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

by Wendy Moffat

  Mohammed had moved to the larger part of the house, much nicer, and with a capital loan of seventy pounds from Morgan, set up as a cotton broker, “buying cotton from the country people & selling it to the dealers.” A second visit in late January 1919 confirmed Morgan’s sense that Mohammed was happily settled in his marriage. This time he brought the gift of an inlaid wooden box to the stunned Gamila, and he and Mohammed took turns teasing her by exaggerating its cost. “God help the man—he must be mad,” she exclaimed, hearing one estimate. But neither man admitted to the lie: it was a shared secret. Choosing presents for Florence’s children—a hat, some small tin whistles—Mohammed offered a startling suggestion. “Why not take them costlier gifts? Why not take them a pair of Egyptians?” Morgan wished he could. Was it possible to transplant what they had grown together? It seemed unthinkable, an even greater fantasy than Maurice and Alec in the greenwood.

  The wedding offered one advantage: now he could tell Lily about the marriage of a new Egyptian friend. Fit and happy, Mohammed followed Morgan back to Alexandria to see him off to the ship, promising to stay in touch. Three eventful years! As he sailed off, Morgan was officially separated from his Red Cross service. And though neither she nor her husband knew it yet, Gamila was already pregnant with a son they would name Morgan.

  PART TWO

  Happiness Can Come

  in One’s Natural Growth

  8

  “Do Not Forget Your Ever Friend”

  Three years later Morgan took up his pen to dedicate a little notebook:

  To Mohammed el Adl,

  who died at Mansourah shortly

  after the 8th of May, 1922,

  aged about twenty three: of consumption;

  his mother, father, brother, and son

  died before him: his daughter has

  died since, his widow is said to

  have married again:

  and to my love for him.

  August 5th 1922.

  He gathered up ephemera: several small studio photographs of his lover, a ticket stub from their first tram ride together, and a pathetic little packet comprising all of Mohammed’s letters to him. Each day he walked alone at Chertsey Mead, the watermeadows a mile from Harnham, pausing at the entrance stile to slip on the ring Mohammed’s widow had sent him—a circle of gold set with a cheap red stone. Each night he slept with the ring under his pillow. “I am sure that I could have lived with him had he been in occupation and good health,” Morgan wrote to Florence. But now that dream was dead. Save for this little trove Mohammed was completely erased from the world.

  Three years before, as he climbed off the ship at Gravesend in January 1919, Morgan was sure he could never be the same man he was when he left for Alexandria. He tried to be philosophical—“with my present freedom what a life I would have led. But the war gave and the war took away.” In gratitude for his safe return, Lily gravely insisted on saying prayers at the dinner table for the first time since his childhood. But it was alienating to feel so completely changed internally, and to have the world of Harnham revert so quickly to its old rhythms. “I see my middle age as clearly as middle age can be seen. Always working and never creating. Pleasant to all trusting no one. A mixture of cowardice and sympathy.” In a half-conscious way he tried to imagine a different path than being a writer—“I don’t see what it is clearly yet, but I know what keeps me from it.”

  As soon as possible, Morgan made a beeline to visit friends he had not seen in the long years of the war: to the Bargers, now in Edinburgh, where George was professor of chemistry; to the Merediths and Forrest Reid in Belfast; to Edward Carpenter and George Merrill, who had moved south to Guildford when the rural winters hobbled the infirm old man. Morgan took a leisurely holiday with Goldie in Lyme Regis. And there was a new friend as well. After so many missed opportunities, he finally met Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon was just over thirty, tall, rangy, and angular of aspect; he was famous as a war hero, and notorious for his public opposition to the war. Right off the bat he told Morgan that he was homosexual, and quickly became a confidant. They shared a common distaste for “the outward nonsense of England”—the grotesque “unbroken front of dress-shirts and golf” that remained “absolutely untouched by the war.”

