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

by Wendy Moffat

  Your good friend, Mrs. Barger, sent me the photograph, for which I was grateful to her (& you). I was sorely tempted to keep it. But what a pleasure to see a real face after the milk & water mongrelly things one sees here! It was a literal refreshment to me. Those eyes—I know so well what they mean, and I think you do too, now! And that very charming mouth! I wish you would send me one for myself, to keep.

  Morgan drew his circle of English friends and acquaintances closer by invoking their mutual interest in his growing love for Mohammed. By Forster’s command, they circulated the little trophies: his narrative, enclosing Mohammed’s letters and photograph. Morgan even gave Florence homework on what it was like to be homosexual, recommending that she read Carpenter’s autobiography, My Days and Dreams, and complimenting her on liking and understanding it. Eventually, he even told Masood about Mohammed. But to Lily, Morgan said nothing about his Egyptian friend.

  In the bleak midwinter, after Mohammed had been in Kantara for a full two months, Morgan turned afresh to writing. He worked in earnest on the research for a planned guide to Alexandria, exploring the past since the present was a vast military zone. And he began another much less veiled history, a complete account of the affair with Mohammed. Maimie had just died, and though he decided not to make the long journey back to England for the funeral, the event and his New Year’s thirty-ninth birthday set a firm cast of memento mori in his mind. He told Florence soberly, “I want to put a few things on record . . . My personal interest in it apart, I feel it oughtn’t to be lost. It’s a little the starved artist writing in fact. I don’t mean this to be an ordinary letter, except it contains my love to you. Let me know if you get it. And keep it, for one forgets.”

  These letters were galvanized by the confidence that his love for Mohammed was both an experience in itself and “proof of something larger and wider.” He approached the history as a novelist, adopting the sweeping temporal perspective he had invented for the unnamed narrator of Howards End: keen insight into immediate events nestled into the serene detachment of a very long view.

  That novel had begun with the famously offhand sentence “One may as well begin with Helen’s letter to her sister.” The narrator’s odd interjections from the distant future gave the story an impulsive, if slightly imbalanced, momentum. Of course, this present tale was clearly still incomplete: six months earlier he had admitted to Goldie that he couldn’t envision how his friendship with Mohammed might end. He felt it was capable of developing into something, since “romantic curiosity seems on both sides to be passing into something more permanent.” But then he shrugged and let go, asking rhetorically, “How does anything end? One should act as if things last.”

  Now being separated from Mohammed made him grasp the reality of his love affair very tightly. He pointedly returned to the previous spring, dissecting the smallest incidents and trying to recall Mohammed’s words verbatim. The method had the twin advantages of contemporaneous impression and retrospection. But it also pointed toward permanence, if only for the eyes of gay men at some distant time. He was becoming convinced that “nothing in my life will ever be as great.” And this view, like many of his instincts, proved prescient: almost forty years later, from the perspective of old age, Forster confirmed that his friendship with el Adl was one of the two “greatest things” in his life.

  But he did not yet have a name for this sensation. It only seemed certain to him that the pseudo-empirical categories developed by sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing and Hirschfeld—which he called “German physiological pigeon holes”—were threadbare ways of expressing the complex conditions of human experience. He told Goldie, “I never did find one to fit me . . .” What he had with Mohammed, he was sure, was as revelatory as a whole new way of seeing and being. As much as he could, Forster took pains to preserve the evidence of their affair as a dialogue, carefully copying out almost fifty letters from Mohammed (while burning all of Florence’s) and keeping a cache of ephemera from ticket stubs to photographs. The best way to respect Mohammed was to give him his own voice.

  He relished how being with Mohammed had sharpened his capacity for surprise. He told Florence he envied her three “children’s sense of looking at life, with each person a new species.” Especially entertaining was the shared practice of inverting social expectations in canny ways. Both men relied on fixed racial attitudes and their shared male privilege in public spaces, sometimes to walk together side by side, hiding in plain sight. Of course he and Mohammed had honed rules to make them safe, but these often involved the creative use of others’ prejudice and obtuseness. Adopting a sardonic voice, he told Florence, “He is unfortunately black—not as black as a child’s face or ink, but blacker than . . . Masood—so that our juxtaposition is noticeable . . .” So they made the most of el Adl’s color when they must. What else could he be thought to be but Morgan’s servant? Disgusted by colonial power, Forster nonetheless employed it to extend metaphorical cover to his friend.

