A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (49 page)

To the gay men in Glenway’s circle Kinsey’s tireless work—and his unjudgmental air—made him something of a saint. He normalized their experience, and appealed to their narcissism. Only Lincoln Kirstein resisted the invitation to give his sexual history, telling Christopher Isherwood,

all the staff of the Mus. Of Mod Art has been had by Dr. Kinsey; he is a disgusting old voyeur and his entire work is a scientific fraud, but he wants to talk to ARTISTS; he wants to know how Artists fuck and come; Glenway is his mentor . . . He has the greatest collection of dirty art in the world, which I long to see, but not at the price of telling him MY story.

Monroe had given Morgan no warning that Kinsey would be there, but the dinner, Glenway reported to Isherwood, “went like a charm. Indeed Mr. F. himself made it go. No reference or even identification while we drank cock-tails—then the instant we were settled at table, Mr. F. turned + asked the first leading question, set the wonderful absurd ball rolling—+ Dr. K. was so pleased. And how Mr. F. listens, now with the worried look, then with the chuckle—it makes one feel like a singer being accompanied on an inaudible piano.”

They spoke of Kinsey’s findings, and of the erotic friezes on the Hindu temples at Khajuraho, thousands of bodies connected in mutual pleasure, which both Campbell and Morgan had seen; of the differences Kinsey had
found between the way women and men become sexually aroused; about “the cancer of unenforceable laws (worst of all sex laws) . . .” Kinsey drily noted that almost everyone he surveyed had broken a sex law of some sort, since premarital and extramarital intercourse, incest, miscegenation, sex outside of statutory age limits, homosexual activity, contact with prostitutes, sexual contact with animals, oral sex, sodomy, and even solitary masturbation were all restricted by law in one state or another. In this light, the stigma attached to particular occasions of homosexual activity—to urban queers, for example, but not as much to “lumbermen, cattlemen, prospectors, miners and hunters”—was clearly arbitrary, a matter of “social custom” rather than moral force.

Not knowing what to expect from Bob Buckingham, Glenway was “surprised” by his ease in the company, his “lively and approving interest at every point.” Bob delightedly extended an invitation of his own to Dr. Kinsey to visit Scotland Yard’s roomfuls of confiscated pornography on his next visit to England. There was much jolly, manly talk. But Morgan tendered no revelations about his own sex life. He offered only the cryptic phrase that Monroe recorded in his little datebook: “I favor reciprocal dishonesty.” Whether the dishonesty in question was his own, Bob’s, his readers’, or society’s was left, as always, to the imagination.

To Morgan, there was something refreshing about Kinsey’s approach. He had so little in common with the European sexologists. He didn’t, like Freud, feel the need to bore into the psyche and penetrate the mystery of desire—an impulse in Freud’s work that both irritated and frightened Morgan. He didn’t, like Hirschfeld and Krafft-Ebing, make “pigeonholes” for sexual desire. Most intriguing to Morgan was Kinsey’s discovery that all men—gay and straight—responded sexually to “obscene” images and fantasies, while few women did. Imagination had long been the wellspring of lust for Morgan, and he cherished the power of his erotic dreams. He had always stoked his own lust, and satisfied it too, by writing erotic tableaux. The day after the dinner, while hiking with Bob and Glenway, Morgan walked ahead in silence for a few minutes, contemplating this nugget of truth. He stopped in his tracks. In a soft voice, he said, “I must say that it comforted me to be told this.”

A second comfort was Kinsey’s affirmation that homosexuals did not seem to be some intermediate sex, as the scientists of Morgan’s youth—indeed even Edward Carpenter—had believed. Bob, in his conventional way, had missed this point. The next day in conversation, Bob quoted the
Bible verse “Male and female he created them” to affirm that Kinsey had identified “two divisions of humankind . . . half effeminate and half manly.” But Morgan corrected him sharply. “‘No, Bob no!’ Forster protested. ‘Effeminacy is only a manner. A homosexual man is as male as a heterosexual man. Only remember just one discovery that the good doctor told us: very few women take any interest in obscene things, whereas most men enjoy them and feel the need for them . . .’”

Two days after the dinner, an august collection of cultural figures from what Morgan teasingly called “fame’s lower slopes” gathered in the grand hall of the academy on 155th Street to hear Morgan give a lecture, “Art for Art’s Sake.” It was an old-fashioned argument, and Morgan knew it.

