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

by Wendy Moffat

  To do this magic task, George worked stealthily. He used his physical beauty and his extraordinary charm to disarm his photographic subjects. He often worked shirtless while wearing dress trousers and a belt. He put sitters at ease with gentle wit. Most important, he created an aura of trust. It was clear that his only object in making a portrait was to bring out a self that resembled the sitter, but more perfectly. In his sessions, George avoided the gaze that would invite a sitter’s self-consciousness by making it seem as though “the subject whom he was photographing appeared to be to him of the least concern.” The actual moment that captured the likeness was disguised. Donald Windham noted, “When Lynes photographed me . . . I was waiting, listening to him telling his assistants to conceal a lamp behind a prop to adjust a spot or bowl, and wondering when he would get around to directing me beyond casually suggesting that I try looking right or left, when he announced that the sitting was over.”

  In a ninety-minute session, George took four sets of portraits, turning from one to another staged setup in his studio and relying on evocative props recycled from his commercial work in fashion photography: two of Morgan alone, a series of Bob alone, and a gay domestic portrait of the two men together. Pieced together, these prints reveal the dazzling balance of speed and spontaneity of Lynes’s working method. George succeeded in fulfilling the fantasy that Morgan had confided in his letter to Paul: making Bob look as vital and seductive as he had when they met twenty years before. For this sequence, George used a mock-up of rough-hewn whitewashed wood, cleverly alluding to the boardwalk steps that descended to the beach at Fire Island that he, Paul, Jerry, and George Tooker frequented in the summers. Leaning back against the crook of a railing, Bob was captured with a laugh fading from his lips, his formal dark suit in such contrast to the bright background that he almost seemed to loom out of a mist. Did Bob recognize the allusion? Did he collude in this portrait of himself as a gay man?

  And Morgan was made to look eminent. George placed him on a mockstone throne with his gold signet ring demonstratively visible. In several of the poses, he held his glasses cupped in his palm; in several others a piece of rolled-up paper. George did not ask Morgan to address the camera directly. Instead he captured Morgan’s public self, lost in contemplation. The photo revealed a bit of Forster’s gentleness; he could not help being both wistful and commanding. In the proofs, it’s hard to ignore a startling cowlick.

  Lynes reused the flat stone throne as a kind of plinth for the double portraits, printing the glass plate in such stark contrast that it appeared the two men were hovering alone in an empty white space. These photographs echoed the composition of a set of double portraits taken fifteen years earlier in London. Morgan had commissioned these portraits from Stephen Spender’s brother Humphrey and Humphrey’s lover, Tom Edmiston. Morgan showed scrupulous interest in retouching and refining them. (His notes to the photographers on retouching and printing remain in pencil on the back of the prints.) In both Spender’s and Lynes’s portraits, the physical position of the men—Bob looming above Morgan—spoke to some aspect of their psychic life together. Morgan willfully erased his status as a “great man” in Bob’s company, becoming subordinate, sheltered by Bob’s bulk, transparently the more emotionally vulnerable and weaker of the pair. In Lynes’s dual portrait, their devotion and intimacy are palpable. Standing above the old man, his leg alongside Morgan’s arm, his arm resting on his shoulder, Bob almost enveloped Morgan.

  But George saved one final sequence that he never shared with Morgan. These two full-length portraits literally caught Morgan unawares, grasping the same piece of paper in his hand that he holds in several of the throne pictures, standing at the verge of the unadorned studio wall, like an actor waiting in the wings. His spectacles are on, and his left hand is in his trouser pocket. The photograph captured Morgan’s owlishness and his vulnerability—the Morgan that Christopher Isherwood described as the sanest person he had ever known, alone, resolute, a tough humanist. Five years later, when George was destitute and dying of lung cancer, he bound up his most precious prints and sold them to Dr. Kinsey. There, hiding among the thousands of photographs in what Lincoln sardonically labeled “the greatest collection of dirty art in the world” at the Kinsey Institute was George’s photograph of Morgan, the lonely pioneer.

