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

by Wendy Moffat

  In the summer of 1928 his old and dear friend Leonard Woolf approached Morgan to join a cause. A mannish lesbian writer named Radclyffe Hall had just published a controversial new novel. The Well of Loneliness courted danger with its sexual subject matter; and now the author and publisher were drawn into a legal fight over its prosecution on charges of criminal obscenity. Hall’s novel was a coming-of-age story of lesbian love. Much like Maurice, its protagonist (a tortured young woman named Stephen Gordon) struggles to understand her identity and find love, if not acceptance, in the modern world. But Hall’s story ends tragically: Stephen’s family rejects her, and her lover, Mary, leaves her for a man. The novel ends with Stephen Gordon’s prayer, “Give us also the right to our existence!”

  Almost immediately after the novel’s publication, the editor of the conservative Sunday Express began a public campaign to suppress it on moral grounds. In a searing editorial, James Douglas called on Hall’s publisher to withdraw all copies from circulation; failing that, he urged the home secretary to undertake prosecution against the book’s publisher and distributor on the grounds of criminal obscenity. The Express explicitly rejected Hall’s cry for tolerance of “inverts,” arguing that “[the novel] is a seductive and insidious piece of special pleading designed to display perverted decadence as a martyrdom inflicted on these outcasts by a cruel society.”

  The home secretary, William Johnson-Hicks, was addicted to purity campaigns. He had already cracked down on gambling and nightclubs and all sorts of sin in the city; within days he took the newspaper’s bait. Though the publisher, Jonathan Cape, did withdraw the book, “Jix” nevertheless instructed the director of public prosecutions to begin lining up witnesses who could attest to its nefarious influence on young people, anticipating that the “defendants have it in mind to procure a number of men of literary eminence to testify as to the innocuousness of the book.” Procure indeed. So Morgan found himself in the low-ceilinged sitting room at Monk’s House outside the little Sussex village of Rodmell, getting drunk with Virginia and Leonard Woolf, talking of “sodomy & sapphism, with emotion” and planning a counterattack.

  “Soon we were telephoning and interviewing and collecting signatures,” Virginia Woolf wrote her lover, Vita Sackville-West. The threatened suppression of the book and prosecution of its publisher quickly persuaded other famous writers—Arnold Bennett, G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells, Lytton Strachey, T. S. Eliot, and Vera Brittain—to sign on. Leonard determined that Morgan would be the best emissary to approach the author herself. Hall was a formidable figure—wearing a full pinstriped man’s suit, and a daunting blackrimmed monocle—and during their meeting Morgan let slip that while he found the novel to be courageous, he had not thought it particularly well written. Virginia described the debacle of Morgan’s retreat:

  Radclyffe scolds him like a fishwife, and says that she wont [sic] have any letter written about her book unless it mentions the fact that it is a work of artistic merit—even genius. And no one has read her book; or can read it: and now we have to explain this to all the great signed names . . . So our ardour in the cause of freedom of speech gradually cools, and instead of offering to reprint the masterpiece, we are already beginning to wish it unwritten.

  Morgan had been willing to defend the “meritorious dull book” on principle. But back at Monk’s House, tipsy and scalded by Hall’s tongue-lashing, he confided to Leonard and Virginia that he found lesbians “disgusting: partly from conventions, partly because he disliked that women should be independent of men.” Hall’s book embraced the modern psychological theories that claimed “inversion” to be a congenital condition—and the three writers’ conversation turned to whether homosexuality could be “cured.” Morgan told the Woolfs he had learned of a prominent neurologist’s boast that he could “convert the sodomites” through an aversion cure—much as Dr. Lasker-Jones had proposed to do to Maurice. “Would you like to be converted?” Leonard asked him, genuinely curious. “‘No’ said Morgan, quite definitely.” In the end Virginia and Morgan composed a rather tame “comic little letter” decrying that social opprobrium such as the Hall case would cause artists to suppress “creative impulses” and “shun anything original.” By October, Morgan found himself sitting on a hard bench at the Bow Street Magistrates Court, alongside forty eminent scientists, theologians, and men of letters waiting to testify on behalf of Hall’s defense. After a long peroration the chief magistrate concluded that as a matter of law he could determine whether the book was obscene without inviting any expert testimony, and summarily—and anticlimactically—dismissed the assembled crowd.

