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

by Wendy Moffat

  The arrangement corrupted Morgan’s soul. He discovered with some disgust that complete power over the boy made him sadistic.

  I resumed sexual intercourse with him, but it was now mixed with the desire to inflict pain. It didn’t hurt him to speak of, but it was bad for me, and new in me . . . I’ve never had that desire with anyone else, before or after, and I wasn’t trying to punish him—I knew his silly little soul was incurable. I just felt he was a slave, without rights, and I a despot whom no one could call to account.

  With a clinical eye Morgan watched his own complicity in the privileges of race and caste. He came to see how his brief stint of perverse cruelty was part of the grander temptations of colonial power. He decided that he could no longer think of Searight and his colonial adventures with benign curiosity.

  These reflections led Morgan to deeper questions. Was his desire for some “emotional response” from Kanaya merely a projection of Western erotic conventions? “It is difficult to find the emotion of a man whose aim it is to give pleasure to others.” Was it ludicrous to ask for sincerity from a whore? How much of his own desire was just a veneer of romanticism over a cold-blooded expression of power?

  On the other hand, it seemed grotesque to Morgan to deny consciousness or agency to Kanaya (or to Mohammed for that matter) just because they weren’t white. In the murky world of English-colonial relations wasn’t skepticism that a brown man could feel affection for him simply a different sort of bigotry? He asked Goldie, “Do ‘fondness’ and ‘love’ lead to intimacies that are different in quality? . . . When I was with M[ohammed] those 3 hours in Port Said I was overwhelmed with a feeling of safety: overwhelmed on account of the route, but the feeling was identical with what I experience when I am with Florence or you . . .” But in India he couldn’t gauge intimacy. It was a hall of mirrors.

  Morgan concluded that he was ill-equipped to interpret the sexual lexicon of this strange world. Sexual attitudes at court seemed prudish, but the religious festivals were chock-full of erotic play. During the holiday of Holi, “the Hindu Dionysia,” Morgan watched a troupe of male dancers enact some sort of sexual farce featuring a married couple. He wrote to Goldie,

  I was struck with the remoteness of their sexual gestures: in most cases I didn’t know what was up. One “girl” lay on her face and extending her hands before her clasped and unclasped them alternately. This indicated the act of copulation. “If it had really been a girl” said H.H. “it wouldn’t have done, it would have been too much. But they have a boy which makes it all right.” I wonder! All very odd. I shall never feel the surety in these matters here that I felt in Egypt. The sphere of “naughtiness” seems wider, and perhaps this it is that makes it faintly distasteful to me.

  A visit to Chhatarpur a few weeks later compounded his bafflement. The maharajah of Chhatarpur, a grotesque little man whose face folded in on itself like a Pekinese dog, had long indulged his passion for beautiful boys by keeping a retinue of actors and singers who, wearing only loincloths, put on skits of the life of Krishna for his daily pleasure. Ten years before, he had hired dozens of them to embody Krishna in all his lovely forms—but the religious cast to his sexual sublimation had consumed much of the court’s budget, and as a consequence of British-imposed thriftiness he was down to a single Krishna boy as an attendant. In a flourish of generosity, he offered the boy as a suitor, arranging a serenade in a romantic tableau. Young Krishna was “intelligent and forthcoming, but the face is sensual and melancholy and probably cruel. I hear his acting and singing were not good, but he must have looked striking, and when we got back he played quite sweetly to me on a flute.”

  That night Krishna came to Morgan on a white horse, riding bareback in the blue moonlight, his long black hair streaming down his back. He was strikingly glamorous, wearing enormous diamond stud earrings, and singing a strange tuneless song. It was a remarkable sight. But the next morning the romance was dispelled. The boy, it seemed, had overplayed the part. He was not authorized to wear the earrings, Morgan was told. He was not supposed to ride the horse.

