A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (6 page)

He became a keen pupil of different
kinds
of knowledge. There was the bilingualism of women, their private talk and their careful, vicious, oblique wielding of social power. And there was dream knowledge, a magical, incantatory way to discover what is already known to be true. In
Maurice
, he would write, “Maurice had two dreams at school; they will interpret him.” The wishes that acted upon, or acted for, the passive Morgan were centered on affection for men. The warm, diffuse, disembodied yearning for connection and intimacy that appeared as a voice calling out in the dark, and the panicky, miserable jolt of fear when the yearning became embodied in any way. Thinking about things was relatively safe. Touching was not.

So Morgan persisted in trying to figure himself out in a kind of vacuum. His earliest self-knowledge was sexual and tinged with homoerotic hunger. At Rooksnest, this island where there were no men, he sought the company of Ansell, a neighboring garden boy, confiding in him and relishing his unknowing touch. Decades later, in his fifties, Morgan recorded the memory in his undated “Sex Diary.” “We built a little house between a straw stack and hedge, and often lay in each other’s arms, tickling and screaming.” When he was eleven, the incantatory voice spoke to him at the scene of his father’s death:

[W]e all went to Bournemouth. There I remember a queer moment. I stood looking out of the sitting room at the deserted road and thought “It all depends on whether a man or a woman first passes.” From the right came a gentleman with a brown moustache. I was much relieved . . . This is the first
conscious
preference that I recall.

The relief may have been conscious, but the queerness felt fateful. That he was attracted to men, Morgan had already known without knowing for some time.

At Rooksnest he soon outstripped Lily’s capacity to tutor him and outlasted the patience of their housemaid, Emma, who turned in her notice after being imperiously instructed in botany, astronomy, cology—“about
shells
”—by a five-year-old. Lily turned to the village of Stevenage, where a pompous young Irishman named Mr. Hervey ran a mediocre day school he grandly called “The Grange.” She commissioned Mr. Hervey not only to teach the boy, but to assist him in masculine activities like climbing. Morgan instead used the trees to masturbate:

I used to hang on the branches, wind my legs about the curve and draw myself up and down. After a long time there would be a nice feeling between my legs, followed by tiredness, when I stopped and slid . . . Once I had the feeling when my tutor stood by—he was supposed to teach me climbing. He said laughing “How he kicks about!” I said to myself “You little know!”

Sometimes his secret life afforded a feeling of mastery over the adult world, but more often it engendered mysterious and startling surprises. Even the “fat dark” Mr. Hervey, with his hopeless little mustache, could summon powerful erotic thoughts in the boy. “Soon after Mr. Hervey came I had a dream which I perhaps added to in my waking hours: his prick, very long, filled the hall and the dining room like white macaroni and wound me up in it. I had never seen his prick, and indeed thought no one but myself had one, so the dream’s odd.”

The retreat into his imagination as a way to explore his desire safely became a lifelong pattern for Morgan. It would be decades before he found both the intimacy and the sexual contact he craved. He arrived at this blissful state, which he called
connection
, through his brain rather than his body, through listening to what he knew he felt before he actually felt it in the blood.

The world conspired with the Word to bewilder him. When he was four, Morgan faithfully told his mother he had discovered the “trick” of rubbing his prepuce “backwards and forwards.” Lily told him that was called “Dirty,” and “presently . . . ‘help me get rid of the dirty trick’ figured in my prayer.” Lily did not know this, but her invocation of Christianity was the first step in the separation of mother and son. Encountering this boundary alerted him to things that could not be said, not even to his beloved mother. All his life Morgan kept his homosexuality a secret from her. One of his friends described their delicate dance: “Morgan never came out of the closet. He wanted to protect his mother. And by the time he could have come out, there wasn’t any closet left.”

He looked in books for ratification of his scanty sexual experience. But the “dirties” of others were sadly absent from
Smith’s Classical Dictionary
,
and “concealed by drapery in the illustrations to Kingsley’s Heroes.” Fiction, and the feelings it produced, were much more satisfying.