  The real drama occurred in Morgan’s life alone. His public and private personae collided with ironic force the very week of the Well of Loneliness trial. He told the story to Sebastian, gamely playing up the comedy of the occasion: “What with being blackmailed on Wednesday and Bow Street on Friday, life has really been quite a whirl.” This single sentence embodies the tension between Forster’s secret and his carefully cultivated public life. The attempted blackmail came through an elliptical approach. The wife of one of Morgan’s casual sex partners discovered her husband had slept with Morgan, and confronted him. She assured him he would not be bothered further if he paid cash.

  Morgan had been quite lucky in his adventures before this moment. With Bess Palmer he had played the part of a befuddled middle-aged man, with no designs on her husband besides hearty friendship. He even managed the delicate feat of remaining her husband’s lover without her knowledge for the rest of his life. But this occasion was a little different. The proof of its sting is revealed by the paucity of records. Morgan destroyed all but the barest shreds of the record of this trauma—and these come elliptically in coded references to a few of his closest friends. “She swears I shan’t be worried or even spoken to,” Morgan wrote to Joe.

  It might seem that Morgan would be ill-prepared to address the practicalities of blackmail. But, characteristically, he had imagined something similar to it more than a decade earlier, even before he had first touched the soldier on the beach in Alexandria. The scene in which Alec threatens Maurice with blackmail in the British Museum predated his own experience. Now he showed the blackmail letter to Gerald Heard. But Heard, sad to say, had been won over by fiction. His praise for this section of Maurice had been so effusive that it was Gerald whom Morgan first “summoned for advice and sympathy.” Soft-hearted Gerald was too influenced by the example of Maurice, as Morgan himself came to recognize. Having “read the wrong book,” Gerald “would do nothing but advise . . . sympathize with the blackmailers,” Morgan wryly told Sprott, concluding that when he thought on it, the episode was not so frightening, since “the mailer indeed had only the faintest tinge of black.”

  The tantalizing reference to a not-very-dark blackmailer suggests that Morgan’s partner, like Reg, was a dark-skinned man. The larger lesson was not to take too serious a view of such setbacks. They were all in a day’s flirtation, it seemed. Quickly the scare blew over—“I calmed down rather quickly and am now O. K.” In public and in private, Morgan was temperamentally unsuited to martyrdom. He paid off the blackmailer, laughed off his anxiety, and dusted off his dignity.

  But Morgan’s relations with Harry Daley began to deteriorate in the months after the Well of Loneliness affair. Harry had always been prickly, prone to take slights and to harbor grudges. But the veneer of Harry’s freshness wore away quite quickly, exposing a man of reckless, even dangerous, self-regard. Morgan tried as tactfully as he could to make Harry see the consequences of his penchant for celebrity and bitchy gossip. Harry understood that his words had power, but he reveled in the fact that Morgan “was always frightened by what I would say next.” In his memoir published decades later, Harry made it clear that he could not view Morgan’s caution as entirely solicitous:

  “Love” seems hardly the right word to describe the spite and back-biting it all involved. People in love must never be crossed or disappointed, it seemed, and all that was asked was t
hat I should give up all my former friends, acquaintances, hobbies and interests, and sit waiting at home until my lovers found time to call—and on no condition tell anyone I knew them.

  Gradually Morgan came to understand that Harry had no internal governor; he told Joe, “I feel sickish over Harry’s behaviour to you, and again have got the feeling that he will have us all in the dock before he is done.”

  It was really painful for Morgan to sever his friendship with Harry, but he did so, utterly. By mutual agreement the two men burned all their correspondence—only a tiny forgotten cache survived, tucked away in several of Harry’s books. By the end of the decade Morgan had finished with counseling patience. He advised Joe, too, to cut off his friendship with Harry altogether, writing, “I don’t blame you over Harry at all. He gets wrong with everyone sooner or later I think.” Analyzing his former lover as if he were a character, Morgan wrote to Joe,

  On Harry it is as easy to report on the position of a windmill sail. He is tragically unhappy, he has a cold, and speaking parentally, he is spoilt: a year’s attention and treatings have made him less considerate of other people’s comfort. His absence of self control the other day made me feel him scarcely human and this acted as an anti-aphrodisiac. I wish such an effect could be general.

