“You see, I too have no news,” he wrote to his friend Forrest Reid in February 1921. It was a familiar refrain. Reid, a Belfast writer a few years older than Forster (and consistently prolific) had tried again to fortify Forster, whom he regarded as a master, and certainly superior to himself. Forster replied, “As you say, I shall go [on] some long and fantastic journey; but we do not yet know whither or when. I am so sad at the bottom of my mind—but I’ve told you this before and it’s useless saddening a letter.”
Wither or when—wherever he must go must be far from Weybridge, the hideous “sububurban” [sic] town so near London and yet so far, where he and Lily lived. The house he shared with his mother there was “a little builder’s house,” as undistinguished as its setting could require, “very fully over furnished” with the relics of Lily’s long life. She would be seventy-seven in January 1922, though Morgan would not be at home to celebrate with her, and she had been a widow for more than four decades. In the house’s favor was the fact that it was a freehold and, though small, was for that reason “easy to run,” since Morgan and Lily had two maids, Ruth and Agnes, and there was only one other inhabitant, a cat, Verouka, who was as placid and as overstuffed as the house he shared with the two servants and his two masters. “The house is littered with manuscripts,” Morgan wrote a friend, “to the great discomfort of every one except the kitten,” who moved from the piles of papers to the backs of chairs, leaping from one to the other with increasing levels of clawful enthusiasm, “until its destructions … [are] so appalling that I have to play a chord on the piano. The chord of C is enough. It stops in the middle of a bound and slinks under a book case, no more to be seen.”
The piles of manuscripts were evidence to Morgan of a shallow prodigality he despised in himself. He wrote sixty-eight articles in 1919–20 alone and the number depressed him. His situation and his prospects were much like T. S. Eliot’s. “I am happiest when busy,” Forster wrote in his diary. “How fatuous!… Always working never creating.” Too sensitive, he thought, to both praise and blame, he worried he had failed himself and was “just the aimiable [sic] journalist—who can’t even write as soon as he looks into his own mind.” He was prolific, but to no meaningful or satisfying end, a distraction from the work he ought to be doing—until it was too obvious to him that it was no distraction at all from his larger failure.
One of his 1919 articles was a review of Virginia’s second novel, Night and Day. Not long after the book was published that autumn, Morgan visited Virginia and Leonard at Hogarth House. Virginia was preoccupied by some of Morgan’s guarded criticisms of the book. Forster, attentive to Virginia’s brilliance on the one hand and to her insecurity on the other, alleviated her worry about what was otherwise a very favorable review by offering additional praise and a fuller explanation of what he’d meant to convey about the importance of her overall achievement. He wanted to encourage her; he knew how fragile a writer’s ego, and creative spark, could be. As they walked together along the Thames for an hour after dinner, they talked “very easily,” Virginia noted in her diary, “the proof being that we (I anyhow) did not mind silences.” In between silences, Morgan confided to her that he was “in trouble with a novel of his own.” He was “fingering the keys but only producing discords so far,” she wrote.
This was the “Indian M.S.” he had begun before the war. He had written seventy-five pages then—and had not added to them. A few months before his November 1919 dinner at Hogarth House he wrote the poet Siegfried Sassoon, “While trying to write my novel, I wanted to scream aloud like a maniac, and it is not in such a mood that one’s noblest work is penned.” After a while he was no longer even trying, and wrote more articles instead.
Shortly after writing Reid in February 1921, Forster received a providential cable that offered a reprieve from his armchair life. He was summoned by the Maharaja of Dewas, an old friend, to “go for six months and be a Prime Minister or something.” The request, to step in for another Englishman, Colonel Leslie, an aide who would be on leave, fulfilled Reid’s prophecy. The whither and when of Morgan’s long and fantastic journey became clear, but not what he would do there or, really, why he should bother to go. The maharaja wrote to Morgan in an infectious burst of childlike enthusiasm to see him once again, yet it was as fantastical that the maharaja would ask Morgan of all people to be the substitute as it was for Morgan to say yes. Morgan, accepting with an anxious sense of a last chance at a grand, if vague, adventure, rushed to “get a passport and passage” and left within two weeks, at the beginning of March. He was going away to serve a cause, as he had done in going to Alexandria, and once again hoping to find a camaraderie, and a purpose, missing from his constricted domestic life. He also hoped to summon, through an engagement with the outside world, the drive he had once felt for writing fiction.
Still, at least to those who’d known him the longest, the university friends he’d met at Cambridge who formed the nucleus of the amorphous Bloomsbury set, it seemed that at forty-two Forster was simply running away from home.
