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

by Wendy Moffat

  Whereas Plomer found “blatant homosexuality, like other forms of blatancy, can be tired and uncivilized,” for his part Joe began to relish his new freedom as a writer. He had published the biography of Queenie with a chapter called “Liquids and Solids,” and also a novel (We Think the World of You) chronicling the peculiar story of his craven lover, his wife, and their dog. Now he began a fiercely unsympathetic autobiography, My Father and Myself, which hinged on the twin secrets of his father’s bigamy and his own homosexuality. (One version of the book began, “My father’s penis was twelve inches long”; he settled for the published version, “I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919.”)

  Both camps of friends invoked Morgan’s approval in their approach to writing about private life, and each was right, because the old man’s position veered. Like William, he felt that Joe Ackerley’s memoir was sad, and should not have been published. “How I do agree with you about Joe’s book—indeed more than agree with you . . . It is sad to leave such a recollection behind one—such a bother to write it out, I should have thought. However, he thought it worth while, and here is an addition to the literature.” Morgan gave Nick Furbank all the erotic stories, which he knew William and Jack did not like, to protect and publish them after his death.

  On June 4, 1967, at the age of seventy-one, Joe Ackerley died in his sleep. He had quit smoking with some fanfare the week before he died. Bob and May were with Morgan at the Aldeburgh Festival when they learned the news. They decided to wait until bedtime to tell Morgan, who absorbed the fact quietly. In some sense he may have felt that he had lost his friend already. The next morning, at breakfast, Morgan was very subdued and wept a little.

  He culled over his papers, amending them with little editorial comments. On the manuscript of Maurice he wrote—“Publishable. But worth it?” In his unpublished diary, he remained cheerfully disgusted by public attitudes toward sex generally and homosexuality in particular: “I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more, but sex has prevented the latter . . .” Adding, “When I am 85 how annoyed I am with Society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal. The subterfuges, the self-consciousness that might have been avoided.”

  As he grew very old, more and more Morgan seemed to be quietly suspended in his imagination, closed in by increasing deafness and a habit of woolgathering. In a tribute to Morgan on his ninetieth birthday William Plomer wrote, “Let us pretend that Morgan’s greatest novel is his life. It may have fictive elements . . . but it is stranger than fiction.” This may have been a pointed commentary on Morgan’s suppressed private life, but it was also a perceptive reading of the power of his creative will. All his life, Morgan’s imagination had preceded and instructed his bodily experience; all his life his utopian belief in the human capacity to love one another had determined the limits of the possible. Nick Furbank put it beautifully: “He believed—literally, and as more than a sentimental cliché—that the true history of the human race was the history of human affection.”

  Plomer noted the corollary, that “it seemed perfectly right for a novelist to regard living persons as characters . . . Clearly he was a novelist peopling his life, as it were, with characters, and himself living, as in a novel, in a network of relationships with them.”

  In his old age, Morgan often discussed the fate of his characters as if they had lived on in the world. In 1958, on the fiftieth anniversary of A Room with a View, he wrote that Lucy Honeychurch “must now be in her late sixties.” And her spurned fiancé, Cecil Vyse, had also reincarnated into life:

  With his integrity and intelligence he was destined for confidential work, and in 1914 he was seconded to Information or whatever the withholding of information was then entitled. I had an example of his propaganda, and a very welcome one, at Alexandria. A quiet little party was held . . . and someone wanted a little Beethoven. The hostess demurred. Hun music might compromise us. But a young officer spoke up. “No, it’s all right,” he said “a chap who knows about those things from the inside told me Beethoven’s definitely Belgian.”

  The chap in question must have been Cecil. That mixture of mischief and culture is unmistakable. Our hostess was reassured, the ban was lifted, and the Moonlight Sonata shimmered into the desert.

  Even inanimate objects had a will and a life of their own. He was not so much superstitious as willing to listen to their inner call. Hearing coins drop out of his trouser pockets, he told Furbank half-comically, half-mournfully, “When they begin to sing, it’s all over with them.”

  At eighty-five Morgan returned to the Figsbury Rings, the charmed landscape in Wiltshire that had inspired his favorite novel, The Longest Journey. The writer William Golding drove him there. As the two men picked their way up to the crest of the steep hill, Morgan’s tonsure of white hair stood up like a dandelion gone to seed. Sixty years after he had sketched the encounter with the lame shepherd boy, Morgan turned again to his diary, thinking how strange it was that just at the moment he met the shepherd boy, his future lover Bob was “almost being born.”

  It was a grey day which I do not mind in Wiltshire and we saw two blue butterflies which are everywhere else extinct. The second displayed itself, open winged and heroically large at the entrance of the inner circle . . . The rings are heroically larger than I thought—I remember them smaller and trimmer and perhaps turnipped. Their grass was tousled and sopping wet and through their wide entrancegaps Wiltshire drifted into the invisible, which was not far off and included the spire of Salisbury.

