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

by Wendy Moffat

At about the time of the Mousehole raid, the London press was transfixed by a libel trial. The American showman Liberace had made a great splash in his London appearances. His flamboyance attracted the invective of a columnist for the Daily Mirror, a moralist and gossip who published under the dire pen name Cassandra. In private Morgan mused over the curious phenomenon of Liberace’s fans who “touched . . . his clothes as if they were the hem of Christ.” But Cassandra published his pointed words:

  [Liberace] is the summit of sex—Masculine, Feminine and Neuter. Everything that He, She and It can ever want . . . [T]his deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love has had the biggest reception and impact on London since Charlie Chaplin arrived . . .

  Like Oscar Wilde seventy years before, Liberace sued for libel; unlike Wilde, in the courtroom he chose to appear as the most sober version of himself. Setting aside the white tails and rhinestones for a gray flannel suit, Liberace testified that Cassandra’s words had attacked his manhood and made his mother ill, and “cost me many years of my professional career by implying that I am a homosexual . . . It has caused untold agonies . . . and made me the subject of ridicule.” On direct examination Liberace lied (as Wilde had done), saying he was not homosexual, nor had engaged in homosexual practices. He persuasively wrapped himself in the mantle of family values. He testified, “My feelings [about homosexuality] are the same as anybody else’s. I am against the practice because it offends convention and offends society.” The jury of ten men and two women determined that the flamboyant pianist had reason to believe that Cassandra’s words implied he was a homosexual, and reason to fear they would harm his career. They awarded him the largest libel verdict to date—eight thousand pounds. Afterward, Liberace remarked that he had “laughed all the way to the bank.”

  The following year Morgan sat in the witness box at another civil trial. In 1928 he had been prepared to defend Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel; thirty-two years later, he defended the literary merits of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The posthumously published novel became the next test case in Sir Theobald Mathews’s latest purity campaign. Morgan’s defense that Lady Chatterley had “very high literary merit” helped to win the day for the Penguin Press. Privately, he could not resist a bit of sardonic commentary: “By the way, did D. H. Lawrence ever do anything for anybody? Now that we have been sweating ourselves to help him, the idea occurs.”

  Neither trial was an unalloyed blow for sexual justice, but they clearly marked real changes in cultural attitudes about sex. In 1932 Morgan described the evolution of attitudes to homosexuality in a letter to the younger William Plomer:

  I am very excited [about Maurice] . . . and thinking over the book again. Most people have thought it poignant and persuasive . . . but have thought it should have ended tragically. I shouldn’t have felt it worth writing tragically. I was trying to escape from “a case” which was harder and tighter by a lot 20 years ago, and a little earlier still the only attitude available can have been a priestlike secrecy and a faith in the Cause and Subject.

  Sex and homosexuality were less secret. Lady Chatterley may have seemed scandalous, but Morgan had read Roger Casement’s Black Diaries, and Ulysses, Lolita, and Giovanni’s Room in the interim years. And just down the street at the local cinema, Elvis Presley—“a handsome boy”—sang and danced “most provocatively” in Jailhouse Rock. Joe recommended it.

  Morgan became inundated by the deaths of old friends. He told William Plomer, “I sometimes have the frightened feeling that people will now not stop dying.” He reflected on the death of Frank Vicary, whom he had met decades before at Montazah Hospital in Alexandria:

  He was everything to me for about 20 years everything fading into nothing because he always needed help, never stuck to a job, and never did anything for me, despite romantic cries of affection. Florence [Barger] saw through him, to my annoyance, and condemned me for allowing him to depend on me. I see now that I was to blame, but he was a cunning trapper . . . He was a wonderful man, and perhaps would have been a failure, even had he not met me.

  In 1960, at eighty-one, Florence Barger died in her sleep. Morgan (exactly her age) recorded her death in his diary, his handwriting terribly shaky from the news. He confided to Joe Ackerley:

  She has been as if dead for months, but these things are shocks. I have suddenly wanted to think or look at warm obscenities—this has happened to me when upset all my life, right back to Alexandria . . . I am rather prone to senile lechery just now—want to touch the right person in the right place, to shake off bodily loneliness . . . the loneliness is not total or tragic. Licentious scribblings help, and though they are probably fatuous I am never ashamed of them.

