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

by Wendy Moffat

  In the days after the funeral, Florence Barger and Agnes tended to him. For sixty-six years he had been psychically inseparable from Lily, and he felt so still, telling Christopher, “I partly died when my mother did, and must smell sometimes of the grave.” The immediate burden was to sort out her effects. Every room of the vast house, and the carriage house, too, was crammed with things—“masses of rubbish from straw fans to wardrobes which are in many cases not absolute rubbish and have a semi-life which complicates their fate.” And there was so much paper: brittle, ancient willow baskets stuffed with letters, wooden boxes and bound books of family accounts going back to Aunt Monie’s father, Henry Thornton, and his busy, frugal Clapham friends. Morgan kept a record of what he burned on the bonfire, dragging out “destroying things—150 years of letters mostly from women to women”; “hundreds of letters in which one woman writes to another about the ill health of a third.” Beyond this sorting out, he told Christopher, he was at a loss, “What I shall do is beyond me, as it is beyond the world.”

  Each time he “broke down” he totted it up in his diary. The most ordinary activity—standing on the railway platform in Dorking—could dissolve him. May and Robin, on holiday from his Quaker school in Saffron Walden, came to visit and cheered him immensely. It lifted his spirits somewhat to see Lily’s possessions go out into the households of his friends. When William Plomer came to keep him company, Morgan gave him a beautiful gold-and-white tea service. To Florence he gave Lily’s stout silver teapot and sugar bowl.

  To distract him and diminish his depression, friends urged him to accept an invitation to the All-India PEN conference in Jaipur. He decided he could use the change of scene, knowing there would be no faces of friends there to greet him. Masood and His Highness had died within six months of each other in 1937—each, in his own way, a tragic ending. Masood, whose grandiosity always swirled before him, enveloping all his friends, had been stripped of his position at the university his grandfather had so proudly founded in Aligarh. His last years were spent in melancholy exile, and he had died at the young age of forty-seven.

  Bapu Sahib, too, had outlived the India of grandeur—a place of his capacious imagination. Malcolm Darling had seen him in the final years of his unraveling, before he absconded from his throne, leaving the state’s accounts in a shambles; when the old friends met, Bapu Sahib put his head in Darling’s lap and sobbed. The Times obituary for His Highness blamed his downfall on “ungovernable temper and self-indulgence,” but Morgan had written a protesting letter, celebrating the maharajah’s imagination, hospitality, and tolerance.

  And so Morgan set out on a tour of India as a public figure, cosseted and accompanied, but very much alone in his memory. It was a welcome distraction. “I feel like a sponge which has been dropped back into an ocean whose existence it had forgotten. I have a swelling soul,” he wrote to Bob. Caravans and caves and camels and sticky cakes—two months of being fêted made him feel that he had been living on the surface of his visit. “With dissatisfaction,” he recorded in his travel diary the evening he began his return, “I look back on myself in India, humorous, conciliatory, an old dear, whose lavish gestures gave away very little . . . The only first class thing about me now is my grief.”

  There would come more sorrow, and quickly. On his first morning back in London he learned from Bob that the lease was up at West Hackhurst. The landlords were claiming the house for a relative. Morgan broke the news to Christopher: “I returned to more worry and sadness, for I have been given notice to leave this house—it is not mine to sell.” In his “Commonplace Book,” he made a careful map of the kitchen garden (as he had almost sixty years before for Rooksnest), this time dating it to “the year I was driven out and after it had been cultivated for 70 years.”

  It was less that he felt uprooted than that the soil of his life had washed away. Again and again in his letters to friends, he emphasized this sense of extinction. “I see myself as a historic figure,” he told Plomer, “if not a very important one: the last survivor, the last possessor of a particular tradition.” To Isherwood he confided, “My mother’s death has been much more awful than I expected. I am glad that no one will miss me like that.” But in the second wave of destruction, as he planned to leave the house forever, he began, perhaps unconsciously, to shape his own afterlife, to supplant the history of Lily and Aunt Monie’s matriarchy with a new story, more androcentric, centered on his private life. He obliterated almost all of his family records, but he preserved the “great unrecorded history” of his personal sexual journey. All but a handful of photographs and letters were in ashes, but he saved his diaries, his photographs, his memoirs of el Adl, and every scrap and shard of his life with the most ordinary working-class men.

