A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (38 page)

Since he began keeping records in it, Morgan had written only on the rectos in the big bound book. Now turning back to its earliest pages, he began to pen addenda on the versos. Imitating the practice of Plutarch’s parallel lives—the great classical biography—Morgan reconstructed the diary as a dialogue between his own life and Bob’s up to the point of their meeting. While Morgan was agonizing over the suicide of Ernest Merz in 1909: “Bob, aged 5 goes to the infant school at Winchester St.” In 1915, opposite a totting-up of the names of acquaintances among the war dead: “Bob, aged 10, goes to the Hugh Middleton school.” The twenty-three-year difference in their ages shrank into insignificance. They were two halves
of a platonic soul. The whole of the past became a prologue to this fateful moment.

At about the same time Morgan began a new address book, which he kept until his death. It reflected Morgan’s young and widening world: A was for Ackerley and for the young poet Wystan (a.k.a. W. H.) Auden, with his gigantic ears and his long horsy face. B was for Buckingham and D for Daley and P for William Plomer, a young South African novelist, with his owlish spectacles and his hyperdiscreet bearing. Plomer seemed buttoned-up and correct, but was subject to outrageous spells of silliness. He was incredibly quick with words. A notorious punster, he cherished spoonerisms and peculiar names, always referring to the grandiose statue of Clive of India on the Thames Embankment as “Olive”; he managed to look innocent while delivering sharp observations that left his dinner companions gasping with laughter. Morgan himself found this sort of humor infectious, once remarking that he had caught William in an “unguardeed moment.” Virginia and Leonard Woolf had been impressd with Plomer’s first novel,
Turbott Wolfe
, a tragic depiction of an interracial love story set in South Africa. In 1931, their Hogarth Press published his second novel,
Sado
, set in Japan and loosely based on Plomer’s love affair with a Japanese boy. Virginia found Plomer to be witty company, but this didn’t prevent her from penning waspish sketches of him in her letters and diary.

Many of Morgan’s young friends had moved to Maida Vale, a once-genteel and now down-at-heels quarter of London tucked behind Paddington Station. Joe Ackerley had joined them there, forced to decamp from the delicious house on the river in Hammersmith when his father died. To the world, and to his son, Roger Ackerley had been the picture of a well-to-do and robust family man; but when his will was opened this persona turned out to be more alarmingly true than Joe had supposed. Instead of inheriting an ample fortune, Joe discovered that his father had been an active bigamist who left strict instructions that his son should support his secret family as well as Joe’s mother and sister, Nancy. But Roger left no money and his scandalized firm refused to pay out the life insurance. Joe’s devil-may-care life collapsed. He took a job at the BBC, eventually rising to be literary editor of
The Listener
, where he worked for the rest of his life.

In Maida Vale, Joe could live for less than half the cost. In this shabby venue he joined a circle of young friends buoyed by their connection to the Woolfs. There was the poet Stephen Spender, looking at twenty-four more
like a teenager than a young Turk, and Johnny Simpson, a peculiar young man whose veiled homosexual novel
Saturday Night at the Greyhound
was published under the pen name of John Hampson by the Hogarth Press. And through John Lehmann, who had been the Hogarth Press’s typesetter, editorial assistant, and dogsbody, Morgan first met Christopher Isherwood. “John Lehmann is back from Vienna with a dumbelle, Christopher Isherwood, whom I like best of all that lot.” Virginia in her diary did not hide her distaste for these “Lilies of the Valley”—“At Duncan [Grant]’s show, we met the Bugger boys, Joe, Morgan, William; & savoured the usual queer scent.”

In the summer of 1932, facing prostate surgery, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson met Morgan in London to give him a packet of important papers: the autobiography he had just completed, and letters to be given to his two surviving sisters in the event of his death. This was a sober brief, to be sure, but Goldie seemed his same essential self—gentle and whimsical, serious of mind, as ever, philosophical. In July he held a dinner for a number of his friends at a restaurant in Soho, offering a toast at the conclusion of the evening. No one could quite recall what he said, but the tone was familiar: despite Goldie’s “youthful interest in everything . . . he felt more and more that all human creatures were somehow equally important or unimportant in the scheme of things as we know it now.” The surgery took place at Guy’s Hospital in London on Monday, August 1. It was a major operation, but Goldie came through swimmingly; he was weak but cheerful and lucid when Morgan sat by his bedside the next day. He planned to recuperate at the home of his old friend and Apostle George Trevelyan. But the next evening Morgan received the “unreal” news that Goldie was dead.