  He chronicled the “very sad loss” of Charles Mauron; and another ghost—Hugh Meredith—HOM, his first love. Though they had drifted apart decades before, the death was a blow: “he was very beautiful at the beginning of the century.”

  He had expected to outlive old friends, but the early death of Robin Buckingham was the greatest tragedy of his life. Robin was Bob and May’s only child, the little boy who had borne his name. Both Buckinghams and Morgan had not-so-secretly hoped that Robin, curious and bright and gentle, would abandon his working-class roots to attend King’s. He grew tall and strong; he made it clear he would be entirely his own man. On a visit to London, Lincoln Kirstein described Robin—“seven feet tall with hands like hams and a dear smile . . . who is NOT under any circumstances going to Cambridge; he’s going to be a plumber’s assistant, he is, and that’s wot.”

  In 1953, when he was twenty, Robin married a lovely young woman; soon they had two young sons. But a few years later he began to suffer from unexplained fevers and jaundice that led him and his extended family on a panicked roundelay of hospitals and specialists. There were exploratory surgeries, rest cures, and consultations—a seesaw of hope and fear and hope again. In 1961 he was diagnosed with terminal Hodgkin’s disease.

  As Robin grew pale and weak he took comfort in Morgan’s gentle, silent company—“sitting side by side in peace our hands touching.” But Morgan knew that the long, slow vigil over Robin’s “perishing body” would change everything.

  Little Clive, held up by his grandfather—my Bob—waves from the end of the ward . . . Bob is the earth mourning, dense to hints and then stunned: he and I will not be together in one sense any more. Ahead looms deprivation as well as trouble, for “we seven” as May likes to put it, including the two noisy infants—were as I put it a symbiosis and had created a rhythm that worked perfectly, thanks largely to her.

  On September 8, 1962, Robin died quietly. He was twenty-nine.

  As Morgan had feared, Robin’s death made Bob remote. Frozen in sorrow, he became impatient with Morgan’s infirmities, shouting him down and bossing him about. But May, who had been with Robin when he died, wanted to talk openly. She and Morgan took great comfort in their shared disbelief in God or an afterlife; that Robin’s cruel death was part of an indifferent universe made it much easier to bear. Robin’s death had indeed altered the balance of affection among “we seven.” It brought Morgan closer than ever to his beloved May.

  That Christmas, perhaps sympathizing with May, Morgan reflected on “Jesus the nuisance” in his diary, narrating the story from Mary’s point of view: “Dec. 25. Thinking of Mary’s wretched life—Tidings of great joy indeed! When she never had sexual pleasure over him, he ran off to make trouble in the Temple, wandered away from home and neglected her, and finally she saw him killed. What did he bring her but sorrow? Were the younger and naturally-born children any comfort?”

  Morgan’s sage old friend Gerald Heard had told him, “As soon as a man ceases to be engrossed in the interest of sex he becomes concerned with the apprehension of death.” After his second prostate operation in 1950, Morgan had thought himself to be completely impotent, but his aged body surprised him. At eighty-tw
o he recorded an erection and orgasm, “the joyful resurgence which a lover can no longer provoke.”

  The worm that never dies must have given its last wriggle this morning. Farewell and thanks. The pleasure, isolated by loneliness and old age, was more distinguished than ever before and distinct from anything attainable through the eye ear tongue, etc. Extraordinary that it came through a little bit of muscle whose daily occupation is pissing and changes its function by being handled skillfully. Nothing starts though, without appropriate thoughts, abandoned at the right moment. It is an art not realised as one until it dies. Previously it has been aiding or impairing human relationships.

  He was equally curious about the sensation of death. He was “not the least afraid of dying, while reserving the right to be frightened at the time.” He had dreams about the dead.

