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

by Wendy Moffat

  Getting off the subway at Sheridan Square, Morgan made his way south to Cadmus and French’s studio. Twenty years later the square would be the site of the Stonewall riots, where gay men would fight back against police harassment at the Stonewall Inn, but even when Forster walked these streets this part of Greenwich Village was well-marked “queer” territory. As part of a WPA project in 1934, Cadmus had sketched a scene at Stewart’s, a coffee shop on the square. In the picture a dozen men and women are crowded around a couple of small tables as the waiter squeezes by, his tray atilt. Sprawling, belching, stretching, leering couples of indeterminate sex talk and flirt. Are these “long haired men or short haired women” crammed around the small tables? It’s hard to tell. But there’s no mistaking the invitation from the beringed louche dandy at the mouth of the men’s lavatory, who looks back over his shoulder at the viewer. Follow me.

  Like Hogarth, Cadmus sketched the teeming city, but in his busy, ribald world gay life was part of the texture of everyday affairs. All his life Cadmus was open and unapologetic about his homosexuality. This idiosyncratic attitude had offended the authorities for some time. In 1934, an irate admiral had censored the exhibition of Cadmus’s painting The Fleet’s In on the grounds that it besmirched the reputation of the navy. The painting was a WPA project, and like Cadmus’s other subjects, Shore Leave and Y.M.C.A. Locker Room, it was drawn directly from his observation of life in Manhattan.

  Strongly horizontal, The Fleet’s In depicted fourteen people (and a reluctant dog) perched on or standing in front of a low wall in Riverside Park near the piers on the Hudson where the navy ships anchored. Six of them are sailors on leave, flirting, leering, posturing, and grabbing flesh in the short time they are ashore. The small dog belongs to a sour-faced middle-aged woman—modeled on Cadmus’s aunt—who disapproves of the spectacle. A sailor accepts a cigarette from an effeminate blond man who knowingly meets his gaze; three voluptuous young women cheerfully face down a pair of leering swabbies; a woman playfully pushes away a sailor who’s wrapped his legs around her as he sits on the wall.

  Sailors will be sailors, the painting told its audience cheerfully. But this depiction was too much for Admiral Henry Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the navy. He demanded that the painting be withdrawn from the Corcoran Gallery’s WPA show as “an unwarranted insult” to enlisted men. Roosevelt accused Cadmus of having a “sordid, depraved imagination” and “no conception of actual conditions in our service.” And so it was suppressed. But the admiral’s moral rectitude did not prohibit him from appropriating the painting for his private club, charmingly named the Alibi Club. (There it stayed over the mantel for many years until a determined scholar pointed out that it had been purchased with taxpayer money.)

  Six years later, when Cadmus appeared for his draft-board interview with work under his arm, one look at his subject matter made the military board summarily reject him as unfit for service. On the paperwork, he was classified as 4F because of a hernia.

  By the time Cadmus completed his satirical portrait of Stewart’s coffee shop, the greasy spoon was a destination not only for gay men and lesbians, but also for tourists who wanted to see “fairies,” with their trademark marcelled hair, tweezed eyebrows, and red neckties. A popular song included the line “Fairyland’s not far from Washington Square.” To Morgan, who confided in a letter to Paul, “You can’t imagine how stuffy we get here [in England],” both Cadmus’s unequivocal approach to his homosexuality and the public presence of gay men and lesbians on the streets of the Village were immensely refreshing.

  The glint of the Hudson was visible from Cadmus’s stoop, and in the right wind it was possible to detect the weedy smell of the river. Walking up the brownstone steps that sunny April morning, Morgan surprised his hosts at work in their studio before they could “make suitable arrangements for entertaining the Great Writer.” It was an auspicious blunder. The reverence of his American friends had begun to make him feel threadbare and inadequate. The faux pas of “busting in on them” humanized him. Paul and Jared (“Jerry”) ran around the corner to the local delicatessen for “delicious prosciutto smoked salmon, wine . . .” and then all three picked their way down the creaky fire escape to the small, shady garden at the back of the house for an al fresco lunch. They peeled the meats off waxed paper, and drank and talked all afternoon, Forster volubly, and uncharacteristically, chattering away. He was quite at home. That afternoon he became, and would always remain, just Morgan to them.

