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

by Wendy Moffat

  Morgan could not resist helping Frank through all his travails. He sponsored Vicary in numerous entrepreneurial ventures, even going so far as to buy him a small pig farm in Gloucestershire. In turn, Vicary named his second son Edward Morgan—thereby scandalizing Lily—and penned effusive letters to an unrequited Morgan. Morgan wrote Joe ruefully that visiting Vicary’s farm was “heavenly . . . if heaven can be just sexless.”

  And to the Brunswick Square flat, like some sort of parcel, Sebastian Sprott sent Charles Lovett, his acquiescent lover from the slums of Nottingham. Lovett was a sweet, rather lumbering young man who adoringly did what was asked of him. He was genuinely fond of Morgan, and happy to be companionable. They established a routine. Morgan would pay Charles’s train fare. Spending a weekend or a long day in London, Charles was treated to a nice meal and the theater. The sex was rather sedate—usually mutual masturbation. Then Charles would return to Sebastian and Nottingham with a small gift, such as new pocket handkerchiefs, for his trouble. Though Lovett was literate, the arrangements were always made between Morgan and Sebastian, with Morgan micromanaging the affair:

  “Don’t let anyone ‘spoil’ Charles . . . though he seems perfectly sensible and resistant . . . And he shouldn’t, for his comfort and others, talk more than he needs about my being a prominent writer . . .” “Tell Charles to arrive at 4.30 as planned and if I am not there to meet him . . . to go to Brunswick Square where he will find a note from me . . . on the mantelpiece . . .” “I have written to Charles and asked him for the 9th instead. You may kindly see I get a reply as soon as may be.” “Do see that C. goes . . . through with his [false] teeth.”

  Lovett’s reliability was his chief virtue—in his diary Morgan called their relationship an “elderly man’s love.”

  Having a separate flat made Morgan feel “solid” and “independent of mother.” But soon Morgan found that scheduling assignations there became exhaustingly complex. He juggled his own plans with requests for the key from Joe and Sebastian, or his old friend Francis Bennett. Occasionally he would bring Lily from Weybridge for an enervating day of London shopping or a musicale. One evening in 1928 he was startled to find “an enormous boy” in the flat when he arrived; he admonished Sebastian not to double-book.

  Morgan’s new friends offered a refreshing outlook, but they distracted him from intellectual work. He was publishing frequent reviews and incidental essays, but his life as a writer of fiction was stalled—and he admitted that he alone was largely responsible for his creative lassitude. His friend and translator Charles Mauron urged him to take up a new novel, but Morgan demurred, citing a temperamental weakness: “not to feel intact, not to [be] able to expose oneself to certain contacts because of self-consciousness—that really is an aweful [sic] nuisance, and I spend a good deal of time now with people who are (vaguely speaking) my inferiors, and to whom I can very easily be kind.”

  It was hard to tell if Morgan’s attitude revealed complacency or anxiety. Certainly it was seductive to surround oneself with people like Reg, who teased him by saying, “O, [the ] celebrated author.” But Morgan sometimes wished that his friendships “could have an intellectual basis.” With the exception of Harry Daley, none of Morgan’s working-class friends gave him much to think about. In consequence some of Morgan’s friends suspected that he enjoyed the feeling of superiority. Leo Charlton noted, “Morgan’s friends hushed their voices, as people do in cathedrals, when talking of him.”

  In truth, Morgan’s attitude toward his social inferiors was complicated. More than many men of his class, Morgan saw how working-class people were slighted, treated as nearly invisible. In Maurice he had deliberately made Alec Scudder “loom up on the reader gradually,” reflecting Maurice Hall’s obtuse habit of looking through the servants until the “masculine blur” of the gamekeeper develops into a full-blown human being “who gives and takes love.” He was disgusted by the senseless class strictures in his own daily life, railing in his diary at “the knowledge that I couldn’t have Frank, e.g. to stay” with him at King’s without causing a stir.

