A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (14 page)

The plot unravels in unexpected ways. Mrs. Herriton’s poisonous sense of duty at first obscures the reader’s sympathy, but she turns out to be right; the marriage
does
make Lilia miserable. Real sorrow is the consequence. Lilia dies in childbirth. The rescue of her infant son—in fact, a kidnapping by his English relatives—ends in the baby’s accidental death. Philip breaks his arm when the carriage with the stolen baby overturns. When Gino discovers his baby has been killed, he tortures Philip by twisting his broken arm. (This was the scene that Morgan later admitted had “stirred” him erotically: “I knew not nor wondered why, and even if I had heard of Masochism I should have denied the connection.”) The British interlopers limp away from Monteriano, where they have done so much harm with such righteous intentions. At the conclusion of the novel, Philip feels transformed by his experience, and decides that he must declare his love to Caroline. But Caroline, too, has learned a lesson from the ordeal. She confides to Philip that she loves Gino, and Philip withholds his true feelings from her, in a Jamesian renunciation. In the end, it is not clear who is being rescued, or from what.

Forster composed the novel “almost with physical force”—ten short chapters in just over a month. His first readers didn’t quite know what to make of it. Aunt Laura’ s elderly friend, the Victorian critic Snow Wedgwood complained that her “fundamental objection to the story was that [Morgan] did not make up his mind at the start whether it was to be a tragedy or comedy. It seemed quite a new idea to him . . . that one ought to have any conception of one’s intentions in this respect. I feel that in a tragedy everything ought to convey some intimation of seriousness.” But should one laugh or cry at Philip’s ridiculous narrow life—or at his sacrifice? In his first completed novel, as in all of Austen’s, even prigs and petty tyrants have moral agency: Morgan recalled “[d]iscovering that Lady Bertram [in Austen’s
Mans-field Park
] had a moral outlook shocked me at first.” He “had not realised the solidity of an art,” he confided in his Commonplace Book, “which kept such an aspect in reserve, and placed her always on the sofa with pug.”

In
Where Angels Fear to Tread
Morgan tried to convey what he labeled “intermittent knowledge”—the “ability to expand or contract perception without being detected . . . [O]ne of the advantages of the novel form . . . [it] has a parallel in our perception of life: we are stupider at some times than at others.” He defended the novel against Robert Trevelyan’s rather “severe”
criticism that the turns in the plot should be more clearly telegraphed, the characters more sympathetic, the English setting more “amusing.” The ethical question, Morgan replied, was how much people can
change
.

The object of the book is the improvement of Philip, and I did really want the improvement to be a surprise . . . [I] dislike finger posts, and couldn’t bear . . . the thought of inserting “Philip has other things in him besides these: watch him” . . . [I] should have felt that the suggestion that a book must have one atmosphere to be pedantic. Life hasn’t any, and the hot and cold of its changes are fascinating to me.

On his birthday, New Year’s Day in 1905, Morgan reported to Leonard Woolf that he had completed the manuscript and sent it off to Blackwood’s in hope of serial publication. He had accomplished something important, but felt weighted down by his personal insignificance. In his diary he set down a sober accounting of his life’s progress. From the little room at the top of the stairs, his life looked bleak:

My life is now straightening into something rather sad & dull to be sure, & I want to set it & me down, as I see us now. Nothing more great will come out of me. I’ve made my two discoveries—the religious about 4 years ago, the other [his homosexuality] in the winter of 1902—and the reconstruction is practically over . . . I may sit year after year in my pretty sitting room, watching things grow more unreal, because I’m afraid of being remarked . . . I still want, in all moods, the greatest happiness but perhaps it is well it should be denied me.

Having always thought that “twenty-five is the boundary of the romantic desirable age,” he was nearly certain that no one would ever love him.

