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

by Wendy Moffat

  Morgan picked up the old rhythms quickly, rejoining Apostles meetings. There in 1947 he met a brilliant young Fellow of Emmanuel College just back from service. Nick Furbank was a literature man, writing a biography of Samuel Butler. Like Morgan, he was a listener, fluent in French and widely read, a bit reticent, intellectually lithe. They shared the same sense of humor, the same cadence of laughter—a long pause followed by hapless, explosive giggles. Soon Nick had read the manuscript of Maurice, and was urging Morgan not to burn anything.

  The displacement from West Hackhurst unearthed a good deal of long-forgotten writing. Lily had kept all his letters from the journey to India before the First War; unlike the faded silks he had brought back to her, they still sparkled. Morgan began to assemble these letters into a volume he would call The Hill of Devi. He dedicated it to his old friend Malcolm Darling. Encouraged by William Plomer, who had discovered and published a Victorian diary that became a bestseller, Morgan fished through a miscellany of family papers dating back to his Aunt Monie’s childhood. They bore the fingerprints of generations of women, keepers of the family flame, the same women whom he had tried to erase in his exodus from Abinger.

  Reading the family record, so carefully copied out in so many delicate hands, Morgan began to regret that he had burned so much. Marianne Thornton, Aunt Monie, had transcribed her estimable father’s memoirs; Aunt Laura copied out Aunt Monie’s letters; and his great-aunt had had dutifully prepared ten tiny leather volumes of family history for Morgan when he was born.

  He began to think of his aunt’s legacy as more than the money that had given him his freedom to write; and now, half in wonderment, half in expiation, he began Marianne Thornton: A Domestic Biography, dividing his aunt’s life into her various roles: daughter, sister, aunt, and great-aunt. It was a wistful book as well as a whimsical one. When he published the biography in 1956, it was a commercial success. He felt happy to have written it.

  In these two final books and in a sketch of West Hackhurst that he did not publish, Morgan recuperatively sifted through his past, in the process discharging some of the vitriol he felt at having been “deprived of a house,” and saying a warm goodbye to his family. He dedicated Marianne Thornton to the memory of his mother.

  The bouleversement of his library also revealed some more personal forgotten treasures: a cache of letters from Mohammed el Adl and the beginning of a novel inspired by Mohammed that Morgan had set aside almost forty years before. He shared the marvel with Nick Furbank:

  I assumed the letters would be nothing much, but gave a glance before destroying them and was amazed—all the things I most adore glimmering in them. [Mohammed] had gone underground in the interval, and there is no doubt that a little of him reemerged in Cocoa . . . I was an awful nuisance to one or two friends at the time, and no wonder. If I talk about him to you, you will anyhow not have to find him a job.

  The Cocoa in question was a character from the long-discarded fragment. It, too, was intended for the scrap heap, but when Morgan showed it to Joe—a reliably exacting editor—he found the story to be coherent and intriguing. In December 1948 “Entrance to an Unwritten Novel,” came out in The Listener, billed as Morgan’s first new fiction since A Passage to India.

  Now Morgan’s pen picked up the scent of fiction writing. With Furbank’s help in typing out the manuscript, he extended the fragment into a novella, a tragic love story between a young Englishman, Lionel March, and the half-caste boy he had met aboard ship as a child. In the first half of the story, the March family returns from India; in the second, Lionel encounters Cocoa a decade later, this time on the voyage out to take up imperial duties. Lionel’s mother had excoriated Cocoa as a “silly idle useless unmanly little boy.” But grown into a man, he seduces Lionel as his revenge. Lionel murders Cocoa in fear and shame, and kills himself by jumping into the ocean.

  Morgan found that it was easier, and more honest, to shape the tangle of lust and guilt and racism into a tragedy. He told Furbank, “Two people made to destroy each other . . . was [a theme] more interesting than the theme of salvation, the rescuer from ‘otherwhere,’ the generic Alec [Scudder]. That was a fake.” Dark, erotic, “The Other Boat” was one of the stories that Christopher Isherwood and John Lehmann would marvel over. It was published two years after Morgan’s death.

