The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  The pile of erotic stories grew. Maurice had arisen from a similar impulse, in the hope that in the novel he would connect “lustful thoughts and glances” with “the personal,” as he longed to do in life and as he had seen other men do it. The inspiration for Maurice, which Forster had written quickly, had been a September 1913 visit with the writer Edward Carpenter, “a believer in the Love of Comrades, whom he sometimes called Uranians.” Carpenter, then sixty-nine, lived openly with his working-class companion George Merrill, more than two decades younger. Their intimacy was a revelation to Forster, as was the casual ease with which Merrill had touched Morgan’s backside, “gently and just above the buttocks. I believe he touched most people’s,” Morgan recalled a half century later. The sensation Morgan felt was unusual and intense, “as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving my thoughts.”

  But nothing of what he had seen, or imagined in his stories or in the novel that he knew was unpublishable, had ever happened to him.

  * * *

  That had changed in Alexandria. He had arrived near the end of 1915 and, almost a year later, was able to confide the news that on October 15, 1916, “for the first time in my life I parted with respectability”—the phrase with which he reported the information to his friend Florence Barger—on a beach, with a soldier. The hurried encounter had left him feeling “curiously sad,” and he thought he would have felt differently, more exultant, if he had taken “the step … at the usual age.”

  He had become even more attuned to male beauty because there was so much of it to see in Alexandria, where his work was to “do the motherly to Tommies,” the British soldiers there, and where he had been exposed to a parade of them, “all these young gods … the beauty of a crest of a wave.” Soon after arriving in Alexandria he had also noticed a tram conductor working on a line he used frequently. Forster had looked up as the young Egyptian man walked past him and was attracted. “Nice,” he remembered thinking. “That boy has some African-Negro blood,” Forster and a friend agreed. Over the course of the next year, Forster and the young man had spoken intermittently as Forster continued to ride the route. He was soon waiting as long as three-quarters of an hour for the conductor to appear at the terminus at the end of a shift. The young man was so beautiful, “in the prime of … physical glory,” that for a long time Morgan did not want to “intervene or speak,” but only to look at him. The flirtatious dance had culminated, in the late spring of 1917, in what Morgan knew was “one great piece of good luck—the sort of thing that comes to most men as a matter of course when they are 18 or 20”—the conductor had agreed to meet Morgan, in a public garden on the outskirts of town. They still did not know each other’s names. The conductor’s, he’d soon learn, was Mohammed el Adl.

  At first Morgan had been drawn by differences in “age, race, rank.” As they had become better acquainted, he had discovered he had “hit on things of objective worth” in Mohammed, including “romantic curiosity … on both sides.” Eventually they had “adventures” in each other’s rooms; but love and proximity, love and reciprocated desire, seemed destined never to mix for Morgan. First there had been the misconnection with Masood. Mohammed went further but responded to Morgan’s sexual overtures from “a gracious generosity rather than upon a nature exactly like mine,” Morgan wrote Florence Barger. Morgan recorded Mohammed’s remark, “my damned prick always stands up whoever it is, it means nothing,” as no more than his own self-abnegating due, and though he had no choice but to believe the explanation, Morgan had worked on Mohammed’s somewhat playacted inhibitions for many fruitless months. Eventually, he found that a “sudden placidness” was more effective than anything more aggressive. “R has been parted with,” Morgan wrote to Florence in October 1917—R meaning respectability—“I am so happy—not for the actual pleasure but because the last barrier has fallen.” Morgan’s tactics apart, Mohammed was leaving Alexandria in a few days for Cairo, for war work, at double his present pay, that Morgan had arranged. Mohammed may simply have been aware of his debt to his friend.

  * * *

  Morgan claimed he had been content with caresses: the ruffling of each other’s hair; the feeling of Mohammed’s arm under his head as they lay on Morgan’s bed after a game of chess more vivid in his memory than their first kiss; his fondling of Mohammed’s thighs when, after an obligatory “gruff demur,” the younger man would loosen his linen underclothes “and lean back a little.” But he was deeply hurt by the limits of their physical relationship and did his best to ignore Mohammed’s “frequent coldness.” They saw each other occasionally when Mohammed could visit Alexandria. Mohammed married in the autumn of 1918, and not long afterward it was time for Morgan to return to Weybridge. He continued to correspond with Mohammed, helped him financially as much as he could, and intervened as far as he was able when Mohammed was imprisoned on trumped-up charges.

