A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster

by Wendy Moffat

  The suicide shook Morgan deeply. He detailed the events in his diary five days after Merz’s death:

  [H]e left me, normal, at about 9.40. Next morning he was found dead . . . The inquest today reports that there was no evidence as to the state of mind. As yet no clue. I may meet sadder things, but never a more mysterious. However horrible the explanation, there surely must be one. He had even taken a holiday for D[arling]’s wedding on the 21st. He was charming . . . I can’t think it has happened.

  Normal. It was truly awful to have been the last person to see Ernest Merz alive, more awful still to be Malcolm’s confidant as he tried to make sense of the unfathomable facts just days before his wedding.

  However horrible the explanation. On Monday morning, the day before the inquest, Malcolm confided to Morgan obtusely that he feared his friend Merz might have been a homosexual. Perhaps this dread secret—or the threat of exposure—might have caused his death? Letters shot back and forth, and Morgan suggested they could have “a few minutes talk alone.” Morgan, who had surmised the same explanation long before Malcolm, warily replied, “The more I think of it the more distressed I get. My own theory—one must have one—is that he was either insulted disgustingly or saw something disgusting. You mustn’t be annoyed at me for writing so freely. The man whom I saw has never made a mess of things, I know that.” Even as he sought to reassure his stricken friend, Morgan plumbed the full weight of the scandal. Did the verdict of suicide “prevent ecclesiastical rites?” he asked Malcolm. He was thinking of the “distress” to Merz’s family.

  The more distressed I get. No wonder, since comforting Darling meant retreating further into deception. He could not tell Malcolm he was homosexual now. Merz’s death brought home to Morgan how something disgusting could happen suddenly—there was always the chance of an inadvertent slip and exposure. But even more palpable than the fear this instilled was the terrifying truth that Merz had seemed happy, normal, to him when they parted just minutes before his death. What a tragedy that Morgan had been unable to sense another human being was in so much pain and fear.

  The incident of Merz’s death made Morgan feel ever more cautious and frozen, ever more despairing about the prospect of a brave Whitmanesque life. His diary went quiet for weeks. Then news of the death of an acquaintance compounded his emotional paralysis: “I feel that I cannot feel.” Weeks after Merz’s suicide, Morgan set aside the notebook that had been his diary since 1904, though there was still room in it to write. He bought a new book covered in sturdy leather, with a lock with a hasp. The “Locked Diary” would be the repository for his inward thoughts for the next sixty years.

  His entries in the Locked Diary over the next few months focused disproportionately on stories of sexual anxiety and danger. He jotted down a report he had heard about a young Frenchman who was told by a pettish lover that she had syphilis. “Going home, he wrote a letter explaining what had happened, & then shot himself. He was examined. No traces of poison were found on him. It was all a joke.” He began and abandoned a fragment of a new novel—called Arctic Summer—breaking off with the suicide of a young man after the discovery of a sexual misdeed. Though Lance March’s sexual crime is unnamed—all that is said is that he “disgraced the college and himself”—he is sent down from Cambridge, and shoots himself after his brother confronts him, asking, “Have you thought of mother at all?”

  Everything conspired to make him feel edgy and disgusted with the world. He had just read Frank Harris’s psychobiography of Shakespeare—a bestseller—which suppressed all discussion of the homoerotic sonnets.

  Was going to reflect sadly on life, but what’s the use of my abuse? A wrong view of S[hakespeare]’s sonnets in a book . . . lent me, and an attempted blackmail in this morning’s paper are the main cause. How barbaric the world! If a tiny fraction of the energy would go to the understanding of man, we would have the millennium. This bullying stupidity.

  Just before Christmas “the biggest thing” of the year occurred when Masood invited him to spend a week together sightseeing in Paris. They shared a glorious time—walking up the steps at Montmartre, attending the Comédie Française—and when they parted at the train station Masood, “plunged in despair,” was full of histrionic goodbyes. “Do buck up,” Morgan told him, embarrassed at the scene. He was satisfied that Masood loved him, but what did this love mean? His year-end reflections focused on “the enigma” of Masood’s feelings: “Will [his love] ever be complete? Is the enigma him or his nationality? That he forgets me in between I could bear, but what is he thinking of at the time?” Back in London, Morgan continued to spend “joyful but inconclusive” evenings with Masood. Unable to gauge Masood’s sincerity, Morgan decided to take a jocular, self-deprecating tone in his letters. He signed off one letter, “From Forster, member of the Ruling Race to Masood, a nigger.”

