by Wendy Moffat
The long train ride gave him time to reflect on what he had learned of America over the weeks of his travels. The experience had given him much to think about. He was struck by the easy approachability of ordinary people. He told Joe Ackerley, “What a contrast to malnourished disgruntled England! One is never snubbed, and sometimes the contrary. I sat for half-an-hour in Arizona on a wall which a Mexican was cementing for his mother, and a correspondence has ensued.”
Especially interesting to him were the glimpses of the way race relations were changing rapidly after the war. Though he had been in India and Egypt, Morgan had had only fleeting encounters with black people besides Reg Palmer. In Britain, the most pervasive image of people Morgan called “negroes” was a remnant of minstrelsy, the cartoonish figure of the golliwog on the Robinson’s marmalade jar. The black street kids who played baseball on the asphalt across from Paul’s studio held an exotic and erotic fascination for him, but he was intimidated by them, concluding defensively that “the negroes don’t on the whole make a good impression—aggressive and rude.” In the middle-class atmosphere of a long train journey, Morgan was more at ease to observe the worldliness and authority of black American GIs returned from service abroad. “I have had breakfast with a negro sergeant major from Japan, and have listened to the negro Pullman attendant ticking off a white G. I. for washing in too smart a lavatory. ‘Gee, I’m surprised at you fellows.’ The G.I. hung his spotty head.” What a contrast to the stultifying, immutable British sense of social order. The second verse of “All Things Bright and Beautiful” was still warbled dutifully in England, though it has since been omitted from the hymnals:
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
He made them high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.
And Americans’ easy, ribald sense of humor brought talk of sex out into the open. In 1935 Morgan had observed a flap at the BBC with distaste and incredulity: “All England convulsed since Saturday night because an improper joke was made on the wireless. Clapham and Dwyer the entertainers, who have delighted listeners for over nine years, came to grief. D said have you ever thought what comes out of the desert waste? C replied or out of a pretty girl’s waist? D aghast, could not reply.” American attitudes toward sex seemed so much more tolerant and good-humored. He jotted down a series of Burma Shave billboards “wittily spaced along the New York Philadelphia rd.” as Isherwood and his lover Bill Caskey drove him from New York to a reading at Bryn Mawr College:
We know how much
You love that gal
But use both hands
For driving, pal.
The corollary to this friendliness was an undercurrent of menace that fascinated him and that he could not quite comprehend. He was appalled by the casual way his hosts and friends described the prevalence of crime in their lives. He took the temperature of each locale he visited, cautiously assessing the danger, contrasting Chicago, where his host had five locks on his door and “where clothes are stolen from bathers, keys extracted and flats gutted before the bathers can dress and return . . . ,” with “Berkeley where the Voge house was left unlocked night and day.”
The occasions that lingered most deeply in Morgan’s imagination were attacks against men like himself, single writers and intellectuals, living alone. It is impossible to discern from the sketchy accounts in his diary whether the motives for the violence he recorded might have been homophobic, or whether all the victims he described were gay. But some of them were. In the winter of 1947 Monroe Wheeler and his partner, Glenway Wescott, had been pulled out of bed, beaten and robbed at gunpoint, then locked in a closet by a “trigger-happy bruiser” they knew slightly. They reported the robbery, but lived to regret doing so: the elevator man at Monroe’s Park Avenue apartment told the police they sometimes lent the key to friends. Soon the robbery investigation became coercive. A detective came to Monroe’s office at the Museum of Modern Art, trying to get the names and addresses of all his homosexual friends. Clearly Morgan’s anxiety about crime in America was magnified by his sense of vulnerability as a gay man.