He had slipped out of life just before dawn, “chiefly occupied in saving us trouble and sparing our feelings.” But Goldie had always kept a very small footprint on the corporeal earth. There were just a few worldly goods—papers and letters and books, on one of which rested the threadbare Chinese silk cap he wore while writing. Morgan hastily wrote a tribute for
The Spectator
, duly praising the accomplishments of Dickinson as a scholar and policy-maker, a shaper of the zeitgeist and an influential public man. But he reserved the greatest compliment for a letter to his old friend Malcolm Darling, who had known Goldie since their undergraduate days. “Mrs. Newman his bedmaker said ‘he was the best man who ever lived,’ and I would write
that on his tomb, if he needed one.” Stunned and heartbroken, Morgan helped to arrange the memorial service in the magnificent Gothic chapel across the courtyard from the window of Goldie’s set of rooms. The service took place on Saturday, August 6, which would have been Goldie’s seventieth birthday.

In the pews of the chapel sat dignitaries from the university, friends from King’s over the generations, former students, Apostles, acolytes who came up from London to mark the ending of a life that was both important and ineffable. Morgan attended almost literally propped up by Bob, his frail frame leaning against the younger man’s broad shoulder. But as the crowd filtered out to the dying strains of the organ, Bob turned to him quietly and confidentially. He spoke plainly. May was pregnant, he told Morgan. They would have to marry, and soon, by the end of the month. It was a matter of finding a day off, and booking the civil ceremony at the registry office. Bob asked Morgan to be his witness.

So on a muggy, hot, overcast afternoon, on the last day of August 1932, five people gathered at the civil registry: the clerk, the bride and groom, and two witnesses. Morgan stood beside Bob and May and stated that there was no impediment to their marriage. The plan was to repair to a local restaurant for a celebratory toast, but Morgan was too heartsick. He begged off, feeling unwell.

As summer turned to autumn after Bob and May’s marriage, Morgan found it increasingly difficult to follow the sort of advice he had offered to friends on such occasions. He couldn’t
let go
, couldn’t resign himself. He thought of suicide, threatened to leave the country, and briefly believed he was going out of his mind, telling Joe after Bob canceled a planned date, “If he fails me again I
feel
I shall smash.” Morgan vilified May, accusing her on scant evidence of being a “domineering, sly, and
knowing
woman.” And he belittled Bob: “He must be made to see that there can’t be a menage à trois, which I think is his dream, and, for the moment, possibly hers too; but he should easily see this when told.” In a primitive way, Morgan imagined that he could simply assert his desires and everyone would acquiesce. But Bob treated Morgan’s outbursts with aplomb, merely telling him, “We’ve got to go without pleasures for a bit.” Not satisfied, Morgan fumed at a perceived inequity: “Yesterday when I went to tea at the S[ection] H[ouse] by arrangement, [I] was turned away at once . . .
May
can be seen, of course.”

Consumed by anxiety and jealousy, equally disgusted by his behavior
and his inability to control himself, Morgan consulted with Sebastian Sprott, as much as a psychologist as a friend.

When I cannot “get what I want” I have tempers like collar-burning Charles, these came on last night, they are canny & calculating & non-suicidal and I hate them, and even if Bob gets the woman under control when his seed comes out of her next year—shall I be in a state to profit? . . . Perhaps I behave like this because of my week end at Cambridge in Goldie’s rooms—but that seemed just sadness, which one always bears, it is the addition to sadness that’s unmanageable.