Fifty years later, Morgan reflected on his premature despair. He concluded that it was a symptom of how humans often feel “not altogether at home in the world of time . . . Growing old is an emotion which comes over us at almost any age. I had it myself violently between the ages of twenty-five and thirty, and still possess a diary recording my despair . . . This unpleasant sensation . . . is probably only another form of the sensation of being too young, which irritates adolescents.” But the young Morgan could not muster the long view.
He steeled himself for the future, writing New Year’s resolutions to discipline his wayward sloth and lust. He vowed to get out of bed by nine in the morning. To “keep the brutes” of physical desire “quiet,” he would adopt a regimen of exercise. He would attempt to overcome his paralyzing shyness. And, in the event he might encounter another young man like the shepherd, he decided to teach himself to “smoke in public: it gives a reason for you & you can observe unchallenged.” More practically, without a manuscript to anchor him, he began to plan his next escape from Lily and his dead-end life.

Again, a friend from King’s came to the rescue. Sydney Waterlow had an eccentric aunt who needed an English tutor for her three eldest children. Elizabeth, the Countess von Arnim, was ostensibly from the minor German nobility, but she came to such a position by a wildly circuitous route. She was a cousin of the novelist Katherine Mansfield. Born in New Zealand to a British father who had made a fortune there, at twenty-two Elizabeth had married a German aristocrat twenty-five years her senior, and coming to dislike both him and his milieu, fashioned a separate existence for herself and her five young children in a rambling seventeenth-century stuccoed
Schloss
, one of his many ancestral properties. Life in Berlin tired her. She set about building an idyll in Nassenheide in the Pomeranian countryside. The estate comprised more than eight thousand acres of farm and piney woods; here she set up a little matriarchy with her adoring children, a private system of schooling them, a study with a typewriter for herself, and a beautiful English garden as a sort of rebuke to the German way of doing things. Her three eldest daughters she rather coyly nicknamed April, May, and June, after the months of their birth. Her (mainly absent) husband she christened “The Man of Wrath.” These circumstances she depicted in a roman à clef,
Elizabeth and Her German Garden
, published in 1898. The domestic myth of Elizabeth floating about her garden with happy children in tow became a late-Victorian bestseller. Elizabeth would go on to write twenty more novels. Two in particular lived on after her death:
Enchanted April
, a romance of female friendship in Italy; and
Vera
, the stark tale of her abusive second marriage.

His sojourn in Nassenheide afforded Morgan the chance to write letters home to Lily, the sort of comic travelogues that periodically renewed their affection and reinforced their shared sense of the ridiculous. In them, he
would become her “Poppy,” or “Popsnake”—his childhood nickname of endearment. He detailed to her an arrival at Nassenheide as a gothic comedy of errors “beyond my wildest dreams.” Traveling by rail through the unknown dark, he was let off the train in a driving rain—“pitch dark, no station, no porter, no one of any kind.” Morgan persuaded a local farmhand to lead him to the
Schloss
—“Slosh! We trod in puddles . . . we waded in manure”—and, after trudging alone up a rough drive full of potholes, he arrived at Elizabeth’s darkened mansion. When he rang the bell, “a hound bayed inside.” A “dishevelled boy” led him through “a long low white washed barrel vaulted hall, hung with trophies of the chase,” while he followed after, his “boots oozing manure.” The countess had expected him to arrive the following day. The next morning after breakfast he encountered his employer. She was not quite what he had expected: “indifferent false teeth & a society drawl.” “How d’ye do, Mr. Forster!” she announced firmly. “We confused you with one of the housemaids. Can you teach the children, do you think? They are
very
difficult.”

He stayed with Elizabeth and her entourage from April to August 1905. Germany did not much impress him—“the country is unthinkably large and contented and patriotic,” he wrote in his diary—but his daily teaching duties were not onerous, and the three girls, ages thirteen to eight, took instruction well. He liked the other tutors, and had plenty of time to himself in a large and comfortable suite of rooms. Within a few days of his arrival he got word that Blackwood wanted to publish his novel, though on parsimonious terms. He showed Elizabeth, an established author, and she offered her opinion of the novel as she read it in stages—the first few chapters “very clever, but most unattractive, and she felt as if she wanted a bath.” Reading further, she decided that the novel was “beautiful,” only to “retract . . . and [go] back to her original opinion.” Morgan and Blackwood had a brief tussle over the title. Blackwood rejected Morgan’s first choice, “Monteriano,” but accepted his second, taken from the famous adage from Alexander Pope—“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” Quite quickly author and publisher “settled into contentment” with each other. All July he read proofs.

