by Wendy Moffat
On the very day that Morgan was to arrive, he learned that Lawrence had been hideously injured in a motorcycle accident just down the road from the white stone in the wall. Restless and despondent, Lawrence had become careless—overtaking two boys on bicycles, he lost control and crashed. Instead of the company of Lawrence, the sleeping bag, and the Victrola, Morgan found himself attending Lawrence’s funeral in the little village. He stood beside a sobbing Winston Churchill as they laid Lawrence in the ground. Lawrence’s brother approached Morgan to compile a memorial edition of Lawrence’s letters. Despite his ambivalence about stoking the Lawrence myth, Morgan took on the task. Encouraged by William Plomer, he had begun assembling a collection of his own occasional essays, dating all the way back to the Alexandrian pieces. These meditations on the English character he would call Abinger Harvest; during the year after Lawrence’s death, he toiled on both projects simultaneously.
Late on a Friday evening in June 1935, in a blistering heatwave, almost three thousand people packed into the salle of the Art Deco Palais de la Mutualité in the Latin Quarter of Paris to hear Morgan deliver the first speech at the International Congress of Writers. He had come to this unlikely moment, and into the public eye, urged on by desperation. The whole world seemed to have become a world of “telegrams and anger.” For six years economic depression had staggered Britain, Germany, and the United States; the summer before, Hitler—now führer—began to rearm Germany in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles; Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia was imminent; and six months before, General Franco had killed striking miners by the thousands. Morgan wrestled with a terrible sense of déjà vu as he watched the long, slow “dégringolade” of European civilization for the second time in a generation.
When André Malraux invited him to come to Paris to speak in “defense of culture,” Morgan had few illusions about the power of writers to shape political events. But he felt he must stand up. He urged Virginia Woolf to join him—“I don’t suppose the conference is of any use—things have gone too far. But I have no doubt as to the importance of people like ourselves inside the conference. We represent the last utterances of the civilised.” Woolf demurred; so Morgan led the British delegation, alongside Aldous Huxley.
The congress’s brief was deliberately amorphous so as to attract all stripes of left-leaning and antifascist thinkers. The roster included some of Europe’s greatest writers—Bertolt Brecht, Gustav Regler, and Heinrich Mann in exile from Hitler’s Germany, Boris Pasternak and Isaak Babel from the Soviet Union, René Crevel and André Breton from France. But its organizers—Henri Barbusse and Malraux—were entranced by communism. Together they embraced the peculiarly French belief that only public intellectuals could rescue the world from political disaster. At the epicenter stood Malraux’s old friend André Gide, a recent convert, who traced the enlightenment from Diderot and Rousseau to Soviet communism, the “condition of society which would permit the fullest development of each man, the bringing forth and application of all his potentialities.”
As always, Morgan stood in the uncomfortable position of seeing things a bit too clearly to be categorical. Fascism horrified him—it was an ideology that “does evil that evil may come.” To communism he was willing to grant good intentions, though it “does many things which I think evil.” Though pacifism was a ubiquitous position of the left—the Oxford Union having voted, 275 to 153, that it would “not take up arms for king or country under any circumstances”—Morgan found refusal to join a war rather beside the point. The prospect of another war seemed simultaneously inevitable and unthinkable. Preparing for the conference, he confessed to Christopher Isherwood,
I don’t think anyone could possess social nerves today, unless he was a fool or a communist, and I am too intelligent to be the first, and too old to be the second. All that I can do is to work out a private ethic which, in the outbreak of a war, might be helpful to me. The individual is more than ever the goods . . . I am O. K. personally, as we call it.
Personally was the watchword. Morgan attended the congress because it seemed like the last moment when it might be possible to speak as an individual to individuals whom he admired. By “next year,” he wrote John Leh-mann, “every one may know their own minds.”
Standing behind the lectern in the immense hall, wearing a rumpled tweed suit, Morgan was almost obscured by a microphone as big as a plate. He looked out on row upon row of men in shirtsleeves, collars pulled off and cuffs popped open—intellectuals indistinguishable from their proletarian brothers in a democracy of sweltering. He spoke to them about the British tradition of free speech.
Morgan’s address was a triumph of nuance and utterly ill-suited to its audience. To the young people drunk on ideology it was a tepid, bourgeois, provincial affair. Morgan began by parsing the limits of English liberty: “It means freedom for the Englishman, but not for the subject-races of his Empire.” But in describing freedom, Morgan acknowledged, he was less concerned with politics than with insidious self-censorship. He told the intellectuals who sat before him, who for four days extolled their solidarity with the workingman, that the whole thrust of their congress was irrelevant: “The hungry and the homeless don’t care about liberty any more than they care about cultural heritage.” In his very English way, he focused on the spread of the dictatorial spirit within a culture, the creeping “national need for secrecy.” His prime text was the Sedition Act, a recent law passed in the defense of national security, which criminalized the dissemination of Communist or pacifist writing to British soldiers. Not only did the law restrict liberties by impeding the moral education of soldiers; it also subjected citizens to general warrants (on a person rather than for a specific crime) for the first time in almost two hundred years. The law, he warned, “encourages the informer.”
