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

by Wendy Moffat

  The strong homoerotic ancestry of the work was unaccountably lost on most of the reviewers. But for these two artists so seasoned in the art of the unspoken, the song cycle became a kind of platonic dialogue, a connection to each other and to the unrecorded history hidden in plain sight. First Ben gave Morgan a copy of the score. Then—thoroughly moved by Pears’s performance—Morgan bought the recording though he had no gramophone to play it on. When Ben heard of this, he bought Morgan a handsome record player. He inscribed Morgan’s copy of Albert Herring—“For my dear Morgan / a very humble tribute to a very great man.” Ben remembered that it was Morgan who had seen Christopher and Wystan off at Waterloo Station when they embarked for America, and Morgan alone of the old guard who had not sneered when, fueled by pacifism, he and Peter had followed their friends to America in 1939.

  Britten and Pears’s three-year sojourn in the United States had not been a success. Ben was a brittle, nervous man who needed settled conditions to work. He and Peter were obliged to tour to make money, and this restlessness made them unhappy and unproductive. In November 1940, they shared a row house in Brooklyn Heights with Auden; Thomas Mann’s son Golo; Paul Bowles and his wife, Jane; the burlesque artist Gypsy Rose Lee; and Carson McCullers. But this bohemian ménage took its toll, and the pair fled west to California. There, in the summer of 1941, an encounter with Morgan’s writing changed their lives. Homesick, cash-strapped, and unhappy, they discovered a copy of The Listener, and in it they read Morgan’s radio talk on the forgotten poet George Crabbe and his character Peter Grimes, a “savage fisherman . . . who murdered his [three young] apprentices and was haunted by their ghosts.”

  Like Crabbe, Britten had grown up in the tiny provincial town of Aldeburgh in the Suffolk marshland. But both Crabbe’s propinquity and his poetry were unknown to him. Reading Forster’s essay gave Ben “such a feeling of nostalgia” that he and Peter combed the used bookstores of Los Angeles for a copy of Crabbe’s The Borough, first published in 1810. They found one, and devoured the poems.

  Nostalgia is a strange word for the feelings evoked by these sketches of folk life. Crabbe’s poetry was, well, crabby. The Borough depicted the flinty, unhappy circumstance of poor rural people living in provincial isolation. Forster’s essay began simply, “To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England.” As a gay man Britten likely detected the ambivalence in these words. Morgan captured Crabbe’s “uncomfortable mind,” his “antipathy . . . connected with a profound attraction” toward the bleak, unforgiving landscape that shaped the townspeople of Aldeburgh, Crabbe, and his art. Morgan located the same “inner tension, the same desire for what repels” in both the poet and his unhappy fisherman. A similar tension may have surfaced in Britten, whose uneasy status as a homosexual and a conscientious objector complicated his desire to be canonized as a court composer. Reading Forster sharpened Ben’s homesickness. Looking back on this moment, Britten wrote that Morgan’s “revealing article” made him “suddenly realize . . . where I belonged and what I lacked.” He and Peter decided to return to England. Morgan had led them home.

  Britten spent the whole of 1944 in England, writing Peter Grimes. His adaptation was telling. Where Crabbe’s Grimes killed his apprentices by neglect and privation, Britten and Pears imagined a character whose sexual desire for the boys is linked to his violence against them. In their preliminary sketch, Grimes replicated a cycle of violence—just as his father had beaten him, he beats the boys, thinking, “Would you rather I loved you? you are sweet, young etc.—but you must love me, why do you not love me? Love me darn you.” Britten’s librettist Montagu Slater took up this angle in the early drafts, emphasizing both Grimes’s pederasty and the complicity of the villagers in looking the other way. (He quoted Crabbe directly: “some on hearing cries / Said calmly ‘Grimes is at his exercise.’”)

  But in revision Britten and Pears thought better of their conception of Grimes’s motives. They erased the hints of pedophilia, shaping a “liberal view” of an ambiguous misfit whose “behavior was excusable and understandable.” Pears explicitly retreated from his original conception, writing to Britten, “The more I hear of it, the more I feel that the queerness is unimportant & doesn’t really exist in the music (or at any rate obtrude) so it mustn’t do so in words. P. G. is an introspective, an artist, a neurotic . . .” The completed libretto pitted Grimes as an Everyman against a hostile society. Britten changed the plot, introducing a sympathetic female champion of Grimes and making clear that the apprentices died by accident. Thus he created a complicated, closeted opera. One could read the plot as a grand allegory of good and evil. But viewers, if they wished, could find in both the villagers’ ostracism and Grimes’s behavior a dark story of homosexual guilt.

