The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  He wrote in his diary on August 4 of a “Confused dream about Mohammed, then someone else who produced w.d.”—a wet dream, “the first time this year.” But the erotic dream was a reminder of the thwarted desire that had defined their relationship, and Morgan was unsentimental—“always know that he has died.” The next day, after another dream of Mohammed, Morgan wrote in his diary, “My boy I am oppressed with you—you are dead and cannot know. I only speak to my memories when I speak your name. I don’t want you alive but to know exactly what you were like—this I can’t do—nothing extra will turn up to help me.… I tried to come near you last night—no use.”

  He now did as Ackerley’s narrator had done:

  … I reeled

  Free from sleep’s fetters

  Out of my chair

  Over to where

  I had concealed

  Certain old letters.

  Holding a taper

  Over my head,

  Thrust I aside

  Bundles of paper,

  Labelled and tied,

  Seeking my dead.

  His own bundle of papers included all the mementos and photographs he had saved. But looking at them was as dispiriting as the dreams were disappointing—“always this sober trying,” he wrote.

  He thought of a new way to seek his dead and, in order “to know exactly what you were like,” sat down to write one more letter to Mohammed, “with my mind on you and with the illusion that your mind still exists and attends.” He wrote it formally and dated the letter on the evening he began it, August 5, 1922, as if it were really to be sent.

  But, like Mabel’s papyrus to Lawrence the year before, this was a letter that was not a letter. Morgan did not write it on stationery but on the first page of a fresh notebook. He began with the usual salutation, “Dear Mohammed,” greeting a recipient who would never read it, but confided to his lost friend that he was writing a book “for you and me.”

  There was the other book he was trying to write, the Indian novel, and now this one, too, written pretending Mohammed was still alive, “although I know that a putrid scrap in the Mansourah burial ground is all that was you.” Morgan had not published a book while Mohammed was alive, but now that Mohammed was dead, and because “I am professionally a writer and want to pay you this last honour,” he was writing a book for him, though one he was not sure that anyone other than himself would see. “I write for my own comfort and to recall the past,” he told Mohammed, an echo of what he had told the Memoir Club, and what he had learned from Proust, about the uses of the past. To honor Mohammed, as his subject and as the recipient of this last gift, he gave the letter the elements of a book and did what he could to make it look like a real book, even if he were faking it.

  He wrote out a dedication in short lines that mimicked both a printed book and the poetical form of Mohammed’s last letters to him.

  To Mohammed el Adl,

  who died at Mansourah shortly

  after the 8th of May, 1922,

  aged about twenty three: of consumption;

  his mother, father, brother, and son

  died before him; his daughter has

  died since, his widow is said to

  have married again:

  and to my love for him.

  Morgan also added an epigram from A. E. Housman’s most recent book, Last Poems, published in 1922, that had touched him as Ackerley’s “Ghosts” had:

  Good-night, my lad, for nought’s eternal

  No league of ours for sure,

  Tomorrow I shall miss you less,

  And ache of heart and heaviness

  Are things that time should cure.

  Morgan wrote the letter in an extraordinarily neat hand, a clarity to each word that was very different from his often difficult to decipher “mediaeval” handwriting (Morgan himself called it “cacography”), as if this astonishingly intimate letter, part memento, part billet-doux, must be read.

  Like the novel Morgan was writing, his book for Mohammed was, for now, to remain unfinished. He wrote a number of pages, and then broke off and resumed it in November (“dead six months … you are decayed to terrible things by this time.… I do not want to prate of perfect love, only to write of you as if you are real … pretend that you are still alive”). He wrote additional parts of the letter at longer intervals, often several years, and finished it only after another trip to Egypt, more than seven years after he had begun, signing it, “Mohammed el Adl—my love, Morgan, December 27th, 1929,” a farewell also to the decade just ending. The letter was by then eighteen pages, but over time continued to grow. Morgan added a further seven pages of Mohammed’s “Words Spoken,” transcribed in 1960 from an earlier memento, and then copied out sixty-two pages of Mohammed’s letters to him from their meeting until Mohammed’s death, Mohammed’s autobiography in letters “written” in Morgan’s hand and preserving all of Mohammed’s errors of grammar and spelling. After Mohammed’s last letter, Morgan drew the kind of decoration often used in printed books to indicate a break. He added as a postscript to the letter—or as an epilogue to this “book”—the two further letters that arrived for him from Egypt after Mohammed’s death, an end to the story that Mohammed’s own letters could not tell. And then he pasted a book plate in the flyleaf: “This book belongs to E. M. FORSTER.”

  Morgan had begun when he was not certain he would ever write another book. By the time he put his finishing touches on it four decades later, “this book” was ninety-two handwritten pages, and his last.

  * * *

  The hope of his epigraph from Housman did not prove true. Morgan did not miss Mohammed less and less after beginning his letter. Writing to Masood from Edinburgh, he told him he had been going through Mohammed’s letters and that doing so had been more disturbing than he had expected. “I get so miserable yet gain no clearer vision of the past,” which had been the point of his writing to “Dear Mohammed” in the first place.

