A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (16 page)

Morgan romanticized his new friend; in Masood he thought he had found the perfect embodiment of his belief in the primacy of human warmth. On Christmas Eve 1906 he wrote in his diary, “Masood gives up duties for friends—which is civilisation. Though he remarks—‘Hence the confusion in Oriental states. To them personal relations come first.’” The personal relations between Morgan and Masood remained chaste, if unorthodox. Not much Latin got learned during their tutoring sessions. When Masood got bored—which was often—he would pick Morgan up, turn him upside down, and tickle him. When Masood went up to Oxford, Morgan visited him, and returned to Weybridge with a hookah, but without his cap, which Masood had “borrowed” without consultation.

Their friendship seemed to achieve an unprecedented intimacy almost immediately. In correspondence Morgan called Masood “My dear boy” while Masood returned magisterially “My dearest Forster.” His proportions were extravagant; after a short interruption in correspondence, he began a letter—“Centuries may pass, years may turn into 2000 centuries, and you never hear from me, and you are not to think that the great affection that I feel for you has in any way diminished.” Masood scolded Morgan for his English temperament, his way of carefully “measur[ing] out [his] emotions as if they were potatoes.”

The emotional whirlwind was salutary, in the end. Looking back, Forster believed that Masood “woke me up out of my suburban and academic life, showed me new horizons and a new civilization and helped me towards the understanding of a continent . . . There never was anyone like him and there never will be anyone like him.” Over the course of several years, the young man eclipsed HOM in Morgan’s imagination. For the time being, all Morgan’s emotions were below the surface. He wrote cryptically in his diary about his deepening love for Masood: “We like the like and love the unlike.” But his life remained so bifurcated that even in his private diary he divided his end-of-year insights into “inward events” and “outward events.”

The Longest Journey
was set to be published in mid-April 1907. Disgruntled by his dealings with Blackwood, Morgan had found a new publisher and better terms. (He remained with Edward Arnold for the rest of his life.) The week before the novel came out, Morgan set off on a walking tour of the Lake District, the fifth wheel to two couples—HOM and his wife, Christabel, and George and Florence Barger. Florence was George’s cousin and wife, a university graduate whose spirited support for socialism, suffrage, and women’s education made clear she planned to be her own person.

Morgan enjoyed the long treks across magnificent scenery and “pigging it” at meals. But he peeled off alone on a personal pilgrimage, following the route of rural place-names in A. E. Housman’s elegiac
A Shropshire Lad
. HOM had introduced him to these poems during their second year at King’s, and his valedictory sense of the receding friendship with HOM magnified Morgan’s romantic appreciation of both the text and the terrain. “The home-sickness and bed-sickness” in Housman’s poems, “the yearning for masculine death—all mingled with my late adolescence and turned inward upon me.” Shrewsbury he found “unspoilt and alive: a city of vigor still adjusted to its beautiful frame. Poetry—or luck—in every inch of it.” Suddenly, he read Housman’s poems as a kind of code that “concealed a personal experience” of its author: “I realized the poet must have fallen in love with a man.” Just outside of Ludlow, Morgan was seized by a desire to communicate his understanding of this hidden connection with Housman. At a rickety oak table in front of a peat fire in the Angel public house, Morgan composed a fervent letter of admiration. It was his first experiment with homosexual author worship. From Housman, silence. Much later, Morgan realized that he had not affixed a return address.

Back in Weybridge he encountered a pile of positive reviews in the newspapers. Most read
The Longest Journey
as an extension of the satirical attitude of
Where Angels Fear to Tread
. The
Times Literary Supplement
wrote, “Mr. Forster fastens himself again, like some sharp wholesome insect upon the life of the suburbs . . .” An unsigned review in the
Morning Post
faulted his spasmodic plotting: “the sudden death rate among the significant characters, exclusive of the two children . . . is 44%.” But the Cambridge friends who found themselves portrayed in the novel were not as sanguine. Lytton Strachey resented Morgan’s commercial and critical success. He described to Leonard Woolf how he had heard something “burrowing in a corner” of the London Library.

