A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (48 page)

Enraptured by the work, Morgan was unaware of this behind-the-scenes drama. His creative energy translated into joy. Bob visited him at Aldeburgh, very affectionate. In his diary Morgan related his delight at their rapprochement: “The great goodness and love of Bob towers. I wonder why he was so short and harsh to me last year, don’t think it was just his health.” But Ben’s response to creative difficulties was often evasion or flight. He suddenly accepted a recital tour abroad with Peter, leaving Morgan puzzled but unenlightened. In this gap, Morgan began to plan a second “American adventure,” to introduce Bob to his new American friends. His work on the opera dictating that he “ought to be away from England for as short a period as possible,” Morgan limited himself to two lucrative public events on the East Coast—the Blashfield lecture at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City and an honorary degree at Bill Roerick’s alma mater, Hamilton College.

He designed the journey to revisit the high points of two years before, viewing each destination vicariously through Bob’s eyes—Lost Farm with Bill, Paul’s studio, a short trip to Philadelphia to visit Tom Coley’s mother.
The visit had a self-conscious, valedictory quality. Morgan began to feel enmeshed in time, as people do in late middle age—each event nestled in prenostalgia even before it is experienced. I have my health, people think. I am
enjoying
this. This is a golden moment, they think. In such a state of consciousness, even Bob began to seem older to Morgan. He told Paul, “I wish you could have [sketched] Bob as I first knew him 20 years ago . . .” It became impossible not to measure every moment against its un-self-conscious origins. “It was sad not seeing you in New York,” he wrote to Paul, who was again away for the summer. “I often thought when I approached the house [at St. Luke’s Place] of my first approach, and of my first meal there: every sort of cold delicacy and wine . . .”

Could things ever become different, or would they always be a continuation of the same? Wystan had happily emigrated, and Christopher, too. Might it be possible to transplant the whole Buckingham family to more amenable soil? Why not? Planning the visit, Morgan scouted for the answer to these questions, looking into his old love’s eyes. For the time being, it was adventure enough to test how his American friends would respond to Bob, “Mr. Forster[’s] lifelong beloved . . . policeman.” The public honors were conspicuous and designed to impress Bob, who sat near General Omar Bradley at the luncheon fêting the Hamilton degree recipients. But too much pomp made Morgan irreverent: he filed away the sheepskin, but made special note of an informal citation, “‘For being Morgan’ Written by Bill Roerick on the reverse of a detached beer bottle label after some distinction or other had been conferred on me.”

Inviting Morgan to give the lucrative Blashfield lecture was the brainchild of Glenway Wescott. Though he had been corresponding with Morgan since 1940, when he sent a copy of his new novel
The Pilgrim Hawk
, Glenway was the only person in his circle of friends who had not yet met Morgan, and he was envious of their proximity to the Great Writer. Newly elected to the academy, Glenway had the ear of its president, the poet Archibald Mac-Leish. He crowed to a friend that he had “killed cock robin” by persuading Morgan to come back to the States. Morgan accepted, and set to work finding “something to say which shall be profound but not disturbing” to earn his lecture fee.

Membership in the academy provided consolatory work for Glenway, who despite early precociousness as a writer had not achieved great literary fame. He had undeniable talent, and a knack for falling in with the right crowd. A
willowy blond farm boy with a dreamy expression, Glenway had been just nineteen when he fled the Midwest with his lover Monroe Wheeler for Greenwich Village, then Paris, then southern France. By then Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams had already published Wescott’s poems. Monroe was a Chicago boy, two years older, compactly built, with saturnine good looks. The two young men were motivated more by an inchoate need for sexual freedom than by any specific vocation. Monroe cannily told Glenway, “In the American culture artists have privileges of freedom that are recognized . . . If you will be a poet and make a life of writing, they will let you alone.” And so Glenway had begun to write quickly, publishing two novels and a collection of short stories. By his mid-twenties, he was a celebrity, his name mentioned in the same breath as Hemingway and Fitzgerald as a “prophet of a New America.”

