A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (2 page)

After the first four novels, there was silence. Morgan struggled for more than a decade to produce his last novel.
A Passage to India
came out in 1924. It had all the hallmarks of his earlier novels, but Morgan’s insight was burnished into a tragic wisdom. Now he asked, in the voice of an Indian man, if it was “possible to be friends with an Englishman.” Despite their intentions to connect in spite of barriers of race and culture, Forster’s complex and enlightened characters—Mrs. Moore and Fielding, Dr. Aziz and Professor Godbole—faced a world that seemed destined to break their wills and their hearts. But after
A Passage to India
, a curious silence. One of the most prominent novelists of his time appeared to simply cease writing fiction at the relatively young age of forty-five. Though he had almost fifty more years to live, there would be no more novels from Morgan.

But Forster forged on as a journalist, reviewer, and advocate for writers’ freedom. Despite being “so shy it makes one feel embarrassed,” he became
a pungent social critic. He argued that Western democracies deeply misunderstand the third world. And he believed that democracy can be sustained only through tolerance and openness,
especially
when these qualities seem to threaten national security. More than anyone Christopher knew, Morgan lived by his personal beliefs. Christopher admired Morgan’s integrity, his ability to apply his liberal beliefs in day-to-day ethical practice. He pronounced Morgan “saner than anyone else I know . . . He’s strong because he doesn’t try to be a stiff-lipped stoic like the rest of us, and so he’ll never crack.”

For more than fifty years Forster entered political fights from the position of the underdog. Almost every week one could read a pithy and pointed letter to the editor in his inimitable voice. He protested against fascism, against censorship, against communism, against “Jew-Consciousness,” against the British occupation of Egypt and India, against racism and jingoism and anything that smelled of John Bull. Morgan’s public voice wasn’t stentorian. He raised it, tremulously, often alone, against the edifice of conformity.

As self-proclaimed gay men, Isherwood and Lehmann adopted the American neologism adopted by the men who resisted police harassment at the Stonewall Inn in Sheridan Square, the men who embraced gay liberation, who eschewed the medical term
homosexual
, which had marked them for decades as a “species.” That they had lived through a sea change in attitudes and argot gave them fierce insight into the mystery of Morgan’s strange broken-backed career. They knew—or suspected—that by the time he published
Howards End
in 1910, Morgan had grown tired of the masquerade of propriety—the unspoiled-countryside settings, the oh-so-English people in their white linen suits, the clever repartée—that generated his plots. As early as June 1911, he confided in his diary his “weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat—the love of men for women & vice versa.” After
A Passage to India
, published in 1924, he simply gave that task up.

Five months had passed since Morgan died in early June. The great old man was ninety-one. He had been a beacon to them both—a confidant, and a cultural father figure.

The brightness of the November day was transitory. With the mysterious package lurking in the book-lined study at the end of the hall, Lehmann allowed himself to be “dragged . . . off” to sit for a portrait. Isherwood’s
partner, Don Bachardy, was a skilled draftsman with a distinctive, intimate style: he drew only from life, in real time and natural light, finishing the work in a single session as he sat close enough to his subject to feel his breath. When they had met almost twenty years before, Bachardy was barely eighteen and Isherwood forty-nine. It was a romance as dramatic and impossible—seemingly as sure to collapse—as Bachardy’s little studio perched on the hillside. But the couple, gay, out, defiant, had rewritten the familiar story in their long partnership. Looking back on their long life together, Bachardy couldn’t repress a mischievous gap-toothed grin. Isherwood, he said with glee, “took [a] young boy and warped him to his mold. It was exactly what the boy wanted, and he
flourished
.”

The light fading, the portrait still wet with wash, Bachardy discreetly slipped away to have dinner with friends. Lehmann and Isherwood settled into the two chairs in the living room, where David Hockney had famously posed Don and Christopher for a double portrait the year before. Before they could dig in to conversation, the Bride of Frankenstein appeared. Literally. The actress Elsa Lanchester, another British transplant in Hollywood, was Christopher’s nearest neighbor in the canyon. The lonely widow of Charles Laughton, she had an “unnerving habit of appearing uninvited through hedges.” Hearing of Lehmann’s visit, she had decided to pay a call.