  Ending the affair with Harry allowed Morgan to assess the pleasures and dangers of the whole of the Hammersmith circle. He had been, he felt, too gullible about the virtues of the working class. Romance, it seemed, had degenerated into bitchiness and backbiting. Harry accused Morgan and Joe of acting like pimps, and there was some truth to this charge, though he had been a willing enough pawn. Singly Morgan’s new friends could be entertaining and charming, but collectively they were becoming exhausting: “Hammersmith is a complete goose when audible en masse, loveable and valuable though the individual feathers may be.” He was happy to keep at a slight remove, physically and metaphysically. “I am so glad you are not coming to Leo’s this evening,” he wrote to Joe. “I have got a kind of cat-ring feeling—so many Dicks, so many Toms . . . I suppose there is something secretive about me, unless I am growing old and I don’t secrete enough.” Perhaps he had outgrown this younger set, he concluded. Carrington, always an acute observer, wrote Sprott that she found Morgan to be “rather unhappy” at this point in his life. “He seemed as if he was trying to hide his feelings and to be gay in spite of an ache in his heart.” Morgan found that Bloomsbury and his Bloomsbury friends offered a respite from the “cat-ring” of Hammersmith. In January 1930, when his lease on the flat expired, he moved next door to 26 Brunswick Square, where he would remain until the Blitz.

  Joe’s Hammersmith terrace house remained a perfect place for a gathering. Priding himself on his polyglot taste in friends, Joe used the occasion of the annual Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race on the Thames to host a party. The atmosphere was exaggerated radical chic. Mixing elements of society in a deliberately provocative way, Ackerley invited new friends from the BBC (where he was now working at the Talks Department), his lover du jour—usually a Guardsman or a cheerful scoundrel who might bring along his wife—artists and actors and local toughs, and his surviving family: his eccentric mother (a glamorous former vaudeville star who was a master of the gaudy hat), his aunt Bunny, who had “something of . . . Mae West in her character” and “an extraordinarily infectious chesty laugh,” and his sister, Nancy—bony, regal in mien, unhappy in a sharp, patrician way. Morgan came too, and so did Anwar and Akbar, Masood’s teenage sons, who had been sent to study in England as their parents’ marriage disintegrated into divorce. Joe laid on magnums of champagne for the Cambridge crowd and bottles of beer for the cops—both camps becoming more raucous as the day wore on, each gawking at the beautiful young men rowing on the river, all embraced in a warm haze of alcohol and companionship. The party was like an Agatha Christie novel run amok.

  On the cool, dull Saturday morning of April 12, 1930, Morgan struck up a conversation at Joe’s Boat Race party with a burly young policeman whom Harry had brought from the Section House. He looked vaguely familiar to Morgan, with his dark hair parted in the center and slicked down, and his wide, open face, which broke into a ready smile. The young man was in his mid-twenties. He was affable, earnest, and at first tried to impress Morgan by expounding on the slight fib that he had been reading Dostoyevsky. In reality he was more expert in the manly, outdoorsy arts. He had been an amateur boxer, picking up a few bob here and there, and he had the broad mashed nose to prove his bona fides. The young man warmed up in conversation. He liked rowing for exercise, and knew a good bit about boats and the river. He had a wide smile. It turned out that his name was Bob Buckingham, and he would become the greatest love of Morgan’s life.