“Morgan goes to India, & I think for ever,” Virginia wrote in her diary of his hasty departure. “He will become a mystic, sit by the roadside, & forget Europe, which I think he half despises.” When she heard the surprising news from Bob Trevelyan, one of Forster’s companions on his first trip to India in 1911–12, that Forster was leaving England in a few days, and without a farewell, she thought “Trevy” made it “all seem very reasonable & desirable”—but also very clear that it wasn’t only Europe Morgan half despised, but his life at Weybridge. It would be, Trevy told her, “just the thing for him—a relief after his … well, his mother is trying sometimes—very fond of him, of course; devoted to him & he…”
The ellipses are Woolf’s, and in trying, as she often did in her diary, to capture the rhythms and curlicues of a person’s way of talking, she suggested a trailing off on Trevy’s part into a knowing silence. For Virginia Woolf rarely abbreviated gossip, savoring, exaggerating, or even inventing detail rather than eliding anything of real or imaginary substance from an account, in conversation or in her diary, of what she had been told, in confidence or otherwise. She added without self-awareness, “This is in the usual Bob style, hinting little defects & mysteries with one corner of his mouth, praising with the other.” Their shared innuendo was one Morgan might have echoed, acknowledging as he did to himself what his friends saw plainly: in still living with Lily, he was “too submissive and deferential,” the very words Morgan used when thinking back, at the age of eighty, on his mother and her unwonted influence on his life. Lily, like the mother in his autobiographical The Longest Journey, “was dignified and reticent, and pathos, like tattle, was disgusting to her. She was afraid of intimacy, in case it led to confidences and tears, and so all her life she held her son at a little distance.” In life, the distance was carefully managed on both sides. Morgan wrote in his diary of a morning when he “broke down at breakfast—very unwise as it puts me into mother’s power. She is very sweet but it is never safe to be seen in pieces.” In The Longest Journey, Morgan consigned Mrs. Elliot, like Lily a young widow with a son, to an early death, when her son is fifteen. Lily, whatever the fate of her fictional counterpart, lived until Morgan was sixty-six.
Morgan could no more acknowledge aloud that the maharaja’s invitation had presented itself as a fortuitous call away from his mother’s dominance than Virginia Woolf or Trevy could. Having noticed long before that “the sudden business of my life only makes her feel the emptiness of her own,” he left his escape to stand as a kind of unspoken reprimand to Lily, who was angered by his sudden departure and whose “naughtiness” at being abandoned marred the usual studied calm of their close quarters in the days before he sailed.
But he had gone farther to find less satisfaction. His first trip to India had inspired the pages he abandoned within a couple of years. The vastness of India had, on his trip a decade before, made him “careless of this suburban life.” He had hoped i
t would again. But in Dewas he was doing a job he was unprepared for, and one he knew almost immediately upon arrival that he was unsuited for. It had been willful blindness that an administrative job might be right for him. Or any job at all.
He was “treated with great kindness by” the maharaja—“H.H.,” as he was called, short for His Highness—but employment as a so-called private secretary was an even starker reminder of his failure to write than being at home, not writing, had been. He had come in order to revive his novel, and now he had more leisure than ever to do so. One of his proposed tasks was to read aloud once a day to H.H.—but in practice he did this only once a month at best. He started a literary society, to be focused on “noble writings of the past and present,” but attendance at the Wednesday meetings was “slight and the enthusiasm slighter.” The solicitous H.H. was undemanding of little more than Morgan’s companionship at his own royal whim, and the court was overrun with underlings and servants (and spies) who better understood its mysterious operations in any case. Morgan had more spacious quarters than Weybridge afforded—a suite, “decently furnished in the European style,” including a bedroom, sitting room, anteroom, bathroom, and veranda. Here was room to write in, if he could set himself to write more than the voluminous correspondence he built up with Lily, his aunt Laura, and various friends. Instead he spent evenings looking at the little pile of his abandoned pages, feeling “only distaste and despair.”
Forster tried, from a sense of duty, to impose some order in Colonel Leslie’s absence, the once acclaimed novelist now immersed in trying to stabilize the state’s catastrophic finances, and occupied with mundane tasks, overseeing the palace gardens and garages as well as the “electric house” and power supply. But Leslie planned to return, and Morgan would shortly have to decide what to do, though he was constitutionally unable to make wise decisions in circumstances like this. His impulsive leap to take the job in Dewas had been a great error, and he recoiled from further action, sapped by the heat and the mosquitoes, and bound as he was by ties of affection and obligation to H.H. Shortly became months.
“Perhaps it is the heat, but I feel so stupid, almost senile,” he confided to a friend. “I cannot concentrate and I cannot remember.” He was lonelier than ever. “The very fact that I have friends will be absent from my mind for hours.”
It was hardly surprising that his job, such as it was, “does not use in me what there is to use,” as he put it. But it was also true that he was not using in himself what there was to use, and had not for many years. “My Indian M.S. is with me,” he wrote to a friend, “but I dare not open it, and I have even lost the desire and the capacity for journalism. I read very little. In fact I think I’m losing more ground.”
The reacquaintance with India that he thought was necessary had not been a key to renewal of work on his novel; in fact, it had the opposite effect. He was disappointed to find that in Dewas the “silliness of Indian life is presented to me in too large a beaker.” The pages he’d written “seemed to wilt and go dead,” almost as if they, too, had been undone by the humidity. He ultimately decided he had “struck a dull piece of India,” where the people were “unattractive for the most part” and even spiritual beauty was “mainly confined to H.H.”