  From this archipelago of tolerant households he always returned home. It was important to keep alert around Lily, to whom he dared make only “[a] couple of sly references to Mohammed my Egyptian friend.” One morning, reading a letter from Mohammed, Morgan “broke down” at the breakfast table, and vowed thereafter to be on his guard—“very unwise as it puts me in mother’s power. She is very sweet but it is unsafe to be seen in pieces.”

  The news from Mohammed was troubling. So was the news from Egypt generally. The British government had promised to dissolve the protectorate when the war ended in favor of some kind of self-rule for Egypt, but immediately reneged. With widespread unemployment and hunger, ordinary Egyptians began to agitate; in March 1919 hundreds of people were killed in riots in Cairo. Unrest spread into the countryside. The British answer was a crackdown. Saad Zaghloul, a prominent nationalist politician who had been selected to represent Egypt at the Versailles talks, was arrested and exiled to Malta. Rural agricultural workers were forced to work as “volunteers” on behalf of the British occupiers. Morgan wrote an impassioned letter to the Manchester Guardian. “The Trouble in Egypt,” he argued, was a consequence of “disgraceful” and “brutal” British policies.

  As Morgan feared, Mohammed had been swept up in the chaos. Still out of work, he had sold some black market goods. He was picked up by the British on a spurious charge of possessing a firearm and sentenced to six months in prison and a steep fine. One of his friends managed to get a letter through to Morgan in French—a kind of code to the monolingual censors—telling him the gist of the story. Morgan sent money to pay the fine, but the silence from Mohammed frightened him.

  When Mohammed was released in the autumn, his letters were tinged with a new bitterness. The baby Morgan, always sickly, had died. And Mohammed’s attitude had hardened. “I wish you was American,” Mohammed wrote. “I noticed a bad habit to English during the Court Martial. The English are revengable.” And corrupt. Conditions in prison were abysmal, and Mohammed found he could ameliorate them only by bribing the guards or granting coerced sexual favors. “I found in my dictionary that english [sic] means cruel.”

  To Morgan, Mohammed’s treatment reflected a “cynical” and “secret” British government, which had passed draconian laws limiting civil liberties under the euphemism of the Defence of the Realm Act—known as DORA. (Lytton Strachey’s friend Dora Carrington had dropped her first name in protest—thereafter signing her letters and paintings simply “Carrington.”) But the populace as a whole seemed to be asleep: the newspapers were consumed with stories of film stars, and a failed transatlantic flight.

  In Egypt the native population is being arrested wholesale. Similarly in India. In Russia our troops are being employed on some unknown adventure. At home prices are rising . . . our homes are full of the wreckage of four years’ war . . . Do we clamour for facts, for the removal of the censorship, for the repeal of DORA? No. In Paris a handful of generals and diplomats are deciding the future of the world. Are we interested? . . . Not in the least. This planet is passing through the supreme crisis of its history. It is being decided whether we shall be governed openly, like a free people, or secretly . . . [H]ow the cynics who govern us secretly must have gloated . . . “There goes the mob!” they must have thought, “just the same as ever after four years of suffering—indifferent to truth, incapable of thought, and keen only on trifles.”

  Leonard Woolf urged Morgan to channel his outrage by contributing to a white paper proposing reforms on behalf of a progressive think tank. The Government of Egypt, with Morgan’s pointed critiques, was published in 1921. But protesting felt like shouting into the wind.

  Just then Malcolm Darling’s old friend the maharajah of Dewas renewed his invi
tation for Morgan to come serve as secretary to the court of Dewas Senior, a central Indian principality. His Highness’s current secretary had requested a leave of six months from March to October 1921. The opportunity to see the other side of India appeared with striking symmetry to Morgan: the Hindu court to balance Masood’s Islamic India; the tiny maharajah, pious and provincial, to contrast with Masood and his worldly, Anglicized manner; the summer timetable to round out the winter months of his previous visit. It would be Morgan’s first proper job, subordinate to someone else. But the duties were rather unclear. He wrote Forrest Reid that he was “going as Prime minister or something.” Ten days before he sailed Morgan had lunch in Berkeley Square with his old friend the Alexandrian George Antonius, now working as an aid to Faisal ibn Hussein, the newly installed king of Iraq. The whole map of the Middle East was being redrawn after the war, and London was abuzz with men jockeying for power. At the margin of the gathering stood a slight blond young man with a long face and burning blue eyes named Lawrence. Morgan was intrigued by the young man’s enthusiasm for the future of the Arab world; he dropped him a note afterward, but Lawrence did not reply.