Lanchester had lived alone for a decade. She was capable of drinking too much. Her large brown eyes could grow pathetic with storms of emotion. But that night, “very affectionate and gentle,” she reminisced about John’s sister Beatrix, a friend and fellow actress with whom she had worked in England long ago. The men delicately escorted Lanchester home, and finally settled in Isherwood’s study. The windows overlooking the ocean began to darken.

Christopher had designed a massive blond wood worktable to stretch along the full window wall. Spread out upon it was a treasure. Pages and pages and pages. For hours, the two men sifted through them in stunned silence as the flat autumn light dimmed, then failed. The final typescript of
Maurice
, the homosexual novel Forster had suppressed for almost sixty years, lay before them.

Maurice
was a revolutionary new genre—a gay love story that ended happily. It was Morgan’s cri de coeur. For him, “a happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.” Like its predecessor
Howards End
,
Maurice
was about the
stranglehold of social class. Like
Howards End
, it was a plea to “only connect,” to find the courage to understand and to love people different from ourselves. The emotional power of the story was a reflection of Morgan’s sexual awakening, but the novel itself was a utopian fantasy. Maurice Hall is a stockbroker, as different in character from Morgan as he could possibly be: “handsome, healthy, bodily attractive, mentally torpid, not a bad business man and rather a snob.” And Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper “senior in date to the prickly gamekeepers of D. H. Lawrence,” is bright, earthy, irreverent, and utterly stifled by his place in prewar England. Alec dispels the suburban nonsense that clouds Maurice’s heart and mind—the talk of platonic love from Maurice’s “former faithless lover” Clive Durham, all dutiful sacrifice and stiff upper lip. He grabs hold of Maurice, and makes him believe in a future together. “He knew what the call was, and what his answer must be. They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them . . . Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions’ who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls.”

Christopher and John pawed through the masses of new typescript. Throughout were new emendations, and marginal notes in Forster’s spidery hand. This version of
Maurice
was much more forthright than the draft Christopher had seen years before. Morgan had taken his advice: that gauzy, sexless version was invigorated with an entirely new, and frank, sex scene. And the resolution was firmer, too. In the draft Morgan showed Christopher years before, Alec emigrated to South America, leaving Maurice only to hope for a reunion. But in the new draft the lovers end up in each other’s arms—in England, of all places and, of all times, before the First World War. In this final draft, Alec tells Maurice decisively, “Now we shan’t be parted no more, and that’s finished.”

Looking down at the jumble of pages, Lehmann was “stunned” to see that the revised
Maurice
typescript was just the beginning. There were masses of new stories “on a homosexual theme, of quite extraordinary power and depth.” One—a terrifying love affair between a colonial master and his subaltern lover—could be read as a darker, sexier iteration of the unrealized friendship between Dr. Aziz and Mr. Fielding in
A Passage to India
. So Morgan had not stopped writing fiction. Indeed, he had composed stories into extreme old age. Christopher was gleeful; John “overwhelmed.” Morgan had
kept his promise. Christopher felt the future of fiction, and the true meaning of Morgan’s life, was in his hands.

Only weeks before Morgan died, Christopher made a pilgrimage to see him at King’s College. Not that it seemed he would ever die. To be sure, he was over ninety, but he had been chugging along. The March visit began with a characteristic comic muddle. On the way up to Forster’s rooms, Christopher encountered him by chance in the stairwell. Morgan exclaimed, “That’s most extraordinary!” as if he had seen an apparition. Isherwood asked, “Have I changed so much?” to which Forster, recovering himself, replied firmly, “Thicker!” To prove his point, when they reached his rooms, Morgan made a studious examination of Christopher’s body, discerning special “thickness” in his neck.

