Arctic Summer (19 page)

He did not put any of this into his book. He wanted to write in an altogether more positive, more uplifting way. He wanted to do everything, in imagination at least, that his life would otherwise not allow him. Above all, it would end in love. Two men from different classes would live together and love each other, in a sublime, suspended, fictional state.

The first half of the book proceeded from him with a steady, effortless ease. Cambridge and thorny Platonic longings—all of this was close to home; there was no artifice required. Shadows and allusions, always on the verge of action: it was the stuff of his life. But then he came to Alec Scudder, and he was no longer so certain. He had only dreamed this part, not lived it. Knowledge had been replaced by fantasy, and the novel had become a little slippery in his hands.

At the same time he made a visit to Goldie, whom he hadn't seen since India. The memory of the journey brought them closer, though Morgan still deferred to the older man. They talked about what had happened since they'd parted, and then Morgan told him about visiting Millthorpe and the book that had come out of it.

Goldie's face was pinched. “But what is the purpose,” he murmured, “if you cannot publish?”

“The time may come when I can.”

Between them, the future shimmered for an instant.

“Do you think so? I hope you may be right. Well, in the meanwhile, I should like very much to read it, when it is ready.”

Morgan hadn't brought the manuscript with him, or he might have shown some pages. But there was something else to hand. “You could take a look at this, if you want to. It's a short story I wrote a month ago. A gesture in the same direction, you might say.”

He meant in the direction of the flesh. He was giving Goldie one of his erotic short stories, which he continued to write intermittently. They were not love stories. But of everyone he knew, he thought Goldie was the person most likely to share his sort of fantasy.

He was wrong. In the morning at the breakfast table a very awkward conversation took place. Goldie, it turned out, was horrified by the story. More than that, he was disgusted. Such things, he thought, shouldn't be written; they demeaned the reader as much as the writer. He told this to Morgan with pained frankness, looking down obliquely over his teacup at a patch of spilled sugar on the tablecloth.

Morgan was profoundly set back. He hadn't expected this reaction at all. “I showed the same story to Hom recently,” he said. “He wasn't upset by it.”

“Perhaps Hom thought it would be too
ordinary
to be upset.” Goldie's lips had stitched primly together. He stacked Morgan's story very exactly and slid it back to him over the table, then busied himself with the tea cosy. Both men understood that the matter had been put away and wouldn't be referred to again.

Nevertheless, Morgan was badly thrown by the exchange. The most troubling thought was that, if Goldie could respond like this to a mere sexual bagatelle, how might he feel about
Maurice
? For the first time since he'd started working on the book, Morgan had doubts. Was he base and crass to be exposing himself in this way? Was he making an exhibition of his perversity?

He paid a return visit to Millthorpe, hoping to rekindle the fire. Though he took away the same joy afterwards from his encounter with Carpenter, George Merrill didn't touch him anywhere. He kept picking away at the book, but his work was slow and worry inhibited his pen. He was drawing closer to the heart of the story, i.e. the union of Maurice and Alec, but how could he describe it? How could he, when he hadn't lived it yet himself? He was thirty-four and virginal and would perhaps be virginal all his life.

And in the only fertile area so far—his writing—he had become sterile too. Here he was, stranded on the threshold of middle age, with three unfinished novels in his hands. He hadn't touched
Arctic Summer
in a year. His Indian book was in trouble, stalled somewhere in its deeper mechanism, and now
Maurice
also seemed to him a morally questionable exercise. Maybe he would never complete anything again. Maybe his power had left him.

 

* * *

 

In March of 1914 he went to stay with Meredith in Bangor. Hom had sunk so far into his married life that only his eyes showed. But there was still a spark and a freshness between him and Morgan, so that it seemed natural to hand over a batch of pages.

“It's my Uranian romance,” he said. “Some of it may seem familiar.”

Hom grunted in vague alarm and carried the manuscript off with him. But he didn't mention it again. Morgan was stopping for a fortnight and on his last morning he asked whether his friend had had a chance to read it.