  Today . . . began exquisitely with K in diamond earrings and upon a horse that he could not ride. We taught each other English and Hindustani for a couple of hours. He was friendly and simple, and only 4 servants were watching us, which is solitude in India . . . [He] is to be punished for calling on me with a horse and earrings. He was told to walk quietly up, avoiding ostentation, because as soon as there is talk he may have to go and with him will depart my last channel for visions of the Deity.

  The next day, crammed into the backseat of a motorcar with the maharajah of Chhatarpur and the Krishna boy, Morgan sought to explain himself. They were traveling to see the erotic sculptures on the temples of Khajuraho. As they bumped along the rutted road, Morgan leaned “across the slender sphinx who sat wedged between us” to confide in his benefactor. “I want him to keep house for me like George Merrill,” he told the maharajah with heartfelt sincerity. His Highness was puzzled. He asked Morgan, “What is to keep house?”

  Out of these muddles—Comic? Tragic? Pathetic?—Morgan would embroider the rich tapestry of his final novel. Morgan’s careful observation of his own erotic conundrum pointed out how impossible it was for him to understand India through the lens of his cultural assumptions, however wellmeaning. In A Passage to India yearning for connection became indistinguishable from desire as Morgan sketched out the friendship between Dr. Aziz and his English friend Cyril Fielding. Riding side by side at the end of the novel, furious, “half-kissing,” Fielding asks Aziz, “Why can’t we be friends now? . . . It’s what I want. It’s what you want.”

  But the horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single-file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw the Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices: “No, not yet,” and the sky said: “No, not there.”

  It was bootless to ask what was “natural” in this tragic, muddled world.

  Well before his term was up, Morgan began to suspect that the Dewas court finances were impossibly in arrears. In August he asked to forgo his salary. He had tried to be effective at representing Bapu Sahib, lending some order to the management of accounts, but it was like pouring water through a sieve. Ruefully, he left the court early. He spent his final ten weeks in India sightseeing near Hyderabad with Masood. Morgan was happy to see him married, and they seamlessly renewed their friendship. They spent a glorious New Year’s birthday together, garlanded with flowers and eating sweetmeats. On January 23, 1922, the ship arrived at Port Said, but instead of Mohammed’s sweet face, there was a shock. Morgan learned from a messenger that “Mohammed collapsed under consumption about a fortnight before I landed,” and was lying mortally ill in his house at Mansourah.

  Morgan rushed to be at his lover’s side. He took Mohammed to Cairo to be examined by the leading medical specialist, who confirmed that the young man had at best weeks to live. It was “an unhappy time for me in the local daily sense,” Morgan told Florence, because Mohammed was irritable and in pain. But the “central truth” of this fatal moment distilled into a calm, pure sensation on both sides—a mixture of awe, gratitude, and love. Morgan was “thankful to be on the spot,” and to have the money to make Mohammed and his family comfortable.

  Morgan and Mohammed’s extended family—Gamila, their baby daughter, hangers-on—repaired to the Nile resort of Helouan. Mohammed rallied enough to take some short expeditions on camelback to see the ruins at Wadi Hof. Morgan nursed him through “all the traditional symptoms, haemorrhage, night-sweats, exhaustion” lovingly, but without hope. Lying awake on a cot beside Mohammed’s bed, Morgan drank in the image of Mohammed’s thin face. By day he read proofs of his guide to Alexandria, gently shooing flies off Mohammed as he dozed. The dying man was in strangely “radiant spirits . . . charming and talkative . . . a jo
lly companion.” Encircling his lover with good wishes from around the globe, Morgan urged both Masood and Florence to write to Mohammed, which they did.

  Mohammed was well enough to come to Cairo to see Morgan off on the day. I trust that the end will come without suffering poor dear little fellow. His face is unchanged. In the house he wears a yellow velvet cap, shaped rather like Goldie’s, and folds his body up as only an Oriental can, so that the intelligent beautiful head seems to be resting on a pyramid of clothes. Ah me—but everything is bearable, it is the betrayal from within that wears away one’s soul and I have been spared that.

