A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (22 page)

The real Alexandria was an
administered
city. Its strategic position on the bottom lip of the Mediterranean Sea—just west of the Suez Canal—had made it irresistible territory for the larger struggles of European power since Napoleonic times. A French colony in the late eighteenth century, for the better part of a century it had been ruled first by the Turks, who appointed a
Khedive, and then, when they were foreclosed in bankruptcy, by a British vice-consul. In the modern city the harbor was shaped like two parentheses back-to-back. The western harbor, its mouth open to the sea, was busy and industrial. The eastern, once Alexander’s ancient site, had settled into a decorative beachfront called the New Quay. Morgan politely called Alexandria “cosmopolitan.” In fact it was commercial. Refugees from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire, and sharp-eyed merchants of many nations, found its geography and its laissez-faire attitude congenial. Alexandria harbored more expatriates than Cairo, a city of ten times its size. Italians, leftover French, stateless Armenians, Jews, Maltese, Palestinian traders from the Levant, and especially Greeks had been deposited as if by sequential tides. It was possible to find or buy almost anything English: the Baedeker enumerated English clubs, English beer, confectionaries, preserved meats, Anglican churches, English theaters, ready-made clothing, baths, banks, doctors, pharmacists, booksellers, woolen goods, cigars . . .

The latest iteration of flotsam was a garrison of twenty-five thousand British troops, stationed in the mercantile hubbub. The city proved to be an ideal location for managing supplies and censoring mail. Just a year before Forster arrived martial law was imposed on the population of almost half a million people. In 1915 and 1916, the great fight over the Dardanelles was coordinated from Alexandria. The wounded of the ill-fated Turkish campaign were shipped here, to the margin of safety, to heal or to die.

Forster was unaware that he entered an especially uneasy sexual climate. One constant anxiety for both British military and civil administrators was the difficulty of containing Alexandria’s inclination toward commercial vice. Sexual hygiene was the key to social hygiene in their view. The “civilizing process” linked morale to morals. But the administration of decent rules of order was complicated by the dual legal structure left over from the French occupation. One could
manage
the soldiers and the British population according to British custom. But “bachelor” army troops were naturally susceptible to all sorts of risks. The army and the Sanitary Commission began the laborious work of counting, sifting, and regulating: studying venereal disease, registering brothels, compelling medical examinations, regulating interracial marriage, “rescuing girls from vice,” actively deporting “undesirable Europeans” and known homosexuals. The distasteful but practical belief prevailed that female prostitution was a necessary evil. Without it,
British soldiers would inevitably succumb to the worse, and ever prevalent, “depraved methods of sexual gratification”—the vice of “traffic in boys.”

Policing purity was endless, maddening work. The vast majority of the occupants of Alexandria were beyond their reach, subject by default to the Egyptian Native Penal Code. Under these laws, inherited from the Napoleonic Code, neither consensual homosexual acts nor male prostitution was illegal. To one administrator charged with developing new “offenses against morality” for a draft penal code, the native population’s blind eye to homosexual practices was particularly galling. It was “unthinkable,” he wrote, that young people, “the most precious asset of a State,” should be “exposed to the moral and physical corruption in the toleration of unnatural offenses.” Martial law allowed the British authorities to begin making the crooked straight and the rough places plain.

The first friend Forster looked up when he arrived in Alexandria, his fellow Kingsman Robert Furness (called Robin), was part of this administrative apparatus. Furness had been a minor magistrate before the war. His own account, in a letter to Maynard Keynes, betrayed a more bemused than exasperated tone: “I have long been a policeman . . . in this disorderly town: daily I feed my disgusted eyes on drunken Welsh governesses and stabbed Circassian whores; I peer into the anus of catamites; I hold inquests upon beggars who die and are eaten by worms.” For Furness, the city indefatigably—even cheerfully—resisted the rule of law, and he went about adjudicating petty infractions of the most sordid sort. He was well aware of the registered brothels and the census of boy prostitutes.