Settled in front of the coal fire, with the pale spring light pouring through the Gothic windows, Morgan seemed to have retrenched into an Edwardian world. The enormous dark mantelpiece had been pried from the dining room of the house where he had lived with his mother until her death in 1945. The walls were hung with “portraits of ladies in bonnets and gentlemen in cravats”—to the left of the mantel, a faux Constable landscape painted by a distant cousin. A mahogany bookshelf wheezed under its load of leatherbound books. Threadbare rugs from India and Egypt were scattered on the floor. An adjustable chair, surrounded by a penumbra of books and papers on the carpet, formed the epicenter of his little universe. It was eons from California.

Though his spirit and sense of humor were intact, for the first time Morgan looked “stooped and feeble” to Christopher. He seemed to be imploding. When the two men ventured out into the forecourt near the chapel, Morgan stopped for a moment. Bent almost in two, sitting on a bench, he was a caricature—just a tweed cap, walking stick, brown shoes. But his rosy face still lit up when he heard a good piece of gossip. He remained cheerful, sensitive, and wily as a “raccoon.”

Christopher and Morgan accepted an invitation from the artist Mark Lancaster to come and see his studio in the great rotunda atop the eighteenth-century Gibbs Building across the courtyard. Mark recalled being “as ‘openly gay’ as people were in 1968.” In Britain, it was the first year that consensual
homosexual acts were no longer a crime: the Labouchère Amendment, under which Oscar Wilde had been convicted of “gross indecency,” had finally been repealed. As the college’s first ever artist-in-residence, he brought a whiff of spice into the settled “half-in and half-out of the closet” tradition of homosexuality at King’s. In college, it was a semisecret that Forster was homosexual. There were even rumors of a secret manuscript. But week after week at High Table, Mark never breathed a word, never asked a question. And Morgan, ever courteous, kept to himself.

Not quite thirty, Lancaster was painting a series of big green-and-blue abstract canvases. He had come back to England from New York, where he had worked at the Factory with Andy Warhol.
Work
actually seemed the wrong word for entering that creative vortex. Andy was equally curious about everything. His detachment was liberating. Under his odd, watchful gaze experiences shook free from the strictures and stigmas that extrinsically accrued to them in the world outside the Factory. His gentle manner encouraged things to
be
without being labeled. In 1964 he filmed Lancaster and Gerard Malanga in a single endlessly long kiss. He called the movie
Kiss
. Warhol spliced it together with film of other couples kissing, couples of all configurations and stripes, eyes open, eyes closed, curious, passive, unerotic. The effect of this moral flatness was strange. It held a mirror up to the audience. The only thing pornographic about this depiction of sex on screen was the discomfiture of those in the audience who singled out—and reviled—the homosexual kissing scene. “In the atmosphere of the Warhol Factory” for the first time, Lancaster felt it was “normal,” even “superior, to be gay.” Compared to the Factory, Lancaster found English life class-bound and rigid, and English gay life “(necessarily) furtive and unspoken.”

Warhol radiated stillness and equanimity. Like an anthropologist from Mars, he watched impassively. Sometimes this unflappable manner revealed just how violent and atavistic the homophobia he and his friends faced actually was. Once, when Norman Mailer punched Mark in the stomach for wearing a pink shirt—“pansy, effete Englishman”—Andy acted out a little charade of plaintive envy. In his breathy voice he asked, “What do
I
have to do to get punched in the stomach by Norman Mailer?” Lancaster, too, was semicomically incensed. There was nothing un-American about the shirt. He had bought it at Bloomingdale’s.

Lancaster had transformed the aerie atop King’s. His door was open whenever he was not “sporting the oak”—shutting the public outer door to
his rooms to signal he was at work. The walls that had divided the room into a set had been dismantled to form a real studio, exposing an immense halfmoon window that dominated the courtyard wall, opening onto a view of the green carpet of lawn and the lacy Gothic screen that cut off the college from the town. A painted mantel remained incongruously anchored to the wall. Christopher patiently walked beside Morgan as he teetered his way up the four flights of stairs to Lancaster’s studio. Dazzling light, somehow unfamiliar. Yes, for decades this room had housed one of Morgan’s dearest friends, the political philosopher Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. But Morgan hadn’t been here since Goldie died in 1932. When Lancaster expressed surprise, Morgan replied that the historian F. E. Adcock, the room’s subsequent occupant, “was such a bore.”