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

by Wendy Moffat

  In the end he inscribed it in Greek “to Hermes, leader of souls,” a cryptic allusion to the friend who had led him from sexual ignorance into the new world. He told Florence that Mohammed had inspired something else—a new and serious homosexual short story.

  I have just written a short story which is his in another sense, though I did not realise that when I started. It is violent and wholly unpublishable, and I do not know whether it is good . . . The characters are a missionary and a young chief of the vague South Seas, who he converts and does inasfar as this world is concerned; in the next world the situation is reversed.

  The story, published posthumously, he called “The Life to Come.” As he was with the Maurice manuscript, Morgan was chary with this new homosexual fiction. “I may show it to Goldie, but there is more sensuality in my composition than in his, and it might distress him.” For the time being, only Florence and Sassoon were trusted to see it.

  Sassoon traded him, contraband for contraband. He lent Morgan his copy of a new book, very hush-hush and privately printed, by a young man detailing his extraordinary adventures among the Bedouin during the war. Morgan realized he had met the author, the “fair-haired boy” from the luncheon with Antonius! The Seven Pillars of Wisdom was a revelation—“exactly what I want,” he told Sassoon. His excitement over reading it lit a creative fire—under the spell of the beautiful Arab memoir, Morgan hurriedly finished writing the final chapters of A Passage to India.

  When Morgan met him for the second time in the winter of 1923, T. E. Lawrence had not yet been transformed into the legendary “Lawrence of Arabia.” (The publication of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom would see to that.) Though he was only thirty-five, Lawrence had already compiled a huge, restless résumé—as an archaeologist, linguist, scholar, diplomat, and soldier-adventurer. He was tiny—a few inches over five feet tall—and reed-thin; from across a room he looked like a luminous boy. Lawrence had been studiously trying to shake off any notion of grandeur, resigning from the colonial office and attempting to enlist in the Royal Air Force under an assumed name. But he had been found out and discharged.

  Morgan wrote Lawrence an effusive letter, with sharply detailed suggestions for revising the manuscript of The Seven Pillars. Lawrence replied quickly this time, honored to be approached by a writer “among the elect. I feel giddy at the idea of you taking the trouble.” He was just discharged from the service, and had bought a tiny cottage in Dorset, no more than a shell really, which he romantically christened Clouds Hill. It was near the army base, so he could frequent the local pub with his buddies; Clouds Hill was so cramped that Morgan put up at the Black Bear. The visit seemed promising: Lawrence was attracted to Morgan by something like hero worship, Morgan to Lawrence by something like lust. On his return to London, Morgan performed the next step in his familiar dance toward intimacy, offering up “The Life to Come” while warning Lawrence of its “unpublishable” content. The young man was excited to be invited into Morgan’s confidence. “I’d very much like to see the unpublishable stuff, any of it you feel able to show me. It shall be safely kept, and quickly returned,” Lawrence promised him, adding reassuringly, “‘Unpublishable’ is a relative, even passing, qualification. The Seven Pillars earned it two or three years ago: and have lost it in that little time.”

  Then, a month’s silence. Then Lawrence wrote disconcertingly to tell Morgan that it was “one of the funniest things I’d ever come across.” He “laughed and laughed” at the story of lust and murder. Morgan replied, clearly taken aback, but game. He told Lawrence that his reaction made him laugh in response. “I am glad you wrote,” he wrote Lawrence, “as I had assumed you were disgusted and was sorry though I knew in such a contretemps neither the disgusted nor the disgusting party would be the least to blame.” So the friendship rested delicately, for the moment. As a billet-doux the story was a flop. Lawrence was immensely attractive, but he was also very strange.