  As he worked over the story of Lionel and Cocoa, Morgan began to revise the Maurice manuscript one final time. He had never suitably determined the mechanics of the lovers reuniting at the novel’s end. Over several months in 1958 and 1959, Morgan puzzled out the plot after Alec decides not to emigrate. He devised a fitting resolution with the lovers in each other’s arms at the boathouse of Clive’s ancestral home, Penge. The new plotting allowed him to discard the stiff and arbitrary epilogue that had troubled Isherwood when he read it twenty years before. It provided the double satisfaction of a happy ending for the lovers and a pointed retribution for Clive.

  But a happy ending in life was not as easy after the Second World War as it might have been after the First. Things had not been conducive to homosexuals in England since, in Quentin Crisp’s immortal words, “Peace Broke Out.” Gone were the handsome young American soldiers, gone the protective cover of darkness on the streets of London. The lights were on everything in a blaze of family values, a march of modernity in pursuit of a New Jerusalem. There was a brand-new government, bursting with order and sincerity, New Towns sprouting up around London to house the bombed-out population in sprawling, shiny suburbs that ate up the village of Stevenage. Now Morgan’s beloved childhood home, ramshackle Rooksnest, stood in a tiny patch of green just miles from row after row of low brick attached houses.

  And now Bob and May lived in one of these too. Bob had reached the police retirement age, and after training to be a probation officer, was transferred to war-shattered Coventry. Their house in Shepherd’s Bush, which Morgan had bought for the Buckinghams so near his Chiswick flat, was sold at a loss and replaced by a brick semidetached house, all mod cons, whose garden “forecasts an allotment in Hell: with the other gardens, it forms a huge quadrangle of despair overlooked from all sides.” The vegetables grown there were to supplement a narrow diet of rationed meat, rationed butter, lard, margarine, eggs, rationed sugar, tea, cheese, jam, and chocolate. Even dish soap was rationed. Morgan stood awed by the sight of a “vast ham” Margaret French had sent to him from New York.

  The social climate, too, had to be cleansed. Sir Theobald Mathews, the new puritanical director of public prosecutions, was appalled by the lax enforcement of the laws against indecent acts. The provinces were holding up their end, but London was a den of vice. Arrests for homosexual acts were duly reported in the newspapers euphemistically as “grave” offenses, “serious” offenses, crimes too horrible to name. But the tabloids echoed the lament of Viscount Samuel in the House of Lords, who decried the “insidious poisoning” of Britain’s “moral state,” complaining that juvenile crime and adultery were rampant, and “the vices of Sodom and Gomorrah, of the Cities of the Plain, appear to be rife among us.” To curb this scourge, police agents provocateurs were sent out to entrap homosexuals through solicitation; a special division of the Metropolitan Police was formed solely to patrol public urinals.

  The home secretary, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, had prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg; now he undertook a crackdown on vice. The number of prosecutions for homosexual offenses skyrocketed. Even powerful and famous men were paraded as examples in the press—including the recently knighted actor Sir John Gielgud and the Labour MP William Field. In the most sensational case, three prominent men were charged with conspiring to commit indecency: the young peer Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, his second cousin Michael Pitt-Rivers, and Peter Wildeblood, chief diplomatic correspondent for the Daily Mail. The press was tipped and the timing of the arrests was orchestrated by the police so the story could appear prominently on the front pages of the Sunday newspapers. The evidence used to convict the men came from love letters—seized in kit searches
of the RAF airmen who were their working-class lovers—and a warrantless search of Wildeblood’s flat.

  Newspapers were in a race to outdo one another in salacious reporting, spinning out contradictory stereotypes about sexual criminals with increasing certainty and fervor. In May 1952 the Sunday Pictorial devoted a full-page feature to ways to recognize these “Evil Men”; nine years later it helpfully explained “How to Spot a Homo.” Readers could discern a homosexual by his sedate tweed jacket, suede shoes, and pipe, or alternately by his telltale effeminate manner and mincing step. These “exposés” reflected the anxieties born of the paradox that homosexuals, forced to live a double life, proved to be quite successful at it.

