by Wendy Moffat
Long, long ago, while Queen Victoria reigned, I attended two preparatory schools. At the first of these, it was held to be a disgrace to have a sister. Any little boy who possessed one was liable to get teased. The word would go round: “Oh, you men, have you seen the Picktoes’ sister?” The men would then reel about with sideways motions, uttering cries of “sucks” and pretending to faint with horror . . .
I got through all right myself, because my conscience was clear . . . It was a very different story at my second school. Here, sisters were negligible, but it was a disgrace to have a mother. Crabbe’s mother, Gob’s mother, eeugh! . . . Those preparatory schools prepared me for life better than I realised, for having passed through two imbecile societies, a sister-conscious and a mother-conscious . . . I am now asked to consider whether the people I meet and talk about are or are not Jews . . . Having been a Gentile at my first preparatory school and a Jew at my second, I know what I am talking about.
The talks he reshaped into essays; these he would publish under the title Two Cheers for Democracy (he could not quite muster three) after the war.
In 1938, Morgan told William Plomer he was “trying to construct a philosophy.” It was built out of the bricolage of the “liberalism crumbling beneath him.” Too secular to be a credo, the essay was titled “What I Believe.” It began startlingly.
I do not believe in Belief. But this is an age of faith, and there are so many militant creeds that, in self-defence, one has to formulate a creed of one’s own. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy are no longer enough in a world which is rent by religious and racial persecution, in a world where ignorance rules, and science, who ought to have ruled, plays the subservient pimp.
The essay was tough and clearheaded. It was a repudiation of machismo—and foreign policy as machismo—that utterly rejected public politics and national “causes.” One famous line had a special bite. Morgan wrote, “I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”
He refused to betray his friends Christopher and Wystan, though they stood accused of abandoning Britain in her time of greatest need. In January 1939, to loud opprobrium, the two young writers departed for the United States. But Morgan saw their situation differently. He alone saw them off at Waterloo Station. Their job, he told them, was “to keep away” and “see us sink from a distance.” His job was to bear a different kind of witness: “I have myself to face a world which is tragic without becoming tragic myself.”
When war was announced over the radio, he was in the parlor at West Hackhurst. He quietly wept alone for a few minutes, and then went to comfort Lily. Putting his emotional keel down, he determined to work his way sequentially through all the Beethoven piano sonatas. “Whatever one does is wrong,” he told Christopher on the day war was declared, “so do not come back here, that is the wrongest.” He sent off letters to his friend at implausible American addresses—the El Kanan Hotel in Santa Monica (nicknamed the “El K-Y”), the Vedanta Center in Hollywood where Christopher studied with the swami, and finally the eponymous Rustic Road. Morgan wrote his return address simply: “London, the Olde World.”
In the spirit of wartime privation, Morgan let go his flat at Brunswick Square, moving west to a tiny aerie in Chiswick overlooking Turnham Green. It was half the cost and closer to Bob. The flat perched atop a postwar mansion block—it could be reached only by taking a rickety lift to the top floor, and then picking one’s way across a sort of catwalk on the roof to the entrance. It was bone-cold in winter, and the pipes often froze, but it offered an unsurpassed view of the burning city. The pied-à-terre proved providential, for in May 1941 Joe Ackerley’s flat in Maida Vale was virtually demolished in the Blitz; he escaped death, having gone around the corner to see how William Plomer was faring at the instant the bomb hit. Throughout the bombing, both men kept their sangfroid. Plomer drily described near-misses as “demi-vierges.” Farther east, in Mecklenburg Square, just meters from Morgan’s old Bloomsbury flat, the Woolfs’ huge library was destroyed by fire. The couple retrenched to the Sussex countryside, Virginia desperately depressed.
Walking through the streets of London, Morgan observed how the scars of war opened unexpected vistas: “What a wildness south of St. Paul’s! I stood (Feb. ’43) by St. Augustine’s—a tiny Wren—and saw the tower of St. Nicholas Cole rising from the plain . . . The sun had set, coldish . . . Full of my own desolation, I thought ‘It will never get straightened out’, also ‘Here is beauty.’ Oh I long for public mourning in the sense of recognition of what has happened.” He promised Bob—whose job of patrolling the streets of London during the Blitz put him in mortal danger—that he would “look after Robin and May. Love does a good deal to cancel what seems unbearable.” “Truly we live in strange times,” Morgan told him, “and the only thing which is really real in them is love.”
London was chock-a-block with beautiful young men in uniform. But spies were everywhere, and Morgan’s natural reticence sharpened into anxiety as his friends fell into danger. Plomer left his job as a reader for Jonathan Cape to do some hush-hush intelligence work for the Admiralty, and just then published his autobiography Double Lives—a perhaps unconscious reference to his sharply compartmentalized public and private lives. He was hyperdiscreet about his naval work, but careless in his cruising. Early in 1943, Plomer was arrested for soliciting a soldier near Paddington Station; he would have lost his job and his liberty but for the intervention of a nimble young coworker named Ian Fleming. (After the war Plomer returned the favor by recommending that Cape publish Fleming’s novel about a dashing British agent named James Bond.) Terrified, Plomer burned his letters from Ackerley, Spender, Isherwood, and Lehmann. He carefully culled all of Morgan’s letters that might hint of homosexuality, and urged him to do the same. Thereafter his letters lost their humor and tang—even in private, he felt watched.
