A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (43 page)

The writer’s warmth and intelligence struck a chord, and the old man and the painter thirty years his junior became epistolary friends. In turn, Cadmus widened the circle of friendship. Soon the painter Jared French, who shared Cadmus’s studio on St. Luke’s Place—and his bed—and French’s wife, Margaret (also an artist), were sending letters to Morgan. Along with the letters came much-welcomed packages of food. All manner of unavailable luxuries found their way across the Atlantic in a swell of generosity.

The countertide of good cheer from sympathetic Americans came at an opportune time for Morgan. These foreigners awoke in him a sense of relevance, and—unknown to him at the time—a connection to the next generation of homosexual men. From the West Coast, Christopher orchestrated pilgrimages of friends and acquaintances traveling to England. One “present” came in the form of an exceptionally handsome young actor who was touring with Irving Berlin’s patriotic revue
This Is the Army
. Before he was drafted, Bill Roerick had known Christopher in Hollywood. Tall, handsome, well-read, and a perfect disciple, he arrived on Morgan’s doorstep with a charming entrée, a letter from Christopher that read in its entirety:

Dearest Morgan,

If this ever reaches you, it will be by the hand of Bill [Roerick], who needs no other introduction because you will like him, too.

As always,
your loving C.

Bill was bright, talkative, fun to be around. They “quickly became attached” in a platonic adulatory friendship. Though Bill was extravagantly generous, Morgan sensed that “something solid” lay beneath his considerable charm. Morgan detailed a list of his gifts for Plomer to savor: “200 cigarettes, 2 pks chocolate, 1 bottle lemon-essence, 1 guinea ticket for [the show], 2 modern American books, 2 acorns brought from the New World for plantation here.” Morgan wryly admitted, “I quite like being pelted by such a storm.” Reciprocating, Morgan concocted an odyssey to see Forrest Reid in Belfast and John Simpson in Birmingham. Bill became a young emissary of Morgan’s goodwill, a kind of proxy younger self, much as Ackerley had been in India.

The new friendships were partial ballast against circumstances at home. A lot of his energy went to saying goodbyes. Morgan recorded in his diary each separation from Bob as if it might be the last: “Bob twice k’d me on Waterloo entrance No. 3 platform, 8 p.m., then walked away firmly, his broad shoulders in bluish sports coat last seen.” In 1943, Bob set aside his pacifism to volunteer for a nearly suicidal bomber detail. Morgan and May were both in agonies of fear, but to their great relief Bob was rejected on account of poor eyesight. He worked night and day for the police force; they saw very little of one another.

By the spring of 1945, age and war exhaustion had thoroughly depleted Lily. A series of falls transformed her to a shade of herself. Though he had often blamed her for stunting his life, Morgan’s compassion bloomed for her as his mother weakened. He found her “beautiful” in extreme old age. He began to rethink his resentments, and to take more responsibility for their sometimes stifling interdependence. A decade before, he had tempered Joe’s accusation that Lily had ruined his life: “Although my mother has been intermittently tiresome for the last thirty years, cramped and warped my genius, hindered my career, blocked and buggered up my house, and boycotted my beloved, I have to admit that she has provided a sort of rich subsoil
where I have been able to rest and grow.” After her death, Morgan was more empathetic:

Now I am older I understand her depression better . . . I often think of my mistakes with mother, or rather the wrongness of an attitude that may have been inevitable. I considered her much too much in a niggling way, and did not become the authoritative male who might have quietened her and cheered her up. When I look at the beauty of her face, even when old, I see that something different should have been done. We were a classic case.

Lily died on March 11, 1945, at the age of ninety. The last night she lived, Morgan lay curled up on a blanket in the passageway outside her bedroom, listening for her breathing. In her intelligent, plainspoken way she accepted death, telling her only child that she could not last long. “No,” he replied tenderly, “but your love will.” In the early afternoon of a cool spring Sunday, as Morgan was feeding her some broth like a baby, Lily looked at him and died.

