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

by Wendy Moffat

  The temptation to play up the drama of his encounters with Reg to a virulently misogynist audience of friends may have encouraged Morgan to exaggerate their antic tone at the expense of the women at the margins of his tales. But it is disquieting to hear Morgan record with such heartlessness Bess’s complaint to her husband as he leaves once more for a day to roll in the hay with his new friend:

  I have just discovered the trouble over [Reg]. Bess won’t let him come . . . Then today—I left Cambridge early for the purpose—I asked if I might come and see him; when I got round, Bess was in the dark and a temper . . . He said “she’s a bit nervous—she don’t like to be left”—no doubt true: and she said crossly “I see nothing of you all the day.” So I retired, defeated I suppose.

  Morgan had been in Cambridge for an Apostles meeting. He discovered after a long drought that his old Cambridge connections could also provide a wellspring of young friends. Chief among them was Sebastian Sprott. The name, like the young man himself, was a creation: he had been born Walter John Herbert Sprott in a resolutely middle-class family from a suburb of Birmingham, but decided early on that his affections were with the proletariat, and once at Cambridge, chose to go by the simple name Jack. But Jack Sprott was ridiculous, his King’s friends insisted, too near “Jack Spratt” for comfort. A loud and sustained debate took place while Walter-John-Herbert-Jack listened, when Dent (then a Fellow of King’s) appeared in Sprott’s rooms, carrying a large sheaf of music by J. S. Bach. Sebastian! his friends suddenly proclaimed. Sebastian would be a mellifluous name! And he agreeably adopted it for a decade or so, gradually reverting simply to Jack.

  Sprott was bright and emotionally acute—at university he studied social psychology—but he applied these virtues elliptically: he demanded to be adopted by someone and then molded to a frame. Maynard Keynes had sponsored him for the Apostles, and taken him to bed. Sebastian fell deeply in love; he accompanied Keynes on a journey to South Africa and was paid to index his book, but Carrington thought his real job title should be “attendant slave.” He tutored Vanessa Bell’s children for a time. Hovering around the alluring margin of the Bloomsbury circle, hungry for culture and just plain hungry, Sprott spent what little money he had on books and clothes. He was a bit of a dandy, with a special eye for odd colors, notable scarves, and a crisp hat. He came across as an exquisite—with fluttering hands, his “voice shooting up and down the scale or suddenly pouncing on some selected word.” But he would lend his last penny, and often did, to anyone more hard up than himself. He was forever adopting strays from a raffish collection of young toughs and crooks in and out of prison whom he befriended easily and without judgment. When Sprott answered the phone, he could be overheard saying with infinite compassion, “I knew you were to be released this afternoon.”

  Sprott took up a position as a lecturer in psychology at the University of Nottingham—“a dreary nowhere at the apex of a pyramid whose basis is Blackpool and Wigan”—moving into a huge, damp, rickety row house in the deepest slums of the city. In his first months there he picked up an affable working-class man in a public toilet. Charles Lovett followed Sebastian home and never left. Lovett was a doughy, sweet, tractable, moon-faced young man, abject in his adoration for Sprott. He lived with Sprott for decades, happily cooking and cleaning for him, a patient witness to countless comings and goings, always waiting for Sebastian’s latest affair to burn out.

  After moving out of his parents’ baronial mansion in Richmond, Joe Ackerley had discovered the ideal neighborhood in London to meet Lovett’s sort of jaunty young men, unemployed and spending most of their time in petty larceny and booking small bets, the kind of honest crooks who knew how to keep their heads just above water, knew when to push off, and knew how to have a good time. Unlike the handsome Guardsmen for whom casual prostitution was a lucrative sideline, these men were happy to go to bed in exchange for a meal and comradeship. Some of them had girlfriends or wives to whom they went home.

  Joe rented a set of rooms at the top of a once-elegant Georgian townhouse at 6 Hammersmith Terrace, which backed straight onto the muddy bank of the Thames. The actor John Gielgud recalled the décor as an admixture of Spartan and camp: “a statue of a Greek youth, a large bunch of bananas on the dining table, and a rather anonymous young disciple ironing shirts in the kitchen.” The house had a spectacular view of Chiswick Eyot at the bend in the river, and served as an ideal vantage point to observe the annual Oxford-Cambridge boat races. Joe was given access to the large terrace on the riverbank by his landlords, an eccentric trio of ancient siblings who had inherited the house. The eldest, an old queen, wearing a dressing gown barely tied, peered up the staircase eagerly when Joe and his friends arrived and departed. “[I]n this négligé . . . he was always overcome by a genteel, simpering embarrassment: ‘Fancy you catching me like this!’”

