A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (32 page)

But the utter erasure of Mohammed and his line—the surviving child was a
girl
, and didn’t count—made the whole question too poignant and final. It was as if in dying Mohammed had dragged Morgan into the shroud with him.

The
mater
is a misfortune for me as well as a grief for at my age I need someone of another generation to speed me up and direct me from the pottering-kindness which is naturally required of my life. I cannot think what he and I together might not have developed into. The end is so final. If his boy had lived there would have been that possibility, but I have no inclination to grapple with a female Oriental infant.

When Morgan took up the Indian manuscript again in the autumn of 1922, the whole process of revision was suffused with this sense of loss. The epigraph of
Howards End
—“only connect!”—now seemed hopelessly naïve to him. He told Masood, “When I began the book I thought of it as a little bridge of sympathy between East and West, but this conception has had to go, my sense of truth forbids anything so comfortable. I think that most Indians, like most English people, are shits, and I am not interested whether they sympathize with one another or not.” But somehow he managed to rescue his new writing from simple despair and misanthropy. His “sense of truth” forbade it.

The final draft of
A Passage to India
was darker and more complex than the first few chapters he had written and set aside in 1913. The novel would remain a meditation on the limitations of human connection, but in a bold and honest decision, he chose to succumb to India’s incomprehensibility. He abandoned omniscience, and emptied out the plot until key elements of the original story became deliberately unknowable. The early drafts of the novel were shaped as a straightforward courtroom melodrama. Adela Quested was sexually accosted in the caves, and Dr. Aziz was the culprit. But in revision the plotline became deliberately murky. At the moment of the attack, Morgan shifted the narrative perspective to follow Aziz into a nearby cave as he smokes a cigarette. What happens cannot be known, but the reader effectively affirms Aziz’s alibi. At the rape trial Adela bravely admits that she does not know who assaulted her, or even if she was assaulted at all.

Adela’s moral courage permits a just verdict for Aziz, but Morgan refused to tip the scales of his novel toward benevolence. The same terrifying unknowability that faced Adela in the Marabar Caves affects the serene Mrs. Moore during her visit there: she enters as a tourist, but leaves as a broken woman. The experience of hearing the echo in the cave unravels her psychologically. Her Christian faith disappears because in the darkness all words—from “Let there be Light” to “It is finished”—carry no meaning. She concludes nihilistically, “Pathos, piety, courage—they exist but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.”

All through 1923 Morgan worked on his last novel. He planned to dedicate it to Masood, “the only person to whom I can open my heart and feel occasionally that I am understood.” The only
living
person. By day, he walked alone and thought of Mohammed; by night, he continued his long letter to his dead friend.

In May 1924, after a final illness that unhinged her mentally, Morgan’s aunt Laura Forster died at the age of eighty-five. She had lived at West Hackhurst since her younger brother first designed the rambling brick house, and she willed the remainder of her tenancy lease to Lily and Morgan. Though he was always to feel like a nephew at the Abinger house, though “he never possessed it,” in a very real sense this invitation was a kind of homecoming for Morgan. With its six bedrooms and its two great chimneys, its north and south verandas, its gables and stables and large rose garden, the house limned Eddie’s aesthetic, and it was the only commission he completed in his short life. It was also a bit of a fossil in 1924. “There was . . . no gas, no electric light, no central heating, no hot water supply or baths. The drinking water is pumped from a well and carried to the kitchen in buckets,” heated on coal stoves by Agnes, and, if one wanted to bathe, carried upstairs in copper kettles. Morgan had known the house intimately since he was born; he visited Aunt Laura faithfully twice every year. But it would never be Rooksnest; it was not quite
home
.

Faced with a move she had long wished for, Lily dithered. Should she move to Abinger, or keep the house in Weybridge? West Hackhurst was well in the country—a long walk up rutted lanes from the little station at Gomshall near Dorking. Unable to make up her mind, Lily extended the lease on Harnham for a time, keeping two houses. In fact, three. After going back and forth in her mind, Lily began the arduous process of moving her belongings to Abinger. Morgan decided it was the moment to take rooms in London—after all, West Hackhurst was considerably farther afield than Weybridge—and he carved out a little freedom in a pied-à-terre in Brunswick Square, close to his Bloomsbury friends. It was a strange feeling, becoming a country squire in middle age. Leaving London for Abinger one day, Morgan told Carrington wryly, “I have to visit my estates.”

Alongside the work on
A Passage to India
, Morgan began to compile his Egyptian essays into a collection. Virginia and Leonard Woolf promised to publish it.
Pharos and Pharillon
was conceived as a tribute to Mohammed, but when the time came to dedicate the volume, Morgan could not summon the courage to put down his lover’s name. He wrote to Florence, one of Mohammed’s cherished circle of friends, to ask her help:

The Hogarth Press are bringing out some of my Alexandrian things this winter. It should be a nice little book. I have dedicated it “To———” because I wished my next book to be Mohammed’s whatever his relation to me, but now I do not like the dedication. All his life I hushed him up and I feel I ought to put his name in full. Yet I don’t want questions from outsiders as to who Mohammed is. Have you any advice, or rather sentiment, on the matter? I could allude to him by some literary paraphrase, but I hate such. Though it occurs to me—two words in Greek—that fit both book and him extraordinarily well.

