A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (7 page)

Only by inscribing such a concrete lie could Morgan articulate the complicated lessons of his strange encounter with panic and power. Writing the word showed that he understood how dangerous writing the truth could be, how
even describing things honestly might enmesh him, too. The “<<>>” incident became a kind of parable in itself, a parable of both finding himself as a writer and losing his faith in social systems. It was like an expulsion from Eden, for he could no longer talk to or trust Lily. “Later in the term mother came to see me, and said how painful it had been to her to write the letter that Mr. H saw, also asked me whether I had cured myself of my ‘dirty trick.’ I said I hadn’t and she was so distressed and worried that I decided not to mention it to her again. This ended my last chance of a confidant.” At the same time he jettisoned his belief in Christianity. He concluded that he could not be a Christian, because there was no evidence in the Bible that Christ had a sense of humor.

The episode with the pedophile effectively ended Morgan’s stint at the Eastbourne school. He came back home for an unsatisfactory resumption of his studies with Mr. Hervey at the Grange. But the lease on Rooksnest expired at the same time, and Lily decided to move to a place where she could live near a good school, and allow Morgan to go there as a day boy. So they moved to Tonbridge, where they joined many other families who took advantage of an obscure provision in the school’s charter that made such an arrangement cheaper than it might have been. Tonbridge School was a relative latecomer to the public-school tradition; it had been converted in the nineteenth century from a kind of guild academy for middle-class boys, and it had all the pretensions of a latecomer trying to prove itself worthy. There were houses and prefects and an elaborate system of sucking up to the older boys. And the place attracted a certain kind of pompous schoolmaster who felt he had to prove himself.

The best depiction of Tonbridge School as Morgan saw it is his scathing sketch of Sawston in
The Longest Journey
, and it is impossible to separate the sense of what the school was like from his virulent active loathing of his two years there. In middle age, Morgan shaped a delicious fantasy that he had actually been invited to supervise the
destruction
of a boarding school, and he lit into the project with glee. Affecting a precious accent he associated with the would-be upper-class men who attended Tonbridge, Forster addresses the audience:

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and bies: school was the unhappiest time of my life, and the worst trick it played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering
how lovely and delightful the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible. From this platform of middle age, this throne of experience, this altar of wisdom, this scaffold of character, this beacon of hope, this threshold of decay, my last words to you are: “there’s a better time coming.”

At almost exactly the same time he wrote these cathartic words, Morgan settled down to compose his Sex Diary. The miseries were more comfortably in his past.

In the present moment, Morgan was subjected to the most crude bullying of his life. One Tonbridge alumnus, when asked about Morgan in the 1950s, recalled him with un-self-conscious spite: “Forster? The writer? Yes, I remember him. A little cissy. We took it out of him, I can tell you.” There is very little concrete evidence of Morgan’s own thoughts at the time. Edmund Gosse’s letter might have applied to the young Forster: “The position of a young man so tormented is really that of a man buried alive and conscious, but deprived of speech.”

Morgan survived Tonbridge, though he felt it prepared him neither for Cambridge nor for life. He took school prizes in Latin and geography, and though he did not distinguish himself enough to earn a scholarship, he was offered entrance to King’s College in October 1897, when he was eighteen.

The young man who went off to university was not nearly so physically ugly as he imagined himself. He had reached almost six feet in height, and had long, slender hands, musical hands. He played piano with intense passion and quite well. He already had learned to use his diffidence to advantage, devising creative ways to hide in plain sight. Shy and nondescript in his habits of dress, the young Morgan fashioned a caricature of an ordinary middle-class Englishman. He looked both completely unassuming and completely correct. He was gangly, a bit stooped even in his youth, and almost chinless. As a friend, Forster was funny, whimsical, emotionally urgent, and unpredictable. Like his great creation in
Howards End
Mrs. Wilcox, he seemed perfectly ordinary, and yet appeared to live on a deeper plane than other mortals.

He was still almost incomprehensibly naïve about sexual matters. After the debacle at the school in Eastbourne, Morgan had tried one last time to communicate with Lily about the strange conflation of biblical and sexual knowledge he had gleaned from Mr. Hutchinson.

Learnt that there was queer stuff in Bible, and thought that “lying together” meant that a man placed his stomach against a woman’s and that it was a crisis when he warmed her—perhaps that a child was born, but of this I cannot be sure. Told my mother in the holidays that now I knew what committing adultery was. She looked worried, and said “So you understand now how dreadful it would be to mention it, especially if a gentleman was there.” Never connected warming operation with my sexual premonitions. This chance guess, that came so near to the truth, never developed and
not till I was 30
did I know exactly how male and female joined.

He began to apply the lessons of his bifurcated life to his conduct in the world, at first unconsciously. A real innocence was at the heart of this sensibility. It consisted of bringing himself, and eventually his friends and his readers, into an imagined world where the limitations of behavior and the possibilities of expression were wider, more honest, and more recondite than those of the material world. Morgan taught himself how to feel by force of a fierce, obtuse innocence.

He went up to King’s green as a reed.

Morgan came to Cambridge at a moment of transition for the university. Even a generation before, a boy like him would probably not have been admitted to King’s. At that time the college favored the kind of confident young man who transformed the word
university
into the languid drawl of
varsity
. The sort of “silly and idle” fellow who “takes pass-degrees, roars round football fields,” the sort of young man who in drunken oblivion “sits down in the middle of Hammersmith Broadway after the boat race . . .” At King’s, this kind of chap breezed in, with no questions asked, directly and almost exclusively from Eton.