  Popular explanations for the causes of homosexuality, in psychology books and newspapers, sermons and speeches, oscillated between the idea of an alien class of humans, diabolical and separate from normal people, or the natural and contagious consequence of men being in each other’s company and kept away from the company of women. War service had brought on an epidemic of this problem. Or excess mother love. Or absent fathers. Morgan sent a copy of a letter he had published asking for “less social stigma” toward homosexuals to Lord Samuel, as a kind of catnip. The viscount took the bait. “Incomprehensible and utterly disgusting as [homosexuality] appears to all normal people,” Lord Samuel replied to Morgan, “it seems to have the capacity to form a habit as potent as alcohol or narcotics.”

  The law that had sent Montagu and his friends to prison was the same law under which Oscar Wilde had been convicted in 1895. Goaded by concerns about public indecency on the streets, in 1954 the Home Office appointed a committee of mandarins—clergy and peers and respectable academics—to investigate the twin problems of female prostitution and male homosexuality. So it was that Sir John Wolfenden, former headmaster of a public school, now vice chancellor of Reading University, assembled a fifteen-person committee that would bear his name. In September 1957 the Wolfenden Report recommended that “homosexual activity between consenting adults over the age of twenty-one in private be no longer a criminal offense.” It took a decade more to enact these recommendations into law—and even then the statute was “mild and aetiolated.” It applied only to England and Wales, excepted members of the armed services, set the age of consent for homosexuals (at twenty-one) four years above that for heterosexuals, and denoted “private” space very narrowly. (Since anywhere a third person was likely to be present—whether present or not—was defined as public space, even the interior of one’s own home was not always deemed private for the application of the law.) After the Sexual Offenses Act went into effect in 1967, prosecutions of homosexual acts soared. The vaunted milestone in homosexual rights was largely symbolic.

  As he convened his committee members, Wolfenden apologized for the odious task, the “distasteful” subjects they were to face. To spare the three ladies on the committee (and the young women who compiled its deliberations), Sir John decided to use euphemisms—and so homosexuals and prostitutes were dutifully recorded in the committee minutes as Huntleys and Palmers, after the famous biscuits. Most of the expert testimony came from experts who had little basis for their conclusions, which gave the proceedings an air of Alice in Wonderland. One witness testified, “I think the only thing we can do is to give a firm opinion. That is the only thing we can do; there is no real evidence.” A prominent clergyman solemnly informed the committee that homosexual behavior was “catching”; he had observed occasions where it “flared out enormously, involving a neighbourhood of boys and young men from just a tiny beginning.”

  Of course there was empirical evidence at hand, in the form of the recently published Kinsey reports. Alfred Kinsey himself met informally with committee members while visiting London for a lecture, but his data were rejected out of hand as the product of an aberrant American society. One committee member reasoned that Kinsey’s numbers were not germane; he was convinced that America had many more homosexuals than Britain, on account of the many broken homes in the United States. The working presumption of Wolfenden and his colleagues was that no one on the committee actually knew a homosexual—a peculiar position since Sir John’s eldest son, Jeremy, had explicitly announced his homosexuality to his father the previous year. Presumably Sir John’s determination to be objective entailed forgetting this fact.

  Only three of thirty-two days set aside to hear testimony were devoted to the experience of homosexuals under the law, and only three homosexual witnesses testified in person. The first was Peter Wildeblood, released from prison after his conviction in the Montagu trial, and pressing for a change in the law. The other two were “good homosexuals,” respectable upper-middle-class professional men: Sir Patrick Trevor-Roper, a renowned eye surgeon, and Carl Winter, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum. Behind the scenes there was considerable informal lobbying. During the proceedings Morgan had a quiet luncheon with Sir John. He was only one of a “number of homosexuals anxious to discuss their problems.” Morgan came away impressed, but not sanguine about the prospect of true reform. He understood the snail’s pace of changing public opinion.

