A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (10 page)

One might conclude that all this talk of brotherly love in the company of so many young homosexual men might ignite an orgy of passion. Not so. The Apostles were not yet the Bloomsbury Group. They were doubtless more tolerant of the notion of homosexual love than their fathers and grandfathers had been, but they remained thoroughly Edwardian, progressive in a delicate, high-minded, academic way. Heterosexual Apostles such as George Trevelyan held an “idealistic attitude towards homosexual love.” But Strachey had not yet begun his systematic seduction of his friends. Keynes captured the odd tone of their discussions, bold but austere: “Strachey issued [an] edict that certain Latin technical terms of sex were the correct words to use, that to avoid them was a grave error, and, even in mixed company, a
weakness, and the use of other synonyms a vulgarity. In 1903 those words were not even esoteric terms of common discourse.”

The furthest Lytton and Maynard went was to apply a pragmatic, if chaste, approach to the selection of new members, “jockeying to procure [the] election” of “beautiful young men” to the society.

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson was neither beautiful nor young. He was almost forty, and though he had been a don at King’s for the whole of Morgan’s residency, they had known each other slenderly before Morgan’s election to the society. “Goldie,” as his friends knew him, had a striking, sensitive face and the gentlest mien. As a King’s undergraduate, he had found his heart and mind utterly transformed by reading Shelley, and he remained a bit of a political romantic all his life. He had trained in classics, absorbing politics through Plato and Aristotle. More than anyone at the university, Goldie had created the new discipline of political science. For a short time after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, Goldie became an essential public man, helping to shape and define the League of Nations. But his more profound influence was to be private and vicarious: his lectures “Modern France,” “The Transition to Democracy in Modern England,” “The Machinery of Administration under Democracy,” and “The Theory of Law and Government” educated generations of young men who would take his lessons into the public world.

In Dickinson, Morgan found the adult most like himself in temperament. Goldie’s life was “not dramatic.” He “tended to inhabit the university spiritually.” All his adult life he was anchored in a set of rooms in the Gibbs Building of the central court at King’s. Like Wedd, who was also an Apostle, Dickinson’s energies were expended more on teaching than on publishing. His teaching method was to “rope . . . people in to get ideas on some problem which puzzled him”; he would “talk more about the problem itself than [his student’s] treatment of it”—an egalitarian process that “disconcerted his weaker pupils, who wanted to be shown where they went wrong.” Mildly but firmly he would tell them, “It hasn’t come yet,” and leave them to revise yet again.

His profound influence was best preserved in the memory of those students who became his close friends. Morgan, who would write Goldie’s biography in 1934, found in his mentor’s ineffable character the key to what is most real and most valuable in human experience. Morgan would dedicate the biography to “Fratrum Societate,” to both the brotherly society where he
first came to know Goldie well, and the idea of brotherliness itself. The book would be a case study in the falseness of external measurements of worth in understanding a human life. That it described the life of a gay man, a man consumed with unrequited and inexpressible love, marked it for Morgan as quintessentially
mortal
.

For Goldie’s writing itself did little to preserve the quick warm essence of the man. The self-consciousness that uncoiled in him in the act of setting things down distorted and darkened his natural good humor: “a thin veil of melancholy . . . interposed between him and the paper as soon as he sat down to type.” His handwriting was so illegible that it subjected him to terrible, comic misunderstandings. One man whose sister attended Goldie’s extension lectures in the Midlands felt her honor had been attacked, and wrote him a minatory letter beginning: “My sister has a bone to pick with you, Mr. Dickinson!” Both the student and her sibling had misread Goldie’s scrawl of “good!” in the margin. They thought he had written “Fool!” Mechanical means of communication proved to be no more reliable. Goldie was notorious for being “the only man who could make a Corona type upside-down.”

Goldie had, to use Morgan’s word, a “maieutic” gift. That is, he served as a midwife, bridging people and ideas, between people and the vision of themselves at their best, the midwife between the intellect and the heart. He traveled widely, loved Chinese and Japanese culture, and was especially adept at explaining alien cultures to the British mind. His
Greek View of Life
, published in 1909, popularized Athenian ideas for the general reader. In
Letters from John Chinaman
(1901), he so thoroughly appropriated the voice of a Chinese official to describe Chinese attitudes to the West that most reviewers believed it could not have been written by a European. Morgan admired, and later would emulate, Goldie’s uncanny ability to befriend younger men, to accept them as true equals. Dickinson was a great man and a great professor because “teaching . . . could not be distinguished . . . from being taught.”

Four months after he joined the Apostles, Morgan calmly let go of Cambridge. He knew these friends would stay with him all his life. His 2:1 on the history Tripos cemented the conclusion that he would not become a don like HOM, or his friend George Barger, who took up a position teaching chemistry
at Edinburgh. There was no immediate prospect of work, no design for life that magically appeared.

So Morgan spent the summer of 1901 contemplating his next step. He began an untitled novel—which he would later abandon as a fragment—about an inhibited young man from the suburbs. Packing up his pages, his books, his rumpled tweed suits, his academic gown and mortarboard, he took off on a brief round of family visits with Lily—to Aunt Laura at West Hackhurst, and Uncle Willie, his father’s youngest brother, in Northumberland. He bought a pocket guide to learning Italian. His most immediate plan was to tour Italy with his mother. Baedeker in hand, he began to plan their journey. They would be away from England for over a year.

