A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (35 page)

The young men were supervised, if one could call it that, by a single exasperated sergeant who was universally loathed. He was a bully—which differentiated him from most of his subordinates—and cheerfully corrupt, which did not. It was commonplace for policemen to collect graft from small-time crooks and hustlers on their beat, and they made a habit of looking the other way when faced with minor infractions from friends and acquaintances.

At work Harry was openly gay. His fellow officers made a clear distinction between the behavior of one of their own and the “nancy boys” brought into the station on charges of soliciting. These men were routinely harassed and humiliated: their faces were rubbed with toilet paper to detect makeup; they were “laughed about as if [they were] not present,” and subjected to searches in which the cops “always found the same sized tin of vaseline in [their] pocket[s].” But within the Section House, for the most part the men lived by the philosophy of laissez faire: “One policeman regularly hoisted his sweetheart over the gate on a rope, to spend the night with him in a bed on the gymnasium floor.” A large, pudgy, and unprepossessing man, Harry was nevertheless capable of defending himself. He endured oblique slights:
a knothole in the main office wall was graffitied to look like an anus, and “love from 308”—Harry’s badge number—was penciled below. But on the whole, Harry was let be.

Morgan was head over heels in love with the spirit of the place, which he slyly labeled “Erection Howze” in a letter to Sebastian. Harry took a photograph of Morgan standing on the roof, his little tonsure of gray hair flapping in the breeze. Often he would stay the night and join the men in the mess hall for a tremendous fry-up the next morning—“steak and eggs and bacon, tinned salmon, fruit, crusty new bread and lots of butter.” On Harry’s day off they would go to the theater—to see a Noel Coward play, or Patrick Hamilton’s
Rope
, based on the Leopold and Loeb murder (and later adapted by Hitchcock), or to the bathhouse at Harry’s workingmen’s club. Morgan loved the texture of life in Harry’s neck of the woods—walking the late-night beat beside his lover through streets deserted “except for a few coster’s barrows,” meeting the boxers, lorry drivers, fishermen, and gang leaders who frequented the neighborhood. The gangsters were especially dear to Morgan’s heart—he felt they “spoke my language.” He was delighted to read the written notice posted in the window of one café—“Nothing but the best margarine served”—wondering, “What on earth can they have been accused of serving?”

For privacy they met at Morgan’s boîte at 27 Brunswick Square in Bloomsbury, an upstairs suite of rooms carved out of a dilapidated Regency townhouse that was later destroyed in the Blitz. His choice of décor was a deliberate rebuke to the sober Victorian good taste of Harnham. The sitting room wall boasted several handmade pictures of Indian ladies wearing brightly colored saris composed of the gaudy wrappers of Indian chocolate bars. The pied-à-terre was kitted out with all the necessities of London bachelor life—a gas ring for primitive cooking, a hot water bottle, and special black soap for killing crab lice. Here Morgan hosted Harry on many a night, and here he also juggled the various assignations of his new, comparatively rich sex life. Reg Palmer also stayed here when he could get away from Bess: though Morgan had vowed to break it off, telling Joe, “It is not my policy to break up homes,” the two men continued to find time for private sex and friendship.

Here Morgan also stayed chastely with Frank Vicary, the young man whom he had befriended years before at the Montazah Hospital in Alexandria. The men resumed their friendship upon Morgan’s return from India. Being near Vicary demanded a good deal of self-restraint. Morgan found Frank charming and attractive, was intrigued by his intellectual curiosity
and quickness, but he dared not stray toward expressing appreciation. To Florence Barger, Morgan lamented, “Vicary cannot take M[ohammed]’s place, because there’s a whole side of my nature remains ungratified and undiscussed.” Morgan listened to Frank’s woes—and he had plenty of them—and always believed the best about his friend’s motives. Time and again Frank would quit a job, or get laid off; he traveled to Canada and the United States in search of work, but came home with his tail between his legs. His marriage, Frank claimed, was unhappy and sexless; his sister committed suicide, killing her child with her; and his beloved eldest son, to whom he was devoted, died in a hideous accident, having been scalded in the bath.

