A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (28 page)

Though Mohammed wrote “affectionately” from the Canal Zone every few days, and they counted the days toward his planned leave of absence in March, the loss of the secret world the two men shared inevitably isolated Forster. “Everything seems breaking here” in Alexandria, he told Florence: Furness was departing for war work in Cairo, and he was “losing” Mohammed. His pool of friends seemed so shallow. Aida, who had been sympathetic during the draft scare, now seemed bored by him. And after the importuning over the hash den, over Mohammed’s joyrides, over finding Mohammed a job, Furness had begun to express real irritation at being drawn into Morgan’s entanglements. By late fall Miss Grant Duff, never a friend of the bosom, had become “Miss Goose Duff” in letters to Lily.

Routines offered no solace. Though he had been promoted to “‘Head
Searcher for Egypt’ whatever that means,” his Red Cross work now seemed terribly mundane. The promotion disrupted the balance of power between Miss Grant Duff and himself, inviting poisonous and unfamiliar office politics. She justifiably felt underappreciated and trumped by a male conspiracy. To compensate, she took up a tone of aggrieved sarcasm. All winter petty encounters between them magnified his misery. News from the hospital almost disappeared from his correspondence. In March 1918 she resigned, leaving him relieved but without even this little drama to distract him.

He felt the “stupidity and deadness” of life without Mohammed. And he chafed at having news so “worthy to be thought about” with no one to tell it to. Defying the military censor, he turned to Florence, Goldie, Strachey, and Carpenter to pour out the exquisite details of his love affair with Mohammed. This turned out to be a very good thing for gay posterity.

Each correspondent received news from a particular angle. Morgan was touched by Florence’s genuine interest in Mohammed. She wrote him separate letters (none survive) and treated them as a legitimate couple. “It is very sweet of you to think of us
both
—I was so touched and happy,” he told her. His letters to her focused on untangling the emotional muddles at the heart of such a complicated love affair. With Dickinson—whose affairs were always unrequited—Morgan adopted a heartier tone, telling him, “I have actually at my age had
adventures
.” But he was initially unable to break free of cliché in his description of Mohammed. It “is more like an affair of Searight’s than anything else I can indicate! This will convey to you age, race, rank, though not precisely relationship.” Perhaps because he sensed that Dickinson was romantically underdeveloped, he quickly ceased describing the inner workings of his emotional life with Mohammed to him. Listing Mohammed’s good qualities—“reliability cleanliness, intellectual detachment, charm . . . test after test comes along, always with the same result”—his letters to Goldie had an arid air. To Edward Carpenter, who followed every move forward with vicarious delight, he hinted flatteringly that Mohammed was like George Merrill. He shared the precious photograph of Mohammed to seal the comparison. Carpenter responded warmly:

Your good friend, Mrs. Barger, sent me the photograph, for which I was grateful to her (& you). I was sorely tempted to keep it. But what a pleasure to see a real face after the milk & water mongrelly things
one sees here! It was a literal refreshment to me. Those eyes—I
know so well
what they mean, and I think you do too,
now
! And that very charming mouth! I wish you would send me one for myself, to keep.

Morgan drew his circle of English friends and acquaintances closer by invoking their mutual interest in his growing love for Mohammed. By Forster’s command, they circulated the little trophies: his narrative, enclosing Mohammed’s letters and photograph. Morgan even gave Florence homework on what it was like to be homosexual, recommending that she read Carpenter’s autobiography,
My Days and Dreams
, and complimenting her on liking and understanding it. Eventually, he even told Masood about Mohammed. But to Lily, Morgan said nothing about his Egyptian friend.

In the bleak midwinter, after Mohammed had been in Kantara for a full two months, Morgan turned afresh to writing. He worked in earnest on the research for a planned guide to Alexandria, exploring the past since the present was a vast military zone. And he began another much less veiled history, a complete account of the affair with Mohammed. Maimie had just died, and though he decided not to make the long journey back to England for the funeral, the event and his New Year’s thirty-ninth birthday set a firm cast of memento mori in his mind. He told Florence soberly, “I want to put a few things on record . . . My personal interest in it apart, I feel it oughtn’t to be lost. It’s a little the starved artist writing in fact. I don’t mean this to be an ordinary letter, except it contains my love to you. Let me know if you get it. And keep it, for one forgets.”

