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

by Wendy Moffat

  No doubt a promise to keep the den a secret had been broken. But Forster’s terror—“sickened to the vitals”—must have come from the realization that he, too, had been vulnerable to exposure. He told Carpenter that the commandant at the hospital was a “purity fanatic” who put men with venereal disease in “prison conditions in a wire enclosure.” No doubt he could imagine a similar fate if he were “peached on.” The episode only fed his sexual anxiety.

  At the time the draft scare was brewing a propitious event opened the secret city still further. At dinner in the Mohammed Ali Club in early March, Pericles Anastassiades introduced him to an old friend, a lifelong Alexandrian and expatriate Greek, whose family (like Anastassiades’s) had made a fortune in exporting cotton. But the man, Constantine Cavafy, had been down on his luck for decades; the ninth and last child, Cavafy had been educated in England, but lost his father at a young age, and lived like Balzac’s Père Goriot in meaner and meaner circumstances.

  Now he presented almost a cartoonish sketch of his more prosperous former self. He was impossibly vain and self-important. Though fifty-four, he styled himself “middle-aged.” He was fastidious and formal. And he somewhat absurdly embalmed his physique. He circulated airbrushed and quite dated photos of himself to his admirers. He wore spectacular black circular spectacles, and brilliantined his hair with some special coal-black concoction. A friend described him as having the air of a boy who had inexplicably aged. He was palpably artificial, and palpably homosexual. And he was utterly intoxicating to Forster.

  It took some weeks before the full magic of Cavafy revealed itself. By August Morgan wrote his mother that he had been invited into the inner circle—to “a literary evening.” Cavafy was something special and “delightful,” a “Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.” He was a poet utterly divorced from the commerce of art. Part of Cavafy’s attraction for Morgan was his “tilt,” the complete bifurcation of his public and his inner, essential life. This entailed separating day from night.

  The daylight world consisted of an almost comic resistance to the British work ethic as espoused by Miss Grant Duff. Despite his great erudition, Cavafy was a clerk for the government office improbably named the Third Circle of Irrigation. For him it was more like the third circle of hell. He cultivated an exquisite sloth. His colleagues there described his elaborate strategies—covering his desk with papers “to give the impression he was overwhelmed with work,” answering the telephone with the plaintive lament “I am very busy,” arriving late but eschewing the elevator to take the stairs, walking slowly as if deep in thought. Most of the day, he composed poetry at his desk. His coworkers observed him: “We saw him lift up his hands like an actor, and put on a strange expression as if in ecstasy [as] he would bend down to write.”

  In the dark world of his salon Cavafy seductively embraced the seedy as the best part of life. He had devolved to a small apartment in the Greek quarter northeast of the square, off limits to the casual visitor because of its impenetrable winding and narrow streets. The flat was on Rue Lepsius, known to the wags as “Rue Clapsius” because of the preponderance of whorehouses in the neighborhood. Indeed, the apartment was on the second floor, directly over a male brothel. Cavafy found the location to be efficient and ideal: “Where could I live better? Below, the brothel caters for the flesh. And there is the church which forgives sin. And there is the hospital where we die.”

  Every evening between five and seven he was at home. Though he had lived there for years, Cavafy dithered about whether to electrify the apartment at his own expense. He never did. As a consequence, the flat was veiled in a kind of mysterious and romantic gloom. Cavafy lit the rooms by lantern and candlelight with studied effect,

  continuously adjusting the light; he himself invariably sat in shadow, timidly avoiding the eyes of others while yet examining them closely. He would get up and open or shut or half-shut the shutters in different parts of the room, or half-draw the curtains . . . He would light or snuff a candle or two, sometimes adding another if a beautiful face appeared in the room.

  The décor was a Fauvist’s dream. There was a dark green hallway, a faded mauve dining room decorated by his late brother Paul, and a tiny red salon with a balcony onto the noisy street below. Here he received special visitors, surrounded by “his better furniture . . . old carved wood, lustres of pierced copper, little tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl . . . silk cushions embroidered with birds and flowers . . .”