  But privately he was as unsatisfied with himself as he was with Masood. He parsed his own character, admitting to himself that “my bourgeois cuteness and desire to know where I am” was “perhaps no less fickle” than Masood’s wild effusions. Masood had shown him an Urdu poem: “‘o love, each time thou goes out of my sight, I die a new death.’ How can I keep it quiet when I read such things? My brain watches me, but it’s literary. Let me keep clear from criticism and scheming. Let me be him. You’ve stopped me. I can only think of you, and not write. I love you, Syed Ross Masood: love.”

  These were Morgan’s final words for the year. The rest of the diary’s page is blank.

  His yearning for Masood was all “literary,” but in daily life, Morgan was overwhelmed by powerful waves of lust. The beauty of men on the street “tormented” him. He was haunted by the image of “a khaki great coat,” of “eyes so indifferent to mine & of manhood’s hidden column.” He had a frightening brush with blackmail: “After lunch in the Savile . . . I said something about a ‘charming boy’ and one of the members lowered his paper looked at me and raised it in a lightning flash. Then I went to have my [hair]-cut, and the man hinted that he would like to borrow 10 pounds—! I had never seen him before . . .”

  He tried hard to suppress these feelings. It was best to be safe, he concluded rather priggishly: “However gross my desires, I find I shall never satisfy them, for the fear of annoying others. I am glad to come across this much good in me. It serves instead of purity.”

  But by the end of 1910, Morgan could no longer settle for the “joyful but inconclusive evening[s]” he had spent with Masood, with their tantalizing embraces. The crisis came after an evening at the opera. On December 28 he took Masood to Covent Garden, to see Richard Strauss’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. By the end of the evening, Morgan was at a fever pitch, and he blurted out his confession of love to Masood in a cascade of emotions. Masood listened quietly and calmly. He waited a moment, and then very softly said, “I know.”

  Alone, on the train home to Weybridge Morgan was in a tumult. He sent off a letter to Masood—which does not survive—reiterating his love and demanding some sort of commitment for the future. It was maddening, but at this moment family obligations intervened: Morgan and Lily paid a New Year’s call on Aunt Laura at her house at West Hackhurst. Days went by without a response from Masood—Morgan chafed and squirmed “in an awful stew all Saturday and Sunday” as the silence persisted. All he had was his diary: “Non respondit, and though I do believe it’s all right, my breast burns suddenly & I have felt ill. He has sent me such a horrid ugly birthday present! tray with candlestick match box and sealing wax rest, colourless message inside: probably posted before my letter reached [Love, Love.]”

  On January 2 a letter arrived from Masood. Unaccountably, wonderfully, he let things stand where they had always stood. He seemed to treat this revelation from Morgan as one more of the strange things Englishmen did. Morgan chastised his friend—“you devil! Why didn’t you write at once?”—but he was deeply relieved. “There is nothing to be said, because everything is understood. I agree,” he told Masood. As he wro
te these words, Morgan had just turned thirty-two. He was back where he had begun, grateful only for not having shattered the friendship that meant the most to him in the world.

  The chasm between Morgan’s public and private personae began to widen in this year, 1910, for the publication of Howards End made him a literary celebrity. As he completed the manuscript in July, he assessed his oeuvre. He liked the new novel well enough, but The Longest Journey was the “book to my own heart. I should have thought it impossible for a writer to look back and find his works so warm and beautiful . . . To have written such a book is something. My next heroism will be to stop writing.”

  (Forty years later, in 1958, Morgan would revisit this question. In retrospect he decided humbly, “Howards End [is] my best novel and approaching a good novel.”)

