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

by Wendy Moffat

  In donning the khaki, he had evaded Miss Pope’s call, but nevertheless found himself subject to the dictates of women. In London, he had been vetted for the role of searcher by the formidable Near Eastern specialist Gertrude Bell, who handed him on to Miss Victoria Grant Duff, the head of Alexandria’s Red Cross Wounded Department. The daughter of a notable Victorian polymath—a Liberal MP and former governor of Madras State—Miss Grant Duff had an exacting education in the ways of empire and the slightly officious air of a young woman who, given her first proper posting, was determined to do it by the book. Morgan, prone to prickliness when it came to professional women, found her “shrewish.” He did not know that her closest brother had been killed in France the year before.

  And there was a third woman in the picture, as usual. The choice of Alexandria was a compromise between his aspirations for romantic escape and Lily’s fears about losing him to the war. The first plan was to set out for his beloved Italy as an ambulance orderly. But “mother was too much against it” and Morgan abandoned the idea, mulling the balance of cowardice and filial devotion in the decision to succumb to her wishes. The ambulance proposal had a hint of grandeur. Reading about Walt Whitman’s nursing work in the American civil war fired his imagination, and offered a masculine identity he could reckon with—at once tender and adventurous. To Masood, he confided his vision of himself in the ambulance unit in Italy. “All one can do in this world of maniacs is to pick up the poor tortured broken people and try to mend them.” But in Alexandria, there would be no picking up of tortured broken people, in fact no touching them at all. He would be a pastoral bureaucrat.

  The idea of Alexandria retained some literary romance. To the boy who read classics at Cambridge, Alexandria had resonance as a mythological first point in an ancient, noble gay past. In the fourth century B.C., had not Alexander the Great left his friend and lover Hephaestion’s side to explore the improbable spine of rock between the Mediterranean Sea and Lake Mariut and give the place his own glorious name? His Ptolemaic successors had built the great lighthouse Pharos as a beacon at the entrance of the harbor. This was the city of Hellenic enlightenment and Hellenic sensuality. The city of Alexander, of Antony and Cleopatra, adrift from Roman law, the city where the greatest library in the world had been built. There was something tragic, something hopeless and beautiful about the possibility of Alexandria.

  Alexander had died just eight years after the founding of his city. His body was brought back there to be buried. The great library founded to be a beacon of learning burned to the ground, all its treasures lost. To Dickinson, Forster confided the stirrings of “a vague scheme for a book or a play about Alexander.” But the reasons he could not follow through were familiar and banal. The weary roundelay of self-censorship: “Here we are again. Unpublishable.”

  The real Alexandria, as the “real India” would be for Adela Quested in A Passage to India, was a profound disappointment. Not a trace of the ancient grandeur remained. All the “things to see” were just miles to the east, in Cairo or the Nile Delta. The city’s treasures seemed to have been recently sold to the highest foreign bidder by some occupying force or other; the great twin obelisks called Cleopatra’s Needles, commissioned by Cleopatra in honor of Mark Antony, now stood three thousand miles apart, domesticated trophies in New York’s Central Park and on the Thames Embankment, to be wondered at by people eating ice cream. Everywhere he looked, Morgan was almost comically deflated by the erasure of former glories. The archaeological museum paled in comparison with the British Museum. Describing its treasures in a guidebook of Alexandria he composed in his later years there, he evokes a deadpan, weary tone: “This room contains nothing of beauty . . . These monuments . . . may have been imported . . . at some unknown date . . . Then come to some painted tombstones protected by glass; they are inferior to some in the rooms farther on . . . Dull colossal statue of Marcus Aurelius . . .” Even Forster’s eye for phallic monuments was dimmed. The glamorously named Pompey’s pillar wasn’t very tall, and turned out to be someone else’s pillar anyway. He commented drily that the “specimen is not even well proportioned.”

  His first impressions of the city were so quotidian they couldn’t even evoke strong feelings. No doubt to reassure Lily, Morgan wrote, “One can’t dislike Alex . . . because it is impossible to dislike either sea or stones. But it consists of nothing else as far as I can gather; just a clean cosmopolitan town beside some blue water.” From his “comfortable” room in the modern Majestic Hotel, tidy French gardens to the north gave way to symmetrical palms planted along a waterfront promenade. The great lighthouse was now no more than a stub of stone on a fitful spit of breakwater.