  Their clothing often belied their station. Mohammed took great pleasure in teasing Morgan about his shabby clothing and great pride in the care of his own dress. “Taking me by the sleeve last night he said gently, ‘You know Forster, though I am poorer than you I would never been seen in such a coat. I am not blaming you—no, I praise—but I would never be seen, and your hat has a hole and your boots have a hole and your socks have a hole.’”

  “Good clothes are an infectious disease,” Mohammed admitted. “I had much better not care and look like you, and so perhaps I will, but only in Alexandria.” He wouldn’t be seen like that at home. The young man who first appeared in blinding tennis whites knew how to distinguish himself and how to become inconspicuous. Sometimes paradoxically: in April 1918, Morgan arranged for a second photograph of Mohammed, as a keepsake while he was away in the Canal Zone. The young man surprised him by arriving for the session dressed in Forster’s shabby military uniform. What a delicious appropriation! What a parody of the way uniforms both mark the distinctive position of their wearers and make them indistinguishable from other men! El Adl knew the portrait would be circulated to Edward Carpenter and to Forster’s other English friends. This photograph boldly proclaimed their intimacy. In another queer cultural cross-dressing, that summer the men commissioned a single dress suit, too big for Mohammed, slightly too small for Morgan, for them to share.

  There is a third, even more revealing and mysterious self-fashioning, a tiny snapshot dating from the period before Mohammed left for Kantara. It was taken out of doors in heavy sun. Wearing a soft collarless cotton shirt unbuttoned at the neck, Morgan sat alone on a volcanic rock like those on the shoreline at Mex, in three-quarter profile, looking down at a book in his hands. There’s no notation of who stood behind the camera. Could it have been Mohammed? Of the thousands of photographs in the King’s College archives, it is one of only a few where he is smiling. It’s tempting to think of this and the photograph of Mohammed in Forster’s uniform as a diptych, in ghostly dialogue, as close to a gay domestic portrait as they could manage at the time. Years later, Forster would pioneer this genre, but not now, not yet.

  This new worldliness and sense of play made plain how insufficient his attempt at gay fiction had been, how imponderable and solemn. “The whole ending of Maurice and its handling of the social question now seems sad timorous half hearted stuff.” Some of the novel’s idealism still seemed right—“I have known in a way before, but never like this,” he told Florence. But he had written it too soon, before he realized that “some lies is necessary to life.” “Oh Florence,” he wrote, “what a mean, truncated life if this had never happened.” For once, his corporeal life had outstripped his imagination.

  As best they could, that spring they arranged to see each other during Mohammed’s rare military leaves from his work. The long-anticipated visit in March dissolved into a muddle. Mohammed did not write as he had promised, and briefly Morgan suspected he had been insulted or forgotten. But Mohammed was very ill—“he went to h
ospital with some slight ailment and caught some filthy fever there.” Moreover, he had been mistreated by the British authorities, having to pay a bribe just to get a hospital bed. Disbelief turned to disgust and a welter of displaced anger when Morgan discovered the truth. He bitterly complained to Florence that the army “shovels [Egyptians] around like dirt.” The episode convinced Morgan that he must “make an effort over A or we shall lose one another for ever. I can’t think how to get him away from this military zone which will neither let him come out nor me in.”

  An Alexandrian reunion in mid-May, however, went off as planned. But with Mohammed now homeless and Irene suspicious, they had to stay in Bacos with an Egyptian friend. These complex arrangements awkwardly coincided with the arrival of E. K. “Francis” Bennett, Morgan’s former student at the Working Men’s College. Before they met, Francis had been a factory worker. (He would eventually climb into an impressive academic career as a German professor at Cambridge, on the foundations of Morgan’s support and his own brains.) Like Morgan, Bennett was homosexual, but he was still clinging to Forrest Reid’s repressed belief in Respectability. Morgan was “obliged to tell him the bare fact” of Mohammed’s existence and Bennett received the news “with more sympathy and interest than I had expected . . .”

