A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (24 page)

He explored the meandering streets of Alexandria, the places where a man without a map would get lost. And he actively researched the secret city of vice. Using his connections within the Censorship Office, Morgan befriended an Egyptian official in the police. He asked him to find a hashish den outside the purview of the British authorities. Hash was thought to be a
more lurid drug than opium. In the public account—“The Den,” in
Pharos and Pharillon
—he shaped the expedition as an amusing sketch of local color with a twist. The den disappoints. No drugs are found, and the trip becomes an occasion to mock the English yearning for a titillating exotic experience. But in his raw private letter to Edward Carpenter, he confessed a very different story with a very different moral.

Here Morgan made clear that the episode sexually stirred him. Drug vice and sexual vice had the same root, and he was deeply implicated in the search for both.

We went up pitch black stairs in a slum and scratched at a door at the top . . . We push in and find a small and well mannered company smoking the drug, quiet and languorous. There was an Arab girl, barefoot, very young and tired, and some boy attendants, playing cards together—not to speak of odd noises in unopened rooms. One of the boys made a sign to me. I did not respond, but he came and sat down . . . on the bench. He was a young man, really, of extraordinary beauty and charm, very big and well built and manly, despite delicacy of lip and softness of eye. He wore garabia and tarboosh and wouldn’t talk Italian and I no Arabic. The other boys—in European dress and less charming—also made signs. Everyone—except ourselves—smoked. I would have smoked if I had been alone.

This seductive episode was interrupted, as it was so often for Forster, by the arrival of Europeans. “Three . . . dapper young men in straw hats, probably Italian shop assistants,” came in and spoiled the mood. Not only did they make Morgan fatally self-conscious, they also enacted the familiar kabuki dance of homophobia. The Italian men, he wrote to Carpenter “were horrified at our sight. Boys tried to sit on their knees but they were not having any of it at all . . .” Even in recounting the episode to Carpenter, self-consciousness made him step back mentally. “Well, now with due regard for the censor, I have indicated what was to me an interesting and even attractive evening. I felt curiously at home in that den of vice.”

Morgan’s letter makes clear that he felt tarnished not by the boys’ sexual invitation, but by his own fatal timidity. As with his protestations about the
repulsiveness of Arab men, he turned the ethics of the episode back on itself. In the immediate aftermath of the visit, Morgan discovered that the Egyptian policeman had revealed the existence of the hash den to the British authorities. To Malcolm Darling he derided this as “an act of pure mud.”

A few days after I heard from Furness that the owner had been hauled up, and on mentioning this to my Egyptian friend was sickened to the vitals that
he
had gone straight to the police and peached. “Oh yes”—smiling modestly. “It was my duty. I am a private gentleman in the evening but a member of the administration (he’s in the Police himself) by day. I keep the two apart.”

No doubt a promise to keep the den a secret had been broken. But Forster’s terror—“sickened to the vitals”—must have come from the realization that he, too, had been vulnerable to exposure. He told Carpenter that the commandant at the hospital was a “purity fanatic” who put men with venereal disease in “prison conditions in a wire enclosure.” No doubt he could imagine a similar fate if he were “peached on.” The episode only fed his sexual anxiety.

At the time the draft scare was brewing a propitious event opened the secret city still further. At dinner in the Mohammed Ali Club in early March, Pericles Anastassiades introduced him to an old friend, a lifelong Alexandrian and expatriate Greek, whose family (like Anastassiades’s) had made a fortune in exporting cotton. But the man, Constantine Cavafy, had been down on his luck for decades; the ninth and last child, Cavafy had been educated in England, but lost his father at a young age, and lived like Balzac’s Père Goriot in meaner and meaner circumstances.