  “If the letters cease it will only mean one thing—that I have died,” Mohammed told him. When Mohammed had a son, he gave him an Egyptian name, but called him Morgan.

  * * *

  As soon as Morgan made arrangements to leave for Dewas, in 1921, he wrote to Mohammed with the news, hoping that they would be able to “snatch a meeting” as his ship passed through Port Said. In fact, the opportunity to take a sea route through Egypt was likely one of the incentives to accept the maharaja’s offer. Now, as 1922 began and he planned his journey back, he looked forward to another, longer visit with Mohammed.

  During Morgan’s stop at Port Said on the way out in 1921, Mohammed had been so eager to see his friend, he had pushed his way on board and escorted him to land. They had “four perfect hours together,” having sex on a deserted beach, despite the cold, under a vaporous cover of fog, Mohammed in a “great coat and blue knitted gloves with which he repeatedly clasped my hands, saying how are you friend, how are you.” The echo of the repeated question sustained Morgan for nearly a year. Now Morgan anticipated a month rather than four hours, and in order to prolong his stay he chose a sea voyage for the second leg rather than a quicker, more expensive trip that would have taken him across Europe by land. That would bring him home too soon. He could save money, a convenient excuse he used in explaining his delay to Lily, and indulge his heart.

  * * *

  A couple of days after his birthday, Morgan wrote his mother with New Year’s greetings for 1922 and an account of the elaborate birthday celebration that had been given to him at Hyderabad, where he was visiting with Masood before he was to sail from Bombay. Amid the public festivities for New Year’s Day, there was a toast to Morgan’s “health, which was drunk in sherbet flavoured with rose water.” But his “flowery day” did not end there, he told Lily. His bedroom had been festooned “like a bridal chamber,” he wrote, and was filled with flowering shrubs pinned to the curtains, vases full of roses on the dressing table, and ropes of rose leaves around the bed. More rose leaves were strewn on it, this last decoration more beautiful than practical, as they ended up “feeling rather like crumbs in the night.” He emphasized to Lily, as he always did, his happiness. “It was roses all the way,” he wrote and signed his letter with another of their nicknames, “Pop.”

  It was roses all the way, except that it was not. He wrote the same day to his friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, a fellow at King’s who was also a member of the Apostles, and informed “Goldie,” too, of his sailing in two weeks. “Let us wish one another a Happy New Year,” he wrote, “though this is to prepare you for my sad and inglorious return.”

  * * *

  The last two weeks of his Indian adventure were as one with the previous nine months: disheartening. Morgan had to travel about 435 miles from Hyderabad, in the interior, to Bombay, on the western coast, from where he would set sail. On his way, he wanted to see the Ajanta caves, a group of thirty cliffside caves, some from as early as 200–100 BC, with elaborate murals and carvings, depicting the life of the Buddha, that r
epresent the beginning of classical Indian art. The caves ringed a cliff above a tributary to a larger river. He planned to travel there on the seventh and to arrive in Bombay on the twelfth, in time for the sailing two days later.

  But Morgan didn’t make it to the caves. He fell and injured his left elbow and right wrist, badly enough that he couldn’t feed himself, no less make the walk. The caves were about twenty-five miles from the nearest train station, and the “elaborate arrangements” that had been made for the visit were now canceled. He quickly regretted his “foolish abandonment” of the plan: his decisions large and small went equally wrong.

  When, later in the 1920s, Virginia was preparing an article on Forster’s novels, she made notes to herself on what was impressive and what was lacking in his books. She copied out some lines Forster gave to one of the protagonists of his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, published in 1905: “I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it—I don’t die—I don’t fall in love,” and added, “True of M: but he has moments of vision.”

  But Morgan, as he was leaving India, felt that he had not had a moment of vision in a long time. He had missed the caves. He was passing through the world without moving it. He did some last sightseeing before sailing two days later, on the RMS Kaisar-i-Hind.

