A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (52 page)

As he convened his committee members, Wolfenden apologized for the odious task, the “distasteful” subjects they were to face. To spare the three ladies on the committee (and the young women who compiled its deliberations), Sir John decided to use euphemisms—and so homosexuals and prostitutes were dutifully recorded in the committee minutes as Huntleys and Palmers, after the famous biscuits. Most of the expert testimony came from experts who had little basis for their conclusions, which gave the proceedings an air of Alice in Wonderland. One witness testified, “I think the only thing we can do is to give a firm opinion. That is the only thing we can do; there is no real evidence.” A prominent clergyman solemnly informed the
committee that homosexual behavior was “catching”; he had observed occasions where it “flared out enormously, involving a neighbourhood of boys and young men from just a tiny beginning.”

Of course there
was
empirical evidence at hand, in the form of the recently published Kinsey reports. Alfred Kinsey himself met informally with committee members while visiting London for a lecture, but his data were rejected out of hand as the product of an aberrant American society. One committee member reasoned that Kinsey’s numbers were not germane; he was convinced that America had many more homosexuals than Britain, on account of the many broken homes in the United States. The working presumption of Wolfenden and his colleagues was that no one on the committee actually
knew
a homosexual—a peculiar position since Sir John’s eldest son, Jeremy, had explicitly announced his homosexuality to his father the previous year. Presumably Sir John’s determination to be objective entailed forgetting this fact.

Only three of thirty-two days set aside to hear testimony were devoted to the experience of homosexuals under the law, and only three homosexual witnesses testified in person. The first was Peter Wildeblood, released from prison after his conviction in the Montagu trial, and pressing for a change in the law. The other two were “good homosexuals,” respectable upper-middle-class professional men: Sir Patrick Trevor-Roper, a renowned eye surgeon, and Carl Winter, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum. Behind the scenes there was considerable informal lobbying. During the proceedings Morgan had a quiet luncheon with Sir John. He was only one of a “number of homosexuals anxious to discuss their problems.” Morgan came away impressed, but not sanguine about the prospect of true reform. He understood the snail’s pace of changing public opinion.

Meeting with Wolfenden was one of several small feints Morgan made in the direction of public advocacy. During the war, he and Joe Ackerley composed a letter (published under Joe’s signature) protesting a horrifying case in Abergavenny, Wales, a purported “orgy of perversion” in a local cinema. (Twenty men were arrested; the convicted men were given sentences up to twelve years, one attempted suicide, and a nineteen-year-old walked in front of a train.)

Morgan served on the board of directors of the London Library, and there he observed a discussion that made him feel he was “in the vanguard of darkness.” Dame Katherine Furse was writing a biography of her father,
John Addington Symonds. She asked to consult the papers her father had entrusted to the library in his will. One of these was the great memoir of his homosexual struggle and his unhappy marriage to her mother. Her request was denied; Morgan copied out the debate among the library’s trustees verbatim in his diary.

As the Wolfenden Report languished and no law was forthcoming, Morgan composed a “Terminal Note” to the manuscript of
Maurice
.

HOMOSEXUALITY

Note in conclusion on a word hitherto unmentioned. Since
Maurice
was written there has been a change in the public attitude here: the change from ignorance and terror to familiarity and contempt. It is not the change towards which Edward Carpenter had worked . . . And I . . . less optimistic, had supposed that knowledge would bring understanding. We had not realised that what the public really loathes in homosexuality is not the thing itself but having to think about it. If it could be slipped into our midst unnoticed, legalised overnight by a decree in small print, there would be few protests. Unfortunately it can only be legalised by Parliament, and Members of Parliament are obliged to think or to appear to think. Consequently the Wolfenden recommendations will be indefinitely rejected, police prosecutions will continue, and Clive on the bench will continue to sentence Alec in the dock. Maurice may get off.