His return to the East Coast in mid-June 1947 turned out to be “very sympathetic.” He took root in “deepest Greenwich Village” in Jerry and Paul’s empty studio, which they had generously “cleaned . . . from side to side, filled the fridge with food and given me 8 bottles of booze.” He urged Sprott to come over to New York the following year: “It is a charming place, and I am very high handed towards it with the whole of the West behind me, and do not allow myself to be overawed.” But “the spectacle from the Staten Island Ferry” staggered him. A different spectacle was more disconcerting. Alone in the studio at night, Forster was unnerved by one of Jerry’s paintings, The Sea. French had been reading Carl Jung, and the painting was an allegory of the mythic struggle of the anima. In it two stylized naked figures lay horizontally on a bright blue field of sea and sky, a light-skinned man swimming in an angular rictus, his head turned with wide eyes toward the viewer, and below him, also wide-eyed and with a hideous grin, a submerged dark gray figure floating, perhaps drowned. Morgan unfolded his cloth coat and hung it over the painting, unable to look at it. Word got out when a friend entered the studio and saw this comical tableau, and soon Jerry and Paul, and eventually Paul’s sister Fidelma and her husband, Lincoln Kirstein, and the whole Provincetown crowd were quietly cackling at the power of Morgan’s imagination. (They never told him.)
Also in the studio were some manuscripts by a young writer in Cadmus’s circle, Donald Windham. His erotic short story “The Hitchhiker” and several others on homosexual themes warmed Forster. He thought Windham had real talent, and told him so when they met later in June, beginning a pattern of mixed friendship and literary promotion for the rest of his life. And back in New York he finally met the incomparable José Martinez. Known as Pete, Martinez was a Mexican dancer who after ten years as Lincoln Kirstein’s lover had become “one of the great loves of his life.” Pete lived on and off with Lincoln and was tolerated by Fidelma Kirstein. He was also a former lover and great confidant of Isherwood, who had worked with Pete at a pacifist hostel in Philadelphia before Martinez was drafted in 1942. Pete was gay in the oldest sense of the word, great fun to be around, camp and wickedly funny. In a somber Quaker meetinghouse, he had turned to Christopher and exclaimed “Darling . . . if you don’t kiss me I shall scream!” With his “fluttering black eyelashes, flashing white teeth, ballet gestures and the scarf which he winds round his neck like a yashmak,” Isherwood wrote with measured understatement, Pete was “an unusual figure for Haverford.” He was considerably more at home in the Ramble of Central Park, a cruising spot so well established that by the twenties it was already called “the fruited plain.” Late in June on the night before Morgan traveled to Provincetown, Martinez took Forster to the park for a glorious night of casual sex; whether with Pete or others, Morgan did not record. At the end of his journey, he reflected on “the kindness I receive from Bill, Paul Cadmus, etc.” and “the graciousness of Pete.”
The Frenches’ rented house on Miller Hill Road kissed the beach. Morgan spent three nights there in the most congenial company of Tooker and Cadmus, and Jerry and Margaret French. They interrupted their usual habit of serious working holidays to make him the center of attention. He “felt to belong at Provincetown.” He fumbled his way through piano duets with Paul, sat for a portrait by Jerry, was photographed laughing un-self-consciously in the dappled shade of the arbor covered with sea grapes that adjoined the rambling house. Jerry regaled him with stories of homoerotic fraternity rituals at Amherst. The PAJAMA trio gave him photographs of themselves and their friends, naked on the dunes, naked on a sunny bed, comically frolicking in a send-up of bodybuilders, arranged like Easter Island statues in the sand. One afternoon’s walk became an allegory of bohemian utopia conquering the forces of convention.
My diamond [insight] at Provincetown: walking out on the dunes with clear blue sky above, I look
ed into it, and it was radiant blue, coming back from the walk, we unwillingly scared the town crier, an elderly man with a nutcracker face who was foolishly decked out as a 17c puritan, and thought we were going to haze him. He scuttled off the path.
In Boston he missed an opportunity, falling “into the fat hands of a neurologist, Matthews, who commanded a destroyer during the war, and wanted to be hospitable. Spoke in disapproval of the sailorfied street through which we waddled and which I should like to have explored.” He returned to New York after another short stay at Lost Farm to spend his last days “in this kindest of lands” in the happy company of Paul Cadmus and George Tooker.