  Morgan did not confide in his host, whom he suspected would have “only caught and condensed the homosexual whiff” of the moment. But the occasion grew outward, magically, into a fantasy of him leaving his corporeal life and entering his imaginative one. He thought of Rickie Elliot’s warm and brusque brother Stephen Wonham at the end of The Longest Journey, lying on his back looking up at the night sky, with his infant daughter tucked beside him in his coat: “The butterfly was a moving glint, and I shall lie in Stephen’s arms instead of his child. How I wish the book hadn’t faults! But they do not destroy it, and the gleam, the greatness, the grass remain. I don’t want any other coffin.”

  In late May 1970, at the age of ninety-one, Morgan had a final stroke in his rooms in King’s College. Nick Furbank, who had moved into the rooms below, heard him fall and cry out. He and Mark Lancaster, who had watched the moon landing with Morgan on the tiny television, carried him to bed. Morgan’s legs would not move. To be with Bob was all his desire. Hearing that Bob could not come to fetch him for a few days, he murmured piteously about what would become of him. But Bob did take him up to Coventry; ensconced in his special bedroom at the Buckinghams, Morgan rallied and grew cheerful. Then he began to fade. In his final days he lay still and silent while May continuously held his hand. If she tried to withdraw it, he half opened an eye in remonstration. On Sunday, June 7, he died in his sleep, surrounded by his beloved family.

  The funeral service was just as he would have wished. There were no speeches and no hymns and no prayers, and very briefly—to the consternation of the undertaker and the presumed pleasure of the Indian gods—the hearse’s engine refused to start. Morgan’s ashes were scattered in the rose garden at the crematorium in Coventry.

  In his will Morgan left a thousand pounds each to May and Bob Buckingham, two thousand for Robin’s widow, Sylvia, to help raise the boys, and small bequests to several distant family members. To his bedmaker, who cleaned his rooms in King’s, he bequeathed a hundred pounds. He left money to HOM’s children and to Masood’s boys, and a hundred pounds each to Charles Lovett and Reg Palmer, who had been faithful lovers and friends. The bulk of the estate went to Jack Sprott, who survived Forster by only a short time. Thereafter, Morgan’s money and his papers went home to King’s.

  But as Morgan had feared, the revelation that he was homosexual made the Buckinghams uneasy. Christopher Isherwood took a benign view—“The poor Bucks, good souls really, are a
lways on the grope for terra firma.” They had cared for Morgan with great devotion, and Morgan had made them materially comfortable and their grandchildren secure, but they began to revise the history of “we seven” into something more conventional than it had been—domesticating Morgan into a kindly grandfather figure. After Morgan’s stroke—the moment Morgan recorded as “Your dear Bob”—Bob Buckingham told May he was shocked that Morgan had embraced him and told him of his love.

  After Morgan died, the new story hardened into a redoubtable myth. Much to the disgust of William Plomer and John Morris, the Buckinghams “reverted to the ‘beautiful friendship’ theory in the shock of the discovery in the last year of Morgan’s life that he was homosexual.” This was too much for Morris. “Had it not occurred to them, I could not bear from asking, that most of Morgan’s friends were queer? Yes, it had. But never that Morgan shared the predilection. Well, well!”

  After Bob’s death, May came to accept the possibility that her husband and Morgan had been lovers. Bob might lie to himself, but she could not. She shared her reminiscences and all her family correspondence with Nick Furbank as he wrote the authorized biography published in 1977. She gave him a free hand. To Bill Roerick, who had known them all, she defended the legitimacy of her marriage and Bob’s love. About these facts there was never any dispute.

  The terms of the will also determined access to the unpublished writings, the “great unrecorded history” of his love for men that he had so carefully preserved. There were no restrictions placed on what readers could see, but Morgan forbade any sort of mechanical reproduction of manuscript materials. From the beautiful glass box of the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin to a friend’s sitting room in Hampstead, from the cool majesty of the Huntington Library in Southern California (where readers are exiled at the lunch hour into a fragrant rose garden) to the modern hush of the Beinecke Library at Yale, and especially in the serene little room in King’s that looks out across the lawn to the great Gothic chapel, you must touch the letters and notebooks, the photographs, the ticket stub from Mohammed’s trolley car, and the baby Morgan’s wispy lock of hair. And you must take the time. Penetrating and puzzling out the difficult, dense penmanship, copying out the relevant scraps by hand, phrase by phrase, engenders a trance, a feeling of automatic writing, a fleeting fantasy of complete connection with Morgan’s remarkable mind and heart. So great and honest a writer and so humane a man, whose “defence at any last Judgement would be ‘I was trying to connect up and use all the fragments I was born with.’ ”

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  Notes

  ABBREVIATIONS FOR LETTERS AND DIARIES

  The Abinger edition of the works of E. M. Forster, published in twenty volumes between 1972 and 1988, comprises the most complete and authoritative text. Unless otherwise noted, all citations are from the Abinger edition.

