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

by Wendy Moffat

  Carpenter predictably “took to” the figure of the gamekeeper, but Morgan was surprised to find that he was “blind to” the sexual troubles of the women in the novel—here, at least, he was ahead of the prophet. Roger Fry told Morgan that the novel was “beautiful . . . the best work I have ever done,” which pleased him immensely; and Sydney Waterlow gave a heterosexual stamp of approval to the love affair, though he felt the novel was most effective as “a sociological tract.”

  Morgan entrusted his most heartfelt discussion of Maurice to three friends with expertise in its “tiny world”—Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Lytton Strachey, and Forrest Reid; but in different ways all three men disappointed him. His defense of the novel allowed him to articulate the clearest vision of what being homosexual meant to him.

  He made the mistake of showing Goldie some short stories on homosexual themes. His mentor’s shocked reaction momentarily shattered Morgan’s confidence. He burned the stories, and the sting of Goldie’s disapproval spilled over to dampen the writing of Maurice. “My smooth spurt is over,” he wrote in his diary, “ended by Dickinson’s disgust.” Just as when A Room with a View had stalled, Morgan was left with “3 unfinished novels on my hands”—the first few chapters of an Indian novel, the fragment of Arctic Summer, and the very beginning of Maurice. By the end of the year, he bucked up, determined to look “Forward rather than back.” He set his sights on a different muse: “Edward Carpenter! Edward Carpenter! Edward Carpenter!”

  Morgan shared a later draft with Goldie, after rewriting a section of the novel. Goldie had objected to “the Scudder part”—presumably a portrayal of rather inexact lovemaking between Maurice and Alec—though he admitted he had little “personal contact” with such people and so might be a poor judge of its veracity. He told Morgan that the novel “breaks my heart almost . . . When Maurice goes back after [Clive’s] marriage—it’s unbearably right.” Goldie had quite a lot of experience with this sort of heartbreak; for the better part of a year he had been telling Morgan about the peregrinations of his lover, Oscar Eckhardt, who had left Goldie for a woman. For his part, Morgan was happy to have used the book for a concrete purpose. He and Goldie, he wrote in his diary, “are on a basis of comrade’s life at last. Maurice has done it.”

  Forrest Reid’s response was even more pointed than Goldie’s had been. Reid was in love with young boys, but self-hating and consumed with a sense of sin. He professed to be surprised that Morgan was homosexual, surprised as well to be discerned as one himself. He had distilled his homosexuality in both life and art into a “sublimated . . . sublime,” a kind of Peter Pan worship of schoolboys’ innocence, schoolboys’ perfections, schoolboys’ disembodied and unerring perfection. All his life he lived with one young boy or other, delighting in making up elaborate stories for them until they left him and grew up. The idea of lovemaking between men was sinful, he believed, and Maurice, even with its gauzy description of Maurice and Alec “sharing” their bodies, seemed repellent and perverted to him. He asked Morgan to burn the letter that told him this. Morgan’s letter in return began quite delicately:

  Dear Reid.

  . . . My perspicacity is equally at fault, for I quite thought you realised my interest in these subjects—something you said my last visit to you quite convinced me. I also thought, and still think, that if expressed in detail much of this interest must give you pain, but of late I am crediting others with the strength to bear the pain, and that is why I sent you the book. Earlier I couldn’t have—should have feared to lose your friendship. I don’t fear now.

  But he had come too far in his own inner life to accept the premises that underpinned Reid’s critique. Whitman had inspired him. He was prepared to argue not only for the legitimacy of homosexual love but also for its necessary bodily expression. He rejected the stink of Christianity in Reid’s response.

  I do want to raise the subject out of the mists of theology: Male and female created He not them. Ruling out undeveloped people like Clive (who “grow out of homosexual feelings”)—one is left with “perverts” (an absurd word, because it assumes they were given a choice, but let’s use it). Are these “perverts” good or bad like normal men, their disproportionate tendency to badness (which I admit) being due to the criminal blindness of society? Or are they inherently bad? You answer, as I do, that they are the former, but you answer with reluctance. I want you to answer vehemently! The man in my book is, roughly speaking, good, but society nearly destroys him. He nearly slinks through his life furtive and afraid, and burdened with a sense of sin. You say “If he had not met another man like him, what then?” What then indeed? But blame Society, not Maurice, and be thankful even in a novel when a man is left to lead the best life he is capable of leading!

