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

by Wendy Moffat

  Back in Weybridge he encountered a pile of positive reviews in the newspapers. Most read The Longest Journey as an extension of the satirical attitude of Where Angels Fear to Tread. The Times Literary Supplement wrote, “Mr. Forster fastens himself again, like some sharp wholesome insect upon the life of the suburbs . . .” An unsigned review in the Morning Post faulted his spasmodic plotting: “the sudden death rate among the significant characters, exclusive of the two children . . . is 44%.” But the Cambridge friends who found themselves portrayed in the novel were not as sanguine. Lytton Strachey resented Morgan’s commercial and critical success. He described to Leonard Woolf how he had heard something “burrowing in a corner” of the London Library.

  It was the Taupe . . . He’s a little changed—very bronzed and healthy-looking, and with very nearly the air of a settled establishment. His book [Where Angels Fear to Tread] has gone into a second edition, and he sits in Weybridge writing another, and will go on doing so all his life. He admits he’s “successful,” and recognises, in that awful taupish way of his, the degradations that that implies. But he’s of course perfectly contented. The thought of him sickens me.

  He added, “The morals, the sentimentality and the melodrama [of The Longest Journey ] are incredible, but there are even further depths of fatuity and filth.” Robert Trevelyan characteristically took it on himself to tell Morgan that his Cambridge friends had found “things in [your novel] which are very bad. They are not the only things in it that are bad, oh no, not by any means, but these . . . things are so bad that it is only common friendliness to let you know.” But criticism didn’t dent his spirits. Morgan was always hardest on himself. Once he had committed to print, he could let it go without much fretting.

  With the promise of a contract for a new novel, he returned to the unfinished Lucy manuscript with a growing sense of dread at how pallid and artificial its inner life seemed to him now. “I have been looking at the ‘Lucy’ novel. I don’t know. It’s bright and sunny and I like the story. Yet I wouldn’t and I couldn’t finish it in the same style. I’m rather depressed. The question is akin to morality.”

  Five years had passed since he sketched out a list of characters in an Italian notebook—

  Lucy Beringer. Miss Bartlett, her cousin.

  H.O.M.

  Miss Lavish . . .

  —but only one of them had been named after an actual person, and this was HOM. That character had disappeared in revision, and the person himself, ensconced in a middle-class life, his wife pregnant with twins, seemed to Morgan more dead than the notebook sketch he had inspired. The whole premise of a romantic novel seemed false.

  The new style, if one could call it that, twinkled still, but underneath it was a hard diamond edge of disgust at the work and his pandering. It took more than a year to hammer out revisions. Morgan adopted a tone of semicomic desperation as he described his efforts. In a parody of the last line of Wordsworth’s “Strange Fits of Passion,” he wrote Robert Trevelyan, “Oh mercy to myself I cried if Lucy don’t get wed.” Writing began to feel like a kind of ventriloquism. He even appropriated Miss Bartlett’s voice to accept an invitation to visit the Trevelyans:

  Sir,

  I hesitate to address you but you have again confused me with my young cousin Miss Honeychurch . . . I am of very little consequence, I do not matter, living in a very quiet way as I do at Tunbridge Wells . . . I beg you therefore for her sake to remember that I am

  CHARLOTTE Bartlett

  In revision he retained the arc of the plot—Lucy Honeychurch’s choice between the intellectual aesthete Cecil Vyse and the impetuous romantic figure of George Emerson—but began to insert private jokes to keep himself amused. The Reverend Mr. Beebe takes down Emerson’s copy of A Shropshire Lad from a bookshelf and announces, “Never heard of it.” He had always planned to dedicate the novel to HOM, and he did so. But his friend need not know that this was a valedictory.

