A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (36 page)

By the mid-1920s, Morgan began to get the hang of the double life. In answer to a query from Joe, he totted up a full accounting of his sexual partners: eighteen to Joe’s two hundred or so. Morgan celebrated their variety, if not their numbers. The list included “1 Scotchman, 1 Colonial and 1 Quaker.” He managed to stay friendly with these men, in contrast to Joe, whose heart was broken several times a year, like clockwork. The secret, Morgan advised, was simple: “If you want a permanent relationship with . . . anyone, you must give up this idea of ownership, and even the idea of being owned.”

Morgan became adept at using his network of friendly connections to discover or arrange sexy flings on trips abroad. Traveling to a conference in Copenhagen with George Barger, Morgan met up with a Danish boy named Aage, an acquaintance of Joe’s; he took him to bed and—rather poetically—to see Elsinore Castle. On a voyage to visit Charles and Marie Mauron in France, he picked up a ship’s stoker named Charlie Day, a big man with a sleepy flat face and a crooked smile. (Later, back in England, Charlie became a pest, making scenes and asking for money, and Morgan asked Joe to intervene and persuade him to desist.) If necessary, Morgan was perfectly happy to appear the stooge in these intrigues, so long as he was in on the joke. He began a casual and friendly love affair with a French sailor, an acquaintance of Joe’s, named Achille Morgenroth. With Achille, Morgan acquiesced in a little charade, willingly posing as a dowdy “uncle in the clothes trade, long domiciled in England.” Achille organized elaborate rules for these trysts, timing their exits from the hotel so as not to be seen together. These little bits of subterfuge to distract Achille’s relatives amused Morgan.

Having adventures made him feel young. In the summer of 1929, coming back from a tour of South Africa with the Bargers, and starved for his secret life, Morgan wrote to Joe Ackerley, “I was 250 years old a fortnight back, and now you can knock off the nought.” It was a testament to the success of
his carefully crafted public persona during these years that even so close a friend as Virginia Woolf could thoroughly misread his situation. Writing to her sister, Vanessa Bell, Woolf lamented that Lily, with her iron-willed love, “is slowly dispatching him . . . he is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.” This was not so true as Virginia believed. Morgan’s adventures would have shocked her.

The kind of fiction writing he wished to pursue cut him off from his audience, and he rechanneled his pen, writing for his own ear, for his friends, and for the more charitable future he had imagined in his dedication to
Maurice
. In contrast to the Rabelaisian fantasies he had destroyed when completing
A Passage to India
, the new stories were serious, thoughtful examinations of the psychological strain of being a gay Englishman. These were the short stories that Christopher Isherwood and John Lehmann would marvel over—and publish—after his death. “Dr. Woolacott,” “Arthur Snatch-fold,” and “The Life to Come” were not strictly autobiographical—“The Life to Come” traced a fatal love affair between a missionary and a native chieftain, “Dr. Woolacott” the mental disintegration of a young veteran of the trenches—but the anxiety of their characters was informed by the tension of living in two worlds. There were very few people to whom he could trust the reading of this new fiction.

As he had done two years earlier, Morgan turned to T. E. Lawrence for literary advice. Lawrence had been sickened by the machine of celebrity, which propelled him into the public eye after the war. He achieved his goal of near-invisibility by reenlisting in the RAF; from his far-off posting in Karachi he wrote abject letters of admiration to Morgan. After months of this, Morgan was beginning to be irritated by Lawrence’s alternating effusions and rebuffs. Lawrence had intellectual keenness, Morgan believed, but an evasive soul. “T. E. liked to meet people upon a platform of his own designing,” Morgan decided—and in his own case, Morgan came to realize “I had to figure as a great artist” while he affected the role of “bungling amateur.” Morgan renewed the offer to send T. E. the manuscript of
Maurice
, but his young friend cagily demurred:

I wanted to read your long novel, & was afraid to. It was like your last keep, I felt: and if I read it I had you: and supposing I hadn’t
liked it? I’m so funnily made up, sexually. At present you are in all respects right, in my eyes: that’s because you reserve so very much, as I do. If you knew all about me (perhaps you do: your subtlety is very great: shall I put it “if I knew that you knew . . .”?) you’d think very little of me.

