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

by Wendy Moffat

  Morgan was more or less “adrift in India,” with no fixed itinerary or clear purpose in mind. Besides visiting Masood, his one object was to spend some weeks with Malcolm and Josie Darling in Lahore. The couple “fitted indifferently into official circles at Lahore . . . indeed sometimes . . . did not fit in at all.” Malcolm had startled some of the local English officials when he inspected a local prison wearing robin’s-egg blue pajamas. Morgan found Josie in particular to be “unconventional, ardent, fearless.” He told Lily,

  The Darlings are ideal hosts and friends. Not many Anglo-Indians would encourage a guest to do queer unusual things, still less to join in them themselves. Everyone is in such a terror of being out of the ordinary. Classical music, literature, intellectual tastes generally—as a rule all is dropped in a couple of years and husbands and wives . . . meet other husbands and wives in a dense mass at the Club.

  Morgan was as well equipped as any Englishman to comprehend the thicket of Indian politics, in large measure because his interests were so “peculiar and personal.” “I didn’t go there to govern . . . or to make money or to improve people,” he said later. “I went there to see a friend.” From October 1912 to March 1913 Morgan constructed a spider web from friend to friend across India, from the club at Lahore to a wedding feast in Dewas, from the Anglo-Oriental College to the Barabar Caves, on bicycle and atop elephants, on foot and “in a sort of starved omnibus.”

  He arrived at a moment of relative calm for the Raj. In 1905 the viceroy, Lord Curzon (the same Lord Curzon who had been the object of Oscar Browning’s affections), partitioned Bengal, ostensibly to make the administration of such a large area less difficult. Like so much of British mapmaking, the effect was destabilizing: Muslims became the majority in Eastern Bengal, and both Hindu and Muslim nationalists magnified tensions as their populations jockeyed for power. The partition was rescinded in time for King George V’s triumphal imperial tour the year before Morgan arrived. The Indian Councils Act reforms of 1909 solidified the Raj, leaving two nominal consultative power bases to Indians, an impotent National Congress, and a loose confederacy of provincial councils, elected indirectly, which kept homogeneous ethnic groups geographically localized and set in uneasy equipoise. As Morgan traveled from Muslim to Hindu states he kept his ears open, hearing a chorus of contradictory ideas about which was the real India, and what should become of the country.

  Of one thing he became certain: even the most well-intentioned British people were coarsened and spiritually corrupted by the experience of imperial power. One Englishwoman told Morgan, “I came out with no feeling against Indians, and now I can’t bear them.” After the rebellion of 1857 the British, afraid of contagion both bacterial and cultural, had retreated into their little rectilinear compounds, eating boiled beef and bottled peas and putting on musicales at the club in a hideous parody of suburban life. Even “a cultivated man with a good sense of unimaginative humour” could only muster the half-joking admission that “I despise the native at the bottom of my heart.” Morgan wrote Florence Barger that he had met a schoolmaster at Benares, “so kind, but whatever I wanted to do, he told me it wasn’t done and whatever I said he replied archly ‘Oh, but that’s seditious.’” When the military chaplain at Chhatarpur suggested to the maharajah that he should eat beef to gain strength, Morgan “winced with horror,” but his private secretary noted serenely, “The padre sahib is a very nice man indeed, he has no interest whatever in religion and that is suitable for a clergyman.”

  After such familiarity with Masood and his Muslim friends, Hindu India was more impenetrable to both Goldie and Morgan. At the “paradise” of Chhatarpur, Morgan met the maharajah, who had been tutored for a time by Sir Theodore Morison; at Dewas Senior, “the oddest corner of the world outside of Alice in Wonderland,” he met the man he would familiarly call “Bapu,” the Maharajah of Dewas. Malcolm Darling had served as a kind of regent to the young rajah before he assumed power, and Morgan and he were invited to attend a grand wedding in honor of a local British dignitary. Morgan was dressed for the occasion, in jodhpurs of white muslin and “a waistcoat the colours of a Neapolitan ice—red, white and green, and this was almost concealed by my chief garment—a magnificent coat of claret coloured silk, trimmed with gold . . . [which] came to below my knees . . . Cocked rakishly over one ear was a Maratha Turban of scarlet and gold . . .”

