A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (11 page)

As he recovered through the spring, the warmth of Naples unsettled him in a different way: he became consumed by erotic dreams about men. They were inchoate but urgent. For the moment, not wishing to understand them, he simply savored the intensity of feeling—“It is not what happens in dreams but the strength of our feelings that is so wonderful.” But a few years later in
Maurice
, he would write:

Where all is obscure and unrealised the best similitude is a dream. Maurice had two dreams . . . they will interpret him. [In the first dream he] was playing football against a nondescript whose existence he resented . . . The nondescript turned into . . . [a] garden boy. But he had to be careful or it would reappear. [The boy] headed down the field towards him, naked and jumping over the woodstacks . . .

The second dream is more difficult to convey. Nothing happened. He scarcely saw a face, scarcely heard a voice say, “That is your friend,” and then it was over, having filled him with beauty and taught him tenderness.

Even in his dreams Morgan felt he had to be careful not to penetrate the boundary between body and soul. The naked boy and the tender male voice came to him on separate nights. But the homoerotic muse would not desist, and in mid-May it apprehended him with full, unexpected force. One sunny morning Morgan walked alone in the country outside Ravello, nothing in view but little trees occasionally ruffled by a little wind, and the town in the distance framed against a dark blue sea. In an instant a story emerged: “I would bring some middle-class Britishers to picnic in this remote spot, I would expose their vulgarity, I would cause them to be terribly frightened they knew not why, and I would make it clear by subsequent events that they had encountered and offended the Great God Pan.” For the next two days Morgan cloistered himself in the hotel writing out the first drafts of “The Story of a Panic.” Never before had he sat “down on the theme as if it were an anthill.”

The form of the story he inherited from Ovid. It was a pure fantasy of metamorphosis. But the pinched perspective of the narrator—male, married, middle-class, middle-aged—was Morgan’s creation. Never has a more pedestrian mind encountered bacchanalian forces.

The plot of the story is both simple and mysterious. Some inexplicable
terror strikes the group of tourists—so suddenly that they neglect to protect the youngest among them. The peevish schoolboy Eustace has been left behind. The narrator and the rest return to find the young man transformed by the sensual spirit of Pan: he wears a “disquieting smile,” comes “whooping down . . . as a wild Indian,” barks like a dog, and sings scattered tuneless songs in the small hotel—“five-finger exercises, scales, hymn tunes, scraps of Wagner.” Most disconcertingly, Eustace becomes physically demonstrative, searching out the Italian waiter and embracing him. The story ends with the waiter’s sudden unaccountable death, and Eustace’s escape into the Italian night. The narrator remains utterly puzzled by what has happened.

“The Story of a Panic” captured many themes that would permeate all of Morgan’s subsequent fiction. The contrast between the tumultuous warmth of Italy or India and the chilly English heart. The genius loci as a source of both inspiration and fear. The strange, often estranging, significance of a plotless discovery about one’s inner self. All at once Morgan seemed to have grasped how to use his complex empathy, the thing Wedd had called his “apparatus,” both to be
inside
bourgeois British culture and to demonstrate how absurd such a position was.

It was a masterful beginning for a writer of twenty-three. But it was also an unwitting gloss on Morgan’s own sexual panic. The immediate reaction of his Cambridge friends to “The Story of a Panic” “horrified” and disgusted the young Morgan. They treated it like a salacious tidbit. Someone gave the manuscript to Maynard Keynes, who shared it with Charles Sayle, a university librarian who cultivated a baroque effeminacy. “Oh dear oh dear, is this Young King’s?” Sayle asked in knowing mock horror. “Then he showed Maynard what the Story was about. B[uggered] by a waiter at the hotel, Eustace commits bestiality with a goat in the valley where I had sat. In the subsequent chapters, he tells the waiter how nice it has been and they try to b[ugger] each other.” Thus opened the abyss between men like Sayle and Lytton Strachey, who took satisfaction and pride in calling homosexuals “buggers,” and Morgan, who even years later would not spell out the whole word.

