by Wendy Moffat
With reluctance, years later, Morgan discovered that though the event “fructified” his novel, “test[ing] the magic” was inevitably disappointing: “The Rings survived . . . the Tree remained.” But his companion on that visit, Lytton Strachey, proved to be immune to the scene’s charms. He was “not one to countenance fanciful transferences.” And during this visit to Wiltshire in the early 1920s, Morgan had cause to measure even for himself how much of the scene’s significance derived purely from his yearning imagination. On a long walk he encountered the shepherd again, recognizing him “because he would have been, and was, a mangy farm labourer, with a club foot. I felt no pleasure, no sadness, nothing at all except a passing fancy that everyone and everything I encountered was equally unreal.” Morgan said nothing to the man, nor, he remarked drily, did he “hand over his share in the royalties of The Longest Journey.”
4
“The Spark, the Darkness on the Walk”
The inchoate idea for a new novel lingered when he and Lily returned to London later that month. After months of searching, “we have got a house, too small and with no garden.” They signed a lease for fifty-five pounds per year on a semidetached house in the little village of Weybridge, which was being built up into a commuter town at the far western edge of London. A railway line meant that Waterloo Station was little more than half an hour away, and the walk from the station to the foot of the village a brisk twenty minutes through woods and country lanes. The house was “small and somewhat suburban,” he told Dent, but fortunately “not genteel.” It stood at the margin of the village’s high street, opposite an old coach inn. The little village was compact, and it absorbed the burst of Victorian development rather gracefully: the faux-Gothic church of St. James was only decades old, but nestled in an ancient churchyard. There were undeveloped woods and fields leading down to the Wey, a tributary of the Thames, where he could row Lily about on a fine day. Less than a mile away was the beautiful wetland the Chertsey Mead, alive with birdlife.
The face of the three-story brick house had an attic gable, and broad windows that looked out onto the postage-stamp-sized Monument Green. A tall marble column dedicated to the memory of a local Hanoverian patroness anchored the green. It had been transported from the notorious London neighborhood of Seven Dials to this suburban safe haven and bore “an inscription to the effect that it really pays to do good: the last line is ‘are registered in courts above.’” To Robert Trevelyan, Morgan offered a parodic sketch. To the rear, a view of “a field full of dropsical chickens.” From the parlor, the phallic monument. “The villa . . . has a beautiful brass bound door step which we are taking on from the last tenant. None of our neighbours have one.”
Like Adam in the garden, Morgan’s first act upon moving into the house was to name it. Built only three years before, it came with the grandiose designation Glendore, which was “too trying.” Instead he called it Harnham, after the watermeadows within sight of Salisbury Cathedral, and the hill to the southeast of the city—the Wilton side—from which there was a remarkable view. Thus the Forsters grafted old England onto their new suburban home. Lily might find that the name reminded her of Maimie. For Morgan, it was a secret link to the place where he had met the shepherd boy.
Harnham was not Rooksnest, but it was “quite pretty in some ways,” far roomier than their Kensington flat, and it radiated Edwardian comfort. On the ground floor were a drawing room with a piano, a dining room, and a kitchen; two large bedrooms for Morgan and Lily and a bathroom occupied the next floor; and tucked up in the attic were three small rooms—one each for Ruth Goldsmith, who had been Lily’s cook at Tunbridge Wells, and Agnes Dowland, the parlormaid, and a workroom for the nascent writer. Downstairs functioned as a purely Victorian middle-class household; upstairs, something more modern was brewing. The tiny study was Morgan’s aerie: twin windows looked out over the green and the road. He rose late in the morning, and divided each day into practicing piano and writing in the little room where he would finish the Lucy novel—which he would eventually call A Room with a View—and write five more. He would live here with Lily for the next twenty-one years.