  Morgan was pleased to have been an inspiration to Ben. He saw the chance to write with Britten as serious business. It made him feel vital to be at work again. As a skilled pianist and an accomplished music critic, Morgan found that “Music had a warmth and vitality which Life in Literature has lacked.” Still aglow from the adulation of younger gay artists in America, Morgan imagined that his work with Britten would have some of the symbolic paternal relation that his friendship with Cadmus had achieved. But he was uneasy at undertaking a libretto without any experience of writing in the form, humbly accepting the help of Eric Crozier, Ben’s experienced librettist and producer.

  Almost immediately Ben and Morgan had the same “telepathic and simultaneous” thought—to adapt Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd. Crozier objected, thinking that an all-male opera with a homosexual subtext might be difficult if not dangerous to produce. But the chance to relish the physical beauty of an all-male cast, to “keep human beings and the smell of tar” was too compelling, and Ben and Morgan prevailed. In mid-January 1949, on their first morning of work, Morgan, Ben, and Eric outlined a list of characters and events, and made a rough sketch of the set—the man-of-war The Indomitable during the Napoleonic Wars. They also settled on a narrative frame. The story of Billy Budd, they decided, would be told as a long flashback through its sole survivor, Captain Edward Vere, “an old man who has experienced much.” So they made Vere the same age as Morgan himself, and decided that Peter would sing the part.

  Morgan thought Billy Budd had the dramatic intensity to be a grand opera. Its three central characters were impelled toward tragedy: Billy Budd, the innocent and beloved young seaman with a fateful stammer; the malevolent Petty Officer John Claggart, who falsely accuses Billy of mutiny, and is struck and killed by him when Billy, tongue-tied, cannot defend himself; and Captain Vere, who though he knows Billy is innocent invokes strict naval law and orders Billy hanged for manslaughter. But the tone of Melville’s novella rankled Morgan. He told the critic Lionel Trilling that his job was “rescuing . . . Vere from his creator.” The man who wrote “What I Believe” could not celebrate Vere’s sense of duty, could not even savor its tragedy. Morgan was repelled by Melville making Vere the hero of his tale. He wanted the hero to be Billy Budd himself.

  Morgan reacted so strongly in part because, as he had done with Crabbe, he identified with the author’s dilemma personally. The publication history of Billy Budd held uncanny parallels to his own long-suppressed Maurice. Like Forster, Melville had lain fallow as a fiction writer. After almost thirty years of silence, Melville wrote Billy Budd near the end of his life, finishing it just months before he died at age seventy-three, virtually the same age as Morgan now. For three decades after Melville’s death in 1891 the manuscript languished. It was published for the first time—in London, in 1924—in the same year as A Passage to India.

  As a redress, Morgan reconceived the story as a meditation on masculinity. To him the real tragedy was the story’s blind machismo, the way all three protagonists were pressed into violence and moral inaction by unconscious rote notions of male duty. Placing the gorgeous, innocent figure of Billy at the center of the opera created an erotic triangle, with Billy as object of both Vere’s benign and Claggart’s malign love. (
“N.B.,” he wrote to Trilling, “Why is it Vere’s touch on Billy’s shoulder that precipitates the blow?”) Melville had dwelt on Claggart’s “natural depravity.” To Morgan, this phrase unmistakably echoed the pseudo-scientific arguments that homosexuality was inherently sinful and perverse, the arguments so familiar from the early decades of his life. Instead he diagnosed Claggart’s “depravity” as desire thwarted, desire corrupted into self-hatred. He criticized Ben’s original music for Claggart’s monologue in Act II as too tepid—“soggy depression or growling remorse.” Instead he wanted Ben to depict Claggart’s love for Billy as “passion—love constricted, perverted, poisoned . . . a sexual discharge gone evil.” He cautioned against constructing too pat a moral for the story, insisting to Ben that though Billy may be “our Saviour, yet he is Billy, not Christ.” Morgan redirected Melville’s tale into an allegory about the social experience of being a homosexual.