  Just then, the sort of magical turn on which so many of his plots depended suddenly occurred in his life. Just as he was forced to decamp from West Hackhurst, he was offered a resident fellowship at King’s. In college, he would be down to (literally) a room of his own—a single large sitting room in Staircase A just inside the gates. It was an unusual offer, since it came with no expectation of teaching. The room was bright and airy, its Gothic windows looking onto a little courtyard. (He would also retain a sitting room and bedroom nearby in Trumpington Street, at the home of the young classicist Patrick Wilkinson and his wife, Sydney.) Leaving Abinger, he peeled off some of the most precious flotsam to take with him to King’s—an ornate mantelpiece his father had designed, the old nursery table from Aunt Monie’s now-demolished mansion on Clapham Common, the table at which he had so earnestly read the etiquette book titled Don’t!. At a farewell party in Abinger, the residents presented him with a book signed by every person in the village. Henry Bone stayed on to work the garden, and Agnes Dowland found belated retirement at the home of her niece. Packing up his library, two Victorian mahogany bookcases, some etchings and landscapes, in late October Morgan paused to observe his raggedy old cat, Toma, hop up on his lap to “honour” him—purring contentedly. He could not bring the canker-eared fellow with him. The next day Toma would—“rubbishy word”—be put to sleep.

  In the autumn of 1947, Morgan moved to Cambridge, where he would live for the rest of his life. It took some time for his inner life to catch up. During the war he had had a strange, violent dream after revisiting Rooksnest. In it the Postons had been forced to move away from the house of his “childhood and safety . . . It was death and humiliation. The house was altered, and they were putting off the packing until I had left.” Now he was plagued by dreams of similar intensity, but more horrifying—that Lily’s coffin had gone to the little churchyard, but her body “had been left [at West Hackhurst] by mistake . . . and was going bad. I half looked at it lying on the bed where she died—hooked face. I woke up with 3 shrieks.” From time to time, he was seized with the thought that “surely she will give up being dead now?”

  As the days darkened, Morgan was cut adrift from the life he had known. But the tendrils of connection that he had spent a lifetime cultivating pushed up through the darkness. He discovered to his pleasure that his room in King’s had belonged to his old undergraduate tutor, Nathaniel Wedd. At year’s end he summed up simply, in gratitude. “O Bless Bob . . . Thank you Bob. I am there. Thank you O living and dead. Thus I end.”

  12

  “My Dear America”

  The trip to America came off after all. In mid-April 1947, he arrived at LaGuardia Field in New York. A boisterous Bill Roerick and his partner, Tom Coley, scooped him up and drove him along Flushing Bay toward the city. It was impossible not to feel New York’s ebullient energy—the vertical thrust of the city, the traffic, the sea of hats as people poured along the sidewalk. It seemed that the whole of midtown Manhattan was being flattened to make way for skyscrapers. The two tallest—the Empire State Building and its glittering counterpart the Chrysler—were just fifteen years old. Times Square, bright as day when the theaters let out, dwarfed Piccadilly Circus.

  Even in Bill and Tom’s mili
eu of the theater, Morgan sensed the teeming variety of New York. They took him to new operas by Gian Carlo Menotti—The Medium and The Telephone—and to Irving Berlin’s popular musical Annie Get Your Gun. Ethel Merman’s ferocious portrayal of Annie Oakley seduced Morgan. He giddily spent the intermission imitating her singing “I’m an Indian too!” The Theater District was packed with new plays and full audiences. Just down the street from where Tom was acting in a “ratty little” melodrama, Marlon Brando rehearsed the new Tennessee Williams play, A Streetcar Named Desire. The city’s creative energy radiated from Broadway all the way to London, where the most popular ticket that season was Oklahoma!, a transfer from New York.

  The principal object of Morgan’s three-month journey to America was to have universities pay him to visit his friends. A dispute between his publishers and the taxman had temporarily frozen Forster’s royalties, and he was strapped for cash. He had accepted an invitation from Harvard to lecture at a symposium on music criticism, principally as a way of evading the endless unpacking in the move to King’s. That speaking occasion was his anchor, and with Roerick’s help and advice he fashioned a horseshoe-shaped itinerary that took him from New York to the West Coast and back again. Wherever possible, he financed a stay with friends with a nearby public reading. He continued to prospect even from New York, learning with disappointment that Berkeley’s English department had run out of funds because it was so close to the end of term.

