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

by Wendy Moffat

  Morgan returned to London in the autumn of 1905 to enthusiastic reviews of Where Angels Fear to Tread. Friends, especially Dent and Dickinson, offered effusive praise. But the experience of being published sharpened his keen sense of his limitations as an artist. He told Robert Trevelyan,

  I know I am not a real artist, and at the same time am fearfully serious over my work and willing to sweat at atmosphere if it helps me to what I want. What I want, I think, is the sentimental, but the sentimental reached by no easy beaten track—I cannot explain myself properly . . . [M]y equipment is frightfully limited, but so good in parts that I want to do with it what I can.

  What he could do was to try out a life in fiction that he felt unable to live in the world. In the first six months of 1906, he took up the fragment of plot that the shepherd boy had sparked in him. He borrowed the title The Longest Journey from Shelley’s Epipsychidion—which loosely translates to “the story of a soul.” Rickie Elliot’s search for love would take him from Cambridge to the Sawston school, to the Wiltshire countryside. The novel, like Shelley’s poem, asked how best—in family or friend, man or woman—one might find intimacy.

  I never was attached to that great sect

  Whose doctrine is that each one should select

  Out of the world a mistress or a friend

  And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend

  To cold Oblivion—though it is the code

  Of modern morals, and the beaten road

  Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread

  Who travel to their home among the dead

  By the broad highway of the world—and so

  With one sad friend, perhaps a jealous foe,

  The dreariest and the longest journey go . . .

  This exhortation to take the road less traveled, to stick by a band of brothers, had been the Apostles’ creed at Cambridge. In a tribute to both his intellectual brothers and the ideal of brotherhood embodied in his years at King’s, Morgan dedicated the novel simply, “Fratribus.” But by the time he wrote The Longest Journey, Morgan felt the strength of those bonds eroding. The “code of modern morals” seemed ineluctably to lead toward “the beaten road” of marriage.

  No summary of the plot can convey how peculiar and uneven a novel The Longest Journey is. It was an autobiographical fantasy. Of all Morgan’s creations, Rickie is the one who most closely resembled himself. For the first third of the novel, through a lonely childhood and an awakening into friendship at Cambridge, Morgan anchored Rickie in the circumstances of his own life. But then he set his surrogate loose into a speculative future. After university, Rickie wants to become a writer, but out of cowardice chooses the more “slavish” life, teaching at Sawston, a mediocre public school that Morgan later remarked drily “owes something to my public school.”

  Agnes Pembroke’s brother teaches at Sawston, and she is engaged to marry Gerald Dawes, a rather dim but virile specimen of an English public school man, who bullied Rickie when they were at school. (Gerald’s attractions are all physical—the narrator tells us that “just where he began to be beautiful the clothes started.”) After Gerald dies suddenly in a football match, Rickie decides to marry Agnes though his motives are obscure, even to him. Rickie’s greatest friend, Ansell, counsels against it. He “foresee[s] the most appalling catastrophe”: “You are not a person who ought to marry at all. You are unfitted in body: that we once discussed. You are also unfitted in soul: you want and you need to like many people and a man of that sort ought not to marry . . . and if you try to enter [a marriage] you will find destruction.”

  This syncopation of the plot was deliberate—Morgan placed Rickie’s marriage to Agnes in the middle of the story, for in a modern novel “marriage is most certainly not an end, either for [a woman] or for her husband. Their courtship [is] but a prelude . . . the drama of their problems, their developments, their mutual interaction, is all to come.”

  As if the drama of his own life could be played out like a game of chess in the novel, Morgan plotted out the consequences of marriage and the alluring prospect of having a brother very unlike himself. As he began writing, he worried that his structure was too calculated to bear the novel’s emotional weight. “Doubt whether the novel’s any good: all ingenious symbols, little flesh and blood.”

  From his very first drafts, the plot had centered around the triangle of Rickie, Agnes, and a male character who became Rickie’s illegitimate brother, Stephen Wonham. Agnes, all middle-class values, abhors Stephen. Agnes is the sort of woman whose devout Christianity leads her to believe in “the soul and the body,” a dialectic that Morgan had known to be irredeemably flawed, since Italy had taught him to “cherish the body.” He summarizes her character with devastating wit. “‘The soul’s what matters,’ said Agnes, and tapped for the waiter again.”