  Meeting with Wolfenden was one of several small feints Morgan made in the direction of public advocacy. During the war, he and Joe Ackerley composed a letter (published under Joe’s signature) protesting a horrifying case in Abergavenny, Wales, a purported “orgy of perversion” in a local cinema. (Twenty men were arrested; the convicted men were given sentences up to twelve years, one attempted suicide, and a nineteen-year-old walked in front of a train.)

  Morgan served on the board of directors of the London Library, and there he observed a discussion that made him feel he was “in the vanguard of darkness.” Dame Katherine Furse was writing a biography of her father, John Addington Symonds. She asked to consult the papers her father had entrusted to the library in his will. One of these was the great memoir of his homosexual struggle and his unhappy marriage to her mother. Her request was denied; Morgan copied out the debate among the library’s trustees verbatim in his diary.

  As the Wolfenden Report languished and no law was forthcoming, Morgan composed a “Terminal Note” to the manuscript of Maurice.

  HOMOSEXUALITY

  Note in conclusion on a word hitherto unmentioned. Since Maurice was written there has been a change in the public attitude here: the change from ignorance and terror to familiarity and contempt. It is not the change towards which Edward Carpenter had worked . . . And I . . . less optimistic, had supposed that knowledge would bring understanding. We had not realised that what the public really loathes in homosexuality is not the thing itself but having to think about it. If it could be slipped into our midst unnoticed, legalised overnight by a decree in small print, there would be few protests. Unfortunately it can only be legalised by Parliament, and Members of Parliament are obliged to think or to appear to think. Consequently the Wolfenden recommendations will be indefinitely rejected, police prosecutions will continue, and Clive on the bench will continue to sentence Alec in the dock. Maurice may get off.

  More and more publicly, Morgan began to take interest in real Alecs in the dock. In 1959 he wrote a letter to The Times protesting the treatment of a seventeen-year-old from Consett, Durham, suspected of homosexual offenses who committed suicide as he awaited trial. Though his family raised the money, he had been denied bail.

  Morgan added a cautious voice to the chorus of liberal support for the Wolfenden Report. (He did not identify himself as homosexual, but defended the honor of the “married women” who urged Parliament to act.) He also donated five hundred pounds—a huge sum—to the Homosexual Law Reform Society, drily noting in his diary that he did not expect to see much return on his investment. When Harry Daley resurfaced briefly to announce that he planned to write his memoirs, he assured Morgan that he would be discreet. But Morgan casually told his estranged old lover to write what he wished. In his diary, Morgan reflected, “The older one grows, the less one values secrecy perhaps, anyhow there is very little of me that I feel
worth-while to lock up.”

  Sometimes the police crackdowns came very close to home. Through a friend Morgan met a young Bulgarian émigré, Mattei Radev, an art conservator whom he liked intensely. Radev confessed to Morgan that he had been arrested for cottaging. Shaken by “Mattei’s disaster,” Morgan decided that he must “speak for his character” in court proceedings. He worried about the situation for weeks, alternately appalled “that the police here are filthy as anywhere” and revved up at the prospect of defending his friend. He was eighty-five and stouthearted, but nonetheless a bit anxious. When the charges evaporated (Mattei paid only a small fine) Morgan wondered whether the threat of his testimony might have altered events. A second scare came on the heels of the first, when a police raid on a Soho club (fetchingly named the Mousehole) caused Joe Ackerley to caution Morgan against frequenting it until the scandal blew over. But Morgan reassured his younger friend that he was unafraid; in any case, he preferred Bobbie’s—a tiny club with a working-class clientele on Dean Street. He told Joe protectively that Bobbie’s “entrance arrangements were culpably slack,” urging him to pass on the warning to its proprietors.

  Indignant about the Mousehole raid, Morgan urged Joe to write a letter in protest; he cagily described an appropriate tone: “Be frisky, but not ‘we homosexuals’ nor so much about yourself, lest it humourlessly be brought against you. ‘I have occasionally drawn a cup of coffee at the Mousehole myself little knowing of my peril, or that a policeman might be observing me and might demand my name and address because my taste in clothes differed from his’—is about the level.”