  The real Alexandria was an administered city. Its strategic position on the bottom lip of the Mediterranean Sea—just west of the Suez Canal—had made it irresistible territory for the larger struggles of European power since Napoleonic times. A French colony in the late eighteenth century, for the better part of a century it had been ruled first by the Turks, who appointed a Khedive, and then, when they were foreclosed in bankruptcy, by a British vice-consul. In the modern city the harbor was shaped like two parentheses back-to-back. The western harbor, its mouth open to the sea, was busy and industrial. The eastern, once Alexander’s ancient site, had settled into a decorative beachfront called the New Quay. Morgan politely called Alexandria “cosmopolitan.” In fact it was commercial. Refugees from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire, and sharp-eyed merchants of many nations, found its geography and its laissez-faire attitude congenial. Alexandria harbored more expatriates than Cairo, a city of ten times its size. Italians, leftover French, stateless Armenians, Jews, Maltese, Palestinian traders from the Levant, and especially Greeks had been deposited as if by sequential tides. It was possible to find or buy almost anything English: the Baedeker enumerated English clubs, English beer, confectionaries, preserved meats, Anglican churches, English theaters, ready-made clothing, baths, banks, doctors, pharmacists, booksellers, woolen goods, cigars . . .

  The latest iteration of flotsam was a garrison of twenty-five thousand British troops, stationed in the mercantile hubbub. The city proved to be an ideal location for managing supplies and censoring mail. Just a year before Forster arrived martial law was imposed on the population of almost half a million people. In 1915 and 1916, the great fight over the Dardanelles was coordinated from Alexandria. The wounded of the ill-fated Turkish campaign were shipped here, to the margin of safety, to heal or to die.

  Forster was unaware that he entered an especially uneasy sexual climate. One constant anxiety for both British military and civil administrators was the difficulty of containing Alexandria’s inclination toward commercial vice. Sexual hygiene was the key to social hygiene in their view. The “civilizing process” linked morale to morals. But the administration of decent rules of order was complicated by the dual legal structure left over from the French occupation. One could manage the soldiers and the British population according to British custom. But “bachelor” army troops were naturally susceptible to all sorts of risks. The army and the Sanitary Commission began the laborious work of counting, sifting, and regulating: studying venereal disease, registering brothels, compelling medical examinations, regulating interracial marriage, “rescuing girls from vice,” actively deporting “undesirable Europeans” and known homosexuals. The distasteful but practical belief prevailed that female prostitution was a necessary evil. Without it, British soldiers would inevitably succumb to the worse, and ever prevalent, “depraved methods of sexual gratification”—the vice of “traffic in boys.”

  Policing purity was endless, maddening work. The vast majority of the occupants of Alexandria were beyond their reach, subject by default to the Egyptian Native Penal Code. Under these laws, inherited from the Napoleonic Code, neither consensual homosexual acts nor male prostitution was illegal. To one administrator charged with developing new “offenses against morality” for a draft penal code, the native population’s blind eye to homosex
ual practices was particularly galling. It was “unthinkable,” he wrote, that young people, “the most precious asset of a State,” should be “exposed to the moral and physical corruption in the toleration of unnatural offenses.” Martial law allowed the British authorities to begin making the crooked straight and the rough places plain.

  The first friend Forster looked up when he arrived in Alexandria, his fellow Kingsman Robert Furness (called Robin), was part of this administrative apparatus. Furness had been a minor magistrate before the war. His own account, in a letter to Maynard Keynes, betrayed a more bemused than exasperated tone: “I have long been a policeman . . . in this disorderly town: daily I feed my disgusted eyes on drunken Welsh governesses and stabbed Circassian whores; I peer into the anus of catamites; I hold inquests upon beggars who die and are eaten by worms.” For Furness, the city indefatigably—even cheerfully—resisted the rule of law, and he went about adjudicating petty infractions of the most sordid sort. He was well aware of the registered brothels and the census of boy prostitutes.