  I was told the Dead were upstairs, and found them in a couple of attics, lying in seedling boxes . . . and mostly in small pieces. There was no liquefaction, and the bones darkled rather than glittered. Skulls like pickled cabbages. They seemed to know I was there, and I heard myself saying “I like the Dead,”: to a pleased murmur . . . Walking away through them was a man in a red tarboosh who might be Mohammed, but just couldn’t be, too long an interval had passed since we parted . . .

  Two close calls in his eighties sent him to the hospital with serious anemia and a small stroke. From both he took the lesson of Bob’s steadfast love. In his diary, under the heading of “Nearly Dying,” he precisely detailed his sensations, which “convinced me that death is nothing if one can approach it as such. I was just a tiny night-light, suffocated in its own wax, and on the point of expiring.”

  No pain, no fear, no thoughts of eternity, infinity, fate, love, sin, humanity, or any of the usuals. Only weakness, and too weak to be aware of anything but the weakness . . . Bob’s little finger pressed mine and pursued when it shifted. This I shall never forget.

  A stroke [at the Buckinghams’ house in Coventry.] Felt odd, and asked not to be driven to station . . . Recovering painless, except when I thrust my left arm under the pillow, found it hot, flung both arms round Bob, shrieked with pain, heard him say “Your dear Bob”—words ever to be remembered.

  Though he sometimes felt muddled, losing a train of thought or forgetting a word, his imagination soared. At the age of eighty-two he began a final short story, “Little Imber,” which he suspected might be good enough to “see the light of night after my death.” The story was set in a futuristic world where almost all women are sterile; a few virile men are sent out to stud at the vast brood-farm nunneries set up in the countryside. But two men have eyes only for each other, and they wrestle themselves into orgasm. Miraculously, the “enigmatic mass” of their intermingled sperm begins to generate some kind of procreative life. (The story reads like a cross between D. H. Lawrence and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.) Morgan pronounced himself satisfied with the uncanny result.

  The Wilkinsons left Trumpington Street, precipitating one last displacement. Morgan moved completely into King’s, which found a spartan little bedroom for him near his sitting room. Visiting him here, a triumvirate of old friends helped him to sort out practical matters—Joe Ackerley up from Putney, Jack Sprott from Nottingham or his little villa on the Norfolk coast, and William Plomer, who had taken a devoted companion with him to a cottage in Sussex. They each took on a job: Joe served as a secretary, typing up letters and paying small bills; Jack accepted the duty of executor for Morgan’s (eventual) estate; and William began gathering “autobiographicalia” for an authorized biography.

  Talking with Plomer, Morgan set out two strong precepts for the book, to be published posthumously. The preeminent point was that “M. said he wanted it made clear that H[omosexuality] ‘had worked.’” Second, Morgan told him “that none of his intimates had been eminent.” These were the story of his life, the key to his unrecorded history. Morgan valued the company of unremarkable people on equal terms with his more celebrated friends. To him the ordinary was the human, the “routine” that the historian Eamon Duffy calls “the undocumented, invisible . . . texture of the past.” The two principles were entwined for Morgan.

  I want to love a strong young man of the lower classes and be loved by him and even hurt by him. That is my ticket, and then I have wanted to write respectable novels. No wonder they have worked out rather queer. The “hurt by him” by the way ought to be written in fainter ink. Although it is on my ticket, it is not as vivid as “perfect union”, and it is not underlined by the desire to be trodden on or shat on which characterizes extreme case. In the best love making I have known there has been a sort of laughter and the most violent embrace gets softened by it. That’s to say my problem as a writer hasn’t been as awful as some’s. It is these lower class youths, rather than any special antic with them, that has bothered me. [N.B. I have never tried to turn a man into a girl, as Proust did with Albertine, for this seemed derogatory to me as a writer]

  [reread without much interest when I am almost 80]

  So the principles of a thematic Life—to be brief and strongly written—were agreed on between Morgan and William.

