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

by Wendy Moffat

  But he was good at his work, which was listening. Day after day, notebook in hand, Morgan sat down gently on the beds of wounded men and asked them to tell him their most horrific memories. He was struck by their vulnerability. The men were underfed, short, fragile, and terribly young. And the stories they told, in little fragments of trauma, made their bodies seem ever more tender and absurd. Miss Grant Duff praised the clarity of his reports, which were forwarded to the men’s families and to the great Red Cross apparatus in London. But privately, for himself, Morgan began to build a counternarrative to capture and to understand the voices of these men.

  It was a recapitulation of his months at the Working Men’s College, but this time Morgan was the pupil. He found the young working-class men “so pleasant and grateful, and some of them quite charming.” Appreciative of his kindness and care, they told him flatly of the most appalling scenes. In wartime every human effort seemed to backfire in ludicrous ways. A small group of men picked away to build a trench only to be summarily drowned in it by a flash flood days later. The bones of fallen comrades reappeared ghoulishly in the mud. One young private “in the Herefords spoke of a dead Australian who was in the way when they were making a parapet, so they cut him at the neck and knees and fired through him.”

  Morgan was patient with the men. His stillness allowed them to open to the horror slowly. His notebook captures even the cadence of their words. The frozen stammer: “After giving careful evidence for 20 minutes, without reproof, [a private from Manchester confided] “I never like anyone to ask me about it—it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. I think of the days again, of the days again . . .”

  The disorienting panic: “He says ‘I’m vomiting tell the Captain I’m vomiting’ There was no guts in the 6.6.—Then I see the Captain with 2 bullets in his Privates. Froth comes out of his mouth.”

  The poignant resignation: “ ‘Goodbye Sergeant. I’ll turn over and die quietly’ Dead in 1/4 hour.”

  In the face of these surreal stories, Morgan found solace in practical ministrations for the men. Sometimes he did small errands, lending them books, writing dictated letters, taking their watches to be mended. He played chess in silence. Sometimes he simply kept them company. One young man, Frank Vicary, sat up in bed and to Morgan’s amazement, said, “ ‘I’m awfully interested in ideas—I’m more interested in ideas than anything’—and blimey so he was.” Morgan gave Vicary books by Goldie Dickinson, and their friendship warmed platonically until Vicary was sent back to England with a bad heart and jangled nerves.

  In his own routine tenderness, Morgan detected a parallel feeling to the love of the men for one another in the muddy trenches. Like them, he found his intimacy disguised by the shape of his duties. Gradually, without sentimentalism, he came to feel that the greatest story of the war was to be found in compassion. And he heard beneath their words a truer story of gay love and friendship. The small notebook collated fragments, but to him the fragments glowed with meaning. Here was the deeper record of the meaning of the war: individual and human, not political. From the verbatim snippets of men in their most extreme trials he gleaned a hidden story that could not be erased. He named this section of the notebook “Friendship.” Under this title, he collected little tessellated fragments to recover its power.

  The story of friendship was often told as a story of loss. Chasing down the stories was dispiriting work: “If one does get news about the missing it is generally bad news.” But it had unexpected compensations for him. In searching for the missing man he found the suppressed story of gay love. One boy told him shyly, “All the boys what I mated with is dead.” Morgan was touched by the working-class locution, “mates,” with its ambiguous elision of comradeship and sexual intimacy. So much had been erased and eradicated, and yet the love of one man for another endured. In another case, the only proof of existence of a missing soldier named Dodds emerged elliptically, even unconsciously, as a tale of lost love. An infantryman told Morgan of a pal who had died near him in the trenches: “I got to know the name [Dodds] through hearing a man call it out so much in his sleep. I slept near him. It used to be Dodds this and Dodds that. They must have been bosom chaps something special.”

