A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (25 page)

Agostino John Sinadino is a poet now almost completely unknown. A devotee of Mallarmé, after the war he became a close friend and correspondent of André Gide. Sinadino was three years older than Forster, but temperamentally a world apart. He was swish, campy, and liked his own outrageous jokes; his laugh was a “treble cackle” that was uniquely discernable
and contagious. “A small middle-aged man with a long prehensile nose,” Sinadino had a way of sniffing out the latest delectable literature from every avant-garde and decadent local scene. He was a peripatetic fellow, popping up in Paris, Alexandria, New York, and Milan in a single decade, cross-pollinating every literary circle he entered. The extracts he copied out from the pseudonymous Pierre Louÿs were explicitly pornographic, and hard to come by.

Morgan couldn’t resist this colorful figure. Not just in the dusty past, the laments of Callimachus or the celebrations of Whitman, but
here, now
, the magic of gay life revealed itself. Even eight years later, back in the drought of Weybridge, Forster remembered these encounters. He took up a pen to write a rare poem in Cavafy’s casual colloquial style:

To see a Sinadino again–
The thought fell into my heart like rain
And then began like a seed to sprout
To see Allesandro coming out
Or Agostino going in . . .

Or even to know that wherever I went—
A policeman’s beat or a General’s tent,
A brothel, a café, the Cavers at Home,
Ramleh’s remote and echoing dome,
The sea when tepid, the streets, when cool,
The stairs, when dark, or a Greek girls’ school
Always to know that wherever I go
I never know
When next I shall meet a Sinadino
.

The thought has blossomed in exquisite flower
And Alexandria returns for an hour. Weybridge 29-1-24

This unpublished poem argued for a special power in gay men’s lives, unavailable to those who could rely on sanctioned conventions to discover their lovers and mates. The possibility of a chance discovery of a lover, found as if by instinct through a surreptitious encounter, seemed magical to Morgan. After Cavafy, Morgan saw the promise of this world everywhere, hidden
in the ordinary world. But its features could be discerned only by relaxing and relying on instinct.

Cavafy offered Morgan not corporeal but emotional and conceptual fulfillment. Morgan was not physically beautiful enough to tempt Cavafy, who in any case was past his sexual conquests, wary and controlling. He had a Warhol-like detachment, and loved to create a scene just to watch it happen around him. But his impenetrability made Forster ever more eager to have a place in preserving and translating this precious thing. “It was not my knowledge that touched him but my desire to know and to receive. He had no idea then that he could be widely desired, even in the stumbling North. To be understood in Alexandria and tolerated in Athens was the extent of his ambition.”

This “desire” for knowledge, figured in such explicitly sexualized terms, sought a way to give Cavafy a future to match his bold appropriation of the past. In his poem “Hidden Things” (1908), Cavafy had acknowledged that his sexual identity was a practical “obstacle in [his] way,” and—like Morgan in
Maurice
—he imagined a utopian future:

All the times I wanted to speak out.
My most unnoticed actions,
Discreet writings those most disguised—
From these alone they’ll understand me . . .
A long time from now—in a more perfect world—
Some other made like me will appear
And, to be sure, he will act freely
.

Morgan took it upon himself to wrest Cavafy’s work for an audience that would appreciate and preserve it. His need to do this was far greater than Cavafy’s need for recognition. Until he walked across the street to die in the Greek Hospital in 1933, Cavafy maintained a scrupulous formality with Forster. The letters from Forster to Cavafy were always more intimate, and more yearning, than the formal and polite letters that came back from the other direction. The imbalance of affection settled into a compensatory filial relation for Forster. He would be a kind of good gay son.

While in Alexandria, Morgan buttonholed George Valassopoulos, a fellow
Kingsman and frequenter of Rue Lepsius, and cajoled and nagged him for the next decade to provide a delicate translation of Cavafy’s poems to be published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. Forster came to believe that meeting Cavafy was one of the great strokes of fortune in his life. The corollary is also true. The English translations awakened the world to this fresh voice, which by mid-century was recognized as the greatest of the modern Greek poets. Forster made Cavafy’s reputation in the world.

Paradoxically, as Cavafy’s world liberated Forster’s mind, it exacerbated the problem of his body. It was embarrassing to be so sexually belated, at thirty-seven not to have any more sexual experience than these terrible cravings of lust and an occasional wank under the stars. Trust was hard to come by in this militarized world. Morgan turned with increasing fervor and frankness to friends abroad. To Florence Barger, exactly his age, married and sexually experienced, whose unjudgmental response made her the perfect interlocutor. To Carpenter, to Dickinson, and in a jocular but veiled guise to Masood. These heartfelt and detailed letters preserved the record of his sexual awakening in striking detail.

He began a campaign to have sex of some kind with someone. For several months, in the summer of 1916, this plunged him into a physical paradise just short of sexual activity. Characteristically, he told Dickinson,

I wished you were here with me at Montazah this morning. It is the country Palace of the ex-Khedive and has been turned into a Convalescent Hospital. Among its tamarisk groves and avenues of flowering oleander, on its reefs and fantastic promontories of rocks and sand, hundreds of young men are at play, fishing, riding donkeys, lying in hammocks, boating, dosing, swimming, listening to bands. They go about bare chested and bare legged, the blue of their linen shorts and the pale mauve of their shirts accenting the brown splendour of their bodies; and down by the sea many of them spend half their days naked and unrebuked . . . It is so beautiful that I cannot believe it has not been planned.

