A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (21 page)

Lawrence was categorical about
everything
. In
Howards End
’s unease with the class system, and the stories of Pan in
The Celestial Omnibus
, Lawrence thought he had found a kindred spirit in Morgan, but he accused him of not going far enough. Lawrence was “a sandy haired passionate Nibelung,” Morgan told Forrest Reid, and “really extraordinarily nice.” Frieda had warmed to
Howards End
, telling Morgan it “is a beautiful book, but you must go further.” The couple invited Morgan to come to their cottage for what turned out to be an alarming weekend: Lawrence held forth, linking Morgan’s temperament to a whole cosmology of what was wrong with modern man, keeping him up till all hours to accuse him—“you belied and betrayed yourself”—and urging him to fulfill “the natural animal in you.” Forster returned to Weybridge, and Lawrence immediately sent a hectoring letter: “In [your] books . . . you are intentional and perverse & not vitally interesting. One must live through the source, through all the racings & heats of Pan, and on to my beloved angels & devils with their aureoles & their feet upon the flowers of lights.” And then he demanded that Morgan come again the next weekend, breezily signing off, “Auf Wiedersehn.”

It emerged that Lawrence’s diagnosis of Morgan’s problem was that he must “satisfy” his “implicit manhood” but “He tries to dodge himself—the sight is painful.” “Why can’t he take a woman and fight clear to his own basic, primal being?” Lawrence lectured Bertrand Russell. Because, he confidently concluded without pausing for an answer, Morgan “sucks his dummy—you know, those child’s comforters—long after his age.” If Morgan would only act, he could become “pregnant with his own soul.” Lawrence told a friend that he found Morgan “very nice.” But he wondered “if the grip has gone out of him.” For his own part, Morgan suspected a different problem in Lawrence’s psyche: suppressed homosexual tendencies. The “Poem of Friendship” in Lawrence’s
The White Peacock
, “which is beautiful,” was also “the queerest product of subconsciousness that I have yet struck,” Morgan told Dent knowingly. Lawrence “has not a glimmering from first to last of what he’s up to.”

The final straw came when Lawrence spoke derisively about Edward Carpenter in Morgan’s presence. Here again Lawrence was quick to judge but off the mark. To Lawrence, the old man was a sexual pioneer in a fusty Victorian vein whereas he alone was clear-thinking and modern. It was another case of Lawrence blindly misreading stylistic clues. Carpenter wore a beard, true, and he had campaigned for sexual freedom since before Lawrence was born, but he had only recently founded the British Society for Sex Psychology. The society was cautious about its members getting ensnared in the recently enacted Defense of the Realm laws against sedition: one had to be sponsored by two members, and to pay dues. But its agenda was genuinely radical—promoting open discussion of sexual matters, women’s right to sexual pleasure, access to birth control, and homosexual rights. At Carpenter’s urging, Morgan had quietly joined the society. Months later, so did Lawrence. In his diary, Morgan realized that he couldn’t forgive Lawrence’s insulting Carpenter. “With regret” he let go of the irascible friendship.

Even when Morgan had been at Nassenheide, British anxiety about the Hun was palpable. In August 1914 war was declared against Germany. The shadow of war had lingered for so long that “up till the last moment it was impossible to believe that the thing was really going to happen.” The fact of war frayed Morgan’s friendships. Even Malcolm’s wife, Josie Darling, who was dear to his heart, became irritable. Stop dreaming, she told him, enlist in the army, and “face facts.” He gave her a sharp answer. “Don’t say ‘face
facts’ to me, Josie. Everybody keeps saying it just now, but the fact is, it’s impossible to face facts. They’re like the walls of a room . . . If you face one wall, you must have your back to the other three.”

He decided he would not enlist, and instead took on a civilian “war assignment,” cataloguing paintings at the National Gallery.
Maurice
was unpublishable, and there were no more novels in him, he felt sure. He confessed to Goldie, “What’s to occupy me for the rest of my life, I can’t conceive.” It was impossible not to comprehend his predicament, and impossible to do anything about it. He told Florence, “I am leading the life of a little girl so long as I am tied to home.”

On the ship from Marseille to Alexandria, the men discussed conscription. It was mid-November 1915, and after fifteen months of total war the British Army was hopelessly depleted. A draft seemed inevitable. The small company of Red Cross volunteers bound for British-occupied northern Africa considered this looming fact. As noncombatants on the margins of the war, they found a bright side: the draft would pull Britain together as a nation, give men a renewed sense of purpose and pride. Both the working-class ambulance driver and the Tory doctor agreed. What a good idea it would be to have all “Englishmen” together in the fight!

In his diary Forster recorded the conversation as if his companions were minor characters in an unwritten expatriate novel. He sat quietly apart from the passengers sunning themselves on deck. Morgan was almost thirty-seven, but gave the impression of someone much younger—“a very pale, delicately-built young man, slightly towzled and very shy, with a habit of standing on one leg and winding the other round it.” He had perfected the art of eavesdropping.

Setting out for Alexandria, it was hard to tell if he was running from or running toward something. In England, Morgan was suspended between two camps, alienated by both the ardent pacifism of Strachey, Dickinson, and his Bloomsbury friends, and the rabid—
female
, he felt—call to arms. War fever grew poisonously. And it was poisonously linked to sexual politics. Zealous self-described “brigades” of young women invented a novel kind of street theater, pressing white feathers into the lapels of men in civilian dress to shame them into enlisting. He had rebuffed an unsolicited letter from the mother of an old school friend, impugning his patriotism, and by extension,
his masculinity. Her attitude was ubiquitous. The
Daily Mail
had just published Jessie Pope’s poem “The Call,” with its insistent goading against effeminacy:

Who’s for the khaki suit—
Are you, my laddie?
Who longs to charge and shoot—
Do you, my laddie?
Who’s keen on getting fit
Who means to show his grit
And who’d rather wait a bit—
Would you, my laddie?

