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

by Wendy Moffat

  Mohammed lived in Bacos, a working-class district east of the central town. His house was not dreadful, but quite ordinary. It comprised a single stark room, more spare than shabby: the only furnishings were a platform bed and a small wooden trunk, which he impulsively flung open and emptied to Morgan’s astonishment. He “showered everything in the room down to ‘This is lip salve’ and . . . flung all that he had in his trunk to the bottom saying ‘Very little, all clean . . . Now I have shown you all there is to show.’” Perhaps because he sensed that the British believed Arabs were unclean, Mohammed overcompensated. But his “immaculate” clothes and his guileless self-exposure spoke expressively. Morgan told Florence, “I remember thinking at the time that the man who did that would also hide no secrets in his heart if he decided to open it.” The caveat was a telling bit of projection, for Morgan had not yet told Mohammed his name.

  At that moment, it turned out, Mohammed made the decision to trust this odd Englishman. He showed Morgan a photograph of his fiancée, a young woman waiting back in the countryside. He told him about the missionary school where he received his rudimentary education. Significantly, he confided to Morgan that though he was very close to his mother, he had always felt like a stranger in his own family: “I have always ate apart and lived apart, and thought apart. Perhaps I am not my father’s son.” It was clearly exciting, and a great honor, to be treated as an equal by a British man. As Forster left later that evening, Mohammed told him quietly, “This is the very happiest evening of my life.”

  Their next meetings were not quite as promising. A few days later, the men arranged to meet for a walk at Glymenopoulo (another unfamiliar station), but the weather was miserable. Another evening Forster returned to Mohammed’s room to be introduced stiffly as a trophy to an assortment of the young man’s friends. Finally Forster invited Mohammed to his room at Irene’s, where they sat on the bed and played chess. But on this occasion Morgan, who had finally introduced himself, “clouded” the advancing intimacy by evading questions about his life in London.

  On their fourth meeting, in Mohammed’s room, Forster and el Adl got into a literal scrape over sex. “Fascinated by [Mohammed’s] character and talk,” Morgan sprawled nearer to the young man on the bed, and they kissed for the first time. Even years later, the sensation of Mohammed’s arm under his head remained “vivid.” He noticed that as they lay together Mohammed kept his hands in his pockets to hide his groin. Sensing that el Adl’s erection was an invitation, Morgan asked, “How fond are you of me?” and moved to unbutton the boy’s flies. The two men tussled—Mohammed “defending himself”—and the scene ended with Forster staunching the blood from a scratch on his face and el Adl nursing a black eye. Morgan was mortified, Mohammed frightened and distressed. Briefly, anxiety pressed them into hardened postures. Morgan “found it hard to believe [Mohammed] was neither traitor nor cad” and became convinced that he had been deliberately insulted. Mohammed retorted by drawing a firm line: they could remain friendly on the trams, but never again meet privately. Morgan flew off in a huff.

  But by the next morning on the tram tempers cooled and the misunderstanding became ridiculous to them both. Forster apologized. Comparing wounds, they laughed out loud. It was a moment of refreshing vulnerability. The two men found themselves in uncharted terrain. In retrospect, Forster observed how unnatural behavior could be fueled by panic. The incident reminded him of the preposterous aborted “engagement” between him and Florence’s sister Elsie Thomas just before he left for Alexandria. “I have often thought of your sister. And wondered . . . whether she, like me, suddenly found it impossible to behave otherwise but in the most extraordinary way . . .” Now he felt a new serenity in the tumult of emotion.

  It isn’t happiness it’s—rather offensive phrase—that I first feel a grown-up man . . . The practical difficulties—there is a big racial and social gulf—are great, but when you are offered affection, honesty, and intelligence with all that you can possibly want in externals thrown in (including a delightful sense of humour), you surely have to take it or die spiritually.

  Their shared sense of the absurdity in this rigid world pulled them through.