“Well, I glanced at it a little.” He pulled a face, which left no doubt about his feelings.

“You didn't care for it.”

“Not much, to be honest. I'm not sure what you're trying to prove, Morgan.”

“I'm not trying to
prove
anything, I'm sure. Just to, to . . . tell the truth, I suppose.”

“The truth? Well, perhaps there is some truth in it. What I don't understand about your type is that you want to emulate the other side. You kick up such a commotion about being different, and all you want is to be the same.”

“To be
treated
the same. Is that so terrible?”

“Yes, it is, if you only knew it. What you want is to live with a man in a happy home. But you don't know how trivial it is. Marriage is emblematic of modern life. The way men and women are together—it's a silly business, it has no nobility. I wish you could see that, instead of romanticising it.”

The remark hurt Morgan deeply. It was Hom's indifference—or the idea that his indifference didn't matter. He'd thought that the story belonged to both of them; now he saw that it might be his alone.
Your type
: he had been set aside, and could only accept his new place.

The great friendship with Hom, which had once promised so much, had run into the sand. Too much time, too little nobility: it had grown between them like a barrier. He could be unmanned by thoughts like these, but it didn't last long. He felt that he had changed in some profound sense. India had done it to him—had shifted him from one base to another, had angled him somehow differently. He didn't depend so much on the good opinion of others to feel complete. Nor did he expect happiness as his right any longer; he knew it was only for the strong.

 

* * *

 

Goldie was his first and most frightening reader. After his reaction to the short story, Morgan expected judgement on a larger scale. But when Goldie responded, it was with warmth and admiration. For the first time, Morgan felt, he and the older man had become true comrades. His little book had done that for them.

Morgan wondered whether Goldie wasn't compensating for his harshness over the short story, but in the months that followed he kept mentioning
Maurice
again, and on one occasion his eyes filled with tears. “You may not have intended it,” he said. “But you spoke for me, as well as for yourself.”

Encouraged by this reaction, Morgan showed the book to a few other friends. Forrest Reid, Sydney Waterlow, Florence Barger—all of them approved. With trepidation, he even gave it to Lytton Strachey to read. Amazingly, Strachey liked it—and he especially liked one aspect.

“Tell me,” he said. “Do not dissemble. Risley,
c'est moi
. Yes? Confirm!”

The character was not flattering, and Morgan had hoped the resemblance would pass unnoticed. But he had seen a certain gleam in Strachey's eye and after a moment he nodded.

“I knew it! I knew it!” The delight was unmistakable. It was Strachey's voice, above all other signs, which conveyed most completely his feelings on any subject. You couldn't mention Edward Carpenter's name, for example, without eliciting a stream of high-pitched squeaks, like a bat in flight. Now his voice rose in a muted shriek of triumph: “My dear, immortality is mine! The title must obviously be changed. No more mention of Maurice. It is Risley, Risley, Risley! This is my only criticism.”

Of course, Strachey didn't have only the one criticism to offer. In a long, perceptive and pertinent letter that followed, he made it clear that in general he admired the parts dealing with the Cambridge set, but he remained unconvinced by Maurice and Alec Scudder. Nor did he think a relationship across classes like that had any chance of lasting. Six months at the most, he gave them. But his most memorable comments had been those about sex. The whole attitude to male copulation, he said, struck him as diseased. The matter of Maurice's tortured chastity, followed by the elaborate internal contortions he went through before going to bed with Scudder: there was something very wrong, he felt, with how the book treated intimacy between men.

Morgan was given pause by this idea. Writing revealed one to oneself, of course, more damningly than any confession, but he hadn't considered this particular question till now. Worse, the comment made something else clear: namely, that Lytton
knew
about these things first-hand. It was bothersome that this unattractive, bizarre-looking man, with his undisciplined limbs and his extraordinary voice, should have engaged in love and carnality when Morgan didn't dare to.