  The (still unpublished) “Incidents of War” notebook unconsciously transformed Morgan’s workaday task of writing reports into a new kind of historical record. Everywhere, he could discern the code that seemed to be illegible on the surface of things. He identified with the human instincts he saw, the timid, the antiheroic, the ordinary kindness in these slight men. In the single, wounded voices, he heard the chord of friendship. His notebook was the beginning of a new enterprise as a writer, to gather an anthology of men’s experience. It was a compensatory narrative, honest and fragmented, the narrative of men who fought as dirty as their enemies and craved only peace. Ideas about patriotism were supplanted by epigrammatic observations, “little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love.” The alchemy of patience and silence distilled his skill at eavesdropping into a new, nonfictional form. By honoring how hard it was for the men to relive these horrors, by recognizing the intimacy of both telling and witnessing, Forster became a gay historian.

  Morgan’s sense that he was witnessing the last moments of an old order turned out to be prescient. The conscription that the Red Cross volunteers had predicted in the autumn became a reality by the spring of 1916. Casualties, especially in Flanders, necessitated a precipitous loosening of physical standards for the young volunteers: from a minimum height requirement of five feet eight inches in the first months of the war, to five feet five inches in October 1915, to five feet three just a month later. Now the net of compulsory conscription reached wider than even the Red Cross workers had imagined. All unmarried men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one were required to present themselves for service. Forster was furious, and terrified. Though almost forty, he was clearly included in the order; the new conscription laws rescinded an earlier agreement whereby Red Cross personnel were excused from direct military service.

  The means by which the conscription scheme worked were particularly loathsome to him. For a few months, until the end of June 1916, the army offered a fig leaf: rather than submitting directly to the draft, men could “attest,” or certify to military tribunals their willingness to serve, subject to medical approval. Entering the military machine in this way offered a slender hope of evading active service, but it required at least lip service to the legitimacy of the government’s claim. Forster found the whole exercise to be in bad faith—cruel, coercive, and servile. He felt the Red Cross was complicit too; by releasing its able-bodied volunteers for military service, the organization finessed its earlier agreements with them and capitulated to the war machine. As a matter of principle, he would not simplify his position. He refused to argue, as Strachey and Duncan Grant had done, that he was a conscientious objector. The crisis of conscience briefly shattered him psychologically: he found himself staggering and bumping into furniture, mysteriously falling to the floor. Only his friends kept him from feeling “crushed” by the experience.

  A brief but pointed exchange with the Red Cross commissioner yielded no results, and he began to summon every means to excuse himself from the military maw. He wrote Lily: “I am quite shameless over the wirepulling. If I can’t keep out of the army by fair means then hey for foul! . . . I haven’t the least desire to pacify the parrots who cry ‘All must go.’ One will lose a certain amount of friends of course, mainly female . . .” One of the parrots surprised him a bit. Miss Grant Duff supported Morgan’s position vociferously, arguing for his continued service as a Red Cross volunteer on the grounds of his exceptional efficiency. To Morgan, this “obscured the issue” by substituting “the question of utility” for the question of conscience, but her advocacy sharpened his sense of alienation from organized structures of power. He told Florence Barger that in her defense of him Miss Grant Duff “is a splendid creature, but she holds the Gospel of work which I don’t and oughtn’t
to. I am an artist—after a week of stress like this one has the right to utter that discredited word—and the artist must (yes! I am actually going to say this too!) live his life, and it was my life not to attest.” The “wretched business” was ironically put to an end by the medical board’s conclusion that Morgan’s body was unfit to fight. In the end, a weak body conquered a strong mind. It was a monumental relief.

  The episode galvanized in him an increasingly pointed political view. He began to conflate the “march of civilisation” with the great machine of social oppression. Slowly he inverted the term which had once been his lodestar into a form of alienation. Civilisation, like respectability, became anathema. In his little notebook he concluded that the real political lesson of the war was that “[w]e must have a numerous and well fed lower class to fill our army.”

