A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (20 page)

“A happy ending was imperative” to the plot of the new novel. Morgan had seen miseries enough in life—Merz’s suicide, Goldie’s unrequited loves, rumors and stories of blackmail, doctor’s “cures” and prison with hard labor, self-abnegation and miserable “loneliness.” A story in the newspaper might end “unhappily, with a lad dangling from a noose,” or with the poor man facing the “penalty society exacts.” What was art for, if not to show a new way forward? “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.” Only in the isolated example of George Merrill and Edward Carpenter had Morgan seen even an inkling of the domestic life for gay men that he had glimpsed in Whitman’s poems, that he believed in and desired.

In shaping the plot, he tried to remain faithful to the spirit of his deepest wishes, but in the character of Maurice himself “I tried to create a character who was completely unlike myself or what I supposed myself to be, someone handsome, healthy, bodily attractive, mentally torpid, not a bad business man and rather a snob.” He wanted to make clear that the novel was wish fulfillment rather than autobiography—to make the point not only about his inner life, but also that the actual world, the place where a man like Henry Wilcox might feel most at home, was a little different than custom would have us believe.

The third figure in the tense triangle of
Maurice
is Clive Durham, who meets Maurice in his rooms at Cambridge. Clive is ahead of Maurice, and
introduces him to the “hellenic temperament,” drawing into an embrace Maurice’s at-first-unwilling arms. As Clive “deteriorates” into hypocrisy, denial, and marriage, he comes more and more to resemble the HOM of recent days, who had become a “ghastly old boy” in Belfast, lecturing on economics, obtuse, morose, and self-involved when Morgan came to visit. Years later Morgan felt he might have been “unfair on Clive” in this portrayal, but the revisions to his character betray Morgan’s unmistakable disappointment—not only for the death of the friendship that had meant the most to him when he was young, but of the painful discovery that HOM had lost his sensitivity and compassion.

He showed the manuscript to no one for several months. Then, gingerly, he began to share the work-in-progress with his most intimate friends, almost as a currency of trust, aware that they could hurt or expose him. He discovered much about the state of his novel from these first forays into sharing his secret—and much about the state of his friendships as well. He had made the mistake of showing Meredith a very early draft, and was dismayed to discover that “it bored him dumb—I shan’t show him the rest.” He concluded, “Hugh can’t again be in my life as he has been . . . I was very badly hit by his indifference to
Maurice
and the pain has opened my eyes little by little to his general indifference.”

This fact Morgan could confide only to Florence Barger, who was untainted by association from King’s College days. At first he approached her tentatively:

I have talked to you so much, that I have decided to add another piece of news—i.e. That I
have
almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England’s. As it is improbable I shall ever show it you, I had not meant to say: but I know that you will be cheered by this proof of fertility, and I hope when it is off my mind I may be free for more practical themes. I have been pretty busy over it for the last 9 months. I think I would rather you didn’t tell George this.

To a heterosexual woman like Florence, he feared that
Maurice
might be “a new and painful world, into which you will hardly have occasion to glance again! A tiny world that is generally unknown to all who are not born in it. My only fear is that it may make me seem remote to you—not for one instant repellent, but remote.” But Florence praised the book. “I am so happy that
you think the thing’s literature,” he wrote her. “It was meant to be, but that naughty Hugh disconcerted me; so much that I nearly chucked it.”

Carpenter predictably “took to” the figure of the gamekeeper, but Morgan was surprised to find that he was “blind to” the sexual troubles of the women in the novel—here, at least, he was ahead of the prophet. Roger Fry told Morgan that the novel was “beautiful . . . the best work I have ever done,” which pleased him immensely; and Sydney Waterlow gave a heterosexual stamp of approval to the love affair, though he felt the novel was most effective as “a sociological tract.”

Morgan entrusted his most heartfelt discussion of
Maurice
to three friends with expertise in its “tiny world”—Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Lytton Strachey, and Forrest Reid; but in different ways all three men disappointed him. His defense of the novel allowed him to articulate the clearest vision of what being homosexual meant to him.