  Stephen’s drunkenness, his illegitimacy, his country ways all threaten Agnes’s domestic stability, and she counsels Rickie to cut him off. But he cannot, and his love for his brother, complexly transferred from Morgan’s erotic vision of the shepherd boy, eventually costs Rickie his life. He dies after being hit by a railway train while pulling the drunken Stephen off the tracks. In the end, Rickie’s stories are published posthumously, to modest acclaim, under the title Pan Pipes.

  The reviewers of The Longest Journey labeled the novel “clever” so often that one suspects they believed its author to be insincere. They could not know how much of this story of a soul was taken directly from Morgan’s deepest yearnings and fears. Morgan told Dent that he had written a scene of pure panic—a chapter in which Rickie runs naked when touched by the spirit of nature—but struck it from the novel because it threw the ending off balance. (He joked to Dent that “only students of the Master’s Juvenilia will now twig what he’s driving at.”) Looking back on The Longest Journey, Morgan acknowledged that while it might be the strangest and the “least popular of my . . . novels” it was “the one I am most glad to have written.” It was cathartic for him to work through in fiction what a terrible idea it would have been for him to marry. But the structure was prescient in ways he could not know. In years to come he would learn how painful a triangular relationship between two men and a woman could be.

  In the summer of 1906, with the novel well under way, Morgan made two sentimental journeys, as if to test the roots of his identity and the promise of sustaining them. The first was to Manchester to visit Hugh Meredith, who had finally settled on the idea of marriage. His fiancée, Christabel Iles, was a bright university woman with progressive ideas about education, child rearing, and suffrage. The trip was not a success. Morgan returned to London disconsolate, sickened by how much he felt “cut off from HOM.” It was not only the prospect of HOM’s marriage that disturbed him. Something essential about their friendship had dwindled, and this disquieting realization fueled a sense that their previous years of friendship had been a chimera, and not the truly intimate connection he had believed them to be. On the trip home, he commented bitterly on the forbidden sights he saw from the train window: in the June heat “the bodies of men drying off after bathing in the Thames.”

  In August he returned to Stevenage for the first time since Lily and he had left Rooksnest when he went off to school. He found Frank Franklyn, the garden boy he had played with as a child. In letters to Lily he described the house in detail, noting changes—“you can hardly see the house for creepers: huge ivies are growing towards the larder window.” But he did not brave a visit inside. The town, too, had changed: “There is a whole new street, parallel between the High Street and the railway . . . towards us it’s all exactly the same.” Thirteen years after their departure, Rooksnest was still us.

  Down the road about a mile at Highfield he wandered shyly into the garden of Lily’s old friends the Postons, catching them unawares in a memorable domestic tableau. Years later the Postons’ daughter recalled her mother going into the rose garden on that day, “wearing a sweeping blue gown. It was hay time and . . . sh
e paused to pick a handful of newmown grass for my rabbits.” At the margin of the garden “a tall gangling young man in ill-fitting tweeds” appeared and introduced himself as Morgan Forster. “My mother welcomed him with her ravishing smile. ‘Of course, you’re an old friend,’ she said. ‘Come along in and have lunch.’” So the glorious image of Mrs. Wilcox in the first chapters of Howards End was imprinted on Morgan’s imagination.

  In October, Morgan and Lily toured the chateaux of the Loire Valley. He joked to Dent that there was “no escape from Table d’hôte.” Back in Weybridge there were tea parties, talks at the local literary society, Thursdays with friends in London, walks to the margin of the village where gardens gave way to lush meadows, sonatas to practice on the piano in the drawing room, and protracted discussions with Lily and Ruth about which cheese to order from the market. Each afternoon he retreated to the attic to press on with The Longest Journey. But just when it seemed to Morgan that his narrow suburban life would stretch out interminably, unchangingly into the future, Weybridge yielded a spectacular surprise. A wonderful dark-skinned boy bounded up the Harnham attic stairs.