Hemingway in particular envied and reviled Glenway. He hated Wescott’s polished sentences, the embellishment, the European air of his characters’ exquisite sensibilities. He also resented Glenway’s friendship with Gertrude Stein. Most of all, he detested the success of homosexual writers: “Glenway Wescott, Thornton Wilder and Julian Green have all gotten rich in a year in which I made less than I made as a newspaper correspondent—and I’m the only one with wives and children to support.” He hated Glenway’s speaking voice. Bitchily, he told Stein, “When you matriculate at the University of Chicago you write down just what accent you will have and they give it to you when you graduate.” So much for Glenway being “let alone.”

In the world he and Monroe made for themselves, they found sympathetic company. In France they made lifelong friends with an extraordinary array of artists: Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Cocteau, Marc Chagall, Willie Maugham, Thornton Wilder, the Sitwell siblings, and the novelist whom Osbert Sitwell called “Freud Madox Fraud.” And they attracted friends back into Stein’s circle. Just before they left New York, Monroe and Glenway had met a beautiful, restless, and painfully young son of an Episcopalian clergyman from the posh parts of New Jersey. George Platt Lynes was not quite twenty. He had gone to prep school with Lincoln Kirstein but lasted only a matter of weeks at Yale, bucking a family tradition. Lynes was preternaturally worldly: he offered the pair all sorts of entrées to the expatriate world of Paris, from which he had already returned.

George Platt Lynes was an aesthete with no settled métier, exasperating to his father, magnetic to his friends. He had opened an elegant little bookshop
in Englewood, New Jersey, and sold it for a profit after six months. He knew books, theater, ballet, painting, photography, fashion, furniture. Bright, rakishly charming, hungry for life, fun, he was impossible to resist. Glenway wrote importuning him—“Dear Little George,” “Sweet Boy,” “Child New York”—to join him and Monroe in France. Dear Little George did, but not before seducing Glenway’s resolutely heterosexual younger brother Lloyd, who had followed Glenway east to New York. Glenway was furious, Monroe philosophical. It was Glenway’s “own fault” for introducing them. Then George followed directions. He arrived, like a comet, back in France in the summer of 1928.

Glenway had invited George, but George ended up chiefly in Monroe’s bed. What might have been—for three more ordinary men—an impossible situation somehow settled, delicately and pleasurably, into a triangle in equipoise; all three found a clear way through into a kinship that—to the end of their lives—none of them ever bothered to label or define. It was deeply shared friendship with sex intermixed: passionate sex between George and Monroe; companionate, polite, less frequent sex between George and Glenway. Between Glenway and Monroe ardor had cooled slightly even before George had come to them, and they settled into a devoted sort of marriage, each comfortably taking on lovers for some months, all perfectly open and friendly.

George’s eyes were hungry for beauty. As the three men traveled through Europe, he began to take pictures. The three of them together in perfect white linen suits, cut by the sharp shadow of a palm tree. A Roman-coiffed Gertrude Stein in profile, with the hills of Provence just a smudge in the distance. Cocteau, withdrawing from an opium habit, intensely facing the camera, all beaky nose, with a shock of curly hair shooting upward as if aflame. Man Ray took a striking portrait of George managing to look like a figure from a Greek myth, despite wearing a diaperlike loincloth. By the time the ménage was transplanted back to New York in 1934, George’s aimless pursuit had focused into a vocation, as Glenway’s had done. He became a fashion photographer.

When Morgan and Bob visited them in 1949, Glenway, Monroe, and George had their cleats into the city. The three men lived in “our household,” a proper ménage à trois, until George, “spellbound, discontented with his life, dissatisfied with himself,” left Glenway and Monroe together, the
way they would stay for the next fifty years. All three traveled in a range of social worlds—Lincoln and the dancers of the New York City Ballet, Paul and his more bohemian friends, the rich patrons of the nascent Museum of Modern Art, where Monroe was director of publications. George attracted fashion models and a raffish crowd of young men—Pullman porters and rent boys and artistic types in advertising. Living in these worlds often meant depending on other people’s money. Glenway enjoyed the patronage of his brother Lloyd and his wife, Barbara, who supported the whole family with her lavish inheritance. George, whether flush or in debt, “seemed to consider the world a gift that he bought and presented to his friends for his own pleasure.” Monroe was like an impoverished aristocrat with brains and taste but little money. During his expatriate years, he had met Jean Renoir, Marc Chagall, and Pablo Picasso; and now, with these connections and a canny eye, he traveled frequently to Europe as one of the museum’s most conspicuous emissaries. He was always impeccably and formally dressed. He had perfect manners. A portrait of him, looking casually suave, appeared in the November 1948
Vogue
. This aura of “worldliness personified” was a necessary part of cultivating the museum’s donors for Monroe, a Chicago boy with only a high school diploma.