A writer . . . who chose “Art for Art’s Sake” for his theme fifty years ago could be sure of being in the swim, and could feel so confident of success that he . . . dressed himself in esthetic costumes suitable to the occasion—in an embroidered dressing-gown . . . or a blue velvet suit with a Lord Fauntleroy collar . . . and carried a poppy or a lily or a long peacock’s feather in his mediaeval hand. Times have changed.

But had they? Standing in a rumpled brown tweed suit rather than Wilde’s ostentatious dress, Morgan told the assemblage of academics, newly inducted artists such as William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Thomas Mann, and his friends Christopher, Wystan, and Glenway, that he, too, felt himself an outsider. It was exactly what he had written to Paul Cadmus several years earlier. They had been discussing whether painters revealed themselves in their art. Ingres was most mysterious, Morgan argued, “a painter’s painter I should think,” who “doesn’t therefore reveal himself to the outsider.” Morgan clearly identified with this position. He confided to Paul, “I am the outsidest of outsiders.”

That afternoon at the academy Morgan embraced the idea, as he had in “What I Believe,” that the artist must necessarily find himself out of favor and out of power. An artist would always be, he said, “the bohemian, the outsider, the parasite, the rat.” So had Shelley been, and so were all great poet-prophets. He ended with a flourish: “I would sooner be a swimming rat than a sinking ship—at all events I can look around me for a little longer.” It was a pessimism about the world he felt was justly earned. Then
he collected his medal and his check and “beat it” to Glenway’s farm in New Jersey.

Farm
is probably the wrong word for the eighteenth-century house and grounds where Glenway’s family lived. Mulhocaway Farm was, to use Alexander Pope’s phrase, “nature to advantage dress’d.” And Lloyd and Barbara Wescott were a modern American version of Pope’s landed gentry. Cadmus had painted the couple in the style of Gainsborough grafted onto Thomas Hart Benton, in front of an opulent display of modern barns, machines, and artificially inseminated livestock, with a single almost invisible groomsman in the background. Lord of this queer manor, Lloyd Wescott stocked Mulhocaway Farm with prize heifers and horses, and eventually, piecemeal, with the whole of his dirt-poor Wisconsin clan—his mother and father, several of his sisters, and the triangle of aesthetes, George, Monroe, and Glenway. He provided them with an eighteenth-century stone farmhouse they called Stoneblossom, where Bob and Morgan slept in adjoining bedrooms at the top of the stairs while Glenway encamped in the paneled library below.

Living in this hothouse atmosphere, Glenway had developed the aura of a boy pressing his nose on the glass looking in at a party to which he had not been invited. His connoisseurship of dependence, and his acute sensitivity, made him an ideal host. He was determined insofar as he could to treat Bob Buckingham as a person in his own right for the duration of the visit. So they took Bob, who had an interest in police work in the United States, to a women’s prison near the farm, where Lloyd knew the woman superintendent intimately. Bob commented, about arresting people, “I don’t even use my truncheon. I use my fists. The poor devils resent it less.”

At Mulhocaway, Glenway propelled Morgan and Bob into a scene of genuine, almost cartoonish familial conviviality. His sister played folk songs on the guitar as they settled around the fireplace after dinner. Glenway, in a gracious kind of reciprocal dishonesty, did not broach the question of
Maurice
—about which he had heard from Christopher—just as he did not broach the question of sleeping arrangements for Morgan and Bob, whose “duet of voices” could be heard laughing and teasing at the top of the stairs. Glenway quoted Morgan to himself: “Mutual secrecy being one of the conditions of life on the globe.”

Notwithstanding this, the precise nature of the relationship between Morgan and Bob was intriguing to him, and the subject of intense speculation
among Forster’s American friends. Paul Cadmus believed Morgan and Bob were lovers, finding them to be temperamentally and otherwise “perfect for each other.” From what he had seen on this trip, Glenway agreed. Lincoln found Bob to be “the toughest man I ever met. Let’s face it,” he told Christopher, “it’s not by accident he is a cop, even though a very kind cop, and a wildly attractive one.” In contrast, Bill Roerick was convinced that Bob was straight, and that Morgan was forced to walk gingerly at the edge of intimacy.