  Leonard Woolf had become a stalwart supporter, urging Morgan to forge on with the Indian novel. So, in late January 1924 Leonard and Virginia were the first to hear that “I’ve put the last words to my novel.” Morgan was pleased and moved, but he knew in some obscure way that it was the end of an era for him. He had a revealing conversation with Virginia about their shared craft, which she recorded in her diary: “Talking of Proust & [D. H.] Lawrence he said he would prefer to be Lawrence; but much rather would be himself. We discussed his novels. I don’t think I am a novelist, he said. Suddenly I said ‘No, I don’t think you are.’ Ah! He exclaimed eagerly, interested, and not dashed.” Virginia was onto something, but she was not in a position to understand fully why Morgan seemed so serene in response to her perception. She thought that Morgan meant to fall back on a career as a journalist and reviewer. But Morgan had not shared his homosexual fiction with her—she was not privy to the Maurice manuscript, did not know how rapidly and avidly he was writing new short stories: “Dr. Woolacott,” a psychological tale of a soldier haunted by his lover, killed in the war, or “The Obelisk,” a ribald fantasy of seduction.

  Morgan’s choice of literary models was telling in ways she could not wholly understand. Proust, the master of memory and despair, had indeed been an inspiration as Morgan finished A Passage to India and as he mourned Mohammed. Virginia was making a similar assumption to the one D. H. Lawrence had made about Morgan. It was true that her mousy friend, at least on the surface, seemed a writer more in the mold of the moody Proust than the irascible D. H. Lawrence. But a notation in Morgan’s diary a decade later illuminates the exchange with Woolf. He had been talking with her about sex—

  In the best love making I have known there has been a sort of laughter and the most violent embrace gets softened by it. That’s to say my problem as a writer hasn’t been as awful as some’s. It is these lower class youths, rather than any special antic with them, that has bothered me. [N.B. I have never tried to turn a man into a girl, as Proust did with Albertine, for this seemed derogatory to me as a writer.]

  In his conversation with Virginia, Morgan exclaimed “Ah!” because she had helped him to make a discovery about the literary identity he would pursue for the rest of his life, the problem he had understood, in an inchoate way, when he had written, in 1919, “I don’t see what [my path] is clearly yet, but I know what keeps me from it.” His path would be not so much one of renunciation as one of literary bifurcation. He would continue to write, as D. H. Lawrence had done, honestly and fiercely, but he would accept that much of this writing would forever—or at least until the “happier year” he had imagined in Maurice—remain “unpublishable.” He told Virginia that day, “I am not at all downcast about my literary career,” because he had radically reimagined its terms.

  Only Morgan knew that A Passage to India would be his valedictory. He dedicated it to “Syed Ross Masood and to the seventeen years of our friendship.” Reviewers welcomed his novel as a “great book,” but they saw it as a return to the stage after a long silence rather than a swan song. In India and in England the novel was recognized as something greater and deeper than a work in the universally admired vein of Forster-the-sensitive-novelist. It was a masterpiece. In a bemused, slightly uneasy mood Morgan watched his “good luck” pile up as the novel took hold in the public consciousness, winning the James Tait Black Award for fiction, and becoming a bestseller. The gush of royalties and his inheritance from Aunt Laura suddenly made him a rich man.

  The day after he turned forty-six, Morgan soberly took inventory:

  Famous wealthy, miserable, physically ugly—red nose enormous, round patch in middle of scalp which I forget less than I did and which is brown when I don’t wash my head and pink when I do. Face in the distance—mirrors of Reform Club—is toad-like and pallid, with a tiny rim of hair at the top of the triangle. My stoop must be appalling. [I] am surprised I don’t repel more generally: I can still get to know anyone I want and have that illusion that I am charming and beautiful . . . Stomach increases, but not yet visible under wa
istcoat. The anus is clotted with hairs, and there is a great loss of sexual power—it was very violent 1921–22. Eyes and probably hearing weaker.

  9

  “Toms and Dicks”

  As Mohammed was dying, Morgan happened upon an elegy in a magazine called the London Mercury. The poem’s premise was commonplace enough four years after the war—a man in mourning, poring over a bundle of letters from a dead friend. But its diction startled him because it echoed word-forword phrases from his secret letter to Mohammed, and his lover’s final letters:

  Seeking my dead

  Hearing him yet

  Saying “Good-bye!”

  Hearing his sigh,

  Murmured so low,

  “Ah, but I know . . .

  You will forget.”