  Less than a week later, Monroe saw Bob and Morgan off at LaGuardia Airport. Back in England, the ether of their fantastic journey wore off rather quickly. Bob resumed his patrols in London, and Morgan repaired to King’s. Now Cambridge became a point of hegira for Morgan’s American friends. Monroe swung by when he traveled to London to collect paintings for the museum; Donald Windham brought his new partner, Sandy Campbell—who had once broken Paul Cadmus’s heart—for a damp but pleasant three-day stay. In the autumn of 1949, Morgan and Paul Cadmus managed a reunion at King’s. Returning from Italy with George Tooker, Paul stopped for a few days to draw the promised portrait. To keep Morgan from stiffening into self-consciousness they suggested he occupy himself in reading, and he obliged in a familiar ritual, breaking out the typescript of Maurice and reading it aloud to them as Paul completed the sketch. Isherwood found the portrait to be unpersuasive, but Morgan loved it, and gave it to Bob and May.

  The dream of emigration gradually retreated in the cool of common sense. Morgan told Glenway that he retained “great affection for America, but, I think, no sentimentality towards her.” Looking back at his journey, his view of American possibilities narrowed. “The American life would have proved unendurable,” Glenway wrote in a record of their conversation. Two years after his return, he would look back to reflect that the moment of opportunity had slipped by without a whisper. “Sometimes I wish,” he told Monroe Wheeler, “that I had led a more adventurous life, but the wish is followed by a feeling of relief that I can’t start living it now.”

  This fact was corporeally derived. Morgan’s body seemed determined to devise the most unhappy and humiliating reminders of old age. First, a suspected “cancer?” of “the arsehole” which turned out to be nothing terribly malign; then he was forced to face the inevitability of a second prostate operation to stem a leaky bladder. It was scheduled for early January 1950, just after his seventy-first birthday. Goldie’s sudden death after just such a simple procedure haunted Morgan, and he made elaborate arrangements to be properly looked after and even began to think practically on what should happen if he should die. His greatest regret as he entered the private hospital in Sloane Square was that he might leave Billy Budd unfinished.

  He was hurt but not surprised to learn that Bob—being no relation—would be barred from visiting him in the hospital. But May, trained as a nurse, volunteered to sit with him in the first few days after the surgery. Her wisdom and medical acumen saved his life. In the middle of the night she alerted the doctor that Morgan was becoming unresponsive. May’s kindness and implacable compassion when he was most vulnerable subtly renewed their intimacy. He found himself sympathizing with her, imagining what it must be like to have always to share Bob, grateful for her quasi-maternal love.

  In the immediate period of recuperation, Morgan stayed at Wendell Road in London with Bob, May, and sixteen-year-old Robin, who was apprenticing to be a plumber; but in the spring, as he regained his energy, he settled for a long stay in Aldeburgh with Peter and Ben to complete Billy Budd. The work went on well enough, but Morgan’s hopes for a deepening friendship with Ben ran aground. As Britten composed the score for the libretto, both Crozier and Morgan became concerned that there was “a tendency to dry-dock feeling” in the music. In part, this cooling off was the inevitable consequence of Britten’s creative method. He confessed to being “in a funny abstracted mood, rather selfish . . . demanding lots of treatment and extra consideration” as he wrote the opera. Ben routinely chewed up and spat out collaborators. Just before he began Billy Budd he spoke with Crozier, confessing rather heartlessly how abruptly he had dropped his previous librettist, Montagu Slater, even though he knew that Sla
ter was terribly ill with cancer. With a mixture of savagery and regret, he told Crozier that he anticipated that he, too, one day would be “one of [my] corpses.”

  But Morgan had no intention of being dropped. Nonetheless, he was irritated by Ben’s high-handedness, his pattern of taking on multiple commissions and jetting off to performances scheduled at the last minute. For Morgan, Billy Budd was the most pressing and important work he had done in a long while, and it wounded him to discover how quickly the mantle of affection had melted from his relations with Ben. He left Aldeburgh earlier than planned. Over the next months, the process of finishing the opera became painful for bystanders to watch. Billy Burrell, a young local fisherman who befriended Britten and attracted Morgan with his hearty good looks, “felt sorry for Morgan” when Ben began to discourage Morgan’s visits as a distraction. Burrell said that Ben was unprepared for the logistics of dealing with the older man: “Morgan was slow . . . you’d have to fetch him from Cambridge . . . you’d have to take him back.” The problem was compounded when Morgan slipped while climbing the steps of the bell tower at Aldeburgh and shattered his ankle. Burrell told Morgan, “We’re only simple humble people, but you’re quite welcome to . . . stay whenever you want.” Thereafter, when Morgan came, he stayed with the fisherman and his wife. The demotion hurt Morgan, and the increasing creative tension between Ben and Morgan and Ben and Eric began to grow poisonous.