Morgan could not resist helping Frank through all his travails. He sponsored Vicary in numerous entrepreneurial ventures, even going so far as to buy him a small pig farm in Gloucestershire. In turn, Vicary named his second son Edward Morgan—thereby scandalizing Lily—and penned effusive letters to an unrequited Morgan. Morgan wrote Joe ruefully that visiting Vicary’s farm was “heavenly . . . if heaven can be just sexless.”

And to the Brunswick Square flat, like some sort of parcel, Sebastian Sprott sent Charles Lovett, his acquiescent lover from the slums of Nottingham. Lovett was a sweet, rather lumbering young man who adoringly did what was asked of him. He was genuinely fond of Morgan, and happy to be companionable. They established a routine. Morgan would pay Charles’s train fare. Spending a weekend or a long day in London, Charles was treated to a nice meal and the theater. The sex was rather sedate—usually mutual masturbation. Then Charles would return to Sebastian and Nottingham with a small gift, such as new pocket handkerchiefs, for his trouble. Though Lovett was literate, the arrangements were always made between Morgan and Sebastian, with Morgan micromanaging the affair:

“Don’t let anyone ‘spoil’ Charles . . . though he seems perfectly sensible and resistant . . . And he shouldn’t, for his comfort and others, talk more than he needs about my being a prominent writer . . .” “Tell Charles to arrive at 4.30 as planned and if I am not there to meet him . . . to go to Brunswick Square where he will find a note from me . . . on the mantelpiece . . .” “I have written to Charles and asked him for the 9th instead. You may kindly see I get a reply as soon as may be.” “Do see that C. goes . . . through with his [false] teeth.”

Lovett’s reliability was his chief virtue—in his diary Morgan called their relationship an “elderly man’s love.”

Having a separate flat made Morgan feel “solid” and “independent of mother.” But soon Morgan found that scheduling assignations there became exhaustingly complex. He juggled his own plans with requests for the key from Joe and Sebastian, or his old friend Francis Bennett. Occasionally he would bring Lily from Weybridge for an enervating day of London shopping or a musicale. One evening in 1928 he was startled to find “an enormous boy” in the flat when he arrived; he admonished Sebastian not to double-book.

Morgan’s new friends offered a refreshing outlook, but they distracted him from intellectual work. He was publishing frequent reviews and incidental essays, but his life as a writer of fiction was stalled—and he admitted that he alone was largely responsible for his creative lassitude. His friend and translator Charles Mauron urged him to take up a new novel, but Morgan demurred, citing a temperamental weakness: “not to feel intact, not to [be] able to expose oneself to certain contacts because of self-consciousness—that really is an aweful [
sic
] nuisance, and I spend a good deal of time now with people who are (vaguely speaking) my inferiors, and to whom I can very easily be kind.”

It was hard to tell if Morgan’s attitude revealed complacency or anxiety. Certainly it was seductive to surround oneself with people like Reg, who teased him by saying, “O, [the ] celebrated author.” But Morgan sometimes wished that his friendships “could have an intellectual basis.” With the exception of Harry Daley, none of Morgan’s working-class friends gave him much to
think
about. In consequence some of Morgan’s friends suspected that he enjoyed the feeling of superiority. Leo Charlton noted, “Morgan’s friends hushed their voices, as people do in cathedrals, when talking of him.”

In truth, Morgan’s attitude toward his social inferiors was complicated. More than many men of his class, Morgan saw how working-class people were slighted, treated as nearly invisible. In
Maurice
he had deliberately made Alec Scudder “loom up on the reader gradually,” reflecting Maurice Hall’s obtuse habit of looking through the servants until the “masculine blur” of the gamekeeper develops into a full-blown human being “who gives
and takes love.” He was disgusted by the senseless class strictures in his own daily life, railing in his diary at “the knowledge that I couldn’t have Frank, e.g. to stay” with him at King’s without causing a stir.

Morgan had long resented the middle-class shibboleth of avoiding the topic of money. His novels are filled with occasions when a heartfelt offer of generosity is rebuffed as
not the done thing
. When Philip Herriton offers Agnes and Gerald some of his inheritance so that they may forgo a long engagement (in
Where Angels Fear to Tread
), the lovers treat his generosity as a rebuke. And Henry Wilcox is mystified by the Schlegels’ willingness to discuss their financial status openly, or to try to help Leonard Bast. It was all very well to develop an unorthodox view of social class, but “only connect” remained a difficult proposition when Morgan consistently had more money than his friends. Disparity of income lent even the most ordinary generosity the odor of condescension. To counter this, in life as in art, Morgan insisted on being
patent
about money. From Mohammed he had learned that the poorer partner
wanted
to pay for things, as a matter of pride. Morgan was careful to mind economic reciprocity—and by inclination quite humble in his tastes. He was perfectly at home eating in a canteen or café, or watching a play from the nosebleed seats.

