A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (39 page)

Working within the constraints established by Dickinson himself, Morgan was actually quite forthright. He painted a picture of a subject who lived entirely in a world of men, who had passionate male friendships and never thought of marriage. “Although he was never drawn to women in the passionate sense, all his deepest emotions being towards men, his life would have been empty and comfortless without them.” Or, “Devoted to [Ferdinand] Schiller, but constantly parted from him, and doubtful whether his devotion was returned, Dickinson suffered for many years from a sense of frustration which the sensitive will understand.”

Morgan also quoted Goldie directly: “I have seldom been out of love, if the word love may be used of a feeling continually thwarted on the physical side. That question I leave to casuists and medical men, though without much expectation they will have anything important to say about it.” And “I think that few young men ever got less out of Paris than I did. For to get anything out of it, it seems essential to approach it by the route of women and that was no route for me.”

To complete his very odd biography, Morgan wrote a curious afterword, adopting a Dickinsonian form: a Socratic dialogue between himself as a biographer and the voice of Mephistopheles. The devil demands he defend
his choice to record such an inconsequential and
inward
life. The terms of Mephistopheles’ objection make it clear that what was at stake for Morgan was personal—it was the threat of the utter extinction of homosexual lives.

Mephistopheles . . . puts his head out at this point and asks me to set all personal feelings aside and state objectively why a memoir of . . . Dickinson need be written. If I say “Because I want to,” the answer is “Who are you?” If I say “My friend was beloved, affectionate, unselfish, . . .” the devil will reply “Yes, but that is neither here nor there, or rather it was there but it is no longer here. I have your word and the word of others that this was once so, but is there nothing which will survive when all of you also have vanished?”

Morgan had invoked this conceit before, in a short eulogy for Edward Carpenter. There he argued that Carpenter would likely be forgotten. He contrasted two types of fame—the sort that arose from “managing to advertise” oneself to the history books, and the kind that Carpenter evinced, which “rested on the constancy and intensity of his affection” for his friends. There was no doubt that the latter, while precious, could be easily extinguished. Morgan told Virginia Woolf, when she struggled with her own biography of their friend Roger Fry, that biographies as a genre would not “interest . . . the next generation.”

The next generation was already a reality. On April 21, 1933, Morgan recorded in the Locked Diary: “Bob’s son born at 5.0 am . . . Nice baby and like him, colour squashed raspberries.” May and Bob named their only child Robert Morgan. To differentiate him from his father, they called him Robin. He was the third child named in honor of Morgan, and he was the center of the universe for his doting parents and for his secular godfather as well.

The birth of this baby, like the birth of the child of Helen Schlegel and Leonard Bast who inherits Howards End, set Morgan to thinking incredulously about the passage of time and his hopes for the future. When Robin was six weeks old, Morgan wrote to “my ever dear Bob,”

I nearly dropped in for tea this afternoon but wasn’t sure it would be convenient . . . I walked on Clapham Common instead and I found the house where I used to stop with my great-aunt [Marianne Thornton] when I was a little boy. She was born in 1798! It seems incredible.
Here is your baby, who is in a little way mine, because he bears my name, and he is born in 1933: one hundred and thirty five years later, and I have lived to see them both.

During this summer Morgan convinced Bob to accompany him on a driving tour of the West Country, in part to give May some rest, in part to reclaim Bob’s affections. Harry Daley, true to form, took the opportunity of Bob’s absence to visit May and stir up trouble. He broadly suggested that the friendship between Morgan and her husband was untoward, and did his best to undermine her confidence in Bob’s love for her. But in the face of this May held firm without being rigid. She refused to begin a power struggle with Morgan, believing that Bob’s loyalties, while divided, were more stable if he was with a man and not with other women. Harry’s malign influence sometimes rattled Bob—“Harry . . . is always yapping back into Hammersmith on three legs and setting off Bob Barkingham”—but he couldn’t fluster May.

