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

began to ossify into law: Parliament, which had been largely silent on these private matters, now began to make them public ones, encoding the age of consent, limiting traffic in “white slavery,” and eventually criminalizing unspecified acts of “gross indecency” between men, in the Labouchère Amendment of 1885. This was the law that would send Oscar Wilde, themost famous and successful writer in London, to prison when Morgan was sixteen. Christian reformers, who had promoted laws to maintain social purity, now began to bewail some consequences of the public scrutiny of relations between men. All sorts of innocent actions now might be misconstrued. The new public consciousness about sexual behavior narrowed the terrain where social actions between men could be assumed to be innocent, meaningless, private, or ambiguous. One lamented, “A few more cases like Oscar Wilde’s and we should find the freedom of companionship now possible to men seriously impaired to the permanent detriment of the race.”
    At about the same time that Mr. Hervey appeared, Aunt Monie finally died at the age of ninety. Morgan had been dutifully taken to visit her in her last illness, but he did not recall it. The “arrival of the news” came by the kind of circumlocution that he and Lily were beginning to develop:
I knew that [Aunt Monie] was ill, and one gloomy afternoon I was walking with my mother towards our home . . . I asked her how Aunt Monie was, and she replied, in the strained tones then thought appropriate to the subject of death, “She is better.”—“Is she well?” I asked. “She
is
” came the solemn answer and I burst into tears. They were composite tears . . . I cried because crying was easy and because my mother might like it, and because the subject was death.
     
    At her death, Monie left him a bequest larger than Eddie had left for his young family, to be devoted to Morgan’s education. And almost immediately, Lily sent him away to school. It was time he grew up and entered the world.
    Going away to school meant both separation from Lily and harsh induction into a new world of uncompromising masculine conventions. He was supremely ill-suited to the public school ethos, with its hierarchies of power and its emphasis on manly sport, and he quickly came to hate it with a fervor he sustained into old age. The Kent House school in Eastbourne, to which he was sent in 1890, was small and relatively enlightened by the standards of the day. There were only thirty boys attending and the headmaster was a bit of an egghead, well-meaning but obtuse when faced with a very sensitive boy. Morgan was painfully homesick, and snubbed by most of the other boys, who called him “Mousie.” They were immune to his intellectual charm. School subjected him to all sorts of indignities—the public bathing was a special humiliation. One of the boys announced, “Have you seen Forster’scock? A beastly little brown thing,” and in one stroke he both learned the word and felt the sting of being thought repellent.
    Most of all, going off to Kent schooled Morgan in the art of detachment. During his second term there, to his great relief, he was excused from playing games, and allowed to walk along the Downs for exercise. There he encountered a pedophile. It was a momentous event in the boy’s education but not for the reasons one might expect. Morgan began his Sex Diary to trace his origins as a man and a writer, certain that his homosexuality was the central fact of his being. More than forty years later, the details of the encounter with the pedophile were etched in his mind.
    It was March 1891, and patches of snow still clung to the hills. Setting out over the Downs, Morgan encountered a man of forty or fifty—“large moustache, pepper and salt knickerbockers suit, deer stalker cap, mackintosh on arm”—near the summit, ostentatiously pissing into a gorse bush.
Having concluded he spoke to me, I forget how, then walked me aside and