  In this exotic locale Forster had a significant scene of gay self-recognition. Almost thirty years later, the moment was still vivid enough for Morgan to capture its every detail in the present tense:

  I am back from my work, costumed in khaki . . . We have been introduced by an English friend, our meetings are rather dim, and Cavafy is now saying with his usual gentleness, “You could never understand my poetry, my dear Forster, never.” A poem is produced—“The God Abandons Antony”—and I detect some coincidences between its Greek and public school Greek. Cavafy is amazed. “Oh, but this is good, my dear Forster, this is very good indeed,” and he raises his hand, and takes over, and leads me through.

  Cavafy led Morgan through to a new world and a new lexicon for homosexual experience. Even picking his way haltingly along the lines of this one poem, Forster knew he had encountered a major poet, more formidable for being so unconcerned with a wide audience. The subject, tone, and diction of Cavafy’s work was of a piece, and completely original. His poems were graceful, unrhymed, offhand. They captured a sense of intertwined insight and loss. Alexandria, “the Alexandria you are losing,” the fateful Alexandria whose “invisible procession of exquisite music,” was his locus and his muse.

  Whether set in Antony’s moment, or Callimachus’, or even in the recent past, Cavafy’s Alexandria was a sensual city. It was a city for unabashed gay men. He celebrated the knowledge that beneath layers of erasure lay a meaning, perhaps known only to one person, which retained an afterglow. That such insights were hidden made them all the more precious. The poems were ravishing and plain. They captured the transcendent power of lust.

  sensation that I love come back and take hold of me—

  when the body’s memory awakens

  and an old longing again moves into the blood,

  when lips and skin remember

  and hands feel as though they touch again.

  Come back often, take hold of me in the night

  when lips and skin remember . . .

  And Cavafy’s poems were intoxicatingly honest. They focused on physical passion rather than intimacy. Often the sexual encounters were fleeting, the speaker resigned to the fact that “it wouldn’t have lasted long anyway—” But what pungent memories remained! “How strong the scents were, / what a magnificent bed we lay in, what pleasure we gave our bodies.” Even more exciting was Cavafy’s belief that this all-male erotic world was superior to the heterosexual world. He was unapologetic, and without timidity or guilt. Cavafy serenely believed in the normality, even the superiority, of homoerotic love. To him the Greek way of love, attached as it was to centuries-old Alexandrian society, was far greater than the debased contemporary world. His oeuvre legitimized both the powerful immediacy and enduring history of gay desire.

  For his nighttime self, Cavafy constructed an artful persona, superior, detached. He chose to be an outsider, forging a linguistic method in which outworn ways of expression were reborn in a new key. In speaking, Cavafy was equally at home in English, French, and Greek. He proudly held himself apart as a Hellene. Though he had lived all his life in Alexandria, he knew only enough Arabic to direct the kitchen staff. But in his poetic form he literally invented a new language for his subject.

  At the time Cavafy composed these poems, there was a vast abyss between written and spoken Greek. Through long decades of political subservience the written language had ossified into a stilted official “classical” jargon, called katharevousa. Demotic Gr
eek, a bastardized spoken language, was crammed with low neologisms and considered unfit for poetry. Cavafy boldly chose bastardy. His poems shocked the ear with “expressions . . . that one might actually hear in a shop.” He seized the colloquial and spoken language and dragged it into “the world within.” To Forster, Cavafy’s innovation was as arresting as the quotidian and original language of the first chapters of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which he eagerly read while in Alexandria. But this new means of expression was galvanizing, and far more moving. Here was a way to freshly uncover the gay past.