  Morgan argued that it is “right . . . that such a relation should include the physical . . . if both people want it and both are old enough to know what they want.” Morgan told Reid that he measured the “success” of his writing on the subject by whether a “normal” reader might see the human in the expression of gay desire—to forget “the form of the passion and only remember . . . it was passion.” (He was bucked up by Waterlow having seen the novel in this way.) It was natural for each person to be prejudiced about “the particular local forms that desire takes”—after all, “we all find it difficult to tolerate a form that isn’t our own.”

  It was the “social fabric” and not nature itself that made homosexuals what they were, Morgan argued to Reid. “My defence at any last Judgement would be ‘I was trying to connect up and use all the fragments I was born with.’”

  To give these people a chance—to see whether Paradises are really nearer any Hell than penal Servitude, whether their convictions of Sin are really more than the burrs in the social fabric that the heart and brain, working together, can pluck out—that’s why I wrote Maurice and let him meet Alec—not saints or aesthetes either of them but just ordinary affectionate men.

  It was a powerful statement of belief, especially since it was wholly a product of Morgan’s idealistic imagination. He had created two lovers who escaped into a utopian world without ever having had the courage to touch any man himself.

  This was precisely the point, from Lytton Strachey’s perspective. He acidly told Morgan that his tender vision of gay domesticity was impossible. At the end of the version Strachey had read, Maurice and Alec went off together to the north of England to pursue a life apart as woodsmen and comrades. Don’t be so romantic, Strachey argued. Men like this don’t find each other. Even if they do, they do not stay together: “I should have prophesied a rupture after 6 months—chiefly as a result of . . . class differences—. . . [E]ven such a simple-minded fellow as Maurice would have felt this—and so your Sherwood Forest ending appears to me slightly mythical.”

  Strachey’s second criticism was that he didn’t “understand why the copulation question should be given such importance.” Not understanding how close to home these comments might be to Morgan, Strachey sharpened his argument: “I really think the whole conception of male copulation in the book rather diseased—in fact morbid and unnatural.” He discerned a double standard in the book, contrasting the two years of “chastity between Maurice and Clive . . . which you consider (a) as a very good thing and (b) as nothing very remarkable” with Clive’s decision to marry “and promptly, quite as a matter of course, to have his wife.” With these provisos, Strachey informed Morgan that he enjoyed the novel very much.

  In his reply, Morgan conceded Strachey’s expertise in sexual matters, without quite acknowledging how deep his own ignorance of the practicalities was. He told Lytton that he agreed with the criticisms more than he “would have liked.” At its heart, Maurice was designed to be a visionary statement, and Strachey’s critique that it was too fantastic and utopian was beside the point. More than a year earlier, he had written Lytton, “No one ever breaks” conventions “in the right place.” The exchange stripped away some of the shiny veneer of Strachey’s condescension
toward Morgan’s commercial success, and made the men much closer friends.

  It also pressed Morgan to articulate his aesthetic objectives in writing Maurice. Thanking Dent for his words of praise, “You can scarcely imagine the loneliness of such an effort as this—a year’s work!” he outlined his accomplishment: “I do feel that I have created something absolutely new, even to the Greeks. Whitman anticipated me, but he didn’t really know what he was after, or only half-knew—shirked, even to himself, the statement.”

  But his hope that writing an unpublishable novel might end his creative sterility was not borne out. By June 1914 the manuscript of Maurice was complete. But there was nothing to show Lily, who could not help noticing the long days and nights that Morgan was squirreled away in his attic writing. He shaped an explanation for her somewhere between a true confession and an outright lie—telling her, “My work is all wrong.”