  Like many British gentlemen, Furness had little trouble maintaining wholly disparate public and private roles. He had a taste for smut and a ribald joke. He detected a hint of seductive play in ordinary sights, such as a young Egyptian man touching one button after another on a soldier’s tunic as a gesture of farewell. Most of all, he adored the Hellenistic Alexandrian poet Callimachus, whom both he and Morgan had studied briefly at Cambridge. He began his own translations of this underappreciated poet, whose work had been dismissed as decadent by the dons. Furness was drawn to Callimachus’ poetic form, the elegiac epigram, with its “frugal, pungent” style. The little vignettes gave the taste of immediacy. Though dating from the second century B.C., they had a freshness of form; the delicate, almost offhand observations, their “intimate and whimsical realism,” made them feel very modern. And they were often frankly sexy, unapologetic about their homosexual lust. They demanded a translator sensitive to nuance. When war came, Furness joined the civil service. By day he applied his editorial skills in a new vein. He managed the Press Censorship department.

  Back in London, Miss Bell suggested firmly to Morgan that the best way to hold to the straight and narrow was to keep to the bright expanse of the central town. When he asked her “what the inhabitants of Alexandria would be like . . . [s]he replied I would have no opportunity to find out. I should only see them in the streets as I went to and fro on my work.” The dangerous parts of the town were the Byzantine ones—in both senses of the word. Just look straight and avoid the meandering and crooked byways, she advised. Rectilinearity begets rectitude. Thus “disguised” in khaki, Forster wrote years later in bemusement, “I went to the Red Cross office and the hospitals and back to the hotel and for a time looked neither to the right hand nor to the left in the streets, as Miss Bell had enjoined.”

  The British world was oriented toward Place Mohammed Ali, named after the “ambitious and westernising Ottoman adventurer from northern Greece who made himself master of the country after Nelson forced Napoleon’s withdrawal.” His large equestrian statue cast in Paris by Jacquemart dominated the public space that the English resolutely called “The Square.” From the square the streets reached out, broad and open, wide vistas framed by palms. It was perfectly possible to join a British club and spend all one’s time smoking cigars and gambling and following “a good deal of horse racing.”

  Indeed, the view from his room was of a clean, modern city. His newly built lodgings in the Hotel Majestic were steps from the square to the east and formal gardens to the north. That much of this celebrated modernity arose from wholesale rebuilding after British gunships leveled the square to quell Egyptian attempts to resist enforced occupation in 1882 was lost on the writers of Baedeker’s 1914 guidebook. Just next to the Anglican church at the northeast corner of the square lay the eponymous St. Mark’s Buildings (“belonging to the British Community”), which housed the Red Cross offices where Forster worked each day. These the Baedeker described unreflexively as “the only buildings” on the square “which escaped the fury of the natives in 1882.”

  During his first winter in Alexandria, Forster’s daily life was contained almost entirely within the orbit of the Baedeker’s recommendations for a day-and-a-half stay. From the hotel to the Red Cross office was less than ten minutes’ walk on the perimeter of the square; from the office to the Mohammed Ali Club (“handsomely fitted up; patronized by Europeans of all nations; introduction by a member necessary”) was an equal distance to the east. From the club Forster took the recently electrified city tram several miles to the east to the Red Cross hospital to interview the men. The name of the branch line was Ramleh, Arabic for “sand.”

  The irony of trading a suburban existence in Weybridge for a bureaucratic existence on the Mediterranean was keen. To Masood he described his daily routine: “I . . . start out about 10.0, returning for lunch and finishing about 7.0.” Foursquare. Twice daily, he commuted between grandiose modern monuments to colonial dreams of the Orient. At the western end was the four-story white stone Majestic, all mod cons, with twin cupolas in an eastern style. At the eastern margin past suburbs along the undulating coast lay the Khedival Palace—a vast Orientalist confection, built at the turn of the century by the Turkish Khedive for his Austrian mistress: light stone, Moorish arches, pergolas, tile roof. The palace site was beautiful, surrounded by fragrant gardens atop a rocky cliff, with steps cut in the rock down to the “intense and unbelievable blue” sea. By the time Forster arrived the palace had been commandeered. The gardens were fenced off, the palace domesticated into rooms for convalescent soldiers.