Even these very close friends found Morgan adept at “reject[ing] intimacy without impairing affection,” to quote Morgan’s own description of T. E. Lawrence. A strange moment of déjà vu between Monroe and Morgan on the way out to the farm underscored this point. They found a rural restaurant in which to eat supper. As they waited for the meal to arrive, Monroe snatched Morgan’s “beclouded” glasses from his nose, and cleaned them. Pleased with himself, he asked Morgan, “Now, don’t you see better?” Just as Mohammed had done when Morgan had touched his spectacles thirty years before, Morgan recoiled and looked around the room in mordant silence. Then he said, terribly politely, “Thank you Monroe. But if you don’t mind my saying so, I’m not sure I want to see so much.”

They were back at St. Luke’s Place from Stoneblossom the Tuesday after Memorial Day. The next afternoon, Bob and Morgan dressed in their best bespoke suits, shaved and combed their hair, and took a cab to George Platt Lynes’s midtown studio. It is hard to believe that the photographs from this session were taken only a day after the snapshots of a dowdy, middle-aged Bob sucking on a pipe at Stoneblossom. As he did for all his sitters, George made Bob and Morgan look wondrous.

Though he was only forty-two, Lynes had gone completely silver-maned. He was so striking that men and women stopped in their tracks to linger and look at him as he walked on the sidewalks of Manhattan. Entering his studio meant entering a seductive, charming, wholly artificial world. The workspace was essentially a stage, a large empty box with concrete walls and a scuffed cement floor. The skylight was painted over to deny all natural light. George devised complex and wildly inventive stage lighting that complemented the insight into character that was the hallmark of his portraits. He was already famous for his iconic photographs of Marianne Moore in her tricornered hat and Kirstein’s New York City Ballet dancers enacting Greek
myths. (He would be more famous still after his death at age forty-eight for his dazzling and provocative male nudes, which were a strong influence on Robert Mapplethorpe.)

In photographing Morgan, George had a real challenge because his subject was notoriously unphotogenic. His liquid moods played upon his face like a screen, but “[w]hen a camera approaches,” Bill Roerick observed, “he looks at it, it looks at him, and they have nothing to say to each other. He produces an official silence, the camera produces an unlikeness.” Only in occasional snapshots could Morgan “sometimes look . . . quite like himself.” George had something even more ambitious in mind: to capture, with Morgan’s cooperation, a chameleon variety of selves, the most beautiful best public and private selves his sitters could imagine.

To do this magic task, George worked stealthily. He used his physical beauty and his extraordinary charm to disarm his photographic subjects. He often worked shirtless while wearing dress trousers and a belt. He put sitters at ease with gentle wit. Most important, he created an aura of trust. It was clear that his only object in making a portrait was to bring out a self that resembled the sitter, but more perfectly. In his sessions, George avoided the gaze that would invite a sitter’s self-consciousness by making it seem as though “the subject whom he was photographing appeared to be to him of the least concern.” The actual moment that captured the likeness was disguised. Donald Windham noted, “When Lynes photographed me . . . I was waiting, listening to him telling his assistants to conceal a lamp behind a prop to adjust a spot or bowl, and wondering when he would get around to directing me beyond casually suggesting that I try looking right or left, when he announced that the sitting was over.”

In a ninety-minute session, George took four sets of portraits, turning from one to another staged setup in his studio and relying on evocative props recycled from his commercial work in fashion photography: two of Morgan alone, a series of Bob alone, and a gay domestic portrait of the two men together. Pieced together, these prints reveal the dazzling balance of speed and spontaneity of Lynes’s working method. George succeeded in fulfilling the fantasy that Morgan had confided in his letter to Paul: making Bob look as vital and seductive as he had when they met twenty years before. For this sequence, George used a mock-up of rough-hewn whitewashed wood, cleverly alluding to the boardwalk steps that descended to the beach at Fire Island that he, Paul, Jerry, and George Tooker frequented in the summers.
Leaning back against the crook of a railing, Bob was captured with a laugh fading from his lips, his formal dark suit in such contrast to the bright background that he almost seemed to loom out of a mist. Did Bob recognize the allusion? Did he collude in this portrait of himself as a gay man?