  Reading “Ghosts” evoked an uncanny sensation of déjà vu, “the horror, beauty, depth, emotional and mental insecurity” of being in thrall to longing and loss. Impulsively, Morgan wrote a letter of praise to the young poet. J. R. Ackerley was only twenty-five. The poem was his first published writing, and he was flattered to hear from a celebrated author. Ackerley preserved the letter as a treasure—as he did every one of the nearly eleven hundred more Morgan would write him over the next fifty years. Thus a spontaneous gesture of encouragement began a deep friendship between two men a generation apart.

  Like many survivors of the First War, Ackerley in his mid-twenties was both older and younger than his age. He had left Cambridge to become an officer in the trenches of France, where his only brother had been “decapitated” by a “whiz-bang” in the final months of the war. Twice wounded, captured by the Germans, Ackerley was transported from camp to camp as a prisoner of war, and eventually interned with other British prisoners at Hotel des Alpes in Switzerland, “guilty and frustrated” at being held in such luxurious conditions. There he fell in love with a young officer dying of tuberculosis. After the war he returned to London with a cold heart and no patience at all for the fustiness and cant of the generation that had sent him to war. Pleasing himself, which had always been his inclination during his indulged childhood, now became a badge of honor and a personal rebellion. Joe Ackerley was unapologetically homosexual, and determinedly promiscuous. He was tall and rangy, and strikingly handsome—with chiseled cheekbones, a sharp strong nose, brown hair, and icy blue eyes. He honed his seductive charm. Sure only of his fierce intelligence, wit, and love of literature, he wandered about from country to country and bed to bed, spending his father’s ample allowance and finding himself.

  Morgan’s first impression of the young man was that he had an undeveloped heart. “I don’t quite like A. though he has intelligence and charm. I suspect him of cruelty, but perhaps it’s merely because I suspect all young men. I have no friend under thirty now.” But being with Joe made Morgan feel less antediluvian. They never slept together, but they became fast friends. Morgan fell into an avuncular role with Joe, making suggestions on what he should read, and chastising him for his romantic scrapes. In turn, the young man, though hapless in his own love life, served as an unjudging and experienced confidant on sexual matters. Morgan sculpted his young protégé into Pygmalion, brokering a position for him as secretary to the maharajah of Chhatarpur. Joe wrote Hindoo Holiday—a hilarious account of his five months there—but he was far less appreciative of Indian mysticism and Indian muddles than his mentor had been, and soon he was back in London, driving around in a green MG with the top down, seducing guardsmen and yearning for the Ideal Friend. His list of qualities for this imagined person—which he later catalogued in his autobiography, My Father and Myself, as if he were ordering up a dish at a restaurant—was exacting enough to preclude most ordinary mortals: the man had to be loyal, physically attractive, circumcised, younger than Ackerley, healthy, no bad breath. And rather more improbably, he had to be heterosexual.

  Just when A Passage to India came out in the summer of 1924, a second, quite corporeal, ghost appeared unexpectedly. Of all places, it chose to haunt Weybridge. Walking back from the railway station to Harnham one day as he shuttled between West Hackhurst and Weybridge, Morgan was shocked to see Mohammed driving a taxicab. Or rather a man with the same wide face, the same delicious color of skin, the same bemused expression, the same casual attitude as his forearms rested on the steering wheel. The young man disappeared for some weeks, and Morgan almost believed that he had been a ghost. Then he reappeared, this time driving the station bus. “It was like a return from the dead, and upset me,” Morgan wrote in his diary.

  The event unsettled the sense of resignation he had so carefully cultivated since Mohammed’s death. He had resolved, “No personal relationships—you bring too little and are too old.” Days before the ghost appeared, Morgan had caught a glimpse of “a man of my own age & class watching rough across the river at Shepperton” and thought with disgust, “I am like that.” But did his disgust stem from “envy or shame?” he wondered. Now, very cautiously, he allowed his hopes to reawaken. Morgan began a flirtation with the driver, who lived with his wife and child in a flat carved out of a large, derelict house in the fields just behind Harnham.

