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

him in these years. Dent was crushed to discover that Hugh had plans to marry. But perhaps because he had been the golden boy in his own family, Hugh had “a horror of people who depend on me.”
    Just before Christmas 1902, HOM initiated an ardent turn in his friendship with Morgan. It began with the theoretical framework of fraternal affection, but it evolved into a peculiar and very unsatisfying love affair. About its details both men were scrupulously silent. The closest thing to a record of this is the portrait of Clive Durham in
Maurice
, a portrait that Morgan could paint only after he had outgrown both Hugh’s platonic affections and the sting of recognizing their limitations. Between the young men there was some very tentative and inept lovemaking—long, earnest, fully clothed embraces, chaste kisses, and florid talk of the Hellenic ideal of friendship. But the intensity of the encounters awakened Morgan’s heart. In his diary two years later he looked back on the two great discoveries of his youth—that he could no longer remain a Christian, and that he desired only men. Both heowed to the influence of HOM. These insights were still so raw, and so dangerous, that he wrote about them at the close of 1904, elliptically: “I’ve made my two discoveries—the religious about 4 years ago, the other in the winter of 1902—and the reconstruction is practically over . . .”
    For his part HOM retreated from real intimacy, but the residue in him was a sense of diminishment and loss. In 1903 he broke off an engagement to marry. Later that year he had some sort of nervous breakdown. Morgan traveled up to Manchester to visit him, walking beside him for hours in silence, keeping him company, asking for nothing. Even in the midst of his depression, Hugh recognized that Morgan was a remarkable friend. He confided glumly to Maynard Keynes, “I think I am dead really now. Or perhaps I should say that I realise now what was plain to others two years ago. I come to life temporarily when I meet Forster.”
    In the spring of 1903, Morgan traveled to Greece with Wedd and a group of Kingsmen, picking up the plans that had been postponed when he broke his arm the year before. This time he took Lily only as far as Italy, leaving her there while he peeled off to join the tour. If Italy had been disappointing because he had been overprepared for it, Greece was anticlimactic because it confirmed what he had already come to know about himself. A second great short story was born there, a variation on “The Story of a Panic.” “The Road from Colonus” ended poignantly, with the elderly Mr. Lucas unable to acknowledge the touch of Hellenic inspiration offered to him. On the road to Colonus he comes upon a natural “shrine,” a tree with water gushing out of its bark, and for a brief moment he knows that “something unimagined, indefinable, had passed over things, and made them intelligible and good.” But he resists the muse. He ends up back in suburban England, untouched by the momentary epiphany, “irritably” complaining about “intolerable” neighbors and barking dogs. But the mysterious sound of running water in his ears haunts him still. Morgan felt a bit like Mr. Lucas. The reprise of Italy was a disconcerting sense of déjà vu: it was a “depressing thing to look down the table” at the pensione “and honestly believe that you are the cleverest person seated at it, which is what I do day after day.”
    At the end of the summer, mother and son returned to London and faced facts. Hotel living had lost its charm; they found a flat, their first ever, in South Kensington, in one of the “mansions”—the modern euphemism for the clean, anonymous buildings of flats then proliferating in West London.Morgan had a very light footprint there. He spread out an early draft of
A Room with a View
in his bedroom, but did not settle in. His lectures at Harpenden and Lowestoft on the Italian city-state took him out of town