sugary because he’s new-Attic—stands all the afternoon warm in thick sunshine. He simply radiates light . . .” Despite his belief that Christianity had fatally separated the soul from bodily pleasure, despite his conviction that passion was the key to redeeming the English soul, with the ironclad certainty of youth, Morgan concluded,

  I’d better eat my soul for I certainly shan’t have it. I’m going to be a minority, if not a solitary, and I’d best make copy out of my position. There is nothing contemptible or cynical in this. I too have sweet waters though I shall never drink them. So I can understand the drought of others, though they will not understand my abstinence.

  His frustrated desires gushed up like a wellspring, fueling his urge to write. If he could not make love, at least he could “make copy.”

  This passage from his most private journal is significant for several reasons. The term Morgan chose at that time to describe his “position” as a homosexual in Edwardian England was “a minority.” By selecting it, he repudiated the mainstream culture, which abhorred homosexuals, criminalized homosexual acts, and made even the thought of such desire “unspeakable.” But the choice of the term also signaled a rejection of the few models for homosexual expression that were known to Morgan. Whether embodied by provocative aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde and Charles Sayle, or by bohemians living in Bloomsbury such as Lytton Strachey and the painter Duncan Grant, the public personae of homosexuals felt inauthentic to him, and not because he was an innocent or a prude. Both Wilde’s public posture and Strachey’s iconoclasm were too precious, too clever, too arch, too intellectual, and too self-referential to appeal to Morgan’s sensibility. The oscillation between conventional and not was in his marrow. He did not have a form for it yet, but what he wanted for himself—and for other men like him—was something he had never seen in the world. He wanted intimacy, love, and domesticity akin to marriage.

  Morgan contemplated his “position” because he earnestly considered the moral implications of his sexual identity. To be sure, his “abstinence” was born of caution and fear of offending his mother. But he sought to express himself in his own language. By choosing the word minority, he eschewed some of the technical terms that were coming into vogue in progressive circles, terms such as invert and intersexual and Uranian and homogenic and homosexual—seductive theoretical explanations as to why this queer attraction happened between men, terms that scientists and doctors devised and intellectuals in the know embraced with relief, even with zeal. Morgan rejected the pigeonhole of medical labels. He was not interested in being a “case study,” as J. A. Symonds had been for Havelock Ellis in his ground-breaking Sexual Inversion (1897). Morgan was deeply suspicious of explanations for the cause of homosexuality, whether the explanations came from Germany—where K. H. Ulrichs and R. von Krafft-Ebing were promoting theories of congenital “morbid predispositions”—or from England. (He would later distance himself from Freud as well.)

  In his journal, Morgan imagined himself suspended between two kinds of hostile misapprehension—those who could not imagine the idea of homosexuality, and those, like Lytton, who would find his “abstinence” cowardly or risible. But Morgan never imaged that he would be utterly alone. Even in this plaintive defense of his “position,” Morgan held on to a vision of a communal sexual identity—“a minority” to be sure, but not a “solitary.” He grafted the Apostles’ belief in personal relations onto an erotic ideal of a lover and friend different from himself. His fantasies concerned the garden boy and the laborer, the clerk and (eventually) dark-skinned men. Since he had begun teaching at the Working Men’s College, the romantic idea tha
t love could be both an expression of lust and of tolerance was incarnated in a particular form. That this was both a conventional trope—Wilde himself had sex with working-class boys, after all—and an unconventional one was emblematic of Morgan’s character and his personal philosophy.

  A few months after he wrote this entry, “an idea for an entire novel—that of a man who discovers that he has an illegitimate brother—took shape” over a weekend in July 1904. It hung in his mind as he and Lily searched for a more permanent and amenable place to live than the dreary flat in South Kensington. Taking a break from house-hunting, mother and son traveled to Wiltshire to visit Maimie Aylward, a cousin by marriage on Eddie’s side of the family, and a dear friend of Lily since before Morgan’s birth. Maimie lived near Salisbury, “the heart of our island: the Chilterns, the North Downs, the South Downs radiate hence.” The great stone circle of Stonehenge stood just outside the city, not far from the cathedral’s magnificent spire. “The fibres of England unite in Wiltshire,” Morgan believed. It was a place to escape into, and a place to come home.