  By March 1949 Eric Crozier and Morgan were “immersed in Billy Budd like two trappist monks,” hammering out the libretto before Ben began to compose the score. The three men settled at Crag House for “sixteen remarkable Billy Budd days.” Within a week, Crozier wrote his wife, they had mastered the “welter of technical [naval] terms” and allotted their writing duties—“Morgan is in charge of the drama, I am in command of the ship . . . It is going to be a stupendous opera.” Crozier found Morgan to be humble and “typically generous . . . a most kind man,” but even at this early moment in the process of composition there were cracks in the glaze. As a close friend of Britten, Crozier was cast in the role of go-between, finding “Ben . . . in a wretched state . . . He does not really want to do Billy as an opera but feels that he cannot withdraw . . . the long hours that Morgan and I are spending cloistered together seem almost to make him a little jealous.” Britten told Crozier that he was “going through a period of revulsion against Billy Budd, from a misunderstanding about the purpose of the story, and he wanted to give the whole thing up.” But Crozier smoothed his feathers—for the time being—and the project went on.

  Enraptured by the work, Morgan was unaware of this behind-the-scenes drama. His creative energy translated into joy. Bob visited him at Aldeburgh, very affectionate. In his diary Morgan related his delight at their rapprochement: “The great goodness and love of Bob towers. I wonder why he was so short and harsh to me last year, don’t think it was just his health.” But Ben’s response to creative difficulties was often evasion or flight. He suddenly accepted a recital tour abroad with Peter, leaving Morgan puzzled but unenlightened. In this gap, Morgan began to plan a second “American adventure,” to introduce Bob to his new American friends. His work on the opera dictating that he “ought to be away from England for as short a period as possible,” Morgan limited himself to two lucrative public events on the East Coast—the Blashfield lecture at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City and an honorary degree at Bill Roerick’s alma mater, Hamilton College.

  He designed the journey to revisit the high points of two years before, viewing each destination vicariously through Bob’s eyes—Lost Farm with Bill, Paul’s studio, a short trip to Philadelphia to visit Tom Coley’s mother. The visit had a self-conscious, valedictory quality. Morgan began to feel enmeshed in time, as people do in late middle age—each event nestled in prenostalgia even before it is experienced. I have my health, people think. I am enjoying this. This is a golden moment, they think. In such a state of consciousness, even Bob began to seem older to Morgan. He told Paul, “I wish you could have [sketched] Bob as I first knew him 20 years ago . . .” It became impossible not to measure every moment against its un-self-conscious origins. “It was sad not seeing you in New York,” he wrote to Paul, who was again away for the summer. “I often thought when I approached the house [at St. Luke’s Place] of my first approach, and of my first meal there: every sort of cold delicacy and wine . . .”

  Could things ever become different, or would they always be a continuation of the same? Wystan had happily emigrated, and Christopher, too. Might it be possible to transplant the whole Buckingham family to more amenable soil? Why not? Planning the visit, Morgan scouted for the answer to these questions, looking into his old love’s eyes. For the time being, it was adventure enough to test how his American friends would respond to Bob, “Mr. Forster[’s] lifelong beloved . . . policeman.” The public honors were conspicuous and designed to impress Bob, who sat near General Omar Bradley at the luncheon fêting the Hamilton degree recipients. But too much pomp made Morgan irreverent: he filed away the sheepskin, but made special note of an informal citation, “‘For being Morgan’ Written by Bill Roerick on the reverse of a detached beer bottle label after some distinction or other had been conferred on me.”

  Inviting Morgan to give the lucrative Blashfield lecture was the brainchild of Glenway Wescott. Though he had been corresponding with Morgan since 1940, when he sent a copy of his new novel The Pilgrim Hawk, Glenway was the only person in his circle of friends who had not yet met Morgan, and he was envious of their proximity to the Great Writer. Newly elected to the academy, Glenway had the ear of its president, the poet Archibald Mac-Leish. He crowed to a friend that he had “killed cock robin” by persuading Morgan to come back to the States. Morgan accepted, and set to work finding “something to say which shall be profound but not disturbing” to earn his lecture fee.

