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

by Wendy Moffat

  During this summer Morgan convinced Bob to accompany him on a driving tour of the West Country, in part to give May some rest, in part to reclaim Bob’s affections. Harry Daley, true to form, took the opportunity of Bob’s absence to visit May and stir up trouble. He broadly suggested that the friendship between Morgan and her husband was untoward, and did his best to undermine her confidence in Bob’s love for her. But in the face of this May held firm without being rigid. She refused to begin a power struggle with Morgan, believing that Bob’s loyalties, while divided, were more stable if he was with a man and not with other women. Harry’s malign influence sometimes rattled Bob—“Harry . . . is always yapping back into Hammersmith on three legs and setting off Bob Barkingham”—but he couldn’t fluster May.

  So, in the first months after Robin’s birth, the three worked out a détente—an unusual kinship that looked from the outside like a completely traditional marriage. It relied on leaving the unspoken unexplored, and on conventional ideas about May’s absolute sway in domestic matters. But gingerly the arrangement grew into a kind of grace, a complex and undefined kinship that depended on Morgan and May’s reciprocal love and admiration. With masterful aplomb, after Morgan’s death May described the “stormy passages” of her relationship with him:

  I now know that he was in love with Robert and therefore critical and jealous of me and our early years were very stormy, mostly because he had not the faintest idea of the pattern of our lives and was determined that Robert should not be engulfed in domesticity. Over the years he changed us both and he and I came to love one another, able to share the joys and sorrows that came.

  May did not ask, and she did not tell.

  If Morgan resisted Bob becoming “engulfed in domesticity” with May, it was because he himself desired to set up housekeeping with his beloved. Morgan began to savor a domestic happiness with Bob at the Brunswick Square flat. It was the sort of quiet life between two men that he had hoped for since he wrote Maurice. He wrote Bob, “The happiest hours of my life will always be the short hours we can spend together in the flat.” In the summer after Robin was born, Morgan amplified these domestic interludes into a monumental story, telling Florence Barger gleefully,

  Bob met me at 8.30 A.M. Liverpool Street, having already got breakfast ready in the flat. I suppose it must feel a little like being married, this sort of thing! Anyhow it is very pleasant and I have never experienced it before . . . I appreciate so much your reception of Bob. It isn’t easy, at 53, to take a new important person into one’s life, the doors should by ordinary rules have shut, but those whom I love, and Bob himself, have done their best to make it easy. I don’t find it much use bothering about age—one is timeless until the end comes, and the years have only bound you and me together because they provided me with precious experience, which we have shared.

  He would create a kind of marriage of his own, outside of ordinary rules, a marriage composed of real patience and joy with an admixture of magical thinking. Partly this meant devaluing the meaning of Bob’s love for May as if it were some habit of working-class men in general; Morgan told Christopher Isherwood that he was considering revising the manuscript of Maurice: “I have sometime thought of Alec [Scudder] marrying.”

  In a real sense Morgan was rewriting his own life as he composed Goldie’s biography. This was the life that Goldie, with his foot set solidly in the Victorian world, could never have. But watching Robin grow, and feeling the baby knit him and the Buckinghams together, Morgan began to take pleasure in being modern. Virginia Woolf noticed with interest how delighted Morgan seemed while writing Goldie’s biography. Perhaps in homage to the tenor of Goldie’s memoirs, Morgan began a separate section of his diary labeled “Sex,” recording his own earliest memories of erotic desire. And in his “Commonplace Book” he wrote a little rebuttal to the note of caution Goldie had left him, imagining that this love for Bob might offer a lesson of hope for others.

  HAPPINESS

  I have been happy for two years . . . Happiness can come in one’s natural growth and not queerly, as religious people think. From 51 to 53 I have been happy, and I would like to remind others that their turns can come too. It is the only message worth giving.

  It was a curious thing that Morgan’s interior world became so enchanted at the moment when the outer world—the world Margaret Schlegel had called the world of “telegrams and anger”—grew more malignant. From his beat, Bob reported to Morgan that trouble was brewing even on the streets of London. Oswald Mosley rented out Olympia, the huge Edwardian convention hall, to exhort a mob of English Fascists; Mosley’s blackshirts spilled out onto the streets of Hammersmith, spewing hateful slogans about Communists and Jews. Bob was on duty to keep the peace at an enormous rally of blackshirts in Hyde Park; at Morgan’s request, he took notes on the scene.