  In mid-July, leaving the ladies to talk, Morgan set out alone into the Wiltshire landscape. Long country walks were a popular pastime. Since Wordsworth’s poetry had been published a century before, finding oneself and finding the Real England through its unspoiled countryside had been a rite of passage for literary men of romantic outlook. Since his days at King’s, Morgan had been impressed by A. E. Housman’s collection of poems A Shropshire Lad and Matthew Arnold’s The Scholar Gypsy. As only a displaced suburban man can be, he was especially ambivalent about the erosion of ties to the land and to the past. Three miles east of Salisbury Morgan came upon an ancient hill fort from the Iron Age, a series of undulating concentric embankments about twelve feet high, overgrown with long “gray and wiry” grasses. As antiquities go, they suited Morgan perfectly: they were “unobtrusive,” “curious rather than impressive.” As he walked toward the single tree at the center of the Rings, Morgan saw “the whole system of the country” before him. And there, in the shade of the small tree, he came upon a shepherd boy with a club foot. Suddenly, as it had been for him in Ravello, “the whole landscape” became “charged with emotion.”

  From the air, the Figsbury Rings look like a fried egg with an enormous yolk, albeit an egg with an area of fifteen acres or so. Each of the two concentric circles has a breach for entry at the east and the west. The force of human will upon the landscape is best revealed from above—the Rings are part of a great constellation of circular shapes pressed into or carved from the chalk hills on Salisbury Plain: tumuli and stone piles and Stonehenge itself, with its grand avenue to the river Avon, and the city-fort of Old Sarum, the first site of Salisbury. The view from above exposes the scars of forgotten conquests. The Romans appropriated Old Sarum and built roads threading from fort to fort, as befits an occupying army. Some of these roads, lean and straight and strong, form the spine of the A roads, a later conquest still. Others, long abandoned, thrust headlong through farmer’s fields. The farther the distance, the more palpable the pattern of scars. The best images of the Figsbury Rings come from satellites.

  If you stand at its highest point on the plateau of the fort, the evidence of human toil is subtler. The prospect presents a paradoxical feeling of being both atop the world and sheltered by it. Morgan called this feeling a “system” of understanding the relations between people and the natural world. The whole of Wiltshire is laid out like a private revelation from here, a God’s-eye view of nature and man’s attempts to work on it—forest and field in patchwork, the river meandering, and on a good day, the cathedral’s emphatic spire. Embraced in the long arms of the embankment, you are hidden from all who might approach.

  For Morgan, lying at the spot in the Rings brought back a reiteration of the cosmic feeling he found inside the chalk circle at Madingley. The haphazard encounter in this magical place magnified the mystery. Forster’s conversation with the shepherd boy took less than a quarter of an hour. It was not a galvanizing plot. Resting in the shade of the single ancient tree that abutted the top ring, they passed the time talking about “nothing—still one of my favourite subjects.” The boy was genial and not the least bit obsequious: he didn’t call Morgan “sir.” Despite his deformity, he seemed happy and at ease. In a flourish of generosity that Morgan found quite touching, he offered a “pull at a pipe.” Since he did not smoke, Morgan declined. As he got up to leave, he offered the boy a tip of sixpence, which was rebuffed without hostility.

  No spark of human warmth has found more willing kindling. Morgan “caught fire up on the Rings.” “In that junction of mind and heart where the creative impulse sparks,” the boy had touched him. It was a subtler touch than the spirit of Pan that had transformed Eustace in “The Story of a Panic”; Morgan was imbued with a spirit of home. The boy’s spontaneous kindness convinced him “that the English can be the greatest men in the world: he was miles greater than an Italian; one can’t dare to call his simplicity naïf.” And the idea of home engendered a surrogate family, the brother he had always hoped for and missed, the sense of belonging that his rootless condition had denied him. He would be father to his fiction—a more positive and impassioned position than “making copy” instead of making love. “I created, I received, I restored,” Morgan wrote decades later about this seminal moment. All at once the shepherd boy “gave birth” to the character of Stephen Wonham in The Longest Journey.