  After the war, Joe had written a play about his experience as a prisoner of war. Doing so was an expiation of the painful love affair he had suffered through with the young and cruel officer who was interned with him. Prisoners of War charted the psychological deterioration of Ackerley’s double, the virile, manly Captain Conrad, who falls in love unrequitedly with the nineteen-year-old tubercular Lieutenant Grayle. The shattered state of returning soldiers was a raw subject in the immediate aftermath of the war, and Joe found it difficult to mount a production—“I do not think that any theatre would undertake a play of so harrowing and distressing a character,” he was told. The problem play was an allegory of broader social problems, but these were perceived very differently by straight and gay audiences, to Ackerley’s advantage. To avoid the scrutiny of the Lord Chamberlain, the official government censor of plays, it was produced in its first showcase by a club theater devoted to producing controversial, uncommercial plays. The sponsor, Mrs. Whitworth, was a progressive woman, the wife of a theater critic and arts editor at Chatto and Windus. She promoted the play convinced that it depicted a universal and deplorable phenomenon, the sad state of psychologically damaged young veterans, each in his own way mangled by the experience of war. It did not occur to her that scenes in which Grayle lays his head on Conrad’s lap while the older man strokes his hair, or the hurried warning “Look out! Someone might come in!” had any homosexual content, and thus she was disconcerted when the theater was inundated with requests for tickets to “the new homosexual play.” Word was out. She demanded a meeting with the playwright.

  Ackerley did not demur or back down. He argued that if Mrs. Whitworth had missed the subtext, other theatergoers would as well; the production went forward, with Ackerley’s friend Frank Birch directing, never mentioning to his actors the groundbreaking theme of the play. The realistic portrayal of the characters—none of whom comported himself according to the effeminate stereotype of a nancy boy—offered plausible cover for the unaware. But Mrs. Whitworth had forever lost her innocence—watching Ackerley embrace his sister at a rehearsal, she hissed, “You see! Incest as well.” In September 1925, when Prisoners of War transferred to the West End for a short commercial run, it became the first play with an explicitly homosexual plot to pass the obtuse scrutiny of the Lord Chamberlain.

  Morgan took the opportunity of the production to introduce Joe to Golds-worthy Lowes Dickinson. He encouraged Joe to send on a draft of the script to Goldie, who offered a long list of enthusiastic suggestions for revision. Morgan’s attempt to bridge his old and new friends backfired when Goldie fell promptly and miserably in love with Joe. It was an ill match: Goldie was famously repressed, and never acted on his physical desires, painfully sublimating them into a shoe fetish. For his part, Joe was notoriously uninterested in older or gay men and had decided that “unable, it seemed, to reach sex through love” he should instead “start . . . upon a long quest in pursuit of love through sex.” Ackerley made matters worse by not only telling Goldie after an overnight visit of passionate talk that he had not had this much fun as an undergraduate at Cambridge, but kissing the old man passionately on the lips
when he left in the morning. Poor Morgan was left to interpret the mysterious chemistry between the bewildered protagonists, in long letters seriatim.

  Morgan was too wise to advocate for Goldie, but he diagnosed an emotional problem at the root of Joe’s perennially unsatisfactory love affairs. Morgan told him so directly: “I think you are scared or bored by response . . . I think love is beautiful and important—somehow I have found it so in spite of all the pain—and it will sadden me if you fail in that particular way.” Days later, while agreeing with Joe that the best love should not be “disembodied,” Morgan sharpened his critique. “Proust seems to think that a certainty of success in love stops one from proceeding; that rebuffs or jealousy are the only stimuli that keep one interested in a person. This isn’t my experience, and I don’t want it to be yours.” He counseled Joe not to waste his time on his current lover, a scamp who, however charming, had fenced stolen goods and habitually run into trouble with the law.

  His own friendship with Reg was gaining footing at the moment Joe’s affair was disintegrating. “It is curious,” Morgan told Joe, “how my affairs generally move upwards, yours downwards. Moralists prefer me. See chart opposite.” At the bottom of this letter Morgan helpfully drew a little graph of two lines pointing in opposite directions, with the facetious attribution of “The Royal Metrogenital Society.”

