A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (44 page)

The principal object of Morgan’s three-month journey to America was to have universities pay him to visit his friends. A dispute between his publishers and the taxman had temporarily frozen Forster’s royalties, and he was strapped for cash. He had accepted an invitation from Harvard to lecture at a symposium on music criticism, principally as a way of evading the endless
unpacking in the move to King’s. That speaking occasion was his anchor, and with Roerick’s help and advice he fashioned a horseshoe-shaped itinerary that took him from New York to the West Coast and back again. Wherever possible, he financed a stay with friends with a nearby public reading. He continued to prospect even from New York, learning with disappointment that Berkeley’s English department had run out of funds because it was so close to the end of term.

The continent was peppered with friends who begged him to visit. There were the émigrés Christopher Isherwood, Wystan Auden, Gerald Heard, and Florence Barger’s son Harold, now a professor at Columbia, all eager to share their new lives in the New World. There were invitations from ordinary American and Canadian GIs who, like Roerick himself, Morgan and Bob had first encountered in London. Morgan also yearned to put faces to the cherished voices of epistolary friendships developed during the war—with Paul Cadmus and the Frenches, Edith Oliver, and the Roots of Hamilton College, who had all sent precious foodstuffs to Abinger. Also enticing was the promise of meeting the elusive ballet dancer Pete Martinez. Isherwood and Lincoln Kirstein had each been his lover, and they told fantastic tales.

Roerick was the ringleader of this circus of possibilities. In England, Morgan had warmed to Bill’s generosity. On his home soil, Bill’s courtesy was Byzantine. Like Dr. Aziz, he constantly downplayed his efforts. He paid for everything though he had very little money, abandoned his bedroom to make way for Morgan, worked tirelessly to make all his arrangements seem effortless. Years later, when he learned that Morgan was seriously ill, Bill sold a small Winslow Homer—the gem of his collection, which he had bought in a junk shop for a song—to pay for a flight to Cambridge. He never told his friend.

Morgan only vaguely sensed how deeply Bill and Tom had made a secular religion of his ideal of personal friendship. Morgan’s books had changed their lives—had touched them and called out a transcendent humanity in them—and Bill and Tom revered him as a kind of guru. His arrival on their home territory was a chance to ratify their love for him and to affirm the values—fidelity, ideal friendship, and deep commitment to art—that all three shared. Without ever being bold enough to say so, Bill and Tom imagined themselves as part of the aristocracy of the “sensitive, the considerate and the plucky” souls whom Morgan celebrated in his essay “What I Believe.”

That Bill and Tom had become actors was a great surprise to their half-bewildered, half-charmed middle-class families. They were both college men whose fathers aspired to financial success but died young. Bill’s story was tragic. His father, he confided to Morgan, “worried because he was not a University man . . . went mad, first worrying over small points in his business, and finally tying his hands and feet and drowning himself in Bermuda.” The young men, now both in their mid-thirties, had been groomed to succeed in business, not the itinerant, financially perilous life of a working actor. They were both voracious readers, pressing books on their fellow actors, attending lectures and keeping abreast of the arts and politics. One friend called them “true intellectuals.”

That they had found each other at all was a twist of fate: they met in 1938, when they were cast in the small roles of the baseball players in the fledgling production of
Our Town
. The play was unprepossessingly simple, and cast and playwright alike were stunned when it won the Pulitzer Prize. The success of
Our Town
cemented their friendship and established their careers. First lovers and always best friends, Bill and Tom were together—separated only by war and work—for more than fifty years. They were both cautious men, formal in mien, uneasy about displays of affection, and reticent on the subject of sexuality. Even when they lived together, they always carefully preserved separate living quarters and separate bedrooms.

In negotiating the world, they were in perfect equipoise: Bill served as the worldly ambassador, Tom as the conscience and devastating wit. “I try never to make an unqualified superlative statement,” Morgan once told them, “but is not Tom the funniest person in the world?” Gregarious and darkly handsome, Bill exuded a muscular charm. Tom was very tall, very shy, and very still. His authority derived from his powerful intelligence. A subtle, truthful actor, Tom had no stomach for self-promotion. He worked tirelessly in summer stock and regional theater, in small roles without complaint. Bill’s personality brought more overt success: he had already been to Hollywood and made a musical film. A strong, sweet baritone had been his ticket from the infantry to a worldwide tour of Irving Berlin’s musical
This Is the Army
. Tom had served in a more difficult theater of war. In the Pacific and in Alaska, he was a military policeman, rising to the rank of captain. Through five long years of service as soldiers in every part of the world they managed to miss each other at every turn. They were recently reunited and cleaved to each other.