One night in August 1921, amid the cacophony of an elaborate religious festival marking the birthday of Lord Krishna, Morgan had a bad dream. Because he had wanted to be closer to the celebrations, and to have a better view, he had moved from his usual suite into rooms in the Old Palace, where among other inconveniences shoes were prohibited. In the dream, Morgan was at home in Weybridge, with his cat, Verouka. “I thought I had shown him a mechanical doll that frightened him so that he was mad and raced round and round in a room overhead,” he recounted in a letter. Morgan awakened, relieved to discover the sound was really the rhythmic noise made by the steam engine that had been brought in at extravagant cost to run the special electric lights required for the festivities.
At home, the room overhead was the attic, where Morgan went to write. Morgan was the frightened one and had been racing round and round in circles in a room overhead for years.
* * *
In his birthday retrospective on the year 1921, he wrote, “how unsuitable were my wanderings at Dewas, where everyone laughed at my incompetence.” He had been defeated by yet another sinister year. “My desire for self-expression has slackened along every line,” he wrote, looking inward without vanity but also without hope. It was a bleak encapsulation of exhaustion at middle age but also a lapsed novelist’s lament for all the lines he had not written.
In the early pages of the long-stalled fragment, there was a description of one of his Indian characters, who in thinking about the British is frustrated that he “felt caught in their meshes.” The character, “Dr Aziz,” knows that his life is shaped by their demands rather than by his own will. Morgan understood the trap on a domestic scale, and had given Aziz his own dilemma. Weybridge was Lily’s domain, Morgan was in her power there, and as his protagonist did he wanted “to escape from the net.” For Aziz, this would mean leaving British India. Morgan had left Weybridge but had not escaped at all. The seventy-five pages of his Indian manuscript were the meshes in which Morgan was caught.
“Slowness and apathy increase,” he wrote in his birthday entry. “I can’t go on any more here.” He had not gone “for ever,” as Virginia had perhaps fancifully believed. He had not become a mystic. He had also not become a novelist at work again. The next escape was to go home. He would sail on January 14, 1922.
* * *
Life with Lily at Weybridge had been a retreat from the social engagement of his years at Cambridge and a too early abandonment of the possibility of an independent life and romantic companionship. His desires were homosexual, and the promise of sexual satisfaction and emotional contentment seemed unattainable. Once again isolated in the suburbs after the war, he had worried that in middle age, “My mind is now obsessed by sexual fancies and hopes: wasting much time.” During his most prolific years, beginning long before he lost his virginity, he had begun to write “indecent” stories “to excite myself.” It was stimulating to write them and to be able to fantasize about “indecent acts” when a partner, casual or otherwise, was unobtainable. Because the impulse behind the stories had nothing to do with artistic expression, he felt a thrill in doing “something positively dangerous” to his career as a novelist, then in full flight. That he was not ashamed of the stories or of his desires did not mitigate what seemed to be his fear—that the discovery of the cache of stories (as he was also to fear the discovery of his diary), or any kind of open discussion of his sexuality, would be fatal to domestic peace or even to his career, though anything short of a public scandal would mean a vast personal relief. Yet it turned out that the danger was somewhat different. The freedom with which he wrote his private stories convinced him of the sterility of the writing he was doing for publication. In 1910, the same year that Howards End was published, he fell in love with Syed Ross Masood, an Indian who had come to England to study. Morgan had been recommended as a tutor in Latin. The year was a watershed. Forster’s popularity reached its height, and at the peak of his literary success, a few days before his thirty-second birthday, he found the courage to confess his feelings to Masood. They were sitting together talking. The conversation was inconsequential. Masood praised Morgan’s “insight into Oriental things.” Morgan, impatient with the formulaic emptiness of the compliment and overwhelmed by suppressed emotion, spoke without forethought. “I could bear no more: He answered ‘I know.’” Masood was less surprised to hear the truth than Morgan was to hear himself express it.
Morgan sent Masood a note the next day, but by New Year’s Eve, he wrote in his diary, “Non respondit, and though I do believe it is all right, my breast burns suddenly & I have felt ill.” Morgan had awaited his birthday, and a response from Masood, burdened with the knowledge that the inauspicious silence meant what he knew it meant, even as he tried t
o convince himself otherwise. Shortly after the new year, Masood replied. He loved Morgan deeply, but as an affectionate friend. The fame that Howards End brought him, and Masood’s demurral, marked the beginning of an era of decline and withdrawal that was to reach its nadir in India.
Perhaps inevitably, Forster after Howards End felt “weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat—the love of men for women & vice versa.” Four novels had exhausted that well. But it was not only a question of the subject conventionally open to him. More insidious was the creative self-doubt—and personal despair—that arose from the fact that anything related to the sexual love of one person for another, “men for women & vice versa,” but also the love of men for men, was unknown to him. After four novels, and after his erotic stories, he did not feel able to write in the abstract any longer. The real Morgan Forster wasn’t to be found in the novels but in the “indecent thoughts and acts” that those novels couldn’t address openly—and that aside from some aborted fumblings, long before, he had never experienced. After the publication of Howards End, and only ten days before he spoke to Masood, he wrote in his diary, “Desire for a book.” It was a sexual longing, and one destined to remain as unfulfilled as his desire for romantic and sexual companionship.
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