Too polite or too circumspect to draw attention to these same tactics as they reinforced Communist orthodoxy at the congress itself, Morgan ended with an example from his own heart—the suppression of a writer’s work because of its content. James Hanley’s homosexual novel Boy had been published in 1931 to good reviews—but just three months before the congress and four years after its initial publication, it was retroactively condemned as obscene and its publisher fined. As president of the newly formed National Council for Civil Liberties, Morgan had campaigned publicly against the Sedition Bill, and protested Hanley’s prosecution; he viewed the congress as a vehicle for publicizing the backlash on civil rights in his own country. But he concluded by acknowledging that to his present audience this sort of issue might be very small beer.
My colleagues . . . may feel it is a waste of time to talk about freedom and tradition when the economic structure of society is unsatisfactory. They may say that if there is another war writers of the individualistic and liberalising type, like myself . . . will be swept away. I am sure that we shall be swept away, and I think . . . that there may be another war. [I]f nations keep on amassing armaments, they can no more help discharging their filth than an animal which keeps on eating can stop itself from excreting. This being so, my job . . . is an interim job. We have just to go on tinkering with our old tools until the crash comes . . . After it—if there is an after—the task of civilisation will be carried on by people whose training has been different from my own.
Watching from the center of the hall, Katherine Anne Porter found the “slender little man with a large forehead and a small chin” speaking to be a pathetic sight. It was not only his tone; his delivery was hopelessly out of touch.
[Forster] paid no attention to the microphone, but wove back and forth, and from side to side, gently, and every time his face passed the mouthpiece I caught a high-voiced syllable or two, never a whole word, only a thin recurring sound like the wind down a chimney . . . Then, surprisingly, once he came to a moment’s pause before the instrument and there sounded into the hall clearly but wistfully a complete sentence: “I DO believe in liberty!”
After this curious display, Morgan’s friend Charle
s Mauron firmly read his French translation. As the audience gathered the meaning of his words—so antique, so bourgeois, so English—they broke out in a “pantomime of malignant ridicule. Mr. Forster and all his kind were already as extinct as a dodo.”
But they did not fully know who “his kind” were. For Morgan had also come to the congress to meet André Gide: Gide the sexual hero; Gide the implacable voice who had published Corydon, a defense of homosexuality cast in the form of a Socratic dialogue; Gide whose frank memoir Si le grain ne meurt chronicled his cruising for boys with Oscar Wilde in Morocco. (This was the Gide whom Joe Ackerley had held up as an example when Morgan resisted Joe’s request that he should publish Maurice. Morgan had replied tartly, “But Gide hasn’t got a mother!”) It was in part to this Gide, who introduced him at the congress’s opening, that Morgan was speaking when he lamented, “In England, more than anywhere else, [writers’] creative work is hampered because they can’t write freely about sex, and I want it recognized that sex is a subject for serious treatment . . .”
It was this Gide in whom Morgan hoped to confide. He was thrilled to be invited to luncheon with Gide and Malraux, and brought along Bob Bucking-ham as his guest—a genuine solidarity of intellectuals and the working class. But Bob, stolid and handsome, spoke not a word of French, and the two great Frenchmen were absorbed in congress politics throughout the meal. Instead of his idealized Gide, Morgan was faced with a more self-satisfied figure, of reptilian face and arch demeanor. This Gide was “slippery as a trout.” He spoke barely a word to Morgan and did not acknowledge Bob at all. At the conclusion of the meal, immediately upon putting down their demitasses and before Morgan even had a chance to clear his throat, the two Andrés disappeared, presenting him only with the spectacle of their “distinguished backs.” The rest of the congress devolved into political theater: “many eulogies of Soviet culture . . . [where] the name of Karl Marx detonate[d] again and again like a well-placed charge . . . draw[ing] after it the falling masonry of applause.” (Gide was to repudiate communism—well before some of his peers—after a visit to Stalin’s Soviet Union the following year.)
Morgan returned to England, convinced both of the emptiness of the exercise and the necessity of performing it. A decade before, his old friend and adversary D. H. Lawrence (who had left England in a long, restless pursuit of freedom) diagnosed Morgan’s admixture of insight and impotence perfectly. He was “[s]ad as ever,” Lawrence told him, “like a lost soul calling Ichabod. But I prefer the sadness to [ironic] Stracheyism. To me you are the last Englishman. And I am the one after that.”
In London, too, there were Philistines aplenty. The 1936 edition of Abinger Harvest had to be recalled and pulped because of a libel action. Morgan had unwittingly blundered into a dispute between two British civil servants who disagreed profoundly on the source of the Nile. The dispute had been played for comedy in Morgan’s essay “A Flood in the Office,” when he originally published it in 1919; but in the interim one party described had sued and won for libel; the reprinting repeated the libel, and the injured party sought to exact a heavy penalty on Morgan and Edward Arnold, his publishers. Five hundred pounds and a reprinting later, Morgan was justifiably jumpy. Looking over the T. E. Lawrence letters, Morgan decided that their frankness, Lawrence’s ambiguous sexuality, and his politics all spelled trouble. More in sorrow than in anger he resigned as editor of the project, feeling wounded and cowardly.