Aboard ship, among strangers, Morgan mulled over the transformative power of an ill-fitting khaki suit. The Red Cross uniform was comically unimpressive: “khaki of sorts with some sort of rank sewn on to it, which later on came out in the wash.” Despite this, despite the least military posture of any male creature alive, despite his distracted academic mien, Forster discovered that clothes made the man. He felt uneasy, in disguise. In his diary he noted wryly, “My uniform is well received. Some think me a soldier, some a chaplain.”

He called the uniform his “costume.” It suited him for an ambiguous role. His official title was Searcher in the Wounded and Missing Department of the Red Cross. He held no rank, but the position afforded the modest privileges of an officer: half-price travel on Alexandria’s new electric trams, a rudimentary salute in greeting. Nevertheless, he was a civilian, and was expected to find his own lodging and pay his own way. As he traveled by rail across the Nile Delta, from Port Said to Zagazig to Tanta, he knew only the barest outline of his duties. He was to interview the wounded in military hospitals to determine the status of soldiers gone missing in the disastrous months of fighting in the Dardanelles. By early December, Forster began his work. He planned to stay three months. He stayed more than three years.

In donning the khaki, he had evaded Miss Pope’s call, but nevertheless found himself subject to the dictates of women. In London, he had been vetted for the role of searcher by the formidable Near Eastern specialist Gertrude
Bell, who handed him on to Miss Victoria Grant Duff, the head of Alexandria’s Red Cross Wounded Department. The daughter of a notable Victorian polymath—a Liberal MP and former governor of Madras State—Miss Grant Duff had an exacting education in the ways of empire and the slightly officious air of a young woman who, given her first proper posting, was determined to do it by the book. Morgan, prone to prickliness when it came to professional women, found her “shrewish.” He did not know that her closest brother had been killed in France the year before.

And there was a third woman in the picture, as usual. The choice of Alexandria was a compromise between his aspirations for romantic escape and Lily’s fears about losing him to the war. The first plan was to set out for his beloved Italy as an ambulance orderly. But “mother was too much against it” and Morgan abandoned the idea, mulling the balance of cowardice and filial devotion in the decision to succumb to her wishes. The ambulance proposal had a hint of grandeur. Reading about Walt Whitman’s nursing work in the American civil war fired his imagination, and offered a masculine identity he could reckon with—at once tender and adventurous. To Masood, he confided his vision of himself in the ambulance unit in Italy. “All one can do in this world of maniacs is to pick up the poor tortured broken people and try to mend them.” But in Alexandria, there would be no picking up of tortured broken people, in fact no touching them at all. He would be a pastoral bureaucrat.

The
idea
of Alexandria retained some literary romance. To the boy who read classics at Cambridge, Alexandria had resonance as a mythological first point in an ancient, noble gay past. In the fourth century
B.C.
, had not Alexander the Great left his friend and lover Hephaestion’s side to explore the improbable spine of rock between the Mediterranean Sea and Lake Mariut and give the place his own glorious name? His Ptolemaic successors had built the great lighthouse Pharos as a beacon at the entrance of the harbor. This was the city of Hellenic enlightenment and Hellenic sensuality. The city of Alexander, of Antony and Cleopatra, adrift from Roman law, the city where the greatest library in the world had been built. There was something tragic, something hopeless and beautiful about the possibility of Alexandria.

Alexander had died just eight years after the founding of his city. His body was brought back there to be buried. The great library founded to be a beacon of learning burned to the ground, all its treasures lost. To Dickinson, Forster confided the stirrings of “a vague scheme for a book or a play about
Alexander.” But the reasons he could not follow through were familiar and banal. The weary roundelay of self-censorship: “Here we are again. Unpublishable.”

The real Alexandria, as the “real India” would be for Adela Quested in
A Passage to India
, was a profound disappointment. Not a trace of the ancient grandeur remained. All the “things to see” were just miles to the east, in Cairo or the Nile Delta. The city’s treasures seemed to have been recently sold to the highest foreign bidder by some occupying force or other; the great twin obelisks called Cleopatra’s Needles, commissioned by Cleopatra in honor of Mark Antony, now stood three thousand miles apart, domesticated trophies in New York’s Central Park and on the Thames Embankment, to be wondered at by people eating ice cream. Everywhere he looked, Morgan was almost comically deflated by the erasure of former glories. The archaeological museum paled in comparison with the British Museum. Describing its treasures in a guidebook of Alexandria he composed in his later years there, he evokes a deadpan, weary tone: “This room contains nothing of beauty . . . These monuments . . . may have been imported . . . at some unknown date . . . Then come to some painted tombstones protected by glass; they are inferior to some in the rooms farther on . . . Dull colossal statue of Marcus Aurelius . . .” Even Forster’s eye for phallic monuments was dimmed. The glamorously named Pompey’s pillar wasn’t very tall, and turned out to be someone else’s pillar anyway. He commented drily that the “specimen is not even well proportioned.”

His first impressions of the city were so quotidian they couldn’t even evoke strong feelings. No doubt to reassure Lily, Morgan wrote, “One can’t dislike Alex . . . because it is impossible to dislike either sea or stones. But it consists of nothing else as far as I can gather; just a clean cosmopolitan town beside some blue water.” From his “comfortable” room in the modern Majestic Hotel, tidy French gardens to the north gave way to symmetrical palms planted along a waterfront promenade. The great lighthouse was now no more than a stub of stone on a fitful spit of breakwater.