A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (8 page)

In Morgan’s case, this feeling of freedom was achieved by cycling through a college gateway. Fluid movement on a bicycle gave this suburban boy his earliest sense that he had discovered the taproot of real traditions, the
real
England. The geography of Cambridge became a kind of psychic landscape, alternately claustrophobic and liberating. Walking or cycling in the city, Morgan squeezed through the pinched wet alleys between the stone walls of college buildings, down the narrow streets that wound to the river Cam or ended abruptly in a cul-de-sac of a college gatehouse. From these confined spaces he found himself plunged without warning into astonishing vistas—the green expanse of Parker’s Piece, Jesus Green, the Midsummer Common, or the marshland at the backs of the colleges, where the sky hung broadly like a Dutch painting, the weather scrolling across it like a film projected at high speed. Even within sight of the bridge at the back of King’s, docile cows lifted their heads from grazing to watch cyclists and students bustling by. The colleges huddled together tightly. Many turned their faces to the street, the market, and the town, but their backs were exposed to wide watermeadows that reached as far as the eye could see, with only the tiny spire of the church at Grantchester visible in the distance.

In the spring of his first year, Forster rode his bicycle out into the open countryside west of the city, alone. Near the village of Madingley he came upon a strange feature in the landscape, an abandoned open chalk pit that had sprouted a copse of pine trees. In the “shelter of the dell” he felt as if he had entered a separate magical world. At the time Morgan recorded the discovery prosaically: “Walked into old chalk pit full of young trees.” But within a decade, the sensation blossomed into a narrative: “The green bank at the entrance hid the road and the world,” and from within the circle he “could see nothing but snow-white ramparts and the evergreen foliage of the firs.”

In
The Longest Journey
, Morgan would step back and use what Cambridge had taught him to shape his younger self into the anxious, priggish character of Rickie Elliot, who retreats to the safety of this place to “tell most things about my birth and parentage and education.” And, most important, in the novel Rickie would not be alone. Morgan would populate the dell with sympathetic friends. The first third of his novel was a valentine to Cambridge.

During the long vacation that summer, Morgan went house hunting with Lily, who had no further ties to Tonbridge after he had left school there. She settled into a semidetached house in Tunbridge Wells—to Morgan a town even more stultifying than Tonbridge had been. On his return, he was delighted to move into the bosom of the college. His set of rooms on the top floor of Bodley’s Building had glorious views—from his bedroom into the symmetry of the Queen’s College gardens and from his sitting room, a long, lazy northern look at the pastures, the King’s and Clare College bridges, the meandering river, and presumably at a philosophical cow herself, who would reappear, immortal, in the first scene of
The Longest Journey
, as the young men lying on the carpet in front of the coal fire debate whether she is
actually
there or only
perceived
by their senses. Bodley’s was faux-Gothic, having been built in 1893; its stone matched the golden flank of the chapel, but it lacked the chapel’s damp chill. It was a hospitable place. In these rooms, for the first time in his life, Morgan discovered that he had a gift for friendship.

At the head of stairway W7 lived a handsome, genial young man with pale skin, a flop of dark hair, and angular eyebrows that telegraphed his exquisite skepticism about things as they are. Hugh Owen Meredith, known by his initials as HOM, was one of the new breed of genuinely brilliant Cambridge undergraduates. His father was an Irish shorthand clerk who sacrificed a great deal to educate his eldest son. To Morgan, HOM’s brains, beauty, and grace were intoxicating. Meredith was a college Scholar, he had racked up prizes in classics and every kind of sport, and he had a shattering confidence about his own beliefs that belied a parallel habit of self-scrutiny amounting to self-hatred. The model for both George Emerson in
A Room with a View
and Clive Durham in
Maurice
, HOM loved to “épater the narrow-minded.”

