by Wendy Moffat
Mr. Hutchinson, too, sought refuge in allegory. He told Morgan haplessly,
“We know from the Bible about certain things, and there is the story of Adam and Eve . . . boys may do great harm to themselves.” He asked if I could identify the man again. All for vengeance, I said that I should, but he warned me against accusing strangers—if I saw anyone whom I suspected, I was to tell one of the masters quietly. “But we shall know him Sir, by this disease.” Mr. H did not reply, his long horse-shaped face was silent, he lost a great opportunity of enlightening me, for I was full of curiosity and quite cheerful . . .
The man was never identified and never found. Mr. Hutchinson even spared the boy the necessity of giving evidence to the police. But the encounter did bring home to Morgan important lessons about how shame and panic could be easily harnessed, even by a young boy, into full-blown hysteria. Forster’s novels would be perspicacious in their examination of how the public voice—what he called in A Passage to India “the herd instinct”—could do savage and irreparable harm. He would become the master of depicting a particular kind of male obtuseness, from hapless cowardice to outright malignity. And he would specialize in placing his readers in complex positions of sympathy, as indeed he had been in even at the time. The lesson of the pedophile was the lesson of telling the story to ignorant people in power, and watching them unravel and strike out in predictable ways. And it offered the inexorable instruction of estrangement. Afterward, he could no longer speak to Lily, or to anyone, about the things that touched him most deeply. The sign that he had learned this came in writing a single word in a now-lost diary. “I made an entry in my Diary <<
Only by inscribing such a concrete lie could Morgan articulate the complicated lessons of his strange encounter with panic and power. Writing the word showed that he understood how dangerous writing the truth could be, how even describing things honestly might enmesh him, too. The “<<
The episode with the pedophile effectively ended Morgan’s stint at the Eastbourne school. He came back home for an unsatisfactory resumption of his studies with Mr. Hervey at the Grange. But the lease on Rooksnest expired at the same time, and Lily decided to move to a place where she could live near a good school, and allow Morgan to go there as a day boy. So they moved to Tonbridge, where they joined many other families who took advantage of an obscure provision in the school’s charter that made such an arrangement cheaper than it might have been. Tonbridge School was a relative latecomer to the public-school tradition; it had been converted in the nineteenth century from a kind of guild academy for middle-class boys, and it had all the pretensions of a latecomer trying to prove itself worthy. There were houses and prefects and an elaborate system of sucking up to the older boys. And the place attracted a certain kind of pompous schoolmaster who felt he had to prove himself.
The best depiction of Tonbridge School as Morgan saw it is his scathing sketch of Sawston in The Longest Journey, and it is impossible to separate the sense of what the school was like from his virulent active loathing of his two years there. In middle age, Morgan shaped a delicious fantasy that he had actually been invited to supervise the destruction of a boarding school, and he lit into the project with glee. Affecting a precious accent he associated with the would-be upper-class men who attended Tonbridge, Forster addresses the audience:
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and bies: school was the unhappiest time of my life, and the worst trick it played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible. From this platform of middle age, this throne of experience, this altar of wisdom, this scaffold of character, this beacon of hope, this threshold of decay, my last words to you are: “there’s a better time coming.”
At almost exactly the same time he wrote these cathartic words, Morgan settled down to compose his Sex Diary. The miseries were more comfortably in his past.
In the present moment, Morgan was subjected to the most crude bullying of his life. One Tonbridge alumnus, when asked about Morgan in the 1950s, recalled him with un-self-conscious spite: “Forster? The writer? Yes, I remember him. A little cissy. We took it out of him, I can tell you.” There is very little concrete evidence of Morgan’s own thoughts at the time. Edmund Gosse’s letter might have applied to the young Forster: “The position of a young man so tormented is really that of a man buried alive and conscious, but deprived of speech.”
Morgan survived Tonbridge, though he felt it prepared him neither for Cambridge nor for life. He took school prizes in Latin and geography, and though he did not distinguish himself enough to earn a scholarship, he was offered entrance to King’s College in October 1897, when he was eighteen.
The young man who went off to university was not nearly so physically ugly as he imagined himself. He had reached almost six feet in height, and had long, slender hands, musical hands. He played piano with intense passion and quite well. He already had learned to use his diffidence to advantage, devising creative ways to hide in plain sight. Shy and nondescript in his habits of dress, the young Morgan fashioned a caricature of an ordinary middle-class Englishman. He looked both completely unassuming and completely correct. He was gangly, a bit stooped even in his youth, and almost chinless. As a friend, Forster was funny, whimsical, emotionally urgent, and unpredictable. Like his great creation in Howards End Mrs. Wilcox, he seemed perfectly ordinary, and yet appeared to live on a deeper plane than other mortals.