  The political situation seemed dark for homosexuals as well as Jews. When Bob and Morgan visited Isherwood in Amsterdam, they were shadowed on the street by mysterious men, probably secret police. Morgan rebuffed Christopher’s entreaty to consider publishing Maurice. Berlin, at least Berlin before Hitler, had seemed to the young man to embody the spirit of Freedom. But Morgan, with a longer view, was more cautious:

  Yes, if the pendulum keeps swinging in its present direction it might get published in time. But the more one meets decent & sensible people, of whom there are now a good few, the more does one forget the millions of beasts and idiots who still prowl in the darkness, ready to gibber and devour. I think I had a truer vision of civilisation thirty years ago, when I regarded myself as hiding a fatal secret.

  The personal peril of Christopher and his German lover, Heinz Nedder-meyer, weighed heavily on Morgan, who sent them money as they pursued peregrinations to keep Heinz from being conscripted into the German army. After Hitler’s election the noose had tightened: Heinz’s entry permit was denied by British immigration officials, who looked askance on his pretext of arriving as a domestic worker, and he was “put on the next boat back to Germany.” The two men fled for respite to Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Their desperate situation—Heinz was eventually caught at the Danish border and forcibly conscripted—made Morgan anxious, both for them and on his own behalf. It was absurd to think that nationality meant anything at all! More than ever Morgan relied on the old Apostles’ ethic of personal relationships.

  The young homosexual men in Isherwood’s circle worked out a creative way to apply Apostolic virtues to these exigent times: they married. Erika Mann, the lesbian daughter of Thomas Mann, approached Christopher in early 1935, asking if he would marry her so she could procure a British passport as a means of escape from Germany. The political cabaret she had founded with the actress Therese Giehse—Brecht’s first Mother Courage—made her a target of the Nazis. Isherwood was too entangled with Heinz to agree to this arrangement, but he happily passed Mann along to Wystan Auden, who cabled back the single word “Delighted!” He and Mann married in June 1935—and remained companionable friends, and legally husband and wife, all their lives.

  The next conscript was the novelist Johnny Simpson. (An odd-looking man with a huge chin, whose long face looked like the curve of a new moon, Simpson had known Wystan and Morgan since the early thirties.) Now Therese Giehse was in danger—not only for her political actions, but because she was a Jew. Auden approached Simpson with “irresistible” logic, asking, “What are buggers for?” In May 1936, the peculiar wedding party appeared at the registry office in Solihull, a posh suburb of Birmingham where Simpson lived—the bride, who spoke not a word of English, clutching a tiny bouquet. Auden, dolled up in full morning suit with striped trousers, grandly orchestrated the event as master of ceremonies. The married couple and their handful of guests repaired to a local pub, where they racked up a huge bar tab. Auden announced in stentorian voice that it was all right—“It’s on Thomas Mann.”

  But not all weddings were fodder for comedy. In November 1933 Morgan was surprised to read the announcement of Siegfried Sassoon
’s engagement in The Times. Having lent a sympathetic ear both to Sassoon and to his theatrical but dear-hearted lover Stephen Tennant for the best part of a decade, Morgan was understandably dubious. Moreover he was hurt by learning the news by such impersonal means. He wrote Sassoon “a line of affection and good wishes and (in a sense) of farewell.” In two senses, actually. It seemed clear that Sassoon, whose aspirations toward the condition of landed gentry had always amused Morgan, had succumbed to convention. And he had betrayed their friendship as well.

  But Sassoon wrote back immediately, explaining that something sudden and mysterious had happened: he was in love with Hester Gatty. There was no accounting for it, but it was true. Morgan replied simply, “Your news, though I accept it as good news, startles me. (Not a question to be answered.)” But he determined to be fair and not to treat Siegfried as a defector or Hester as an enemy.