In New York they forged a second family from a circle of intimates—actors and writers, men and women—who had escaped to the city and loved the arts. Their closest friend was Edith Oliver, the Off-Broadway drama critic for
The New Yorker
, and already Morgan’s benefactor. She hosted him on his second night in America. Miss Oliver was tiny, sharp-eyed, and foulmouthed. She was tough in a city-dweller way, but uneasy about rural things. She once agreed to meet her beloved great-niece’s horse—named Oliver in her honor—only if he were walked over to the car where she sat bolt upright with the windows closed. Like all of Bill and Tom’s close friends, Oliver lived frugally and opened her heart to Morgan. On his second evening in America, he found himself deep in conversation and deep in his cups from drinking her homemade berry wine.

The visitor and his hosts settled into a humble and crowded encampment reminiscent of West Hackhurst during the Blitz. Mrs. Roerick’s apartment was in Marble Hill, a middle-class enclave in the Bronx. It comprised the top two floors of a house that had been subdivided during the war. Here she lived with her son and Tom, Bill’s sister and brother-in-law, and a skeptical dachshund named Minky. They moved cots to the attic to give Morgan his own room, where he piled the bed high with letters, newspapers, spectacles, and fruit. They presented him with a key and he came and went as he wished. Often he crept up the back stairs, appearing unexpectedly in the kitchen. After so much privation, the city’s ordinary abundance stunned him. Tom and Bill found him outside a small greengrocer’s shop on Third Avenue, standing awestruck before row upon row of Italian oranges. “I think,” Morgan said drily, “the English have taken the war as an excuse to indulge the innate squalor of their palate.”

The city was dazzling. But it was also legible, and map in hand he struck out to explore it on foot, as he had done in Alexandria years before. The exercise gave him blessed anonymity and autonomy. He startled Robert Giroux, the new editor in chief at Harcourt Brace, arriving unannounced at the reception desk and asking to see Mr. Brace, since retired, who had published
A Passage to India
more than twenty years before. Though almost seventy, Morgan seemed much younger. He was “an unprepossessing man . . . with a gray mustache and wispy hair, wearing steel-rimmed glasses and a rumpled gray suit.” His only luggage—so light he forgot he was carrying it—was a light blue knapsack, containing a toothbrush, a set of clean linens, and two Penguin paperbacks.

Morgan had crammed for his travels by devising a whirlwind syllabus of American literature—Twain, Melville, and his beloved Whitman. He was so primed to encounter the exotic that he mistook the rumble of the trains beneath Park Avenue for an earthquake. Seeking out the house on East Twenty-sixth Street where Melville wrote
Billy Budd
and where he died, Morgan was disappointed to see that, like so much of New York, it had been razed to make way for a larger building. Then, spotting the curved verdigris roof of the nearby Regimental Armory, he remarked—melding Melville and
Hamlet
’s Osric—that it looked very like a whale. He delighted in navigating the subways. And he delighted in small human exchanges in the immense modern city. He bought an American schoolchild’s notebook, with a speckled black-and-white cover and lined paper. In it he recorded that when he debarked at Marble Hill for the Roericks’ apartment, the train conductor called after him softly, “Be good, sir.”

He explored widely. One point of pilgrimage was St. Luke’s Place. The part of Greenwich Village where Cadmus and the Frenches lived was already a mythic bohemian destination, albeit a belated one. It had been thirty years since Theodore Dreiser and Marianne Moore lived on the same small block. Moore had walked just a few steps across the street to the library branch where she worked. On the north side, a row of attached Victorian brownstones faced an empty yard surrounded by a chain-link fence—once a potter’s field and now an asphalt playground. Before the First World War the anarchist John Reed had declared his Village apartment open to all, pinning a sign to the door that read simply “Property Is Theft.” But after the war property became
property
—and expensive to boot. Two new subways bored into the enclave of low brick houses, and the Holland Tunnel opened traffic still further to occupants of the wider city. The Village was being gentrified by a new generation of young people who wanted that artistic feeling, but with a doorman and elevator. St. Luke’s Place, Cadmus told Morgan, was now “on the fringe of the habitable sections of N.Y.,” where, splitting the rent for the studio with Jared French, he could barely afford to live.