In December 1904, a year after his first major revision of the Lucy drafts, he set aside that novel yet again, breaking off at the moment when the engagement with Cecil Vyse is put to Lucy Honeychurch in earnest. Very quickly Morgan began to sketch out a wholly new novel based on a scrap of conversation, a “sorry bit of twaddle” he had heard and remarked on during his first Italian travels in 1902, a tidbit about a disastrous marriage between a young English widow and a younger Italian man.
Where Angels Fear to Tread is a novel Henry James might have written if he’d had a sense of humor. Like the Lucy drafts, the novel was conceived as a clash of cultures between middle-class English people and ordinary Italians. Forster’s working title was “The Rescue”: Philip Herriton, lover of Italy, and his hidebound sister, Harriet, are dispatched by their formidable mother to rescue his brother’s widow, Lilia, from Signor Gino Carella, the son of a dentist in Monteriano. But Lilia’s hapless chaperone, Caroline Abbott, has utterly failed, and by the time Philip arrives Lilia has already married.
The plot unravels in unexpected ways. Mrs. Herriton’s poisonous sense of duty at first obscures the reader’s sympathy, but she turns out to be right; the marriage does make Lilia miserable. Real sorrow is the consequence. Lilia dies in childbirth. The rescue of her infant son—in fact, a kidnapping by his English relatives—ends in the baby’s accidental death. Philip breaks his arm when the carriage with the stolen baby overturns. When Gino discovers his baby has been killed, he tortures Philip by twisting his broken arm. (This was the scene that Morgan later admitted had “stirred” him erotically: “I knew not nor wondered why, and even if I had heard of Masochism I should have denied the connection.”) The British interlopers limp away from Monteriano, where they have done so much harm with such righteous intentions. At the conclusion of the novel, Philip feels transformed by his experience, and decides that he must declare his love to Caroline. But Caroline, too, has learned a lesson from the ordeal. She confides to Philip that she loves Gino, and Philip withholds his true feelings from her, in a Jamesian renunciation. In the end, it is not clear who is being rescued, or from what.
Forster composed the novel “almost with physical force”—ten short chapters in just over a month. His first readers didn’t quite know what to make of it. Aunt Laura’ s elderly friend, the Victorian critic Snow Wedgwood complained that her “fundamental objection to the story was that [Morgan] did not make up his mind at the start whether it was to be a tragedy or comedy. It seemed quite a new idea to him . . . that one ought to have any conception of one’s intentions in this respect. I feel that in a tragedy everything ought to convey some intimation of seriousness.” But should one laugh or cry at Philip’s ridiculous narrow life—or at his sacrifice? In his first completed novel, as in all of Austen’s, even prigs and petty tyrants have moral agency: Morgan recalled “[d]iscovering that Lady Bertram [in Austen’s Mans-field Park] had a moral outlook shocked me at first.” He “had not realised the solidity of an art,” he confided in his Commonplace Book, “which kept such an aspect in reserve, and placed her always on the sofa with pug.”
In Where Angels Fear to Tread Morgan tried to convey what he labeled “intermittent knowledge”—the “ability to expand or contract perception without being detected . . . [O]ne of the advantages of the novel form . . . [it] has a parallel in our perception of life: we are stupider at some times than at others.” He defended the novel against Robert Trevelyan’s rather “severe” criticism that the turns in the plot should be more clearly telegraphed, the characters more sympathetic, the English setting more “amusing.” The ethical question, Morgan replied, was how much people can change.
The object of the book is the improvement of Philip, and I did really want the improvement to be a surprise . . . [I] dislike finger posts, and couldn’t bear . . . the thought of inserting “Philip has o
ther things in him besides these: watch him” . . . [I] should have felt that the suggestion that a book must have one atmosphere to be pedantic. Life hasn’t any, and the hot and cold of its changes are fascinating to me.