  After the wedding came a feast. Morgan detailed the items on the thali: “brown tennis-ball, not bad . . . three dreadful little dishes that tasted of nothing till they were well in your mouth, when your whole tongue suddenly burst into flame. I got to hate this side of the tray . . . Long thin cake, like a brandy snap but salt.” And a mound of seed “As for canaries . . .”

  At Chhatarpur, Goldie noted, the maharajah “turned out” to be homosexual, though he had melded his sexual inclination to a kind of perverse religiosity, in which the boys who were the object of his yearning became figured as the god Krishna, the god who like the Messiah was always promising to come but never came—Krishna as a kind of “ideal friend.” For Dickinson, who himself practiced a kind of chaste version of Hellenic boy worship, this was a familiar and melancholy theme.

  Masood’s young friends who had studied law at Cambridge chafed at the indignities of their daily lives under the Raj, and were unabashed at explaining this to Morgan. In Allahabad, he recorded the conversations between the junior magistrate Abu Saeed Mirza and his friends at a Mogul dinner they served. They had to be ever so careful with European women, they complained—“not even a little flirt.” Whipped into honest anger, Mirza told him, “It may be fifty or one hundred years but we shall throw you out.” Morgan transposed this comment to the mouth of Dr. Aziz, though even when he finished A Passage to India in 1924 he could have no idea how prescient it would prove to be.

  The weeks spent with Masood did not resolve the question of their friendship. Almost from the beginning of the visit Morgan was lamenting “he who might be slipping away,” and in mid-January, spending two weeks with Masood at his work in Bankipore, Morgan learned that Masood planned to marry the following year. The two men had some sort of long conversation and reckoning, which survives only in the poignant entry in Morgan’s journal for January 13: “Long and sad day . . . Aie-aie-aie-growing after tears. Mosquito net, fizzling lamp, high step between rooms. Then return and comfort a little.” The next day Morgan rose early to visit the Barabar Caves. Masood did not see him off on the journey.

  Perhaps because of this farewell, India always conveyed a sweet sense of wanting in Morgan—both a sense of desire and a sense of loss. He recognized that the narrative of perpetual longing was embroidered into a larger tapestry of Orientalism, that India would always reflect British desires for the exotic, would always tantalize and disappoint. The essays he wrote in the immediate aftermath of his voyage are full of little deconstructions of his own attitudes, making the man who yearns too much into a figure both poignant and comical. Whenever Morgan looked for magic in India his expectations were deflated, but often in the places he was not looking for it, it found him. Morgan came away from his first visit to India certain that there was no certainty. But he was brimming with images and scenes: the nationalist Muslim wedding where the gramophone played “I’d Rather Be Busy with My Little Lizzie,” competing aurally with the orthodox call to prayer; a long conversation on the road with a completely un-self-conscious naked boy; the inadvertently comic carved inscription “God si love” on a marble wall; in the courts at Aurangabad a punkah wallah pulling the blades of a huge leaf fan back and forth “with the impassivity of Atropos”; hundreds of naked men waiting to bathe in the Ganges; the blank sheen of the walls in the Barabar Caves. Each of these visions would burn its way into his great novel of India, but not for a long time to come. As Morgan traveled the subcontinent, he felt sterile, and convinced that these impressions would be of no use to him. He told his new friend, the Belfast writer Forrest Reid, “I am dried up. Not in my emotions but in their expression .
. . To have done good work is something.”

  As he left Bombay for Marseille on April 1, Morgan already conceived that his incomplete understanding of India was a crystalline example of the human muddles that obscure and distort love. He wrote a final letter to Masood from aboard ship. “It’s an awful pity when people who love each other and might live together don’t. I’m coming to live with you in our old age, but till then you must make some other arrangement.”