  They came to this understanding from vastly different places. Forster was awed at how frank and relaxed the young man’s sexual education had been. “One morning I woke up and said O mother what is this? My mother told me, so then I knew.” His attitude toward sex and love had “so much cheerfulness in it—none of the solemnity which Christianity has thought essential to Romance.” Though Mohammed had been brought up a Christian in a Muslim world, he calmly rejected his faith, saying, “I did not like Christianity.” Morgan marveled that he seemed impervious to its pernicious influence. Comparing the “inroads on free thought made by Christianity and Islam,” Morgan concluded Mohammed must have been saved by his culture, for “Islam makes less mess.”

  They talked a lot about sex. It was a relief to have a serious interlocutor on the subject. But the talk was also partly sublimation, for as much as Morgan campaigned for a full sexual partnership with Mohammed, he made little progress on this front. (He returned to the beach in early June to have anonymous sex for a second time.) In mid-July Mohammed’s mother died suddenly, and he traveled home to Mansourah for her funeral. Forster’s acute sympathy pulled them closer together. When Mohammed returned they had an honest conversation about their sexual expectations.

  Mohammed had kissed him and embraced him, stroked his “short hair but crisp,” telling Morgan it was “beautiful.” But he recoiled from genital sex. Forster sketched out the chasm humbly in a letter to Florence. He recognized that his yearnings distorted things. Not at all sheepishly, he admitted he had exaggerated his sexual intimacy with Mohammed in an earlier letter to her.

  We hadn’t entirely [parted with Respectability] and I wish to—it indeed seems right to me that we should, and I thought his objections trivial and beat back against them. He has made me see that I must not do this . . . but he has made me see it with so much tenderness and affection that I feel our friendship is only now beginning . . . As soon as he can give more he will give it.

  This economy of sex, this emphasis on giving and getting, made el Adl uneasy. He was terribly sensitive about his relative poverty, and Morgan’s tenacious insistence compounded his anxieties about being unworthy. It also awakened the old fear of exploitation.

  Completely to part with Respectability he refuses—“Never! Never!”—then with an indescribable mixture of detachment and tenderness turned his head away and said “I want to ask you a question. Do you never consider that your wish has led you to know a T.C.? And do you not think that a pity for you, and a disgrace? While answering my questions you are not to look at me.”

  T.C. was el Adl’s shorthand for Tram Conductor. The question was a goad, and a test of Morgan’s sincerity: Would he betray a taint of class-consciousness? Could Morgan’s hungry eyes be trusted? They must look away. Mohammed wanted to be not a sexual toy but a true intimate.

  By early October he felt capable of honestly articulating his own desire:

  If we are to be friends forever you must promise me something. (Do you wish to be friends forever?) If you wish (I do) You must promise at once to tell me if I wrong you so that we make its place clear. 1.2.3.4. wrongs may not matter but if we have more then all may become evil . . . But I must be independent—if I do not want to meet you I must say “I do not”, if I am not sure I must be able to say perhaps. You must respect me as I respect you.

  The sexual impasse was now clearer to Morgan, who realized that Mohammed “feared he was only externals for me.” But even with the muddle sorted out, it was clear that sex meant different things to each of them. The scuffle over el Adl’s erection—his sudden ambivalence in the midst of so much physical affection—puzzled Forster enough to ask about its meaning later in their friendship. El Adl insisted that it didn’t indicate any particular desire. He explained, “My damn prick stands up whoever it is, it means nothing.”
For Forster, who had concluded by this time that being homosexual was the core of his identity, el Adl’s casual polymorphous attitude was fascinating. He told Morgan he had slept pleasurably with both men and female prostitutes, and he blithely expected to marry and have children. Like most Egyptian men, he viewed all kinds of penetrative sexual behavior as a natural expression of male prerogative. Centuries-old Islamic practice took a pragmatic approach to official morality: sex with men made “a sinner, but did not imperil the status and honor due him as a man.” The Napoleonic Code coincided easily with local custom; it viewed gay sex as distasteful, but a private matter. In this context, el Adl’s statement “My damn prick stands up whoever it is” may well be the equivalent of Forster’s “I feel a grownup man.”