In the days after the funeral, Florence Barger and Agnes tended to him. For sixty-six years he had been psychically inseparable from Lily, and he felt so still, telling Christopher, “I partly died when my mother did, and must smell sometimes of the grave.” The immediate burden was to sort out her effects. Every room of the vast house, and the carriage house, too, was crammed with
things
—“masses of rubbish from straw fans to wardrobes which are in many cases not absolute rubbish and have a semi-life which complicates their fate.” And there was so much paper: brittle, ancient willow baskets stuffed with letters, wooden boxes and bound books of family accounts going back to Aunt Monie’s father, Henry Thornton, and his busy, frugal Clapham friends. Morgan kept a record of what he burned on the bonfire, dragging out “destroying things—150 years of letters mostly from women to women”; “hundreds of letters in which one woman writes to another about the ill health of a third.” Beyond this sorting out, he told Christopher, he was at a loss, “What I shall do is beyond me, as it is beyond the world.”

Each time he “broke down” he totted it up in his diary. The most ordinary activity—standing on the railway platform in Dorking—could dissolve him. May and Robin, on holiday from his Quaker school in Saffron Walden,
came to visit and cheered him immensely. It lifted his spirits somewhat to see Lily’s possessions go out into the households of his friends. When William Plomer came to keep him company, Morgan gave him a beautiful gold-and-white tea service. To Florence he gave Lily’s stout silver teapot and sugar bowl.

To distract him and diminish his depression, friends urged him to accept an invitation to the All-India PEN conference in Jaipur. He decided he could use the change of scene, knowing there would be no faces of friends there to greet him. Masood and His Highness had died within six months of each other in 1937—each, in his own way, a tragic ending. Masood, whose grandiosity always swirled before him, enveloping all his friends, had been stripped of his position at the university his grandfather had so proudly founded in Aligarh. His last years were spent in melancholy exile, and he had died at the young age of forty-seven.

Bapu Sahib, too, had outlived the India of grandeur—a place of his capacious imagination. Malcolm Darling had seen him in the final years of his unraveling, before he absconded from his throne, leaving the state’s accounts in a shambles; when the old friends met, Bapu Sahib put his head in Darling’s lap and sobbed. The
Times
obituary for His Highness blamed his downfall on “ungovernable temper and self-indulgence,” but Morgan had written a protesting letter, celebrating the maharajah’s imagination, hospitality, and tolerance.

And so Morgan set out on a tour of India as a public figure, cosseted and accompanied, but very much alone in his memory. It was a welcome distraction. “I feel like a sponge which has been dropped back into an ocean whose existence it had forgotten. I have a swelling soul,” he wrote to Bob. Caravans and caves and camels and sticky cakes—two months of being fêted made him feel that he had been living on the surface of his visit. “With dissatisfaction,” he recorded in his travel diary the evening he began his return, “I look back on myself in India, humorous, conciliatory, an old dear, whose lavish gestures gave away very little . . . The only first class thing about me now is my grief.”

There would come more sorrow, and quickly. On his first morning back in London he learned from Bob that the lease was up at West Hackhurst. The landlords were claiming the house for a relative. Morgan broke the news to Christopher: “I returned to more worry and sadness, for I have been given notice to leave this house—it is not mine to sell.” In his “Commonplace
Book,” he made a careful map of the kitchen garden (as he had almost sixty years before for Rooksnest), this time dating it to “the year I was driven out and after it had been cultivated for 70 years.”

It was less that he felt uprooted than that the soil of his life had washed away. Again and again in his letters to friends, he emphasized this sense of extinction. “I see myself as a historic figure,” he told Plomer, “if not a very important one: the last survivor, the last possessor of a particular tradition.” To Isherwood he confided, “My mother’s death has been much more awful than I expected. I am glad that no one will miss me like that.” But in the second wave of destruction, as he planned to leave the house forever, he began, perhaps unconsciously, to shape his own afterlife, to supplant the history of Lily and Aunt Monie’s matriarchy with a new story, more androcentric, centered on his private life. He obliterated almost all of his family records, but he preserved the “great unrecorded history” of his personal sexual journey. All but a handful of photographs and letters were in ashes, but he saved his diaries, his photographs, his memoirs of el Adl, and every scrap and shard of his life with the most ordinary working-class men.