  Morgan came home from India bearing gifts—yards and yards of brightly colored silk that he arranged atmospherically: the dining room table “with silks strewn and incense burning,” so beautiful that Lily gave a “gasp of joy.” She called Ruth and Agnes in to witness the unpacking. It was a “radiant moment.”

  Lily was fifty-eight, stout, and plagued by gout and rheumatism; in September 1912 she decided on a month’s water cure at Harrogate, in the north of England, to soak her bones in the glorious Orientalist fantasy of the recently renovated Turkish baths. Morgan spent some of the time in Belfast, visiting HOM and Forrest Reid, for whom he had written a letter of praise for his novel The Bracknells earlier in the year. Reid was a few years older than Morgan, buttoned-up and terribly middle-class. He had paid his own way through Cambridge after inheriting some money, and lived a very quiet bachelor life, penning delicate novels celebrating schoolboy virtues. Morgan appreciated being Reid’s mentor, and their epistolary friendship had meant much to him during his time in India. In mid-September, Morgan joined Lily in Harrogate, and with her safely placed at the spa, he made a secret pilgrimage about an hour’s travel south, to visit Edward Carpenter.

  By the time he died in 1929, Carpenter was considered a Victorian relic, but as Dent defended him then, this was true only because “modern life had absorbed so much of his message that one can hardly understand that it was ever necessary for him to utter it.” Carpenter was approaching seventy when Morgan made a visit, the most recent in a long line of admirers and supplicants who made their way to the cottage and garden and writing shed that comprised the old man’s “Thoreau ideal” in the tiny hamlet of Millthorpe, south of Sheffield. A romantic and a socialist, a Victorian guru of radical causes, Carpenter had cast aside a life of comfort and privilege (and the Anglican priesthood) to live among working-class people in the slums of Sheffield and agitate for class equality, women’s rights, and social acceptance of homosexuality. Tall and skinny, with a great shock of white hair and a beard like an Old Testament prophet, he lived with his much younger working-class lover, George Merrill, in a cottage on seven acres of land. Carpenter had rescued Merrill from destitute poverty in Sheffield. Now Merrill cooked and cleaned and gardened—at first growing produce to sell in local markets, and eventually for subsistence only. He worked wearing sandals—sometimes only sandals—among the vegetables. Carpenter had traveled to America to meet Whitman, who inspired him and slept with him. The two men shared a belief in the principles they labeled democracy.

  What Carpenter believed and how he lived were indistinguishable. Because he despised economic inequality, he gave up his privilege; because he abhorred how modern life atomized people, separated them from one another and their physical nature, he lived simply and off the grid. He did not distinguish between the forces that oppressed women’s lives and the ignominy heaped on homosexuals. He composed extravagant Whitmanesque poetry promoting “homogenic love,” free sex, and women’s liberation, and lived openly as Merrill’s comrade for almost forty years. The simple example of his life proved inspiring for generations. Goldie and Roger Fry, when they were undergraduate lovers, had stayed at the cottage with Carpenter a generation before; G. B. Shaw and William Morris revered him the generation before that.

  Carpenter himself was grateful to have found his calling and lived his ideals; Merrill felt that he had been rescued by his life with Carpenter. The younger man defended their isolated idyll—he once chased away a pair of roving missionaries, shouting, “We’re all in heaven here.” For his part, Carpenter described in his autobiography how he had given his dress clothes away, and eschewing respectability, found that he could change the world and earn real happiness by settling down with his lover as “two bachelors.” Morgan described how Carpenter, by “escap[ing] from culture by the skin of his teeth,” became “not only charming and lovable, but great.” Carpenter’s “candor about sex, particularly about homosexuality” was what drew Morgan to visit him, and the occasion would utterly change Morgan’s life.

  In the kitchen of the little farmhouse Carpenter sent off a spark of ideas. But it was the dark, handsome Merrill, then in his forties, who (unbeknown to the old man) made a play for Morgan, touching “a creative spring,” which was located—it turned out—“just above the buttocks.” Morgan had never been touched there like that before, and could still recall its thrill almost fifty years later: “It was as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving my thoughts.”