  And the salon provided another benefit. Cavafy’s salon connected men, literally through literature. He carefully selected a coterie of beautiful young men to show his poems. Cavafy wrote them out by hand, and left them, unbound, in little piles on the bookshelves in his simple back room. He would bring the manuscripts out, in different configurations, to flatter or please the individual reader. Reluctant to part with them, he claimed he was still polishing them, often for years. From time to time, he walked to the Grammata bookshop to give the owner a small handful of poems—erotic enough to “burn . . . his fingers”—to print in its eponymous journal. But more often he insisted that they could be viewed only as pages passed from hand to hand.

  Up until now, Morgan had not imagined any way to be a writer but to partake in a public world of letters. Inability to find an audience had always led him to what he called “sterility.” But Cavafy proved there was a different path: by exercising authorial control he forged a homosexual culture. Sublimely detached from the dictates of the public, he refused to encounter the world on any other than his own terms. Cavafy’s strange, secret world cemented trust and interdependency. Morgan had grown up in an English world where even to be seen looking exposed gay men to danger. Now he found a place where a writer shaped intimacy with steely determination. Elated, Forster described his newly discovered gay network to Dickinson: “The best Alexandrian I know—Cavaffy [sic]—reminds me of Callimachus or some such poet—sensitive, scholarly and acute—not at all devoid of creative power but devoting it to the rearranging and resuscitating of the past. And another poet—Sinadino—lately typed me for a present a series of extracts from Pierre Loüys [sic].”

  Agostino John Sinadino is a poet now almost completely unknown. A devotee of Mallarmé, after the war he became a close friend and correspondent of André Gide. Sinadino was three years older than Forster, but temperamentally a world apart. He was swish, campy, and liked his own outrageous jokes; his laugh was a “treble cackle” that was uniquely discernable and contagious. “A small middle-aged man with a long prehensile nose,” Sinadino had a way of sniffing out the latest delectable literature from every avant-garde and decadent local scene. He was a peripatetic fellow, popping up in Paris, Alexandria, New York, and Milan in a single decade, cross-pollinating every literary circle he entered. The extracts he copied out from the pseudonymous Pierre Louÿs were explicitly pornographic, and hard to come by.

  Morgan couldn’t resist this colorful figure. Not just in the dusty past, the laments of Callimachus or the celebrations of Whitman, but here, now, the magic of gay life revealed itself. Even eight years later, back in the drought of Weybridge, Forster remembered these encounters. He took up a pen to write a rare poem in Cavafy’s casual colloquial style:

  To see a Sinadino again–

  The thought fell into my heart like rain

  And then began like a seed to sprout

  To see Allesandro coming out

  Or Agostino going in . . .

  Or even to know that wherever I went—

  A policeman’s beat or a General’s tent,

  A brothel, a café, the Cavers at Home,

  Ramleh’s remote and echoing dome,

  The sea when tepid, the streets, when cool,

  The stairs, when dark, or a Greek girls’ school

  Always to know that wherever I go

  I never know

  When next I shall meet a Sinadino.

  The thought has blossomed in exquisite flower

  And Alexandria returns for an hour. Weybridge 29-1-24

  This unpublished poem argued for a special power in gay men’s lives, unavailable to those who could rely on sanctioned conventions to discover their lovers and mates. The possibility of a chance discovery of a lover, found as if by instinct through a surreptitious encounter, seemed magical to Morgan. After Cavafy, Morgan saw the promise of this world everywhere, hidden in the ordinary world. But its features could be discerned only by relaxing and relying on instinct.

  Cavafy offered Morgan not corporeal but emotional and conceptual fulfillment. Morgan was not physically beautiful enough to tempt Cavafy, who in any case was past his sexual conquests, wary and controlling. He had a Warhol-like detachment, and loved to create a scene just to watch it happen around him. But his impenetrability made Forster ever more eager to have a place in preserving and translating this precious thing. “It was not my knowledge that touched him but my desire to know and to receive. He had no idea then that he could be widely desired, even in the stumbling North. To be understood in Alexandria and tolerated in Athens was the extent of his ambition.”