More and more publicly, Morgan began to take interest in real Alecs in the dock. In 1959 he wrote a letter to
The Times
protesting the treatment of a seventeen-year-old from Consett, Durham, suspected of homosexual offenses who committed suicide as he awaited trial. Though his family raised the money, he had been denied bail.

Morgan added a cautious voice to the chorus of liberal support for the Wolfenden Report. (He did not identify himself as homosexual, but defended the honor of the “married women” who urged Parliament to act.) He also donated five hundred pounds—a huge sum—to the Homosexual Law Reform Society, drily noting in his diary that he did not expect to see much return on his investment. When Harry Daley resurfaced briefly to announce that he planned to write his memoirs, he assured Morgan that he would be discreet. But Morgan casually told his estranged old lover to write what he
wished. In his diary, Morgan reflected, “The older one grows, the less one values secrecy perhaps, anyhow there is very little of me that I feel worth-while to lock up.”

Sometimes the police crackdowns came very close to home. Through a friend Morgan met a young Bulgarian émigré, Mattei Radev, an art conservator whom he liked intensely. Radev confessed to Morgan that he had been arrested for cottaging. Shaken by “Mattei’s disaster,” Morgan decided that he must “speak for his character” in court proceedings. He worried about the situation for weeks, alternately appalled “that the police here are filthy as anywhere” and revved up at the prospect of defending his friend. He was eighty-five and stouthearted, but nonetheless a bit anxious. When the charges evaporated (Mattei paid only a small fine) Morgan wondered whether the threat of his testimony might have altered events. A second scare came on the heels of the first, when a police raid on a Soho club (fetchingly named the Mousehole) caused Joe Ackerley to caution Morgan against frequenting it until the scandal blew over. But Morgan reassured his younger friend that he was unafraid; in any case, he preferred Bobbie’s—a tiny club with a working-class clientele on Dean Street. He told Joe protectively that Bobbie’s “entrance arrangements were culpably slack,” urging him to pass on the warning to its proprietors.

Indignant about the Mousehole raid, Morgan urged Joe to write a letter in protest; he cagily described an appropriate tone: “Be frisky, but not ‘we homosexuals’ nor so much about yourself, lest it humourlessly be brought against you. ‘I have occasionally drawn a cup of coffee at the Mousehole myself little knowing of my peril, or that a policeman might be observing me and might demand my name and address because my taste in clothes differed from his’—is about the level.”

At about the time of the Mousehole raid, the London press was transfixed by a libel trial. The American showman Liberace had made a great splash in his London appearances. His flamboyance attracted the invective of a columnist for the
Daily Mirror
, a moralist and gossip who published under the dire pen name Cassandra. In private Morgan mused over the curious phenomenon of Liberace’s fans who “touched . . . his clothes as if they were the hem of Christ.” But Cassandra
published
his pointed words:

[Liberace] is the summit of sex—Masculine, Feminine and Neuter. Everything that He, She and It can ever want . . . [T]his deadly, winking,
sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love has had the biggest reception and impact on London since Charlie Chaplin arrived . . .

Like Oscar Wilde seventy years before, Liberace sued for libel; unlike Wilde, in the courtroom he chose to appear as the most sober version of himself. Setting aside the white tails and rhinestones for a gray flannel suit, Liberace testified that Cassandra’s words had attacked his manhood and made his mother ill, and “cost me many years of my professional career by implying that I am a homosexual . . . It has caused untold agonies . . . and made me the subject of ridicule.” On direct examination Liberace lied (as Wilde had done), saying he was not homosexual, nor had engaged in homosexual practices. He persuasively wrapped himself in the mantle of family values. He testified, “My feelings [about homosexuality] are the same as anybody else’s. I am against the practice because it offends convention and offends society.” The jury of ten men and two women determined that the flamboyant pianist had reason to believe that Cassandra’s words implied he was a homosexual, and reason to fear they would harm his career. They awarded him the largest libel verdict to date—eight thousand pounds. Afterward, Liberace remarked that he had “laughed all the way to the bank.”

