A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster by Wendy Moffat

Author:Wendy Moffat [Moffat, Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2010-05-06T04:00:00+00:00

Radclyffe scolds him like a fishwife, and says that she wont [sic] have any letter written about her book unless it mentions the fact that it is a work of artistic merit—even genius. And no one has read her book; or can read it: and now we have to explain this to all the great signed names . . . So our ardour in the cause of freedom of speech gradually cools, and instead of offering to reprint the masterpiece, we are already beginning to wish it unwritten.

Morgan had been willing to defend the “meritorious dull book” on principle. But back at Monk’s House, tipsy and scalded by Hall’s tongue-lashing, he confided to Leonard and Virginia that he found lesbians “disgusting: partly from conventions, partly because he disliked that women should be independent of men.” Hall’s book embraced the modern psychological theories that claimed “inversion” to be a congenital condition—and the three writers’ conversation turned to whether homosexuality could be “cured.” Morgan told the Woolfs he had learned of a prominent neurologist’s boast that he could “convert the sodomites” through an aversion cure—much as Dr. Lasker-Jones had proposed to do to Maurice. “Would you like to be converted?” Leonard asked him, genuinely curious. “‘No’ said Morgan, quite definitely.” In the end Virginia and Morgan composed a rather tame “comic little letter” decrying that social opprobrium such as the Hall case would cause artists to suppress “creative impulses” and “shun anything original.” By October, Morgan found himself sitting on a hard bench at the Bow Street Magistrates Court, alongside forty eminent scientists, theologians, and men of letters waiting to testify on behalf of Hall’s defense. After a long peroration the chief magistrate concluded that as a matter of law he could determine whether the book was obscene without inviting any expert testimony, and summarily—and anticlimactically—dismissed the assembled crowd.

The real drama occurred in Morgan’s life alone. His public and private personae collided with ironic force the very week of the Well of Loneliness trial. He told the story to Sebastian, gamely playing up the comedy of the occasion: “What with being blackmailed on Wednesday and Bow Street on Friday, life has really been quite a whirl.” This single sentence embodies the tension between Forster’s secret and his carefully cultivated public life. The attempted blackmail came through an elliptical approach. The wife of one of Morgan’s casual sex partners discovered her husband had slept with Morgan, and confronted him. She assured him he would not be bothered further if he paid cash.

Morgan had been quite lucky in his adventures before this moment. With Bess Palmer he had played the part of a befuddled middle-aged man, with no designs on her husband besides hearty friendship. He even managed the delicate feat of remaining her husband’s lover without her knowledge for the rest of his life. But this occasion was a little different. The proof of its sting is revealed by the paucity of records. Morgan destroyed all but the barest shreds of the record of this trauma—and these come elliptically in coded references to a few of his closest friends.

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