  The “diminution” of his intimacy with Masood, which had been growing since he returned from India, “was to be expected” now that his friend had married, and Morgan did not worry over it much. About the rupture with HOM, he decided, “[I] do not think I am to blame.” His old friendships took a backseat to two new relationships that burst into his life but foundered quickly on the thorough misapprehension of his character. First, a small embarrassment: Florence Barger’s sister Elsie Thomas fell in love with him. But writing Maurice had fortified his resolve, and he let her down quickly and gently, without revealing anything but his respect for her. In late January 1915, Morgan met D. H. Lawrence and his new wife, Frieda, at a dinner party held by the Bloomsbury patroness Lady Ottoline Morrell. The son of a miner, Lawrence had crawled out of poverty and a miserably unhappy family life to become a school inspector. But the educational system was stultifying, and he broke free—by stealing the affection of his favorite professor’s wife. Lawrence was almost thirty and had completed his autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers. He and Frieda lived by the kindness of friends who lent them a cottage in Sussex. The couple were about to begin their restless hegira to find a place in the world—Australia, France, a ranch in New Mexico—where they could feel at home and free.

  Lawrence was categorical about everything. In Howards End’s unease with the class system, and the stories of Pan in The Celestial Omnibus, Lawrence thought he had found a kindred spirit in Morgan, but he accused him of not going far enough. Lawrence was “a sandy haired passionate Nibelung,” Morgan told Forrest Reid, and “really extraordinarily nice.” Frieda had warmed to Howards End, telling Morgan it “is a beautiful book, but you must go further.” The couple invited Morgan to come to their cottage for what turned out to be an alarming weekend: Lawrence held forth, linking Morgan’s temperament to a whole cosmology of what was wrong with modern man, keeping him up till all hours to accuse him—“you belied and betrayed yourself”—and urging him to fulfill “the natural animal in you.” Forster returned to Weybridge, and Lawrence immediately sent a hectoring letter: “In [your] books . . . you are intentional and perverse & not vitally interesting. One must live through the source, through all the racings & heats of Pan, and on to my beloved angels & devils with their aureoles & their feet upon the flowers of lights.” And then he demanded that Morgan come again the next weekend, breezily signing off, “Auf Wiedersehn.”

  It emerged that Lawrence’s diagnosis of Morgan’s problem was that he must “satisfy” his “implicit manhood” but “He tries to dodge himself—the sight is painful.” “Why can’t he take a woman and fight clear to his own basic, primal being?” Lawrence lectured Bertrand Russell. Because, he confidently concluded without pausing for an answer, Morgan “sucks his dummy—you know, those child’s comforters—long after his age.” If Morgan would only act, he could become “pregnant with his own soul.” Lawrence told a friend that he found Morgan “very nice.” But he wondered “if the grip has gone out of him.” For his own part, Morgan suspected a different problem in Lawrence’s psyche: suppressed homosexual tendencies. The “Poem of Friendship” in Lawrence’s The White Peacock, “which is beautiful,” was also “the queerest product of subconsciousness that I have yet struck,” Morgan told Dent knowingly. Lawrence “has not a glimmering from first to last of what he’s up to.”

  The final straw came when Lawrence spoke derisively about Edward Carpenter in Morgan’s presence. Here again Lawrence was quick to judge but off the mark. To Lawrence, the old man was a sexual pioneer in a fusty Victorian vein whereas he alone was clear-thinking and modern. It was another case of Lawrence blindly misreading stylistic clues. Carpenter wore a beard, true, and he had campaigned for sexual freedom since before Lawrence was born, but he had only recently founded the British Society for Sex Psychology. The society was cautious about its members getting ensnared in the recently enacted Defense of the Realm laws against sedition: one had to be sponsored by two members, and to pay dues. But its agenda was genuinely radical—promoting open discussion of sexual matters, women’s right to sexual pleasure, access to birth control, and homosexual rights. At Carpenter’s urging, Morgan had quietly joined the society. Months later, so did Lawrence. In his diary, Morgan realized that he couldn’t forgive Lawrence’s insulting Carpenter. “With regret” he let go of the irascible friendship.