Now he presented almost a cartoonish sketch of his more prosperous former self. He was impossibly vain and self-important. Though fifty-four, he styled himself “middle-aged.” He was fastidious and formal. And he somewhat absurdly embalmed his physique. He circulated airbrushed and quite dated photos of himself to his admirers. He wore spectacular black circular spectacles, and brilliantined his hair with some special coal-black concoction. A friend described him as having the air of a boy who had inexplicably
aged. He was palpably artificial, and palpably homosexual. And he was utterly intoxicating to Forster.

It took some weeks before the full magic of Cavafy revealed itself. By August Morgan wrote his mother that he had been invited into the inner circle—to “a literary evening.” Cavafy was something special and “delightful,” a “Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.” He was a poet utterly divorced from the commerce of art. Part of Cavafy’s attraction for Morgan was his “tilt,” the complete bifurcation of his public and his inner, essential life. This entailed separating day from night.

The daylight world consisted of an almost comic resistance to the British work ethic as espoused by Miss Grant Duff. Despite his great erudition, Cavafy was a clerk for the government office improbably named the Third Circle of Irrigation. For him it was more like the third circle of hell. He cultivated an exquisite sloth. His colleagues there described his elaborate strategies—covering his desk with papers “to give the impression he was overwhelmed with work,” answering the telephone with the plaintive lament “I am very busy,” arriving late but eschewing the elevator to take the stairs, walking slowly as if deep in thought. Most of the day, he composed poetry at his desk. His coworkers observed him: “We saw him lift up his hands like an actor, and put on a strange expression as if in ecstasy [as] he would bend down to write.”

In the dark world of his salon Cavafy seductively embraced the seedy as the best part of life. He had devolved to a small apartment in the Greek quarter northeast of the square, off limits to the casual visitor because of its impenetrable winding and narrow streets. The flat was on Rue Lepsius, known to the wags as “Rue Clapsius” because of the preponderance of whorehouses in the neighborhood. Indeed, the apartment was on the second floor, directly over a male brothel. Cavafy found the location to be efficient and ideal: “Where could I live better? Below, the brothel caters for the flesh. And there is the church which forgives sin. And there is the hospital where we die.”

Every evening between five and seven he was at home. Though he had lived there for years, Cavafy dithered about whether to electrify the apartment at his own expense. He never did. As a consequence, the flat was veiled in a kind of mysterious and romantic gloom. Cavafy lit the rooms by lantern and candlelight with studied effect,

continuously adjusting the light; he himself invariably sat in shadow, timidly avoiding the eyes of others while yet examining them closely. He would get up and open or shut or half-shut the shutters in different parts of the room, or half-draw the curtains . . . He would light or snuff a candle or two, sometimes adding another if a beautiful face appeared in the room.

The décor was a Fauvist’s dream. There was a dark green hallway, a faded mauve dining room decorated by his late brother Paul, and a tiny red salon with a balcony onto the noisy street below. Here he received special visitors, surrounded by “his better furniture . . . old carved wood, lustres of pierced copper, little tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl . . . silk cushions embroidered with birds and flowers . . .”

In this exotic locale Forster had a significant scene of gay self-recognition. Almost thirty years later, the moment was still vivid enough for Morgan to capture its every detail in the present tense:

I am back from my work, costumed in khaki . . . We have been introduced by an English friend, our meetings are rather dim, and Cavafy is now saying with his usual gentleness, “You could never understand my poetry, my dear Forster, never.” A poem is produced—“The God Abandons Antony”—and I detect some coincidences between its Greek and public school Greek. Cavafy is amazed. “Oh, but this is good, my dear Forster, this is very good indeed,” and he raises his hand, and takes over, and leads me through.

Cavafy led Morgan through to a new world and a new lexicon for homosexual experience. Even picking his way haltingly along the lines of this one poem, Forster knew he had encountered a major poet, more formidable for being so unconcerned with a wide audience. The subject, tone, and diction of Cavafy’s work was of a piece, and completely original. His poems were graceful, unrhymed, offhand. They captured a sense of intertwined insight and loss. Alexandria, “the Alexandria you are losing,” the fateful Alexandria whose “invisible procession of exquisite music,” was his locus and his muse.

