A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (47 page)

Tolerance and sexual freedom were interlinked in Paul’s mind. So he made
What I Believe
a paean to the polymorphous expression of desire. In the center of a vast field of naked humanity the figure of Forster presided—a naked Pan, smiling, his hair blown in the breeze like a dandelion gone to seed, his long thin hands palms up in a characteristic gesture both eloquent and awkward, between a shrug and a beatification. His counterpart, a ghastly
figure of death, loomed from a recently dug grave. All around them were naked lovers and friends, lovers of every shape and color, lovers in a great tangle, grotesque or picturesque, enraptured, affectionate. Flesh, flesh, flesh.

And spirit. Partly influenced by Jerry’s interest in Jung’s dualities of the self, Paul painted several figures in the painting twice. There were two self-portraits: one Paul in the picture sat sketching intensely, embraced by Jerry while Margaret stood behind them, her arms encircling them both. The second Paul was more quizzical. He lay on his belly reading a chapter titled “Relationships” in a book labeled
What I Believe
. Cadmus painted his brother-in-law Lincoln Kirstein twice, the first comical, playing a panpipe, with a cat balanced on his head. The figure of Fidelma rested her head in his lap. The second Lincoln was tender, standing with his arms around Pete Martinez’s neck. Forster, the gay paterfamilias to this extraordinary assemblage, wore nothing but a ribbon with the words “Love, the beloved republic” inscribed on it. In the far distance the tiny lighthouse of Pharos cast its enlightening beam. Forster was “charmed” to be the muse for this scene of sexual friendship, though he told Paul that he found his portrait too flattering, “for I
have
got so fat!” Still, to be the genius loci of a sexual utopia was a worthy immortality.

Paul was not the only younger artist who sought Morgan’s approval. In the summer of 1948 the composer Benjamin Britten organized a music festival near his home in Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast. He asked Morgan, “England’s greatest novelist,” to give a lecture. Morgan joined Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, sleeping several nights in the guest bedroom of Crag House, a stucco villa whose front garden touched the shingle of the North Sea. Late at night his hosts entertained him, Ben hunched over the grand piano while Pears stood, leaning on its cluttered closed lid. They made up little musical parodies and sang folk songs late into the night. Aldeburgh was “a bleak little place: not beautiful,” Forster wrote. But he found the large sitting room congenial, and Ben and Peter to be “the sweetest people.”

Britten and Pears had been inseparable partners, in love and work, for a decade. With his unruly cloud of curly hair and his sloping shoulders, Ben was slighter than the imposing Peter, whose craggy features amplified the expressiveness of his tenor voice. To the “shock” and consternation of some of their friends, the men brazenly shared a large bed in the main bedroom upstairs with a wide view of the sea. For the public they accommodated a
more chaste cover story. The adjoining room with a spartan single bed (where Morgan slept) was labeled “Peter Pears’ room” in a photo montage celebrating the nascent festival. During the visit, Britten proposed a future collaboration. When a commission for an opera for the Festival of Britain materialized, he invited Morgan to write the libretto. Together they would choose the subject.

Though Britten was only thirty-four at the time, he was already acknowledged as the greatest British composer of the century. He had met Morgan more than a decade before. Like so many of Morgan’s younger friends, they were introduced by Christopher Isherwood. Then only twenty-three, Ben had written the incidental music for
The Ascent of F6
. Just after the play premiered Britten’s mother died, and Morgan’s sympathy and his musical sensitivity lingered in Ben’s mind. Seven years later, in 1944, Morgan had come to London specially to hear Pears sing Britten’s
Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo
in a J. A. Symonds translation.

The strong homoerotic ancestry of the work was unaccountably lost on most of the reviewers. But for these two artists so seasoned in the art of the unspoken, the song cycle became a kind of platonic dialogue, a connection to each other and to the unrecorded history hidden in plain sight. First Ben gave Morgan a copy of the score. Then—thoroughly moved by Pears’s performance—Morgan bought the recording though he had no gramophone to play it on. When Ben heard of this, he bought Morgan a handsome record player. He inscribed Morgan’s copy of
Albert Herring
—“For my dear Morgan / a very humble tribute to a very great man.” Ben remembered that it was Morgan who had seen Christopher and Wystan off at Waterloo Station when they embarked for America, and Morgan alone of the old guard who had not sneered when, fueled by pacifism, he and Peter had followed their friends to America in 1939.