Felt deeply about boys in books, especially about Ernest, the priggish second son in the
Swiss Family Robinson
. . . I could not bear that Ernest should grow up—he was 13 I think—so the end of the
Swiss Family Robinson
, which takes place 10 years later, was repellent to me, and I would pretend that Ernest and the others were magicked back into being boys.

When Lily misapprehended Morgan’s thoughts, he did not correct her. “My mother said ‘I believe Jack [third son—lively] is your favorite!’ ” He recognized that Lily, too, sought her consolations in literature. He would not be the man she wanted him to be, but she did not have to know.

Ironically, Sunday school stories became an excellent vehicle for homoerotic fantasies. The Christ omnipresent in Victorian stained glass—the genteel, compassionate figure in every Anglican parish church—is a grown-up Lord Fauntleroy. And this Christ was introduced into steamy narratives, “long serial stories. In one of them I was Christ and led my companions about.” Morgan perfectly mirrored Edwardian preoccupations, neatly conflating imperial and Christian themes in his subsequent erotic fantasies: “sleeping with naked black man in a cave” and “converting the inhabitants of New Guinea to Christ.”

There is no record of whether the era’s sexual scandals—the Cleveland Street scandal, which implicated the Prince of Wales’s son Albert in a homosexual brothel, or the discovery of a boy prostitution ring among British high officials in Dublin Castle—made their way to Morgan’s ears or eyes. But his fantasies comprised a queer refashioning of cultural anxieties about male friendship that were very much in the news when he was a child. Sexual issues began to ossify into law: Parliament, which had been largely silent on these private matters, now began to make them public ones, encoding the age of consent, limiting traffic in “white slavery,” and eventually criminalizing unspecified acts of “gross indecency” between men, in the Labouchère Amendment of 1885. This was the law that would send Oscar Wilde, the
most famous and successful writer in London, to prison when Morgan was sixteen. Christian reformers, who had promoted laws to maintain social purity, now began to bewail some consequences of the public scrutiny of relations between men. All sorts of innocent actions now might be misconstrued. The new public consciousness about sexual behavior narrowed the terrain where social actions between men could be assumed to be innocent, meaningless, private, or ambiguous. One lamented, “A few more cases like Oscar Wilde’s and we should find the freedom of companionship now possible to men seriously impaired to the permanent detriment of the race.”

At about the same time that Mr. Hervey appeared, Aunt Monie finally died at the age of ninety. Morgan had been dutifully taken to visit her in her last illness, but he did not recall it. The “arrival of the news” came by the kind of circumlocution that he and Lily were beginning to develop:

I knew that [Aunt Monie] was ill, and one gloomy afternoon I was walking with my mother towards our home . . . I asked her how Aunt Monie was, and she replied, in the strained tones then thought appropriate to the subject of death, “She is better.”—“Is she well?” I asked. “She
is
” came the solemn answer and I burst into tears. They were composite tears . . . I cried because crying was easy and because my mother might like it, and because the subject was death.

At her death, Monie left him a bequest larger than Eddie had left for his young family, to be devoted to Morgan’s education. And almost immediately, Lily sent him away to school. It was time he grew up and entered the world.

Going away to school meant both separation from Lily and harsh induction into a new world of uncompromising masculine conventions. He was supremely ill-suited to the public school ethos, with its hierarchies of power and its emphasis on manly sport, and he quickly came to hate it with a fervor he sustained into old age. The Kent House school in Eastbourne, to which he was sent in 1890, was small and relatively enlightened by the standards of the day. There were only thirty boys attending and the headmaster was a bit of an egghead, well-meaning but obtuse when faced with a very sensitive boy. Morgan was painfully homesick, and snubbed by most of the other boys, who called him “Mousie.” They were immune to his intellectual charm. School subjected him to all sorts of indignities—the public bathing was a special humiliation. One of the boys announced, “Have you seen Forster’s
cock? A beastly little brown thing,” and in one stroke he both learned the word and felt the sting of being thought repellent.