  Both his hosts and their environs were deeply “attractive” to Morgan. He noted with approval that “the flat is Bloomsbury and unsanitary . . .” The studio at number 5 was on the top floor of a shabby brownstone that had been divided into apartments by floor. The whole house retained battered but dignified remnants of Victorian elegance: a carved marble mantel on which Paul and Jerry photographed their friends nude, an oriel skylight in a lacy plaster frame, a dilapidated wrought-iron fence near the stoop. The walls were painted a greenish gray “that cleverly blends in with the dust.” The two rooms at the outer edges of the apartment were commandeered for studios—Jerry’s facing the sunny playground across the street, Paul’s looking north toward the tiny overgrown garden and the back of the tenements beyond. Whenever it was warm enough Jerry painted naked, surrounded by a jumbled disorder: “large anatomy books, an Houdon écorché with muscles painted on, bottles of powdered pigments, dirty work clothes, paint rags with a slightly rotten egg smell, all piled anywhere: in the way of furniture, a drawing table, easel, etc and two pianos—a grand and an upright out of tune individually and with each other.” In between was a pocket living room crammed with books and lit by a large skylight, with a daybed covered with a paisley shawl and assorted furniture so worm-eaten that it “might collapse with a bumptious guest.” Before the lunch was finished, they offered Morgan the use of the place for the rest of his visit, and exacted a promise from him to visit them and Jerry’s wife, Margaret, in their sprawling summer house in Provincetown.

  From his correspondence, Morgan had imagined Paul Cadmus to be plump and unprepossessing; instead, to his relief, he found a tall, slender man with an angular bony face and hair cut “en brosse” in the most modern style. With his deep-set burning blue eyes, an aquiline nose, and a slight overbite, he looked like an amiable “sun burnt rodent,” Morgan noted in his diary. Cadmus radiated benign sweetness. Jerry was shorter and a bit stocky, with a smoldering energy like a spring wound up. Paul captured Jerry’s seductiveness, his powerful intelligence and charisma, in the 1931 work that he considered his first finished painting. The portrait showed Jerry lying in the disheveled sheets of the bed they shared. Naked to the waist, muscular and brooding, he looked as if he had been interrupted while reading the banned novel Ulysses just a second before—his fingers are still caressing the page, holding his place—to look up at his lover with a frank and steadfast gaze. This intensity of looking made Jerry sexy to everybody he met. He was utterly confident, sometimes to the point of belligerence. He knew what he wanted. He wanted Paul. And he wanted more than Paul.

  Jerry was “the only true bisexual” man Paul had ever known. When the men returned from a two-year working idyll in the cheapest parts of Europe in 1933, Jerry fell in love and into bed with Margaret Hoening, a recent Smith graduate studying painting. They married in 1937. Margaret was enigmatic, brilliant, serene. Jerry painted a tiny tempera portrait of his wife, the size of a postcard, the expression in her huge, widely set blue eyes as flat as those of a kouros. Her eyes saw everything and seemed to judge nothing.

  Margaret loved Paul dearly—who didn’t? Both she and Cadmus had room for Jerry in their hearts and in their beds. They were both the sort of people, their friend Glenway Wescott noticed, who put others first: rising silently after a meal to wash the dishes together as Jerry held forth with the remnant of the guests. Margaret protected her husband fiercely and revered him—waiting patiently as he burned through love affairs. There was no mistaking Jerry’s reciprocal love for
her, or their physical passion after a decade of marriage: Margaret wrote letters to friends from their still-warm bed. And Jerry limned a life-size double portrait of them lazily lying in bed, half clothed and half asleep, knotted together in a loose embrace. Their friend George Platt Lynes embroidered the sketch into an enormous needlepoint cover for a daybed.

  Jerry was magnetic, self-confident, proud, and driven to do his own thing, almost contemptuous of the art world and of passing fads. He could be cruel, “surly and morose.” He had graduated from Amherst College and had worked at a white-glove financial firm, but he threw away the prospect of prosperity after taking classes at the Art Students League. Paul, Jerry, and Margaret blended their artistic lives together, in a melded partnership they called PAJAMA after the first syllables of their names. For years they took remarkable photographs of themselves and their friends on the beaches of Provincetown, Fire Island, and Nantucket, in the empty rooms of Margaret’s childhood home in Hoboken, in the apartment below the studio at St. Luke’s Place where Jerry and Margaret lived for a time. Sometimes the photos were studies for their paintings, archetypal arrangements of bodies in space that were either tranquil or stoical, modern or ancient, depending on the viewer’s mood. The Frenches had a studied emotional flatness to their work. Paul’s painting was much more animated—shot through with his irreverent sensibility, more corporeal and less cerebral.