  Social hypocrisy, the theme that had generated so much comedy in his novels, now took on a more serious cast. Since his defense of Maurice to Forrest Reid three years earlier, he had understood homophobia to be a social rather than a spiritual ill. But now homoeroticism itself seemed to be a political stance. One evening by the sea, at the base of the palace at Montazah, Morgan witnessed a scene that he shaped into a parable:

  I was bathing myself on the deserted beach and a man galloped up on a donkey, stripped, and tried to pull it into the water with him. The lines of a straining nude have always seemed academic to me up to now but hereafter I shall remember red light on them, and ripples like grey ostrich-feathers breaking on the sand. He didn’t—to grow less serious—get the donkey to follow him, but I don’t know that I want to grow less serious. I come away from that place each time thinking “Why not more of this? Why not? What would it injure? Why not a world like this—its beauty of course impaired by death and old age and poverty and disease, but a world that should not torture itself by organised and artificial horrors?”

  He told this story to Dickinson in the spirit of homosexual solidarity. Like him, Goldie had despaired of finding sexual intimacy. And he had despaired for the future of the world. Morgan saw a connection between these two forces. The arbitrary horrors of war making were inextricably linked to the horrors of persecuting gay men. He could only hope, as he had done in the dedication of Maurice, for a more tolerant, if distant, future: “It’s evidently not to be in our day, nor while nationality lives, but I can’t believe it Utopian, for each human being has in him the germs of such a world.” In these private writings, he began to shape a politics of quiet resistance, to celebrate the power of the individual and to preserve his own kind of human meaning, not within, but against society. These ideas would achieve full flower years later, in the celebrated essays on personal freedom published in Two Cheers for Democracy.

  Morgan seized upon what he understood to be a precious final moment to open himself to the unknown city. Walking without a guide became a quasi-political act. He set out on foot, this time deliberately looking to the left and the right, trying to engage the people whom Miss Bell has assured him didn’t exist. The key to his method was the antithesis of Miss Grant Duff’s gospel of utility—deliberate aimlessness. The city opened up like a flower. He followed the margins set by water, not by pavement: the canal near the Nouzah Gardens, the unchartered seafront, the shores of Lake Mariut. He taught himself to swim. There were unexpected surprises in this rambling. On the southern shore he found a tiny fishing village cut off from the main city by slums.

  He found that his nondescript khaki served not merely as a “costume,” but as a disguise. Even a uniform with indeterminate and ephemeral rank was a passport to travel freely. Just as he became mercenary in protecting himself from the draft, he traded on male privilege and his status as a British officer to wander with impunity. No one need know the inside of his heart.

  This restless rambling was the half-sublimation of intensifying unfulfilled lust. Everywhere there were invitations that couldn’t be accepted. The very air seemed to call out to him poetically, in the voices of the tram conductors as they announced the approaching stations—“Come here Mustafa Pasha, come here Sidi Bashr . . . yes yes come here Bulkeley and Glymenopoulo.” In A Passage to India these plaintive calls would be transmuted into Godbole’s hopeless and mysterious song, “come come” to the reticent gods who never do. It seemed to him he would die without ever having a sexual encounter with another human being.

  The sexual climate of Alexandria was enticing but dangerous. Though Aida and Furness were understanding, he had few real confidants. So he wrote to friends in England, braving the military censor’s eye. His chief respite was his old mentor Edward Carpenter’s sympathetic ear:

  I don’t want to grouse, as so much is all right with me, but this physical loneliness has gone on for too many months, and with it springs and grows a wretched fastidiousness, so that even if the opportunity for which I yearn was offered I fear I might refuse it. In such a refusal there is nothing spiritual.—It is rather a sign that the spirit is being broken. I am sure that some of the decent people I see daily would be willing to save me if they knew, but they don’t know, can’t know—I sit leaning over them for a bit and there it ends—except for images which burn in my sleep. I know that though you have heard this and sadder cases 1000 times before, you will yet be sympathetic, and that is why you are such a comfort to me. It’s awful to live with an unsatisfied craving, now and then smothering it but never killing it or even wanting to. If I could get one solid night it would be something.