  Even when Morgan had been at Nassenheide, British anxiety about the Hun was palpable. In August 1914 war was declared against Germany. The shadow of war had lingered for so long that “up till the last moment it was impossible to believe that the thing was really going to happen.” The fact of war frayed Morgan’s friendships. Even Malcolm’s wife, Josie Darling, who was dear to his heart, became irritable. Stop dreaming, she told him, enlist in the army, and “face facts.” He gave her a sharp answer. “Don’t say ‘face facts’ to me, Josie. Everybody keeps saying it just now, but the fact is, it’s impossible to face facts. They’re like the walls of a room . . . If you face one wall, you must have your back to the other three.”

  He decided he would not enlist, and instead took on a civilian “war assignment,” cataloguing paintings at the National Gallery. Maurice was unpublishable, and there were no more novels in him, he felt sure. He confessed to Goldie, “What’s to occupy me for the rest of my life, I can’t conceive.” It was impossible not to comprehend his predicament, and impossible to do anything about it. He told Florence, “I am leading the life of a little girl so long as I am tied to home.”

  6

  “Parting with Respectability”

  On the ship from Marseille to Alexandria, the men discussed conscription. It was mid-November 1915, and after fifteen months of total war the British Army was hopelessly depleted. A draft seemed inevitable. The small company of Red Cross volunteers bound for British-occupied northern Africa considered this looming fact. As noncombatants on the margins of the war, they found a bright side: the draft would pull Britain together as a nation, give men a renewed sense of purpose and pride. Both the working-class ambulance driver and the Tory doctor agreed. What a good idea it would be to have all “Englishmen” together in the fight!

  In his diary Forster recorded the conversation as if his companions were minor characters in an unwritten expatriate novel. He sat quietly apart from the passengers sunning themselves on deck. Morgan was almost thirty-seven, but gave the impression of someone much younger—“a very pale, delicately-built young man, slightly towzled and very shy, with a habit of standing on one leg and winding the other round it.” He had perfected the art of eavesdropping.

  Setting out for Alexandria, it was hard to tell if he was running from or running toward something. In England, Morgan was suspended between two camps, alienated by both the ardent pacifism of Strachey, Dickinson, and his Bloomsbury friends, and the rabid—female, he felt—call to arms. War fever grew poisonously. And it was poisonously linked to sexual politics. Zealous self-described “brigades” of young women invented a novel kind of street theater, pressing white feathers into the lapels of men in civilian dress to shame them into enlisting. He had rebuffed an unsolicit
ed letter from the mother of an old school friend, impugning his patriotism, and by extension, his masculinity. Her attitude was ubiquitous. The Daily Mail had just published Jessie Pope’s poem “The Call,” with its insistent goading against effeminacy:

  Who’s for the khaki suit—

  Are you, my laddie?

  Who longs to charge and shoot—

  Do you, my laddie?

  Who’s keen on getting fit

  Who means to show his grit

  And who’d rather wait a bit—

  Would you, my laddie?

  Aboard ship, among strangers, Morgan mulled over the transformative power of an ill-fitting khaki suit. The Red Cross uniform was comically unimpressive: “khaki of sorts with some sort of rank sewn on to it, which later on came out in the wash.” Despite this, despite the least military posture of any male creature alive, despite his distracted academic mien, Forster discovered that clothes made the man. He felt uneasy, in disguise. In his diary he noted wryly, “My uniform is well received. Some think me a soldier, some a chaplain.”

  He called the uniform his “costume.” It suited him for an ambiguous role. His official title was Searcher in the Wounded and Missing Department of the Red Cross. He held no rank, but the position afforded the modest privileges of an officer: half-price travel on Alexandria’s new electric trams, a rudimentary salute in greeting. Nevertheless, he was a civilian, and was expected to find his own lodging and pay his own way. As he traveled by rail across the Nile Delta, from Port Said to Zagazig to Tanta, he knew only the barest outline of his duties. He was to interview the wounded in military hospitals to determine the status of soldiers gone missing in the disastrous months of fighting in the Dardanelles. By early December, Forster began his work. He planned to stay three months. He stayed more than three years.