  In late November 1950, about a year before the opera’s scheduled premiere at Covent Garden, Ben and Eric came to Cambridge to iron out differences with Morgan. Ben’s offhandedness catalyzed Morgan’s simmering resentment. He exploded in rage. The even-handed Crozier was stunned by the virulence of Morgan’s verbal attack: “To me, [Morgan] was chilly but polite. To Britten he was outrageous: he spoke to him like some low-class servant who deserves to be whipped.” As he had done with the servant Kanaya, Morgan channeled the worst kind of snobbish savagery when he felt impotent and humiliated. He “berated [Ben] like a schoolboy.” Then he stormed out of his rooms into the cold night.

  In Morgan’s mind, the contretemps blew over quickly. Totting up emotional accounts at the end of the year, he dismissed the incident’s importance: “I am rather a fierce old man at the moment, and he is rather a spoilt boy, and certainly a busy one.” But Ben became wary, and their friendship fizzled out.

  By November 1951, rehearsals for the premiere were going well. The tenor Theodore Uppmann, all blond curls and muscles, made a handsome and impressive Billy—“gay young, strong charming, good voice and some acting power.” Also, alas, resolutely heterosexual. Morgan wrote Tom Coley breathily: “Heavens the excitement in which we live. I adore it, and spend most of each day at rehearsals.” Some hijinks leavened the tension: the orchestra burst into a surprise “Happy Birthday” instead of the prescribed music while Ben began conducting on his birthday. Joe Ackerley was banned from rehearsals because he was mooning around “like Dido” at the sailors. In early December 1951, Billy Budd opened to largely enthusiastic reviews of both the score and the libretto. Covent Garden had perhaps never held so many unlikely working-class operagoers. Morgan invited many of his closest friends. It was the first time Billy Burrell had ever worn evening dress.

  Working on Billy Budd, Morgan came to realize, had been a way to “wrestle with the void.” So much of his sense of self, of well-being was tethered to his aging body, to his hope that he could remain attractive or even lovable to Bob. As the glow of their New York adventure faded, Morgan had felt “gnawed by my failure to impress or interest Bob any more.” But an unaccountable year-end burst of “randiness” in Bob distracted and warmed Morgan again. He assessed the texture of their long-lived love in his diary: “As for Bob, I do now know of the freshness and warmth of his love, not only of its reliability, and I hope I shall never again be fussed. I love him, I now know, more than any one else can, and he has helped me to care for living physically . . .”

  For Morgan, lust had always been the green fuse of life and of imagination. He still felt it keenly, but what was it worth if this feeling could not connect to something human, if not physically, then at least metaphysically—as it had done at the Figsbury Rings when the spirit of Stephen Wonham appeared in the shepherd boy so many years before?

  The back roads from Cambridge to Aldeburgh, which he had traveled so often in these last few years, took Morgan by a Suffolk crossroads near Moulton, where a primitive grave near the roadside was tended by local people who preserved a folk myth. Here, it was reported, lay the body of a young gypsy boy who had rashly killed himself when he could not account for all his herd of sheep. The story of this desperate outcast resonated with Morgan, “but not at an accessible layer of the mind.” This figure—of Stephen Wonham, of Pan—conflated with the flotsam of newspaper clippings he had kept from decades before, of the boy who died of pneumonia on the road after being cast out of the school for loving his friend. The poignant feeling lingered like a “secret that has not been noticed.”

  When Morgan paused to visit the grave on one journey, he brought a talisman: he buried “a little polished shell” from the beach near Aldeburgh as a secret offering. The gypsy boy’s tale stood somehow as “the wonder that has not been organized, the small thing I can cling to as proof of the void I feel in the modern world, which no reputable religion can fill.” This “dark force” connected in Morgan’s mind to the unrecorded history of his yearning, and all yearning. It recalled an image from the deep past:

  I remember—or think I remember—masturbating on a moonlight night in Zimbabwe in 1929 anyhow I went out there alone with masturbationary thoughts, and gained nothing. The ritual—like the phallic sea-shell I pressed into the boys’ grave—is desirable but does not focus. It is as the proof of the void that all this is valuable.