He was disgusted by British exceptionalism, by the celebration of Mrs. Miniver, whose middle-class smugness and stoicism could be “exploited for their . . . factitious value . . . by rival government gangs.” Just as twenty years earlier, self-styled decadence brigades patrolled the streets looking for nancy boys, in this moment Morgan recognized the “old herd instinct,” the familiar specious tug of war between “the decadent” and “the civilised.” But he had come a long way from the timid young man who condemned “the brassy rattle of civilisation” quietly. Now, in public, he sought to redefine the term—to claim the mantle of civilization for his own outlook. “The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power,” he wrote. He refused to consider human history to be synonymous with brute force: “Some people call its absences ‘decadence’; I call them ‘civilisation’ and find in such interludes the chief justification for the human experiment. Whether this is due to courage or to cowardice in my own case I cannot be sure.”
On the eve of the Munich Crisis, Morgan met up with Isherwood, just back from his “journey to a war” in China and about to emigrate to the New World. The prospect of war was horrifying: Morgan confessed that he was haunted by a vision of himself as if seen from above, “going mad—of suddenly turning and running away from people in the street.” But Christopher discerned strength in Morgan’s emotional clarity. In his diary, he wrote,
[Morgan] is as anxious and afraid as any of us, and never for an instant pretends not to be . . . But, actually, he’s the last person who would ever go mad; he’s far saner than anyone else I know. And immensely, superhumanly strong. He’s strong because he doesn’t try to be a stiff-lipped stoic, so he’ll never crack. He’s absolutely flexible. He lives by love, not by will . . . my “England” is E. M.; the anti-heroic hero, with his straggly straw mustache, his light, gay, baby blue eyes and his elderly stoop.
Christopher’s friend Wystan Auden praised Forster’s lonely voice in a sonnet he dedicated to him.
Though Italy and King’s are far away
And Truth a subject only bombs discuss,
Our ears unfriendly, still you speak to us,
Insisting that the inner life can pay.
In the years between the writers’ congress and the onset of war, Morgan learned how best to use a microphone. Hilda Matheson, the head of the Talks Department at the nascent BBC, invited Morgan (along with many famous writers of the day) to write and deliver occasional broadcasts. Sequestered in a booth soundproofed by quilted blankets, the microphone before him perched atop a tiny table covered in baize, Morgan felt much more at home than he had been at the Palais. He spoke deliberately, softly but clearly, into the instrument as if he were speaking into a single listener’s ear. His voice was a measured, slightly wiry tenor; his accent suburban, much less plummy than the Received Pronunciation that the BBC director, Sir John Reith, dictated. (Reith’s subordinates called him “Mussolini” behind his back.)
There was no getting around the intimacy of Morgan’s distinctive voice. It was of a piece with his argument. In choosing to broadcast one man’s views, to be an individual and to invite dissent, Morgan’s approach was a deliberate rebuttal to Goebbels’s plan for broadcasting. In Germany it was illegal to listen to the wireless with the windows closed; the radio became the perfect instrument to foster national conformity—one people, one Reich, one Führer. For Morgan, the microphone was not a megaphone but a humbler device. He had long been a student of the English national temperament, and now he brought to bear all that he had learned as a connoisseur of caution, speaking with utter honesty about the limits of what one man could do. It was the only kind of authority he could wield in good conscience—a still, small voice speaking his truth in public. Quoting Shakespeare’s Richard II, he told his audience “I’ve been studying how I may compare ‘This prison where I live unto the world.’ I’ve been wondering where liberty ends and restraint begins in contemporary society. I suppose we’re free.”
In his BBC talks he returned, in a different register, to the old questions that Goldie and G. E. Moore had first posed to him by the coal grate in his rooms at King’s—how to be oneself and how to be good. Without explicitly stating so, he made the ethics of his conflicted identity the subject itself. Though he thought himself a coward, in their unstinting observation of power and powerlessness the talks displayed their own sinewy courage. Powerlessness became the point. He told a friend, “All I can do is to ‘behave well’. . . with the full knowledge that
my behaviour cannot alter the course of events.”
But he could change people’s minds. Morgan’s great gift was the ability to see life at a slant; in his radio addresses, he slyly invited his audience to consider unsettling comparisons. He warned against the willing sacrifice of domestic civil liberties in the name of national security. On the tercentenary of the Areopagitica, Milton’s classic call for political freedom, Morgan remarked, “We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked in the past and cannot be a nuisance,” he wrote. “In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.”
And he discerned in the celebration of British national identity a “racial exercise” in its own right, disconcertingly similar to the Nazis’ agenda. Homebred anti-Semitism was particularly familiar and frightening to him. In an essay on “Jew-Consciousness,” he brilliantly and disarmingly argued that anyone could be subject to capricious cruelty.