Forster’s presence was like rolling thunder: reports of his sympathetic visit to Provincetown brought invitations from an ever-widening circle of gay friends on the East Coast. Though he was delighted to have made a success of the trip, Morgan’s time was running out. He declined an invitation from Glenway Wescott. As a sort of proxy, Wescott sent a mutual friend, the young artist Bernard Perlin, whom Morgan had met once before, in London during the war. At that first meeting Perlin was returning from service as an artist attached to the army, having documented the firebombing of Tokyo and the Germans’ retreat from Syria. That day, to cleanse his visual palate, Morgan and Bernard toured the National Gallery, discussing “the pinchability of Rubens.”
Now, in Cadmus’s studio, Perlin sketched a quick silverpoint portrait while Cadmus and Tooker packed Morgan’s bags as carefully as completing a jigsaw puzzle. Wescott claimed Perlin’s portrait as a prize, since he had not yet met Morgan. For the time being, this memento would have to suffice.
13
“I Favor Reciprocal Dishonesty”
After all the excitement and adulation, Morgan returned to England’s hum-drum rhythms—each week, back and forth from Chiswick to Cambridge, dinner with Bob, perhaps a play, an occasional visit with Reg Palmer, whose “present goodness warmth raffishness and affection” were still welcome. Christopher Isherwood tried to rev things up as he had by sending Bill Roerick, but his envoys disappointed: Tennessee Williams cocked up and missed the meeting, and Morgan “disliked” Gore Vidal “a lot.”
By the autumn of 1948, the difference in age between Morgan and Bob began to signify. Morgan was weeks away from turning seventy, and Bob was only forty-five. Morgan worried about getting old, and being old, being boring, and being taken for granted. He began to nurse wounded feelings and suspicions. Having spent a good deal of money to buy Bob and May a terraced row house in Shepherd’s Bush a little more than a mile from his Chiswick flat, he bristled that his generosity had only made Bob “boorish,” entitled, and neglectful. “Bob’s indifference to me and preoccupation with May fall unluckily in a year when I have bought them the house. He has seldom been gracious when I am there.”
The dark, cold autumn amplified his alienation into something truly frightening. In early October, he turned to his diary:
After three miserable days in London I believed that I must address myself. For I cannot speak to others of my worst trouble, which is that I have got tired of people and personal relationships . . . Unless I can manage to settle down to some work this year, I may go wrong in my head. I feel so desolate and useless, and observant people see it in my face. A “red-Indian” slapped me on the arm in Tottenham Court Road saying “be cheerful”. . . I feel scared. If human beings have failed me, what is left?
For a short time he clung to the belief that neither Bob nor May could be counted in the ranks of “observant people.” But over the winter invitations mounted and his anxiety slowly receded. He was included in the Buckinghams’ Christmas plans and enjoyed a lavish seventieth birthday party organized by William Plomer and Joe Ackerley. He imagined that the reason “Bob changed suddenly” was that “the word has got round that I am old and must be spoilt. Kindness, consideration for all, also flattery for my fame. I am grateful and do not look too deep. Half-understanding the truest wisdom, at least in private matters . . .” “Half-understanding” had long been Lily’s province. Now as he grew older Morgan made it his own. He was learning to modify his acute sensitivity, selectively to practice the art of the unexamined life.
Most of the ardor for friendship came from across the Atlantic. Morgan’s visit to New York had inspired Paul Cadmus to begin an allegorical painting on sexual freedom. Paul was not merely working out an abstract idea of friendship and sexual desire. Before he met Morgan, the breakup of an affair and the delicate renegotiation of his relations with Jerry and Margaret French had been painful; more recently, his relationship with George Tooker had deepened. He was committed to remaining a friend to past lovers but under no illusions about the difficulties. He inched his way forward, using Forster’s writing as a personal gospel. For months Paul worked on the painting, which he named What I Believe after the essay that had brought him friendship with Morgan. This was the project on his worktable when his friend the photographer George Platt Lynes climbed onto the rickety fire escape at St. Luke’s Place with his camera to capture the three artists, Cadmus, Tooker, and Jerry French, together in the studio. When the painting was finished Paul sent a black-and-white photograph to Morgan.