Joe Ackerley’s sexual escapades became increasingly reckless, and more and more often he called on Morgan to mop up the mess. Joe had taken a summer cottage in Dover just before the war; a stream of dashing young sailors and petty thieves eventually caught the attention even of his el derly landladies, and Morgan—who was their age and appeared respectable—was dispatched to make amends. He was willing to do so, but remonstrated: “What does concern me is that you won’t face up to the fact that, to the average person, this sort of thing is disgusting, especially when it obtrudes its creaks-and-sheets end first upon their notice. No doubt it oughtn’t to disgust. But it does.”
In vain Morgan had tried to counsel Joe against his attraction to venal guardsmen, thieves, and opportunists whom he routinely tried to “rescue”: “Joe—, you must give up looking for gold in coal-mines—it merely prevents you from getting amusement out of a nice piece of coal.” But in 1943 Joe got himself and his friends into real danger. Persuading himself he was in love, he criminally abetted the desertion of a feckless Guardsman, giving the young man money and sequestering him in a spare room. After the police became involved, Morgan became obsessed with the idea that his letters to Joe might be found, and that both he and Bob might be implicated in a serious crime.
Morgan enlisted John Morris, an ex-army man and head of the BBC Far Eastern Service, to try to talk some sense into Joe. Morris was a friend of Plomer, the kind of bluff, frank, but reliably discreet homosexual who could make clear what was at stake. But Joe had “altered”—Morgan read his maddening narcissism as “indifference” to the capacity for real friendship. “I love and have loved you,” Morgan wrote to Joe. “But none of that means anything to you, I’m afraid.” He asked that Joe return all his letters. “I must seem selfish and timorous over this, but it is the only corner of a very large affair which I feel competent to touch.” But the letters were precious to Joe; he moved them to his office at the BBC for safekeeping, ducking the request. The friendship—and the letters—survived the war, but for a time things did not go smoothly.
But Morgan, not so pure an artist by his own account, knew that he must stay. West Hackhurst, at the far western margin of the metropolis, escaped the worst of the bombings. To this country refuge came a stream of ancient family members and friends displaced by the war: his cousin Percy Whichelo—recently retired from the Ecclesiastical Commission—and his wife, Dutchie; his uncle Philip Whichelo (in his mid-seventies); Lily’s old friend Mrs. Mawe; and finally Florence Barger, who had been suddenly widowed just before the war, and whose house in Hampstead had been destroyed. Without much regret on either side, Morgan and Florence had outgrown the intimacy forged three decades before during his affair with Mohammed. In Abinger she proved to be of practical help and a good friend to Lily, and stayed on serenely for almost two years. The other visitors left after a few months, tempers frayed all around.
Morgan tried to see the humor in his new ménage. “It is part of the psychology of this war that everyone, sooner or later, will come to feel provincial,” he wrote Christopher; he counseled himself to “be wary of melancholy as a sort of rage.” In part to amuse himself, in part to add to the recorded history of his “race,” he began to compose a canon of homosexual literature on a commercial tablet of lined paper. There was a certain reverence in setting aside a notebook for this purpose; paper was so scarce that Morgan had begun to cannibalize books from his library for letter paper. But there was irreverence, too. The notebook’s cover was a World War I propaganda poster depicting four naval gunners on the deck of a warship, loading a huge phallic artillery shell into the mouth of a cannon. Across the top, Morgan wrote “Lest We Forget Him!” in a spidery hand, deftly appropriating Kipling’s patriotic piety (from his 1897 poem “Recessional”) into a different key. In it he carefully transcribed passages by Donne and Whitman and Symonds, a selection from an ancient Chinese pillow book translated by his friend Arthur Waley, and snippets of writing by young homosexual writers—Denton Welch, Desmond Stewart, and Roger Gellert. He would not forget them.
He titled the notebook with tongue in cheek, but it was designed with an eye to extinction. Cut off from the people whom he most loved, Morgan felt like “the last of my race.” In case he should be killed, Morgan recorded a valedictory list of pals and lovers: “Johnny, Reg, Charles Lovett, Charlie Day, Harry Digby, George Dowsing, Achille, Mohammed and Bob himself . . .” The war put him in a contemplative, melancholy state of mind: “I have violent longings for fragments of my past . . . and I reconstruct partings which I hadn’t at the time known would be for so long.” The worst was the feeling that he had abandoned his old friend Charles Mauron in occupied France. Morgan could not shake the memory of himself—heedless—scrambling onto a little mountain train the summer before the war, leaving Charles, “already almost blind,” his eyes tearing up behind the dark spectacles he wore to shield them, forlornly waving from the station platform.
