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

slender hands, musical hands. He played piano with intense passion and quite well. He already had learned to use his diffidence to advantage, devising creative ways to hide in plain sight. Shy and nondescript in his habits of dress, the young Morgan fashioned a caricature of an ordinary middle-class Englishman. He looked both completely unassuming and completely correct. He was gangly, a bit stooped even in his youth, and almost chinless. As a friend, Forster was funny, whimsical, emotionally urgent, and unpredictable. Like his great creation in
Howards End
Mrs. Wilcox, he seemed perfectly ordinary, and yet appeared to live on a deeper plane than other mortals.
    He was still almost incomprehensibly naïve about sexual matters. After the debacle at the school in Eastbourne, Morgan had tried one last time to communicate with Lily about the strange conflation of biblical and sexual knowledge he had gleaned from Mr. Hutchinson.
Learnt that there was queer stuff in Bible, and thought that “lying together” meant that a man placed his stomach against a woman’s and that it was a crisis when he warmed her—perhaps that a child was born, but of this I cannot be sure. Told my mother in the holidays that now I knew what committing adultery was. She looked worried, and said “So you understand now how dreadful it would be to mention it, especially if a gentleman was there.” Never connected warming operation with my sexual premonitions. This chance guess, that came so near to the truth, never developed and not till I was 30 did I know exactly how male and female joined.
     
    He began to apply the lessons of his bifurcated life to his conduct in the world, at first unconsciously. A real innocence was at the heart of this sensibility. It consisted of bringing himself, and eventually his friends and his readers, into an imagined world where the limitations of behavior and the possibilities of expression were wider, more honest, and more recondite than those of the material world. Morgan taught himself how to feel by force of a fierce, obtuse innocence.
    He went up to King’s green as a reed.

 
2
     
Kings and Apostles
     
    Morgan came to Cambridge at a moment of transition for the university. Even a generation before, a boy like him would probably not have been admitted to King’s. At that time the college favored the kind of confident young man who transformed the word
university
into the languid drawl of
varsity
. The sort of “silly and idle” fellow who “takes pass-degrees, roars round football fields,” the sort of young man who in drunken oblivion “sits down in the middle of Hammersmith Broadway after the boat race . . .” At King’s, this kind of chap breezed in, with no questions asked, directly and almost exclusively from Eton.
    For more than four hundred years Eton College had been the wellspring for King’s students. But the luster of the founder’s pious intentions had dulled over the centuries. In 1441 the king in question—Henry VI, the young son of the victor of Agincourt—established a fund to educate young men training for holy orders. The whole of the college comprised seventy souls: the number of Jesus’ disciples, according to St. Luke. Like the kneeling figures carved in stone in the college’s wondrous Gothic chapel, Henry’s acolytes proceeded in a “steady pilgrimage” from Eton, the king’s charitable school near Windsor palace, to King’s, where they remained until they married or died, then presumably on to heaven above.
    But by the mid-eighteenth century this design had devolved into a system of “automatic and effortless advancement” for privileged young gentlemen. Secular, wealthy, and well-connected Etonians began to swell the college. There were no entrance exams; students had “the right to claim a degree without sitting for an examination”; and the degree, once conferred, entitledits holder to a life fellowship, so putatively all graduates, and all masters at Eton, had