Britten and Pears’s three-year sojourn in the United States had not been a success. Ben was a brittle, nervous man who needed settled conditions to work. He and Peter were obliged to tour to make money, and this restlessness made them unhappy and unproductive. In November 1940, they shared a row house in Brooklyn Heights with Auden; Thomas Mann’s son Golo; Paul Bowles and his wife, Jane; the burlesque artist Gypsy Rose Lee; and Carson McCullers. But this bohemian ménage took its toll, and the pair fled west to California. There, in the summer of 1941, an encounter with Morgan’s writing changed their lives. Homesick, cash-strapped, and unhappy, they
discovered a copy of
The Listener
, and in it they read Morgan’s radio talk on the forgotten poet George Crabbe and his character Peter Grimes, a “savage fisherman . . . who murdered his [three young] apprentices and was haunted by their ghosts.”

Like Crabbe, Britten had grown up in the tiny provincial town of Aldeburgh in the Suffolk marshland. But both Crabbe’s propinquity and his poetry were unknown to him. Reading Forster’s essay gave Ben “such a feeling of nostalgia” that he and Peter combed the used bookstores of Los Angeles for a copy of Crabbe’s
The Borough
, first published in 1810. They found one, and devoured the poems.

Nostalgia
is a strange word for the feelings evoked by these sketches of folk life. Crabbe’s poetry was, well, crabby.
The Borough
depicted the flinty, unhappy circumstance of poor rural people living in provincial isolation. Forster’s essay began simply, “To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England.” As a gay man Britten likely detected the ambivalence in these words. Morgan captured Crabbe’s “uncomfortable mind,” his “antipathy . . . connected with a profound attraction” toward the bleak, unforgiving landscape that shaped the townspeople of Aldeburgh, Crabbe, and his art. Morgan located the same “inner tension, the same desire for what repels” in both the poet and his unhappy fisherman. A similar tension may have surfaced in Britten, whose uneasy status as a homosexual and a conscientious objector complicated his desire to be canonized as a court composer. Reading Forster sharpened Ben’s homesickness. Looking back on this moment, Britten wrote that Morgan’s “revealing article” made him “suddenly realize . . . where I belonged and what I lacked.” He and Peter decided to return to England. Morgan had led them home.

Britten spent the whole of 1944 in England, writing
Peter Grimes
. His adaptation was telling. Where Crabbe’s Grimes killed his apprentices by neglect and privation, Britten and Pears imagined a character whose sexual desire for the boys is linked to his violence against them. In their preliminary sketch, Grimes replicated a cycle of violence—just as his father had beaten him, he beats the boys, thinking, “Would you rather I loved you? you are sweet, young etc.—but you must love me, why do you not love me? Love me darn you.” Britten’s librettist Montagu Slater took up this angle in the early drafts, emphasizing both Grimes’s pederasty and the complicity of the villagers in looking the other way. (He quoted Crabbe directly: “some on hearing cries / Said calmly ‘Grimes is at his exercise.’”)

But in revision Britten and Pears thought better of their conception of Grimes’s motives. They erased the hints of pedophilia, shaping a “liberal view” of an ambiguous misfit whose “behavior was excusable and understandable.” Pears explicitly retreated from his original conception, writing to Britten, “The more I hear of it, the more I feel that the queerness is unimportant & doesn’t really exist in the music (or at any rate obtrude) so it mustn’t do so in words. P. G. is an introspective, an artist, a neurotic . . .” The completed libretto pitted Grimes as an Everyman against a hostile society. Britten changed the plot, introducing a sympathetic female champion of Grimes and making clear that the apprentices died by accident. Thus he created a complicated, closeted opera. One could read the plot as a grand allegory of good and evil. But viewers, if they wished, could find in both the villagers’ ostracism and Grimes’s behavior a dark story of homosexual guilt.

Morgan was pleased to have been an inspiration to Ben. He saw the chance to write with Britten as serious business. It made him feel vital to be at work again. As a skilled pianist and an accomplished music critic, Morgan found that “Music had a warmth and vitality which Life in Literature has lacked.” Still aglow from the adulation of younger gay artists in America, Morgan imagined that his work with Britten would have some of the symbolic paternal relation that his friendship with Cadmus had achieved. But he was uneasy at undertaking a libretto without any experience of writing in the form, humbly accepting the help of Eric Crozier, Ben’s experienced librettist and producer.