  It was harder and harder for anyone to remain friends with Joe. He had “disintegrated” into deafness and misanthropy. The treacherous lover-cum-deserter who had alienated Morgan from him during the war had left Joe with one precious thing—a beautiful Alsatian bitch named Queenie. She became the only female, and finally the only creature whom Joe could actually love. Over the years he became enthralled by her, and she—heartless and doggy—became his Belle Dame Sans Merci. She may have “loved him true,” but she made life with other people impossible. Her barking drowned out conversation; her anxious possessiveness over Joe made her snarl and bite. Joe had (according to Harry Daley) “endless abusive exchanges with bus conductors . . . to say nothing of neighbours complaining and police calling with warnings,” but he remained convinced that “he and his dog were the envy and admiration of the whole of Putney.”

  His love for Queenie—which he marvelously chronicled in his biography of her, My Dog Tulip—led Joe to declare, “Every one in the long run must decide for himself whether he is on the side of the human or the animal—one cannot serve both.” He wrote endless letters to newspapers, decrying the treatment of animals; traveled to friends’ houses to keep their cats company while they took a holiday; watched rats swimming in the Thames; lamented that it was unfair that wasps should get trapped indoors, or that birds should be shooed away from a mulberry tree. When Queenie died at a ripe age in 1961, Morgan paid for Joe to be sent on a long holiday to Japan to distract him from his heartbreak. (There he had one last and predictably disastrous love affair.) But Joe’s bitterness and indifference to humans troubled Morgan, and they inexorably grew apart.

  It was predictable in these circumstances that the system of “triangular correspondence” (among Plomer, Ackerley, and Sprott) should end up “weaving a pattern of remarkable complexity.” The three old friends saw one another less and less often, and the communication among them raveled over time. Both Jack and Joe drank a good deal, and William Plomer, too, retreated in his own way, becoming religious and outwardly more punctiliously conventional as he grew older.

  Seven years after the initial plan for Plomer to write the biography, Morgan wrote a letter, penned by Joe, asking Nick Furbank to undertake the project. Furbank accepted, wholly unaware that there was any previous agreement. Joe blamed the muddle on Morgan’s failing memory, but William suspected nefarious doings. He was deeply hurt at being usurped, but graciously shared his notes with the new official biographer. For his part, Morgan seemed serenely oblivious to the tug-of-war over his legacy, which played out sometimes in the shadows and sometimes in the light. The truth was that all three of Morgan’s friends were subject to the distorting conditions of having been in on the ground floor—so to speak—of the Great Man’s career. To paraphrase Jane Austen, it became impossible to discern the mercenary from the prudent motive in
the matter of Morgan’s posthumous life.

  Joe Ackerley began to feel rankled that the Buckinghams had received so much of Morgan’s money—first the house and a car, then an allowance, and now ample money set aside for Robin’s widow, and for her boys’ education. Sprott, too, had been given an allowance in the past, and he stood to gain as executor. Joe felt very put-upon. His pension from the BBC was a pittance, and both an aged aunt and his neurotic sister were entirely dependent upon him—indeed lived with him for a time in his tiny flat. So he wrote to Morgan bluntly asking for money; in the return post, Morgan sent a thousand pounds, writing it was both “easy and pleasant” to do so. But Joe rightly suspected that Morgan had not given him more because he worried Joe might drink it away. Growing desperate, Joe wrote a long and moving tribute to Morgan, planned as an obituary. But when he shopped it to The Times, he discovered he had been beaten to the prize by William Plomer. He found a place for an abbreviated draft in The Observer. Finally he homed in on his only patrimony—almost eleven hundred letters from Morgan, written from 1922 to 1966. He sold the whole lot to the University of Texas for six thousand pounds. No one knows if Morgan ever learned of this. It would have broken his heart.

  A widening gulf emerged as the friends considered the shape of Morgan’s posthumous life and reputation, and how their own sex lives might be implicated by the revelations. All his life Plomer had mastered elliptical forms. The titles of his books can be read as coded commentary on his closeted life: A Message in Code, his edition of the diary of Richard Rumbold, a military man whose misery about being homosexual led him to suicide; the post-war book of poems Borderline Ballads; his memoir titled Double Lives—referring, of course, to his expatriate identity. (Morgan cannily critiqued the book, telling William that it “would have been balanced better if it had contained more about yourself.”) Morgan’s design for the biography threatened a different kind of border.