  Morgan climbed aboard ship for London knowing he would never see Mohammed alive again.

  A month later, in March 1922, Virginia Woolf was shocked at the sight of Morgan when she encountered him on the street in London. He seemed to her

  depressed to the verge of inanition. To come back to Weybridge, to come back to an ugly house a mile from the station, an old, fussy exacting mother, to come back having lost your Rajah, without a novel, & with no power to write one—this is dismal, I expect, at the age of 43. The middle age of buggers is not to be contemplated without horror.

  She was wrong about the object of Morgan’s affection, but correct in assessing his state of mind. Leonard, ever practical, invited him to dinner, and urged a resumption of work on the Indian novel; work had always been their solace when Virginia was ill. Goldie, too, urged him forward.

  Days later, impulsively, Morgan burned all his homosexual stories. It was not so much that he was ashamed of them, but he felt they were the equivalent of masturbation, written “to excite myself.” Keeping them around “clogged me artistically.” When he had begun writing them fifteen years before he was convinced that he was “doing something positively dangerous to my career as a novelist.” Now they seemed tame, inconsequential, “[t]he wrong channel for my pen.”

  Mohammed’s last letters came to Harnham, where Morgan read them secretly at his little desk under the eaves.

  dear Morgan

  I am sending you the photograph

  I am very bad

  I got nothing more to say

  the family are good. My compliments to mother.

  My love to you

  My love to you

  My love to you

  Do not forget your ever friend

  Moh el Adl

  By the time Morgan received this letter in early May 1922, Mohammed was already gone.

  In the little notebook Morgan began to write back to his dead lover, “although I know that a putrid scrap in the Mansourah burial ground is all that was you.” If he was not to forget his “ever friend” it seemed an urgent necessity to examine their love affair clearly and dispassionately, to record all that could be known about Mohammed. So much was at stake. “One slip of my mind would make a spook of you.” But fighting sentimentality opened Morgan to dark thoughts. He was tortured by the possibility that “determined my life should contain one success I have concealed from myself and others M’s frequent coldness towards me. And his occasional warmth may be due to politeness, gratitude, or pity.” One thing he knew to be true. In Howards End, Morgan had summarized his philosophy: “Death destroys a man; the idea of Death saves him.” The sweet paradox—death erases everything; but without death nothing has meaning—had been written in innocence, before the sting of death had really touched him. Mohammed was rotting, of this Morgan was certain. There would be no reunion with his lover in heaven. But Morgan must simply trust the words—“My love to you / My love to you / My love to you.”

  But the utter erasure of Mohammed and his line—the surviving child was a girl, and didn’t count—made the whole question too poignant and final. It was as if in dying Mohammed had dragged Morgan into the shroud with him.

  The mater is a misfortune for me as well as a grief for at my age I need someone of another generation to speed me up and direct me from the pottering-kindness which is naturally required of my life. I cannot think what he and I together might not have developed into. The end is so final. If his boy had lived there would have been that possibility, but I have no inclination to grapple with a female Oriental infant.

  When Morgan took up the Indian manuscript again in the autumn of 1922, the whole process of revision was suffused with this sense of loss. The epigraph of Howards End—“only connect!”—now seemed hopelessly naïve to him. He told Masood, “When I began the book I thought of it as a little bridge of sympathy between East and West, but this conception has had to go, my sense of truth forbids anything so comfortable. I think that most Indians, like most English people, are shits, and I am not interested whether they sympathize with one another or not.” But somehow he managed to rescue his new writing from simple despair and misanthropy. His “sense of truth” forbade it.