  Mohammed surprised him in the short stopover at Port Said, bribing his way aboard; he was still unemployed, but fit and cheerful, and the two spent a few “dream like” hours together, drinking Turkish coffee, walking along the deserted beach to have sex at the toe of the grandiose statue of de Lesseps. It was cold and foggy: Mohammed wore “a great coat and blue knitted gloves with which he repeatedly clasped my hands, saying how are you, friend, how are you.” Both men felt as if they had never parted. Morgan arranged to spend at least a month with Mohammed in Egypt on his return journey.

  His Highness Tukoji Rao III—whom Morgan called Bapu Sahib—ruled a tiny state that had been forged out of a splintered Hindu empire in the eighteenth century. He was exactly nine years younger than Morgan: they auspiciously shared a birthday on January 1. He was very small, with a huge mustache, dark eyes, and an impish body, bright but mercurial in temperament, and even by the time Morgan arrived—years before he fled his palace in advance of a mob—unreliable, “deceitful and impractical” as a ruler. Morgan wrote to Florence, “I wish he used his intelligence more. It is mostly employed in the detection of intrigues. The truth is that the fundamental in him is religious, not intellectual, and that I must understand his religion better before I can understand him.” But Morgan liked him. “He was a charming creature, gay, witty, affectionate, generous, and with a strong religious element in him . . . [H]e made a tragic mess of his life in the end . . . I went out to be his secretary . . . I had never been a secretary before and he did not know how to employ one. So it was a strange affair.”

  Morgan thought the visit might revivify his Indian novel, dormant since before the war. He had told Lily that another visit to India might help “finish it—it is stuck now because all the details of India are vague in my mind not for any other reason.” But India, like Egypt, had shifted under his feet. The same British government that had seen fit to elevate Bapu Sahib from rajah to maharajah in 1919 as a way to placate the Hindu states had in the same year ordered the slaughter of unarmed religious pilgrims in a garden near Amritsar. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed. Malcolm Darling had written to Morgan days afterward:

  [P]anic and cruelty—the two go together. I understand now why Germans did those terrible things in Belgium, they . . . fell blindly upon the people whom they feared. So with us . . . We did not rape and hack to pieces, but one day in Amritsar they shot down hundreds, mostly zemindars, there by religious hazard . . . I have seen the place—a death trap. 5 or 6,000 there, the kernel of them thoroughly seditious, but the majority lookers on . . . Enter infuriated general—“I took 30 seconds to make up my mind,” said he to Watkin—and then—1500 rounds. God it makes me sick to think of it. Yet I was told by my chief 10 days later—“people at the Club (Lahore) say you ought to be court martialled for criticizing.”

  The pace of political change in India was more rapid than either Forster or Darling could have imagined a decade before. Anxieties about sedition engendered repressive new laws in India, as they had in Britain, too. The Rowlatt Act authorized the government to arrest anyone suspected of terrorism and to hold prisoners indefinitely without trial. In response an obscure lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi, who had just returned from South Africa, began to organize peaceful protests against the government. In the context of calls for self-rule the sclerotic condition of Dewas Senior pointed up the compromised and antique British ideas of Indian government. Morgan explained to Florence,

  In his social life (e.g. the abolition of Purdah) [His Highness] is most revolutionary. But in his politics, and particularly in his attitude to British India . . . he is conservativissimus, and I rejoice that the political problem is not urgent yet in Dewas . . . The attitude to the English officials . . . is much more friendly than when I was here before and at the same time more independent: the explanation being that the ruling classes, whether English or Indian, find a common menace in Gandhi.