He made the mistake of showing Goldie some short stories on homosexual themes. His mentor’s shocked reaction momentarily shattered Morgan’s confidence. He burned the stories, and the sting of Goldie’s disapproval spilled over to dampen the writing of
Maurice
. “My smooth spurt is over,” he wrote in his diary, “ended by Dickinson’s disgust.” Just as when
A Room with a View
had stalled, Morgan was left with “3 unfinished novels on my hands”—the first few chapters of an Indian novel, the fragment of
Arctic Summer
, and the very beginning of
Maurice
. By the end of the year, he bucked up, determined to look “Forward rather than back.” He set his sights on a different muse: “Edward Carpenter! Edward Carpenter! Edward Carpenter!”

Morgan shared a later draft with Goldie, after rewriting a section of the novel. Goldie had objected to “the Scudder part”—presumably a portrayal of rather inexact lovemaking between Maurice and Alec—though he admitted he had little “personal contact” with such people and so might be a poor judge of its veracity. He told Morgan that the novel “breaks my heart almost . . . When Maurice goes back after [Clive’s] marriage—it’s unbearably right.” Goldie had quite a lot of experience with this sort of heartbreak; for the better part of a year he had been telling Morgan about the peregrinations of his lover, Oscar Eckhardt, who had left Goldie for a woman. For his part, Morgan was happy to have used the book for a concrete purpose. He and Goldie, he wrote in his diary, “are on a basis of comrade’s life at last.
Maurice
has done it.”

Forrest Reid’s response was even more pointed than Goldie’s had been. Reid was in love with young boys, but self-hating and consumed with a sense of sin. He professed to be surprised that Morgan was homosexual, surprised as well to be discerned as one himself. He had distilled his homosexuality in both life and art into a “sublimated . . . sublime,” a kind of Peter Pan worship of schoolboys’ innocence, schoolboys’ perfections, schoolboys’ disembodied and unerring perfection. All his life he lived with one young boy or other, delighting in making up elaborate stories for them until they left him and grew up. The
idea
of lovemaking between men was sinful, he believed, and
Maurice
, even with its gauzy description of Maurice and Alec “sharing” their bodies, seemed repellent and perverted to him. He asked Morgan to burn the letter that told him this. Morgan’s letter in return began quite delicately:

Dear Reid.

. . . My perspicacity is equally at fault, for I quite thought you realised my interest in these subjects—something you said my last visit to you quite convinced me. I also thought, and still think, that if expressed in detail much of this interest must give you pain, but of late I am crediting others with the strength to bear the pain, and that is why I sent you the book. Earlier I couldn’t have—should have feared to lose your friendship. I don’t fear now.

But he had come too far in his own inner life to accept the premises that underpinned Reid’s critique. Whitman had inspired him. He was prepared to argue not only for the legitimacy of homosexual love but also for its necessary bodily expression. He rejected the stink of Christianity in Reid’s response.

I do want to raise the subject out of the mists of theology: Male and female created He not them. Ruling out undeveloped people like Clive (who “grow out of homosexual feelings”)—one is left with “perverts” (an absurd word, because it assumes they were given a choice, but let’s use it). Are these “perverts” good or bad like normal men, their disproportionate tendency to badness (which I admit) being due to the criminal blindness of society? Or are they inherently bad? You
answer, as I do, that they are the former, but you answer with reluctance. I want you to answer
vehemently
! The man in my book is, roughly speaking, good, but society nearly destroys him. He nearly slinks through his life furtive and afraid, and burdened with a sense of sin. You say “If he had not met another man like him, what then?” What then indeed? But blame Society, not Maurice, and be thankful even in a novel when a man is left to lead the best life he is capable of leading!

Morgan argued that it is “right . . . that such a relation should include the physical . . . if both people want it and both are old enough to know what they want.” Morgan told Reid that he measured the “success” of his writing on the subject by whether a “normal” reader might see the
human
in the expression of gay desire—to forget “the form of the passion and only remember . . . it was passion.” (He was bucked up by Waterlow having seen the novel in this way.) It was natural for each person to be prejudiced about “the particular local forms that desire takes”—after all, “we all find it difficult to tolerate a form that isn’t our own.”

It was the “social fabric” and not nature itself that made homosexuals what they were, Morgan argued to Reid. “My defence at any last Judgement would be ‘I was trying to connect up and use all the fragments I was born with.’”