Morgan was in a raw state of anxiety. The titanic struggle with May Buck-ingham was really a projection, a terror of
loss
. In truth, Goldie’s death had been an “addition to sadness” in itself, the last in a series of deaths that even before Bob’s marriage had shaken Morgan to the core. In January, six months before Goldie’s death, Lytton Strachey had died horribly of stomach cancer; two months later Carrington, desperate with grief and unable to live without Lytton, had shot herself. Morgan recorded the twin tragedies in his diary, forgiving Carrington her suicide but wishing she had been able to hold on to life.

And eighteen months before, in the summer of 1929, the ancient Edward Carpenter had died too, bereft at having outlived his beloved younger partner, George Merrill. Goldie had visited Carpenter in the last months of his life; he told Morgan that during this sad final encounter the old man had insisted on walking to the cemetery. Goldie had stood mute while Carpenter stood over Merrill’s grave sobbing, gasping out that his lover had been put in the cold, cold ground.

Even the irascible vibrant D. H. Lawrence was gone. Only forty-four, he had finally succumbed to tuberculosis on March 2, 1930. Despite their uneasy friendship, Morgan had believed Lawrence to be “the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation,” and he publicly defended Lawrence against a hostile obituary in
The Times
. In private, to Lawrence’s widow, Frieda, Morgan wrote a simple letter, dated two days after Lawrence’s death:

I have had such a shock over D.H.L. He was always in my heart, and I think too of the books he would still have written.

I have been thinking about you too, and wondering how you are, and what you will do. It’s difficult to write, and please don’t answer this. I wish I could help you.

E. M. Forster

In the wake of Bob’s marriage, the death of these dear friends felt like an extinction. Morgan set to work dutifully on a project of recuperation: he decided to write a biography of Goldie’s life. Surrounded by stacks of books and papers, picking through mountains of letters in Goldie’s impenetrable hand, Morgan settled down in his friend’s rooms, with their great half-circle window unblinkingly gazing at the golden flank of the chapel across the courtyard. Most of Goldie’s correspondence proved banal in the extreme. Morgan wrote Joe, “I continue to read Goldie’s letters to [his sister] May, which are even poorer than most of his letters, with placidity, and to hear him saying ‘Really my dear Morgan that you should have to do this!’”

But almost imperceptibly, writing the biography began to give Morgan joy. He told Virginia Woolf that the process made him love Goldie all the more, and was going much more quickly than he had foretold. And the idea of a biography as a filial act got him thinking about his own posthumous legacy: “I wish I could get one written about me after I die,” Morgan told Joe, “but I should want everything told, everything, and there’s so far so little. Goldie, because one’s condemned to omissions, looms larger.”

These “omissions” stemmed from Goldie’s injunction against writing about his homosexuality. The “Recollections” he had given to Morgan were explicitly constructed as variations on a single theme: the effect of fifty years of failed or sublimated love affairs with men. He had recorded them frankly “in the hope that what I am writing, if it should ever see the light, may bring some help and encouragement to others who have the same temperament; or may contribute to enlighten and humanise public opinion on a point as to which, especially in England, it is singularly irrational and cruel.”

But he had also tied Morgan’s hands.

My present feeling is that if anything were published (as to which I have no judgement) the sex part should be omitted. One can’t trust people yet (nor perhaps ever) to be decent about those things, and anyhow my relations are still alive. Remember that my sisters have
not seen this autobiography and I don’t wish them to, except in a safely bowdlerised form.

In writing the biography, Morgan faced the reality that Goldie’s had been an
undramatic
life. Certainly Dickinson had been cerebral, and certainly the events of his life followed the serene plot of an academic story. But the greater narrative problem was that Goldie’s life had been distorted both by sexual sublimation and sexual renunciation—and the cause of this tension within him could not be disclosed in the biography.

So Morgan shaped an entirely new genre, a biography that was truthful, if not exactly honest. In his writing, as in his dealings with Bob and May, he began to use creative silence to tell a story that would have been utterly destroyed by being labeled or named. Just as Adela Quested had felt diminished when she acquiesced in becoming Ronnie’s
wife
—“Unlike the green bird, or the hairy animal, she was labelled now.” In composing
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
, Morgan left room for his “sensitive” readers to discover the source of his friend’s unhappiness.