  * * *

  It had been ten months since he had seen Mohammed, and Morgan was more eager to get to Egypt again than he was to return to Weybridge. Planning his stay, he wrote his mother disingenuously but obligingly that after mid-January his address would be “C/o Messrs T. Cook Cairo, which seems nearer Mummy.” Nearer the truth, however, is that Cairo was nearer to Mohammed. Economizing on his return passage, as he had told her he would be doing, also meant he had money “for a splash in Upper Egypt” with Mohammed. Morgan was lonelier than ever in middle age—“inclined to a pot belly, a red nose, and baldness,” he soon complained. Worried that he was long since too old to “make another great friend,” he was, he had confided to Goldie, relieved that he’d “pulled in Mohammed only just before the gate shut.”

  His expectations for the visit, already high, rose further as its likelihood became more fragile. By December, Egypt, occupied by the British since 1882 and under martial law since November 1914, had come closer and closer to open rebellion. The country might be too dangerous to stop in, and he worried: “I shall be carried past not 100 yds. from my goal,” meaning Mohammed. His own “frustration & wretchedness” could hardly weigh against “the misery of an entire nation,” he knew, but it was hard work to balance his conscience against thwarted desire. Egypt, however, was under control by the time of his arrival on January 24.

  But fair political weather did not make for the triumphant reunion he hoped to have. He had worried that his arrival a day ahead of schedule would mean that Mohammed would be unable to get there in time, as he had promised. And he wasn’t there to greet the boat. A messenger gave Morgan a letter. Mohammed was too ill to make the roughly eighty-mile trip from Mansourah, the town in the Nile delta where he lived. Morgan would have to go to him.

  Only a few days into the new year, Mohammed had suffered a recurrence of his tuberculosis first diagnosed years before. Once in Mansourah, Morgan knew immediately he would “not see him alive again.” Mohammed had all the worst symptoms of consumption: “haemorrage, night-sweats, exhaustion—he cannot live,” Morgan wrote to Masood. The local doctor was “a robber and probably a quack” and in the interest of higher fees had refused to make the proper diagnosis, instead inoculating Mohammed pointlessly and pumping “tubes of useless stuff into his poor little arm.” Mohammed rallied a bit after Morgan’s arrival, but even so was mostly too weak to walk far.

  Shocked by Mohammed’s condition, Morgan thought, initially, that he must leave Egypt as quickly as possible. He could not simply “sit attempting to nurse in Mansourah,” he told Masood. Mohammed had become “irritable and hard—it is an unhappy time for me in the local daily sense.” Morgan recognized, though, that his money could be of use both now and in the future, and he made arrangements through friends who might pay out monthly allowances for Mohammed on Morgan’s behalf.

  But two days with Mohammed softened Morgan’s resolve. Indecision, usually Morgan’s weakness, here became a strength. Illness had also made Mohammed “sombre and beautiful, no longer responsive, which last I have to face.” The end might be very soon, and if Mohammed’s case were as dire as it seemed, Morgan would not be a nurse but a final companion, his own desires, in every sense, set aside.

  “I am very ill so my roughness must be excused,” Mohammed said quietly one day. He, too, had been making plans for Morgan’s arrival, and Morgan was moved by the fact that Mohammed, who for all the bravado of his greeting the year before was usually unsentimental, had been looking forward to seeing him, too. Morgan would go to Alexandria to visit friends there and would return to Mansourah for another week or two with Mohammed before then leaving for England.

  Morgan became nurse, concierge, and companion, able to attend to practical details, a happy contrast, amid unhappy events, to the incompetence he had felt at Dewas. Mohammed’s illness had been exacerbated by his doctor’s inept treatment and by unsanitary living conditions. Morgan was able to pay for a visit to a Cairo specialist, a trip of about seventy-five miles that would otherwise have been beyond el Adl. They went in early February, and it was as he feared. “The leading doctor in Cairo confirms my worst suspicions—no shadow of hope, only doesn’t know whether it will be weeks or months.” Morgan did not want Mohammed to return to Mansourah, and certainly did not want to go there himself. Now that they were in Cairo, perhaps at least part of the “splash” might still be possible. Morgan found them a comfortable home in the “rheumatic and consumptive resort” of Helouan, about twenty miles south of Cairo on the Nile, opposite the ruins of Memphis.

