A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (40 page)

Lily, not knowing the cause but grasping the context, began to panic and fear the worst. Even at fifty-six, Morgan had not resolved how to counter her machinations, and he repaired to the London flat in preparation for the surgery, but mainly as a temporary escape from West Hackhurst. Just days before the operation, he wrestled with his tone in composing letters to her: “You must try to treat me less like a small boy when I get back! You sometimes say that I am bored at home—I am not at all, but I do get depressed [with] so much supervision . . .” “I felt it was no good talking it over with you [buying a new divan], since although you want me to be comfortable you don’t like change.” Whereupon, ratifying his own worst excesses, he ended the letter childishly: “Will now have some cocoa or an orange (not sure which!) and then go to bedy-by.”

The operation took place on December 18. Two nights before he went under the knife, Morgan composed a valedictory letter to Bob, telling him bravely, “I have an open mind whether I shall get through or not. I don’t feel afraid of anything, and it is your love that has made me like this.” But the procedure, the first of two, was a success; he rallied quickly, and quite soon forgot that he had worried over suffering Goldie’s fate. Instead, as he recuperated slowly in a private nursing home, Morgan focused on the indignity of being cut off from the man he loved most dearly, complaining to Joe, “I don’t expect mother has quite conveyed the position here. They have stopped Bob coming because I am fond of him . . .”

Even when in some pain, he retained his sense of humor, writing to Joe,
I was thinking yesterday of the prick with some detachment, probably rather like the Maharajah did. The maddening delight mine has so often given me and a knowledge of other people which no other part of my body could have given. And now it stands—or rather flops—for wet flannel trousers and changes of plans. No wonder they garlanded it with marigold and bedewed it with ghee. But to the Westerner such specialisation must always seem silly.

Marooned with Lily at the rambling Victorian pile of West Hackhurst, Morgan recovered from surgery. His mother was eighty-one, stout, crotchety, and “terribly authoritarian”; Morgan had just turned fifty-seven. Together, in this place, they seemed suspended in the past like bees in amber. They shared the sprawling house with two live-in servants: Agnes Dowland, the “last parlourmaid in England,” and Henry Bone, the gardener, each almost as old as Lily and almost as infirm. Coal had to be carried to the grates, and ashes to the garden. There was no proper plumbing, no electricity, and no telephone. If they wanted to bathe, Agnes heated water atop the kitchen stove and painfully hauled it upstairs in brass cans. The mile-long path to the village trailed through a field of brambles.

Morgan’s friends back at Hammersmith Section House may have regarded the Forsters as country gentry, but Lily had served as a governess to the children at Abinger Hall sixty years earlier, and even after decades of respectable widowhood she was sensitive to her precarious social standing. Both Forsters keenly understood their dependence on the Farrers of Abinger Hall, who had allowed their friend Laura Forster to build the house but refused her the freehold of the land under it. Since Aunt Laura’s death, Morgan and Lily clung to the murky assumption that Lord Farrer would not enforce the terms of the lease. Now it was due to expire in months, just a short sixty years after Eddie Forster had drawn up the designs for the house. As the date loomed Morgan delicately bruited the question. The answer disquieted. Lord Farrer did not wish to tie his heirs’ hands by voiding the original terms. Through skirmishes of hyperformal correspondence with his landlord, Morgan bargained for an extension of the lease for his lifetime, but
he was forced to settle for a vague agreement for the presumably shorter term of Lily’s lifetime instead. In the dozen years they lived at West Hackhurst, they had never been asked to dine at the “big house.” Occasionally, in a burst of spite, they would instruct Agnes to turn on the tap in the kitchen to diminish the water pressure at the Hall.

Recuperating at the Buckinghams was out of the question. They, too, had been suffering health woes. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, May was sent to a sanatorium at Pinewood for the better part of a year. Little Robin, just two, had been packed off to live with an aunt and uncle, as Bob, exhausted, balanced his police rota with visits to May, to Robin, and to Morgan. When the little boy failed to recognize May on a hospital visit, his parents were heart-broken. The strain on his new family awoke a tenderness in Morgan; he sent May a stream of encouraging letters, books, and little gifts, regaling her with humorous stories about Robin, and reassuring her that all would be healed in time. He was especially solicitous that Bob and May must have time to rebuild their family life, advising her firmly, “You and R. and Robin will need to be alone together for quite a long time at first, if only to get accustomed to home life again, and you’ll have to have in a woman at moments to do work which is too much for you.”

Morgan’s epistolary and practical support endeared him to May. In turn, he admired her pluck and loyalty during her long recuperation. Visiting her in the hospital was a stilted affair; a residue of Morgan’s prickly possessiveness remained. But writing to her was different: being in control of words allowed him to articulate his love and admiration for her. It was as if by first becoming a character in Morgan’s hands May Buckingham gradually transformed into a person in his consciousness. During her illness May became an individual, a “very decent sort,” a “friend in her own right.”

After she returned home, relations between Morgan and the couple adjusted very subtly into a stable triangle that would sustain all three of them in different ways for the next thirty-five years. The terms of this innovative family structure were never codified, nor were the boundaries tested. In an understated English way, each of them exercised restraint, each traded shared silence for a steady equanimity. Between them, Morgan and May deftly carved out an intimate space for their respective “marriages” to their beloved Bob, with the long weekends for May and the short weekends for Morgan. At the little brick house standing opposite a pocket-sized park in Shepherd’s Bush, May ruled domestic life absolutely. Morgan fiercely claimed
the flat at Brunswick Square, where Bob would fix an omelet on the gas ring. And wherever Morgan traveled, Bob accompanied Morgan in a cavalcade of male camaraderie, from Cerne Abbas (with its huge Neolithic chalk-figure of a man with a massive phallus) to Paris, to Amsterdam.

