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

by Wendy Moffat

  When Morgan and Bob visited them in 1949, Glenway, Monroe, and George had their cleats into the city. The three men lived in “our household,” a proper ménage à trois, until George, “spellbound, discontented with his life, dissatisfied with himself,” left Glenway and Monroe together, the way they would stay for the next fifty years. All three traveled in a range of social worlds—Lincoln and the dancers of the New York City Ballet, Paul and his more bohemian friends, the rich patrons of the nascent Museum of Modern Art, where Monroe was director of publications. George attracted fashion models and a raffish crowd of young men—Pullman porters and rent boys and artistic types in advertising. Living in these worlds often meant depending on other people’s money. Glenway enjoyed the patronage of his brother Lloyd and his wife, Barbara, who supported the whole family with her lavish inheritance. George, whether flush or in debt, “seemed to consider the world a gift that he bought and presented to his friends for his own pleasure.” Monroe was like an impoverished aristocrat with brains and taste but little money. During his expatriate years, he had met Jean Renoir, Marc Chagall, and Pablo Picasso; and now, with these connections and a canny eye, he traveled frequently to Europe as one of the museum’s most conspicuous emissaries. He was always impeccably and formally dressed. He had perfect manners. A portrait of him, looking casually suave, appeared in the November 1948 Vogue. This aura of “worldliness personified” was a necessary part of cultivating the museum’s donors for Monroe, a Chicago boy with only a high school diploma.

  They divided their time between urban and rural entertainments, and they swept Morgan and Bob along for both. The highlight of Wescott’s plans was a dinner at Monroe’s two nights before the lecture. Monroe’s apartment was configured for show, with the large public rooms facing Park Avenue, while a tiny kitchen, truncated bedrooms, and bathroom faced the back. The drawing room and dining room could have been from an updated novel by Henry James—fitted with beautiful, expensive European furniture, bibelots, and fine books, many borrowed from Glenway’s sister-in-law Barbara. A Courbet landscape hung over the mantelpiece.

  Here George and his mother, Adelaide—an elegant and intelligent woman—joined the small company for cocktails. It was a disarming idea to start with George, like an amuse-bouche. He lingered just long enough to persuade Bob and Morgan to have their portraits taken the following week at his studio. Then the Lyneses evaporated. The six dinner guests—all men—had been carefully chosen to make the evening both provocative and welcoming. Monroe, who was serious about the closet, was “worried about it, hasn’t warned EMF and keeps forbidding me to let the news item out, lest there be embarrassment about B.B.,” Glenway wrote a friend. He had reason to be careful: each dinner party was organized around a theme, and the theme of this one, unbeknown to Morgan, was sex.

  That the party would be fuel for news—and for local gossip—was inevitable. Morgan and Bob were the guests of honor. Glenway had also invited Joseph Campbell, whose work linking “ancient and primitive religions, especially the Hindu” with modern psychology had just earned him an American Academy grant. The history of world mythology was in Campbell’s palm; he knew Sanskrit and shared a special love of India with Morgan. But the catalyst for controversy and conversation was the guest who had come to New York to research sex. Dr. Alfred Kinsey was the sixth man at the table. Monroe had penciled into his little leather daybook a full five hours on the following afternoon for Kinsey to take his sex history.

  Dr. Kinsey wasn’t a physician. A professor of zoology who had begun his career studying gall wasps, he had published his magisterial report Sexual Behavior in the Human Male just five months earlier. The tome was scientifically scrupulous and lucidly written by Kinsey himself. It presented the “actual behavior of people” based on more than twelve thousand firsthand interviews conducted by Kinsey and his handful of researchers at Indiana University in Bloomington.

  In this urbane company, Kinsey came across as a Midwestern square. His hair was cut short on the sides to well above his ears, topped by a long bristle of thatch that he attempted to part in the middle. He wore, as always, a rumpled jacket, crisp white shirt, and bow tie. But his intense curiosity was beguiling. Like the Boy Scout he had once been, he was honest, hardworking, true and plain, kindhearted and utterly sincere. (He was also, unknown to himself and his dinner companions, on the edge of a dangerous decision. The night he met Morgan and Bob was the first night Kinsey met Glenway. Within a few months Glenway invited him to watch sex parties, and two summers later, Kinsey reciprocated, asking Glenway to come to Indiana to be filmed while masturbating. There they became sexual partners and close friends. Their secret would eventually endanger the project, and its funding, though it did not threaten Kinsey’s very open marriage.)