  With the tutelage and encouragement of Joe Ackerley, Morgan plotted how to test the boundaries of the driver’s affection. Affable but cagey, the man went through several pseudonyms before Morgan found out his real name, Reg Palmer. Reg was of mixed race—“some black blood,” Morgan noted in his diary; he had a mashed boxer’s nose and stood stocky and strong. The men exchanged cigarettes each time they met—thank heavens Morgan had learned how to smoke since he met the shepherd boy!—and soon Reg “asked me rather shyly whether I’d care to come round to his place one evening and ‘have a crack.’” This auspicious phrase turned out to mean having a meal with Reg’s wife and toddler. Morgan adopted an amused tone in explaining the situation to Florence.

  She was a very nice woman—better educated than he—and we all had biscuits and coffee, and I nursed the cat. The man is not intelligent and rather rough, and I don’t think anything important will come from it. But he is perfectly straight—a simple response to friendship—so I mean to go on. I told mother about it (in passing), for now I must ask him here, and I had to get her leave. She thinks he hasn’t placed me socially, and will collapse when he sees the splendours of Harnham. I’m not sure. I must arrange that Agnes doesn’t open the door to him, however!

  Reg shared Morgan’s pleasure in conspiring against the women—both Lily and Reg’s wife, Bess. The pretext for visiting Harnham would be to obtain “French lessons”—“he learned some strange sounds in France which it pleases him to repeat.” Reg showed up for his first lesson bearing the gift of a photograph. Lily, who “didn’t trust his face,” commented acidly, “How like the lower classes to have given you his photograph as a first call. They always think one in love with them after the slightest civility.”

  Reg came by Harnham several times to move carpets and heavier furniture as the Forsters prepared to debark permanently to Aunt Laura’s house. Morgan decided to be practical: “I had better have such adventures while I can, for there will be no place for them in the pseudo-feudalism of West Hackhurst.” The two men creatively found ways to be alone together. In January 1925 they made love in the half-empty parlor of Harnham while Lily was at West Hackhurst unpacking the china—“a queer ending to my almost 20 years sojourn in this suburb.”

  Reg told Morgan that he had never had sex with a man before, but he was quite keen and confident as a lover: “The visit was sticky, but friendly and physically superb.” Considering the evidence, Morgan concluded that his new friend was a habitual but harmless dissembler, whose lies were “mere social behaving.” In July, Morgan felt “nearly off my head for happiness” from an extended sexual romp, made more delightful since it played out like a Feydeau farce—the window cleaners arriving at the front door at just the moment when the two men tiptoed out the back. Morgan composed a picaresque for Joe all in French—“Madame n’est pas sans soupçons”—before breaking off, �
��Oh Joe—it is like before—I want to die, but then it was only 10 minutes happiness, and today it was 9 hours.” It would have been longer, but Bess was about to go into labor with her second child.

  Decades later, Morgan’s friend Eudora Welty admiringly reviewed his posthumously published gay fiction. But she added one telling caveat: “when the women went out of his stories, they took the comedy with them.” The same could be said for the tone of the personal relationships Morgan developed in his late forties, after he met Joe Ackerley. Under Joe’s tutelage, Morgan explored gay London—places beyond the “tatty pubs in Soho . . . dull clubs frequented by elderly queers” and “dark and smelly urinals”—and by entering this completely male secretive world, he developed a taste for categorical misogyny that would have been unthinkable to him in previous years.

  Like many young homosexuals of his generation, Joe Ackerley defined his homosexuality by opposition to everything feminine. Contempt for women was a badge of honor. This attitude amplified Morgan’s latent profound misgivings about female power. He broadened his personal resentment of Lily and Bess into a worldview, writing in his “Commonplace Book,”

  Women have got out of hand . . . Twenty years ago I thought “It’s unpleasing to me but it won’t go further” and spoke with false enthusiasm of women’s rights. She shall have all she wants, I can still get away from her, I thought. I grudged her nothing except my company. But it has gone further . . . This, I begin to see, is sex-war, and D. H. L. has seen it . . . and is far more on the facts than Bernard Shaw and his Life Force.