Morgan’s generosity was exceptionally deep and thoughtful. He delicately ascertained the perfect needful thing, and made it occur with a minimum of fuss. Throughout his life he bestowed practical gifts with deft delicacy: he paid Joe Ackerley’s expenses for a long-needed holiday, sent Sebastian Sprott small gifts of money, and took on the full cost of private medical care when Harry Daley’s mother needed surgery. All told, the fees amounted to more than a hundred pounds—a sum so extravagant that he felt obliged to hide it from Lily, telling her he had contributed only half that amount.

Though he wore his generosity lightly, Morgan could not resist lecturing Harry on economies: “Those tickets cost 4/9 each I believe—well you mustn’t ever spend so much on me again. Make 2/6 the limit, either for theatre or a meal. Will you agree? Isn’t this common sense—given your present salary? And is anything in it contrary to friendship? I don’t think so.”

For his part Harry was happy enough to take Morgan’s money, but resentful about being
managed
. After Morgan offered to foot the bill for his mother’s medical care, Harry wrote one letter to Morgan, thanking him effusively, and a second to his mother, reassuring her, “Don’t worry, old Morgan’s got
plenty of money.” Then he inadvertently switched the envelopes and mailed the two letters in the same post. Morgan was terribly offended, but he stuck to his policy of preserving friendship—“Don’t rebuke, don’t arguefy, don’t apologise.”

He examined his own motives rather carefully. He was acutely aware that he viewed life through a veil of middle-class assumptions, that the virtues of thrift, forbearance, and courtesy that were the bedrock of his way of living might be qualities his poorer friends could ill-afford. So Morgan pondered whether the disappointing behavior of Harry and Reg and Frank Vicary was singular or social—“decayed morale or the natural morality of the non-bourgeois?” In Frank’s case especially, he had reason to be appalled. In debt, perpetually out of work, increasingly feckless and prone to drink, Frank had mortgaged the little Gloucestershire farm and frittered the money away. Morgan’s disappointment permanently punctured his romantic view of Vicary and their putative shared future. He ruefully told Joe that he had imagined himself toddling about the little farm “in old age, looked after by the robust and grateful lower classes.”

Indeed, Morgan’s ideal of intimacy consistently required a more delicate sensibility than his working-class friends could muster. His encounters with Reg were always physically satisfying, but asking for or expecting real conversation from him seemed hopelessly beside the point; after one session of lovemaking, Morgan wrote in his diary, “Coarseness and tenderness have kissed one another, but imaginative passion, love, doesn’t exist in the lower classes.” After another, he was more satisfied: “Lust + goodwill—is anything more wanted? . . . [I feel] not happiness, but proud to be alive.” For his own part, he chastened himself, worrying that his own attitude reflected a “superficial itch for intimacy that makes for popularity and is misleading.”

Joe Ackerley and Sebastian Sprott provided tutoring in the new practicalities of the double life. It was inevitable that in Morgan’s hands subterfuge would sometimes descend into farce. In 1924 his Bunburying unraveled in spectacular style when he agreed to be part of a scheme to conceal Joe’s whereabouts from his parents while he visited a lover in Italy. Morgan’s first reaction was to ask rather reasonably, “Is a lie necessary?” But Joe insisted on an elaborate scheme. He told his parents he was at Harnham visiting Morgan, but his father had a sudden heart attack while Joe was en route to
Italy. Because Morgan didn’t have a telephone in Weybridge, Mrs. Ackerley sent a domestic servant over in a rush to fetch her son, and Joe and Morgan’s conspiracy was exposed. Parents were constantly making uncomfortable discoveries. A compromising and ribald telegram from Sebastian had to be elaborately explained away when Lily inadvertently opened and read it. So parcels and letters sent to West Hackhurst must be elaborately disguised. Morgan requested that Joe post a tube of ointment to treat crab lice—which Morgan charitably labeled “signs of fertility”—in a package disguised as a book.