 

* * *

 

If he had imagined that writing
Maurice
would free him elsewhere too and that he would go back to his Indian novel with fresh vision and enthusiasm, he discovered now that it wasn't the case. Reading over the pages of green ink, they looked stale to him, without blood or breath. He was still stuck in the caves, still vexed by what did or didn't happen there, and what it meant. Now that he had written so much more personally, he felt suddenly very far from India and he didn't think he could return to it.

And in the meanwhile other happenings had unfolded which made India seem not just distant, but unreachable. The very idea of war seemed impossible, outrageous. And yet the word was coming up suddenly in every conversation, growing and thickening till there was no other topic. Nor was it often mentioned without fervour.

When England officially joined the conflict, Lily became restive. “I think you ought to do
something
, Poppy,” she told him. “Everybody else is volunteering.”

He would not join up; he would not fight. He knew this with calm certainty, in the same way that one knew one's own character. Just the day before he had seen some white-faced boys guarding the railway line, as if it might be in danger—he could do something meaningless like that, or perhaps there might be work in a hospital somewhere. He was happy to mop up blood, just not to shed it.

Only a few days later, there was a solution. One of his Weybridge acquaintances, Sir Charles Holroyd, was Director of the National Gallery. He sent a message that Morgan should come to see him, and then offered him a post as a cataloguer at the Gallery.

“It's only four days a week,” Sir Charles told him. “And a night of fire-watching here and there. Nothing very taxing, I can assure you. In any case, we are putting the more important paintings in storage, until this unpleasantness is over. One never knows—bombs and whatnot.”

“So if I die there, it'll be among second-rate masterpieces. How fitting.”

Sir Charles stared at him with open mouth for a moment, then guffawed when he understood the joke. “You won't die
there
,” he said, then spluttered. “I mean to say, I hope you won't die
anywhere
.”

His mother agreed completely. “Now you will be able to do your bit,” she told him, “and still come home for dinner in the evenings.”

So life continued in a semblance of its old form for a while. One didn't have to consider the War too closely, although it ran through everything like the vibration of a distant earthquake. Perceived from home, it was a great concentration of calamity, but out of sight, over the horizon somewhere. He secretly suspected that it existed merely on his account, to teach him some kind of moral lesson. If he died, it would cease to be there, it would be cancelled.

But in his normal life it showed mostly as a deep change in the attitudes around him, very alarming to a sensitive disposition. The Defence of the Realm Act, for one thing, with all that it allowed, including censorship—though what bothered him much more was the
acceptance
of these changes by everybody. People believed it was necessary and somehow
good
to be altering their priorities in radical ways. A new mentality was taking hold, a mentality of crowds and slogans and mass emotions, in which he felt queasy and afraid.

He visited the Morisons more frequently than he wanted to, in order to get news of Masood. Theodore Morison had been knighted a few years before and—though he remained humble about it—his wife had taken on great airs. He was startled one afternoon to hear from Lady Morison the sentiment that war lifted people to a higher plane.

“A transfiguration takes place,” she told him, “when a man picks up a gun. A spiritual renewal, very mysterious. It is almost like a light, shining from within. Do you not agree?”

So surprising was this idea that he believed, for an instant, she was being ironic. Then he saw that her face had its own shining light, and set down his teacup.

“No, I'm afraid I do not,” he said firmly.

“You must have observed it. Surely.”

“I have observed a base instinct take charge,” he said. “I have observed European civilisation being set back by thirty years. That is all.”

“Indeed.” The light had switched off in her now, to be replaced by coldness. “Of course, you are entitled to your opinion, though you mustn't expect patriotic people to agree. But is that the time? I hadn't realised it was so late, I'm afraid you will have to excuse me.”

These little clarities didn't last. He couldn't rest too smugly in his own convictions, not when doubt continually gnawed at the extremities. Morgan wasn't immovable. Though the idea of killing was awful, he found something distasteful, too, about the lofty isolation of those who refused to fight.