Like many British gentlemen, Furness had little trouble maintaining wholly disparate public and private roles. He had a taste for smut and a ribald joke. He detected a hint of seductive play in ordinary sights, such as a young Egyptian man touching one button after another on a soldier’s tunic as a gesture of farewell. Most of all, he adored the Hellenistic Alexandrian poet Callimachus, whom both he and Morgan had studied briefly at Cambridge. He began his own translations of this underappreciated poet, whose work had been dismissed as decadent by the dons. Furness was drawn to Callimachus’ poetic form, the elegiac epigram, with its “frugal, pungent” style. The little vignettes gave the taste of immediacy. Though dating from the second century
B.C.
, they had a freshness of form; the delicate, almost offhand observations, their “intimate and whimsical realism,” made them feel very modern. And they were often frankly sexy, unapologetic about their
homosexual lust. They demanded a translator sensitive to nuance. When war came, Furness joined the civil service. By day he applied his editorial skills in a new vein. He managed the Press Censorship department.

Back in London, Miss Bell suggested firmly to Morgan that the best way to hold to the straight and narrow was to keep to the bright expanse of the central town. When he asked her “what the inhabitants of Alexandria would be like . . . [s]he replied I would have no opportunity to find out. I should only see them in the streets as I went to and fro on my work.” The dangerous parts of the town were the Byzantine ones—in both senses of the word. Just look straight and avoid the meandering and crooked byways, she advised. Rectilinearity begets rectitude. Thus “disguised” in khaki, Forster wrote years later in bemusement, “I went to the Red Cross office and the hospitals and back to the hotel and for a time looked neither to the right hand nor to the left in the streets, as Miss Bell had enjoined.”

The British world was oriented toward Place Mohammed Ali, named after the “ambitious and westernising Ottoman adventurer from northern Greece who made himself master of the country after Nelson forced Napoleon’s withdrawal.” His large equestrian statue cast in Paris by Jacquemart dominated the public space that the English resolutely called “The Square.” From the square the streets reached out, broad and open, wide vistas framed by palms. It was perfectly possible to join a British club and spend all one’s time smoking cigars and gambling and following “a good deal of horse racing.”

Indeed, the view from his room was of a clean, modern city. His newly built lodgings in the Hotel Majestic were steps from the square to the east and formal gardens to the north. That much of this celebrated modernity arose from wholesale rebuilding after British gunships leveled the square to quell Egyptian attempts to resist enforced occupation in 1882 was lost on the writers of Baedeker’s 1914 guidebook. Just next to the Anglican church at the northeast corner of the square lay the eponymous St. Mark’s Buildings (“belonging to the British Community”), which housed the Red Cross offices where Forster worked each day. These the Baedeker described unreflexively as “the only buildings” on the square “which escaped the fury of the natives in 1882.”

During his first winter in Alexandria, Forster’s daily life was contained almost entirely within the orbit of the Baedeker’s recommendations for a day-and-a-half stay. From the hotel to the Red Cross office was less than ten
minutes’ walk on the perimeter of the square; from the office to the Mohammed Ali Club (“handsomely fitted up; patronized by Europeans of all nations; introduction by a member necessary”) was an equal distance to the east. From the club Forster took the recently electrified city tram several miles to the east to the Red Cross hospital to interview the men. The name of the branch line was Ramleh, Arabic for “sand.”

The irony of trading a suburban existence in Weybridge for a bureaucratic existence on the Mediterranean was keen. To Masood he described his daily routine: “I . . . start out about 10.0, returning for lunch and finishing about 7.0.” Foursquare. Twice daily, he commuted between grandiose modern monuments to colonial dreams of the Orient. At the western end was the four-story white stone Majestic, all mod cons, with twin cupolas in an eastern style. At the eastern margin past suburbs along the undulating coast lay the Khedival Palace—a vast Orientalist confection, built at the turn of the century by the Turkish Khedive for his Austrian mistress: light stone, Moorish arches, pergolas, tile roof. The palace site was beautiful, surrounded by fragrant gardens atop a rocky cliff, with steps cut in the rock down to the “intense and unbelievable blue” sea. By the time Forster arrived the palace had been commandeered. The gardens were fenced off, the palace domesticated into rooms for convalescent soldiers.

