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

Cambridge friends to “The Story of a Panic” “horrified” and disgusted the young Morgan. They treated it like a salacious tidbit. Someone gave the manuscript to Maynard Keynes, who shared it with Charles Sayle, a university librarian who cultivated a baroque effeminacy. “Oh dear oh dear, is this Young King’s?” Sayle asked in knowing mock horror. “Then he showed Maynard what the Story was about. B[uggered] by a waiter at the hotel, Eustace commits bestiality with a goat in the valley where I had sat. In the subsequent chapters, he tells the waiter how nice it has been and they try to b[ugger] each other.” Thus opened the abyss between men like Sayle and Lytton Strachey, who took satisfaction and pride in calling homosexuals “buggers,” and Morgan, who even years later would not spell out the whole word.
    It was not until two decades later—in the mid-1920s—that Morgan had the detachment to observe how much the story of writing “The Story of a Panic” was the story of his own sexual anxiety. Morgan read this little fable of authors and critics to a sympathetic group of friends, many of them the Apostles whom he had known at Cambridge. He never published it. By thetime he was forty he could laugh at his priggish younger self. That he, at twenty-three, had been “horrified” by Sayle’s lascivious reading later confirmed to the mature Morgan how close to the truth this unwelcome interpretation lay. When he had conceived the story “no thought of sex was in my mind”; but, looking back, later he acknowledged, “I had been excited as I wrote and the passages where Sayle had thought something was up had excited me most.” Nevertheless, he could not forgive the librarian for his ham-handed literal reading of the story. A reader like Sayle, he concluded, cannot be countenanced “because he thinks he knows and slips out after twilight in his strongest spectacles . . . for a peep of a nightshirt.” To the end of his life Morgan recognized the sexual force as a wellspring of his creative work. But as an artist he resisted looking too closely at anything so “sacred and mysterious” as the mechanics of creation.
    The long tour of Italy seemed merely to postpone the reckoning of what to do with his life. Anticipating his return to London in the autumn, he confided to Dent, “I watch my own inaction with grave disapproval but I am still as far as ever from settling what to do.” Fortuitously, George Trevelyan offered an intriguing stopgap: “Would you care to do some teaching at the W[orking] M[en’s] College, next October?” The prospect was welcome, not least because it would offer proximity to Hugh Meredith, who was studying economic history at the London School of Economics and had rooms just around the corner from the college on Guilford Street.
    In September 1902 Morgan and Lily returned to London. With no permanent home, they took up residence at the Kingsley Temperance Hotel just opposite the British Museum. Temperance indeed. The Kingsley was crammed with the sorts of people who frequented the pensiones they had stayed in over the last year: dowagers and earnest students, and young ladies traveling with an aunt as a chaperone. This was a very different Bloomsbury than the bohemian playground that Lytton Strachey, Vanessa Stephen, and her sister, Virginia Woolf, would establish just a few years later in a shabby townhouse blocks away on Gordon Square. There was very little privacy for Morgan at the hotel, but the city beckoned. The museum held wonders: beautiful naked Attic sculptures, a giant pair of winged Assyrian bulls carved out of stone, designed to be seen from two perspectives—they had four legs from thefront, five legs from the side. In
Maurice
, just here, between the two “monsters,” the gamekeeper Alec Scudder would corner the stockbroker Maurice Hall and unsuccessfully try to blackmail him.
    By month’s end Morgan was teaching Latin once a week at the Working Men’s