  Syed Ross Masood was seventeen—a decade younger than Morgan—but from the first moments he dominated their friendship. Well over six feet tall, he looked at the top of Morgan’s head, and he was barrel-chested and virile, willing to pick a fight if he felt his honor was impugned. He was profoundly handsome, in a matinée-idol exotic sort of way, with large, wide-set, almost black eyes, and a fierce black mustache. He had come from Delhi to live with Lily’s Weybridge neighbors Sir Theodore and Lady Morison. Sir Theodore had recently retired from two decades at the Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh, first as professor of English and finally as principal of the college. The ostensible purpose of Masood’s arrival in their English household was to prepare him for entrance exams to Oxford—hence the need for Morgan to tutor him in Latin—but the real story was a dark family drama back home in India.

  What a family it was! Masood was descended from the Muslim intelligentsia, with a lineage of great power and significance. He was the only grandson of Syed Ahmad Khan. Sir Syed, as he liked to be known after being honored by the Crown, had begun as a clerk in the East India Company, and risen by hard work, intelligence, and loyalty to become a high-ranking official for the Raj. He was a bold and decisive man. During the 1857 revolt, he had risked his life and reputation to evacuate the British from Bijnor, and took charge of the district for a time to protect European residents from violence; subsequently he published a treatise blaming the origins of the mutiny not on rebellious soldiers, but on the “pride and arrogance” of Indian civil service officers who “consider the Natives of India as undeserving of the name of human beings.” He looked back to the Mogul empire as the halcyon moment of Indian culture and stability. In 1875, Sir Syed founded the Anglo-Oriental College with the twin aims of creating a rigorous western-style scientific university and promoting Muslim unity. (He promoted Urdu as the proper language for the future of India, believing Hindi to be vulgar.) He was forward-thinking in a very particular mode. He revered British education, sent his own son to study law at Christ College, Cambridge, and designed the Anglo-Oriental College to be a sort of Muslim Cambridge. His vision of the school included both Sunni and Shia boys—who would be forbidden to provoke disputes along doctrinal lines. To win back the glory of ancient Muslim days, he published a weekly journal, Tahzib-al-Akhlaq—“The Training of Morals”—which disseminated Muslim culture, the revival of Urdu, and a pan-Islamic proto-national identity for India. In his day these ideas earned him enemies: Muslim clergymen derided his ecumenicism within the faith, and Hindu leaders were equally hostile to his triumphalist view of Muslim culture and what they viewed as his hand-in-glove attitude toward the Raj. Syed Ross Masood was only eight when his grandfather died, an old and venerated man in his community.

  Masood’s father, Syed Mahmud, had trained as a barrister and ascended to the “highest position a ‘Native’ could hold in the British Government of India”—he was appointed a High Court judge at the age of thirty-seven. But he stood uneasily under the long shadow of his famous father. He gave his only son the name Ross after his English friend the barrister George Ross, but he rankled over discrimination and ill-treatment by the British authorities. An alcoholic, he resigned from the bench when a British judge blamed his tardiness in issuing opinions and absence from work on drunkenness. Syed Mahmud returned to Aligarh, but he alienated Sir Syed by drinking in front of him. He had hoped to be appointed as his father’s successor to the college, and his life unraveled further when this did not happen.

  Masood suffered at the hands of his unstable, unhappy father. His mother intervened with British authorities and friends, including Sir Theodore Morison, to protect her young son. One night Syed Mahmud—drunk and in a rage—dragged the ten-year-old Masood outdoors in freezing weather, forcing him back and forth across the college lawn to teach the boy how to break up the sod with a wooden plow. He had in his addled mind some sort of lesson about India’s place in the world, and the political history of agriculture. Terrified, the boy’s mother called upon Sir Theodore, who interceded, “wrapped up the shivering . . . boy in his greatcoat” and took him home. And there he stayed. Masood’s father “was driven out of Aligarh,” reciting a snatch of Urdu poetry, “All that splendor is left behind / When the gypsy packs up and goes.” For the three years before the family moved back to England, the Morisons were effectively foster parents to Masood, whom they loved dearly. Sir Theodore had a son about Masood’s age, and he always referred to them both as his sons.