Most of all, going off to Kent schooled Morgan in the art of detachment. During his second term there, to his great relief, he was excused from playing games, and allowed to walk along the Downs for exercise. There he encountered a pedophile. It was a momentous event in the boy’s education but not for the reasons one might expect. Morgan began his Sex Diary to trace his origins as a man and a writer, certain that his homosexuality was the central fact of his being. More than forty years later, the details of the encounter with the pedophile were etched in his mind.

It was March 1891, and patches of snow still clung to the hills. Setting out over the Downs, Morgan encountered a man of forty or fifty—“large moustache, pepper and salt knickerbockers suit, deer stalker cap, mackintosh on arm”—near the summit, ostentatiously pissing into a gorse bush.

Having concluded he spoke to me, I forget how, then walked me aside and made me sit between some gorse bushes on the mackintosh. He sat on my left—then undid his flies, I forget how soon, and told me to take hold of his prick. “Dear little fellow . . . play with it . . . dear little fellow . . . pull it about.” I obeyed with neither pleasure or reluctance. Had no emotion at the time, but was startled at the red lolling tip (my own prepuce covering the gland even at erection) and was startled when some thick white drops trickled out. He rapidly lost interest in me, asked me where I lived (“Hertfordshire”) and offered me a shilling (“no thank you”). He didn’t try to handle me and I went off quietly.

The encounter with the pedophile did not fundamentally damage Morgan. Nor did it have much “effect on [his] development” since he “connected it with no sensations of my own.” But leaving the man raised the complex moral question of whether he should
tell
anyone about his experience, and here the tension began to mount in the young boy. “Going down hill I became upset and thought how if I had accepted the 1/- I would have hurled it into a patch of snow.” He decided to write to Lily about it.

As the event became public property, it magnified and hardened in predictable ways. Lily consulted her rector’s wife, and advised on the tone Morgan should take in reporting the circumstances to his headmaster, Mr.
Hutchinson. “By this time,” Morgan wrote in his Sex Diary, “I was in another mood, hard and important.” He decided to adopt a manly air, and to approximate a manly metaphor for what had occurred. “You know your bowels sir” [Morgan asked.] Mr. H said he did, and I described how this man’s bowels were diseased. This conversation took place near a fireplace in the dining room. It was followed by another equally disconcerting for Mr. H, as we walked down to the Police Station to report the matter.”

Mr. Hutchinson, too, sought refuge in allegory. He told Morgan haplessly,

“We know from the Bible about certain things, and there is the story of Adam and Eve . . . boys may do great harm to themselves.” He asked if I could identify the man again. All for vengeance, I said that I should, but he warned me against accusing strangers—if I saw anyone whom I suspected, I was to tell one of the masters quietly. “But we shall know him Sir, by this disease.” Mr. H did not reply, his long horse-shaped face was silent, he lost a great opportunity of enlightening me, for I was full of curiosity and quite cheerful . . .

The man was never identified and never found. Mr. Hutchinson even spared the boy the necessity of giving evidence to the police. But the encounter did bring home to Morgan important lessons about how shame and panic could be easily harnessed, even by a young boy, into full-blown hysteria. Forster’s novels would be perspicacious in their examination of how the public voice—what he called in
A Passage to India
“the herd instinct”—could do savage and irreparable harm. He would become the master of depicting a particular kind of male obtuseness, from hapless cowardice to outright malignity. And he would specialize in placing his readers in complex positions of sympathy, as indeed he had been in even at the time. The lesson of the pedophile was the lesson of telling the story to ignorant people in power, and watching them unravel and strike out in predictable ways. And it offered the inexorable instruction of estrangement. Afterward, he could no longer speak to Lily, or to anyone, about the things that touched him most deeply. The sign that he had learned this came in writing a single word in a now-lost diary. “I made an entry in my Diary <<>> to remind me it had been something.”