  Morgan had long resented the middle-class shibboleth of avoiding the topic of money. His novels are filled with occasions when a heartfelt offer of generosity is rebuffed as not the done thing. When Philip Herriton offers Agnes and Gerald some of his inheritance so that they may forgo a long engagement (in Where Angels Fear to Tread), the lovers treat his generosity as a rebuke. And Henry Wilcox is mystified by the Schlegels’ willingness to discuss their financial status openly, or to try to help Leonard Bast. It was all very well to develop an unorthodox view of social class, but “only connect” remained a difficult proposition when Morgan consistently had more money than his friends. Disparity of income lent even the most ordinary generosity the odor of condescension. To counter this, in life as in art, Morgan insisted on being patent about money. From Mohammed he had learned that the poorer partner wanted to pay for things, as a matter of pride. Morgan was careful to mind economic reciprocity—and by inclination quite humble in his tastes. He was perfectly at home eating in a canteen or café, or watching a play from the nosebleed seats.

  Morgan’s generosity was exceptionally deep and thoughtful. He delicately ascertained the perfect needful thing, and made it occur with a minimum of fuss. Throughout his life he bestowed practical gifts with deft delicacy: he paid Joe Ackerley’s expenses for a long-needed holiday, sent Sebastian Sprott small gifts of money, and took on the full cost of private medical care when Harry Daley’s mother needed surgery. All told, the fees amounted to more than a hundred pounds—a sum so extravagant that he felt obliged to hide it from Lily, telling her he had contributed only half that amount.

  Though he wore his generosity lightly, Morgan could not resist lecturing Harry on economies: “Those tickets cost 4/9 each I believe—well you mustn’t ever spend so much on me again. Make 2/6 the limit, either for theatre or a meal. Will you agree? Isn’t this common sense—given your present salary? And is anything in it contrary to friendship? I don’t think so.”

  For his part Harry was happy enough to take Morgan’s money, but resentful about being managed. After Morgan offered to foot the bill for his mother’s medical care, Harry wrote one letter to Morgan, thanking him effusively, and a second to his mother, reassuring her, “Don’t worry, old Morgan’s got plenty of money.” Then he inadvertently switched the envelopes and mailed the two letters in the same post. Morgan was terribly offended, but he stuck to his policy of preserving friendship—“Don’t rebuke, don’t arguefy, don’t apologise.”

  He examined his own motives rather carefully. He was acutely aware that he viewed life through a veil of middle-class assumptions, that the virtues of thrift, forbearance, and courtesy that were the bedrock of his way of living might be qualities his poorer friends could ill-afford. So Morgan pondered whether the disappointing behavior of Harry and Reg and Frank Vicary was singular or social—“decayed morale or the natural morality of the non-bourgeois?” In Frank’s case especially, he had reason to be appalled. In debt, perpetually out of work, increasingly feckless and prone to drink, Frank had mortgaged the little Gloucestershire farm and frittered the money away. Morgan’s disappointment permanently punctured his romantic view of Vicary and their putative shared future. He ruefully told Joe that he had imagined himself toddling about the little farm “in old age, looked after by the robust and grateful lower classes.”

  Indeed, Morgan’s ideal of intimacy consistently required a more delicate sensibility than his working-class friends could muster. His encounters with Reg were always physically satisfying, but asking for or expecting real conversation from him seemed hopelessly beside the point; after one session of lovemaking, Morgan wrote in his diary, “Coarseness and tenderness have kissed one another, but imaginative passion, love, doesn’t exist in the lower classes.” After another, he was more satisfied: “Lust + goodwill—is anything more wanted? . . . [I feel] not happiness, but proud to be alive.” For his own part, he chastened himself, worry
ing that his own attitude reflected a “superficial itch for intimacy that makes for popularity and is misleading.”