  But disheartened as he was, he continued to write his Indian novel. He soon gave his dilemma to one of his protagonists, Dr. Aziz, a young widower who looks repeatedly at a photograph of his dead wife, only to find that the more he looks, the less he sees: “She had eluded him thus, ever since he had carried her to her tomb … the very fact that we have loved the dead increases their unreality, and the more passionately we invoke them the further they recede.”

  All through the summer he had been “absolutely battered at by people”—because of the “boom in the Times” he had gone from as good as dead to alive and in demand. But, he wrote to Masood, his new fame was for the wrong reasons: “they think I am amusing without being alarming.” Declining another invitation to Garsington, he apologized to Ottoline for the “accumulation of muddle” that he must see to after his long summer absences. “I am in several other universes,” he wrote, meaning he had been to so many places recently, the “queerest” of which had been Ireland. He said nothing to her of the other universe he was inhabiting at the moment, the realm of Mohammed’s letters to which he was writing a posthumous reply.

  He shared with Florence the news that while he was still working on the novel—“terribly slowly,” he told her, as he had told everyone—he now worried that what he was writing would lack a continuity of emotion. He did not brood upon it, though, even when, one evening, he was “quite alone in the house.” His solitude was not lonely, and it seemed to inspire him. “I like being with my dead—they are so far very different from most people’s and any how they have eternal youth.”

  When Morgan added to the letter, he wrote in an odd mix of the present and the past, of “the occasional nights we have slept in one bed” and the details of the “last instants we sat together in the train at Cairo,” in particular that moment when, Morgan recalled, “you nudged me twice with your right elbow out of love.” Mohammed had been “the greatest thing in my life,” and if he were to fade into nothingness, then so might Morgan.

  To the bundle of Mohammed’s papers, he had been
able to add another memento. “This day I received my friend’s ring, sent me by his sister,” he wrote in his diary on October 10. This was the only thing of Mohammed’s he had asked for from Mohammed’s family, a ring with a dark yellow stone that Mohammed used to wear. In June, he had asked Florence to write to Egypt to request it on his behalf and, perhaps to prevent its being opened by Lily during his summer travels, he had also asked her to have it sent to her. He had not really expected to receive the ring, but when he opened the envelope from Florence he discovered the ring cocooned inside “a silk bag inside cotton wool inside a cigarette box inside a coat of pyjama-skin inside a coat of sacking.” He could hardly believe the “absurd care” with which it had been packed, each layer he unfolded bringing him no closer to the secret of Mohammed’s intentions or affections. He showed it to a local merchant and asked what kind of stone it might be. Mr. Hill hesitated, Morgan reported to Florence, and only “after due pretending not to hurt my feelings” told him it was “the kind of stone used to decorate the tops of umbrellas, and of no value! But we agreed that didn’t matter.”

  He wrote this to Florence while wearing the ring, which “just goes on to my little finger,” and even though he did not like to wear rings, he wore it once a day, “generally at night.” He also put it on occasionally when he added to his letter to Mohammed. He guarded it but was not overly sentimental about the totem or about his attachment to it. He wrote to Masood, “I know that if I lost it it would be nearer to him, because he is lost.”

  * * *

  While in Brighstone, in June, Forster thought of D. H. Lawrence, whom he had not seen since 1915 but whose works he continued to read. He asked Siegfried Sassoon whether he had a copy of Women in Love or another book by “D. H. L.” that he had missed while he was in India. Soon after, Forster wrote to D. H. L. for the first time in years. The letter missed him in Australia and, along with Seltzer’s letters about Sumner, was waiting for him when he arrived in Taos. Lawrence’s reply is dated September 20. Forster preserved it even when late in life he destroyed other correspondence. On the reverse, he wrote “1922” in his elderly hand.

  Evidently Forster had asked him a question of great importance, to which Lawrence replied, “Yes I think of you—of your saying to me, on top of the downs in Sussex—‘How do you know I’m not dead?’—Well, you can’t be dead, since here’s your script. But I think you did make a nearly deadly mistake glorifying those business people in Howards End. Business is no good.” Here was his script, but of course there had been no books to remind Lawrence of Forster, as Lawrence’s books had reminded Forster of the younger novelist. It seems Forster mentioned he was writing again.

  “Do send me anything you publish, & I’ll order Seltzer to send you two of my books which are only published here—one appearing just now.

  “Taos is a tiny place 30 miles from the railway high up—6000 ft—in the desert. I feel a great stranger, but have got used to that feeling, & prefer it to feeling ‘homely.’ After all, one is a stranger, nowhere so hopelessly as at home.”

  It was an idea with which Forster could sympathize, which is why he, like Lawrence, had spent so much of the recent months away. He might, as he had written, “like being with my dead,” but there was less to enjoy being with Lily, and so he continued to travel in the autumn too. Morgan visited the Woolves in September and was not the only guest. Joining them was T. S. Eliot.

