A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (12 page)

At the end of the summer, mother and son returned to London and faced facts. Hotel living had lost its charm; they found a flat, their first ever, in South Kensington, in one of the “mansions”—the modern euphemism for the clean, anonymous buildings of flats then proliferating in West London.
Morgan had a very light footprint there. He spread out an early draft of
A Room with a View
in his bedroom, but did not settle in. His lectures at Harpenden and Lowestoft on the Italian city-state took him out of town weekly, and at Cambridge he was always welcome in Goldie’s rooms at King’s, or Dent’s (who had just been made a Fellow). He joined Apostles meetings and went to concerts frequently.

Goldie, Roger Fry, and George Trevelyan had just established a little magazine they named
The Independent Review
, and the first of Morgan’s travel essays were published here. It was an amenable place to come into print. The journal’s aim was mainly political, “to advocate sanity in Foreign affairs and a constructive policy” against Chamberlain’s jingoist and imperialist domestic platform. This editorial position was carefully placed so as not to align with party politics: “not so much a Liberal review as an appeal to liberalism from the Left to be its better self.” So from
Basileon
and the
Cambridge Review
to
The Independent Review
, Morgan found a home for his writing supported by his friends from King’s.

In December 1903 Morgan, unsatisfied with the structure of the “Lucy novel” he had been writing fitfully for more than a year, began a wholesale revision. He cracked open a notebook and labeled it “New Lucy.” Unlike the “Old Lucy” drafts, this revision brought Lucy Honeychurch and her pathetic cousin and chaperone Charlotte Bartlett back home from their Italian travels to England. For Lucy Honeychurch to have real moral agency, she would need real choices, and would need to face real antagonists to her narrow and protected view of the world. So Morgan spiced up the sedate crowd of characters in the “Old Lucy” drafts, introducing the iconoclastic, plain-speaking Emersons, father and son, and the sexually ambiguous, insightful clergyman Mr. Beebe. And Cecil Vyse, the aesthete with whom Lucy breaks off an engagement, was given startling and sympathetic depth. The basic premise of the plot remained just as Jane Austen might have conceived it: Whom should Lucy wed? But the new draft placed the heroine in a modern, unstable world—because, as he explained in a lecture to the Working Men’s College, “the woman of today is quite another person” than an “early Victorian woman.”

Lucy thinks she is safe when she returns in the second half of the novel to “Windy Corner,” the sprawling Victorian house in Sussex where she had led a cosseted childhood—Pimm’s cups and tennis on the lawn, and tidy, complacent ideas about the proper place of People Like Her. But the threat
of something modern and unorthodox stalks her even in the parish of Summer Street, emanating from suburban villas with twee little names such as Cissie and Albert. The Emersons have moved into the neighborhood. “The fatal improvement” of the train lines from London and the advent of the bicycle have made it impossible to keep even this quiet part of the Home Counties from becoming a “perfect paradise” for the wrong sorts of people—bank clerks, men who work for the railways and in trade, ambitious freethinkers such as George Emerson. When they heard the siren song of love from these unorthodox quarters, neither Lucy nor (it turned out) even Charlotte would make the mistake of Mr. Lucas in “The Road from Colonus.” But Morgan would have to bring them home to test the full effect of the touch of Italy upon their dutiful English hearts. Even with this conceptual advance, something still stalled the novel’s progress toward completion—a quaver, a spasm of self-consciousness, a sense that he was “not a real artist.”

A month later Morgan turned twenty-five. It was difficult to tell what he
was
but rather easy to determine what he
wasn’t
, and wasn’t likely to become. Morgan wasn’t the same son who had left Lily for King’s. He couldn’t pretend to be an undergraduate any longer. He wasn’t a gentleman. He wasn’t a published writer, or a proper academic, or a career man of any sort. He wasn’t to be like his friends Sydney Waterlow and George Barger and Malcolm Darling and George Trevelyan’s brother Robert, who, one by one, settled into marriages. Even HOM, who had broken off his engagement the summer before, and entered into a second (later aborted) plan to marry, seemed inevitably destined to be a husband. In a few years, Morgan would categorically reject his friends’ path. He would define his identity in opposition to them, writing in his journal, “I do not resemble other people.” But at twenty-five he was still unwilling to be decisive.

From this quiet interior space in a world of fixed social rules—a world where passing the jam the wrong way at the tea table could invite a sharp glance—Morgan summoned a miraculous burst of creativity. Few artists have ever had a year like Morgan’s in 1904. In the span of twelve months, he set aside the manuscript of
A Room with a View
, conceived and wrote the whole of his first published novel,
Where Angels Fear to Tread
, mapped out his second published novel,
The Longest Journey
, revised, wrote, and published “The Story of a Siren,” “The Eternal Moment,” “The Road from Colonus,” “The Story of a Panic,” and most of the other short stories that he would collectively publish in
The Celestial Omnibus
. He also began to write short
stories with explicitly homoerotic themes, stories that would be published only posthumously. In her rich diary, Morgan’s friend Virginia Woolf would record each wisp of idea, every iteration of her creative thoughts, all her strategies for revision. But Morgan was taciturn on his extraordinary creative flowering. He jotted down only a comment or two on his writing process in his diary. He did not even mention when he completed
Where Angels Fear to Tread
, or note the day it was published.

The years since he had left Cambridge looked like indolence or indecision, but they had been fruitful and reflective. For though his early fiction was not autobiographical in the strict sense, it worked through the three questions that had gnawed at him since his adolescence. What he was, what he would do, and how he was made up sexually were wholly intertwined. In his annus mirabilis the answer to these questions hatched all at once.

Like Cézanne relentlessly painting and repainting the silhouette of Mont Sainte-Victoire, or Jane Austen sketching her moral vision on the “little bit of ivory” of provincial domestic life, Morgan discovered the richness and complexity of his entire oeuvre, his whole aesthetic enterprise in a single subject: the search of each person for an honest connection with another human being. Especially someone unlike himself. He would return to it again and again. He was well aware that this subject was a spiritual inheritance from the women writers who came before him, and he adopted their foundational forms as the template for his moral world. He would anchor his plots in the domestic sphere that had been so richly explored by Austen and George Eliot. He would concern himself with their themes: the right choice for a marriage, the tug-of-war between propriety and personal freedom, the moral complexities of an interior life, the pressures of a small community upon an individual’s moral actions. He would not need wide vistas. But he would redefine the old conventions. Out of the remarkable isolation of his upbringing and despite his characteristic timidity, Morgan found a way to displace the center of these time-honored plots. He would discomfit his readers by looking all around a question, asking them to identify with unlikely characters—an Indian doctor, a working-class clerk struggling for an education, a headstrong young widow who falls impetuously in love with the wrong man. He would make complicated use of the “question I am always discussing with myself”—“whether I am conventional or not.” The answer was yes and no.

Always he was alert to the tension between the constraints he faced in his
daily life and the possibilities presented by his imagination. The vision of a beautiful world, a world in which he might love and be loved by another man, beckoned to him like a mirage. He glimpsed it in 1904 when he contemplated the
kouroi
in the British Museum: “Each time I see those Greek things in the B.M. they are more beautiful and more hopeless . . . That wonderful boy with the broken arm—who I suppose is to be called sugary because he’s new-Attic—stands all the afternoon warm in thick sunshine. He simply radiates light . . .” Despite his belief that Christianity had fatally separated the soul from bodily pleasure, despite his conviction that passion was the key to redeeming the English soul, with the ironclad certainty of youth, Morgan concluded,

I’d better eat my soul for I certainly shan’t have it. I’m going to be a minority, if not a solitary, and I’d best make copy out of my position. There is nothing contemptible or cynical in this. I too have sweet waters though I shall never drink them. So I can understand the drought of others, though they will not understand my abstinence.

His frustrated desires gushed up like a wellspring, fueling his urge to write. If he could not make love, at least he could “make copy.”

This passage from his most private journal is significant for several reasons. The term Morgan chose at that time to describe his “position” as a homosexual in Edwardian England was “a minority.” By selecting it, he repudiated the mainstream culture, which abhorred homosexuals, criminalized homosexual acts, and made even the thought of such desire “unspeakable.” But the choice of the term also signaled a rejection of the few models for homosexual expression that were known to Morgan. Whether embodied by provocative aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde and Charles Sayle, or by bohemians living in Bloomsbury such as Lytton Strachey and the painter Duncan Grant, the public personae of homosexuals felt inauthentic to him, and not because he was an innocent or a prude. Both Wilde’s public posture and Strachey’s iconoclasm were too precious, too clever, too arch, too intellectual, and too self-referential to appeal to Morgan’s sensibility. The oscillation between
conventional
and
not
was in his marrow. He did not have a form for it yet, but what he wanted for himself—and for other men like him—was
something he had never seen in the world. He wanted intimacy, love, and domesticity akin to marriage.

Morgan contemplated his “position” because he earnestly considered the moral implications of his sexual identity. To be sure, his “abstinence” was born of caution and fear of offending his mother. But he sought to express himself in his own language. By choosing the word
minority
, he eschewed some of the technical terms that were coming into vogue in progressive circles, terms such as
invert
and
intersexual
and
Uranian
and
homogenic
and
homosexual
—seductive theoretical explanations as to why this queer attraction happened between men, terms that scientists and doctors devised and intellectuals in the know embraced with relief, even with zeal. Morgan rejected the pigeonhole of medical labels. He was not interested in being a “case study,” as J. A. Symonds had been for Havelock Ellis in his ground-breaking
Sexual Inversion
(1897). Morgan was deeply suspicious of explanations for the
cause
of homosexuality, whether the explanations came from Germany—where K. H. Ulrichs and R. von Krafft-Ebing were promoting theories of congenital “morbid predispositions”—or from England. (He would later distance himself from Freud as well.)

In his journal, Morgan imagined himself suspended between two kinds of hostile misapprehension—those who could not imagine the idea of homosexuality, and those, like Lytton, who would find his “abstinence” cowardly or risible. But Morgan never imaged that he would be utterly alone. Even in this plaintive defense of his “position,” Morgan held on to a vision of a communal sexual identity—“a minority” to be sure, but not a “solitary.” He grafted the Apostles’ belief in personal relations onto an erotic ideal of a lover and friend
different
from himself. His fantasies concerned the garden boy and the laborer, the clerk and (eventually) dark-skinned men. Since he had begun teaching at the Working Men’s College, the romantic idea that love could be both an expression of lust and of tolerance was incarnated in a particular form. That this was both a conventional trope—Wilde himself had sex with working-class boys, after all—and an unconventional one was emblematic of Morgan’s character and his personal philosophy.

A few months after he wrote this entry, “an idea for an entire novel—that of a man who discovers that he has an illegitimate brother—took shape” over a weekend in July 1904. It hung in his mind as he and Lily searched for a more permanent and amenable place to live than the dreary flat in South
Kensington. Taking a break from house-hunting, mother and son traveled to Wiltshire to visit Maimie Aylward, a cousin by marriage on Eddie’s side of the family, and a dear friend of Lily since before Morgan’s birth. Maimie lived near Salisbury, “the heart of our island: the Chilterns, the North Downs, the South Downs radiate hence.” The great stone circle of Stonehenge stood just outside the city, not far from the cathedral’s magnificent spire. “The fibres of England unite in Wiltshire,” Morgan believed. It was a place to escape into, and a place to come home.

In mid-July, leaving the ladies to talk, Morgan set out alone into the Wiltshire landscape. Long country walks were a popular pastime. Since Wordsworth’s poetry had been published a century before, finding oneself and finding the Real England through its unspoiled countryside had been a rite of passage for literary men of romantic outlook. Since his days at King’s, Morgan had been impressed by A. E. Housman’s collection of poems
A Shropshire Lad
and Matthew Arnold’s
The Scholar Gypsy
. As only a displaced suburban man can be, he was especially ambivalent about the erosion of ties to the land and to the past. Three miles east of Salisbury Morgan came upon an ancient hill fort from the Iron Age, a series of undulating concentric embankments about twelve feet high, overgrown with long “gray and wiry” grasses. As antiquities go, they suited Morgan perfectly: they were “unobtrusive,” “curious rather than impressive.” As he walked toward the single tree at the center of the Rings, Morgan saw “the whole system of the country” before him. And there, in the shade of the small tree, he came upon a shepherd boy with a club foot. Suddenly, as it had been for him in Ravello, “the whole landscape” became “charged with emotion.”