These letters were galvanized by the confidence that his love for Mohammed was both an experience in itself and “proof of something larger and wider.” He approached the history as a novelist, adopting the sweeping temporal perspective he had invented for the unnamed narrator of
Howards End
: keen insight into immediate events nestled into the serene detachment of a very long view.

That novel had begun with the famously offhand sentence “One may as well begin with Helen’s letter to her sister.” The narrator’s odd interjections from the distant future gave the story an impulsive, if slightly imbalanced, momentum. Of course, this present tale was clearly still incomplete: six
months earlier he had admitted to Goldie that he couldn’t envision how his friendship with Mohammed might end. He felt it was capable of developing into something, since “romantic curiosity seems on both sides to be passing into something more permanent.” But then he shrugged and let go, asking rhetorically, “How does anything end? One should act as if things last.”

Now being separated from Mohammed made him grasp the reality of his love affair very tightly. He pointedly returned to the previous spring, dissecting the smallest incidents and trying to recall Mohammed’s words verbatim. The method had the twin advantages of contemporaneous impression and retrospection. But it also pointed toward permanence, if only for the eyes of gay men at some distant time. He was becoming convinced that “nothing in my life will ever be as great.” And this view, like many of his instincts, proved prescient: almost forty years later, from the perspective of old age, Forster confirmed that his friendship with el Adl was one of the two “greatest things” in his life.

But he did not yet have a name for this sensation. It only seemed certain to him that the pseudo-empirical categories developed by sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing and Hirschfeld—which he called “German physiological pigeon holes”—were threadbare ways of expressing the complex conditions of human experience. He told Goldie, “I never did find one to fit me . . .” What he had with Mohammed, he was sure, was as revelatory as a whole new way of seeing and being. As much as he could, Forster took pains to preserve the evidence of their affair as a dialogue, carefully copying out almost fifty letters from Mohammed (while burning all of Florence’s) and keeping a cache of ephemera from ticket stubs to photographs. The best way to respect Mohammed was to give him his own voice.

He relished how being with Mohammed had sharpened his capacity for surprise. He told Florence he envied her three “children’s sense of looking at life, with each person a new species.” Especially entertaining was the shared practice of inverting social expectations in canny ways. Both men relied on fixed racial attitudes and their shared male privilege in public spaces, sometimes to walk together side by side, hiding in plain sight. Of course he and Mohammed had honed rules to make them safe, but these often involved the creative use of others’ prejudice and obtuseness. Adopting a sardonic voice, he told Florence, “He is unfortunately black—not as black as a child’s face or ink, but blacker than . . . Masood—so that our juxtaposition is noticeable . . .” So they made the most of el Adl’s color when they must.
What else could he be thought to be but Morgan’s servant? Disgusted by colonial power, Forster nonetheless employed it to extend metaphorical cover to his friend.

Their clothing often belied their station. Mohammed took great pleasure in teasing Morgan about his shabby clothing and great pride in the care of his own dress. “Taking me by the sleeve last night he said gently, ‘You know Forster, though I am poorer than you I would never been seen in such a coat. I am not blaming you—no, I praise—but I would never
be
seen, and your hat has a hole and your boots have a hole and your socks have a hole.’”

“Good clothes are an infectious disease,” Mohammed admitted. “I had much better
not
care and look like
you
, and so perhaps I will, but only in Alexandria.” He wouldn’t be seen like that at home. The young man who first appeared in blinding tennis whites knew how to distinguish himself and how to become inconspicuous. Sometimes paradoxically: in April 1918, Morgan arranged for a second photograph of Mohammed, as a keepsake while he was away in the Canal Zone. The young man surprised him by arriving for the session dressed in Forster’s shabby military uniform. What a delicious appropriation! What a parody of the way uniforms both mark the distinctive position of their wearers and make them indistinguishable from other men! El Adl knew the portrait would be circulated to Edward Carpenter and to Forster’s other English friends. This photograph boldly proclaimed their intimacy. In another queer cultural cross-dressing, that summer the men commissioned a single dress suit, too big for Mohammed, slightly too small for Morgan, for them to share.