While in Nassenheide, Morgan turned to his diary to ruminate on the wider question of how he fit into the world. He felt out of touch with modern writers. In its infancy, the novel had been
novel
—of all the literary forms, it made the unique promise of showing life truthfully—but the conventions of
the nineteenth-century novels Morgan revered had begun to feel a little like a cage. It seemed to him wrongheaded, even trivial these days simply to end a novel with “the old, old answer,
marriage
”: “Artists now realise that marriage, the old full stop, is not an end at all . . .” Resolving a plot with a marriage was part of the imperative of comedy, but the blind optimism of lesser writers seemed dishonest to him: “The writer who depicts [life as a bed of roses] may possibly be praised for his healthy simplicity. But his own conscience will never approve him, for he knows that healthiness and simplicity are not, in all cases, identical with truth.”

The modern writers whom he most admired, from Dostoyevsky to Ibsen to Hardy, were convinced that truth lay in a tragic vision. But his temperament, his need to see both “hot” and “cold” in the world, could not find sympathy with these brooding minds. This set of aesthetic problems reflected the most pressing questions in his inner life. As one by one his closest friends disappeared behind the “astonishing glass shade . . . that interposes between married couples and the world”—HOM, George Barger, Malcolm Darling—he was beginning to feel certain “I do not resemble other people.” Must intimacy always take the form of marriage?

He mulled over a correlative. What social force made people so herdlike, so inclined to divide between
us
and
them
? The strange insular world of the von Arnim household, from one angle, seemed merely an iteration of the strange insular world of Weybridge, or any other enclave of privilege. Most people he knew had very little sense of the lives of people unlike themselves. It was all very well to read Dickens or Mrs. Gaskell’s
North and South
: “To be enthusiastic & sentimental over the picturesque poor is no difficulty.” The comfortable world he knew best concerned itself only with finer gradations of status. Lily, his aunts, their friends, spent endless hours determining who was too “vulgar,” who “genteel” enough to visit or invite to tea. The approach to people unlike oneself, he believed, was a moral obligation, but an obligation with risks.

To know and help [the poor] are we to lose our souls—or how much of them . . . [C]onditions are appalling: poverty, matrimony, much of family life all work against love and clear vision: and to those are added the rules of the game—death and decay yet people contrive to get in touch—I believe because they are radically good.

For the time being, these ideas remained a mere wisp in his diary. Within the year he would work them into a lecture called “Pessimism in Literature” to be delivered across the class divide to students at the Working Men’s College. How to “contrive to get in touch” with people would remain the great ethical question that illuminated his life and art. He would face its difficulties squarely, unflinchingly, in his last and greatest novels,
Howards End
and
A Passage to India
. In the meantime he would try to live his life according to the ideals of his art.

Morgan returned to London in the autumn of 1905 to enthusiastic reviews of
Where Angels Fear to Tread
. Friends, especially Dent and Dickinson, offered effusive praise. But the experience of being published sharpened his keen sense of his limitations as an artist. He told Robert Trevelyan,

I know I am not a real artist, and at the same time am fearfully serious over my work and willing to sweat at atmosphere if it helps me to what I want. What I want, I think, is the sentimental, but the sentimental reached by no easy beaten track—I cannot explain myself properly . . . [M]y equipment is frightfully limited, but so good in parts that I want to do with it what I can.

What he
could
do was to try out a life in fiction that he felt unable to live in the world. In the first six months of 1906, he took up the fragment of plot that the shepherd boy had sparked in him. He borrowed the title
The Longest Journey
from Shelley’s
Epipsychidion
—which loosely translates to “the story of a soul.” Rickie Elliot’s search for love would take him from Cambridge to the Sawston school, to the Wiltshire countryside. The novel, like Shelley’s poem, asked how best—in family or friend, man or woman—one might find intimacy.