Tolerance and sexual freedom were interlinked in Paul’s mind. So he made What I Believe a paean to the polymorphous expression of desire. In the center of a vast field of naked humanity the figure of Forster presided—a naked Pan, smiling, his hair blown in the breeze like a dandelion gone to seed, his long thin hands palms up in a characteristic gesture both eloquent and awkward, between a shrug and a beatification. His counterpart, a ghastly figure of death, loomed from a recently dug grave. All around them were naked lovers and friends, lovers of every shape and color, lovers in a great tangle, grotesque or picturesque, enraptured, affectionate. Flesh, flesh, flesh.
And spirit. Partly influenced by Jerry’s interest in Jung’s dualities of the self, Paul painted several figures in the painting twice. There were two self-portraits: one Paul in the picture sat sketching intensely, embraced by Jerry while Margaret stood behind them, her arms encircling them both. The second Paul was more quizzical. He lay on his belly reading a chapter titled “Relationships” in a book labeled What I Believe. Cadmus painted his brother-in-law Lincoln Kirstein twice, the first comical, playing a panpipe, with a cat balanced on his head. The figure of Fidelma rested her head in his lap. The second Lincoln was tender, standing with his arms around Pete Martinez’s neck. Forster, the gay paterfamilias to this extraordinary assemblage, wore nothing but a ribbon with the words “Love, the beloved republic” inscribed on it. In the far distance the tiny lighthouse of Pharos cast its enlightening beam. Forster was “charmed” to be the muse for this scene of sexual friendship, though he told Paul that he found his portrait too flattering, “for I have got so fat!” Still, to be the genius loci of a sexual utopia was a worthy immortality.
Paul was not the only younger artist who sought Morgan’s approval. In the summer of 1948 the composer Benjamin Britten organized a music festival near his home in Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast. He asked Morgan, “England’s greatest novelist,” to give a lecture. Morgan joined Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, sleeping several nights in the guest bedroom of Crag House, a stucco villa whose front garden touched the shingle of the North Sea. Late at night his hosts entertained him, Ben hunched over the grand piano while Pears stood, leaning on its cluttered closed lid. They made up little musical parodies and sang folk songs late into the night. Aldeburgh was “a bleak little place: not beautiful,” Forster wrote. But he found the large sitting room congenial, and Ben and Peter to be “the sweetest people.”
Britten and Pears had been inseparable partners, in love and work, for a decade. With his unruly cloud of curly hair and his sloping shoulders, Ben was slighter than the imposing Peter, whose craggy features amplified the expressiveness of his tenor voice. To the “shock” and consternation of some of their friends, the men brazenly shared a large bed in the main bedroom upstairs with a wide view of
the sea. For the public they accommodated a more chaste cover story. The adjoining room with a spartan single bed (where Morgan slept) was labeled “Peter Pears’ room” in a photo montage celebrating the nascent festival. During the visit, Britten proposed a future collaboration. When a commission for an opera for the Festival of Britain materialized, he invited Morgan to write the libretto. Together they would choose the subject.
Though Britten was only thirty-four at the time, he was already acknowledged as the greatest British composer of the century. He had met Morgan more than a decade before. Like so many of Morgan’s younger friends, they were introduced by Christopher Isherwood. Then only twenty-three, Ben had written the incidental music for The Ascent of F6. Just after the play premiered Britten’s mother died, and Morgan’s sympathy and his musical sensitivity lingered in Ben’s mind. Seven years later, in 1944, Morgan had come to London specially to hear Pears sing Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo in a J. A. Symonds translation.
