A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (51 page)

In 1949, Prime Minister Clement Atlee “offered a Knighthood,” which Morgan, delighted, promptly but gently refused. To Bob he suggested that “the company”—two minor writers and a famous cricketer—was to blame; in truth, he feared “the nursing home [would] have just stuck the prices on.” But on his birthday in 1953, he was pleased to accept the Companion of Honour, a civil award for contributions to literature. Benjamin Britten was his corecipient. In February 1953 Morgan went to the palace to receive the beribboned medal, knowing the occasion would impress both Bob and Agnes the parlormaid. He much relished his conversation with the Queen, whom he
found entrancing; he told friends “if the Queen had been a boy he would have fallen in love with her.” He made no friends among the servants at the palace, however. Examining the dazzling enameled medal, Morgan announced with relish, “Well, I got my little toy.” This observation was met with a frosty reception. (Her Majesty may have been amused. In 1969, she selected Morgan to receive the Order of Merit, an honor only the monarch can bestow.)

About once a week he took the train and the tube to his London flat. Rail journeys offered blissful anonymity, the chance to chat up young strangers or to observe particular quirks of male beauty. There was the boy with “a tattoo on his fingers, which was the oddest I had ever seen—T, R, U, E on those of the one hand and L, O, V, E on the other . . . I occupied myself with inventing variants.” He traveled light, carefully tucking a single egg and a pat of butter screwed into brown paper into his sock. In his Chiswick flat he met old friends, who crammed around the tiny table for dinner parties. He cooked simply, and a charwoman came to clean. There were the usual and the unusual domestic muddles: Bob tore the bedsheet with his sharp big toe; once, when there was a fire in the flat below, Morgan evacuated to the street, wearing only a wet bath towel, and clutching a decanter of brandy. To the very end of his life, this place welcomed the friends he had made in the thirties. The Weybridge bus driver Reg Palmer still came by to share comfort and sex. Their friendship was a “prank . . . I can think of nothing which has lasted so long and borne such odd fruit.”

Daily life in King’s had not changed much since his undergraduate days. At Evensong the low throb of the chapel organ rolled across the lawn; dinner in Hall; the clang of the bedmakers’ mops and brooms in the morning; sherry in the Combination Room. In the middle courtyard, laborers were busy trying to dismantle the fountain erected in Goldie’s memory. It was a useless water feature—never managing more than an intermittent trickle—but its wide basin was resilient and sturdy, so, unable to demolish it, they refashioned it into a huge planter instead. If he felt low, Morgan would trot around to Caius College, where his old friend Francis Bennett sympathetically listened to his woes. Attracted by the novelty of having such a famous personage across the landing, undergraduates were enchanted by Morgan’s ability to cut across the decades and treat them simply as
people
. He had no condescension,
and was especially welcoming to the now-less-rare young men from the north and from comprehensive schools, sons of miners and village teachers, who spoke in broad accents and stood forthrightly with their hands in their pockets.

Morgan picked up the old rhythms quickly, rejoining Apostles meetings. There in 1947 he met a brilliant young Fellow of Emmanuel College just back from service. Nick Furbank was a literature man, writing a biography of Samuel Butler. Like Morgan, he was a
listener
, fluent in French and widely read, a bit reticent, intellectually lithe. They shared the same sense of humor, the same cadence of laughter—a long pause followed by hapless, explosive giggles. Soon Nick had read the manuscript of
Maurice
, and was urging Morgan
not to burn anything
.

The displacement from West Hackhurst unearthed a good deal of long-forgotten writing. Lily had kept all his letters from the journey to India before the First War; unlike the faded silks he had brought back to her, they still sparkled. Morgan began to assemble these letters into a volume he would call
The Hill of Devi
. He dedicated it to his old friend Malcolm Darling. Encouraged by William Plomer, who had discovered and published a Victorian diary that became a bestseller, Morgan fished through a miscellany of family papers dating back to his Aunt Monie’s childhood. They bore the fingerprints of generations of women, keepers of the family flame, the same women whom he had tried to erase in his exodus from Abinger.

Reading the family record, so carefully copied out in so many delicate hands, Morgan began to regret that he had burned so much. Marianne Thornton, Aunt Monie, had transcribed her estimable father’s memoirs; Aunt Laura copied out Aunt Monie’s letters; and his great-aunt had had dutifully prepared ten tiny leather volumes of family history for Morgan when he was born.