Just then, the sort of magical turn on which so many of his plots depended suddenly occurred in his life. Just as he was forced to decamp from West Hackhurst, he was offered a resident fellowship at King’s. In college, he would be down to (literally) a room of his own—a single large sitting room in Staircase A just inside the gates. It was an unusual offer, since it came with no expectation of teaching. The room was bright and airy, its Gothic windows looking onto a little courtyard. (He would also retain a sitting room and bedroom nearby in Trumpington Street, at the home of the young classicist Patrick Wilkinson and his wife, Sydney.) Leaving Abinger, he peeled off some of the most precious flotsam to take with him to King’s—an ornate mantelpiece his father had designed, the old nursery table from Aunt Monie’s now-demolished mansion on Clapham Common, the table at which he had so earnestly read the etiquette book titled
Don’t
!. At a farewell party in Abinger, the residents presented him with a book signed by every person in the village. Henry Bone stayed on to work the garden, and Agnes Dowland found belated retirement at the home of her niece. Packing up his library, two Victorian mahogany bookcases, some etchings and landscapes, in late October Morgan paused to observe his raggedy old cat, Toma, hop up on his lap to “honour” him—purring contentedly. He could not bring the canker-eared fellow with him. The next day Toma would—“rubbishy word”—be put to sleep.

In the autumn of 1947, Morgan moved to Cambridge, where he would live for the rest of his life. It took some time for his inner life to catch up. During the war he had had a strange, violent dream after revisiting Rooksnest. In it the Postons had been forced to move away from the house of his “childhood and safety . . . It was death and humiliation. The house was altered, and they were putting off the packing until I had left.” Now he was plagued by dreams of similar intensity, but more horrifying—that Lily’s coffin had gone to the little churchyard, but her body “had been left [at West Hackhurst] by mistake . . . and was going bad. I half looked at it lying on the bed where she died—hooked face. I woke up with 3 shrieks.” From time to time, he was seized with the thought that “surely she will give up being dead now?”

As the days darkened, Morgan was cut adrift from the life he had known. But the tendrils of connection that he had spent a lifetime cultivating pushed up through the darkness. He discovered to his pleasure that his room in King’s had belonged to his old undergraduate tutor, Nathaniel Wedd. At year’s end he summed up simply, in gratitude. “O Bless Bob . . . Thank you Bob. I am there. Thank you O living and dead. Thus I end.”

The trip to America came off after all. In mid-April 1947, he arrived at LaGuardia Field in New York. A boisterous Bill Roerick and his partner, Tom Coley, scooped him up and drove him along Flushing Bay toward the city. It was impossible not to feel New York’s ebullient energy—the vertical thrust of the city, the traffic, the sea of hats as people poured along the sidewalk. It seemed that the whole of midtown Manhattan was being flattened to make way for skyscrapers. The two tallest—the Empire State Building and its glittering counterpart the Chrysler—were just fifteen years old. Times Square, bright as day when the theaters let out, dwarfed Piccadilly Circus.

Even in Bill and Tom’s milieu of the theater, Morgan sensed the teeming variety of New York. They took him to new operas by Gian Carlo Menotti—
The Medium
and
The Telephone
—and to Irving Berlin’s popular musical
Annie Get Your Gun
. Ethel Merman’s ferocious portrayal of Annie Oakley seduced Morgan. He giddily spent the intermission imitating her singing “I’m an Indian too!” The Theater District was packed with new plays and full audiences. Just down the street from where Tom was acting in a “ratty little” melodrama, Marlon Brando rehearsed the new Tennessee Williams play,
A Streetcar Named Desire
. The city’s creative energy radiated from Broadway all the way to London, where the most popular ticket that season was
Oklahoma
!, a transfer from New York.