  Into this odd, contented, inseparable world of work and friendship came a fourth person at just around the time Morgan made his visit. The young painter George Tooker, recently separated from the Marines, became Paul’s lover. Like Paul, he took up Jerry’s painstaking method of tempera painting, passing the pliant yolk back and forth between his palms, pricking the membrane, and blending pigments, layering the milky unforgiving mixture as the medieval painters had done, slowly and carefully until a detailed painting appeared. Tooker had a wide-eyed innocence that translated into a remarkable artistic view. Like some mystical Pre-Raphaelite painter transposed to the modern world, he painted figures in urban landscapes, watching birds in Central Park, frozen in a tiled subway corridor, standing still in a waiting room or a soulless government office, encountering the world. Lynes photographed the three artists in the studio above St. Luke’s Place in the summer of 1948 in receding perspective, each sitting at an easel, painting. The triple portrait was principally symbolic—Tooker never shared the studio with Paul and Jerry, though their methods and ideas influenced one another deeply. Gradually, for the most part amiably, the triangle of PAJAMA settled into two pairs.

  Though Bloomsbury was Morgan’s point of reference for understanding this domestic structure, it was actually an entirely new idiom of work and sexual expression to him. Cadmus had described it himself in a letter to Morgan: “I don’t look like your Bohemian with a louse in his beard—in fact I dress almost elegantly with a tendency towards chi-chi in neckties—but I live almost as he might.” Paul was a literal renaissance man: a draftsman as classical and beautifully precise as the Old Masters, a skilled self-taught pianist, a fine writer and cook, and a devoted friend. His figurative painting, like its ancient technique, was completely out of style in the art world of the day, but he remained steadily and serenely absorbed. His gentleness, his wicked grin, his love of life put him (usually happily) in the center of a swirling circle of young, free-spirited gay friends and ex-lovers. PAJAMA was like an idealized version of what Morgan had hoped his life with May and Bob could have been like, an indefinable kinship of blended platonic and sexual love. Though both Paul and Margaret were helpmeets to Jerry, Morgan identified with Cadmus. He worried about his endless accommodation of others’ desires. He wrote in his diary, “Paul Cadmus must protect himself by retreating. Or he would lead no life of his own, nor be able to practice his accomplished art.”

  Somewhat wistfully Morgan left New York, which had “more blood and more allurement,” for the isolation of Bill’s rustic cabin in Tyringham, Massachusetts, to revise his Harvard address. When they arrived in late April it was snowing heavily, and Bill’s tiny Colonial saltbox was snowbound and uninhabitable. Lost Farm—so named because it was deep in a thicket, down a disused dirt road—had no heat, electricity, toilets, or running water. For the first few days Morgan and Bill instead stayed nearby with the sympathetic family of Bill’s college friend Robert Barnes Rudd. The Rudds were erudite people who lived in an enclave of buildings built and abandoned by the Shakers early in the nineteenth century. Morgan cannily realized that this part of the Berkshires was “a charming place for rich Americans who do not want to seem so.” He was “ravished . . . by the absence of bad taste in the buildings, widely spaced on both sides of the road.” After a few days the weather tempered, and he and Bill set up together in the cozy house, lit by candles and heated by firelight. Morgan’s room looked out toward a distant shoulder of mountains. Lost Farm reminded Morgan of T. E. Lawrence’s Clouds Hill, a “sketchy, uncomfortable, but somehow comforting” male place. Like a platonic Alec and Maurice in a frozen greenwood, they worked together on the Harvard speech, which began as incomplete jottings. Morgan kneaded it into shape, but his imagination was not fired by the task. Instead, he focused on the view: “thousands and thousands of birch trees, their trunks whiter than the birch trees [in England], milk white, ghost white in the sharp sunshine . . .”