Getting off the subway at Sheridan Square, Morgan made his way south to Cadmus and French’s studio. Twenty years later the square would be the site of the Stonewall riots, where gay men would fight back against police harassment at the Stonewall Inn, but even when Forster walked these streets this part of Greenwich Village was well-marked “queer” territory. As part of a WPA project in 1934, Cadmus had sketched a scene at Stewart’s, a coffee
shop on the square. In the picture a dozen men and women are crowded around a couple of small tables as the waiter squeezes by, his tray atilt. Sprawling, belching, stretching, leering couples of indeterminate sex talk and flirt. Are these “long haired men or short haired women” crammed around the small tables? It’s hard to tell. But there’s no mistaking the invitation from the beringed louche dandy at the mouth of the men’s lavatory, who looks back over his shoulder at the viewer.
Follow me
.

Like Hogarth, Cadmus sketched the teeming city, but in his busy, ribald world gay life was part of the texture of everyday affairs. All his life Cadmus was open and unapologetic about his homosexuality. This idiosyncratic attitude had offended the authorities for some time. In 1934, an irate admiral had censored the exhibition of Cadmus’s painting
The Fleet’s In
on the grounds that it besmirched the reputation of the navy. The painting was a WPA project, and like Cadmus’s other subjects,
Shore Leave
and
Y.M.C.A. Locker Room
, it was drawn directly from his observation of life in Manhattan.

Strongly horizontal,
The Fleet’s In
depicted fourteen people (and a reluctant dog) perched on or standing in front of a low wall in Riverside Park near the piers on the Hudson where the navy ships anchored. Six of them are sailors on leave, flirting, leering, posturing, and grabbing flesh in the short time they are ashore. The small dog belongs to a sour-faced middle-aged woman—modeled on Cadmus’s aunt—who disapproves of the spectacle. A sailor accepts a cigarette from an effeminate blond man who knowingly meets his gaze; three voluptuous young women cheerfully face down a pair of leering swabbies; a woman playfully pushes away a sailor who’s wrapped his legs around her as he sits on the wall.

Sailors will be sailors, the painting told its audience cheerfully. But this depiction was too much for Admiral Henry Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the navy. He demanded that the painting be withdrawn from the Corcoran Gallery’s WPA show as “an unwarranted insult” to enlisted men. Roosevelt accused Cadmus of having a “sordid, depraved imagination” and “no conception of actual conditions in our service.” And so it was suppressed. But the admiral’s moral rectitude did not prohibit him from appropriating the painting for his private club, charmingly named the Alibi Club. (There it stayed over the mantel for many years until a determined scholar pointed out that it had been purchased with taxpayer money.)

Six years later, when Cadmus appeared for his draft-board interview with work under his arm, one look at his subject matter made the military board
summarily reject him as unfit for service. On the paperwork, he was classified as 4F because of a hernia.

By the time Cadmus completed his satirical portrait of Stewart’s coffee shop, the greasy spoon was a destination not only for gay men and lesbians, but also for tourists who wanted to see “fairies,” with their trademark marcelled hair, tweezed eyebrows, and red neckties. A popular song included the line “Fairyland’s not far from Washington Square.” To Morgan, who confided in a letter to Paul, “You can’t imagine how stuffy we get here [in England],” both Cadmus’s unequivocal approach to his homosexuality and the public presence of gay men and lesbians on the streets of the Village were immensely refreshing.

The glint of the Hudson was visible from Cadmus’s stoop, and in the right wind it was possible to detect the weedy smell of the river. Walking up the brownstone steps that sunny April morning, Morgan surprised his hosts at work in their studio before they could “make suitable arrangements for entertaining the Great Writer.” It was an auspicious blunder. The reverence of his American friends had begun to make him feel threadbare and inadequate. The faux pas of “busting in on them” humanized him. Paul and Jared (“Jerry”) ran around the corner to the local delicatessen for “delicious prosciutto smoked salmon, wine . . .” and then all three picked their way down the creaky fire escape to the small, shady garden at the back of the house for an al fresco lunch. They peeled the meats off waxed paper, and drank and talked all afternoon, Forster volubly, and uncharacteristically, chattering away. He was quite at home. That afternoon he became, and would always remain, just Morgan to them.