Glimpsing Cavafy’s world had convinced him that, far from some sort of heroic sacrifice, celibacy was the embodiment of moral cowardice. Respectability, the internalization of fear itself, became his enemy. Finally, in mid-October—almost a year after he arrived in Alexandria—Morgan mustered
the courage to be spontaneous. When he made this decision, he approached it with almost bureaucratic resolve. On the beach at Montazah, in the shadow of the hospital, suspended between terror and courage, he found a recuperating soldier as hungry as himself. The sex was brief and anonymous. To Florence Barger, he didn’t specify the act, which was most likely a hurried sucking off. Instead he described it by what it meant for his soul: “parting with Respectability.”

The sexual encounter was a calculated attempt to bring his body in line with his ravenous imagination. The next day, October 16, 1916, he examined more dispassionately what he called his “lopsided” life. He wrote to Florence unsentimentally: “Yesterday, for the first time in my life I parted with . I have felt the step would be taken for many months. I have tried to take it before. It has left me curiously sad.” The shorthand—“”—was a practicality to evade relaying an obvious conclusion to a military censor. This wasn’t misplaced paranoia. Unbeknown to Morgan, earlier that summer some letters to Masood had been intercepted. Their tone of affection aroused the suspicion of the postal censor in Bombay, who sent it on to his superiors, voicing the conclusion that the writer was “a decadent coward and apparently a sexual pervert.” Only the fortuitous presence of one of Goldie’s friends saved him from disaster. Lieutenant-Colonel C. E. Luard, in the Bombay Political Office, assured the censor that while Morgan might be “a poor creature” and no real man, “there is no foundation for the suggestion that he is a sexual pervert.” Thus did the tightly knit network of Kingsmen protect their own.

Even as he reported his escape from sexual isolation to Florence, Forster understood that the kind of casual anonymous sex of Cavafy’s most erotic poems was unsatisfactory for him. He characteristically blamed himself, sensing that in his debilitated state he didn’t have the capacity for real intimacy. The episode stopped short of guilt. But he relentlessly aspired to greater spiritual growth. He summed up the lesson:

I realise in the first place that I am tethered to the life of the spirit—tethered by habit, not by free will or aspiration. (Why do people assume that only the flesh binds?) To put it in other words . . . the step would
not
have left me with these feelings had I taken it at the usual age—though it might have left me with remorse instead.

This was not a tragic vision. Nor was it wholly pathetic. He recognized and condemned a thread of narcissism in his belated sexual experience.

The moment became an invitation to digest something beyond the insights Cavafy had opened for him. He wanted to tie together the human and the political. He wanted to place the sorrow that sex could bring into the context of the meaning of his life. Morgan believed that Florence, who had not only had children, but had lost them to miscarriage, could best understand this complicated feeling.

Well, my dear, this is odd news for a Matron to receive, but you’ve got to receive it because you’re the only person in the world I want to tell it to . . .
*
I am too old to change to other food . . . My life has
not
been unhappy, but it has been too dam lop sided for words and physically dam lonely.

*
I don’t even know if it’s important news.

It
was
important news. The fierceness of his diction—
damn
lopsided and
damn
lonely—said so. For even in this half-realized moment, he sensed a utopian possibility that set him apart from Strachey, Cavafy, and the cynical set of gay men who found enough in pure sensuality. Sex promised not only the possibility of intimacy, but a sense of what it is humanly
for
. Morgan had diagnosed what was wrong with Britain and with warmongering nationalisms as a real disease of the soul. He felt the nation becoming “tighter and tinier and shinier than ever—a very precious little party, I don’t doubt, but most insistently an island.” He wouldn’t settle for sex as an isolating phenomenon. But there was no doubt it was a relief to be in the physical world.

In his war notebook, he pulled together the personal, the sexual, and the political, examining his own part in the lockstep toward self-censorship and jingoism. He began to speculate on the bond that brought men to this place, in words that could well reflect his own desire to see into the life of these men: “To merge myself. To test myself. To do my bit. To suffer what soldiers suffer that I may understand them. These—apart from compulsion—are the motives that send men to fight.” Here was the spectacular insight of a Red Cross searcher who discovers what he didn’t expect, something in his own character. As if looking in a mirror, he diagnosed the spiritual ills: “Human nature under war conditions. The obverse of love is not hatred but fear. Fear
is only one of the forms being taken, cowardice being another and efficiency a third.”

The sexual awakening was not possible to describe publicly. So he slyly translated it for straight ears in coded form: in 1922, in
Alexandria: A History and a Guide
, Morgan described the place where he first had sex.

Montazah Sta.—Close to the station is the
Summer Resort
of the ex-Khedive . . . The road leads by roses, oleanders and pepper trees . . . Beautiful walks in every direction, and perfect bathing . . . During the recent war (1914–1919) Montazah became a Red Cross Hospital; thousands of convalescent soldiers passed through it and will never forget the beauty and the comfort that they found there.

He never did forget this moment. For sex was not everything. But sex was a start.

Almost immediately he plunged into “unappetizing gloom . . . depressing his friends, mangling his work, boring the prostrate soldiery.” It was not a metaphysical condition, he discovered, but a prelude to a case of jaundice that began with a spectacular, humiliating bout of vomiting at a dinner party. A week later, comfortably ensconced in the General Hospital’s officers’ quarters, he had sufficient humor to pen a third-person comic grotesque: “gleams of primrose passed over his face, and his eyes glowed with celandines, and his ankles wobbled like two cuckoo flowers.” Three weeks in the hospital restored him enough to wanly celebrate his thirty-eighth birthday on New Year’s Day. But in early February he sprained one weakened ankle, and was back in a hospital bed for two more weeks. What a contrast to those beautiful young bodies on the beach! He felt himself “an inoffensive blossom.”