Within weeks of meeting Morgan, Hugh boldly announced he was an atheist, and proceeded to separate Morgan from the last remnants of his faith. To HOM it was clear that not only was church practice hypocrisy, but the very concept of Christ was humbug. Along with John Maynard Keynes, who would become perhaps the greatest economist of the century, HOM led a public attack under the banner of secularism on the college’s sponsorship of a Christian mission in the slums of East London. Like many undergraduate political protests, the atheists’ “sincere and bellicose” display verged on comedy. They sent a representative to present a petition of grievances timed to interrupt prayers at High Table. Just as the provost intoned, “In the Name of Jesus Christ our Lord,” there was a scuffle; the rude emissary was
escorted out of the hall, and a don piped up loudly: “Would you mind passing the potatoes?” The renegades won the day; it was decided that college work with the London poor could be done through a secular organization.

Under Hugh Meredith’s influence, Morgan lost his faith “quietly and quickly.”

The idea of a god becoming a man to help man is overwhelming to anyone possessed of a heart. Even at that age I was aware that this world needs help. But I had never much sense of sin, and when I realised that the main aim of the Incarnation was not to stop war or pain or poverty, I became less interested and ended by scrapping it.

Examining the Gospels carefully to discern the personality of Christ ended the matter permanently: “So much moving away from worldliness towards preaching and threats, so much emphasis on followers, on an elite, so little intellectual power . . . such an absence of humour and fun that my blood chilled.”

The Meredith family had been scandalized by the news of HOM’s atheism, but Lily responded more phlegmatically to Morgan’s “pompous” pronouncement that he had lost his faith. His mimicry of rebellion, though sincere, proved a bit of an anticlimax. “It so happened . . . that my father had lost his faith about 30 years previously and had recovered it after a short interval. My family assumed that I should follow the paternal pattern.”

Losing his faith cleared the way for Morgan to divine a new philosophy. It is hard to imagine that a young man so kind, so bright, so sensitive could live to the age of twenty with no real experience of friendship, but it was so. With “no formula for unknown experience,” Morgan used the tools at hand. He discovered the beautiful ideas of ancient Athens just at the moment he found the brilliant and beautiful Hugh, and in the alchemy of mind and heart he began to inch toward an ethics of human “warmth.”

Hellenism was an intermediate step toward his personal philosophy. For many a late-Victorian man, the classics served as an excellent looking glass. If you were inclined toward empire, the study of ancient Greece reinforced your belief in the inevitability of Britain’s wealth, the rectitude of its ideals, and the justice of its global sway. Young men like Morgan, wrestling with how to
be
, and how to be
good
, found that “Athens in particular had expressed our problems with a lucidity beyond our power.” And for homosexual men,
Hellenism served as both an ideal and a disguise. From J. A. Symonds to Oscar Wilde himself, they justified the legitimacy of their desire by invoking the halcyon days of ancient Greece. Just two years before Morgan entered King’s, speaking from the dock, Wilde had summoned the redoubtable troika of the Bible, Hellenic practice, and Shakespeare himself to defend his love affair with the young Alfred Lord Douglas:

The love that dare not speak its name in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is a deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect . . . It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it.

Wilde’s greatest error had been to believe that the homophilia of his cloistered Magdalen College life could be practiced in the public world. The men of King’s would not make the same mistake. Anxiety and fascination with homosexuality reverberated just under the surface, but the subject itself was carefully contained. Describing tutorials at Cambridge in
Maurice
, Morgan would demonstrate the knowing evasions of the dons: “They attended the Dean’s translation class, and when one of the men was forging quietly ahead Mr. Cornwallis observed in a flat toneless voice: ‘Omit: a reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks.’”

Such behavior deflected attention from the homophilia at the heart of the King’s notion of friendship between the faculty and students. The college’s most famous don, Oscar Browning, “saw in King’s the material of a new Athens.” Practically speaking, this meant that he loved both Greek literature and beautiful boys. Browning’s reverence for young men was eccentric and pronounced. He had retreated to King’s in 1876 in a spectacular scandal, claiming his life fellowship in the wake of being fired as a master at Eton. At that time he was forty, but he had already earned the jocular nickname “The O.B.,” and he had swelled to the vast walrus bulk that made him the recognizable subject of caricature in undergraduate magazines.