So, in the first months after Robin’s birth, the three worked out a détente—an unusual kinship that looked from the outside like a completely traditional marriage. It relied on leaving the unspoken unexplored, and on conventional ideas about May’s absolute sway in domestic matters. But gingerly the arrangement grew into a kind of grace, a complex and undefined kinship that depended on Morgan and May’s reciprocal love and admiration. With masterful aplomb, after Morgan’s death May described the “stormy passages” of her relationship with him:

I now know that he was in love with Robert and therefore critical and jealous of me and our early years were very stormy, mostly because he had not the faintest idea of the pattern of our lives and was determined that Robert should not be engulfed in domesticity. Over the years he changed us both and he and I came to love one another, able to share the joys and sorrows that came.

May did not ask, and she did not tell.

If Morgan resisted Bob becoming “engulfed in domesticity” with May, it was because he himself desired to set up housekeeping with his beloved. Morgan began to savor a domestic happiness with Bob at the Brunswick Square flat. It was the sort of quiet life between two men that he had hoped for since he wrote
Maurice
. He wrote Bob, “The happiest hours of my life
will always be the short hours we can spend together in the flat.” In the summer after Robin was born, Morgan amplified these domestic interludes into a monumental story, telling Florence Barger gleefully,

Bob met me at 8.30 A.M. Liverpool Street, having already got breakfast ready in the flat. I suppose it must feel a little like being married, this sort of thing! Anyhow it is very pleasant and I have never experienced it before . . . I appreciate so much your reception of Bob. It isn’t easy, at 53, to take a new important person into one’s life, the doors should by ordinary rules have shut, but those whom I love, and Bob himself, have done their best to make it easy. I don’t find it much use bothering about age—one is timeless until the end comes, and the years have only bound you and me together because they provided me with precious experience, which we have shared.

He would create a kind of marriage of his own, outside of ordinary rules, a marriage composed of real patience and joy with an admixture of magical thinking. Partly this meant devaluing the meaning of Bob’s love for May as if it were some habit of working-class men in general; Morgan told Christopher Isherwood that he was considering revising the manuscript of
Maurice
: “I have sometime thought of Alec [Scudder] marrying.”

In a real sense Morgan was rewriting his own life as he composed Goldie’s biography. This was the life that Goldie, with his foot set solidly in the Victorian world, could never have. But watching Robin grow, and feeling the baby knit him and the Buckinghams together, Morgan began to take pleasure in being modern. Virginia Woolf noticed with interest how delighted Morgan seemed while writing Goldie’s biography. Perhaps in homage to the tenor of Goldie’s memoirs, Morgan began a separate section of his diary labeled “Sex,” recording his own earliest memories of erotic desire. And in his “Commonplace Book” he wrote a little rebuttal to the note of caution Goldie had left him, imagining that this love for Bob might offer a lesson of hope for others.

HAPPINESS

I have been happy for two years . . . Happiness can come in one’s natural growth and not queerly, as religious people think. From 51 to 53 I have been happy, and I would like to remind others that their turns can come too. It is the only message worth giving.

It was a curious thing that Morgan’s interior world became so enchanted at the moment when the outer world—the world Margaret Schlegel had called the world of “telegrams and anger”—grew more malignant. From his beat, Bob reported to Morgan that trouble was brewing even on the streets of London. Oswald Mosley rented out Olympia, the huge Edwardian convention hall, to exhort a mob of English Fascists; Mosley’s blackshirts spilled out onto the streets of Hammersmith, spewing hateful slogans about Communists and Jews. Bob was on duty to keep the peace at an enormous rally of blackshirts in Hyde Park; at Morgan’s request, he took notes on the scene.

The political situation seemed dark for homosexuals as well as Jews. When Bob and Morgan visited Isherwood in Amsterdam, they were shadowed on the street by mysterious men, probably secret police. Morgan rebuffed Christopher’s entreaty to consider publishing
Maurice
. Berlin, at least Berlin before Hitler, had seemed to the young man to embody the spirit of Freedom. But Morgan, with a longer view, was more cautious:

Yes, if the pendulum keeps swinging in its present direction it might get published in time. But the more one meets decent & sensible people, of whom there are now a good few, the more does one forget the millions of beasts and idiots who still prowl in the darkness, ready to gibber and devour. I think I had a truer vision of civilisation thirty years ago, when I regarded myself as hiding a fatal secret.