Whether set in Antony’s moment, or Callimachus’, or even in the recent past, Cavafy’s Alexandria was a sensual city. It was a city for unabashed gay men. He celebrated the knowledge that beneath layers of erasure lay a meaning,
perhaps known only to one person, which retained an afterglow. That such insights were hidden made them all the more precious. The poems were ravishing and plain. They captured the transcendent power of lust.

sensation that I love come back and take hold of me—
when the body’s memory awakens
and an old longing again moves into the blood,
when lips and skin remember
and hands feel as though they touch again
.

Come back often, take hold of me in the night
when lips and skin remember . . .

And Cavafy’s poems were intoxicatingly honest. They focused on physical passion rather than intimacy. Often the sexual encounters were fleeting, the speaker resigned to the fact that “it wouldn’t have lasted long anyway—” But what pungent memories remained! “How strong the scents were, / what a magnificent bed we lay in, what pleasure we gave our bodies.” Even more exciting was Cavafy’s belief that this all-male erotic world was superior to the heterosexual world. He was unapologetic, and without timidity or guilt. Cavafy serenely believed in the normality, even the superiority, of homoerotic love. To him the Greek way of love, attached as it was to centuries-old Alexandrian society, was far greater than the debased contemporary world. His oeuvre legitimized both the powerful immediacy and enduring history of gay desire.

For his nighttime self, Cavafy constructed an artful persona, superior, detached. He chose to be an outsider, forging a linguistic method in which outworn ways of expression were reborn in a new key. In speaking, Cavafy was equally at home in English, French, and Greek. He proudly held himself apart as a Hellene. Though he had lived all his life in Alexandria, he knew only enough Arabic to direct the kitchen staff. But in his poetic form he literally invented a new language for his subject.

At the time Cavafy composed these poems, there was a vast abyss between written and spoken Greek. Through long decades of political subservience the written language had ossified into a stilted official “classical” jargon, called
katharevousa
. Demotic Greek, a bastardized spoken language, was crammed with low neologisms and considered unfit for poetry. Cavafy
boldly chose bastardy. His poems shocked the ear with “expressions . . . that one might actually hear in a shop.” He seized the colloquial and spoken language and dragged it into “the world within.” To Forster, Cavafy’s innovation was as arresting as the quotidian and original language of the first chapters of Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, which he eagerly read while in Alexandria. But this new means of expression was galvanizing, and far more moving. Here was a way to freshly uncover the gay past.

And the salon provided another benefit. Cavafy’s salon connected men, literally through literature. He carefully selected a coterie of beautiful young men to show his poems. Cavafy wrote them out by hand, and left them, unbound, in little piles on the bookshelves in his simple back room. He would bring the manuscripts out, in different configurations, to flatter or please the individual reader. Reluctant to part with them, he claimed he was still polishing them, often for years. From time to time, he walked to the Grammata bookshop to give the owner a small handful of poems—erotic enough to “burn . . . his fingers”—to print in its eponymous journal. But more often he insisted that they could be viewed only as pages passed from hand to hand.

Up until now, Morgan had not imagined any way to be a writer but to partake in a public world of letters. Inability to find an audience had always led him to what he called “sterility.” But Cavafy proved there was a different path: by exercising authorial control he forged a homosexual culture. Sublimely detached from the dictates of the public, he refused to encounter the world on any other than his own terms. Cavafy’s strange, secret world cemented trust and interdependency. Morgan had grown up in an English world where even
to be seen looking
exposed gay men to danger. Now he found a place where a writer shaped intimacy with steely determination. Elated, Forster described his newly discovered gay network to Dickinson: “The best Alexandrian I know—Cavaffy [
sic
]—reminds me of Callimachus or some such poet—sensitive, scholarly and acute—not at all devoid of creative power but devoting it to the rearranging and resuscitating of the past. And another poet—Sinadino—lately typed me for a present a series of extracts from Pierre Loüys [
sic
].”