  14

  “The Worm That Never Dies”

  Morgan’s fellowship at King’s required no teaching or lecturing. He was simply to be himself in college. Each morning he picked his way down Trumpington Street, past the little shops opposite the imposing façade of the Fitzwilliam Museum, past Fitzbillies’ bakery and the flinty tower of St. Botolph’s, to the Gothic gatehouse, as if he were traveling back in time. Once in his room he settled into a William Morris chair, covered himself with a lap rug, and began to tackle the mountain of correspondence—letters from friends in Calcutta and California, invitations to lecture or to accept honorary degrees, drafts of radio talks for the BBC Indian Service (where Malcolm Darling was now a producer), earnest questions from graduate students about the symbolic meaning of his novels, requests from Joe Ackerley to review books for The Listener. He wryly accepted his new role, telling Joe, “I seem to be a Great Man.” “My fame is much more of a pleasure than a nuisance,” he noted in his diary, “but being an important person is almost a full-time job.”

  In 1949, Prime Minister Clement Atlee “offered a Knighthood,” which Morgan, delighted, promptly but gently refused. To Bob he suggested that “the company”—two minor writers and a famous cricketer—was to blame; in truth, he feared “the nursing home [would] have just stuck the prices on.” But on his birthday in 1953, he was pleased to accept the Companion of Honour, a civil award for contributions to literature. Benjamin Britten was his corecipient. In February 1953 Morgan went to the palace to receive the beribboned medal, knowing the occasion would impress both Bob and Agnes the parlormaid. He much relished his conversation with the Queen, whom he found entrancing; he told friends “if the Queen had been a boy he would have fallen in love with her.” He made no friends among the servants at the palace, however. Examining the dazzling enameled medal, Morgan announced with relish, “Well, I got my little toy.” This observation was met with a frosty reception. (Her Majesty may have been amused. In 1969, she selected Morgan to receive the Order of Merit, an honor only the monarch can bestow.)

  About once a week he took the train and the tube to his London flat. Rail journeys offered blissful anonymity, the chance to chat up young strangers or to obse
rve particular quirks of male beauty. There was the boy with “a tattoo on his fingers, which was the oddest I had ever seen—T, R, U, E on those of the one hand and L, O, V, E on the other . . . I occupied myself with inventing variants.” He traveled light, carefully tucking a single egg and a pat of butter screwed into brown paper into his sock. In his Chiswick flat he met old friends, who crammed around the tiny table for dinner parties. He cooked simply, and a charwoman came to clean. There were the usual and the unusual domestic muddles: Bob tore the bedsheet with his sharp big toe; once, when there was a fire in the flat below, Morgan evacuated to the street, wearing only a wet bath towel, and clutching a decanter of brandy. To the very end of his life, this place welcomed the friends he had made in the thirties. The Weybridge bus driver Reg Palmer still came by to share comfort and sex. Their friendship was a “prank . . . I can think of nothing which has lasted so long and borne such odd fruit.”

  Daily life in King’s had not changed much since his undergraduate days. At Evensong the low throb of the chapel organ rolled across the lawn; dinner in Hall; the clang of the bedmakers’ mops and brooms in the morning; sherry in the Combination Room. In the middle courtyard, laborers were busy trying to dismantle the fountain erected in Goldie’s memory. It was a useless water feature—never managing more than an intermittent trickle—but its wide basin was resilient and sturdy, so, unable to demolish it, they refashioned it into a huge planter instead. If he felt low, Morgan would trot around to Caius College, where his old friend Francis Bennett sympathetically listened to his woes. Attracted by the novelty of having such a famous personage across the landing, undergraduates were enchanted by Morgan’s ability to cut across the decades and treat them simply as people. He had no condescension, and was especially welcoming to the now-less-rare young men from the north and from comprehensive schools, sons of miners and village teachers, who spoke in broad accents and stood forthrightly with their hands in their pockets.