Morgan and Lily embarked on something considerably more middle-class and Edwardian than a Grand Tour. Their assault on Italy was ambitious in its thoroughness if not its delicacy of sentiment. Every church, every monument, every fresco, every museum, every sight was planned, viewed, ticked off the list. Morgan confessed to the more urbane and adventurous Wedd that his traveling was all by the book: “Baedeker-bestarred Italy . . . is all that I have yet seen.” To Goldie, his most intimate correspondent, he wrote discontentedly, “Our life is where we sleep and eat, and the glimpses of Italy that I get are only
accidents
.”

He might have done differently if he had not been traveling with Lily. There was an odor of duty about their approach that unsettled Morgan even at the outset; he wrote Dent, whose travels were more off
piste
, that “the hotels are comfortable and costly I hate it.” Pensione life offered all the conventions of suburban England, slightly askew: wallpapered rooms where the carpet and antimacassars smelled a bit sour, services at the local Anglican church listening to a droning sermon by an undistinguished Oxonian vicar, stewed prunes for breakfast, boiled beef for supper. The Pensione Simi on the banks of the Arno may have offered a room with a view, but it was run, improbably, by a Cockney landlady.

Even viewed through this keyhole, Italian culture was undeniably stirring. Little observations wormed their way into Morgan’s imagination: the look of a handsome Italian waiter as he stepped through French doors onto the pergola, the way a sharp burst of wind sheared through the trees on a hillside, the shimmer of oppressive heat, the sudden sting of grit in his eye from a passing railway train. He absorbed the plebian poetry in the cadence of the
Baedeker. His first published novel,
Where Angels Fear to Tread
, ironically captured its encyclopedic tone: “Philip could never read ‘The view from the Rocca (small gratuity) is finest at sunset’ without a catching at the heart.”

Their constant movement—a month or even two in Florence, Rome, and Milan, a week in Siena, Pisa, Naples, a retreat to the Alto Adige in the heat of summer—only partially disguised the profound regression in Morgan’s relations with his mother. Months before, he had been in the company of his friends, debating the meaning of beauty. Now he was setting out for the day with guidebook, smelling salts, and a parasol. Lily sensed that something was odd: “M is much quieter than he was before he went to Cambridge,” she wrote to her mother. Edward Dent, visiting with the Forsters as they overlapped in Italy, noted how sharply Lily reprimanded her son. He disapproved of Morgan’s timidity. Dent, too, had an imposing Victorian mother, but he drew a line: he “took her to buy butter dishes, but he would never, ever have gone to Italy with her.”

For her part Lily “never saw anybody so incapable” as her son, who missed trains, misread directions, lost his gloves, mislaid guidebooks, left maps behind at every stop. Each day their progress unraveled as they sought to retrieve items misplaced hours before. Long after her death, when Morgan was in his seventies, he reflected on how hapless he must have seemed to her:

Now I am older I understand her depression better . . . I often think of my mistakes with mother, or rather the wrongness of an attitude that may have been inevitable. I considered her much too much in a niggling way, and did not become the authoritative male who might have quietened her and cheered her up. When I look at the beauty of her face, even when old, I see that something different should have been done. We were a classic case.

But the young Morgan could discern only that something was missing in his sensory apparatus. To prepare so carefully had made each experience an anticlimax: “I missed nothing—neither the campaniles, nor the crooked bridges over dry torrent beds, nor the uniformity of the blue sky, nor the purple shadows of the mountains over the lake. But I knew that I must wait for many days before they meant any thing to me or gave me any pleasure.” Even at the beginning of his travels, he dimly understood what would become the central premise of his two Italian novels: that the best lessons of
Italy for the Englishman were corporeal. The art he encountered was ecstatic, irrational. The Madonna of Mantegna in the cathedral at Milan was “surrounded by a circle of cherubims, who are warbling—not singing, but with their tongues out and their mouths open, like birds.” The Italians had retained the classical ideal: “[C]herish the body and you will cherish the soul. This was the belief of the Greeks. The belief in wearing away the body by penance in order that the quivering soul might be exposed had not yet entered the world.” Even the tourist venues were admirably unprudish and practical. High above the Madonna and cherubs on the roof of the cathedral the local authority had installed a lavatory.

In the winter of 1901, “very discontented” with the novel fragment
Nottingham Lace
, he abandoned the story of young Edgar and his meddling, status-conscious mother. The attempt had given him a grip on his aesthetic goals, however unrealized. He explained to Goldie,

I’ve tried to invent realism, if you see what I mean: instead of copying incidents & characters that I have come across, I have tried to imagine others equally commonplace, being under the impression that this was art, and by mixing two methods have produced nothing. I think I shall have a try at imagination pure & simple . . .

Instead he began to sketch essays of his impressions of Italy. He channeled his damnable self-consciousness into a virtue. Now each destination became food for future writing. Some places, alas, were already spoken for. “Perugia would be nicer, I think, if Symonds had not written an Essay on it.” In March 1902 he complained to Goldie, “Traveling does not conduce to work. I have a few sentimental articles on Italy, and have got a plan for a new novel.” After a long labor, this would become
A Room with a View
.

When the corporeal lessons of Italy intruded, they came suddenly, precipitously, unasked for. He sprained his ankle in late January, and languished indoors for days at the little hotel near the Trevi fountain. Here he was marooned among “all females, and not very amusing.” A week later he tripped on the steps of St. Peter’s and broke his arm, which necessitated canceling a side trip to Greece in the welcome company of his Cambridge friends. The second injury rendered him utterly helpless. Lily had to bathe him, and each morning he woke up riddled with fleabites. Everything conspired to make him feel inept.