On his birthday, New Year’s Day in 1905, Morgan reported to Leonard Woolf that he had completed the manuscript and sent it off to Blackwood’s in hope of serial publication. He had accomplished something important, but felt weighted down by his personal insignificance. In his diary he set down a sober accounting of his life’s progress. From the little room at the top of the stairs, his life looked bleak:
My life is now straightening into something rather sad & dull to be sure, & I want to set it & me down, as I see us now. Nothing more great will come out of me. I’ve made my two discoveries—the religious about 4 years ago, the other [his homosexuality] in the winter of 1902—and the reconstruction is practically over . . . I may sit year after year in my pretty sitting room, watching things grow more unreal, because I’m afraid of being remarked . . . I still want, in all moods, the greatest happiness but perhaps it is well it should be denied me.
Having always thought that “twenty-five is the boundary of the romantic desirable age,” he was nearly certain that no one would ever love him.
Fifty years later, Morgan reflected on his premature despair. He concluded that it was a symptom of how humans often feel “not altogether at home in the world of time . . . Growing old is an emotion which comes over us at almost any age. I had it myself violently between the ages of twenty-five and thirty, and still possess a diary recording my despair . . . This unpleasant sensation . . . is probably only another form of the sensation of being too young, which irritates adolescents.” But the young Morgan could not muster the long view. He steeled himself for the future, writing New Year’s resolutions to discipline his wayward sloth and lust. He vowed to get out of bed by nine in the morning. To “keep the brutes” of physical desire “quiet,” he would adopt a regimen of exercise. He would attempt to overcome his paralyzing shyness. And, in the event he might encounter another young man like the shepherd, he decided to teach himself to “smoke in public: it gives a reason for you & you can observe unchallenged.” More practically, without a manuscript to anchor him, he began to plan his next escape from Lily and his dead-end life.
Again, a friend from King’s came to the rescue. Sydney Waterlow had an eccentric aunt who needed an English tutor for her three eldest children. Elizabeth, the Countess von Arnim, was ostensibly from the minor German nobility, but she came to such a position by a wildly circuitous route. She was a cousin of the novelist Katherine Mansfield. Born in New Zealand to a British father who had made a fortune there, at twenty-two Elizabeth had married a German aristocrat twenty-five years her senior, and coming to dislike both him and his milieu, fashioned a separate existence for herself and her five young children in a rambling seventeenth-century stuccoed Schloss, one of his many ancestral properties. Life in Berlin tired her. She set about building an idyll in Nassenheide in the Pomeranian countryside. The estate comprised more than eight thousand acres of farm and piney woods; here she set up a little matriarchy with her adoring children, a private system of schooling them, a study with a typewriter for herself, and a beautiful English garden as a sort of rebuke to the German way of doing things. Her three eldest daughters she rather coyly nicknamed April, May, and June, after the months of their birth. Her (mainly absent) husband she christened “The Man of Wrath.” These circumstances she depicted in a roman à clef, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, published in 1898. The domestic myth of Elizabeth floating about her garden with happy children in tow became a late-Victorian bestseller. Elizabeth would go on to write twenty more novels. Two in particular lived on after her death: Enchanted April, a romance of female friendship in Italy; and Vera, the stark tale of her abusive second marriage.
His sojourn in Nassenheide afforded Morgan the chance to write letters home to Lily, the sort of comic travelogues that periodically renewed their affection and reinforced their shared sense of the ridiculous. In them, he would become her “Poppy,” or “Popsnake”—his childhood nickname of endearment. He detailed to her an arrival at Nassenheide as a gothic comedy of errors “beyond my wildest dreams.” Traveling by rail through the unknown dark, he was let off the train in a driving rain—“pitch dark, no station, no porter, no one of any kind.” Morgan persuaded a local farmhand to lead him to the Schloss—“Slosh! We trod in puddles . . . we waded in manure”—and, after trudging alone up a rough drive full of potholes, he arrived at Elizabeth’s darkened mansion. When he rang the bell, “a hound bayed inside.” A “dishevelled boy” led him through “a long low white washed barrel vaulted hall, hung with trophies of the chase,” while he followed after, his “boots oozing manure.” The countess had expected him to arrive the following day. The next morning after breakfast he encountered his employer. She was not quite what he had expected: “indifferent false teeth & a society drawl.” “How d’ye do, Mr. Forster!” she announced firmly. “We confused you with one of the housemaids. Can you teach the children, do you think? They are very difficult.”