  Writing the Lucy novel had become a mechanical exercise. But jolted by reading Walt Whitman’s Calamus poems, Morgan began to take Whitman’s declaration to heart: “I will escape from the sham that was proposed to me.” He began a systematic reading of the gay canon. If he listened with a newly attuned ear, the panpipes of erotic music he had detected in Housman could be heard everywhere. He jotted down a cryptic list of names in his diary without commentary, as if someone reading over his shoulder might discern the hidden pattern. There were the authors of “Etonian meditation[s],” stories of “delicate sensitive little schoolboys” who fall hopelessly in love with older boys, but whose “devotion only ends with death.” These Edwardian novels and their writers are long forgotten: A.E.W. Clarke’s Jaspar Tristram, H. N. Dickinson’s Keddy, Howard Overing Sturgis’s Tim, and the schoolboy fantasies of Desmond Coke, who published under the delicious pseudonym “Belinda Blinders.” There were defenses of homosexuality by J. A. Symonds and the Victorian sage Edward Carpenter. And there were the overtly sexual poems of Whitman, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare. Slowly and tentatively, Morgan began “contriving to get in touch” with an unacknowledged body of gay literature.

  In mid-January 1908 Morgan was offered a decisive opportunity to meet a homosexual author whom he might imagine as a master and mentor. Sydney Waterlow lived in Sussex near Rye, and through his wife’s family he had befriended Henry James, insofar as it was possible to move toward intimacy with that august presence. Waterlow attached himself to the Master in toadying admiration, and the old man, now approaching seventy, seemed content to bask in it.

  The myth of James, contrived by his own careful hand, was well under way. Ensconced in the cool and dark of Lamb House, James had fashioned himself into not merely an elder statesman of literature and guardian of the future of the novel, but a member of the English gentry. Through his friendship with Waterlow, Morgan was invited to take Sunday tea with James, keenly aware that James was purportedly “a really first class person.” Half jocular, half eagerly sincere, he wrote to Lily and Dent about the impending occasion: “I felt all that the ordinary healthy man feels in the presence of a lord.” The austere brick house had formal gardens and pristine lawns; inside, Morgan and Waterlow stole a glimpse as they walked past the darkened study where James composed at a massive table.

  The Master was sixty-six, rotund, and “effectively bald”; Morgan, tall, stammering, and shy, only twenty-seven. In The Albany magazine he had just published “The Celestial Omnibus”—a story of a boy who takes an ordinary bus to heaven on a fantastic journey—and feared that James would “know better” than to like it. But he was unprepared for the confusion that their actual meeting unleashed. Morgan was introduced as a published author. But James, who was a bit deaf and unlikely to be budged from his initial impressions, somehow decided that he was meeting the young philosopher-Apostle from King’s. “Your name’s Moore,” he announced firmly, grasping Morgan’s shoulder in a proprietary grip. Nonplussed, Morgan did not clearly correct the mistake, and a cascade of other small misunderstandings ensued: Was Forster from Wakefield or Weybridge? Had James or had he not known Forster’s great-aunt?

  In retrospect it was clear that James had wanted his guests to be comfortable, if only comfortable in their willingness to hear him hold forth on his opinions of the day. He had recently read Queen Victoria’s letters, and pronounced that she was “More of a man than I expected.” But the whole atmosphere of the place, and the compulsory reverence for James himself, repelled Morgan. The American transplant seemed to him to take on the worst attributes of “the English character.” There was no spontaneity, none of the kind of haphazard but reliable warmth that he had so loved in Masood, and even in HOM in his earlier days. James’s house and his person were like his novels, “disembodied” and fastidious in their emotional control.

  Twenty years later, while preparing the lectures that would be collected in Aspects of the Novel, Morgan would single out James for particularly savage criticism, in part because an artist of such great talent seemed to him to ha
ve a moral imperative to be human. James’s novels were beautifully designed, he acknowledged there, but their “pattern [is] woven—at what sacrifice? Most of human life has to disappear—all fun, all rapid motion, carnality, etc., and 9/10ths of heroism. Maimed creatures can alone breathe in his pages.” Characters in James’s novels are “gutted of the common stuff” in “the interest of the pattern” their godlike author seeks to impose, and “this castrating is not in the interests of the Kingdom of Heaven” since “there is no philosophy . . . no religion (except an occasional touch of superstition), no prophecy, no benefit for the superhuman at all. It is for the sake of a particular aesthetic effect which is certainly gained, but at this heavy price.” Though he did not say it aloud, Morgan concluded privately that the source of James’s cramp was repressed homosexuality—James was “merely declining to think about homosex, and the knowledge that he is declining throws him into the necessary fluster.”