  One Sunday morning Ackerley went out into the river mist of Hammersmith Terrace at dawn to get the milk bottle off his stoop, and came back inside with the milk and a brilliant young policeman who had been walking the beat. Harry Daley was only twenty-four. He had grown up in Lowestoft like one of the “unthinkable” poor of Howards End: his orphaned father was a fisherman, and his mother a charlady. When Harry was a boy his father drowned at sea; Mrs. Daley moved her four young children to live near Dorking. Harry worked as a delivery boy in Abinger, where (by coincidence) he had brought groceries to Aunt Laura Forster at West Hackhurst. He intended to join the navy, but instead was recruited into the Metropolitan Police.

  Harry was voraciously hungry for the pleasures of the glittering city. He had chosen the police force for its human drama and its proximity to the West End. He enjoyed being posted to T Division, with a beat from Chiswick to Hammersmith, since “Hammersmith Broadway was the pleasure centre of this end of London in the same way that Piccadilly Circus was supposed to be for London as a whole.” An aficionado, Harry had unusual discernment in matters of culture: he impressed Joe Ackerley when they first met by asking if he was the same man who had written Prisoners of War. He drank in Beethoven, Brahms, and Franck, listening to concerts on the wireless or playing scratchy records on the gramophone with an outsize horn he set up in his cubicle at the police barracks where he lived. Harry never forgot the afternoon at West Hackhurst when he listened, rapturous, as Morgan played a Mozart sonata with a “heavenly touch” on a tiny new piano he had installed in his study. Morgan’s delight in the music “made him wonderfully loveable.” It was a golden moment made especially memorable because, music lover that he was, Harry had never before heard a piano played live.

  Almost immediately after Joe introduced them in the summer of 1926, Harry and Morgan became lovers. Through Morgan and Joe, Harry was unexpectedly drawn into a glamorous, “gay and all embracing” world, a secret world unlike any he had known, where men from all walks of life shared sex, talk, and friendship. They were a colorful and eclectic bunch. His circle of new friends included aristocrats and heirs to great fortunes—Eddie Sackville-West, the music critic (and cousin to Vita Sackville-West), who had inherited Knole, a vast Elizabethan country house in Sussex; and Christopher Wood, willowy, effete, sporting a monocle, whose money came from a family business in canned jams. And there were Bloomsbury artists—Duncan Grant, who painted a portrait of Harry in his uniform, and Raymond Mortimer, later the critic for The Times, whose flat was crammed with Picassos and Braques.

  There was General L. E. O. Charlton, known as Leo. This stern, almost priggish chief of Air Staff in Iraq was a principled man who had quit the RAF to protest its policy of bombing civilian targets. He lived quietly with his partner, a shy working-class RAF man named Tom Wichelo. Through Leo and Tom, Harry met Gerald Heard, a philosopher much influenced by Hindu mysticism. Heard was a gentle soul who in his later years became a guru in a Los Angeles ashram, but who at the time Harry met him lived, unaccountably, in Weybridge. Heard was sui generis. He suffered from persistent conjunctivitis, which required him to apply gentian violet to his eyelids, giving him the aspect of a cockeyed Theda Bara. He compounded this aura of eccentricity by adopting unusual habits of dress. Once he came to dinner at Joe Ackerley’s parents’ house wearing “purple suede shoes and a leather jacket with a leopardskin collar.”

  Harry returned the favor. He introduced Morgan to his circle of happy-go-lucky young men out of work and on the lookout for fun, petty thieves and gangsters and rough-faced working-class men, cheerful crooked boys with no money but plenty of Cockney charm, men who “scraped and pinched to buy gay clothes” and “stood about like peacocks, with empty pockets,” who owned nothing more than the clothes on their backs. There were boxers and fitness buffs, pickpockets and scam artists, men with whom Daley broke bread and whom he occasionally had to lock up. There were no hard feelings on either side, since Daley’s friends understood being arrested “as part of the excitement of their calling” and “were from families where such things are no disgrace.” Besides, he was always willing to pass a cigarette to them through the bars.

  Harry lived with ninety-nine other unmarried policemen in the Hammersmith Section House on Paddenswick Road, overlooking Ravenscroft Park. It was just blocks away from Joe’s rooms on the river. The “big bare building” was essentially a barracks, with “a billiard room, a mess room and a kitchen on the ground floor, an old army hut in the yard, and lots of bathrooms and a hundred cubicles up the dingy stone stairs.” Here—Harry deliciously relished the Metropolitan Police public relations slogan—the finest body of men in the world lived in the loose atmosphere of a workingmen’s club. “In this cramped world of cubicles we lounged on one another’s beds to talk and conduct our affectionate Platonic friendships . . . it was like camping out and it was heavenly.”