  Joe Ackerley and Sebastian Sprott provided tutoring in the new practicalities of the double life. It was inevitable that in Morgan’s hands subterfuge would sometimes descend into farce. In 1924 his Bunburying unraveled in spectacular style when he agreed to be part of a scheme to conceal Joe’s whereabouts from his parents while he visited a lover in Italy. Morgan’s first reaction was to ask rather reasonably, “Is a lie necessary?” But Joe insisted on an elaborate scheme. He told his parents he was at Harnham visiting Morgan, but his father had a sudden heart attack while Joe was en route to Italy. Because Morgan didn’t have a telephone in Weybridge, Mrs. Ackerley sent a domestic servant over in a rush to fetch her son, and Joe and Morgan’s conspiracy was exposed. Parents were constantly making uncomfortable discoveries. A compromising and ribald telegram from Sebastian had to be elaborately explained away when Lily inadvertently opened and read it. So parcels and letters sent to West Hackhurst must be elaborately disguised. Morgan requested that Joe post a tube of ointment to treat crab lice—which Morgan charitably labeled “signs of fertility”—in a package disguised as a book.

  By the mid-1920s, Morgan began to get the hang of the double life. In answer to a query from Joe, he totted up a full accounting of his sexual partners: eighteen to Joe’s two hundred or so. Morgan celebrated their variety, if not their numbers. The list included “1 Scotchman, 1 Colonial and 1 Quaker.” He managed to stay friendly with these men, in contrast to Joe, whose heart was broken several times a year, like clockwork. The secret, Morgan advised, was simple: “If you want a permanent relationship with . . . anyone, you must give up this idea of ownership, and even the idea of being owned.”

  Morgan became adept at using his network of friendly connections to discover or arrange sexy flings on trips abroad. Traveling to a conference in Copenhagen with George Barger, Morgan met up with a Danish boy named Aage, an acquaintance of Joe’s; he took him to bed and—rather poetically—to see Elsinore Castle. On a voyage to visit Charles and Marie Mauron in France, he picked up a ship’s stoker named Charlie Day, a big man with a sleepy flat face and a crooked smile. (Later, back in England, Charlie became a pest, making scenes and asking for money, and Morgan asked Joe to intervene and persuade him to desist.) If necessary, Morgan was perfectly happy to appear the stooge in these intrigues, so long as he was in on the joke. He began a casual and friendly love affair with a French sailor, an acquaintance of Joe’s, named Achille Morgenroth. With Achille, Morgan acquiesced in a little charade, willingly posing as a dowdy “uncle in the clothes trade, long domiciled in England.” Achille organized elaborate rules for these trysts, timing their exits from the hotel so as not to be seen together. These little bits of subterfuge to distract Achille’s relatives amused Morgan.

  Having adventures made him feel young. In the summer of 1929, coming back from a tour of South Africa with the Bargers, and starved for his secret life, Morgan wrote to Joe Ackerley, “I was 250 years old a fortnight back, and now you can knock off the nought.” It was a testament to the success of his carefully crafted public persona during these years that even so close a friend as Virginia Woolf could thoroughly misread his situation. Writing to her sister, Vanessa Bell, Woolf lamented that Lily, with her iron-willed love, “is slowly dispatching him . . . he is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.” This was not so true as Virginia believed. Morgan’s adventures would have shocked her.

  The kind of fiction writing he wished to pursue cut him off from his audience, and he rechanneled his pen, writing for his own ear, for his friends, and for the more charitable future he had imagined in his dedication to Maurice. In contrast to the Rabelaisian fantasies he had destroyed when completing A Passage to India, the new stories were serious, thoughtful examinations of the psychological strain of being a gay Englishman. These were the short stories that Christopher Isherwood and John Lehmann would marvel over—and publish—after his death. “Dr. Woolacott,” “Arthur Snatch-fold,” and “The Life to Come” were not strictly autobiographical—“The Life to Come” traced a fatal love affair between a missionary and a native chieftain, “Dr. Woolacott” the mental disintegration of a young veteran of the trenches—but the anxiety of their characters was informed by the tension of living in two worlds. There were very few people to whom he could trust the reading of this new fiction.

