A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster by Wendy Moffat
Authors: Wendy Moffat
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might enmesh him, too. The “<<>>” incident became a kind of parable in itself, a parable of both finding himself as a writer and losing his faith in social systems. It was like an expulsion from Eden, for he could no longer talk to or trust Lily. “Later in the term mother came to see me, and said how painful it had been to her to write the letter that Mr. H saw, also asked me whether I had cured myself of my ‘dirty trick.’ I said I hadn’t and she was so distressed and worried that I decided not to mention it to her again. This ended my last chance of a confidant.” At the same time he jettisoned his belief in Christianity. He concluded that he could not be a Christian, because there was no evidence in the Bible that Christ had a sense of humor.
The episode with the pedophile effectively ended Morgan’s stint at the Eastbourne school. He came back home for an unsatisfactory resumption of his studies with Mr. Hervey at the Grange. But the lease on Rooksnest expired at the same time, and Lily decided to move to a place where she could live near a good school, and allow Morgan to go there as a day boy. So they moved to Tonbridge, where they joined many other families who took advantage of an obscure provision in the school’s charter that made such an arrangement cheaper than it might have been. Tonbridge School was a relative latecomer to the public-school tradition; it had been converted in the nineteenth century from a kind of guild academy for middle-class boys, and it had all the pretensions of a latecomer trying to prove itself worthy. There were houses and prefects and an elaborate system of sucking up to the older boys. And the place attracted a certain kind of pompous schoolmaster who felt he had to prove himself.
The best depiction of Tonbridge School as Morgan saw it is his scathing sketch of Sawston in
The Longest Journey
, and it is impossible to separate the sense of what the school was like from his virulent active loathing of his two years there. In middle age, Morgan shaped a delicious fantasy that he had actually been invited to supervise the
destruction
of a boarding school, and he lit into the project with glee. Affecting a precious accent he associated with the would-be upper-class men who attended Tonbridge, Forster addresses the audience:
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and bies: school was the unhappiest time of my life, and the worst trick it played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discoveringhow lovely and delightful the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible. From this platform of middle age, this throne of experience, this altar of wisdom, this scaffold of character, this beacon of hope, this threshold of decay, my last words to you are: “there’s a better time coming.”
At almost exactly the same time he wrote these cathartic words, Morgan settled down to compose his Sex Diary. The miseries were more comfortably in his past.
In the present moment, Morgan was subjected to the most crude bullying of his life. One Tonbridge alumnus, when asked about Morgan in the 1950s, recalled him with un-self-conscious spite: “Forster? The writer? Yes, I remember him. A little cissy. We took it out of him, I can tell you.” There is very little concrete evidence of Morgan’s own thoughts at the time. Edmund Gosse’s letter might have applied to the young Forster: “The position of a young man so tormented is really that of a man buried alive and conscious, but deprived of speech.”
Morgan survived Tonbridge, though he felt it prepared him neither for Cambridge nor for life. He took school prizes in Latin and geography, and though he did not distinguish himself enough to earn a scholarship, he was offered entrance to King’s College in October 1897, when he was eighteen.
The young man who went off to university was not nearly so physically ugly as he imagined himself. He had reached almost six feet in height, and had long,
The episode with the pedophile effectively ended Morgan’s stint at the Eastbourne school. He came back home for an unsatisfactory resumption of his studies with Mr. Hervey at the Grange. But the lease on Rooksnest expired at the same time, and Lily decided to move to a place where she could live near a good school, and allow Morgan to go there as a day boy. So they moved to Tonbridge, where they joined many other families who took advantage of an obscure provision in the school’s charter that made such an arrangement cheaper than it might have been. Tonbridge School was a relative latecomer to the public-school tradition; it had been converted in the nineteenth century from a kind of guild academy for middle-class boys, and it had all the pretensions of a latecomer trying to prove itself worthy. There were houses and prefects and an elaborate system of sucking up to the older boys. And the place attracted a certain kind of pompous schoolmaster who felt he had to prove himself.
The best depiction of Tonbridge School as Morgan saw it is his scathing sketch of Sawston in
The Longest Journey
, and it is impossible to separate the sense of what the school was like from his virulent active loathing of his two years there. In middle age, Morgan shaped a delicious fantasy that he had actually been invited to supervise the
destruction
of a boarding school, and he lit into the project with glee. Affecting a precious accent he associated with the would-be upper-class men who attended Tonbridge, Forster addresses the audience:
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and bies: school was the unhappiest time of my life, and the worst trick it played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discoveringhow lovely and delightful the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible. From this platform of middle age, this throne of experience, this altar of wisdom, this scaffold of character, this beacon of hope, this threshold of decay, my last words to you are: “there’s a better time coming.”
At almost exactly the same time he wrote these cathartic words, Morgan settled down to compose his Sex Diary. The miseries were more comfortably in his past.
In the present moment, Morgan was subjected to the most crude bullying of his life. One Tonbridge alumnus, when asked about Morgan in the 1950s, recalled him with un-self-conscious spite: “Forster? The writer? Yes, I remember him. A little cissy. We took it out of him, I can tell you.” There is very little concrete evidence of Morgan’s own thoughts at the time. Edmund Gosse’s letter might have applied to the young Forster: “The position of a young man so tormented is really that of a man buried alive and conscious, but deprived of speech.”
Morgan survived Tonbridge, though he felt it prepared him neither for Cambridge nor for life. He took school prizes in Latin and geography, and though he did not distinguish himself enough to earn a scholarship, he was offered entrance to King’s College in October 1897, when he was eighteen.
The young man who went off to university was not nearly so physically ugly as he imagined himself. He had reached almost six feet in height, and had long,
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