He began to think of his aunt’s legacy as more than the money that had given him his freedom to write; and now, half in wonderment, half in expiation, he began
Marianne Thornton: A Domestic Biography
, dividing his aunt’s life into her various roles: daughter, sister, aunt, and great-aunt. It was a wistful book as well as a whimsical one. When he published the biography in 1956, it was a commercial success. He felt happy to have written it.

In these two final books and in a sketch of West Hackhurst that he did not publish, Morgan recuperatively sifted through his past, in the process discharging some of the vitriol he felt at having been “deprived of a house,”
and saying a warm goodbye to his family. He dedicated
Marianne Thornton
to the memory of his mother.

The bouleversement of his library also revealed some more personal forgotten treasures: a cache of letters from Mohammed el Adl and the beginning of a novel inspired by Mohammed that Morgan had set aside almost forty years before. He shared the marvel with Nick Furbank:

I assumed the letters would be nothing much, but gave a glance before destroying them and was amazed—all the things I most adore glimmering in them. [Mohammed] had gone underground in the interval, and there is no doubt that a little of him reemerged in Cocoa . . . I was an awful nuisance to one or two friends at the time, and no wonder. If I talk about him to you, you will anyhow not have to find him a job.

The Cocoa in question was a character from the long-discarded fragment. It, too, was intended for the scrap heap, but when Morgan showed it to Joe—a reliably exacting editor—he found the story to be coherent and intriguing. In December 1948 “Entrance to an Unwritten Novel,” came out in
The Listener
, billed as Morgan’s first new fiction since
A Passage to India
.

Now Morgan’s pen picked up the scent of fiction writing. With Furbank’s help in typing out the manuscript, he extended the fragment into a novella, a tragic love story between a young Englishman, Lionel March, and the half-caste boy he had met aboard ship as a child. In the first half of the story, the March family returns from India; in the second, Lionel encounters Cocoa a decade later, this time on the voyage out to take up imperial duties. Lionel’s mother had excoriated Cocoa as a “silly idle useless unmanly little boy.” But grown into a man, he seduces Lionel as his revenge. Lionel murders Cocoa in fear and shame, and kills himself by jumping into the ocean.

Morgan found that it was easier, and more honest, to shape the tangle of lust and guilt and racism into a tragedy. He told Furbank, “Two people made to destroy each other . . . was [a theme] more interesting than the theme of salvation, the rescuer from ‘otherwhere,’ the generic Alec [Scudder]. That was a fake.” Dark, erotic, “The Other Boat” was one of the stories that Christopher Isherwood and John Lehmann would marvel over. It was published two years after Morgan’s death.

As he worked over the story of Lionel and Cocoa, Morgan began to revise the
Maurice
manuscript one final time. He had never suitably determined the mechanics of the lovers reuniting at the novel’s end. Over several months in 1958 and 1959, Morgan puzzled out the plot after Alec decides not to emigrate. He devised a fitting resolution with the lovers in each other’s arms at the boathouse of Clive’s ancestral home, Penge. The new plotting allowed him to discard the stiff and arbitrary epilogue that had troubled Isherwood when he read it twenty years before. It provided the double satisfaction of a happy ending for the lovers and a pointed retribution for Clive.

But a happy ending in life was not as easy after the Second World War as it might have been after the First. Things had not been conducive to homosexuals in England since, in Quentin Crisp’s immortal words, “Peace Broke Out.” Gone were the handsome young American soldiers, gone the protective cover of darkness on the streets of London. The lights were on everything in a blaze of family values, a march of modernity in pursuit of a New Jerusalem. There was a brand-new government, bursting with
order
and
sincerity
, New Towns sprouting up around London to house the bombed-out population in sprawling, shiny suburbs that ate up the village of Stevenage. Now Morgan’s beloved childhood home, ramshackle Rooksnest, stood in a tiny patch of green just miles from row after row of low brick attached houses.