  In the end he was in Egypt, and with Mohammed, for almost the full month he had anticipated.

  * * *

  In ancient times the town was known as Ain-An, its sacred therapeutic springs legendary in the time of the pharaohs. Morgan and Mohammed lived together but not alone: they lived with Mohammed’s wife and child and others of Mohammed’s extended family.

  Mohammed briefly rallied; “perked up by this good desert air, he announced he should get well.” The town was less expensive than Morgan had thought, and together they were “oddly tranquil considering the circumstances.” Some days were even “merry and happy.”

  Though he had capital enough to live on, Morgan was always worried about money, particularly since royalties from his books were now negligible. Only sixty-six copies of A Room with a View had been sold in 1921; and only thirty-two of Howards End. Still, he was enormously wealthy by Mohammed’s, and Egyptian, standards. “How wonderful money is, I said to myself, when the mid-day train drew up,” he wrote, even though husbanding his resources was as much on his mind in Egypt as it was in Weybridge, where he had occasionally been in debt to his mother for his yearly contribution to the housekeeping. “I wish I knew how long he would live, since I could spread my spare cash accordingly,” he wrote to Florence. He thought that once he was back in England, he could continue to support Mohammed for about six months “without difficulty.”

  Morgan’s sadness at Mohammed’s condition was complicated by his disappointment that they would not have sex. In Dewas, sex had been one of the very few bright spots, though he was not pleased in an unmixed way. H.H. had provided him with a concubine. He was uneasy about the boy at first, though H.H. was frank with him about the management of the relationship with Kanaya: he must not take the passive role, for this would lead to shame at court if it were talked about, as it inevitably would be, H.H. knew. For Morgan, this was a time, he was to remember, of “very violent” sexual desire. Only a few years later he was to look back and note a “great loss of sexual power” in only a relatively short period of time. The intensity of his desire for the concubine surprised Morgan and saddened him. It did no
t seem comradely, in the Carpenter way, to have a concubine at his disposal, or simply to make use of him with what Morgan took to be cruelty. He remained uneasy that he had found the encounters deeply satisfying, and he looked forward to sex with Mohammed, perhaps partly to redeem the fact that their own sexual relationship had been satisfying to neither of them, and had never been consummated as Morgan had hoped it would be.

  But the tuberculosis had apparently left Mohammed impotent, or he “rather believed himself to be,” as Morgan put it, so that it amounted to the same thing. “I had been looking forward for months,” he admitted to Florence. But he was distracted from Mohammed’s lack of interest, at least briefly. A “half hour’s stroll along the sea front solved one of my difficulties,” he told Masood. He had, to his own, and Mohammed’s, relief, “parted with r.—!” he wrote Florence. The phrase was no longer code for virginity itself. Every encounter was a delightful and newsworthy parting from respectability.

  Yet the two weeks they spent in Helouan were largely happy. Mohammed’s rally meant that they were able to take donkey rides in the desert “and we sit about at cafés, and the weather has turned delicious, and he is stronger and cheerful.” But Mohammed’s cough worsened as Morgan’s departure neared. He had strength enough to accompany Morgan to the port of Cairo and was determined to do so despite the fact that he was “little more than bones now.” Morgan’s ship, the SS Delta, departed on February 20. The awkwardness of their failed physical intimacy was behind them now, irrelevant, as they said good-bye for the last time. “He sat by me in the Railway carriage and said ‘My love to you, there is nothing else to say,’ which is exactly the truth,” Morgan wrote to Florence. The face of his “poor dear little fellow” was unchanged. It was still “a very nice one” despite illness. Morgan focused on that as he departed, and on the sight of Mohammed, in a yellow velvet cap, his body folded up “as only an Oriental can, so that his intelligent beautiful face seems to be resting on a pyramid of clothes.” At the last instant Mohammed nudged Morgan twice with his right elbow, “out of love.”