  Clearly the young wounded soldier Frank Vicary, for all his warmth and sympathy, was one of the men whose images burned in Morgan’s dreams. With Frank he could “do the . . . brotherly” thing—but he could not bring himself to risk touching him.

  Everywhere he found absence, and in the absences he discerned codes of repression. A sign painted at a blocked-off entrance to the hospital read “No admission this way even if the fence has fallen down.” To quell his feverish desires, he began to write, publishing small essays in the Egyptian Mail, the Saturday edition of a Cairo English-language newspaper. The narrative of these small travelogues was in itself subversive. He set up parallels between Alexandrian and British attitudes, leveling their ethical field. An essay on the strangeness of the Egyptians’ bastard “Gippo English” was balanced with an essay on the risibility of “Army English.” These short sketches, some still unpublished, some later collected in Pharos and Pharillon, were disguised as amusing travelogues. But they were more pointedly a self-conscious antidote to Baedeker’s smug and secure Eurocentrism. Close reading of them reveals a complex narrative sympathy—an attempt to bring across his insights in a different key, one that Morgan would come to describe as an invitation to view life at an angle.

  He explored the meandering streets of Alexandria, the places where a man without a map would get lost. And he actively researched the secret city of vice. Using his connections within the Censorship Office, Morgan befriended an Egyptian official in the police. He asked him to find a hashish den outside the purview of the British authorities. Hash was thought to be a more lurid drug than opium. In the public account—“The Den,” in Pharos and Pharillon—he shaped the expedition as an amusing sketch of local color with a twist. The den disappoints. No drugs are found, and the trip becomes an occasion to mock the English yearning for a titillating exotic experience. But in his raw private letter to Edward Carpenter, he confessed a very different story with a very different moral.

  Here Morgan made clear that the episode sexually stirred him. Drug vice and sexual vice had the same root, and he was deeply implicated in the search for both.

  We went up pitch black stairs in a slum and scratched at a door at the top . . . We push in and find a small and well mannered company smoking the drug, quiet and languorous. There was an Arab girl, barefoot, very young and tired, and some boy attendants, playing cards together—not to speak of odd noises in unopened rooms. One of the boys made a sign to me. I did not respond, but he came and sat down . . . on the bench. He was a young man, reall
y, of extraordinary beauty and charm, very big and well built and manly, despite delicacy of lip and softness of eye. He wore garabia and tarboosh and wouldn’t talk Italian and I no Arabic. The other boys—in European dress and less charming—also made signs. Everyone—except ourselves—smoked. I would have smoked if I had been alone.

  This seductive episode was interrupted, as it was so often for Forster, by the arrival of Europeans. “Three . . . dapper young men in straw hats, probably Italian shop assistants,” came in and spoiled the mood. Not only did they make Morgan fatally self-conscious, they also enacted the familiar kabuki dance of homophobia. The Italian men, he wrote to Carpenter “were horrified at our sight. Boys tried to sit on their knees but they were not having any of it at all . . .” Even in recounting the episode to Carpenter, self-consciousness made him step back mentally. “Well, now with due regard for the censor, I have indicated what was to me an interesting and even attractive evening. I felt curiously at home in that den of vice.”

  Morgan’s letter makes clear that he felt tarnished not by the boys’ sexual invitation, but by his own fatal timidity. As with his protestations about the repulsiveness of Arab men, he turned the ethics of the episode back on itself. In the immediate aftermath of the visit, Morgan discovered that the Egyptian policeman had revealed the existence of the hash den to the British authorities. To Malcolm Darling he derided this as “an act of pure mud.”

  A few days after I heard from Furness that the owner had been hauled up, and on mentioning this to my Egyptian friend was sickened to the vitals that he had gone straight to the police and peached. “Oh yes”—smiling modestly. “It was my duty. I am a private gentleman in the evening but a member of the administration (he’s in the Police himself) by day. I keep the two apart.”