  Mohammed told Morgan, charitably, that his desire was “Foolish.” Morgan replied, “All have their foolishness and this is mine.” But to Mohammed, sexual subordination was a peculiar, even preposterous, choice for an adult man. Morgan’s lobbying for more frequent and intimate sexual expression in their relationship, his barely unexpressed desire to be penetrated, must have been read by the younger man as an inexplicable concession of social power.

  Living after Freud and Foucault, we parse the misunderstanding differently than the men did at the time. In a sense they lived on either side of a great (although still permeable) conceptual divide, between sex being sex and sex being identity. Forster anticipated modern ideas about sexuality, but only vaguely. He grasped only that what was happening between him and el Adl was more in the nature of “an understanding rather than an agreement.” He was willing to wait. And if he had to choose, he concluded he would opt for intimacy over mere sex.

  It befell that he didn’t have to choose. Just days after the passionate request for respect and honesty, Mohammed gave Morgan a “sudden hard kiss” and after “a gruff demur” leaned back, untied his linen trousers, and let Morgan masturbate him. This was a milestone. The struggle was over:

  Dearest Florence,

  R. Has been parted with, and in the simplest most inevitable way . . . I am so happy—not for the actual pleasure but because the last barrier has fallen . . . I wish I was writing the latter half of Maurice now I know so much more. It is awful to know of the thousands who go through youth without ever knowing. I have known in a way before, but never like this. My luck has been amazing.

  The affair with Mohammed intensified his romantic conviction that gay men could be connected to each other deeply, even permanently. And while the relationship seemed to him resolutely modern and unclassifiable, perhaps because of Cavafy’s influence he extrapolated from his individual experience to a collective, hidden past. One starry late-summer night the landscape once again related a parable. It was similar in tone and power to the glorious revelation of the naked man pulling the donkey on the beach of which he had written Goldie a year before. This time he shared it with Florence. As he sat on the veranda of the Sultan Hussein Club near the Bourse,

  The half moon, with beautiful blue markings on its primrose, stands looking at the sunset . . . It is very sweet of you to think of us both—I feel so touched and happy: yet, considering the relation from outside, I imagine it is indeed worthy to be thought about; it is such a triumph over nonsense and artificial difficulties: it is a sample of the . . . other triumphs that I am sure come off but of which we hear nothing through the brassy rattle of civilisation so called . . . When I am with him smoking or talking quietly ahead . . . I see beyond my own happiness and intimacy, occasional glimpses of the happiness of 1000s of others whose names I shall never hear, and I know that there is a great unrecorded history.

  Unlike “the thousands” of wretched repressed Englishmen he imagined in his other letter to Florence, here Forster conjured a more benign multitude. Beneath the brittle veneer of civilization, beneath history as the official record of the powerful, was a transcendent alternative history that only a softened heart could glean.

  But even this worthy vision was subject to the noisy wartime world. After Mohammed’s mother died, much about living in the city became less pleasant to him. Privacy was becoming scarcer. His half-brother inexplicably came to stay at the Home of Misery for almost a month, literally and figuratively squatting in the corner of the room that Morgan noted sourly “would otherwise be ours.” Once while conversing innocently the two men were discovered in Morgan’s room by Irene, who let out a muffled scream. Forster fumed to Florence, “It’s absurd he can’t stop here. Only when one feels seriously does one realise how false is the constitution of society.” Conditions, never ideal, became more pinched at just the moment the relationship deepened.

  And Mohammed’s job, already precarious, had become even more untenable. Although he knew it to be against his more selfish interests, Forster lobbied Furness to find a better-paying position for his lover. In October 1917 Mohammed left for Kantara, in the Canal Zone, where he served as a clerk in the British military apparatus at more than twice his wage on the tram. The work was mundane, but deliciously subversive. Mohammed told Morgan slyly that he was going “to be a spy.”

  By doing low-level intelligence work for the British in the Canal Zone, it could be argued that Mohammed was being co-opted. But Forster’s letters indicate that this joke was a shared conspiracy. He asked Florence: “Do you not think it is very bad to have made him a spy? We do not think it is so bad.” El Adl told Forster his philosophy in all things was “some lies is necessary to life.” Now Forster and his lover were lying together, as it were, in the service of friendship over allegiance to empire.