  What Forster “conceived” in that furtive touch was his fifth, and only truly honest, novel—Maurice. He imagined a happy gay love story between two “ordinary affectionate men”—Maurice Hall, a suburban stockbroker, and his lover Alec Scudder, a restive working-class man who takes on the job of gamekeeper to a threadbare gentryman’s estate. Together, Maurice and Alec end up much as Carpenter and Merrill did, in isolation but defying society in two significant ways: by being unregenerately and openly homosexual, and by loving as equal partners despite their class differences. (The gamekeeper-as-salt-of-the-earth lover may have become a stereotype since the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but it is well to remember that Morgan’s story was written almost twenty years before D. H. Lawrence’s.) Returning to Harrogate after a few short days, Morgan began to write as if he were on fire.

  “A happy ending was imperative” to the plot of the new novel. Morgan had seen miseries enough in life—Merz’s suicide, Goldie’s unrequited loves, rumors and stories of blackmail, doctor’s “cures” and prison with hard labor, self-abnegation and miserable “loneliness.” A story in the newspaper might end “unhappily, with a lad dangling from a noose,” or with the poor man facing the “penalty society exacts.” What was art for, if not to show a new way forward? “I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.” Only in the isolated example of George Merrill and Edward Carpenter had Morgan seen even an inkling of the domestic life for gay men that he had glimpsed in Whitman’s poems, that he believed in and desired.

  In shaping the plot, he tried to remain faithful to the spirit of his deepest wishes, but in the character of Maurice himself “I tried to create a character who was completely unlike myself or what I supposed myself to be, someone handsome, healthy, bodily attractive, mentally torpid, not a bad business man and rather a snob.” He wanted to make clear that the novel was wish fulfillment rather than autobiography—to make the point not only about his inner life, but also that the actual world, the place where a man like Henry Wilcox might feel most at home, was a little different than custom would have us believe.

  The third figure in the tense triangle of Maurice is Clive Durham, who meets Maurice in his rooms at Cambridge. Clive is ahead of Maurice, and introduces him to the “hellenic temperament,” drawing into an embrace Maurice’s at-first-unwilling arms. As Clive “deteriorates” into hypocrisy, denial, and marriage, he comes more and more to resemble the HOM of recent days, who had become a “ghastly old boy” in Belfast, lecturing on economics, obtuse, morose, and self-involved when Morgan came to visit. Years later Morgan felt he might have been “unfair on Clive” in this portrayal, but the revisions to his character betray Morgan’s unmistakable disappointment—not only for the death of the friendship that had meant the most to him when he was young, but of the painful discovery that HOM had lost his sensitivity and compassion.

  He showed the manuscript to no one for several months. Then, gingerly, he began to shar
e the work-in-progress with his most intimate friends, almost as a currency of trust, aware that they could hurt or expose him. He discovered much about the state of his novel from these first forays into sharing his secret—and much about the state of his friendships as well. He had made the mistake of showing Meredith a very early draft, and was dismayed to discover that “it bored him dumb—I shan’t show him the rest.” He concluded, “Hugh can’t again be in my life as he has been . . . I was very badly hit by his indifference to Maurice and the pain has opened my eyes little by little to his general indifference.”

  This fact Morgan could confide only to Florence Barger, who was untainted by association from King’s College days. At first he approached her tentatively:

  I have talked to you so much, that I have decided to add another piece of news—i.e. That I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England’s. As it is improbable I shall ever show it you, I had not meant to say: but I know that you will be cheered by this proof of fertility, and I hope when it is off my mind I may be free for more practical themes. I have been pretty busy over it for the last 9 months. I think I would rather you didn’t tell George this.

  To a heterosexual woman like Florence, he feared that Maurice might be “a new and painful world, into which you will hardly have occasion to glance again! A tiny world that is generally unknown to all who are not born in it. My only fear is that it may make me seem remote to you—not for one instant repellent, but remote.” But Florence praised the book. “I am so happy that you think the thing’s literature,” he wrote her. “It was meant to be, but that naughty Hugh disconcerted me; so much that I nearly chucked it.”