  The disappointment he felt in meeting James may have been inevitable, and it was certainly partly Morgan’s own fault. In letters to his friends and in his own diary, he had built up the encounter into something auspicious, and the consciousness of these expectations dampened any chance of finding something magical in even the lackluster humor of his own inept performance. He wrote to Lily a brief comic sketch of himself as a hapless visitor, which played a familiar score but deflected the deeper lesson. The arid atmosphere of high art in Lamb House, the fawning and the hush, repelled Morgan. This kind of authority “was not my own road.”

  As he stepped out, literally, onto the gravel road outside Lamb House that blue-gray evening after tea, from down the lane framed by tall privets a bright flicker of flame flared and guttered. In the distance a workman walking home had paused to light a cigarette. It was not a deliberate call sign—the man never saw Morgan at all—but the glow set Morgan ablaze in a synaptic burst. It was a private revelation. Suddenly, Morgan felt impelled to travel a different road, to walk away from the house of Art toward the rougher, more real life he knew he desired.

  In his private diary, he wrote a sharp little sketch of the evening’s impressions to capture the feeling of the meeting with James. And then, without any context to frame it, a poem spilled out onto the page:

  I saw you or I thought of you

  I know not which, but in the dark

  Piercing the known and the untrue

  It gleamed—a cigarette’s faint spark.

  It gleamed—and when I left the room

  Where culture unto culture knelt

  Something just darker than the gloom

  Waited—it might be you I felt.

  It was not you; you pace no night

  No youthful flesh weighs down your youth.

  You are eternal, infinite,

  You are the unknown, and the truth.

  Yet each must seek reality:

  For those within the room, high talk,

  Subtle experience—for me

  The spark, the darkness on the walk.

  For the time being, he would not approach such men. He would spin his heart’s insights into art, captured in a rarefied, disembodied ideal of “eternal, infinite” manly beauty. But the impulse set his compass toward the human. He would go with the spark.

  5

  “Ordinary Affectionate Men”

  Working over the typescript of A Room with a View in early May 1908, Morgan dismissed the novel as “bilge.” His own words sounded inauthentic to him, but he had found a voice worth listening to: “I opened Walt Whitman for a quotation, and he started speaking to me . . . he is not a book but an acquaintance, and if I believe him, he’s more.” In Leaves of Grass Whitman had vowed to “dissipate this entire show of appearance,” to celebrate the poet’s love not merely of mankind, but of men. Morgan saw that Whitman, too, had been “stifled and choked” but he had shaken off his chains. Celebratory, effusive, manly, democratic, Whitman’s poems promised that there need be “no more fighting between the soul and the body.” So much of Whitman echoed Morgan’s hopes and desires. How wonderful it would be to “believe him,” to share his courage and his optimism. Whitman’s erotic poems were electrifying in their own right, but they gained greater power because they were part of a larger human yearning to connect.

  Passage to India!

  Lo, soul! seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?

  The earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work,

  The people to become brothers and sisters,

  The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,

  The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,

  The lands to be welded together.

  Just days after Whitman spoke to him, Morgan felt the “[i]dea for another novel shaping” in his quickening imagination. In a single short paragraph, he sketched out virtually the whole conception of Howards End. This story would be an answer to the thin, brittle quality he had come to detest in the long revisions of A Room with a View. Howards End would take a wider view. He would ground his characters in the modern world—the London wincing at the din of new construction, motor cars, and the pounding of steam pile drivers, and the timeless English countryside rapidly eroding into endless suburbia.