In Greenwich Village the young painter Paul Cadmus read “What I Believe” in The Nation and was buoyed by Forster’s singular vision. He sent Morgan a fan letter, enclosing photographs of two paintings inspired by his writing. In the essay Forster had argued for “not an aristocracy of power, based on rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos.” It was clear from Cadmus’s response that he took the phrase “queer race” to speak directly to him. Cadmus had always proudly called himself “queer.”
The “secret understanding” that Forster, too, was homosexual was known to Cadmus through talk amounting to gossip that originated with Isherwood. But the passion with which Cadmus and his young friends responded to Forster’s beliefs was serious and heartfelt. Without ever having met him, Cadmus wrote Morgan of
the admiration and devotion I feel towards your works—and through, them, towards you. “What I Believe” is so much what I believe too that I always read it to potential friends. I do it with so much conviction and emotion that I and they forget that it is not I speaking. They almost give me the credit. Once, it even caused me to be loved, I think: at least it was a strong, contributing factor. It was really You, not I who won the love and deserved it; and I am afraid I was not able to live up to it, nor to you.
The writer’s warmth and intelligence struck a chord, and the old man and the painter thirty years his junior became epistolary friends. In turn, Cadmus widened the circle of friendship. Soon the painter Jared French, who shared Cadmus’s studio on St. Luke’s Place—and his bed—and French’s wife, Margaret (also an artist), were sending letters to Morgan. Along with the letters came much-welcomed packages of food. All manner of unavailable luxuries found their way across the Atlantic in a swell of generosity.
The countertide of good cheer from sympathetic Americans came at an opportune time for Morgan. These foreigners awoke in him a sense of relevance, and—unknown to him at the time—a connection to the next generation of homosexual men. From the West Coast, Christopher orchestrated pilgrimages of friends and acquaintances traveling to England. One “present” came in the form of an exceptionally handsome young actor who was touring with Irving Berlin’s patriotic revue This Is the Army. Before he was drafted, Bill Roerick had known Christopher in Hollywood. Tall, handsome, well-read, and a perfect disciple, he arrived on Morgan’s doorstep with a charming entrée, a letter from Christopher that read in its entirety:
Dearest Morgan,
If this ever reaches you, it will be by the hand of Bill [Roerick], who needs no other introduction because you will like him, too.
As always,
your loving C.
Bill was bright, talkative, fun to be around. They “quickly became attached” in a platonic adulatory friendship. Though Bill was extravagantly generous, Morgan sensed that “something solid” lay beneath his considerable charm. Morgan detailed a list of his gifts for Plomer to savor: “200 cigarettes, 2 pks chocolate, 1 bottle lemon-essence, 1 guinea ticket for [the show], 2 modern American books, 2 acorns brought from the New World for plantation here.” Morgan wryly admitted, “I quite like being pelted by such a storm.” Reciprocating, Morgan concocted an odyssey to see Forrest Reid in Belfast and John Simpson in Birmingham. Bill became a young emissary of Morgan’s goodwill, a kind of proxy younger self, much as Ackerley had been in India.
The new friendships were partial ballast against circumstances at home. A lot of his energy went to saying goodbyes. Morgan recorded in his diary each separation from Bob as if it might be the last: “Bob twice k’d me on Waterloo entrance No. 3 platform, 8 p.m., then walked away firmly, his broad shoulders in bluish sports coat last seen.” In 1943, Bob set aside his pacifism to volunteer for a nearly suicidal bomber detail. Morgan and Ma
y were both in agonies of fear, but to their great relief Bob was rejected on account of poor eyesight. He worked night and day for the police force; they saw very little of one another.
By the spring of 1945, age and war exhaustion had thoroughly depleted Lily. A series of falls transformed her to a shade of herself. Though he had often blamed her for stunting his life, Morgan’s compassion bloomed for her as his mother weakened. He found her “beautiful” in extreme old age. He began to rethink his resentments, and to take more responsibility for their sometimes stifling interdependence. A decade before, he had tempered Joe’s accusation that Lily had ruined his life: “Although my mother has been intermittently tiresome for the last thirty years, cramped and warped my genius, hindered my career, blocked and buggered up my house, and boycotted my beloved, I have to admit that she has provided a sort of rich subsoil where I have been able to rest and grow.” After her death, Morgan was more empathetic:
Now I am older I understand her depression better . . . I often think of my mistakes with mother, or rather the wrongness of an attitude that may have been inevitable. I considered her much too much in a niggling way, and did not become the authoritative male who might have quietened her and cheered her up. When I look at the beauty of her face, even when old, I see that something different should have been done. We were a classic case.
Lily died on March 11, 1945, at the age of ninety. The last night she lived, Morgan lay curled up on a blanket in the passageway outside her bedroom, listening for her breathing. In her intelligent, plainspoken way she accepted death, telling her only child that she could not last long. “No,” he replied tenderly, “but your love will.” In the early afternoon of a cool spring Sunday, as Morgan was feeding her some broth like a baby, Lily looked at him and died.