  The sexual breakthrough coincided with Mohammed leaving Alexandria. It may have been a parting concession on his part, but it was also a promise for the future. In preparation for their time apart, Forster helped Mohammed pack his things, and gave him some money he could ill afford. (Weeks earlier, with Lily’s rent in Weybridge going up usuriously, he told her to sell his typewriter to pay for expenses.) With so much of their world in flux, each man was anxious to fix the moment in his own way. Morgan persuaded Mohammed to sit for a studio photograph, dressed in a tarboosh, Western suit, bow tie, and shiny spats. The boy was handsome, young, and very earnest. Like Morgan, he took off his spectacles for the occasion. A fly whisk of white horsehair—which belonged to Morgan—in his right hand draped over a small table. For his part, Mohammed offered a desperate goodbye. As his train left the station “it felt like the fall of a curtain after an act.” He called after Morgan, begging, “Don’t forget me, don’t—” The plangent voice lingered despite Forster’s assertion that “by now our relationship is too deep and firm to fear separation.” Years later, he recalled a similar scene of separation: “You called out my name at Bebbit el Hagar station after we had seen that ruined temple . . . that no one else seems to have seen. It was dark and I hear an Egyptian shouting who had lost his friend: Margan, Margan—you calling me and I felt we belonged to each other, you had made me an Egyptian.”

  Though Mohammed wrote “affectionately” from the Canal Zone every few days, and they counted the days toward his planned leave of absence in March, the loss of the secret world the two men shared inevitably isolated Forster. “Everything seems breaking here” in Alexandria, he told Florence: Furness was departing for war work in Cairo, and he was “losing” Mohammed. His pool of friends seemed so shallow. Aida, who had been sympathetic during the draft scare, now seemed bored by him. And after the importuning over the hash den, over Mohammed’s joyrides, over finding Mohammed a job, Furness had begun to express real irritation at being drawn into Morgan’s entanglements. By late fall Miss Grant Duff, never a friend of the bosom, had become “Miss Goose Duff” in letters to Lily.

  Routines offered no solace. Though he had been promoted to “‘Head Searcher for Egypt’ whatever that means,” his Red Cross work now seemed terribly mundane. The promotion disrupted the balance of power between Miss Grant Duff and himself, inviting poisonous and unfamiliar office politics. She justifiably felt underappreciated and trumped by a
male conspiracy. To compensate, she took up a tone of aggrieved sarcasm. All winter petty encounters between them magnified his misery. News from the hospital almost disappeared from his correspondence. In March 1918 she resigned, leaving him relieved but without even this little drama to distract him.

  He felt the “stupidity and deadness” of life without Mohammed. And he chafed at having news so “worthy to be thought about” with no one to tell it to. Defying the military censor, he turned to Florence, Goldie, Strachey, and Carpenter to pour out the exquisite details of his love affair with Mohammed. This turned out to be a very good thing for gay posterity.

  Each correspondent received news from a particular angle. Morgan was touched by Florence’s genuine interest in Mohammed. She wrote him separate letters (none survive) and treated them as a legitimate couple. “It is very sweet of you to think of us both—I was so touched and happy,” he told her. His letters to her focused on untangling the emotional muddles at the heart of such a complicated love affair. With Dickinson—whose affairs were always unrequited—Morgan adopted a heartier tone, telling him, “I have actually at my age had adventures.” But he was initially unable to break free of cliché in his description of Mohammed. It “is more like an affair of Searight’s than anything else I can indicate! This will convey to you age, race, rank, though not precisely relationship.” Perhaps because he sensed that Dickinson was romantically underdeveloped, he quickly ceased describing the inner workings of his emotional life with Mohammed to him. Listing Mohammed’s good qualities—“reliability cleanliness, intellectual detachment, charm . . . test after test comes along, always with the same result”—his letters to Goldie had an arid air. To Edward Carpenter, who followed every move forward with vicarious delight, he hinted flatteringly that Mohammed was like George Merrill. He shared the precious photograph of Mohammed to seal the comparison. Carpenter responded warmly: