A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (13 page)

From the air, the Figsbury Rings look like a fried egg with an enormous yolk, albeit an egg with an area of fifteen acres or so. Each of the two concentric circles has a breach for entry at the east and the west. The force of human will upon the landscape is best revealed from above—the Rings are part of a great constellation of circular shapes pressed into or carved from the chalk hills on Salisbury Plain: tumuli and stone piles and Stonehenge itself, with its grand avenue to the river Avon, and the city-fort of Old Sarum, the first site of Salisbury. The view from above exposes the scars of forgotten conquests. The Romans appropriated Old Sarum and built roads threading from
fort to fort, as befits an occupying army. Some of these roads, lean and straight and strong, form the spine of the A roads, a later conquest still. Others, long abandoned, thrust headlong through farmer’s fields. The farther the distance, the more palpable the pattern of scars. The best images of the Figsbury Rings come from satellites.

If you stand at its highest point on the plateau of the fort, the evidence of human toil is subtler. The prospect presents a paradoxical feeling of being both atop the world and sheltered by it. Morgan called this feeling a “system” of understanding the relations between people and the natural world. The whole of Wiltshire is laid out like a private revelation from here, a God’s-eye view of nature and man’s attempts to work on it—forest and field in patchwork, the river meandering, and on a good day, the cathedral’s emphatic spire. Embraced in the long arms of the embankment, you are hidden from all who might approach.

For Morgan, lying at the spot in the Rings brought back a reiteration of the cosmic feeling he found inside the chalk circle at Madingley. The haphazard encounter in this magical place magnified the mystery. Forster’s conversation with the shepherd boy took less than a quarter of an hour. It was not a galvanizing
plot
. Resting in the shade of the single ancient tree that abutted the top ring, they passed the time talking about “nothing—still one of my favourite subjects.” The boy was genial and not the least bit obsequious: he didn’t call Morgan “sir.” Despite his deformity, he seemed happy and at ease. In a flourish of generosity that Morgan found quite touching, he offered a “pull at a pipe.” Since he did not smoke, Morgan declined. As he got up to leave, he offered the boy a tip of sixpence, which was rebuffed without hostility.

No spark of human warmth has found more willing kindling. Morgan “caught fire up on the Rings.” “In that junction of mind and heart where the creative impulse sparks,” the boy had touched him. It was a subtler touch than the spirit of Pan that had transformed Eustace in “The Story of a Panic”; Morgan was imbued with a spirit of
home
. The boy’s spontaneous kindness convinced him “that the English
can
be the greatest men in the world: he was miles greater than an Italian; one can’t dare to call his simplicity naïf.” And the idea of home engendered a surrogate family, the brother he had always hoped for and missed, the sense of belonging that his rootless condition had denied him. He would be father to his fiction—a more positive and impassioned
position than “making copy” instead of making love. “I created, I received, I restored,” Morgan wrote decades later about this seminal moment. All at once the shepherd boy “gave birth” to the character of Stephen Wonham in
The Longest Journey
.

Morgan had already begun to imagine a character like himself, a bright and shy young man who is transformed by “the fearless influential Cambridge that sought for reality and cared for truth,” the Cambridge . . . “which I knew at the beginning of the century.” But now he realized that Cambridge would be only part of a larger story. The orphaned Rickie Elliot, Morgan’s surrogate in the novel, would discover by chance that he has a bastard half-brother in Stephen. Stephen is everything Rickie is not—a hard drinker, a shepherd and farmhand, an autodidact, cantankerous, as comfortable in himself as he is uncaring about the opinion of the world. He is at once the spirit of Brotherhood, distilled from the Apostles’ love of Greece and of one another, and a quintessential common Englishman. So the weaving of life into art began: “Figsbury Rings became [the fictional] Cadbury Rings. The valley of the Winterbourne below them turned into the Cam . . .
The Longest Journey
was born.” Tellingly, Morgan transferred the club foot from the figure who had inspired Stephen to the character of Rickie. It was a mark of his difference, and his inadequacy. Citified and sissified, Rickie, the head to Stephen’s heart, would carry the defect that set him off from others, make him unable to play sports at school, and after his unfortunate marriage render him genetically unsuitable to father healthy children.

Just a day after the incident in the Rings, Morgan’s self-consciousness began to erode his confidence. He minutely parsed his own behavior toward the boy. How stiff and stupid he had been! How denigrating to offer him money! This, his first record of the encounter in his private journal, was already haunted by the feeling of being belated—“I walked out
again
to Figsbury Rings”—he began his account. As he denigrated himself, he elevated the boy’s motives until the shepherd became an emblem, not merely of chance friendliness, but of peasant “wisdom,” national character, the spirit of Englishness itself. He decided that, “whether he knows it or not,” the boy was “one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met.”

Characteristically, Morgan mulled over the scene as it might have appeared from the boy’s point of view. The boy’s refusal to accept his money manifested “great wisdom” and a simple courage. “I was simply bound to
think myself unsympathetic,” Morgan concluded in his diary that September, “whether I offered that sixpence or not, and I get a comfort in the rebuff.” Looking at the scene in retrospect, overcome with lust, guilt, and anxiety, Morgan turned to Italian to encode his powerful feelings:
“Vorrei cercario ancora—ma come si puó vivere quando si domanda sempre ‘cosa fa?’, ‘dove va?”
(I would still like to search for him, but how can one live when people are always asking “what are you doing?” “where are you going?”)

Twice more, on Monday and Tuesday, Morgan walked back to the same spot to see if he could find the young shepherd again. (One imagines him fretfully planning to do so over the weekend, thinking up a pretext to disentangle himself from Maimie’s and Lily’s “Where are you going?”s.) But it was not possible to recapture the radiance of effortless synchronicity. The boy and his flock had gone on to Wilton, six miles away. Morgan learned this fact on his third visit in pursuit of the boy, from the boy’s father, also a shepherd “neatly dressed” and friendly, but “altogether less wonderful” than his son. Morgan took comfort that neither father nor son would call him “sir.”

In later years Morgan was at pains to emphasize that there was nothing sexually illicit about his behavior toward the boy. Charles Sayle, the Cambridge librarian, may have been canny about the motives for “The Story of a Panic,” Morgan admitted, but he must misconstrue the story of the shepherd boy: “Charles Sayle wipes his glasses but our interview was of no interest to any type of observer.” So much was true: Morgan was exceptionally careful to act with propriety. But his mind buzzed with emotions, and his behavior at the time suggests that the encounter had a mesmerizing erotic power—an alloy of lust and gauzy romance. Nowhere in his writing does he acknowledge that the chance meeting between himself and the shepherd was an iteration, in inversion, of the moment from his school days when he encountered the pedophile on the Downs. But the incident had the same silhouette: a man and a boy; the offer of payment rejected; the tumult of excitement; the palpable urge to detail and explain his innocence.

With reluctance, years later, Morgan discovered that though the event “fructified” his novel, “test[ing] the magic” was inevitably disappointing: “The Rings survived . . . the Tree remained.” But his companion on that visit, Lytton Strachey, proved to be immune to the scene’s charms. He was “not one to countenance fanciful transferences.” And during this visit to Wiltshire in the early 1920s, Morgan had cause to measure even for himself
how much of the scene’s significance derived purely from his yearning imagination. On a long walk he encountered the shepherd again, recognizing him “because he would have been, and was, a mangy farm labourer, with a club foot. I felt no pleasure, no sadness, nothing at all except a passing fancy that everyone and everything I encountered was equally unreal.” Morgan said nothing to the man, nor, he remarked drily, did he “hand over his share in the royalties of
The Longest Journey
.”

The inchoate idea for a new novel lingered when he and Lily returned to London later that month. After months of searching, “we have got a house, too small and with no garden.” They signed a lease for fifty-five pounds per year on a semidetached house in the little village of Weybridge, which was being built up into a commuter town at the far western edge of London. A railway line meant that Waterloo Station was little more than half an hour away, and the walk from the station to the foot of the village a brisk twenty minutes through woods and country lanes. The house was “small and somewhat suburban,” he told Dent, but fortunately “not genteel.” It stood at the margin of the village’s high street, opposite an old coach inn. The little village was compact, and it absorbed the burst of Victorian development rather gracefully: the faux-Gothic church of St. James was only decades old, but nestled in an ancient churchyard. There were undeveloped woods and fields leading down to the Wey, a tributary of the Thames, where he could row Lily about on a fine day. Less than a mile away was the beautiful wetland the Chertsey Mead, alive with birdlife.

The face of the three-story brick house had an attic gable, and broad windows that looked out onto the postage-stamp-sized Monument Green. A tall marble column dedicated to the memory of a local Hanoverian patroness anchored the green. It had been transported from the notorious London neighborhood of Seven Dials to this suburban safe haven and bore “an inscription to the effect that it really pays to do good: the last line is ‘are registered in courts above.’” To Robert Trevelyan, Morgan offered a parodic sketch. To the rear, a view of “a field full of dropsical chickens.” From the parlor, the phallic monument. “The villa . . . has a beautiful brass bound
door step which we are taking on from the last tenant. None of our neighbours have one.”

Like Adam in the garden, Morgan’s first act upon moving into the house was to name it. Built only three years before, it came with the grandiose designation Glendore, which was “too trying.” Instead he called it Harnham, after the watermeadows within sight of Salisbury Cathedral, and the hill to the southeast of the city—the Wilton side—from which there was a remarkable view. Thus the Forsters grafted old England onto their new suburban home. Lily might find that the name reminded her of Maimie. For Morgan, it was a secret link to the place where he had met the shepherd boy.

Harnham was not Rooksnest, but it was “quite pretty in some ways,” far roomier than their Kensington flat, and it radiated Edwardian comfort. On the ground floor were a drawing room with a piano, a dining room, and a kitchen; two large bedrooms for Morgan and Lily and a bathroom occupied the next floor; and tucked up in the attic were three small rooms—one each for Ruth Goldsmith, who had been Lily’s cook at Tunbridge Wells, and Agnes Dowland, the parlormaid, and a workroom for the nascent writer. Downstairs functioned as a purely Victorian middle-class household; upstairs, something more modern was brewing. The tiny study was Morgan’s aerie: twin windows looked out over the green and the road. He rose late in the morning, and divided each day into practicing piano and writing in the little room where he would finish the Lucy novel—which he would eventually call
A Room with a View
—and write five more. He would live here with Lily for the next twenty-one years.

In December 1904, a year after his first major revision of the Lucy drafts, he set aside that novel yet again, breaking off at the moment when the engagement with Cecil Vyse is put to Lucy Honeychurch in earnest. Very quickly Morgan began to sketch out a wholly new novel based on a scrap of conversation, a “sorry bit of twaddle” he had heard and remarked on during his first Italian travels in 1902, a tidbit about a disastrous marriage between a young English widow and a younger Italian man.

Where Angels Fear to Tread
is a novel Henry James might have written if he’d had a sense of humor. Like the Lucy drafts, the novel was conceived as a clash of cultures between middle-class English people and ordinary Italians. Forster’s working title was “The Rescue”: Philip Herriton, lover of Italy, and his hidebound sister, Harriet, are dispatched by their formidable mother to rescue his brother’s widow, Lilia, from Signor Gino Carella, the son of a dentist
in Monteriano. But Lilia’s hapless chaperone, Caroline Abbott, has utterly failed, and by the time Philip arrives Lilia has already married.