It was the Taupe . . . He’s a little changed—very bronzed and healthy-looking, and with very nearly the air of a settled establishment. His book [
Where Angels Fear to Tread
] has gone into a second edition, and he sits in Weybridge writing another, and will go on doing so all his life. He admits he’s “successful,” and recognises, in that awful taupish way of his, the degradations that that implies. But he’s of course perfectly contented. The thought of him sickens me.

He added, “The morals, the sentimentality and the melodrama [of
The Longest Journey
] are incredible, but there are even further depths of fatuity and filth.” Robert Trevelyan characteristically took it on himself to tell Morgan that his Cambridge friends had found “things in [your novel] which are very bad. They are not the only things in it that are bad, oh no, not by any means, but these . . . things are so bad that it is only common friendliness to let you know.” But criticism didn’t dent his spirits. Morgan was always hardest on himself. Once he had committed to print, he could let it go without much fretting.

With the promise of a contract for a new novel, he returned to the unfinished Lucy manuscript with a growing sense of dread at how pallid and artificial its inner life seemed to him now. “I have been looking at the ‘Lucy’ novel. I don’t know. It’s bright and sunny and I like the story. Yet I wouldn’t and I couldn’t finish it in the same style. I’m rather depressed. The question is akin to morality.”

Five years had passed since he sketched out a list of characters in an Italian notebook—

Lucy Beringer. Miss Bartlett, her cousin.
H.O.M.
Miss Lavish . . .

—but only one of them had been named after an actual person, and this was HOM. That character had disappeared in revision, and the person himself, ensconced in a middle-class life, his wife pregnant with twins, seemed to Morgan more dead than the notebook sketch he had inspired. The whole premise of a romantic novel seemed false.

The new style, if one could call it that, twinkled still, but underneath it was a hard diamond edge of disgust at the work and his pandering. It took more than a year to hammer out revisions. Morgan adopted a tone of semicomic desperation as he described his efforts. In a parody of the last line of Wordsworth’s “Strange Fits of Passion,” he wrote Robert Trevelyan, “Oh mercy to myself I cried if Lucy don’t get wed.” Writing began to feel like a kind of ventriloquism. He even appropriated Miss Bartlett’s voice to accept an invitation to visit the Trevelyans:

Sir,

I hesitate to address you but you have again confused me with my young cousin Miss Honeychurch . . . I am of very little consequence, I do not matter, living in a very quiet way as I do at Tunbridge Wells . . . I beg you therefore for her sake to remember that I am

CHARLOTTE Bartlett

In revision he retained the arc of the plot—Lucy Honeychurch’s choice between the intellectual aesthete Cecil Vyse and the impetuous romantic figure of George Emerson—but began to insert private jokes to keep himself amused. The Reverend Mr. Beebe takes down Emerson’s copy of
A Shropshire Lad
from a bookshelf and announces, “Never heard of it.” He had always planned to dedicate the novel to HOM, and he did so. But his friend need not know that this was a valedictory.

Writing the Lucy novel had become a mechanical exercise. But jolted by reading Walt Whitman’s Calamus poems, Morgan began to take Whitman’s declaration to heart: “I will escape from the sham that was proposed to me.”
He began a systematic reading of the gay canon. If he listened with a newly attuned ear, the panpipes of erotic music he had detected in Housman could be heard everywhere. He jotted down a cryptic list of names in his diary without commentary, as if someone reading over his shoulder might discern the hidden pattern. There were the authors of “Etonian meditation[s],” stories of “delicate sensitive little schoolboys” who fall hopelessly in love with older boys, but whose “devotion only ends with death.” These Edwardian novels and their writers are long forgotten: A.E.W. Clarke’s
Jaspar Tristram
, H. N. Dickinson’s
Keddy
, Howard Overing Sturgis’s
Tim
, and the schoolboy fantasies of Desmond Coke, who published under the delicious pseudonym “Belinda Blinders.” There were defenses of homosexuality by J. A. Symonds and the Victorian sage Edward Carpenter. And there were the overtly sexual poems of Whitman, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare. Slowly and tentatively, Morgan began “contriving to get in touch” with an unacknowledged body of gay literature.