And now Bob and May lived in one of these too. Bob had reached the police retirement age, and after training to be a probation officer, was transferred to war-shattered Coventry. Their house in Shepherd’s Bush, which Morgan had bought for the Buckinghams so near his Chiswick flat, was sold at a loss and replaced by a brick semidetached house,
all mod cons
, whose garden “forecasts an allotment in Hell: with the other gardens, it forms a huge quadrangle of despair overlooked from all sides.” The vegetables grown there were to supplement a narrow diet of rationed meat, rationed butter, lard, margarine, eggs, rationed sugar, tea, cheese, jam, and chocolate. Even dish soap was rationed. Morgan stood awed by the sight of a “vast ham” Margaret French had sent to him from New York.

The social climate, too, had to be cleansed. Sir Theobald Mathews, the new puritanical director of public prosecutions, was appalled by the lax enforcement of the laws against indecent acts. The provinces were holding up their end, but London was a den of vice. Arrests for homosexual acts were
duly reported in the newspapers euphemistically as “grave” offenses, “serious” offenses, crimes too horrible to name. But the tabloids echoed the lament of Viscount Samuel in the House of Lords, who decried the “insidious poisoning” of Britain’s “moral state,” complaining that juvenile crime and adultery were rampant, and “the vices of Sodom and Gomorrah, of the Cities of the Plain, appear to be rife among us.” To curb this scourge, police agents provocateurs were sent out to entrap homosexuals through solicitation; a special division of the Metropolitan Police was formed solely to patrol public urinals.

The home secretary, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, had prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg; now he undertook a crackdown on vice. The number of prosecutions for homosexual offenses skyrocketed. Even powerful and famous men were paraded as examples in the press—including the recently knighted actor Sir John Gielgud and the Labour MP William Field. In the most sensational case, three prominent men were charged with conspiring to commit indecency: the young peer Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, his second cousin Michael Pitt-Rivers, and Peter Wildeblood, chief diplomatic correspondent for the
Daily Mail
. The press was tipped and the timing of the arrests was orchestrated by the police so the story could appear prominently on the front pages of the Sunday newspapers. The evidence used to convict the men came from love letters—seized in kit searches of the RAF airmen who were their working-class lovers—and a warrantless search of Wildeblood’s flat.

Newspapers were in a race to outdo one another in salacious reporting, spinning out contradictory stereotypes about sexual criminals with increasing certainty and fervor. In May 1952 the
Sunday Pictorial
devoted a full-page feature to ways to recognize these “Evil Men”; nine years later it helpfully explained “How to Spot a Homo.” Readers could discern a homosexual by his sedate tweed jacket, suede shoes, and pipe, or alternately by his telltale effeminate manner and mincing step. These “exposés” reflected the anxieties born of the paradox that homosexuals, forced to live a double life, proved to be quite successful at it.

Popular explanations for the causes of homosexuality, in psychology books and newspapers, sermons and speeches, oscillated between the idea of an alien class of humans, diabolical and separate from normal people, or the natural and contagious consequence of men being in each other’s company and kept away from the company of women. War service had brought on an
epidemic of this problem. Or excess mother love. Or absent fathers. Morgan sent a copy of a letter he had published asking for “less social stigma” toward homosexuals to Lord Samuel, as a kind of catnip. The viscount took the bait. “Incomprehensible and utterly disgusting as [homosexuality] appears to all normal people,” Lord Samuel replied to Morgan, “it seems to have the capacity to form a habit as potent as alcohol or narcotics.”

The law that had sent Montagu and his friends to prison was the same law under which Oscar Wilde had been convicted in 1895. Goaded by concerns about public indecency on the streets, in 1954 the Home Office appointed a committee of mandarins—clergy and peers and respectable academics—to investigate the twin problems of female prostitution and male homosexuality. So it was that Sir John Wolfenden, former headmaster of a public school, now vice chancellor of Reading University, assembled a fifteen-person committee that would bear his name. In September 1957 the Wolfenden Report recommended that “homosexual activity between consenting adults over the age of twenty-one in private be no longer a criminal offense.” It took a decade more to enact these recommendations into law—and even then the statute was “mild and aetiolated.” It applied only to England and Wales, excepted members of the armed services, set the age of consent for homosexuals (at twenty-one) four years above that for heterosexuals, and denoted “private” space very narrowly. (Since anywhere a third person was likely to be present—whether present or not—was defined as
public
space, even the interior of one’s own home was not always deemed private for the application of the law.) After the Sexual Offenses Act went into effect in 1967, prosecutions of homosexual acts soared. The vaunted milestone in homosexual rights was largely symbolic.