  Despite completing preparatory school in Delhi, it was not at all clear that Masood was ready for a British university. He was a mercurial character. There was a bit of his father’s hot temper in him, and a bit of his grand-father’s grandeur. He habitually made big plans—to memorize all the verse of the Urdu poet Ghalib, to take up tennis, to learn to play the banjo—but only fitfully followed through. Masood was generous, especially when he didn’t have money, princely in his manner toward both his own countrymen and Englishmen, whom he regarded as “poor fellows.” All his life he was the center of a coterie of admirers, who listened to him tell tall tales in his “sonorous and beautiful voice; one could not fail to notice his voice, for he never stopped talking.” He had “the vast self-confidence that comes from being able to trace one’s ancestry back through the Prophet Mohammed at the thirty-seventh generation to Adam at the one hundred and twentieth.” To Morgan, who had been parched for so long, this fountain of effusiveness was irresistibly charming. Not all of Morgan’s family shared his enthusiasm. When his cousin Maimie Aylward heard he was tutoring a black man, she exclaimed, “Oh dear, I do hope he won’t steal the spoons.”

  Morgan romanticized his new friend; in Masood he thought he had found the perfect embodiment of his belief in the primacy of human warmth. On Christmas Eve 1906 he wrote in his diary, “Masood gives up duties for friends—which is civilisation. Though he remarks—‘Hence the confusion in Oriental states. To them personal relations come first.’” The personal relations between Morgan and Masood remained chaste, if unorthodox. Not much Latin got learned during their tutoring sessions. When Masood got bored—which was often—he would pick Morgan up, turn him upside down, and tickle him. When Masood went up to Oxford, Morgan visited him, and returned to Weybridge with a hookah, but without his cap, which Masood had “borrowed” without consultation.

  Their friendship seemed to achieve an unprecedented intimacy almost immediately. In correspondence Morgan called Masood “My dear boy” while Masood returned magisterially “My dearest Forster.” His proportions were extravagant; after a short interruption in correspondence, he began a letter—“Centuries may pass, years may turn into 2000 centuries, and you never hear from me, and you are not to think that the great affection that I feel for you has in any way diminished.” Masood scolded Morgan for his English temperament, his way of carefully “measur[ing] out [his] emotions as if they we
re potatoes.”

  The emotional whirlwind was salutary, in the end. Looking back, Forster believed that Masood “woke me up out of my suburban and academic life, showed me new horizons and a new civilization and helped me towards the understanding of a continent . . . There never was anyone like him and there never will be anyone like him.” Over the course of several years, the young man eclipsed HOM in Morgan’s imagination. For the time being, all Morgan’s emotions were below the surface. He wrote cryptically in his diary about his deepening love for Masood: “We like the like and love the unlike.” But his life remained so bifurcated that even in his private diary he divided his end-of-year insights into “inward events” and “outward events.”

  The Longest Journey was set to be published in mid-April 1907. Disgruntled by his dealings with Blackwood, Morgan had found a new publisher and better terms. (He remained with Edward Arnold for the rest of his life.) The week before the novel came out, Morgan set off on a walking tour of the Lake District, the fifth wheel to two couples—HOM and his wife, Christabel, and George and Florence Barger. Florence was George’s cousin and wife, a university graduate whose spirited support for socialism, suffrage, and women’s education made clear she planned to be her own person.

  Morgan enjoyed the long treks across magnificent scenery and “pigging it” at meals. But he peeled off alone on a personal pilgrimage, following the route of rural place-names in A. E. Housman’s elegiac A Shropshire Lad. HOM had introduced him to these poems during their second year at King’s, and his valedictory sense of the receding friendship with HOM magnified Morgan’s romantic appreciation of both the text and the terrain. “The home-sickness and bed-sickness” in Housman’s poems, “the yearning for masculine death—all mingled with my late adolescence and turned inward upon me.” Shrewsbury he found “unspoilt and alive: a city of vigor still adjusted to its beautiful frame. Poetry—or luck—in every inch of it.” Suddenly, he read Housman’s poems as a kind of code that “concealed a personal experience” of its author: “I realized the poet must have fallen in love with a man.” Just outside of Ludlow, Morgan was seized by a desire to communicate his understanding of this hidden connection with Housman. At a rickety oak table in front of a peat fire in the Angel public house, Morgan composed a fervent letter of admiration. It was his first experiment with homosexual author worship. From Housman, silence. Much later, Morgan realized that he had not affixed a return address.