  In the waning days of 1935 Morgan faced an ironic recapitulation of his encounter with Goldie’s life: his doctor diagnosed prostate trouble, and recommended the same surgery that Dickinson had undergone. The attitude of his doctor, who ascribed the condition to excessive masturbation, compounded the humiliating disease itself: “he seemed quite genuine in his disgust, and added that this sort of thing isn’t natural and that nature takes it out of you somehow if you go against her. If he wants my reactions to shock he’ll get them all right.” Visiting the Woolfs, Morgan took Leonard aside and spoke to him gravely. After the two men’s “little private talk” Virginia recorded in her diary, “I think he feels he may die.”

  Lily, not knowing the cause but grasping the context, began to panic and fear the worst. Even at fifty-six, Morgan had not resolved how to counter her machinations, and he repaired to the London flat in preparation for the surgery, but mainly as a temporary escape from West Hackhurst. Just days before the operation, he wrestled with his tone in composing letters to her: “You must try to treat me less like a small boy when I get back! You sometimes say that I am bored at home—I am not at all, but I do get depressed [with] so much supervision . . .” “I felt it was no good talking it over with you [buying a new divan], since although you want me to be comfortable you don’t like change.” Whereupon, ratifying his own worst excesses, he ended the letter childishly: “Will now have some cocoa or an orange (not sure which!) and then go to bedy-by.”

  The operation took place on December 18. Two nights before he went under the knife, Morgan composed a valedictory letter to Bob, telling him bravely, “I have an open mind whether I shall get through or not. I don’t feel afraid of anything, and it is your love that has made me like this.” But the procedure, the first of two, was a success; he rallied quickly, and quite soon forgot that he had worried over suffering Goldie’s fate. Instead, as he recuperated slowly in a private nursing home, Morgan focused on the indignity of being cut off from the man he loved most dearly, complaining to Joe, “I don’t expect mother has quite conveyed the position here. They have stopped Bob coming because I am fond of him . . .”

  Even when in some pain, he retained his sense of humor, writing to Joe, I was thinking yesterday of the prick with some detachment, probably rather like the Maharajah did. The maddening delight mine has so often given me and a knowledge of other people which no other part of my body could have given. And now it stands—or rather flops—for wet flannel trousers and changes of plans. No wonder they garlanded it with marigold and bedewed it with ghee. But to the Westerner such specialisation must always seem silly.

  11

  “The Last Englishman”

  Marooned with Lily at the rambling Victorian pile of West Hackhurst, Morgan recovered from surgery. His mother was eighty-one, stout, crotchety, and “terribly authoritarian”; Morgan had just turned fifty-seven. Together, in this place, they seemed suspended in the past like bees in amber. They shared the sprawling house with two live-in servants: Agnes Dowland, the “last parlourmaid in England,” and Henry Bone, the gardener, each almost as old as Lily and almost as infirm. Coal had to be carried to the grates, and ashes to the garden. There was no proper plumbing, no electricity, and no telephone. If they wanted to bathe, Agnes heated water atop the kitchen stove and painfully hauled it upstairs in brass cans. The mile-long path to the village trailed through a field of brambles.

  Morgan’s friends back at Hammersmith Section House may have regarded the Forsters as country gentry, but Lily had served as a governess to the children at Abinger Hall sixty years earlier, and even after decades of respectable widowhood she was sensitive to her precarious social standing. Both Forsters keenly understood their dependence on the Farrers of Abinger Hall, who had allowed their friend Laura Forster to build the house but refused her the freehold of the land under it. Since Aunt Laura’s death, Morgan and Lily clung to the murky assumption that Lord Farrer would not enforce the terms of the lease. Now it was due to expire in months, just a short sixty years after Eddie Forster had drawn up the designs for the house. As the date loomed Morgan delicately bruited the question. The answer disquieted. Lord Farrer did not wish to tie his heirs’ hands by voiding the original terms. Through skirmishes of hyperformal correspondence with his landlord, Morgan bargained for an extension of the lease for his lifetime, but he was forced to settle for a vague agreement for the presumably shorter term of Lily’s lifetime instead. In the dozen years they lived at West Hackhurst, they had never been asked to dine at the “big house.” Occasionally, in a burst of spite, they would instruct Agnes to turn on the tap in the kitchen to diminish the water pressure at the Hall.