For more than four hundred years Eton College had been the wellspring for King’s students. But the luster of the founder’s pious intentions had dulled over the centuries. In 1441 the king in question—Henry VI, the young son of the victor of Agincourt—established a fund to educate young men training for holy orders. The whole of the college comprised seventy souls: the number of Jesus’ disciples, according to St. Luke. Like the kneeling figures carved in stone in the college’s wondrous Gothic chapel, Henry’s acolytes proceeded in a “steady pilgrimage” from Eton, the king’s charitable school near Windsor palace, to King’s, where they remained until they married or died, then presumably on to heaven above.

But by the mid-eighteenth century this design had devolved into a system of “automatic and effortless advancement” for privileged young gentlemen. Secular, wealthy, and well-connected Etonians began to swell the college. There were no entrance exams; students had “the right to claim a degree without sitting for an examination”; and the degree, once conferred, entitled
its holder to a life fellowship, so putatively all graduates, and all masters at Eton, had lifelong refuge in King’s.

By the 1880s, the medieval structure of the university had begun to give way to the social necessity of educating a crop of men to fill the needs of a rapidly growing professional class. The imperial civil service in particular had a hungry mouth. In Asia and Mesopotamia, India and Ceylon, Egypt and southern Africa, and in London, too, now a world city, professional men were needed, bright men, organized men, men with a head on their shoulders for business, hearty, clubbable, oar-pulling men. Some Kingsmen still lived by the public school ethos, with its reverence of “team work . . . and cricket”; some still believed that “firmness, self-complacency and fatuity . . . between them compose the whole armour of man.”

But within the university King’s began to earn a distinctive place, threading the needle between the demands of rigor and the call to modernity. In 1869 King’s began to require that all undergraduates sit the Tripos, the university examinations toward an honors degree, which had real intellectual bite; and King’s students disproportionately took first-class honors in classics, which Morgan had chosen for his subject. The result was a crop of graduates inclined to public service and intellectual pursuits. Kingsmen became schoolmasters and parsons, professors and lawyers, doctors or diplomats, but rarely stockbrokers or businessmen. Fewer Etonians were admitted. The college began to make room for “oddities and the crudities—people who had not enjoyed their public schools or had been to the wrong school or even to none.”

His father, Eddie, had been a Trinity man, but on the advice of family friends Morgan chose the less-rugged ethos of King’s, just next door. So King’s made room for Morgan, a suburban day boy from a middling school. Like his character Rickie Elliot in
The Longest Journey
, Morgan “crept cold and friendless and ignorant” from public school to university. At Michael-mas term 1897 Morgan and forty-seven other boys entered King’s for a three-year course of study. The college was small and civilized, with fewer than two hundred undergraduates and eighteen Fellows in residence. Morgan was eighteen, tall, gangly, impossibly shy, unformed, terribly underprepared, but more clever than he knew.

The atmosphere at King’s was conducive to Morgan’s growing agnosticism. King’s abolished the compulsory religious tests that other colleges
retained. Mandatory attendance at chapel was relaxed; students who missed services were nevertheless obliged to sign a roster by eight in the morning, and Morgan, along with many other young men, shuffled out in slippers and dressing gowns to the Porter’s Lodge to autograph the book. In freshman year his lodgings were near the present-day Guild Hall, and daily Morgan “could be seen rushing up St. Edward’s Passage to mingle with the larger flood which surged from the College itself.”

More significantly, the college had abolished the requirement that Fellows must subscribe to the articles of faith in the Anglican Church (which had been a condition of employment at Cambridge for centuries), along with the rule of celibacy that accompanied it. The newer dons had progressive views, and under their influence the classical curriculum of Greek and Latin history, literature, and philosophy—in place since medieval times—was widened to include more modern subjects: first modern history and politics and the natural sciences, then the modern languages. But King’s continued to emphasize the teaching don, the bachelor don, the man who recognized that college life should rightly belong to the undergraduates. The teachers who made the greatest impression spiritually and intellectually on the young Morgan published very little, but they
listened
to young men.

To be listened to, one must first have something to say; but Morgan was too callow, too “stupefied” by Cambridge life to contribute to the conversation. He had earned a small Exhibition scholarship on the strength of his entrance exams. Socially and academically he found his first year “bewildering.” He seemed to view himself from the outside. In November 1897, after he had been in Cambridge a month, Lily requested a photograph of him in cap and gown, but he was “unsure of my clothes,” and anxious about his hair—“as I have my cap on, I don’t think my hair will matter.” Two months later he tried a new and unconvincing persona: golfing for the first time in his life, with some Tonbridge School acquaintances. In nine holes, he shot 133. The following week, he worsened his score.

For many young people, going off to university is the time when grown-ups become characters—it is possible to step away from them sufficiently to walk around them, so to speak, and ascertain or at least speculate on their motives. By practice and pretense, a young person can become a self, thinking through what he really believes and knows. So slowly Morgan became a character too, who found himself best when he was alone. Years later, he
observed that “it is difficult for an inexperienced boy to . . . realise that freedom can sometimes be gained by walking out through an open door.”