It was not until two decades later—in the mid-1920s—that Morgan had the detachment to observe how much the story of writing “The Story of a Panic” was the story of his own sexual anxiety. Morgan read this little fable of authors and critics to a sympathetic group of friends, many of them the Apostles whom he had known at Cambridge. He never published it. By the
time he was forty he could laugh at his priggish younger self. That he, at twenty-three, had been “horrified” by Sayle’s lascivious reading later confirmed to the mature Morgan how close to the truth this unwelcome interpretation lay. When he had conceived the story “no thought of sex was in my mind”; but, looking back, later he acknowledged, “I had been excited as I wrote and the passages where Sayle had thought something was up had excited me most.” Nevertheless, he could not forgive the librarian for his ham-handed literal reading of the story. A reader like Sayle, he concluded, cannot be countenanced “because he thinks he knows and slips out after twilight in his strongest spectacles . . . for a peep of a nightshirt.” To the end of his life Morgan recognized the sexual force as a wellspring of his creative work. But as an artist he resisted looking too closely at anything so “sacred and mysterious” as the mechanics of creation.

The long tour of Italy seemed merely to postpone the reckoning of what to do with his life. Anticipating his return to London in the autumn, he confided to Dent, “I watch my own inaction with grave disapproval but I am still as far as ever from settling what to do.” Fortuitously, George Trevelyan offered an intriguing stopgap: “Would you care to do some teaching at the W[orking] M[en’s] College, next October?” The prospect was welcome, not least because it would offer proximity to Hugh Meredith, who was studying economic history at the London School of Economics and had rooms just around the corner from the college on Guilford Street.

In September 1902 Morgan and Lily returned to London. With no permanent home, they took up residence at the Kingsley Temperance Hotel just opposite the British Museum. Temperance indeed. The Kingsley was crammed with the sorts of people who frequented the pensiones they had stayed in over the last year: dowagers and earnest students, and young ladies traveling with an aunt as a chaperone. This was a very different Bloomsbury than the bohemian playground that Lytton Strachey, Vanessa Stephen, and her sister, Virginia Woolf, would establish just a few years later in a shabby townhouse blocks away on Gordon Square. There was very little privacy for Morgan at the hotel, but the city beckoned. The museum held wonders: beautiful naked Attic sculptures, a giant pair of winged Assyrian bulls carved out of stone, designed to be seen from two perspectives—they had four legs from the
front, five legs from the side. In
Maurice
, just here, between the two “monsters,” the gamekeeper Alec Scudder would corner the stockbroker Maurice Hall and unsuccessfully try to blackmail him.

By month’s end Morgan was teaching Latin once a week at the Working Men’s College on Great Ormond Street. In this he joined George Trevelyan, HOM, and other idealistic young Cambridge men. He also applied for a position as a lecturer for a university extension service in regional towns near London. He proposed a syllabus on the history of the Italian city-states. It was a great relief to him to have something to do, and especially to be in the company of robust, attractive male students. Morgan wrote to Dent that he thought he wasn’t a very effective teacher. “I am afraid I enjoy it more than they do.”

The Working Men’s College was the fruit of Christian socialist idealism. It had been founded forty years before by a man called F. D. Maurice to provide a university-style education for men of the working classes. There were already mechanics’ institutes devoted to vocational training, but F. D. Maurice’s liberal imagination was not satisfied. Did workingmen not yearn for knowledge for its own sake? Did they not deserve the human fellowship of university life? So the course of the Working Men’s College was set to self-consciously mirror the most advanced curricula of the day: systematic study of controversial political subjects, great literature, and art. The founders’ ideals emphasized “rational enjoyment and hard work mingled with education” and encouraged “the formation of friendships” between faculty and students. The opportunities for friendship centered on manly pursuits—boxing and other sports. For the less hearty there was a library.

Though the intended clientele were laborers, most of the students who attended the college in fact came from a rung up the social ladder. These were clerks and lower-level professionals—men like Leonard Bast in
Howards End
, or indeed like Hugh Meredith’s father, men who stood on their feet for twelve hours a day, filing cards in the new modern systems of cross-ledgers and indexing, or scratching out copies of business documents with inky fingers. Manual laborers, the reformers discovered, “demanded more practical subjects.” No reading of Ruskin’s “Stones of Venice” for them. They wanted to
get on
in the world.