The personal peril of Christopher and his German lover, Heinz Nedder-meyer, weighed heavily on Morgan, who sent them money as they pursued peregrinations to keep Heinz from being conscripted into the German army. After Hitler’s election the noose had tightened: Heinz’s entry permit was denied by British immigration officials, who looked askance on his pretext of arriving as a domestic worker, and he was “put on the next boat back to Germany.” The two men fled for respite to Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Their desperate situation—Heinz was eventually caught at the Danish border and forcibly conscripted—made Morgan anxious, both for them and on his own behalf. It was absurd to think that nationality meant anything at all! More than ever Morgan relied on the old Apostles’ ethic of personal relationships.

The young homosexual men in Isherwood’s circle worked out a creative
way to apply Apostolic virtues to these exigent times: they married. Erika Mann, the lesbian daughter of Thomas Mann, approached Christopher in early 1935, asking if he would marry her so she could procure a British passport as a means of escape from Germany. The political cabaret she had founded with the actress Therese Giehse—Brecht’s first Mother Courage—made her a target of the Nazis. Isherwood was too entangled with Heinz to agree to this arrangement, but he happily passed Mann along to Wystan Auden, who cabled back the single word “Delighted!” He and Mann married in June 1935—and remained companionable friends, and legally husband and wife, all their lives.

The next conscript was the novelist Johnny Simpson. (An odd-looking man with a huge chin, whose long face looked like the curve of a new moon, Simpson had known Wystan and Morgan since the early thirties.) Now Therese Giehse was in danger—not only for her political actions, but because she was a Jew. Auden approached Simpson with “irresistible” logic, asking, “What are buggers for?” In May 1936, the peculiar wedding party appeared at the registry office in Solihull, a posh suburb of Birmingham where Simpson lived—the bride, who spoke not a word of English, clutching a tiny bouquet. Auden, dolled up in full morning suit with striped trousers, grandly orchestrated the event as master of ceremonies. The married couple and their handful of guests repaired to a local pub, where they racked up a huge bar tab. Auden announced in stentorian voice that it was all right—“It’s on Thomas Mann.”

But not all weddings were fodder for comedy. In November 1933 Morgan was surprised to read the announcement of Siegfried Sassoon’s engagement in
The Times
. Having lent a sympathetic ear both to Sassoon and to his theatrical but dear-hearted lover Stephen Tennant for the best part of a decade, Morgan was understandably dubious. Moreover he was hurt by learning the news by such impersonal means. He wrote Sassoon “a line of affection and good wishes and (in a sense) of farewell.” In two senses, actually. It seemed clear that Sassoon, whose aspirations toward the condition of landed gentry had always amused Morgan, had succumbed to convention. And he had betrayed their friendship as well.

But Sassoon wrote back immediately, explaining that something sudden and mysterious had happened: he was in love with Hester Gatty. There was no accounting for it, but it was true. Morgan replied simply, “Your news, though I accept it as good news, startles me. (Not a question to be answered.)”
But he determined to be fair and not to treat Siegfried as a defector or Hester as an enemy.

In the waning days of 1935 Morgan faced an ironic recapitulation of his encounter with Goldie’s life: his doctor diagnosed prostate trouble, and recommended the same surgery that Dickinson had undergone. The attitude of his doctor, who ascribed the condition to excessive masturbation, compounded the humiliating disease itself: “he seemed quite genuine in his disgust, and added that this sort of thing isn’t natural and that nature takes it out of you somehow if you go against her. If he wants my reactions to shock he’ll get them all right.” Visiting the Woolfs, Morgan took Leonard aside and spoke to him gravely. After the two men’s “little private talk” Virginia recorded in her diary, “I think he feels he may die.”