They divided their time between urban and rural entertainments, and they swept Morgan and Bob along for both. The highlight of Wescott’s plans was a dinner at Monroe’s two nights before the lecture. Monroe’s apartment was configured for show, with the large public rooms facing Park Avenue, while a tiny kitchen, truncated bedrooms, and bathroom faced the back. The drawing room and dining room could have been from an updated novel by Henry James—fitted with beautiful, expensive European furniture, bibelots, and fine books, many borrowed from Glenway’s sister-in-law Barbara. A Courbet landscape hung over the mantelpiece.

Here George and his mother, Adelaide—an elegant and intelligent woman—joined the small company for cocktails. It was a disarming idea to start with George, like an amuse-bouche. He lingered just long enough to persuade Bob and Morgan to have their portraits taken the following week at his studio. Then the Lyneses evaporated. The six dinner guests—all men—had been carefully chosen to make the evening both provocative and welcoming. Monroe, who was serious about the closet, was “worried about it, hasn’t warned EMF and keeps forbidding me to let the news item out, lest
there be embarrassment about B.B.,” Glenway wrote a friend. He had reason to be careful: each dinner party was organized around a theme, and the theme of this one, unbeknown to Morgan, was
sex
.

That the party would be fuel for news—and for local gossip—was inevitable. Morgan and Bob were the guests of honor. Glenway had also invited Joseph Campbell, whose work linking “ancient and primitive religions, especially the Hindu” with modern psychology had just earned him an American Academy grant. The history of world mythology was in Campbell’s palm; he knew Sanskrit and shared a special love of India with Morgan. But the catalyst for controversy and conversation was the guest who had come to New York to research sex. Dr. Alfred Kinsey was the sixth man at the table. Monroe had penciled into his little leather daybook a full five hours on the following afternoon for Kinsey to take his sex history.

Dr. Kinsey wasn’t a physician. A professor of zoology who had begun his career studying gall wasps, he had published his magisterial report
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
just five months earlier. The tome was scientifically scrupulous and lucidly written by Kinsey himself. It presented the “actual behavior of people” based on more than twelve thousand firsthand interviews conducted by Kinsey and his handful of researchers at Indiana University in Bloomington.

In this urbane company, Kinsey came across as a Midwestern square. His hair was cut short on the sides to well above his ears, topped by a long bristle of thatch that he attempted to part in the middle. He wore, as always, a rumpled jacket, crisp white shirt, and bow tie. But his intense curiosity was beguiling. Like the Boy Scout he had once been, he was honest, hardworking, true and plain, kindhearted and utterly sincere. (He was also, unknown to himself and his dinner companions, on the edge of a dangerous decision. The night he met Morgan and Bob was the first night Kinsey met Glenway. Within a few months Glenway invited him to watch sex parties, and two summers later, Kinsey reciprocated, asking Glenway to come to Indiana to be filmed while masturbating. There they became sexual partners and close friends. Their secret would eventually endanger the project, and its funding, though it did not threaten Kinsey’s very open marriage.)

Discovering the norms of sexual practice in America proved an irresistible impulse for many readers. Kinsey’s book became an instant bestseller. He pursued a briskly American way of
measuring
sex: he counted orgasms. This emphasis was a bit
hydraulic
. Because it focused on behavior rather
than psychology, all sorts of desire never counted in Kinsey’s work. But just by closely observing and reporting, in
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
Kinsey made an enormous impact. His survey proved supple enough to complicate the picture of human sexual expression.

Three observations about homosexuality in particular galvanized his readers. Thirty-seven percent of Kinsey’s large sample of men reported homosexual experiences leading to orgasm. Ten percent of men were exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of sixteen and sixty-five. And four percent of the men were “exclusively homosexual throughout their lives.” Kinsey’s sympathy to bisexuality may have deliberately shaped his method to “make there seem to be as much homosexual activity as possible.” His coworkers later came to regret the three-year window of sexual activity as an indefensibly arbitrary measurement—but his reported figures were nonetheless transparent and incontrovertible.