  This “desire” for knowledge, figured in such explicitly sexualized terms, sought a way to give Cavafy a future to match his bold appropriation of the past. In his poem “Hidden Things” (1908), Cavafy had acknowledged that his sexual identity was a practical “obstacle in [his] way,” and—like Morgan in Maurice—he imagined a utopian future:

  All the times I wanted to speak out.

  My most unnoticed actions,

  Discreet writings those most disguised—

  From these alone they’ll understand me . . .

  A long time from now—in a more perfect world—

  Some other made like me will appear

  And, to be sure, he will act freely.

  Morgan took it upon himself to wrest Cavafy’s work for an audience that would appreciate and preserve it. His need to do this was far greater than Cavafy’s need for recognition. Until he walked across the street to die in the Greek Hospital in 1933, Cavafy maintained a scrupulous formality with Forster. The letters from Forster to Cavafy were always more intimate, and more yearning, than the formal and polite letters that came back from the other direction. The imbalance of affection settled into a compensatory filial relation for Forster. He would be a kind of good gay son.

  While in Alexandria, Morgan buttonholed George Valassopoulos, a fellow Kingsman and frequenter of Rue Lepsius, and cajoled and nagged him for the next decade to provide a delicate translation of Cavafy’s poems to be published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. Forster came to believe that meeting Cavafy was one of the great strokes of fortune in his life. The corollary is also true. The English translations awakened the world to this fresh voice, which by mid-century was recognized as the greatest of the modern Greek poets. Forster made Cavafy’s reputation in the world.

  Paradoxically, as Cavafy’s world liberated Forster’s mind, it exacerbated the problem of his body. It was embarrassing to be so sexually belated, at thirty-seven not to have any more sexual experience than these terrible cravings of lust and an occasional wank under the stars. Trust was hard to come by in this militarized world. Morgan turned with increasing fervor and frankness to friends abroad. To Florence Barger, exactly his age, married and sexually experienced, whose unjudgmental response made her the perfect interlocutor. To Carpenter, to Dickinson, and in a jocular but veiled guise to Masood. These heartfelt and detailed letters preserved the record of his sexual awakening in striking detail.

  He began a campaign to have sex of some kind with someone. For several months, in the summer of 1916, this plunged him into a physical paradise just short of sexual activity. Characteristically, he told Dickinson,

  I wished you were here with me at Montazah this morning. It is the country Palace of the ex-Khedive and has been turned into a Convalescent Hospital. Among its tamarisk groves and avenues of flower
ing oleander, on its reefs and fantastic promontories of rocks and sand, hundreds of young men are at play, fishing, riding donkeys, lying in hammocks, boating, dosing, swimming, listening to bands. They go about bare chested and bare legged, the blue of their linen shorts and the pale mauve of their shirts accenting the brown splendour of their bodies; and down by the sea many of them spend half their days naked and unrebuked . . . It is so beautiful that I cannot believe it has not been planned.

  Glimpsing Cavafy’s world had convinced him that, far from some sort of heroic sacrifice, celibacy was the embodiment of moral cowardice. Respectability, the internalization of fear itself, became his enemy. Finally, in mid-October—almost a year after he arrived in Alexandria—Morgan mustered the courage to be spontaneous. When he made this decision, he approached it with almost bureaucratic resolve. On the beach at Montazah, in the shadow of the hospital, suspended between terror and courage, he found a recuperating soldier as hungry as himself. The sex was brief and anonymous. To Florence Barger, he didn’t specify the act, which was most likely a hurried sucking off. Instead he described it by what it meant for his soul: “parting with Respectability.”

  The sexual encounter was a calculated attempt to bring his body in line with his ravenous imagination. The next day, October 16, 1916, he examined more dispassionately what he called his “lopsided” life. He wrote to Florence unsentimentally: “Yesterday, for the first time in my life I parted with