  ACF:

  Alice Clara Forster

  BB:

  Bob Buckingham

  CI:

  Christopher Isherwood

  DHL:

  D. H. Lawrence

  EC:

  Edward Carpenter

  EMF:

  E. M. Forster

  FB:

  Florence Barger

  GLD:

  Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

  GW:

  Glenway Wescott

  HOM:

  Hugh Owen Meredith

  JL:

  John Lehmann

  JRA:

  J. R. Ackerley

  KCC:

  King’s College Modern Archives, Cambridge University

  LK:

  Lincoln Kirstein

  LS:

  Lytton Strachey

  MEA:

  Mohammed el Adl

  MT:

  Marianne Thornton

  PC:

  Paul Cadmus

  TEL:

  T. E. Lawrence

  VW:

  Virginia Woolf

  WP:

  William Plomer

  PROLOGUE: “START WITH THE FACT THAT HE WAS HOMOSEXUAL”

  3 “impossible not to be drawn to him”: Lehmann, In My Own Time, 120.

  4 “might have belonged to”: Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 97.

  4 “pale narrowed quizzing eyes”: Ibid.

  4 “the future of the English novel”: The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, V:185, Nov. 1, 1938. Woolf records this comment by Somerset Maugham.

  4 Auden stayed in New York: Isherwood, diary entry for Oct. 29, 1973. Quoted in “Introduction” to Christopher Isherwood, Lost Years: A Memoir, ed. Katherine Bucknell, xi.

  5 E. M. Forster, the “master”: Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 105.

  5 “Instead of trying to screw”: Isherwood, Lions and Shadows, 173–74.

  5 “possible to be friends”: Forster, A Passage to India, 5.

  5 “so shy it makes”: Spender to CI, Letters to Christopher, 57.

  6 “saner than anyone else”: Isherwood, Down There on a Visit, 175.

  6 “weariness of the only subject”: EMF, Locked Diary, June 16, 1911, KCC.

  6 With the mysterious package: Lehmann, Christopher Isherwood, 121.

  7 “took [a] young boy and”: Bachardy in Chris and Don, a film by Tina Mascara and Guido Santi, 2007.

  7 “unnerving habit of appearing”: Wright, John Lehmann: A Pagan Adventure, 236.

  7 “very affectionate and gentle”: Lehmann, Christopher Isherwood, 121.

  7 “a happy ending was imperative”: Forster, “Notes on Maurice,” in Maurice, 216.

  8 “handsome, healthy, bodily attractive”: Ibid., 209.

  8 Alec dispels the suburban nonsense: Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 127.

  8 “He knew what the call was”: Forster, Maurice, 207.

  8 “Now we shan’t be parted”: Ibid.

  8 Christopher was gleeful: Lehmann, Christopher Isherwood, 121.

  9 Only weeks before Morgan died: Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 104–6.

  9 The March visit began: Furbank, E. M. Forster, II:324; interview with Mark Lancaster, Jamestown, R.I., Feb. 24, 2007.

  9 “portraits of ladies in bonnets”: Culme-Seymour, “Memories of E. M. Forster,” in J. H. Stape, ed., E. M. Forster: Interviews and Recollections, 87.

  9 “stooped and feeble”: Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 106.

  9 wily as a “raccoon”: Interview with Don Bachardy, Santa Monica, Calif., Nov. 5, 2007.

  9 “as ‘openly gay’ as people were”: Lancaster, “Artist in Residence,” 16.

  10 “In the atmosphere of the Warhol Factory”: Mark Lancaster, correspondence with author, March 10, 2007.

  10 “What do I have to do?”: Interview with Mark Lancaster, Feb. 24, 2007.

  11 “was such a bore”: Lancaster, “Artist in Residence,” 16.

  11 “the man who comes”: Plomer in Furbank, “The Personality of E. M. Forster,” 61.

  12 “always makes me into a chatterbox”: Sassoon, Diary, July 10, 1923, in Hart-Davis, ed., Siegfried Sassoon Diaries, 61.

  12 “false and tricky”: Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 106.

  12 “startlingly shrewd look of”: Rama Rau, “Remembering E. M. Forster,” in J. H. Stape, ed., E. M. Forster: Interviews and Recollections, 133.

  12 “a baby who remembers”: Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 106.

  12 “tip a sentence”: Panter-Downes, “Kingsman,” 62.

  12 “It’s impossible to face facts”: Forster to Josie Darling, 1914, in Furbank, E. M. Forster, II:2.

  12 “I will try to decide”: Craft, “Tea in Cambridge,” in J. H. Stape, ed., E. M. Forster: Interviews and Recollections, 25.

  13 “shuffled in, asked me”: Lancaster, “Artist in Residence,” 16; interview with Mark Lancaster, Feb. 24, 2007.

  13 When Christopher first met: Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 105.

  13 “the key to the whole art
”: Ibid.

  13 “And so, one evening”: Isherwood, The Memorial, 210.

  14 “I shall spend the entire morning”: Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 104.

  14 “silly solemn old professor”: Ibid., 17.

  15 “clasping this magic volume”: Ibid., 106.

  15 His “lover and beloved,” Bob Buckingham: Lago and Furbank, eds., Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, II:112; EMF to Sprott, Oct. 4, 1932, KCC.