  Morgan balanced two families with very different values, each equally convinced of the supremacy of their way of seeing life: Margaret and Helen, the Schlegel sisters, who cherish personal relations and the liberal values of “temperance, tolerance and sexual equality”; and the Wilcoxes, who believe in money, business, and power, and who know to their marrow that the sisters’ outlook is “sheltered [and] academic”—“that Equality was nonsense, Votes for Women nonsense, Socialism nonsense, Art and Literature, except when conducive to strengthening the character, nonsense.” Morgan understood that “the spiritual cleavage between the families” must be tested by Margaret’s marriage to Henry Wilcox, and that she must marry him even after she discovers that though “impeccable publicly,” Henry has been hiding a sexual secret—a past liaison with “a prostitute.” Howards End explores the tension between respectability and personal morality, and the tremendous gulf between the standards for men’s and women’s sexual behavior.

  He also wanted to give the principles of liberalism a long hard look. It was all very well to dismiss the world of the Wilcoxes, the world of external things, of money and business—but Morgan knew that the world where young men could sit toasting crumpets on a long fork in front of the fire talking about ideas and art depended on things and money, depended, too, at its foundation on the unseen clerks and office boys who toiled in it. Where Henry and his children believe that they have earned their wealth, the Schlegel sisters feel a twinge of guilt about their privilege. The Schlegels’ politics are vaguely well-meaning: “they desired that public life should mirror what is good in the life within.” Their intervention on behalf of Leonard Bast—a young clerk whom they meet at a concert—begins the chain of events that leads to his death, and Helen Schlegel’s pregnancy and disgrace.

  Howards End is a house, the ancestral house of Ruth Wilcox, the first Mrs. Wilcox. It is a replica of Morgan’s child’s-eye view of Rooksnest, right down to the chimneys and the wych-elm with the boars’ teeth pressed into it. And Ruth Wilcox is a sort of spiritually attuned matriarch. She can read people’s hearts. Oblivious to the modern world, in touch with nature, content with her role as mother and wife, she is everything that the Schlegel sisters detest about women of their mother’s generation. And yet they both come to discover that Mrs. Wilcox is extraordinary, for reasons they cannot explain. Mrs. Wilcox is the female equivalent of Stephen Wonham.

  Morgan based his complex characters on models from his life. He told Dickinson, “Your home at All Souls Place somehow suggested the Schlegels’ house to me . . . and your three sisters seen as it were with a sideway glance and then refocussed.” In their unorthodox habits the Schlegels also resemble the orphaned daughters of Sir Leslie Stephen, who would soon marry to become Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell
. Leonard Bast, wary, believes that “to trust people is a luxury only the wealthy can indulge.” His character originated from Morgan’s observations of one of his proud and striving students at the Working Men’s College. Alexander Hepburn was a printer who fiercely wanted to become cultured. As Morgan watched the changes in “throbbing stinking London,” he worried that “Money is power, and nothing else is, as far as I can see.” He would test this principle as he worked on drafts of the novel throughout 1909.

  Just as Morgan began to imagine in an abstract way that Henry Wilcox’s sexual misconduct might set the story of the two families’ conflict in motion, a story of real sexual danger interjected into his life with horrifying force.

  Malcolm Darling’s impending wedding was the event of the summer in Morgan’s circle of Kingsmen. Darling had come home on leave from the Indian civil service, eager that Morgan should meet his best friend and groomsman, Ernest Merz. Merz was twenty-seven, a lawyer with the heart of a poet, good company, bright and funny, “a continual bubble of suppressed laughter”—Morgan liked him immediately. On Thursday, July 8, the three young men shared a congenial, leisurely bachelor supper at a Soho restaurant. After dinner Darling peeled off, leaving Morgan to stroll with Merz toward his club. They talked amiably, and said their goodbyes. Shortly after, Merz went to his rooms in the Albany, the fashionable bachelor apartments next to the Royal Academy, walked upstairs, poured himself a whisky, and hanged himself.