  The continent was peppered with friends who begged him to visit. There were the émigrés Christopher Isherwood, Wystan Auden, Gerald Heard, and Florence Barger’s son Harold, now a professor at Columbia, all eager to share their new lives in the New World. There were invitations from ordinary American and Canadian GIs who, like Roerick himself, Morgan and Bob had first encountered in London. Morgan also yearned to put faces to the cherished voices of epistolary friendships developed during the war—with Paul Cadmus and the Frenches, Edith Oliver, and the Roots of Hamilton College, who had all sent precious foodstuffs to Abinger. Also enticing was the promise of meeting the elusive ballet dancer Pete Martinez. Isherwood and Lincoln Kirstein had each been his lover, and they told fantastic tales.

  Roerick was the ringleader of this circus of possibilities. In England, Morgan had warmed to Bill’s generosity. On his home soil, Bill’s courtesy was Byzantine. Like Dr. Aziz, he constantly downplayed his efforts. He paid for everything though he had very little money, abandoned his bedroom to make way for Morgan, worked tirelessly to make all his arrangements seem effortless. Years later, when he learned that Morgan was seriously ill, Bill sold a small Winslow Homer—the gem of his collection, which he had bought in a junk shop for a song—to pay for a flight to Cambridge. He never told his friend.

  Morgan only vaguely sensed how deeply Bill and Tom had made a secular religion of his ideal of personal friendship. Morgan’s books had changed their lives—had touched them and called out a transcendent humanity in them—and Bill and Tom revered him as a kind of guru. His arrival on their home territory was a chance to ratify their love for him and to affirm the values—fidelity, ideal friendship, and deep commitment to art—that all three shared. Without ever being bold enough to say so, Bill and Tom imagined themselves as part of the aristocracy of the “sensitive, the considerate and the plucky” souls whom Morgan celebrated in his essay “What I Believe.”

  That Bill and Tom had become actors was a great surprise to their half-bewildered, half-charmed middle-class families. They were both college men whose fathers aspired to financial success but died young. Bill’s story was tragic. His father, he confided to Morgan, “worried because he was not a University man . . . went mad, first worrying over small points in his business, and finally tying his hands and feet and drowning himself in Bermuda.” The young men, now both in their mid-thirties, had been groomed to succeed in business, not the itinerant, financially perilous life of a working actor. They were both voracious readers, pressing books on their fellow actors, attending lectures and keeping abreast of the arts and politics. One friend called them “true intellectuals.”

  That they had found each other at all was a twist of fate: they met in 1938, when they were cast in the small roles of the baseball players in the fledgling production of Our Town. The play was unprepossessingly simple, and cast and playwright alike were stunned when it won the Pulitzer Prize. The success of Our Town cemented their friendship and established their careers. First lovers and always best friends, Bill and Tom were together—separated only by war and work—for more than fifty years. They were both cautious men, formal in mien, uneasy about displays of affection, and reticent on the subject of sexuality. Even when they lived together, they always carefully preserved separate living quarters and separate bedrooms.

  In negotiating the world, they were in perfect equipoise: Bill served as the worldly ambassador, Tom as the conscience and devastating wit. “I try never to make an unqualified superlative statement,” Morgan once told them, “but is not Tom the funniest person in the world?” Gregarious and darkly handsome, Bill exuded a muscular charm. Tom was very tall, very shy, and very still. His authority derived from his powerful intelligence. A subtle, truthful actor, Tom had no stomach for self-promotion. He worked tirelessly in summer stock and regional theater, in small roles without complaint. Bill’s personality brought more overt success: he had already been to Hollywood and made a musical film. A strong, sweet baritone had been his ticket from the infantry to a worldwide tour of Irving Berlin’s musical This Is the Army. Tom had served in a more difficult theater of war. In the Pacific and in Alaska, he was a military policeman, rising to the rank of captain. Through five long years of service as soldiers in every part of the world they managed to miss each other at every turn. They were recently reunited and cleaved to each other.