  Discovering the norms of sexual practice in America proved an irresistible impulse for many readers. Kinsey’s book became an instant bestseller. He pursued a briskly American way of measuring sex: he counted orgasms. This emphasis was a bit hydraulic. Because it focused on behavior rather than psychology, all sorts of desire never counted in Kinsey’s work. But just by closely observing and reporting, in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male Kinsey made an enormous impact. His survey proved supple enough to complicate the picture of human sexual expression.

  Three observations about homosexuality in particular galvanized his readers. Thirty-seven percent of Kinsey’s large sample of men reported homosexual experiences leading to orgasm. Ten percent of men were exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of sixteen and sixty-five. And four percent of the men were “exclusively homosexual throughout their lives.” Kinsey’s sympathy to bisexuality may have deliberately shaped his method to “make there seem to be as much homosexual activity as possible.” His coworkers later came to regret the three-year window of sexual activity as an indefensibly arbitrary measurement—but his reported figures were nonetheless transparent and incontrovertible.

  To the gay men in Glenway’s circle Kinsey’s tireless work—and his unjudgmental air—made him something of a saint. He normalized their experience, and appealed to their narcissism. Only Lincoln Kirstein resisted the invitation to give his sexual history, telling Christopher Isherwood,

  all the staff of the Mus. Of Mod Art has been had by Dr. Kinsey; he is a disgusting old voyeur and his entire work is a scientific fraud, but he wants to talk to ARTISTS; he wants to know how Artists fuck and come; Glenway is his mentor . . . He has the greatest collection of dirty art in the world, which I long to see, but not at the price of telling him MY story.

  Monroe had given Morgan no warning that Kinsey would be there, but the dinner, Glenway reported to Isherwood, “went like a charm. Indeed Mr. F. himself made it go. No reference or even identification while we drank cock-tails—then the instant we were settled at table, Mr. F. turned + asked the first leading question, set the wonderful absurd ball rolling—+ Dr. K. was so pleased. And how Mr. F. listens, now with the worried look, then with the chuckle—it makes one feel like a singer being accompanied on an inaudible piano.”

  They spoke of Kinsey’s findings, and of the erotic friezes on the Hindu temples at Khajuraho, thousands of bodies connected in mutual pleasure, which both Campbell and Morgan had seen; of the differences Kinsey had found between the way women and men become sexually aroused; about “the cancer of unenforceable laws (worst of all sex laws) . . .” Kinsey drily noted that almost everyone he surveyed had broken a sex law of some sort, since premarital and extramarital intercourse, incest, miscegenation, sex outside of statutory age limits, homosexual activity, contact with prostitutes, sexual contact with animals, oral sex, sodomy, and even solitary masturbation were all restricted by law in one state or another. In this light, the stigma attached to particular occasions of homosexual activity—to urban queers, for example, but not as much to “lumbermen, cattlemen, prospectors, miners and hunters”—was clearly arbitrary, a matter of “social custom” rather than moral force.

  Not knowing what to expe
ct from Bob Buckingham, Glenway was “surprised” by his ease in the company, his “lively and approving interest at every point.” Bob delightedly extended an invitation of his own to Dr. Kinsey to visit Scotland Yard’s roomfuls of confiscated pornography on his next visit to England. There was much jolly, manly talk. But Morgan tendered no revelations about his own sex life. He offered only the cryptic phrase that Monroe recorded in his little datebook: “I favor reciprocal dishonesty.” Whether the dishonesty in question was his own, Bob’s, his readers’, or society’s was left, as always, to the imagination.