He was still almost incomprehensibly naïve about sexual matters. After the debacle at the school in Eastbourne, Morgan had tried one last time to communicate with Lily about the strange conflation of biblical and sexual knowledge he had gleaned from Mr. Hutchinson.
Learnt that there was queer stuff in Bible, and thought that “lying together” meant that a man placed his stomach against a woman’s and that it was a crisis when he warmed her—perhaps that a child was born, but of this I cannot be sure. Told my mother in the holidays that now I knew what committing adultery was. She looked worried, and said “So you understand now how dreadful it would be to mention it, especially if a gentleman was there.” Never connected warming operation with my sexual premonitions. This chance guess, that came so near to the truth, never developed and not till I was 30 did I know exactly how male and female joined.
He began to apply the lessons of his bifurcated life to his conduct in the world, at first unconsciously. A real innocence was at the heart of this sensibility. It consisted of bringing himself, and eventually his friends and his readers, into an imagined world where the limitations of behavior and the possibilities of expression were wider, more honest, and more recondite than those of the material world. Morgan taught himself how to feel by force of a fierce, obtuse innocence.
He went up to King’s green as a reed.
2
Kings and Apostles
Morgan came to Cambridge at a moment of transition for the university. Even a generation before, a boy like him would probably not have been admitted to King’s. At that time the college favored the kind of confident young man who transformed the word university into the languid drawl of varsity. The sort of “silly and idle” fellow who “takes pass-degrees, roars round football fields,” the sort of young man who in drun
ken oblivion “sits down in the middle of Hammersmith Broadway after the boat race . . .” At King’s, this kind of chap breezed in, with no questions asked, directly and almost exclusively from Eton.
For more than four hundred years Eton College had been the wellspring for King’s students. But the luster of the founder’s pious intentions had dulled over the centuries. In 1441 the king in question—Henry VI, the young son of the victor of Agincourt—established a fund to educate young men training for holy orders. The whole of the college comprised seventy souls: the number of Jesus’ disciples, according to St. Luke. Like the kneeling figures carved in stone in the college’s wondrous Gothic chapel, Henry’s acolytes proceeded in a “steady pilgrimage” from Eton, the king’s charitable school near Windsor palace, to King’s, where they remained until they married or died, then presumably on to heaven above.
But by the mid-eighteenth century this design had devolved into a system of “automatic and effortless advancement” for privileged young gentlemen. Secular, wealthy, and well-connected Etonians began to swell the college. There were no entrance exams; students had “the right to claim a degree without sitting for an examination”; and the degree, once conferred, entitled its holder to a life fellowship, so putatively all graduates, and all masters at Eton, had lifelong refuge in King’s.
By the 1880s, the medieval structure of the university had begun to give way to the social necessity of educating a crop of men to fill the needs of a rapidly growing professional class. The imperial civil service in particular had a hungry mouth. In Asia and Mesopotamia, India and Ceylon, Egypt and southern Africa, and in London, too, now a world city, professional men were needed, bright men, organized men, men with a head on their shoulders for business, hearty, clubbable, oar-pulling men. Some Kingsmen still lived by the public school ethos, with its reverence of “team work . . . and cricket”; some still believed that “firmness, self-complacency and fatuity . . . between them compose the whole armour of man.”
But within the university King’s began to earn a distinctive place, threading the needle between the demands of rigor and the call to modernity. In 1869 King’s began to require that all undergraduates sit the Tripos, the university examinations toward an honors degree, which had real intellectual bite; and King’s students disproportionately took first-class honors in classics, which Morgan had chosen for his subject. The result was a crop of graduates inclined to public service and intellectual pursuits. Kingsmen became schoolmasters and parsons, professors and lawyers, doctors or diplomats, but rarely stockbrokers or businessmen. Fewer Etonians were admitted. The college began to make room for “oddities and the crudities—people who had not enjoyed their public schools or had been to the wrong school or even to none.”
His father, Eddie, had been a Trinity man, but on the advice of family friends Morgan chose the less-rugged ethos of King’s, just next door. So King’s made room for Morgan, a suburban day boy from a middling school. Like his character Rickie Elliot in The Longest Journey, Morgan “crept cold and friendless and ignorant” from public school to university. At Michael-mas term 1897 Morgan and forty-seven other boys entered King’s for a three-year course of study. The college was small and civilized, with fewer than two hundred undergraduates and eighteen Fellows in residence. Morgan was eighteen, tall, gangly, impossibly shy, unformed, terribly underprepared, but more clever than he knew.
The atmosphere at King’s was conducive to Morgan’s growing agnosticism. King’s abolished the compulsory religious tests that other colleges retained. Mandatory attendance at chapel was relaxed; students who missed services were nevertheless obliged to sign a roster by eight in the morning, and Morgan, along with many other young men, shuffled out in slippers and dressing gowns to the Porter’s Lodge to autograph the book. In freshman year his lodgings were near the present-day Guild Hall, and daily Morgan “could be seen rushing up St. Edward’s Passage to mingle with the larger flood which surged from the College itself.”