  For friendship, at first he relied on the familiar network of university men, which never quite “coalesced into a set.” He began closest to home, with Kingsmen and Furness’s colleagues at the censorship office. Besides Robin Furness, a tall, “cerebral and ruffled heron” of a man, there were a “Syrian” and a “Greek,” George Antonius and Pericles Anastassiades. Antonius, only twenty-five, was cosmopolitan and sympathetic. Born in Alexandria to Palestinian parents, he had made his way from an English-speaking public school in Ramleh to King’s. Now he returned the favor, taking a sympathetic Englishman into his world. In his company, Morgan began fitfully to explore the city, “discarding my uniform . . . [to] plunge . . . into the Bazaar.” Antonius exemplified what Forster came to describe as the “typical Alexandrian” identity, which “symbolizes for me a mixture, a bastardy, an idea which I find congenial and opposed to that sterile idea of 100% in something or other which has impressed the modern world and forms the backbone of its blustering nationalisms.” Here was a young man whose very being connected East and West.

  Anastassiades, a cotton broker, also reached out to Morgan. Ambitious and striving, and eager to appear polished, he paid Morgan four pounds a month for English lessons. Through Furness, Forster met an extraordinary woman, Aida Borchgrevink.

  Aida was a force of nature. She was born in America, the daughter of a Midwestern corn king. Trained as an opera singer before her marriage, she had been literally translated by Verdi—hearing the opera on her honeymoon, she added a fateful i to her pedestrian given name, Ada. She had married a Norwegian judge presiding at the Mixed Courts, the special courts for civil cases between Egyptians and foreigners. Now in her mid-fifties, after a decade of widowhood, she lived an extravagantly romantic and eccentric life with her daughter in a fashionable suburb of the city. She burst into arias from Wagner’s Ring whenever she was behind the wheel of a car. Partly under her benign but spirited influence, Furness and his friends sponsored a membership for Morgan in the men-only club, the Mohammed Ali. Here he uneasily donned the white linen uniform of an expatriate gentleman. By spring, he had decamped to live with Furness in a villa east of the city center, with wide views of the sea. By all appearances, he was getting settled nicely—saving a bit of money, making a bit of money, finding congenial acquaintances.

  But to Masood, he opened his weary heart. “All t
hat I cared for in civilisation has gone forever, and I am trying to live without either hopes or fears.” It was not only that the war had shattered a sense of progress and possibility; it was also the concomitant sense that his sojourn in Alexandria seemed so unreal. In the spring, he wrote Virginia Woolf,

  I imagine it is here that civilisation will expire. It is already dead in Cairo, which has war correspondents and 119 Generals and clubs of perturbed and earnest men. But in Alexandria it still seems possible to read books and bathe. It’s true I talk about the war all day, but to people who can say “we fought every inch as dirty as the Turks,” and whose deepest wish is peace at once.

  The cruel parody of this new suburban life began to disgust Morgan. Alexandria roused a disturbing herd instinct in him. Watching the Arabs on the street each day infuriated him. He wrote Malcolm Darling in India:

  I came inclined to be pleased and quite free from racial prejudice, but in 10 months I’ve acquired an instinctive dislike to the Arab voice, the Arab figure, the Arab way of looking or walking or pumpshitting or eating or laughing or anythinging—exactly the emotion that I censured in the Anglo-Indian towards the native . . . It’s damnable and disgraceful, and it’s in me.

  It was in him, all right. Far from instinctive, Morgan’s reaction came from careful, painful observation of these Arab men. There it is: that odd self-made term pumpshitting, which signaled his most intimate erotic thoughts. Watching Arab men look at him, watching them piss on the street, watching them laugh and be separate from him inflamed his desire, and his self-loathing. The damnable disgrace was his timidity, which coiled back on itself into a kind of displaced hatred. He hated what he did not have the courage to touch.