Morgan had correctly understood that being “an awful tease” was Lawrence’s calculated emotional defense. Literally and figuratively Lawrence “did not like being touched,” Morgan realized, and after this exchange he “touched him as seldom as possible.”

That this bright young man, so attractive, so intelligent, was merely another iteration of the kind of charming, unknowable intellectual siren that Frank Vicary had become both vexed and saddened Morgan. He told Florence Barger that Lawrence was incapable of friendship—though he did not speculate on the psychological source of this handicap. Privately he believed that the effects of Lawrence’s sexual abuse had somehow unhinged his character.

Despite his disappointment, Morgan decided to dedicate a “forthcoming volume of stories” to Lawrence. The stories in
The Eternal Moment
had all been published before. He took the occasion to tell a small sharp truth, writing Lawrence that he had settled on the epigraph “‘To T. E.
in the absence of anything else
’: The dedication can be given a wrong meaning, which you will enjoy doing, and I shall like to think of you doing it. The matter is decided therefore.” The collection “promises to be [my] last created word that will ever find public utterance”; he warned Lawrence, “If you ever inscribe anything to me, good bad or indifferent, I shall be a lot annoyed.”

He mailed the letter to Karachi from West Hackhurst, “the frail house of old women,” admonishing that both he and Lawrence had been wrong to “hanker at all after a notion of escaping” such a world. It was far too resilient, Morgan understood: “a twig from the elm tree would shatter it, yet it preserves its relative strength internally. My mother still keeps the maids in order.”

Silenced as a writer of publishable fiction, Morgan recast his public voice, banking on the eminence he had established with the publication of
A Passage to India
in 1924. In the spring of 1926 he was invited to deliver the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge—a distinguished series on any topic in English literature after Chaucer. Morgan chose to take in hand the poetics of the novel form itself, from the perspective of a creative practitioner
rather than an academician. Not so much a history of the novel form than an early version of narratology—how the novel does what it does, from characterization to emplotment, to how realism is conveyed—the lectures received mixed reviews, along familiar lines. Those in the audience who identified themselves as “common readers,” following Dr. Johnson’s dictum—taken up by Virginia Woolf in her essays of the same name—found them irreverent, refreshing, and commonsensical. The learned authorities on English literature who were beginning feel their oats as a profession at Cambridge found Morgan’s literary criticism less persuasive: F. R. Leavis pronounced the lectures “intellectually null.” The venerable A. E. Housman, whom Morgan had long admired and written to from the smoke-filled pub in Shropshire decades before, was a Fellow of Trinity. But the second encounter between the two authors went even worse than the first. Housman felt obscurely snubbed by Morgan’s failure to attend formal supper in the college’s Hall during the spring, and responded to a letter of praise from Morgan so vilely that Morgan burned the letter and never mentioned it again. The most significant response to the lectures came from the Fellows of King’s, who offered Morgan a three-year fellowship, with the expectation that he would be in residence six weeks a year.

In the summer of 1928 his old and dear friend Leonard Woolf approached Morgan to join a cause. A mannish lesbian writer named Radclyffe Hall had just published a controversial new novel.
The Well of Loneliness
courted danger with its sexual subject matter; and now the author and publisher were drawn into a legal fight over its prosecution on charges of criminal obscenity. Hall’s novel was a coming-of-age story of lesbian love. Much like
Maurice
, its protagonist (a tortured young woman named Stephen Gordon) struggles to understand her identity and find love, if not acceptance, in the modern world. But Hall’s story ends tragically: Stephen’s family rejects her, and her lover, Mary, leaves her for a man. The novel ends with Stephen Gordon’s prayer, “Give us also the right to our existence!”

Almost immediately after the novel’s publication, the editor of the conservative
Sunday Express
began a public campaign to suppress it on moral grounds. In a searing editorial, James Douglas called on Hall’s publisher to withdraw all copies from circulation; failing that, he urged the home secretary to undertake prosecution against the book’s publisher and distributor on the grounds of criminal obscenity. The
Express
explicitly rejected Hall’s cry for tolerance of “inverts,” arguing that “[the novel] is a seductive and
insidious piece of special pleading designed to display perverted decadence as a martyrdom inflicted on these outcasts by a cruel society.”