  A different plan to integrate Morgan’s Egyptian and his English lives was frustrated at the last moment, when a rendezvous with the poet Siegfried Sassoon was aborted because Sassoon did not get permission to leave ship. Sassoon’s correspondence was so sympathetic that this was a real disappointment. (They would meet in England in the coming year.)

  Morgan took Mohammed to the remote rocky beach at Mex, where they swam, sunbathed, and sat “as Maurice and Clive sat at Cambridge” on their delicious day playing hooky. Mohammed told him “two days have passed like two minutes.” The idyll was like “some lovely cloud” that interposed between him and the war. “He has hidden my home life too,” he told Florence. But did the cloud obscure or did it clarify? By the end of May the vision jarred him into thoughts about their future together. Florence had recommended that Morgan decamp from Irene’s to avoid her hostility, and set up an alternative domestic arrangement supporting the young man. “Your new arrangement isn’t possible,” he replied. Mohammed’s “bloody independence for one thing wouldn’t consent . . . [He] expects marriage and life among his own people, so far as he looks forward at all, and I scarcely look forward to anything different.” But these facts belied Mohammed’s attitude. “He strikes me as more fully attached to me than hitherto: says he had awful dreams about me when he nearly died.” The idea of living together was improbable, but it wormed into his brain, even “[m]onth after month with my life in a box . . .” Their restlessness over the future jarred Mohammed into action. At the end of May, without other prospects, he “chucked that infernal job” and left for Mansourah. But life—or rather, death—intruded suddenly in June.

  Mohammed’s father died two days after he returned home, and two days later in a cruel double blow he “received a wire from Tanta [in the Nile Delta] stating that my brother—the tailor—drowned in the Nile.” “Griefs never come one by one,” Mohammed told him, “they always come in battalions . . . What am I going to do? I have always asked myself the question but I did not find the answer yet.” Mohammed had never felt close to his father, but his brother Ahmed was beloved, and the death bewildered and shattered him. “He was a good swimmer and the Canal [where he drowned] is not so deep. I did not realise it yet.” Morgan immediately traveled to Mansourah to console him. The visit “was even better than either of us had hoped. Does one experience a renewal or a deepening of emotion each time?” he asked Florence.

  Mohammed now found himself in a middle-class predicament: jobless, but a homeowner. For once, the men had some privacy—“perfect conditions”—though they were a reiteration of the Home of Misery. The house was more like three tiny houses connected together in a slum near the railway station, and Mohammed had rented out all but one small room to keep to himself. This was considerably less clean than the room in Bacos, but no matter: the men “seldom touched [the muddy floor] bottom.” They headed straight for the bed. Food was brought in to them by a “semi-slave” who “squatted in the passage while we ate.” To wash they stripped in a passage under the stair, “pour[ing] little tins of water over each other.” Though Mohammed was “awfully grave at first,” he rebounded the next day, wrestling and ragging with Morgan in the bed, playfully threatening, “‘Morgan I will hurt you—Edward I will kill you’ and we went on fooling until we fell asleep.”

  Here there was no need to be coy. Mohammed gave him quite a tour of Mansourah by boat and carriage, introducing him to “Mr. Ganda and all [his] other friends.” The two men cheerfully planned Mohammed’s next step: marrying his brother’s widow and adopting their two-year-old child, of whom he was fond. Morgan told Florence: “I am rather in favour of it. He likes her and has often seen her, and she likes him and approves the scheme . . . She requires no dowry, and—being a widow—there will be no expense over the wedding.” Morgan prided himself on his pragmatism and knowledge of local customs, pointing out that he returned by third-class ticket, traveling like a proper Egyptian to spite British hauteur.