In mid-January 1908 Morgan was offered a decisive opportunity to meet a homosexual author whom he might imagine as a master and mentor. Sydney Waterlow lived in Sussex near Rye, and through his wife’s family he had befriended Henry James, insofar as it was possible to move toward intimacy with that august presence. Waterlow attached himself to the Master in toadying admiration, and the old man, now approaching seventy, seemed content to bask in it.

The myth of James, contrived by his own careful hand, was well under way. Ensconced in the cool and dark of Lamb House, James had fashioned himself into not merely an elder statesman of literature and guardian of the future of the novel, but a member of the English gentry. Through his friendship with Waterlow, Morgan was invited to take Sunday tea with James, keenly aware that James was purportedly “a really first class person.” Half jocular, half eagerly sincere, he wrote to Lily and Dent about the impending occasion: “I felt all that the ordinary healthy man feels in the presence of a lord.” The austere brick house had formal gardens and pristine lawns; inside, Morgan and Waterlow stole a glimpse as they walked past the darkened study where James composed at a massive table.

The Master was sixty-six, rotund, and “effectively bald”; Morgan, tall, stammering, and shy, only twenty-seven. In
The Albany
magazine he had just published “The Celestial Omnibus”—a story of a boy who takes an ordinary
bus to heaven on a fantastic journey—and feared that James would “know better” than to like it. But he was unprepared for the confusion that their actual meeting unleashed. Morgan was introduced as a published author. But James, who was a bit deaf and unlikely to be budged from his initial impressions, somehow decided that he was meeting the young philosopher-Apostle from King’s. “Your name’s Moore,” he announced firmly, grasping Morgan’s shoulder in a proprietary grip. Nonplussed, Morgan did not clearly correct the mistake, and a cascade of other small misunderstandings ensued: Was Forster from Wakefield or Weybridge? Had James or had he not known Forster’s great-aunt?

In retrospect it was clear that James had wanted his guests to be comfortable, if only comfortable in their willingness to hear him hold forth on his opinions of the day. He had recently read Queen Victoria’s letters, and pronounced that she was “More of a man than I expected.” But the whole atmosphere of the place, and the compulsory reverence for James himself, repelled Morgan. The American transplant seemed to him to take on the worst attributes of “the English character.” There was no spontaneity, none of the kind of haphazard but reliable warmth that he had so loved in Masood, and even in HOM in his earlier days. James’s house and his person were like his novels, “disembodied” and fastidious in their emotional control.

Twenty years later, while preparing the lectures that would be collected in
Aspects of the Novel
, Morgan would single out James for particularly savage criticism, in part because an artist of such great talent seemed to him to have a moral imperative to
be human
. James’s novels were beautifully designed, he acknowledged there, but their “pattern [is] woven—at what sacrifice? Most of human life has to disappear—all fun, all rapid motion, carnality, etc., and 9/10ths of heroism. Maimed creatures can alone breathe in his pages.” Characters in James’s novels are “gutted of the common stuff” in “the interest of the pattern” their godlike author seeks to impose, and “this castrating is not in the interests of the Kingdom of Heaven” since “there is no philosophy . . . no religion (except an occasional touch of superstition), no prophecy, no benefit for the superhuman at all. It is for the sake of a particular aesthetic effect which is certainly gained, but at this heavy price.” Though he did not say it aloud, Morgan concluded privately that the source of James’s cramp was repressed homosexuality—James was “merely
declining to think about homosex, and the knowledge that he is declining throws him into the necessary fluster.”

The disappointment he felt in meeting James may have been inevitable, and it was certainly partly Morgan’s own fault. In letters to his friends and in his own diary, he had built up the encounter into something auspicious, and the consciousness of these expectations dampened any chance of finding something magical in even the lackluster humor of his own inept performance. He wrote to Lily a brief comic sketch of himself as a hapless visitor, which played a familiar score but deflected the deeper lesson. The arid atmosphere of high art in Lamb House, the fawning and the hush, repelled Morgan. This kind of authority “was not my own road.”