  To Morgan, there was something refreshing about Kinsey’s approach. He had so little in common with the European sexologists. He didn’t, like Freud, feel the need to bore into the psyche and penetrate the mystery of desire—an impulse in Freud’s work that both irritated and frightened Morgan. He didn’t, like Hirschfeld and Krafft-Ebing, make “pigeonholes” for sexual desire. Most intriguing to Morgan was Kinsey’s discovery that all men—gay and straight—responded sexually to “obscene” images and fantasies, while few women did. Imagination had long been the wellspring of lust for Morgan, and he cherished the power of his erotic dreams. He had always stoked his own lust, and satisfied it too, by writing erotic tableaux. The day after the dinner, while hiking with Bob and Glenway, Morgan walked ahead in silence for a few minutes, contemplating this nugget of truth. He stopped in his tracks. In a soft voice, he said, “I must say that it comforted me to be told this.”

  A second comfort was Kinsey’s affirmation that homosexuals did not seem to be some intermediate sex, as the scientists of Morgan’s youth—indeed even Edward Carpenter—had believed. Bob, in his conventional way, had missed this point. The next day in conversation, Bob quoted the Bible verse “Male and female he created them” to affirm that Kinsey had identified “two divisions of humankind . . . half effeminate and half manly.” But Morgan corrected him sharply. “‘No, Bob no!’ Forster protested. ‘Effeminacy is only a manner. A homosexual man is as male as a heterosexual man. Only remember just one discovery that the good doctor told us: very few women take any interest in obscene things, whereas most men enjoy them and feel the need for them . . .’”

  Two days after the dinner, an august collection of cultural figures from what Morgan teasingly called “fame’s lower slopes” gathered in the grand hall of the academy on 155th Street to hear Morgan give a lecture, “Art for Art’s Sake.” It was an old-fashioned argument, and Morgan knew it.

  A writer . . . who chose “Art for Art’s Sake” for his theme fifty years ago could be sure of being in the swim, and could feel so confident of success that he . . . dressed himself in esthetic costumes suitable to the occasion—in an embroidered dressing-gown . . . or a blue velvet suit with a Lord Fauntleroy collar . . . and carried a poppy or a lily or a long peacock’s feather in his mediaeval hand. Times have changed.

  But had they? Standing in a rumpled brown tweed suit rather than Wilde’s ostentatious dress, Morgan told the assemblage of academics, newly inducted artists such as William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Thomas Mann, and his friends Christopher, Wystan, and Glenway, that he, too, felt himself an outsider. It was exactly what he had written to Paul Cadmus several years earlier. They had been discussing whether painters revealed themselves in their art. Ingres was most mysterious, Morgan argued, “a painter’s painter I should think,” who “doesn’t therefore reveal himself to the outsider.” Morgan clearly identified with this position. He confided to Paul, “I am the outsidest of outsiders.”

  That afternoon at the academy Morgan embraced the idea, as he had in “What I Believe,” that the artist must necessarily find himself out of favor and out of power. An artist would always be, he said, “the bohemian, the outsider, the parasite, the rat.” So had Shelley been, and so were all great poet-prophets. He ended with a flourish: “I would sooner be a swimming rat than a sinking ship—at all events I can look around me for a little longer.” It was a pessimism about the world he felt was justly earned. Then he collected his medal and his check and “beat it” to Glenway’s farm in New Jersey.

  Farm is probably the wrong word for the eighteenth-century house and grounds where Glenway’s family lived. Mulhocaway Farm was, to use Alexander Pope’s phrase, “nature to advantage dress’d.” And Lloyd and Barbara Wescott were a modern American version of Pope’s landed gentry. Cadmus had painted the couple in the style of Gainsborough grafted onto Thomas Hart Benton, in front of an opulent display of modern barns, machines, and artificially inseminated livestock, with a single almost invisible groomsman in the background. Lord of this queer manor, Lloyd Wescott stocked Mulhocaway Farm with prize heifers and horses, and eventually, piecemeal, with the whole of his dirt-poor Wisconsin clan—his mother and father, several of his sisters, and the triangle of aesthetes, George, Monroe, and Glenway. He provided them with an eighteenth-century stone farmhouse they called Stoneblossom, where Bob and Morgan slept in adjoining bedrooms at the top of the stairs while Glenway encamped in the paneled library below.