  Morgan had already begun to imagine a character like himself, a bright and shy young man who is transformed by “the fearless influential Cambridge that sought for reality and cared for truth,” the Cambridge . . . “which I knew at the beginning of the century.” But now he realized that Cambridge would be only part of a larger story. The orphaned Rickie Elliot, Morgan’s surrogate in the novel, would discover by chance that he has a bastard half-brother in Stephen. Stephen is everything Rickie is not—a hard drinker, a shepherd and farmhand, an autodidact, cantankerous, as comfortable in himself as he is uncaring about the opinion of the world. He is at once the spirit of Brotherhood, distilled from the Apostles’ love of Greece and of one another, and a quintessential common Englishman. So the weaving of life into art began: “Figsbury Rings became [the fictional] Cadbury Rings. The valley of the Winterbourne below them turned into the Cam . . . The Longest Journey was born.” Tellingly, Morgan transferred the club foot from the figure who had inspired Stephen to the character of Rickie. It was a mark of his difference, and his inadequacy. Citified and sissified, Rickie, the head to Stephen’s heart, would carry the defect that set him off from others, make him unable to play sports at school, and after his unfortunate marriage render him genetically unsuitable to father healthy children.

  Just a day after the incident in the Rings, Morgan’s self-consciousness began to erode his confidence. He minutely parsed his own behavior toward the boy. How stiff and stupid he had been! How denigrating to offer him money! This, his first record of the encounter in his private journal, was already haunted by the feeling of being belated—“I walked out again to Figsbury Rings”—he began his account. As he denigrated himself, he elevated the boy’s motives until the shepherd became an emblem, not merely of chance friendliness, but of peasant “wisdom,” national character, the spirit of Englishness itself. He decided that, “whether he knows it or not,” the boy was “one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met.”

  Characteristically, Morgan mulled over the scene as it might have appeared from the boy’s point of view. The boy’s refusal to accept his money manifested “great wisdom” and a simple courage. “I was simply bound to think myself unsympathetic,” Morgan concluded in his diary that September, “whether I offered that sixpence or not, and I get a comfort in the rebuff.” Looking at the scene in retrospect, overcome with lust, guilt, and anxiety, Morgan turned to Italian to encode his powerful feelings: “Vorrei cercario ancora—ma come si puó vivere quando si domanda sempre ‘cosa fa?’, ‘dove va?” (I would still like to search f
or him, but how can one live when people are always asking “what are you doing?” “where are you going?”)

  Twice more, on Monday and Tuesday, Morgan walked back to the same spot to see if he could find the young shepherd again. (One imagines him fretfully planning to do so over the weekend, thinking up a pretext to disentangle himself from Maimie’s and Lily’s “Where are you going?”s.) But it was not possible to recapture the radiance of effortless synchronicity. The boy and his flock had gone on to Wilton, six miles away. Morgan learned this fact on his third visit in pursuit of the boy, from the boy’s father, also a shepherd “neatly dressed” and friendly, but “altogether less wonderful” than his son. Morgan took comfort that neither father nor son would call him “sir.”

  In later years Morgan was at pains to emphasize that there was nothing sexually illicit about his behavior toward the boy. Charles Sayle, the Cambridge librarian, may have been canny about the motives for “The Story of a Panic,” Morgan admitted, but he must misconstrue the story of the shepherd boy: “Charles Sayle wipes his glasses but our interview was of no interest to any type of observer.” So much was true: Morgan was exceptionally careful to act with propriety. But his mind buzzed with emotions, and his behavior at the time suggests that the encounter had a mesmerizing erotic power—an alloy of lust and gauzy romance. Nowhere in his writing does he acknowledge that the chance meeting between himself and the shepherd was an iteration, in inversion, of the moment from his school days when he encountered the pedophile on the Downs. But the incident had the same silhouette: a man and a boy; the offer of payment rejected; the tumult of excitement; the palpable urge to detail and explain his innocence.