The following year Morgan sat in the witness box at another civil trial. In 1928 he had been prepared to defend Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel; thirty-two years later, he defended the literary merits of D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. The posthumously published novel became the next test case in Sir Theobald Mathews’s latest purity campaign. Morgan’s defense that
Lady Chatterley
had “very high literary merit” helped to win the day for the Penguin Press. Privately, he could not resist a bit of sardonic commentary: “By the way, did D. H. Lawrence ever do anything for anybody? Now that we have been sweating ourselves to help him, the idea occurs.”

Neither trial was an unalloyed blow for sexual justice, but they clearly marked real changes in cultural attitudes about sex. In 1932 Morgan described the evolution of attitudes to homosexuality in a letter to the younger William Plomer:

I am very excited [about
Maurice
] . . . and thinking over the book again. Most people have thought it poignant and persuasive . . . but
have thought it should have ended tragically. I shouldn’t have felt it worth writing tragically. I was trying to escape from “a case” which was harder and tighter by a lot 20 years ago, and a little earlier still the only attitude available can have been a priestlike secrecy and a faith in the Cause and Subject.

Sex and homosexuality were less secret.
Lady Chatterley
may have seemed scandalous, but Morgan had read Roger Casement’s Black Diaries, and
Ulysses
,
Lolita
, and
Giovanni’s Room
in the interim years. And just down the street at the local cinema, Elvis Presley—“a handsome boy”—sang and danced “most provocatively” in
Jailhouse Rock
. Joe recommended it.

Morgan became inundated by the deaths of old friends. He told William Plomer, “I sometimes have the frightened feeling that people will now not stop dying.” He reflected on the death of Frank Vicary, whom he had met decades before at Montazah Hospital in Alexandria:

He was everything to me for about 20 years everything fading into nothing because he always needed help, never stuck to a job, and never did anything for me, despite romantic cries of affection. Florence [Barger] saw through him, to my annoyance, and condemned me for allowing him to depend on me. I see now that I was to blame, but he was a cunning trapper . . . He was a wonderful man, and perhaps would have been a failure, even had he not met me.

In 1960, at eighty-one, Florence Barger died in her sleep. Morgan (exactly her age) recorded her death in his diary, his handwriting terribly shaky from the news. He confided to Joe Ackerley:

She has been as if dead for months, but these things are shocks. I have suddenly wanted to think or look at warm obscenities—this has happened to me when upset all my life, right back to Alexandria . . . I am rather prone to senile lechery just now—want to touch the right person in the right place, to shake off bodily loneliness . . . the loneliness is not total or tragic. Licentious scribblings help, and though they are probably fatuous I am never ashamed of them.

He chronicled the “very sad loss” of Charles Mauron; and another ghost—Hugh Meredith—HOM, his first love. Though they had drifted apart decades before, the death was a blow: “he was very beautiful at the beginning of the century.”

He had expected to outlive old friends, but the early death of Robin Buckingham was the greatest tragedy of his life. Robin was Bob and May’s only child, the little boy who had borne his name. Both Buckinghams and Morgan had not-so-secretly hoped that Robin, curious and bright and gentle, would abandon his working-class roots to attend King’s. He grew tall and strong; he made it clear he would be entirely his own man. On a visit to London, Lincoln Kirstein described Robin—“seven feet tall with hands like hams and a dear smile . . . who is NOT under any circumstances going to Cambridge; he’s going to be a plumber’s assistant, he is, and that’s wot.”

In 1953, when he was twenty, Robin married a lovely young woman; soon they had two young sons. But a few years later he began to suffer from unexplained fevers and jaundice that led him and his extended family on a panicked roundelay of hospitals and specialists. There were exploratory surgeries, rest cures, and consultations—a seesaw of hope and fear and hope again. In 1961 he was diagnosed with terminal Hodgkin’s disease.