There is a third, even more revealing and mysterious self-fashioning, a tiny snapshot dating from the period before Mohammed left for Kantara. It was taken out of doors in heavy sun. Wearing a soft collarless cotton shirt unbuttoned at the neck, Morgan sat alone on a volcanic rock like those on the shoreline at Mex, in three-quarter profile, looking down at a book in his hands. There’s no notation of who stood behind the camera. Could it have been Mohammed? Of the thousands of photographs in the King’s College archives, it is one of only a few where he is smiling. It’s tempting to think of this and the photograph of Mohammed in Forster’s uniform as a diptych, in ghostly dialogue, as close to a gay domestic portrait as they could manage at the time. Years later, Forster would pioneer this genre, but not now, not yet.

This new worldliness and sense of play made plain how insufficient his attempt at gay fiction had been, how imponderable and solemn. “The whole
ending of
Maurice
and its handling of the social question now seems sad timorous half hearted stuff.” Some of the novel’s idealism still seemed right—“I have known in a way before, but never like this,” he told Florence. But he had written it too soon, before he realized that “some lies is necessary to life.” “Oh Florence,” he wrote, “what a mean, truncated life if this had never happened.” For once, his corporeal life had outstripped his imagination.

As best they could, that spring they arranged to see each other during Mohammed’s rare military leaves from his work. The long-anticipated visit in March dissolved into a muddle. Mohammed did not write as he had promised, and briefly Morgan suspected he had been insulted or forgotten. But Mohammed was very ill—“he went to hospital with some slight ailment and caught some filthy fever there.” Moreover, he had been mistreated by the British authorities, having to pay a bribe just to get a hospital bed. Disbelief turned to disgust and a welter of displaced anger when Morgan discovered the truth. He bitterly complained to Florence that the army “shovels [Egyptians] around like dirt.” The episode convinced Morgan that he must “make an effort over A or we shall lose one another for ever. I can’t think how to get him away from this military zone which will neither let him come out nor me in.”

An Alexandrian reunion in mid-May, however, went off as planned. But with Mohammed now homeless and Irene suspicious, they had to stay in Bacos with an Egyptian friend. These complex arrangements awkwardly coincided with the arrival of E. K. “Francis” Bennett, Morgan’s former student at the Working Men’s College. Before they met, Francis had been a factory worker. (He would eventually climb into an impressive academic career as a German professor at Cambridge, on the foundations of Morgan’s support and his own brains.) Like Morgan, Bennett was homosexual, but he was still clinging to Forrest Reid’s repressed belief in Respectability. Morgan was “obliged to tell him the bare fact” of Mohammed’s existence and Bennett received the news “with more sympathy and interest than I had expected . . .”

A different plan to integrate Morgan’s Egyptian and his English lives was frustrated at the last moment, when a rendezvous with the poet Siegfried Sassoon was aborted because Sassoon did not get permission to leave ship.
Sassoon’s correspondence was so sympathetic that this was a real disappointment. (They would meet in England in the coming year.)

Morgan took Mohammed to the remote rocky beach at Mex, where they swam, sunbathed, and sat “as Maurice and Clive sat at Cambridge” on their delicious day playing hooky. Mohammed told him “two days have passed like two minutes.” The idyll was like “some lovely cloud” that interposed between him and the war. “He has hidden my home life too,” he told Florence. But did the cloud obscure or did it clarify? By the end of May the vision jarred him into thoughts about their future together. Florence had recommended that Morgan decamp from Irene’s to avoid her hostility, and set up an alternative domestic arrangement supporting the young man. “Your new arrangement isn’t possible,” he replied. Mohammed’s “bloody independence for one thing wouldn’t consent . . . [He] expects marriage and life among his own people, so far as he looks forward at all, and I scarcely look forward to anything different.” But these facts belied Mohammed’s attitude. “He strikes me as more fully attached to me than hitherto: says he had awful dreams about me when he nearly died.” The idea of living together was improbable, but it wormed into his brain, even “[m]onth after month with my life in a box . . .” Their restlessness over the future jarred Mohammed into action. At the end of May, without other prospects, he “chucked that infernal job” and left for Mansourah. But life—or rather, death—intruded suddenly in June.