  Recuperating at the Buckinghams was out of the question. They, too, had been suffering health woes. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, May was sent to a sanatorium at Pinewood for the better part of a year. Little Robin, just two, had been packed off to live with an aunt and uncle, as Bob, exhausted, balanced his police rota with visits to May, to Robin, and to Morgan. When the little boy failed to recognize May on a hospital visit, his parents were heart-broken. The strain on his new family awoke a tenderness in Morgan; he sent May a stream of encouraging letters, books, and little gifts, regaling her with humorous stories about Robin, and reassuring her that all would be healed in time. He was especially solicitous that Bob and May must have time to rebuild their family life, advising her firmly, “You and R. and Robin will need to be alone together for quite a long time at first, if only to get accustomed to home life again, and you’ll have to have in a woman at moments to do work which is too much for you.”

  Morgan’s epistolary and practical support endeared him to May. In turn, he admired her pluck and loyalty during her long recuperation. Visiting her in the hospital was a stilted affair; a residue of Morgan’s prickly possessiveness remained. But writing to her was different: being in control of words allowed him to articulate his love and admiration for her. It was as if by first becoming a character in Morgan’s hands May Buckingham gradually transformed into a person in his consciousness. During her illness May became an individual, a “very decent sort,” a “friend in her own right.”

  After she returned home, relations between Morgan and the couple adjusted very subtly into a stable triangle that would sustain all three of them in different ways for the next thirty-five years. The terms of this innovative family structure were never codified, nor were the boundaries tested. In an understated English way, each of them exercised restraint, each traded shared silence for a steady equanimity. Between them, Morgan and May deftly carved out an intimate space for their respective “marriages” to their beloved Bob, with the long weekends for May and the short weekends for Morgan. At the little brick house standing opposite a pocket-sized park in Shepherd’s Bush, May ruled domestic life absolutely. Morgan fiercely claimed the flat at Brunswick Square, where Bob would fix an omelet on the gas ring. And wherever Morgan traveled, Bob accompanied Morgan in a cavalcade of male camaraderie, from Cerne Abbas (with its huge Neolithic chalk-figure of a man with a massive phallus) to Paris, to Amsterdam.

  Bob and May decided not to have more childr
en, and they sustained an amorous marriage. For his part, throughout the thirties Morgan continued to have the occasional fling, often reassuring Bob that he had kept vigilant against sexual infection. He acknowledged that the Buckinghams’ robust sex life gave both of them pleasure and intimacy he could not share, but refused to accept that this diminished the legitimacy of his special bond with Bob. Only once did Bob rub Morgan’s nose in the supremacy of his conjugal relations with May, which prompted a heartfelt rejoinder:

  I felt a bit sad at some of the things you said yesterday, not that you meant to make me sad, but you made me think of my limitations whereas generally you make me forget them. I believe that you are right—that particular experiences which I can’t ever have might make the two people who share it feel they are in touch with the universe through each other. What a pity all (normal) people don’t get it.

  The friendship between T. E. Lawrence and Morgan had settled into a fitful correspondence. Several times Morgan had visited Clouds Hill, the Spartan little cottage on the verge of the RAF camp at Bovington in Dorset, delighting in the raucous male company of Lawrence’s working-class enlisted mates. To mitigate the cooling of their friendship over his strange response to Morgan’s homosexual stories, Lawrence had revealed the manuscript of his next book, The Mint. It was an uncensored recounting of barracks life, full of foul language and homosocial camaraderie; Lawrence decided, ruefully, that it was unpublishable.

  Lawrence’s official work since he had returned from Pakistan was all very hush-hush. Though he professed to be uneasy about the public image of himself as the icon of British manhood—debonair, reckless, patriotic, humble—Lawrence alternately stoked the public fantasy and retreated from it. One month he would be testing speedboats in the Solent on some top-secret orders from Winston Churchill himself; the next he would hole up in the whitewashed cottage and listen to music on the gramophone with the huge white bell. Morgan accepted an invitation to visit Lawrence there, sensing that he might need company after he was discharged from service. The conditions would be little better than camping: no toilet, and only the sparest bath in a lean-to, two sleeping bags, embroidered “Meum” and “Teum”—the guest on a little leather banquette, while Lawrence spread out on the floor. The lane to the cottage was so remote that Lawrence assured Morgan he would place a whitewashed stone in a newly built wall to mark the place. In early April 1935, just weeks after he had been severed from the RAF, Lawrence worked with a friend to make ready for Morgan’s arrival.