  The novel came out on October 18. Its rapturous reviews, oddly, reawakened the tristesse Morgan had felt while writing the revisions of A Room with a View. The Daily Telegraph announced, “There is no doubt about it whatever. Mr. E. M. Forster is one of the great novelists. His stories are not about life. They are life.” The Athenaeum pronounced him “one of the handful of writers who count.” To Goldie, Morgan confessed that the adulation made him uneasy. “I go about saying that I like the money, because one is simply bound to be pleased about something on such an occasion.” In his diary he reflected, “I am not vain of my overpraised book, but I wish I was obscure again.” He was disquieted that Lily “is evidently deeply shocked” by Helen’s pregnancy in Howards End. Maimie and Aunt Laura—all the Victorian ladies—concurred. “Yet I have never written anything less erotic.”

  The truth was that more than ever he felt the “sterility” of his creative life. It would be another six months before he could diagnose its source with accuracy:

  main causes of my sterility 1. Inattention to health—curable. 2. Weariness of the only subject that I can and may treat—the love of men for women and vice versa . . . 3. Depressing & enervating surroundings. My life’s work, if I have any, is to live with a person who thinks nothing worth while.

  After the crisis with Masood at New Year’s 1911, something began to disintegrate in the relations between Morgan and his mother. It became impossible for both of them not to resent the sclerotic state of their shared lives. Louisa Whichelo, Lily’s mother, suddenly became ill and died in mid-January at the age of eighty-four; her death plunged Lily, who was fifty-six, into a depression that seemed permanently to diminish her. Lily began to make little cutting remarks. She told Morgan that if Masood ever came back to live in Britain again, his friendship with Morgan could never be on the same footing. Morgan believed that “sorrow has altered her, and I had to alter too, or leave.” He tried to squelch his anger at her, which made him feel “trivial and effeminate.”

  To his disgust, he found himself acting like a little boy. When Aunt Laura asked him how he liked a cheese she had served them at West Hackhurst, Morgan pretended he had not tasted it though it had gone rotten; Lily was left to bear the bad news, and later excoriated him, saying that he was “just like his father, unable to put his foot down at the right moment.” It was the first time that Lily had spoken about Eddie in a denigrating way, and Morgan felt afterward that he could not respect her any longer. When he cracked a vase he “feared to tell mother,” but was disgusted by his “cowardice.” On the anniversary of his father’s death, he had a private “Satanic fit of rage against mother for grumbling and fault finding” and imagined that he would sweep all the china figurines off the mantelpiece and cut his throat. But Hamlet-like, he could not act. He knew that “mother does not think highly of me. Whatever I do she is thinking ‘Oh that’s weak.’”

  The final ignominy came when Roger Fry painted his portrait—a rather modern rendition of him as “a bright healthy young man, without one hand, it is true, and very queer legs, perhaps the result of an aeroplane accident, as he seems to have fallen from an immense height on to a sofa.” Despite the comical description to Florence Barger, he was rather proud of the painting, and bought it. But he gave it to Florence after a local vicar came to visit Lily in Weybridge, and seeing it in the drawing room, exclaimed, “I say! Your son isn’t queer, is he?”

  In the summer of 1911, anticipating Masood’s permanent return to India, he and Morgan arranged a monthlong walking tour of the Italian lakes. In retrospect, he found the trip to have the flavor of “a honeymoon slightly off colour” though it “was clear he liked me better than any man in the world.” Eventually he tore up his letters home because they were so “wet” and colorless. All that remains of the visit “is a photograph of us there . . . I starry eyed with a huge moustache, looking very odd indeed.” It was to be the first of a series of formal domestic portraits with friends and lovers he would preserve throughout his life.

  Impressive sales of Howards End brought Morgan enough money to undertake a six-month journey to see Masood and Malcolm Darling in India. Lily remained fragile after her mother’s death, but Morgan persuaded her that a holiday in Italy with her friend Mrs. Mawe might warm and solace her. He agreed to travel with the ladies as far as Rome to tuck them into their hotel. For the onward journey he would meet up with a group of Cambridge friends. Morgan joined Robert Trevelyan in Naples; Dickinson joined the party at Port Said.

