A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (17 page)

As he stepped out, literally, onto the gravel road outside Lamb House that blue-gray evening after tea, from down the lane framed by tall privets a bright flicker of flame flared and guttered. In the distance a workman walking home had paused to light a cigarette. It was not a deliberate call sign—the man never saw Morgan at all—but the glow set Morgan ablaze in a synaptic burst. It was a private revelation. Suddenly, Morgan felt impelled to travel a different road, to walk away from the house of Art toward the rougher, more real life he knew he desired.

In his private diary, he wrote a sharp little sketch of the evening’s impressions to capture the feeling of the meeting with James. And then, without any context to frame it, a poem spilled out onto the page:

I saw you or I thought of you
I know not which, but in the dark
Piercing the known and the untrue
It gleamed—a cigarette’s faint spark.
It gleamed—and when I left the room
Where culture unto culture knelt
Something just darker than the gloom
Waited—it might be you I felt
.

It was not you; you pace no night
No youthful flesh weighs down your youth.
You are eternal, infinite,
You are the unknown, and the truth.
Yet each must seek reality:
For those within the room, high talk,
Subtle experience—for me
The spark, the darkness on the walk
.

For the time being, he would not approach such men. He would spin his heart’s insights into art, captured in a rarefied, disembodied ideal of “eternal, infinite” manly beauty. But the impulse set his compass toward the human. He would go with the spark.

Working over the typescript of
A Room with a View
in early May 1908, Morgan dismissed the novel as “bilge.” His own words sounded inauthentic to him, but he had found a voice worth listening to: “I opened Walt Whitman for a quotation, and he started speaking to me . . . he is not a book but an acquaintance, and if I believe him, he’s more.” In
Leaves of Grass
Whitman had vowed to “dissipate this entire show of appearance,” to celebrate the poet’s love not merely of mankind, but of
men
. Morgan saw that Whitman, too, had been “stifled and choked” but he had shaken off his chains. Celebratory, effusive, manly, democratic, Whitman’s poems promised that there need be “no more fighting between the soul and the body.” So much of Whitman echoed Morgan’s hopes and desires. How wonderful it would be to “believe him,” to share his courage and his optimism. Whitman’s erotic poems were electrifying in their own right, but they gained greater power because they were part of a larger human yearning to
connect
.

Passage to India!
Lo, soul! seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work,
The people to become brothers and sisters,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together
.

Just days after Whitman spoke to him, Morgan felt the “[i]dea for another novel shaping” in his quickening imagination. In a single short paragraph,
he sketched out virtually the whole conception of
Howards End
. This story would be an answer to the thin, brittle quality he had come to detest in the long revisions of
A Room with a View
.
Howards End
would take a wider view. He would ground his characters in the modern world—the London wincing at the din of new construction, motor cars, and the pounding of steam pile drivers, and the timeless English countryside rapidly eroding into endless suburbia.

Morgan balanced two families with very different values, each equally convinced of the supremacy of their way of seeing life: Margaret and Helen, the Schlegel sisters, who cherish personal relations and the liberal values of “temperance, tolerance and sexual equality”; and the Wilcoxes, who believe in money, business, and power, and who know to their marrow that the sisters’ outlook is “sheltered [and] academic”—“that Equality was nonsense, Votes for Women nonsense, Socialism nonsense, Art and Literature, except when conducive to strengthening the character, nonsense.” Morgan understood that “the spiritual cleavage between the families” must be tested by Margaret’s marriage to Henry Wilcox, and that she must marry him even after she discovers that though “impeccable publicly,” Henry has been hiding a sexual secret—a past liaison with “a prostitute.”
Howards End
explores the tension between respectability and personal morality, and the tremendous gulf between the standards for men’s and women’s sexual behavior.

He also wanted to give the principles of liberalism a long hard look. It was all very well to dismiss the world of the Wilcoxes, the world of external things, of money and business—but Morgan knew that the world where young men could sit toasting crumpets on a long fork in front of the fire talking about ideas and art depended on things and money, depended, too, at its foundation on the unseen clerks and office boys who toiled in it. Where Henry and his children believe that they have earned their wealth, the Schlegel sisters feel a twinge of guilt about their privilege. The Schlegels’ politics are vaguely well-meaning: “they desired that public life should mirror what is good in the life within.” Their intervention on behalf of Leonard Bast—a young clerk whom they meet at a concert—begins the chain of events that leads to his death, and Helen Schlegel’s pregnancy and disgrace.

Howards End is a house, the ancestral house of Ruth Wilcox, the first Mrs. Wilcox. It is a replica of Morgan’s child’s-eye view of Rooksnest, right down to the chimneys and the wych-elm with the boars’ teeth pressed into it. And Ruth Wilcox is a sort of spiritually attuned matriarch. She can read
people’s hearts. Oblivious to the modern world, in touch with nature, content with her role as mother and wife, she is everything that the Schlegel sisters detest about women of their mother’s generation. And yet they both come to discover that Mrs. Wilcox is extraordinary, for reasons they cannot explain. Mrs. Wilcox is the female equivalent of Stephen Wonham.

Morgan based his complex characters on models from his life. He told Dickinson, “Your home at All Souls Place somehow suggested the Schlegels’ house to me . . . and your three sisters seen as it were with a sideway glance and then refocussed.” In their unorthodox habits the Schlegels also resemble the orphaned daughters of Sir Leslie Stephen, who would soon marry to become Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Leonard Bast, wary, believes that “to trust people is a luxury only the wealthy can indulge.” His character originated from Morgan’s observations of one of his proud and striving students at the Working Men’s College. Alexander Hepburn was a printer who fiercely wanted to become
cultured
. As Morgan watched the changes in “throbbing stinking London,” he worried that “Money is power, and nothing else is, as far as I can see.” He would test this principle as he worked on drafts of the novel throughout 1909.