  At Eliot House he was the guest of the master, the young classics scholar John H. Finley. Harvard’s three-day music symposium was something of an extravaganza, with new pieces commissioned from Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, concerts every night and talks all day. The final night of the symposium unveiled a new Martha Graham ballet, which one reviewer described as “a highly refined stylized symbolized fertility rite, its sexuality as easily discernable as unobjectionable.” In his journal Forster tartly compared the dance to a catheter.

  Forster was the headline attraction, as a notable lover of music, but the atmosphere at Harvard was not encouraging. His speech, “The Raison d’Être of Criticism in the Arts,” described the critic’s mystic call to revere the place “where the artist worked.” He described criticism, the proper understanding of a work of art, as “an unusual state” that “we can only enter . . . through love.” His approach could hardly have been less congenial to the literary scholars in his audience. Academic critics after the war championed the humanities with scientific zeal, seeking to bring to the study of literature the same level of technical scrutiny, and the same esteem, as the sciences. T. S. Eliot, whose epic The Waste Land was accompanied by his copious footnotes, was their man and a Harvard alumnus to boot. The symposium was capped by a cocktail party with Forster and Eliot as the guests of honor. The two literary giants were parked on opposite sides of a massive ceremonial fireplace in the common room, and Morgan watched as acolytes circled around the poet like moths. The line to speak with Eliot grew longer and longer—students and faculty alike drawn into the fine points of the objective correlative, the meaning of Four Quartets, the best methods of properly dispassionate reading. Morgan was left in the good company of a single student with whom he chatted amiably about his plans to explore the western United States.

  From Boston he made his way west to El Tovar Hotel at the mouth of the Grand Canyon. Flying over the desert, he discerned vast airfields of obsolete surplus materiel, thousands of airplanes that he learned were about to be destroyed. He was disheartened by the American “Spirit of Waste,” the corollary to its vast abundance. Arriving at the Grand Canyon, he contemplated the descent to the canyon floor. It took several days to screw his courage to the sticking place, which turned out to be the back of a large slow mule named Monkey. From this vantage point he had a clear view of astonishing scenery: the “throbbing mad” Colorado river “between dark red precipices” and the back of a “lean cinematic cowboy” named James who zigzagged the pack down circuitous trails. At night by the campfire he heard music, “James or someone strumming a guitar and looking handsome no doubt.”

  Los Angeles and Berkeley fo
llowed Colorado. Ironically, having finally arrived in Southern California he missed Isherwood, who had traveled home to Cheshire to divest his ancestral properties to his younger brother. In Northern California he stayed for a week with Noel Voge, a young academic whom Bob had met on the banks of the Thames during the war, and Noel’s new wife, Marietta. Noel took him to Yosemite and to the vast orchards of Los Gatos. It was a visit full of admiration and veiled lust, like his sojourns with Frank Vicary and his family. From California he traveled to Chicago through the Rockies on a long, spectacular train trip. He encountered wondrous sights: a young Mormon woman “Saint” reeling drunk down the street, the “gasper” of the final descent down the eastern face of the Rockies, Boulder Dam with its “vision of a transformed world.” In Salt Lake City, Morgan was touched when a chambermaid rejected his tip, saying, “I don’t like to take your money, brother, you need it more than I do.”

  Morgan wrote Sprott—who had by now reverted to merely “Jack”—that since his visit began he had been plagued with nightmares about being displaced from West Hackhurst. After a stay with Tom Coley’s mother near Philadelphia, Morgan dreamed that Lily told him she was happy being dead. He recognized that he was “not correct psychically,” concluding that “probably a little—ahem would help.” In hopes of a brief sexual fling he wrote to Johnny Kennedy, a Canadian airman whom he had met in London, taking up his invitation to stay with him (and his wife and child) at his home near Niagara Falls. Telling Bob “I am just doing, in friendship’s name, a slightly risky thing,” Morgan braved immigration officials and possible humiliation to embark on a significant detour. But his hopes for sexual intimacy were not fulfilled, and he concluded—wrongly—that they would not be on this journey. He wrote in his notebook: “I have made an impression with my writing, music, genius, and modesty which saddens me not because it is undeserved but because no one impresses me comparably in return, and I shall leave the colonies insipidly without a heart-heat.”