Bob and May decided not to have more children, and they sustained an amorous marriage. For his part, throughout the thirties Morgan continued to have the occasional fling, often reassuring Bob that he had kept vigilant against sexual infection. He acknowledged that the Buckinghams’ robust sex life gave both of them pleasure and intimacy he could not share, but refused to accept that this diminished the legitimacy of his special bond with Bob. Only once did Bob rub Morgan’s nose in the supremacy of his conjugal relations with May, which prompted a heartfelt rejoinder:

I felt a bit sad at some of the things you said yesterday, not that you meant to make me sad, but you made me think of my limitations whereas generally you make me forget them. I believe that you are right—that particular experiences which I can’t ever have
might
make the two people who share it feel they are in touch with the universe through each other. What a pity all (normal) people don’t get it.

The friendship between T. E. Lawrence and Morgan had settled into a fitful correspondence. Several times Morgan had visited Clouds Hill, the Spartan little cottage on the verge of the RAF camp at Bovington in Dorset, delighting in the raucous male company of Lawrence’s working-class enlisted mates. To mitigate the cooling of their friendship over his strange response to Morgan’s homosexual stories, Lawrence had revealed the manuscript of his next book,
The Mint
. It was an uncensored recounting of barracks life, full of foul language and homosocial camaraderie; Lawrence decided, ruefully, that it was unpublishable.

Lawrence’s official work since he had returned from Pakistan was all very hush-hush. Though he professed to be uneasy about the public image of himself as the icon of British manhood—debonair, reckless, patriotic, humble—Lawrence alternately stoked the public fantasy and retreated from it. One month he would be testing speedboats in the Solent on some top-secret orders from Winston Churchill himself; the next he would hole up in the whitewashed cottage and listen to music on the gramophone with the
huge white bell. Morgan accepted an invitation to visit Lawrence there, sensing that he might need company after he was discharged from service. The conditions would be little better than camping: no toilet, and only the sparest bath in a lean-to, two sleeping bags, embroidered “Meum” and “Teum”—the guest on a little leather banquette, while Lawrence spread out on the floor. The lane to the cottage was so remote that Lawrence assured Morgan he would place a whitewashed stone in a newly built wall to mark the place. In early April 1935, just weeks after he had been severed from the RAF, Lawrence worked with a friend to make ready for Morgan’s arrival.

On the very day that Morgan was to arrive, he learned that Lawrence had been hideously injured in a motorcycle accident just down the road from the white stone in the wall. Restless and despondent, Lawrence had become careless—overtaking two boys on bicycles, he lost control and crashed. Instead of the company of Lawrence, the sleeping bag, and the Victrola, Morgan found himself attending Lawrence’s funeral in the little village. He stood beside a sobbing Winston Churchill as they laid Lawrence in the ground. Lawrence’s brother approached Morgan to compile a memorial edition of Lawrence’s letters. Despite his ambivalence about stoking the Lawrence myth, Morgan took on the task. Encouraged by William Plomer, he had begun assembling a collection of his own occasional essays, dating all the way back to the Alexandrian pieces. These meditations on the English character he would call
Abinger Harvest
; during the year after Lawrence’s death, he toiled on both projects simultaneously.

Late on a Friday evening in June 1935, in a blistering heatwave, almost three thousand people packed into the
salle
of the Art Deco Palais de la Mutualité in the Latin Quarter of Paris to hear Morgan deliver the first speech at the International Congress of Writers. He had come to this unlikely moment, and into the public eye, urged on by desperation. The whole world seemed to have become a world of “telegrams and anger.” For six years economic depression had staggered Britain, Germany, and the United States; the summer before, Hitler—now führer—began to rearm Germany in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles; Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia was imminent; and six months before, General Franco had killed striking miners by the thousands. Morgan wrestled with a terrible sense of déjà vu as he watched the
long, slow “dégringolade” of European civilization for the second time in a generation.

When André Malraux invited him to come to Paris to speak in “defense of culture,” Morgan had few illusions about the power of writers to shape political events. But he felt he must stand up. He urged Virginia Woolf to join him—“I don’t suppose the conference is of any use—things have gone too far. But I have no doubt as to the importance of people like ourselves
inside
the conference. We represent the last utterances of the civilised.” Woolf demurred; so Morgan led the British delegation, alongside Aldous Huxley.

The congress’s brief was deliberately amorphous so as to attract all stripes of left-leaning and antifascist thinkers. The roster included some of Europe’s greatest writers—Bertolt Brecht, Gustav Regler, and Heinrich Mann in exile from Hitler’s Germany, Boris Pasternak and Isaak Babel from the Soviet Union, René Crevel and André Breton from France. But its organizers—Henri Barbusse and Malraux—were entranced by communism. Together they embraced the peculiarly French belief that only public intellectuals could rescue the world from political disaster. At the epicenter stood Malraux’s old friend André Gide, a recent convert, who traced the enlightenment from Diderot and Rousseau to Soviet communism, the “condition of society which would permit the fullest development of each man, the bringing forth and application of all his potentialities.”

As always, Morgan stood in the uncomfortable position of seeing things a bit too clearly to be categorical. Fascism horrified him—it was an ideology that “does evil that evil may come.” To communism he was willing to grant good intentions, though it “does many things which I think evil.” Though pacifism was a ubiquitous position of the left—the Oxford Union having voted, 275 to 153, that it would “not take up arms for king or country under any circumstances”—Morgan found refusal to join a war rather beside the point. The prospect of another war seemed simultaneously inevitable and unthinkable. Preparing for the conference, he confessed to Christopher Isherwood,