  10

  “A Little Like Being Married”

  Like Harry Daley, Bob Buckingham worked out of the Hammersmith Section House, and like Harry he had grown up in deep poverty and effectively fatherless. At a young age Bob had begun supporting his mother and many siblings while his feckless father disappeared for months at a time. The family lived in Somerstown, in the slums squeezed between St. Pancras and Euston stations. Like so many young men in the twenties, Bob scraped by on occasional work and lived through spells of unemployment. He was dexterous and enterprising: he could dismantle and fix small motors, knew his way around a bit of carpentry, and, strong-backed, he had worked on the docks and hauled parcels as a deliveryman before joining the police force. On the beat he was affable, but firm. He derived authority from his ample square-built frame and his booming bass voice. Harry, who took credit for introducing Bob to Morgan, channeled his envy at the success of their friendship into criticism of his rival. He consoled himself by believing that Bob was rather dim, “not really a reading man,” pompous, and a bit of a lickspittle. Bob’s bourgeois staidness was the real goad to Harry. He refused to see Harry as a threat, treating his machinations with “amused protective kindness.” For Morgan, especially after Daley’s tempestuous presence, Bob’s loyalty and calm were a tonic.

  Their relationship began, like so many of Morgan’s affairs, with a delicate dance just shy of overt seduction. Morgan invited Bob to the movies, to the theater, to dinner, to stay the weekend at the Brunswick Square flat. After each treat, Bob sent a polite thank-you note in model penmanship, suggesting the next time he would be free to meet. Morgan took charge of Bob’s education, lending him books and querying him earnestly on what he learned from them. From the earliest moments of their friendship, Morgan found a kindred spirit in Bob, projecting onto his new friend’s calm a vulnerability not discerned by others in the Hammersmith set. Joe Ackerley was amused to watch Morgan shield the sturdy young man from gossip and intrigue. But Morgan was set on preserving Bob’s reputation, abjuring Joe, “I must reemphasise the need of silence about Bob.”

  Morgan proceeded with delicacy, he told Sprott, because “I am quite sure that [Bob’s] feeling for me is something he has never had before.” Bob was comfortable in the company of men, but had slept only with women; in the summer of 1931 Morgan reported that Bob had “fallen very violently in liking” with him. Morgan proudly told Lytton Strachey that he had achieved “a complete success” in an “affair” with his new young man, a description of sexual conquest that the more experienced Lytton found “fayish” and “delightful.” To Sebastian, Morgan described his sex life with Bob as “a spiritual feeling which has extended to my physique.” He was careful to allow Bob the freedom to pursue affairs with women, taking a lesson from the contretemps with Reg and Bess Palmer. Occasionally he even offered Bob the keys to the Brunswick Square flat for assignations with a woman he had met on the rebound from an earlier affair, a bright, practically minded young nurse in training named May Hockey. May was unthreatening, with a good sense of humor and a comfortable sense of herself. She resolutely resisted the cult of femininity. She didn’t wear makeup, dressed sensibly, and had no room for religion or sentimentality.

  As he grew comfortable in their love affair Morgan brought B
ob to West Hackhurst, ostensibly to make small repairs around the house. Lily, almost eighty, was still alert enough to suspect that something was up. Rather waspishly she began a campaign to test Morgan’s affections, remarking on how ugly his new friend was—with his broad, flattened nose—and how common. She obtusely refused to hear Bob’s name correctly, referring to the end of her days to “Mr. Bucknam.” Morgan, as usual, took the path of least resistance with her, acquiescing to her criticisms without standing up for Bob. At the same time he introduced Bob to his closest female friends—to Florence Barger, who set about befriending him warmly, and to Carrington, who “found Policeman Bob very charming and attractive to look at & ‘easy to get on with’, as they say.”

  It was Bob’s very ordinariness that made him so attractive to Morgan. There was much to admire. He had found a profession by hard work and perseverance; despite a Dickensian past he engaged the world with cheerful curiosity. Like the eponymous protagonist of Maurice, Bob was a man “completely unlike” Morgan himself—“someone handsome, healthy, bodily attractive . . .”; and like Alec Scudder, Maurice’s lover, Bob was working-class and exceptionally loyal. For his part, Bob was entranced by Morgan’s adoration, keen to experience the world of culture Morgan opened to him, and touched by the warmth and acceptance of Morgan’s friends. He worked eagerly to improve himself intellectually, striving to advance in the force in part because his success would bring pleasure to Morgan. Even Harry grudgingly admitted that temperamentally they were a well-balanced pair: “Bob was the man for Morgan, much more suitable than me, and I am glad that’s how it ended.”