Just as Morgan began to imagine in an abstract way that Henry Wilcox’s sexual misconduct might set the story of the two families’ conflict in motion, a story of real sexual danger interjected into his life with horrifying force.

Malcolm Darling’s impending wedding was the event of the summer in Morgan’s circle of Kingsmen. Darling had come home on leave from the Indian civil service, eager that Morgan should meet his best friend and groomsman, Ernest Merz. Merz was twenty-seven, a lawyer with the heart of a poet, good company, bright and funny, “a continual bubble of suppressed laughter”—Morgan liked him immediately. On Thursday, July 8, the three young men shared a congenial, leisurely bachelor supper at a Soho restaurant. After dinner Darling peeled off, leaving Morgan to stroll with Merz toward his club. They talked amiably, and said their goodbyes. Shortly after, Merz went to his rooms in the Albany, the fashionable bachelor apartments next to the Royal Academy, walked upstairs, poured himself a whisky, and hanged himself.

The suicide shook Morgan deeply. He detailed the events in his diary five days after Merz’s death:

[H]e left me, normal, at about 9.40. Next morning he was found dead . . . The inquest today reports that there was no evidence as to the state of mind. As yet no clue. I may meet sadder things, but never a more mysterious. However horrible the explanation, there surely must be one. He had even taken a holiday for D[arling]’s wedding on the 21st. He was charming . . . I can’t think it has happened.

Normal
. It was truly awful to have been the last person to see Ernest Merz alive, more awful still to be Malcolm’s confidant as he tried to make sense of the unfathomable facts just days before his wedding.

However horrible the explanation
. On Monday morning, the day before the inquest, Malcolm confided to Morgan obtusely that he feared his friend Merz might have been a homosexual. Perhaps this dread secret—or the threat of exposure—might have caused his death? Letters shot back and forth, and Morgan suggested they could have “a few minutes talk alone.” Morgan, who had surmised the same explanation long before Malcolm, warily replied, “The more I think of it the more distressed I get. My own theory—one must have one—is that he was either insulted disgustingly or saw something disgusting. You mustn’t be annoyed at me for writing so freely. The man whom I saw has never made a mess of things, I know that.” Even as he sought to reassure his stricken friend, Morgan plumbed the full weight of the scandal. Did the verdict of suicide “prevent ecclesiastical rites?” he asked Malcolm. He was thinking of the “distress” to Merz’s family.

The more distressed I get
. No wonder, since comforting Darling meant retreating further into deception. He could not tell Malcolm he was homosexual now. Merz’s death brought home to Morgan how
something disgusting
could happen suddenly—there was always the chance of an inadvertent slip and exposure. But even more palpable than the fear this instilled was the terrifying truth that Merz had seemed happy,
normal
, to him when they parted just minutes before his death. What a tragedy that Morgan had been unable to sense another human being was in so much pain and fear.

The incident of Merz’s death made Morgan feel ever more cautious and frozen, ever more despairing about the prospect of a brave Whitmanesque life. His diary went quiet for weeks. Then news of the death of an acquaintance compounded his emotional paralysis: “I feel that I cannot feel.” Weeks after Merz’s suicide, Morgan set aside the notebook that had been his diary since 1904, though there was still room in it to write. He bought a new book
covered in sturdy leather, with a lock with a hasp. The “Locked Diary” would be the repository for his inward thoughts for the next sixty years.

His entries in the Locked Diary over the next few months focused disproportionately on stories of sexual anxiety and danger. He jotted down a report he had heard about a young Frenchman who was told by a pettish lover that she had syphilis. “Going home, he wrote a letter explaining what had happened, & then shot himself. He was examined. No traces of poison were found on him. It was all a joke.” He began and abandoned a fragment of a new novel—called
Arctic Summer
—breaking off with the suicide of a young man after the discovery of a sexual misdeed. Though Lance March’s sexual crime is unnamed—all that is said is that he “disgraced the college and himself”—he is sent down from Cambridge, and shoots himself after his brother confronts him, asking, “Have you thought of mother at all?”

Everything conspired to make him feel edgy and disgusted with the world. He had just read Frank Harris’s psychobiography of Shakespeare—a bestseller—which suppressed all discussion of the homoerotic sonnets.

Was going to reflect sadly on life, but what’s the use of my abuse? A wrong view of S[hakespeare]’s sonnets in a book . . . lent me, and an attempted blackmail in this morning’s paper are the main cause. How barbaric the world! If a tiny fraction of the energy would go to the understanding of man, we would have the millennium. This bullying stupidity.

Just before Christmas “the biggest thing” of the year occurred when Masood invited him to spend a week together sightseeing in Paris. They shared a glorious time—walking up the steps at Montmartre, attending the Comédie Française—and when they parted at the train station Masood, “plunged in despair,” was full of histrionic goodbyes. “Do buck up,” Morgan told him, embarrassed at the scene. He was satisfied that Masood loved him, but what did this love mean? His year-end reflections focused on “the enigma” of Masood’s feelings: “Will [his love] ever be complete? Is the enigma him or his nationality? That he forgets me in between I could bear, but what is he thinking of at the time?” Back in London, Morgan continued to spend “joyful but inconclusive” evenings with Masood. Unable to gauge Masood’s sincerity, Morgan decided to take a jocular, self-deprecating tone
in his letters. He signed off one letter, “From Forster, member of the Ruling Race to Masood, a nigger.”