  In anticipation, Morgan began furious planning for the trip. He read up on Buddhism and tackled the Bhagavad Gita. There was much correspondence with Robert and Goldie over provisions for the trip—which deck chair to buy at the Army and Navy Stores, the best sort of celluloid underwear. He practiced some Urdu phrases—while riding a bicycle one was supposed to shout, “‘Out of the way brother’ or ‘Mother, do not take up all road.’” Leonard Woolf, back from Ceylon, did what little he could to teach Morgan to ride horseback. On Putney Common the two men made quite a scene. Morgan discovered there was the problem of steering the animal, and then there was the problem of stopping it. Atop even the gentlest mount, he always felt as if the horse had six legs.

  The prospect of leaving home catalyzed a deepening friendship with Florence Barger. She was exactly his age, compassionate, fiercely intelligent, and quite lonely: her husband, George, was consumed with work while she was marooned at home with two sons, aged two and five. On a visit to the Bargers just before he left, Morgan steeled himself and told her that he was homosexual. She surprised him. Quite instinctively, she took up discussion of his “inner life” as analogous to her own, and with frankness that happily outstripped his expectations she talked about sex—telling him of a miscarriage, her unhappiness about George’s infidelity, how women were slower to sexual excitement than men. It was a “[v]ery great happiness” to have a woman as a friend. “She loves me and I her.”

  At Port Said, Morgan finally began to feel as though he were entering another world. Goldie climbed aboard ship from a tiny boat, looking unconvincing in a pith helmet. The greasy little boys on dockside called out to tourists, “Here smut postcard.” Flying fish danced at the ship’s bow, glinting in the sun. On deck the Cambridge clique sat apart from the body of staid English civil servants on their way to Bombay, who dubbed them “the Professors” in a tone with “a little nip of frost.” Their cloud of disapproval brought out a schoolboy irreverence in the group. They perched on bollards on deck instead of playing games, and “argued about the shape of the earth at the breakfast table.” Although he was fifty, Goldie was “evanescent . . . shooting out little glints of nonsense.”

  Morgan struck up a conversation with a handsome young army officer who lay on a deck chair reading a book of poems in the hot sun. Kenneth Searight was returning to his unit at the Khyber Pass. Searight melded a Byronic sensibility to the soul of a colonial accountant. “It’s not a star that’s beautiful, it’s its effect on one,” he told Morgan. Searight was “very intimate with the natives,” Morgan confided to Florence. Indeed. Searight unveiled a leather diary containing his own encyclopedia of colonial pedophilia, row upon row of young native boys: name, age, race, sex acts,
and number of his orgasms all totted up. He had also written a long poem in the Romantic style about being “perpetually in love with some boy or other” and a “minorite story.” Morgan spent hours with him in “amazing conversation.”

  When the cabins became unbearably hot, Morgan moved his cot to sleep on deck. After two weeks of sailing, the party arrived in Bombay, and hired personal servants to travel with them for the duration of the trip. Morgan made a beeline to Masood at Aligarh, nine hundred miles away by first-class railway. The Anglo-Oriental College, “spread . . . out over the plain like red mushrooms,” was beginning to fray at the seams: there were fractious disputes between the English faculty and the remnants of Sir Syed’s Muslim friends. Masood was cordial, but Morgan was clearly his showpiece, and it was impossible to gauge the state of their friendship through the scrim of his elaborate and public hospitality. Each day Morgan met dozens of Masood’s friends; a large supper was organized in Morgan’s honor where they ate bad English food. There was much manly camaraderie, and much expense. One of Masood’s friends put on a nautch, a stag party with dancing girls who sang at deafening pitch; after hours of this, Morgan realized that the event would continue until he left. Pressed into kissing the women goodbye, he settled for shaking their hands instead.

  From Aligarh, Morgan (joined by Robert and Goldie) headed north to the Afghan border to visit Searight, “superb in his uniform.” They drove along moonlit roads to attend a formal dinner in the officers’ barracks. In a scene he would refigure in A Passage to India, Morgan lost his collar stud; with dinner ever more delayed, he gave up looking for it and went off with his collar askew. Afterward the officers danced together under the stars, Searight commandeering Morgan into a foxtrot. It was the last Morgan ever saw of him.