To give these people a chance—to see whether Paradises are really nearer any Hell than penal Servitude, whether their convictions of Sin are really more than the burrs in the social fabric that the heart and brain, working together, can pluck out—that’s why I wrote
Maurice
and let him meet Alec—not saints or aesthetes either of them but just ordinary affectionate men.

It was a powerful statement of belief, especially since it was wholly a product of Morgan’s idealistic imagination. He had created two lovers who escaped into a utopian world without ever having had the courage to touch any man himself.

This was precisely the point, from Lytton Strachey’s perspective. He acidly told Morgan that his tender vision of gay domesticity was impossible. At the end of the version Strachey had read, Maurice and Alec went off together
to the north of England to pursue a life apart as woodsmen and comrades. Don’t be so romantic, Strachey argued. Men like this don’t find each other. Even if they do, they do not
stay
together: “I should have prophesied a rupture after 6 months—chiefly as a result of . . . class differences—. . . [E]ven such a simple-minded fellow as Maurice would have felt this—and so your Sherwood Forest ending appears to me slightly mythical.”

Strachey’s second criticism was that he didn’t “understand why the copulation question should be given such importance.” Not understanding how close to home these comments might be to Morgan, Strachey sharpened his argument: “I really think the whole conception of male copulation in the book rather diseased—in fact morbid and unnatural.” He discerned a double standard in the book, contrasting the two years of “chastity between Maurice and Clive . . . which you consider (a) as a very good thing and (b) as nothing very remarkable” with Clive’s decision to marry “and promptly, quite as a matter of course, to have his wife.” With these provisos, Strachey informed Morgan that he enjoyed the novel very much.

In his reply, Morgan conceded Strachey’s expertise in sexual matters, without quite acknowledging how deep his own ignorance of the practicalities was. He told Lytton that he agreed with the criticisms more than he “would have liked.” At its heart,
Maurice
was designed to be a visionary statement, and Strachey’s critique that it was too fantastic and utopian was beside the point. More than a year earlier, he had written Lytton, “No one ever breaks” conventions “in the right place.” The exchange stripped away some of the shiny veneer of Strachey’s condescension toward Morgan’s commercial success, and made the men much closer friends.

It also pressed Morgan to articulate his aesthetic objectives in writing
Maurice
. Thanking Dent for his words of praise, “You can scarcely imagine the loneliness of such an effort as this—a year’s work!” he outlined his accomplishment: “I do feel that I have created something absolutely new, even to the Greeks. Whitman anticipated me, but he didn’t really know what he was after, or only half-knew—shirked, even to himself, the statement.”

But his hope that writing an unpublishable novel might end his creative sterility was not borne out. By June 1914 the manuscript of
Maurice
was complete. But there was nothing to show Lily, who could not help noticing the long days and nights that Morgan was squirreled away in his attic writing. He shaped an explanation for her somewhere between a true confession and an outright lie—telling her, “My work is all wrong.”

The “diminution” of his intimacy with Masood, which had been growing since he returned from India, “was to be expected” now that his friend had married, and Morgan did not worry over it much. About the rupture with HOM, he decided, “[I] do not think I am to blame.” His old friendships took a backseat to two new relationships that burst into his life but foundered quickly on the thorough misapprehension of his character. First, a small embarrassment: Florence Barger’s sister Elsie Thomas fell in love with him. But writing
Maurice
had fortified his resolve, and he let her down quickly and gently, without revealing anything but his respect for her. In late January 1915, Morgan met D. H. Lawrence and his new wife, Frieda, at a dinner party held by the Bloomsbury patroness Lady Ottoline Morrell. The son of a miner, Lawrence had crawled out of poverty and a miserably unhappy family life to become a school inspector. But the educational system was stultifying, and he broke free—by stealing the affection of his favorite professor’s wife. Lawrence was almost thirty and had completed his autobiographical novel
Sons and Lovers
. He and Frieda lived by the kindness of friends who lent them a cottage in Sussex. The couple were about to begin their restless hegira to find a place in the world—Australia, France, a ranch in New Mexico—where they could feel at home and free.