  The final draft of A Passage to India was darker and more complex than the first few chapters he had written and set aside in 1913. The novel would remain a meditation on the limitations of human connection, but in a bold and honest decision, he chose to succumb to India’s incomprehensibility. He abandoned omniscience, and emptied out the plot until key elements of the original story became deliberately unknowable. The early drafts of the novel were shaped as a straightforward courtroom melodrama. Adela Quested was sexually accosted in the caves, and Dr. Aziz was the culprit. But in revision the plotline became deliberately murky. At the moment of the attack, Morgan shifted the narrative perspective to follow Aziz into a nearby cave as he smokes a cigarette. What happens cannot be known, but the reader effectively affirms Aziz’s alibi. At the rape trial Adela bravely admits that she does not know who assaulted her, or even if she was assaulted at all.

  Adela’s moral courage permits a just verdict for Aziz, but Morgan refused to tip the scales of his novel toward benevolence. The same terrifying unknowability that faced Adela in the Marabar Caves affects the serene Mrs. Moore during her visit there: she enters as a tourist, but leaves as a broken woman. The experience of hearing the echo in the cave unravels her psychologically. Her Christian faith disappears because in the darkness all words—from “Let there be Light” to “It is finished”—carry no meaning. She concludes nihilistically, “Pathos, piety, courage—they exist but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.”

  All through 1923 Morgan worked on his last novel. He planned to dedicate it to Masood, “the only person to whom I can open my heart and feel occasionally that I am understood.” The only living person. By day, he walked alone and thought of Mohammed; by night, he continued his long letter to his dead friend.

  In May 1924, after a final illness that unhinged her mentally, Morgan’s aunt Laura Forster died at the age of eighty-five. She had lived at West Hackhurst since her younger brother first designed the rambling brick house, and she willed the remainder of her tenancy lease to Lily and Morgan. Though he was always to feel like a nephew at the Abinger house, though “he never possessed it,” in a very real sense this invitation was a kind of homecoming for Morgan. With its six bedrooms and its two great chimneys, its north and south verandas, its gables and stables and large rose garden, the house limned Eddie’s aesthetic, and it was the only commission he completed in his short life. It was also a bit of a fossil in 1924. “There was . . . no gas, no electric light, no central heating, no hot water supply or baths. The drinking water is pumped from a well and carried to the kitchen in buckets,” heated on coal stoves by Agnes, and, if one wanted to bathe, carried upstairs in copper kettles. Morgan had known the house intimately since he was born; he visited Aunt Laura faithfully twice every year. But it would never be Rooksnest; it was not quite home.

  Faced with a move she had long wished for, Lily dithered. Should she move to Abinger, or keep the house in Weybridge? West Hackhurst was well in the country—a long walk up rutted lanes from the little station at Gomshall near Dorking. Unable to make up her mind, Lily extended the lease on Harnham for a time, keeping two houses. In fact, three. After going back and forth i
n her mind, Lily began the arduous process of moving her belongings to Abinger. Morgan decided it was the moment to take rooms in London—after all, West Hackhurst was considerably farther afield than Weybridge—and he carved out a little freedom in a pied-à-terre in Brunswick Square, close to his Bloomsbury friends. It was a strange feeling, becoming a country squire in middle age. Leaving London for Abinger one day, Morgan told Carrington wryly, “I have to visit my estates.”

  Alongside the work on A Passage to India, Morgan began to compile his Egyptian essays into a collection. Virginia and Leonard Woolf promised to publish it. Pharos and Pharillon was conceived as a tribute to Mohammed, but when the time came to dedicate the volume, Morgan could not summon the courage to put down his lover’s name. He wrote to Florence, one of Mohammed’s cherished circle of friends, to ask her help:

  The Hogarth Press are bringing out some of my Alexandrian things this winter. It should be a nice little book. I have dedicated it “To———” because I wished my next book to be Mohammed’s whatever his relation to me, but now I do not like the dedication. All his life I hushed him up and I feel I ought to put his name in full. Yet I don’t want questions from outsiders as to who Mohammed is. Have you any advice, or rather sentiment, on the matter? I could allude to him by some literary paraphrase, but I hate such. Though it occurs to me—two words in Greek—that fit both book and him extraordinarily well.