In the end he inscribed it in Greek “to Hermes, leader of souls,” a cryptic allusion to the friend who had led him from sexual ignorance into the new world. He told Florence that Mohammed had inspired something else—a new and serious homosexual short story.

I have just written a short story which is his in another sense, though I did not realise that when I started. It is violent and wholly unpublishable, and I do not know whether it is good . . . The characters are a missionary and a young chief of the vague South Seas, who he converts and does inasfar as this world is concerned; in the next world the situation is reversed.

The story, published posthumously, he called “The Life to Come.” As he was with the
Maurice
manuscript, Morgan was chary with this new homosexual fiction. “I may show it to Goldie, but there is more sensuality in my composition than in his, and it might distress him.” For the time being, only Florence and Sassoon were trusted to see it.

Sassoon traded him, contraband for contraband. He lent Morgan his copy of a new book, very hush-hush and privately printed, by a young man detailing his extraordinary adventures among the Bedouin during the war. Morgan realized he had met the author, the “fair-haired boy” from the luncheon with Antonius!
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
was a revelation—“exactly what I want,” he told Sassoon. His excitement over reading it lit a creative fire—under the spell of the beautiful Arab memoir, Morgan hurriedly finished writing the final chapters of
A Passage to India
.

When Morgan met him for the second time in the winter of 1923, T. E. Lawrence had not yet been transformed into the legendary “Lawrence of
Arabia.” (The publication of
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
would see to that.) Though he was only thirty-five, Lawrence had already compiled a huge, restless résumé—as an archaeologist, linguist, scholar, diplomat, and soldier-adventurer. He was tiny—a few inches over five feet tall—and reed-thin; from across a room he looked like a luminous boy. Lawrence had been studiously trying to shake off any notion of grandeur, resigning from the colonial office and attempting to enlist in the Royal Air Force under an assumed name. But he had been found out and discharged.

Morgan wrote Lawrence an effusive letter, with sharply detailed suggestions for revising the manuscript of
The Seven Pillars
. Lawrence replied quickly this time, honored to be approached by a writer “among the elect. I feel giddy at the idea of you taking the trouble.” He was just discharged from the service, and had bought a tiny cottage in Dorset, no more than a shell really, which he romantically christened Clouds Hill. It was near the army base, so he could frequent the local pub with his buddies; Clouds Hill was so cramped that Morgan put up at the Black Bear. The visit seemed promising: Lawrence was attracted to Morgan by something like hero worship, Morgan to Lawrence by something like lust. On his return to London, Morgan performed the next step in his familiar dance toward intimacy, offering up “The Life to Come” while warning Lawrence of its “unpublishable” content. The young man was excited to be invited into Morgan’s confidence. “I’d very much like to see the unpublishable stuff, any of it you feel able to show me. It shall be safely kept, and quickly returned,” Lawrence promised him, adding reassuringly, “‘Unpublishable’ is a relative, even passing, qualification.
The Seven Pillars
earned it two or three years ago: and have lost it in that little time.”

Then, a month’s silence. Then Lawrence wrote disconcertingly to tell Morgan that it was “one of the funniest things I’d ever come across.” He “laughed and laughed” at the story of lust and murder. Morgan replied, clearly taken aback, but game. He told Lawrence that his reaction made him laugh in response. “I am glad you wrote,” he wrote Lawrence, “as I had assumed you were disgusted and was sorry though I knew in such a contretemps neither the disgusted nor the disgusting party would be the least to blame.” So the friendship rested delicately, for the moment. As a billet-doux the story was a flop. Lawrence was immensely attractive, but he was also very
strange
.

Leonard Woolf had become a stalwart supporter, urging Morgan to forge on with the Indian novel. So, in late January 1924 Leonard and Virginia were the first to hear that “I’ve put the last words to my novel.” Morgan was pleased and moved, but he knew in some obscure way that it was the end of an era for him. He had a revealing conversation with Virginia about their shared craft, which she recorded in her diary: “Talking of Proust & [D. H.] Lawrence he said he would prefer to be Lawrence; but much rather would be himself. We discussed his novels. I don’t think I am a novelist, he said. Suddenly I said ‘No, I don’t think you are.’ Ah! He exclaimed eagerly, interested, and not dashed.” Virginia was onto something, but she was not in a position to understand fully why Morgan seemed so serene in response to her perception. She thought that Morgan meant to fall back on a career as a journalist and reviewer. But Morgan had not shared his homosexual fiction with her—she was not privy to the
Maurice
manuscript, did not know how rapidly and avidly he was writing new short stories: “Dr. Woolacott,” a psychological tale of a soldier haunted by his lover, killed in the war, or “The Obelisk,” a ribald fantasy of seduction.

Morgan’s choice of literary models was telling in ways she could not wholly understand. Proust, the master of memory and despair, had indeed been an inspiration as Morgan finished
A Passage to India
and as he mourned Mohammed. Virginia was making a similar assumption to the one D. H. Lawrence had made about Morgan. It was true that her mousy friend, at least on the surface, seemed a writer more in the mold of the moody Proust than the irascible D. H. Lawrence. But a notation in Morgan’s diary a decade later illuminates the exchange with Woolf. He had been talking with her about
sex
—