The home secretary, William Johnson-Hicks, was addicted to purity campaigns. He had already cracked down on gambling and nightclubs and all sorts of sin in the city; within days he took the newspaper’s bait. Though the publisher, Jonathan Cape, did withdraw the book, “Jix” nevertheless instructed the director of public prosecutions to begin lining up witnesses who could attest to its nefarious influence on young people, anticipating that the “defendants have it in mind to procure a number of men of literary eminence to testify as to the innocuousness of the book.”
Procure
indeed. So Morgan found himself in the low-ceilinged sitting room at Monk’s House outside the little Sussex village of Rodmell, getting drunk with Virginia and Leonard Woolf, talking of “sodomy & sapphism, with emotion” and planning a counterattack.

“Soon we were telephoning and interviewing and collecting signatures,” Virginia Woolf wrote her lover, Vita Sackville-West. The threatened suppression of the book and prosecution of its publisher quickly persuaded other famous writers—Arnold Bennett, G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells, Lytton Strachey, T. S. Eliot, and Vera Brittain—to sign on. Leonard determined that Morgan would be the best emissary to approach the author herself. Hall was a formidable figure—wearing a full pinstriped man’s suit, and a daunting blackrimmed monocle—and during their meeting Morgan let slip that while he found the novel to be courageous, he had not thought it particularly well written. Virginia described the debacle of Morgan’s retreat:

Radclyffe scolds him like a fishwife, and says that she wont [
sic
] have any letter written about her book unless it mentions the fact that it is a work of artistic merit—even genius. And no one has read her book; or can read it: and now we have to explain this to all the great signed names . . . So our ardour in the cause of freedom of speech gradually cools, and instead of offering to reprint the masterpiece, we are already beginning to wish it unwritten.

Morgan had been willing to defend the “meritorious dull book” on principle. But back at Monk’s House, tipsy and scalded by Hall’s tongue-lashing, he confided to Leonard and Virginia that he found lesbians “disgusting: partly from conventions, partly because he disliked that women should be independent
of men.” Hall’s book embraced the modern psychological theories that claimed “inversion” to be a congenital condition—and the three writers’ conversation turned to whether homosexuality could be “cured.” Morgan told the Woolfs he had learned of a prominent neurologist’s boast that he could “convert the sodomites” through an aversion cure—much as Dr. Lasker-Jones had proposed to do to Maurice. “Would you like to be converted?” Leonard asked him, genuinely curious. “‘No’ said Morgan, quite definitely.” In the end Virginia and Morgan composed a rather tame “comic little letter” decrying that social opprobrium such as the Hall case would cause artists to suppress “creative impulses” and “shun anything original.” By October, Morgan found himself sitting on a hard bench at the Bow Street Magistrates Court, alongside forty eminent scientists, theologians, and men of letters waiting to testify on behalf of Hall’s defense. After a long peroration the chief magistrate concluded that as a matter of law he could determine whether the book was obscene without inviting any expert testimony, and summarily—and anticlimactically—dismissed the assembled crowd.

The real drama occurred in Morgan’s life alone. His public and private personae collided with ironic force the very week of the
Well of Loneliness
trial. He told the story to Sebastian, gamely playing up the comedy of the occasion: “What with being blackmailed on Wednesday and Bow Street on Friday, life has really been quite a whirl.” This single sentence embodies the tension between Forster’s secret and his carefully cultivated public life. The attempted blackmail came through an elliptical approach. The wife of one of Morgan’s casual sex partners discovered her husband had slept with Morgan, and confronted him. She assured him he would not be bothered further if he paid cash.

Morgan had been quite lucky in his adventures before this moment. With Bess Palmer he had played the part of a befuddled middle-aged man, with no designs on her husband besides hearty friendship. He even managed the delicate feat of remaining her husband’s lover without her knowledge for the rest of his life. But this occasion was a little different. The proof of its sting is revealed by the paucity of records. Morgan destroyed all but the barest shreds of the record of this trauma—and these come elliptically in coded references to a few of his closest friends. “She swears I shan’t be worried or even spoken to,” Morgan wrote to Joe.