There is very little record of Morgan’s time teaching at the college. It was essentially a private pleasure. But he did succeed at making one lifelong close friend. One of his students was a brilliant young man who worked as a
clerk in a Crosse and Blackwell pickle factory. E. K. Bennett, known as Francis, was quiet, gentle, and homosexual. Despite his tendency to denigrate himself, Bennett’s career was a remarkable success story: he rapidly progressed from student to teacher at the Working Men’s College, and after George Trevelyan supplied money for a scholarship, he went on to a brilliant career at Cambridge, as a Fellow of Caius College in modern German literature. Bennett was one of a very few pioneering working-class dons.

So in the dank November of 1902, Morgan traveled back and forth across Russell Square, between the bustle of the male world of the Working Men’s College and the Kingsley Hotel, where, like Jane Austen at her writing table, he had almost no time to write and almost no privacy. He was picking his way along on a new Italian novel. A heroine named Lucy, a wide-eyed tourist, was his surrogate. He planned to dedicate the novel to HOM.

Meredith was living in Bloomsbury to retool—to begin an academic career as an economic historian, which would lead him first to Manchester and finally to Queen’s College, Belfast. He remained a romantic, penning “week-day poems” from the point of view of working-class Londoners. Hugh was indecisive, intensely self-critical, and prone to appreciate things just after they had gone out of reach. Perhaps inadvertently, perhaps because of his mixture of darkness and adamantine wit, he continued to exert a magnetic, quasi-sexual attraction on a whole circle of friends long after he left King’s. A kind of soap opera of alienated affection swirled around him in these years. Dent was crushed to discover that Hugh had plans to marry. But perhaps because he had been the golden boy in his own family, Hugh had “a horror of people who depend on me.”

Just before Christmas 1902, HOM initiated an ardent turn in his friendship with Morgan. It began with the theoretical framework of fraternal affection, but it evolved into a peculiar and very unsatisfying love affair. About its details both men were scrupulously silent. The closest thing to a record of this is the portrait of Clive Durham in
Maurice
, a portrait that Morgan could paint only after he had outgrown both Hugh’s platonic affections and the sting of recognizing their limitations. Between the young men there was some very tentative and inept lovemaking—long, earnest, fully clothed embraces, chaste kisses, and florid talk of the Hellenic ideal of friendship. But the intensity of the encounters awakened Morgan’s heart. In his diary two years later he looked back on the two great discoveries of his youth—that he could no longer remain a Christian, and that he desired only men. Both he
owed to the influence of HOM. These insights were still so raw, and so dangerous, that he wrote about them at the close of 1904, elliptically: “I’ve made my two discoveries—the religious about 4 years ago, the other in the winter of 1902—and the reconstruction is practically over . . .”

For his part HOM retreated from real intimacy, but the residue in him was a sense of diminishment and loss. In 1903 he broke off an engagement to marry. Later that year he had some sort of nervous breakdown. Morgan traveled up to Manchester to visit him, walking beside him for hours in silence, keeping him company, asking for nothing. Even in the midst of his depression, Hugh recognized that Morgan was a remarkable friend. He confided glumly to Maynard Keynes, “I think I am dead really now. Or perhaps I should say that I realise now what was plain to others two years ago. I come to life temporarily when I meet Forster.”

In the spring of 1903, Morgan traveled to Greece with Wedd and a group of Kingsmen, picking up the plans that had been postponed when he broke his arm the year before. This time he took Lily only as far as Italy, leaving her there while he peeled off to join the tour. If Italy had been disappointing because he had been overprepared for it, Greece was anticlimactic because it confirmed what he had already come to know about himself. A second great short story was born there, a variation on “The Story of a Panic.” “The Road from Colonus” ended poignantly, with the elderly Mr. Lucas unable to acknowledge the touch of Hellenic inspiration offered to him. On the road to Colonus he comes upon a natural “shrine,” a tree with water gushing out of its bark, and for a brief moment he knows that “something unimagined, indefinable, had passed over things, and made them intelligible and good.” But he resists the muse. He ends up back in suburban England, untouched by the momentary epiphany, “irritably” complaining about “intolerable” neighbors and barking dogs. But the mysterious sound of running water in his ears haunts him still. Morgan felt a bit like Mr. Lucas. The reprise of Italy was a disconcerting sense of déjà vu: it was a “depressing thing to look down the table” at the pensione “and honestly believe that you are the cleverest person seated at it, which is what I do day after day.”