Almost immediately Ben and Morgan had the same “telepathic and simultaneous” thought—to adapt Herman Melville’s novella
Billy Budd
. Crozier objected, thinking that an all-male opera with a homosexual subtext might be difficult if not dangerous to produce. But the chance to relish the physical beauty of an all-male cast, to “keep human beings and the smell of tar” was too compelling, and Ben and Morgan prevailed. In mid-January 1949, on their first morning of work, Morgan, Ben, and Eric outlined a list of characters and events, and made a rough sketch of the set—the man-of-war
The Indomitable
during the Napoleonic Wars. They also settled on a narrative frame. The story of Billy Budd, they decided, would be told as a long flashback through its sole survivor, Captain Edward Vere, “an old man who has experienced much.” So they made Vere the same age as Morgan himself, and decided that Peter would sing the part.

Morgan thought
Billy Budd
had the dramatic intensity to be a grand opera. Its three central characters were impelled toward tragedy: Billy Budd, the innocent and beloved young seaman with a fateful stammer; the malevolent Petty Officer John Claggart, who falsely accuses Billy of mutiny, and is struck and killed by him when Billy, tongue-tied, cannot defend himself; and Captain Vere, who though he knows Billy is innocent invokes strict naval law and orders Billy hanged for manslaughter. But the tone of Melville’s novella rankled Morgan. He told the critic Lionel Trilling that his job was “rescuing . . . Vere from his creator.” The man who wrote “What I Believe” could not celebrate Vere’s sense of duty, could not even savor its tragedy. Morgan was repelled by Melville making Vere the hero of his tale. He wanted the hero to be Billy Budd himself.

Morgan reacted so strongly in part because, as he had done with Crabbe, he identified with the author’s dilemma personally. The publication history of
Billy Budd
held uncanny parallels to his own long-suppressed
Maurice
. Like Forster, Melville had lain fallow as a fiction writer. After almost thirty years of silence, Melville wrote
Billy Budd
near the end of his life, finishing it just months before he died at age seventy-three, virtually the same age as Morgan now. For three decades after Melville’s death in 1891 the manuscript languished. It was published for the first time—in London, in 1924—in the same year as
A Passage to India
.

As a redress, Morgan reconceived the story as a meditation on masculinity. To him the real tragedy was the story’s blind machismo, the way all three protagonists were pressed into violence and moral inaction by unconscious rote notions of male duty. Placing the gorgeous, innocent figure of Billy at the center of the opera created an erotic triangle, with Billy as object of both Vere’s benign and Claggart’s malign love. (“N.B.,” he wrote to Trilling, “Why is it Vere’s touch on Billy’s shoulder that precipitates the blow?”) Melville had dwelt on Claggart’s “natural depravity.” To Morgan, this phrase unmistakably echoed the pseudo-scientific arguments that homosexuality was inherently sinful and perverse, the arguments so familiar from the early decades of his life. Instead he diagnosed Claggart’s “depravity” as desire
thwarted
, desire corrupted into self-hatred. He criticized Ben’s original music for Claggart’s monologue in Act II as too tepid—“soggy depression or growling remorse.” Instead he wanted Ben to depict Claggart’s love for Billy as “
passion
—love constricted, perverted, poisoned . . . a sexual discharge gone evil.” He cautioned against constructing too pat a moral for the story,
insisting to Ben that though Billy may be “our Saviour, yet he is Billy, not Christ.” Morgan redirected Melville’s tale into an allegory about the social experience of being a homosexual.

By March 1949 Eric Crozier and Morgan were “immersed in Billy Budd like two trappist monks,” hammering out the libretto before Ben began to compose the score. The three men settled at Crag House for “sixteen remarkable Billy Budd days.” Within a week, Crozier wrote his wife, they had mastered the “welter of technical [naval] terms” and allotted their writing duties—“Morgan is in charge of the drama, I am in command of the ship . . . It is going to be a stupendous opera.” Crozier found Morgan to be humble and “typically generous . . . a most kind man,” but even at this early moment in the process of composition there were cracks in the glaze. As a close friend of Britten, Crozier was cast in the role of go-between, finding “Ben . . . in a wretched state . . . He does not really want to do
Billy
as an opera but feels that he cannot withdraw . . . the long hours that Morgan and I are spending cloistered together seem almost to make him a little jealous.” Britten told Crozier that he was “going through a period of revulsion against
Billy Budd
, from a misunderstanding about the purpose of the story, and he wanted to give the whole thing up.” But Crozier smoothed his feathers—for the time being—and the project went on.