A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster by Wendy Moffat Read Free Book Online

when I stopped and slid . . . Once I had the feeling when my tutor stood by—he was supposed to teach me climbing. He said laughing “How he kicks about!” I said to myself “You little know!”
     
    Sometimes his secret life afforded a feeling of mastery over the adult world, but more often it engendered mysterious and startling surprises. Even the “fat dark” Mr. Hervey, with his hopeless little mustache, could summon powerful erotic thoughts in the boy. “Soon after Mr. Hervey came I had a dream which I perhaps added to in my waking hours: his prick, very long, filled the hall and the dining room like white macaroni and wound me up in it. I had never seen his prick, and indeed thought no one but myself had one, so the dream’s odd.”
    The retreat into his imagination as a way to explore his desire safely became a lifelong pattern for Morgan. It would be decades before he found both the intimacy and the sexual contact he craved. He arrived at this blissful state, which he called
connection
, through his brain rather than his body, through listening to what he knew he felt before he actually felt it in the blood.
    The world conspired with the Word to bewilder him. When he was four, Morgan faithfully told his mother he had discovered the “trick” of rubbing his prepuce “backwards and forwards.” Lily told him that was called “Dirty,” and “presently . . . ‘help me get rid of the dirty trick’ figured in my prayer.” Lily did not know this, but her invocation of Christianity was the first step in the separation of mother and son. Encountering this boundary alerted him to things that could not be said, not even to his beloved mother. All his life Morgan kept his homosexuality a secret from her. One of his friends described their delicate dance: “Morgan never came out of the closet. He wanted to protect his mother. And by the time he could have come out, there wasn’t any closet left.”
    He looked in books for ratification of his scanty sexual experience. But the “dirties” of others were sadly absent from
Smith’s Classical Dictionary
,and “concealed by drapery in the illustrations to Kingsley’s Heroes.” Fiction, and the feelings it produced, were much more satisfying.
Felt deeply about boys in books, especially about Ernest, the priggish second son in the
Swiss Family Robinson
. . . I could not bear that Ernest should grow up—he was 13 I think—so the end of the
Swiss Family Robinson
, which takes place 10 years later, was repellent to me, and I would pretend that Ernest and the others were magicked back into being boys.
     
    When Lily misapprehended Morgan’s thoughts, he did not correct her. “My mother said ‘I believe Jack [third son—lively] is your favorite!’ ” He recognized that Lily, too, sought her consolations in literature. He would not be the man she wanted him to be, but she did not have to know.
    Ironically, Sunday school stories became an excellent vehicle for homoerotic fantasies. The Christ omnipresent in Victorian stained glass—the genteel, compassionate figure in every Anglican parish church—is a grown-up Lord Fauntleroy. And this Christ was introduced into steamy narratives, “long serial stories. In one of them I was Christ and led my companions about.” Morgan perfectly mirrored Edwardian preoccupations, neatly conflating imperial and Christian themes in his subsequent erotic fantasies: “sleeping with naked black man in a cave” and “converting the inhabitants of New Guinea to Christ.”
    There is no record of whether the era’s sexual scandals—the Cleveland Street scandal, which implicated the Prince of Wales’s son Albert in a homosexual brothel, or the discovery of a boy prostitution ring among British high officials in Dublin Castle—made their way to Morgan’s ears or eyes. But his fantasies comprised a queer refashioning of cultural anxieties about male friendship that were very much in the news when he was a child. Sexual issues