  The young men were supervised, if one could call it that, by a single exasperated sergeant who was universally loathed. He was a bully—which differentiated him from most of his subordinates—and cheerfully corrupt, which did not. It was commonplace for policemen to collect graft from small-time crooks and hustlers on their beat, and they made a habit of looking the other way when faced with minor infractions from friends and acquaintances.

  At work Harry was openly gay. His fellow officers made a clear distinction between the behavior of one of their own and the “nancy boys” brought into the station on charges of soliciting. These men were routinely harassed and humiliated: their faces were rubbed with toilet paper to detect makeup; they were “laughed about as if [they were] not present,” and subjected to searches in which the cops “always found the same sized tin of vaseline in [their] pocket[s].” But within the Section House, for the most part the men lived by the philosophy of laissez faire: “One policeman regularly hoisted his sweetheart over the gate on a rope, to spend the night with him in a bed on the gymnasium floor.” A large, pudgy, and unprepossessing man, Harry was nevertheless capable of defending himself. He endured oblique slights: a knothole in the main office wall was graffitied to look like an anus, and “love from 308”—Harry’s badge number—was penciled below. But on the whole, Harry was let be.

  Morgan was head over heels in love with the spirit of the place, which he slyly labeled “Erection Howze” in a letter to Sebastian. Harry took a photograph of Morgan standing on the roof, his little tonsure of gray hair flapping in the breeze. Often he would stay the night and join the men in the mess hall for a tremendous fry-up the next morning—“steak and eggs and bacon, tinned salmon, fruit, crusty new bread and lots of butter.” On Harry’s day off they would g
o to the theater—to see a Noel Coward play, or Patrick Hamilton’s Rope, based on the Leopold and Loeb murder (and later adapted by Hitchcock), or to the bathhouse at Harry’s workingmen’s club. Morgan loved the texture of life in Harry’s neck of the woods—walking the late-night beat beside his lover through streets deserted “except for a few coster’s barrows,” meeting the boxers, lorry drivers, fishermen, and gang leaders who frequented the neighborhood. The gangsters were especially dear to Morgan’s heart—he felt they “spoke my language.” He was delighted to read the written notice posted in the window of one café—“Nothing but the best margarine served”—wondering, “What on earth can they have been accused of serving?”

  For privacy they met at Morgan’s boîte at 27 Brunswick Square in Bloomsbury, an upstairs suite of rooms carved out of a dilapidated Regency townhouse that was later destroyed in the Blitz. His choice of décor was a deliberate rebuke to the sober Victorian good taste of Harnham. The sitting room wall boasted several handmade pictures of Indian ladies wearing brightly colored saris composed of the gaudy wrappers of Indian chocolate bars. The pied-à-terre was kitted out with all the necessities of London bachelor life—a gas ring for primitive cooking, a hot water bottle, and special black soap for killing crab lice. Here Morgan hosted Harry on many a night, and here he also juggled the various assignations of his new, comparatively rich sex life. Reg Palmer also stayed here when he could get away from Bess: though Morgan had vowed to break it off, telling Joe, “It is not my policy to break up homes,” the two men continued to find time for private sex and friendship.

  Here Morgan also stayed chastely with Frank Vicary, the young man whom he had befriended years before at the Montazah Hospital in Alexandria. The men resumed their friendship upon Morgan’s return from India. Being near Vicary demanded a good deal of self-restraint. Morgan found Frank charming and attractive, was intrigued by his intellectual curiosity and quickness, but he dared not stray toward expressing appreciation. To Florence Barger, Morgan lamented, “Vicary cannot take M[ohammed]’s place, because there’s a whole side of my nature remains ungratified and undiscussed.” Morgan listened to Frank’s woes—and he had plenty of them—and always believed the best about his friend’s motives. Time and again Frank would quit a job, or get laid off; he traveled to Canada and the United States in search of work, but came home with his tail between his legs. His marriage, Frank claimed, was unhappy and sexless; his sister committed suicide, killing her child with her; and his beloved eldest son, to whom he was devoted, died in a hideous accident, having been scalded in the bath.