  Living in this hothouse atmosphere, Glenway had developed the aura of a boy pressing his nose on the glass looking in at a party to which he had not been invited. His connoisseurship of dependence, and his acute sensitivity, made him an ideal host. He was determined insofar as he could to treat Bob Buckingham as a person in his own right for the duration of the visit. So they took Bob, who had an interest in police work in the United States, to a women’s prison near the farm, where Lloyd knew the woman superintendent intimately. Bob commented, about arresting people, “I don’t even use my truncheon. I use my fists. The poor devils resent it less.”

  At Mulhocaway, Glenway propelled Morgan and Bob into a scene of genuine, almost cartoonish familial conviviality. His sister played folk songs on the guitar as they settled around the fireplace after dinner. Glenway, in a gracious kind of reciprocal dishonesty, did not broach the question of Maurice—about which he had heard from Christopher—just as he did not broach the question of sleeping arrangements for Morgan and Bob, whose “duet of voices” could be heard laughing and teasing at the top of the stairs. Glenway quoted Morgan to himself: “Mutual secrecy being one of the conditions of life on the globe.”

  Notwithstanding this, the precise nature of the relationship between Morgan and Bob was intriguing to him, and the subject of intense speculation among Forster’s American friends. Paul Cadmus believed Morgan and Bob were lovers, finding them to be temperamentally and otherwise “perfect for each other.” From what he had seen on this trip, Glenway agreed. Lincoln found Bob to be “the toughest man I ever met. Let’s face it,” he told Christopher, “it’s not by accident he is a cop, even though a very kind cop, and a wildly attractive one.” In contrast, Bill Roerick was convinced that Bob was straight, and that Morgan was forced to walk gingerly at the edge of intimacy.

  Even these very close friends found Morgan adept at “reject[ing] intimacy without impairing affection,” to quote Morgan’s own description of T. E. Lawrence. A strange moment of déjà vu between Monroe and Morgan on the way out to the farm underscored this point. They found a rural restaurant in which to eat supper. As they waited for the meal to arrive, Monroe snatched Morgan’s “beclouded” glasses from his nose, and cleaned them. Pleased with himself, he asked Morgan, “Now, don’t you see better?” Just as Mohammed had done when Morgan had touched his spectacles thirty years before, Morgan recoiled and looked around the room in mordant silence. Then he said, terribly politely, “Thank you Monroe. But if you don’t mind my saying so, I’m not sure I want to see so much.”

  They were back at St. Luke’s Place from Stoneblossom the Tuesday after Memorial Day. The next afternoon, Bob and Morgan dressed in their best bespoke suits, shaved and combed their hair, and took a cab to George Platt Lynes’s midtown studio. It is hard to believe that the photographs from this session were taken only a day after the snapshots of a dowdy, middle-aged Bob sucking on a pipe at Stoneblossom. As he did for all his sitters, George made Bob and Morgan look wondro
us.

  Though he was only forty-two, Lynes had gone completely silver-maned. He was so striking that men and women stopped in their tracks to linger and look at him as he walked on the sidewalks of Manhattan. Entering his studio meant entering a seductive, charming, wholly artificial world. The workspace was essentially a stage, a large empty box with concrete walls and a scuffed cement floor. The skylight was painted over to deny all natural light. George devised complex and wildly inventive stage lighting that complemented the insight into character that was the hallmark of his portraits. He was already famous for his iconic photographs of Marianne Moore in her tricornered hat and Kirstein’s New York City Ballet dancers enacting Greek myths. (He would be more famous still after his death at age forty-eight for his dazzling and provocative male nudes, which were a strong influence on Robert Mapplethorpe.)

  In photographing Morgan, George had a real challenge because his subject was notoriously unphotogenic. His liquid moods played upon his face like a screen, but “[w]hen a camera approaches,” Bill Roerick observed, “he looks at it, it looks at him, and they have nothing to say to each other. He produces an official silence, the camera produces an unlikeness.” Only in occasional snapshots could Morgan “sometimes look . . . quite like himself.” George had something even more ambitious in mind: to capture, with Morgan’s cooperation, a chameleon variety of selves, the most beautiful best public and private selves his sitters could imagine.