  As he had done two years earlier, Morgan turned to T. E. Lawrence for literary advice. Lawrence had been sickened by the machine of celebrity, which propelled him into the public eye after the war. He achieved his goal of near-invisibility by reenlisting in the RAF; from his far-off posting in Karachi he wrote abject letters of admiration to Morgan. After months of this, Morgan was beginning to be irritated by Lawrence’s alternating effusions and rebuffs. Lawrence had intellectual keenness, Morgan believed, but an evasive soul. “T. E. liked to meet people upon a platform of his own designing,” Morgan decided—and in his own case, Morgan came to realize “I had to figure as a great artist” while he affected the role of “bungling amateur.” Morgan renewed the offer to send T. E. the manuscript of Maurice, but his young friend cagily demurred:

  I wanted to read your long novel, & was afraid to. It was like your last keep, I felt: and if I read it I had you: and supposing I hadn’t liked it? I’m so funnily made up, sexually. At present you are in all respects right, in my eyes: that’s because you reserve so very much, as I do. If you knew all about me (perhaps you do: your subtlety is very great: shall I put it “if I knew that you knew . . .”?) you’d think very little of me.

  Morgan had correctly understood that being “an awful tease” was Lawrence’s calculated emotional defense. Literally and figuratively Lawrence “did not like being touched,” Morgan realized, and after this exchange he “touched him as seldom as possible.”

  That this bright young man, so attractive, so intelligent, was merely another iteration of the kind of charming, unknowable intellectual siren that Frank Vicary had become both vexed and saddened Morgan. He told Florence Barger that Lawrence was incapable of friendship—though he did not speculate on the psychological source of this handicap. Privately he believed that the effects of Lawrence’s sexual abuse had somehow unhinged his character.

  Despite his disappointment, Morgan decided to dedicate a “forthcoming volume of stories” to Lawrence. The stories in The Eternal Moment had all been published before. He took the occasion to tell a small sharp truth, writing Lawrence that he had settled on the epigraph “‘To T. E. in the absence of anything else’: The dedication can be given a wrong meaning, which you will enjoy doing, and I shall like to think of you doing it. The matter is decided therefore.” The collection “promises to be [my] last created word that will ever find public utterance”; he warned Lawrence, “If you ever inscribe anything to me, good bad or indifferent, I shall be a lot annoyed.”

  He mailed the letter to Karachi from West Hackhurst, “the frail house of old women,” admonishing that both he and Lawrence had been wrong to “hanker at all after a notion of escaping” such a world. It was far too resilient, Morgan understood: “a twig from the elm tree would shatter it, yet it preserves its relative strength internally. My mother still keeps the maids in order.”

  Silenced as a writer of publishable fiction, Morgan recast his public voice, banking on the eminence he had established with the publication of A Passage to India in 1924. In the spring of 1926 he was invited to deliver the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge—a distinguished series on any topic in English literature after Chaucer. Morgan chose to take in hand the poetics of the novel form itself, from the perspective of a creative practitioner rather than an academician. Not so much a history of the novel form than an early version of narratology—how the novel does what it does, from characterization to emplotment, to how realism is conveyed—the lectures received mixed reviews, along familiar lines. Those in the audience who identified themselves as
“common readers,” following Dr. Johnson’s dictum—taken up by Virginia Woolf in her essays of the same name—found them irreverent, refreshing, and commonsensical. The learned authorities on English literature who were beginning feel their oats as a profession at Cambridge found Morgan’s literary criticism less persuasive: F. R. Leavis pronounced the lectures “intellectually null.” The venerable A. E. Housman, whom Morgan had long admired and written to from the smoke-filled pub in Shropshire decades before, was a Fellow of Trinity. But the second encounter between the two authors went even worse than the first. Housman felt obscurely snubbed by Morgan’s failure to attend formal supper in the college’s Hall during the spring, and responded to a letter of praise from Morgan so vilely that Morgan burned the letter and never mentioned it again. The most significant response to the lectures came from the Fellows of King’s, who offered Morgan a three-year fellowship, with the expectation that he would be in residence six weeks a year.