  In New York they forged a second family from a circle of intimates—actors and writers, men and women—who had escaped to the city and loved the arts. Their closest friend was Edith Oliver, the Off-Broadway drama critic for The New Yorker, and already Morgan’s benefactor. She hosted him on his second night in America. Miss Oliver was tiny, sharp-eyed, and foulmouthed. She was tough in a city-dweller way, but uneasy about rural things. She once agreed to meet her beloved great-niece’s horse—named Oliver in her honor—only if he were walked over to the car where she sat bolt upright with the windows closed. Like all of Bill and Tom’s close friends, Oliver lived frugally and opened her heart to Morgan. On his second evening in America, he found himself deep in conversation and deep in his cups from drinking her homemade berry wine.

  The visitor and his hosts settled into a humble and crowded encampment reminiscent of West Hackhurst during the Blitz. Mrs. Roerick’s apartment was in Marble Hill, a middle-class enclave in the Bronx. It comprised the top two floors of a house that had been subdivided during the war. Here she lived with her son and Tom, Bill’s sister and brother-in-law, and a skeptical dachshund named Minky. They moved cots to the attic to give Morgan his own room, where he piled the bed high with letters, newspapers, spectacles, and fruit. They presented him with a key and he came and went as he wished. Often he crept up the back stairs, appearing unexpectedly in the kitchen. After so much privation, the city’s ordinary abundance stunned him. Tom and Bill found him outside a small greengrocer’s shop on Third Avenue, standing awestruck before row upon row of Italian oranges. “I think,” Morgan said drily, “the English have taken the war as an excuse to indulge the innate squalor of their palate.”

  The city was dazzling. But it was also legible, and map in hand he struck out to explore it on foot, as he had done in Alexandria years before. The exercise gave him blessed anonymity and autonomy. He startled Robert Giroux, the new editor in chief at Harcourt Brace, arriving unannounced at the reception desk and asking to see Mr. Brace, since retired, who had published A Passage to India more than twenty years before. Though almost seventy, Morgan seemed much younger. He was “an unprepossessing man . . . with a gray mustache and wispy hair, wearing st
eel-rimmed glasses and a rumpled gray suit.” His only luggage—so light he forgot he was carrying it—was a light blue knapsack, containing a toothbrush, a set of clean linens, and two Penguin paperbacks.

  Morgan had crammed for his travels by devising a whirlwind syllabus of American literature—Twain, Melville, and his beloved Whitman. He was so primed to encounter the exotic that he mistook the rumble of the trains beneath Park Avenue for an earthquake. Seeking out the house on East Twenty-sixth Street where Melville wrote Billy Budd and where he died, Morgan was disappointed to see that, like so much of New York, it had been razed to make way for a larger building. Then, spotting the curved verdigris roof of the nearby Regimental Armory, he remarked—melding Melville and Hamlet’s Osric—that it looked very like a whale. He delighted in navigating the subways. And he delighted in small human exchanges in the immense modern city. He bought an American schoolchild’s notebook, with a speckled black-and-white cover and lined paper. In it he recorded that when he debarked at Marble Hill for the Roericks’ apartment, the train conductor called after him softly, “Be good, sir.”

  He explored widely. One point of pilgrimage was St. Luke’s Place. The part of Greenwich Village where Cadmus and the Frenches lived was already a mythic bohemian destination, albeit a belated one. It had been thirty years since Theodore Dreiser and Marianne Moore lived on the same small block. Moore had walked just a few steps across the street to the library branch where she worked. On the north side, a row of attached Victorian brownstones faced an empty yard surrounded by a chain-link fence—once a potter’s field and now an asphalt playground. Before the First World War the anarchist John Reed had declared his Village apartment open to all, pinning a sign to the door that read simply “Property Is Theft.” But after the war property became property—and expensive to boot. Two new subways bored into the enclave of low brick houses, and the Holland Tunnel opened traffic still further to occupants of the wider city. The Village was being gentrified by a new generation of young people who wanted that artistic feeling, but with a doorman and elevator. St. Luke’s Place, Cadmus told Morgan, was now “on the fringe of the habitable sections of N.Y.,” where, splitting the rent for the studio with Jared French, he could barely afford to live.