More significantly, the college had abolished the requirement that Fellows must subscribe to the articles of faith in the Anglican Church (which had been a condition of employment at Cambridge for centuries), along with the rule of celibacy that accompanied it. The newer dons had progressive views, and under their influence the classical curriculum of Greek and Latin history, literature, and philosophy—in place since medieval times—was widened to include more modern subjects: first modern history and politics and the natural sciences, then the modern languages. But King’s continued to emphasize the teaching don, the bachelor don, the man who recognized that college life should rightly belong to the undergraduates. The teachers who made the greatest impression spiritually and intellectually on the young Morgan published very little, but they listened to young men.
To be listened to, one must first have something to say; but Morgan was too callow, too “stupefied” by Cambridge life to contribute to the conversation. He had earned a small Exhibition scholarship on the strength of his entrance exams. Socially and academically he found his first year “bewildering.” He seemed to view himself from the outside. In November 1897, after he had been in Cambridge a month, Lily requested a photograph of him in cap and gown, but he was “unsure of my clothes,” and anxious about his hair—“as I have my cap on, I don’t think my hair will matter.” Two months later he tried a new and unconvincing persona: golfing for the first time in his life, with some Tonbridge School acquaintances. In nine holes, he shot 133. The following week, he worsened his score.
For many young people, going off to university is the time when grown-ups become characters—it is possible to step away from them sufficiently to walk around them, so to speak, and ascertain or at least speculate on their motives. By practice and pretense, a young person can become a self, thinking through what he really believes and knows. So slowly Morgan became a character too, who found himself best when he was alone. Years later, he observed that “it is difficult for an inexperienced boy to . . . realise that freedom can sometimes be gained by walking out through an open door.”
In Morgan’s case, this feeling of freedom was achieved by cycling through a college gateway. Fluid movement on a bicycle gave this suburban boy his earliest sense that he had discovered the taproot of real traditions, the real England. The geography of Cambridge became a kind of psychic landscape, alternately claustrophobic and liberating. Walking or cycling in the city, Morgan squeezed through the pinched wet alleys between the stone walls of college buildings, down the narrow streets that wound to the river Cam or ended abruptly in a cul-de-sac of a college gatehouse. From these confined spaces he found himself plunged without warning into astonishing vistas—the green expanse of Parker’s Piece, Jesus Green, the Midsummer Common, or the marshland at the backs of the colleges, where the sky hung broadly like a Dutch painting, the weather scrolling across it like a film projected at high speed. Even within sight of the bridge at the back of King’s, docile cows lifted their heads from grazing to watch cyclists and students bustling by. The colleges huddled together tightly. Many turned their faces to the street, the market, and the town, but their backs were exposed to wide watermeadows that reached as far as the eye could see, with only the tiny spire of the church at Grantchester visible in the distance.
In the spring of his first year, Forster rode his bicycle out into the open countryside west of the city, alone. Near the village of Madingley he came upon a strange feature in the landscape, an abandoned open chalk pit that had sprouted a copse of pine trees. In the “shelter of the dell” he felt as if he had entered a separate magical world. At the time Morgan recorded the discovery prosaically: “Walked into old chalk pit full of young trees.” But within a decade, the sensation blossomed into a narrative: “The green bank at the entrance hid the road and the world,” and from within the circle he “could see nothing but snow-white ramparts and the evergreen foliage of the firs.”
In The Longest Journey, Morgan would step back and use what Cambridge had taught him to shape h
is younger self into the anxious, priggish character of Rickie Elliot, who retreats to the safety of this place to “tell most things about my birth and parentage and education.” And, most important, in the novel Rickie would not be alone. Morgan would populate the dell with sympathetic friends. The first third of his novel was a valentine to Cambridge.
During the long vacation that summer, Morgan went house hunting with Lily, who had no further ties to Tonbridge after he had left school there. She settled into a semidetached house in Tunbridge Wells—to Morgan a town even more stultifying than Tonbridge had been. On his return, he was delighted to move into the bosom of the college. His set of rooms on the top floor of Bodley’s Building had glorious views—from his bedroom into the symmetry of the Queen’s College gardens and from his sitting room, a long, lazy northern look at the pastures, the King’s and Clare College bridges, the meandering river, and presumably at a philosophical cow herself, who would reappear, immortal, in the first scene of The Longest Journey, as the young men lying on the carpet in front of the coal fire debate whether she is actually there or only perceived by their senses. Bodley’s was faux-Gothic, having been built in 1893; its stone matched the golden flank of the chapel, but it lacked the chapel’s damp chill. It was a hospitable place. In these rooms, for the first time in his life, Morgan discovered that he had a gift for friendship.