Browning’s ostentatious romance with a pupil, Lord Curzon’s son George—who, at fifteen, was decades away from his lofty position as the viceroy of
India—had proved to be too much for his colleagues at Eton. Not that the relationship was overtly sexual. Browning never laid a hand on an English boy. That he reserved for the safer, grubbier Greek and Italian boys he encountered on holiday. But his chaste pedophilia might best be described as “soul-fingering.” This practice he continued with the slightly older students at King’s. Morgan understood and appreciated Browning’s fractious power: he found him to be “a deposit of radium, a mass of equivocal fire.” Browning generated a torrent of adjectives—one colleague’s list included “Falstaffian, shameless, affectionate, egoistic, generous, snobbish, democratic, witty, lazy, dull, worldly, academic,” to which Morgan later in life added “a bully and a liar.” Despite these shortcomings, Morgan believed, “Whatever his make up, he did manage to educate young men.”

Browning was “the hero of a lost play by Shakespeare.” The memoirs of his colleagues and students are studded with extraordinary vignettes. “His corpulent person was consistently to be found in a state of primitive nudity,” either sporting with undergraduates in the Cam or holding impromptu office hours in his rooms
en déshabille
. He habitually chose handsome young men with indeterminate skills to be his secretaries. His student (and later Morgan’s great friend) Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson recalled finding him undressed “in his inner room, where he slept behind a screen, in the act of getting up. On one side of him was a secretary writing letters to dictation, and on the other another [boy] playing the violin.” Browning may have been unregenerate, but his younger colleague Nathaniel Wedd, always alert to hypocrisy, defended him. Wedd observed trenchantly, “Eton sacked OB for introducing the very things on which it now prides itself.”

Inside the insular all-male world of King’s, Browning ruled. The college was virtually cloistered; the gates were locked at nine in the evening. Within this world freedom was defined in part by extravagant misogyny. There is nothing so sure to make a young man feel invincible and important as the cocoon of excluding others. The college porter is always ready to spot you the money for a cab if you should arrive late and penniless in the fog; outsiders—even, famously, Virginia Woolf—are scooted off the lawns in front of your eyes. Fewer than a tenth of the university’s students were women, who were denied degrees and were contained in two women’s colleges at the margin of the city; Browning, who marked their exams for extra money, announced that the best woman’s essay was markedly inferior to the worst of the men’s. He
prided himself on his ignorance of women. When asked if he found the Venus of Botticelli to be lifelike, Browning replied that he could not answer the question, since he had never seen a woman naked.

In the city, too, women were curtailed in unconscionable ways. University rules superseded British common law and applied to all inhabitants. Under rules established in the Elizabethan era, university proctors were empowered to arrest women “suspected of evil” (that is, presumed to be prostitutes), hold them without notice to civil authorities or their families, and incarcerate them in a private prison known as the Spinning House. In the 1890s Cambridge was transfixed by lawsuits brought in Crown Court by two innocent young women who sued the university for false imprisonment. Jane Elsden and Daisy Hopkins lost their cases, but the publicity incited political pressure to limit the university’s power to control civil life. By the time Morgan left King’s, the Spinning House courts had been abolished by Act of Parliament.

For Morgan it was a relief to live in a world so different from the one dominated by Lily and the Aunts. True, he was steeped in the reflexive misogyny of Edwardian culture. When discord in any relationship occurred he would believe that “as usual the women have precipitated the trouble.” But he was attuned to bigotry and aware of his own ignorance of women. In a few years he would begin to explore why the price of justifying oneself as a homosexual should be exacted in the hatred of women. In
The Longest Journey
he would show Rickie Elliot to be obtuse and discourteous when Agnes Pembroke came to visit King’s. The Schlegel sisters, two of the most complex and sympathetic female characters in any novel, would anchor
Howards End
. One New Year’s resolution in December 1904 would be to “get a less superficial idea of women.”