  Morgan understood that H.H. was a complicated figure, a pawn to both sides of the chess board, and pressed by political forces well beyond his control.

  Nevertheless, arriving in Dewas Senior in the spring of 1921, Morgan found the court in chaos. Parts of the palace that had been under construction when he visited a decade before were already crumbling into ruin. He wrote to Lily, “You would weep at the destruction, expense and hideousness, and I almost do.” The scene below his bedroom window was a case in point: in the courtyard workers ineffectually scrabbled in the dirt, five thin brown men passing a single bucket hand to hand to deposit the pile on a molehill a few yards away. “For acres around the soil is pitted with similar efforts, slabs of marble lie about, roads lead nowhere, costly fruit trees die for want of water, and I have discovered incidentally that £1000 worth (figure accurate) of electric batteries lie in a room and will spoil unless fixed promptly . . .” As he wrote this letter, Morgan watched a squirrel boldly walk up a long flight of steps, disappearing into the innards of one of the several unused grand pianos in the palace hall.

  Morgan knew that His Highness disapproved of homosexuality and had dismissed a previous secretary when he was discovered to be gay, and he told himself, “The least I can do is to cause no trouble.” An ill omen as he approached the palace brought on an uncanny sense of dread. “It was a dull evening at the end of March, the road was straight and rough and edged with small dreary trees and we passed a dead cow round which vultures were standing. I . . . had the definite thought ‘That’s how it will end.’”

  Now that his body had been touched by Mohammed, Morgan’s lust was unquenchable. It swelled in the “grilling heat” of midday, and masturbation—even “thrice in one afternoon”—offered no relief. Self-control was no use. Riding in a carriage one afternoon, the mere thought that his wrist might brush the arm of the young Indian sitting beside him made Morgan ejaculate into his trousers. The panopticon of courtyards and hallways at the palace robbed him of privacy—or so he imagined. Despite a miasma of paranoia, he began to flirt with a Hindu coolie, a slim boy of about eighteen who seemed to reciprocate his advances—the lingering touch of a finger echoed by a sensuous salaam. But surreptitious efforts to consummate his desire devolved into farce—every time the two got close, they were interrupted or discovered, and broke away from each other. Morgan began to believe that the court gossip, always feverish, was centered on his indiscretion. Sick at heart, he confessed to Bapu Sahib. “I think you know I am in great trouble,” he announced miserably. But H.H. told Morgan he had heard nothing. “His voice was kind, but I wished I was dead.”

  Morgan recorded the conversation verbatim in a little diary. Despite his prejudice against homosexuals, the maharajah was both curious and pragmatic.

  He continued gravely but without reproach. “Why a man and not a woman? Is not a woman more natural?”

  “Not in my case. I have no feeling for women.�
�

  “Oh but then that alters everything. You are not to blame.”

  “I don’t know what ‘natural’ is.”

  “You are quite right Morgan—I ought never to have used the word. Now don’t worry.”

  His Highness reassured him, and promptly arranged to find a sexual partner from among the palace servants. For this kindness, among others, Morgan came to think of the maharajah as a “kind of saint.”

  Kanaya was a barber at the palace, a slender, pretty, devious boy. Shaving Morgan became the sanctioned pretext for their sexual encounters. His Highness instructed Morgan to cheerfully agree with any scurrilous rumors that he and Kanaya were having sex as the best way to dispel gossip. The boy was already “budgeted for,” he reassured Morgan. The only caveat was that Morgan must do nothing that could be interpreted as sexual passivity. And so for some weeks Morgan sodomized the boy, who punctually arrived to satiate his lust. Soon Kanaya tried to parlay his secret into a bigger salary, and bragged to his friends at the court that he slept with Morgan. H.H. boxed the boy’s ears.