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

made me sit between some gorse bushes on the mackintosh. He sat on my left—then undid his flies, I forget how soon, and told me to take hold of his prick. “Dear little fellow . . . play with it . . . dear little fellow . . . pull it about.” I obeyed with neither pleasure or reluctance. Had no emotion at the time, but was startled at the red lolling tip (my own prepuce covering the gland even at erection) and was startled when some thick white drops trickled out. He rapidly lost interest in me, asked me where I lived (“Hertfordshire”) and offered me a shilling (“no thank you”). He didn’t try to handle me and I went off quietly.
     
    The encounter with the pedophile did not fundamentally damage Morgan. Nor did it have much “effect on [his] development” since he “connected it with no sensations of my own.” But leaving the man raised the complex moral question of whether he should
tell
anyone about his experience, and here the tension began to mount in the young boy. “Going down hill I became upset and thought how if I had accepted the 1/- I would have hurled it into a patch of snow.” He decided to write to Lily about it.
    As the event became public property, it magnified and hardened in predictable ways. Lily consulted her rector’s wife, and advised on the tone Morgan should take in reporting the circumstances to his headmaster, Mr.Hutchinson. “By this time,” Morgan wrote in his Sex Diary, “I was in another mood, hard and important.” He decided to adopt a manly air, and to approximate a manly metaphor for what had occurred. “You know your bowels sir” [Morgan asked.] Mr. H said he did, and I described how this man’s bowels were diseased. This conversation took place near a fireplace in the dining room. It was followed by another equally disconcerting for Mr. H, as we walked down to the Police Station to report the matter.”
    Mr. Hutchinson, too, sought refuge in allegory. He told Morgan haplessly,
“We know from the Bible about certain things, and there is the story of Adam and Eve . . . boys may do great harm to themselves.” He asked if I could identify the man again. All for vengeance, I said that I should, but he warned me against accusing strangers—if I saw anyone whom I suspected, I was to tell one of the masters quietly. “But we shall know him Sir, by this disease.” Mr. H did not reply, his long horse-shaped face was silent, he lost a great opportunity of enlightening me, for I was full of curiosity and quite cheerful . . .
     
    The man was never identified and never found. Mr. Hutchinson even spared the boy the necessity of giving evidence to the police. But the encounter did bring home to Morgan important lessons about how shame and panic could be easily harnessed, even by a young boy, into full-blown hysteria. Forster’s novels would be perspicacious in their examination of how the public voice—what he called in
A Passage to India
“the herd instinct”—could do savage and irreparable harm. He would become the master of depicting a particular kind of male obtuseness, from hapless cowardice to outright malignity. And he would specialize in placing his readers in complex positions of sympathy, as indeed he had been in even at the time. The lesson of the pedophile was the lesson of telling the story to ignorant people in power, and watching them unravel and strike out in predictable ways. And it offered the inexorable instruction of estrangement. Afterward, he could no longer speak to Lily, or to anyone, about the things that touched him most deeply. The sign that he had learned this came in writing a single word in a now-lost diary. “I made an entry in my Diary <<>> to remind me it had been something.”
    Only by inscribing such a concrete lie could Morgan articulate the complicated lessons of his strange encounter with panic and power. Writing the word showed that he understood how dangerous writing the truth could be, howeven describing things honestly