  Mohammed’s wedding plans did not diminish their intimacy. While lying in bed they had another frank conversation about sex. “I theorised to him . . . rather deeply against R[espectability]—how afterwards I found it even more important than at the time. He said very gently ‘I quite understand’”—neatly accommodating both Forster’s sexual needs and his conviction that loving Mohammed meant hating the British. Now Forster had “the happiness of knowing that things are sound even on an intellectual basis.” In a parallel confidence, Mohammed told Morgan that he had blackmailed men over sexual advances when he was younger but abandoned this “low down” behavior over sympathy for his victims. He concluded, “All is exceptions in men as in English grammar.” Now they were both firmly on the same side.

  “Sick of” Mansourah, Mohammed returned to Alexandria late in July to visit Morgan. He teased him about finding a pair of Morgan’s socks—distinguishable by the hole in their toe—which he had left by the latrine in the dark. On the fourth anniversary of the start of the war, while everyone else was watching military exercises, they slipped off to the remote beach at Mex, beyond Ramleh, “bathing and sprawling among the rocks on the breakwater.” Mohammed had decided to marry a different woman, his widowed sister-in-law’s unmarried sister, Gamila. This was a “more romantic” choice, with “more probability of nice children in consequence—at least isn’t that so? . . . I hope he may yet live ‘as a happy man in my own paternal home.’”

  But by the fall, with marriage plans advancing, Morgan became deeply worried about Mohammed’s health. Perhaps it was tuberculosis—Mohammed was coughing and had alarmingly lost weight—“his back looks hollow.” Perhaps he was only ground down by the sorrows of the summer. Morgan’s concerns were magnified by a new sense of urgency, for big political events augured an end to the war, and to their idyll. The British had already taken Jerusalem, and in October Damascus fell. Everywhere the Turks were being pushed back. Soon he must leave Egypt. As the wedding approached at the beginning of October, Morgan became seized with dread. He wrote Florence:

  I think A’s [Adl’s] must be the saddest letter a man ever wrote on his wedding eve. The marriage disconcerts me more and more. It seems just a hygienic measure. He says he has read about love in books, but he just doesn’t know what it means. Now I wonder whether I should have dissociated with him. I was so anxious for him to have whatever might enlarge his life . . . I trust it is not this disease. I feel morbid as well as sad so I won’t go on . . . In my calmer moments I tell myself he merely hasn’t eaten enough, and that this desolating breakdown of spirits is natural in one who has suffered as he has. If he should die I shall cable to you as it will relieve me.

  A week after the wedding, Morgan developed an exaggerated fear that telling
Mohammed he would leave might actually kill him.

  I have just been writing a ghastly letter to him . . . telling him it is unlikely I shall be in Egypt much longer. They are bound to move us. The breakup of Turkey leaves Alexandria nothing to do . . . I understand A’s psychology but not his physiology and I tremble lest it have at such a time a bad effect—the mixup of his marriage and illness and then me coming on the top.

  To Morgan’s relief, marriage made Mohammed feel serene, happy, and manly, as if he “was scarcely in the world before.” And a doctor, paid for by Morgan, told him, “[h]e has not actually got consumption—is on the verge.” Even better, “Our relationship just doesn’t change. He wants me to stop with him. I shall once again before I go.”

  In mid-November, just after the Armistice, Morgan traveled again to Mohammed’s home in Mansourah to meet his new wife. The arrangements were entirely unorthodox and to Morgan “the first twelve hours of my visit were as perfect as I have known.” The only disquieting fact was that Mohammed, though “fatter,” still felt ill. Morgan massaged him to sleep, but he awoke with terrible itching, and Gamila took over.

  Morgan crashed the honeymoon by invitation, but the visit was a severe breach of local custom. The companionship of a European with a married man was unthinkable, and Morgan realized that Mohammed had made “more sacrifices for me than I ever had for him.” Gamila herself stayed out of the way except for “glimpses.” Morgan liked her a great deal, though the Egyptian form of marriage seemed as strange to him as (no doubt) Forster’s presence must have seemed to her. “She is like some tame and pretty country animal, and he will be kind to her as all, but the idea of companionship seems never to have entered his head. It is queer even to me, who know the East a little . . . At present he regards her alternately as a [play—scratched out] comfort and a financial anxiety.”