  Membership in the academy provided consolatory work for Glenway, who despite early precociousness as a writer had not achieved great literary fame. He had undeniable talent, and a knack for falling in with the right crowd. A willowy blond farm boy with a dreamy expression, Glenway had been just nineteen when he fled the Midwest with his lover Monroe Wheeler for Greenwich Village, then Paris, then southern France. By then Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams had already published Wescott’s poems. Monroe was a Chicago boy, two years older, compactly built, with saturnine good looks. The two young men were motivated more by an inchoate need for sexual freedom than by any specific vocation. Monroe cannily told Glenway, “In the American culture artists have privileges of freedom that are recognized . . . If you will be a poet and make a life of writing, they will let you alone.” And so Glenway had begun to write quickly, publishing two novels and a collection of short stories. By his mid-twenties, he was a celebrity, his name mentioned in the same breath as Hemingway and Fitzgerald as a “prophet of a New America.”

  Hemingway in particular envied and reviled Glenway. He hated Wescott’s polished sentences, the embellishment, the European air of his characters’ exquisite sensibilities. He also resented Glenway’s friendship with Gertrude Stein. Most of all, he detested the success of homosexual writers: “Glenway Wescott, Thornton Wilder and Julian Green have all gotten rich in a year in which I made less than I made as a newspaper correspondent—and I’m the only one with wives and children to support.” He hated Glenway’s speaking voice. Bitchily, he told Stein, “When you matriculate at the University of Chicago you write down just what accent you will have and they give it to you when you graduate.” So much for Glenway being “let alone.”

  In the world he and Monroe made for themselves, they found sympathetic company. In France they made lifelong friends with an extraordinary array of artists: Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Cocteau, Marc Chagall, Willie Maugham, Thornton Wilder, the Sitwell siblings, and the novelist whom Osbert Sitwell called “Freud Madox Fraud.” And they attracted friends back into Stein’s circle. Just before they left New York, Monroe and Glenway had met a beautiful, restless, and painfully young son of an Episcopalian clergyman from the posh parts of New Jersey. George Platt Lynes was not quite twenty. He had gone to prep school with Lincoln Kirstein but lasted only a matter of weeks at Yale, bucking a family tradition. Lynes was preternaturally worldly: he offered the pair all sorts of entrées to the expatriate world of Paris, from which he had already returned.

  George Platt Lynes was an aesthete with no settled métier, exasperating to his father, magnetic to his friends. He had opened an e
legant little bookshop in Englewood, New Jersey, and sold it for a profit after six months. He knew books, theater, ballet, painting, photography, fashion, furniture. Bright, rakishly charming, hungry for life, fun, he was impossible to resist. Glenway wrote importuning him—“Dear Little George,” “Sweet Boy,” “Child New York”—to join him and Monroe in France. Dear Little George did, but not before seducing Glenway’s resolutely heterosexual younger brother Lloyd, who had followed Glenway east to New York. Glenway was furious, Monroe philosophical. It was Glenway’s “own fault” for introducing them. Then George followed directions. He arrived, like a comet, back in France in the summer of 1928.

  Glenway had invited George, but George ended up chiefly in Monroe’s bed. What might have been—for three more ordinary men—an impossible situation somehow settled, delicately and pleasurably, into a triangle in equipoise; all three found a clear way through into a kinship that—to the end of their lives—none of them ever bothered to label or define. It was deeply shared friendship with sex intermixed: passionate sex between George and Monroe; companionate, polite, less frequent sex between George and Glenway. Between Glenway and Monroe ardor had cooled slightly even before George had come to them, and they settled into a devoted sort of marriage, each comfortably taking on lovers for some months, all perfectly open and friendly.

  George’s eyes were hungry for beauty. As the three men traveled through Europe, he began to take pictures. The three of them together in perfect white linen suits, cut by the sharp shadow of a palm tree. A Roman-coiffed Gertrude Stein in profile, with the hills of Provence just a smudge in the distance. Cocteau, withdrawing from an opium habit, intensely facing the camera, all beaky nose, with a shock of curly hair shooting upward as if aflame. Man Ray took a striking portrait of George managing to look like a figure from a Greek myth, despite wearing a diaperlike loincloth. By the time the ménage was transplanted back to New York in 1934, George’s aimless pursuit had focused into a vocation, as Glenway’s had done. He became a fashion photographer.