For friendship, at first he relied on the familiar network of university men, which never quite “coalesced into a set.” He began closest to home, with Kingsmen and Furness’s colleagues at the censorship office. Besides Robin Furness, a tall, “cerebral and ruffled heron” of a man, there were a “Syrian” and a “Greek,” George Antonius and Pericles Anastassiades. Antonius, only twenty-five, was cosmopolitan and sympathetic. Born in Alexandria to Palestinian parents, he had made his way from an English-speaking public school in Ramleh to King’s. Now he returned the favor, taking a sympathetic Englishman into his world. In his company, Morgan began fitfully to explore the city, “discarding my uniform . . . [to] plunge . . . into the Bazaar.” Antonius exemplified what Forster came to describe as the “typical Alexandrian” identity, which “symbolizes for me a mixture, a bastardy, an idea which I find congenial and opposed to that sterile idea of 100% in something or other which has impressed the modern world and forms the backbone of its blustering nationalisms.” Here was a young man whose very being connected East and West.

Anastassiades, a cotton broker, also reached out to Morgan. Ambitious and striving, and eager to appear polished, he paid Morgan four pounds a month for English lessons. Through Furness, Forster met an extraordinary woman, Aida Borchgrevink.

Aida was a force of nature. She was born in America, the daughter of a Midwestern corn king. Trained as an opera singer before her marriage, she had been literally translated by Verdi—hearing the opera on her honeymoon, she added a fateful
i
to her pedestrian given name, Ada. She had married a Norwegian judge presiding at the Mixed Courts, the special courts for civil cases between Egyptians and foreigners. Now in her mid-fifties, after a decade of widowhood, she lived an extravagantly romantic and eccentric life with her daughter in a fashionable suburb of the city. She burst into arias from Wagner’s Ring whenever she was behind the wheel of a car. Partly under her benign but spirited influence, Furness and his friends sponsored a membership for Morgan in the men-only club, the Mohammed Ali. Here he uneasily donned the white linen uniform of an expatriate gentleman. By spring, he had decamped to live with Furness in a villa east of the city center, with wide views of the sea. By all appearances, he was getting settled nicely—saving a bit of money, making a bit of money, finding congenial acquaintances.

But to Masood, he opened his weary heart. “All that I cared for in civilisation has gone forever, and I am trying to live without either hopes or fears.” It was not only that the war had shattered a sense of progress and possibility; it was also the concomitant sense that his sojourn in Alexandria seemed so unreal. In the spring, he wrote Virginia Woolf,

I imagine it is here that civilisation will expire. It is already dead in Cairo, which has war correspondents and 119 Generals and clubs of perturbed and earnest men. But in Alexandria it still seems possible to read books and bathe. It’s true I talk about the war all day, but to people who can say “we fought every inch as dirty as the Turks,” and whose deepest wish is peace at once.

The cruel parody of this new suburban life began to disgust Morgan. Alexandria roused a disturbing herd instinct in him. Watching the Arabs on the street each day infuriated him. He wrote Malcolm Darling in India:

I came inclined to be pleased and quite free from racial prejudice, but in 10 months I’ve acquired an instinctive dislike to the Arab voice, the Arab figure, the Arab way of looking or walking or pumpshitting or eating or laughing or anythinging—exactly the emotion that I censured in the Anglo-Indian towards the native . . . It’s damnable and disgraceful, and it’s in me.

It was
in him
, all right. Far from instinctive, Morgan’s reaction came from careful, painful observation of these Arab men. There it is: that odd self-made term
pumpshitting
, which signaled his most intimate erotic thoughts. Watching Arab men look at him, watching them piss on the street, watching them laugh and be separate from him inflamed his desire, and his self-loathing. The damnable disgrace was his timidity, which coiled back on itself into a kind of displaced hatred. He hated what he did not have the courage to touch.

But he was good at his work, which was listening. Day after day, notebook in hand, Morgan sat down gently on the beds of wounded men and asked them to tell him their most horrific memories. He was struck by their vulnerability. The men were underfed, short, fragile, and terribly young. And the stories they told, in little fragments of trauma, made their bodies seem ever more tender and absurd. Miss Grant Duff praised the clarity of his reports, which were forwarded to the men’s families and to the great Red Cross apparatus in London. But privately, for himself, Morgan began to build a counternarrative to capture and to understand the voices of these men.