He stayed with Elizabeth and her entourage from April to August 1905. Germany did not much impress him—“the country is unthinkably large and contented and patriotic,” he wrote in his diary—but his daily teaching duties were not onerous, and the three girls, ages thirteen to eight, took instruction well. He liked the other tutors, and had plenty of time to himself in a large and comfortable suite of rooms. Within a few days of his arrival he got word that Blackwood wanted to publish his novel, though on parsimonious terms. He showed Elizabeth, an established author, and she offered her opinion of the novel as she read it in stages—the first few chapters “very clever, but most unattractive, and she felt as if she wanted a bath.” Reading further, she decided that the novel was “beautiful,” only to “retract . . . and [go] back to her original opinion.” Morgan and Blackwood had a brief tussle over the title. Blackwood rejected Morgan’s first choice, “Monteriano,” but accepted his second, taken from the famous adage from Alexander Pope—“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” Quite quickly author and publisher “settled into contentment” with each other. All July he read proofs.
While in Nassenheide, Morgan turned to his diary to ruminate on the wider question of how he fit into the world. He felt out of touch with modern writers. In its infancy, the novel had been novel—of all the literary forms, it made the unique promise of showing life truthfully—but the conventions of the nineteenth-century novels Morgan revered had begun to feel a little like a cage. It seemed to him wrongheaded, even trivial these days simply to end a novel with “the old, old answer, marriage”: “Artists now realise that marriage, the old full stop, is not an end at all . . .” Resolving a plot with a marriage was part of the imperative of comedy, but the blind optimism of lesser writers seemed dishonest to him: “The writer who depicts [life as a bed of roses] may possibly be praised for his healthy simplicity. But his own conscience will never approve him, for he knows that healthiness and simplicity are not, in all cases, identical with truth.”
The modern writers whom he most admired, from Dostoyevsky to Ibsen to Hardy, were convinced that truth lay in a tragic vision. But his temperament, his need to see both “hot” and “cold” in the world, could not find sympathy with these brooding minds. This set of aesthetic problems reflected the most pressing questions in his inner life. As one by one his closest friends disappeared behind the “astonishing glass shade . . . that interposes between married couples and the world”—HOM, George Barger, Malcolm Darling—he was beginning to feel certain “I do not resemble other people.” Must intimacy always take the form of marriage?
He mulled over a correlative. What social force made people so herdlike, so inclined to divide between us and them? The strange insular world of the von Arnim household, from one angle, seemed merely an iteration of the strange insular world of Weybridge, or any other enclave of privilege. Most people he knew
had very little sense of the lives of people unlike themselves. It was all very well to read Dickens or Mrs. Gaskell’s North and South: “To be enthusiastic & sentimental over the picturesque poor is no difficulty.” The comfortable world he knew best concerned itself only with finer gradations of status. Lily, his aunts, their friends, spent endless hours determining who was too “vulgar,” who “genteel” enough to visit or invite to tea. The approach to people unlike oneself, he believed, was a moral obligation, but an obligation with risks.
To know and help [the poor] are we to lose our souls—or how much of them . . . [C]onditions are appalling: poverty, matrimony, much of family life all work against love and clear vision: and to those are added the rules of the game—death and decay yet people contrive to get in touch—I believe because they are radically good.
For the time being, these ideas remained a mere wisp in his diary. Within the year he would work them into a lecture called “Pessimism in Literature” to be delivered across the class divide to students at the Working Men’s College. How to “contrive to get in touch” with people would remain the great ethical question that illuminated his life and art. He would face its difficulties squarely, unflinchingly, in his last and greatest novels, Howards End and A Passage to India. In the meantime he would try to live his life according to the ideals of his art.