  Chapter 14

  A SEPTEMBER WEEKEND WITH THE WOOLVES

  From London to Lewes was an easy trip by train, about an hour south from Victoria Station, and it was only a mile’s further ride by pony trap from the station to the tiny village of Rodmell, where Leonard and Virginia Woolf lived in a small house mostly hidden behind high hedges. They had bought Monk’s House after the war, in July 1919, three summers ago, and though the name of the house was redolent of a history, beginning in the fifteenth century, as a retreat for the monks of the nearby Lewes Priory, it was, despite this heritage, an “unpretending house,” Virginia wrote, “long & low, a house of many doors,” the ideal retreat from the “incessant nibble nibble” of London for two twentieth-century writers in search of a quiet to be broken only by the scratching of a nib pen or the striking of typewriter keys.

  The house, on the town’s single main street, was two stories, built of brick and flint, “very humble and unromantic,” Virginia warned a friend, in comparison to the country house, Asheham, for which they would be exchanging it. Before moving in, Virginia had wondered in her diary, “but why do I let myself imagine spaces of leisure at Monks [sic] House? I know I shall have books that must be read there too … this dressing up of the future is one of the chief sources of our happiness, I believe.”

  Monk’s House had few rooms, no electricity, and no heat or indoor plumbing. Its countervailing charms, though, included an “old chimney piece & the niches for holy water” the monks had required on either side of the fireplace, as well as expansive views across the downs to and beyond the river Ouse.

  Despite a “distinctly bad” kitchen that had only an oil stove for cooking and that did double duty for heating the bath water, the pedigree conjured a Sussex home built for isolation amid natural profusion. Virginia had felt upon first sight “profound pleasure at the size & shape & fertility & wildness of the garden”—“an infinity of fruitbearing trees,” “unexpected flowers sprouted among cabbages” and “well kept rows of peas, artichokes, potatoes”—and she was filled with rapture in the direction of the river, “the garden gate admits to the water meadows, where all nature is to be had in five minutes.” Leonard had seen it the next day and agreed. “He was pleased beyond his expectation. The truth is he has the making of a fanatical lover of that garden,” Virginia wrote. Elsewhere in England there might be “very good” country with “mystic mounds & tombs of prehistoric kings,” Leonard thought. But everywhere else lacked the distinctive character and atmosphere of the Sussex countryside, he wrote to Virginia not long after their wedding, when they first thought of buying a house.

  When, a few years later, Lytton Strachey was buying a country house, he became frustrated that the seller was fighting him penny by penny into a price he feared was too high. “Still I advised the leap, as I always advise leaps,” Virginia wrote in her diary. In 1919, they had leapt at Monk’s House.

  How “ironical” it was to find the “so savagely anti-clerical” Leonard in a house for monks. And, to some, how appalling: Leonard, “a born writer and a born gardener,” was also Jewish. “As soon as a Jew has enough money to buy a place in the country he always chooses one that is called the Priory, Abbey, Minster, Chantry,” the Baron de Charlus says in Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah.

  But the name “Monk’s House,” it turned out, was entirely a snare. It was a realtor’s invention, “quite fraudulent,” used for the first time when the house was advertised for sale the summer the Woolves bought it, as Leonard, usually the most careful of businessmen and the most meticulous of record keepers, discovered almost five decades later. He was then in his eighties, still very much in residence, and writing the fourth volume of his autobiography. The house had been expanded and modernized in stages, as Virginia’s income from writing had increased book by book, and then again many times during the almost three decades he lived there alone after her death. In the more than two hundred years of its history before he and Virginia bought it for £700, no monks, but rather a carpenter and a miller and their relations, had ever retreated to its plain rooms. The house had been known as “The Cleers,” for one of the three families that lived there.

  * * *

  On the side away from the meadows, Monk’s House abutted the local church, its school, and its graveyard. The church bell’s chiming of the hour so close by brought its own punctual frustration—as did the noisy interruption of children on their way to and from the church school or singing. These sounds found their way into Jacob’s Room. One character is a painter, who, “loving children,” is nevertheless “exasperated by t
he noise” of one child calling to another outside his studio as he “picked nervously at the dark little coils on his palette.” Noise had been a worry, too, when she and Leonard had been thinking of moving to Hogarth House, in Richmond. “We walked to Hogarth this afternoon, to see if the noise of schoolchildren is really a drawback,” Virginia had written of their inspection, relieved to find it would really “only affect Suffield,” the other half of the early-eighteenth-century residence from which the two adjoined houses had been divided.

  In such “rather shabby, but very easy surroundings, the members of Bloomsbury gathered to eat and talk,” Quentin Bell, Virginia’s nephew and her biographer, remembered decades later of homes like Monk’s and Hogarth House. “I don’t think they needed much else to amuse them.” In 1922, Virginia and Leonard were hosts at Monk’s House to many more guests than usual—the “most sociable summer we’ve ever had,” Virginia wrote in her diary, the contrast with the summer of 1921 stark and refreshing.

  They ended their London “season,” at the end of July, with Rodmell “summers” running from August into autumn and the first week of October. “What is the sense of coming to London in September?” Virginia wrote to a friend trying to arrange a visit. “You must know that the Woolves aren’t there then. How could we be? Why should we be? And then you pretend to expect to see us.” Why should they be, when every year, as Leonard put it, “Sept. is so magnificent here,” and he could spend nearly every afternoon in the garden.