Arctic Summer (20 page)

Was he a conscientious objector? The description didn't fit comfortably. The principle of abstaining didn't ennoble him, any more than bloodshed would. Both sides had their idealism, which he heard everywhere he went, till he felt that he might choke. What was most distressing was the ability to understand both viewpoints while being able to follow neither.

 

* * *

 

At the start of 1915, his spirits were briefly lifted by a new acquaintanceship. He had known Lady Ottoline Morrell for a few years, though he had always resisted being drawn too fully into her social stratagems. Many people in his circle, especially Lytton, were regular visitors at her Bedford Square soirées, but she alarmed Morgan slightly, with her jutting jaw and her horsey teeth, to say nothing of her outlandish outfits when the eccentric mood struck. But now Lady O had taken it into her head that he, Morgan, would get on
extremely
well with her new protégé, a young novelist by the name of David Herbert Lawrence.

Nor was she wrong at first. Morgan was seated next to Lawrence at the dinner party held in his honour, and they took warmly to one another. Lawrence did hold forth somewhat emphatically, it was true, and his new German wife was afraid of being overlooked, but the impression they left behind was of passion rather than egotism. The very next day, however, at Duncan Grant's studio, the mood was decidedly different. When Lawrence launched into a heated diatribe against the
evil
he detected in Duncan's paintings, Morgan thought it best to make his excuses and slip away.

An exchange of letters followed. He found himself accepting an invitation to Greatham in Sussex, where the Lawrences were living. The visit was pleasant to begin with. He was stopping for three days, and on the first afternoon he and Lawrence went for a long walk on the Downs. While they walked, they talked of a topic Lawrence had already raised in his letter—namely Rananim, his projected Utopia.

“And you will always have a place there, Forster,” his host assured him. “You and your woman.”

“Well, that is very generous.” Not keen to linger on this topic, he asked quickly, “What exactly does your Utopia consist in?”

“It is an island. Not part of the existing world. That is all you need to know.”

“But how does one live in it?”

At this, Lawrence became so voluble that he lost coherence. It seemed to be a place without class or division or money, where people who were already fulfilled might fulfil themselves further.

“Not unlike Edward Carpenter's little cottage,” Morgan ventured to suggest.

“Carpenter? That old outdated mystical fraud! No, Rananim will be nothing like that.”

Morgan laughed uncomfortably, but the remark about Carpenter would stay with him. It would take on an extra sharpness the very next afternoon, when Lawrence suddenly, without any apparent reason, launched a ferocious attack on the English political system. A revolution was needed! The land, industry and the press should immediately be nationalised! Morgan murmured mildly that he couldn't quite agree and suddenly the mood changed. Like the hot beam of a lighthouse, he felt Lawrence's angry attention swing round upon him.

It began quietly, though the tone was earnest, and soon became an unfettered rage. It was astonishing to realise that
he
was the object of so much displeasure: his person, his lifestyle and his writing. All of it, apparently, was unacceptable. Why was Morgan content to live in such a cloistered, limp, ineffectual way? Why did he shelter himself from his own primal being? He should
act
, he should engage his basic appetites and live them out! He should find a female counterpart and dig down to his volcanic base material, instead of fossicking about with love stories set in Italy, in between his knitting and visits to the opera. His books were proof enough of his sterile preoccupations. The characters that interested Morgan were all, without a single exception, types that belonged to a suffocating and futureless world, which he, Lawrence, longed to tear open like a placenta and emerge from, newly born and bloodied and crying . . .

Morgan interrupted this tirade to say primly: “I don't knit.”

Lawrence scowled and flung a stone at a tree. “In your soul, you do,” he said. “If you want to come to life, you must change your whole existence. All of it!”

“How do you know I'm not dead already?”

“You see, that is precisely the kind of remark I mean. Your idea of the future is a return to the Greeks. Your idea of God is Pan. But Pan is the source, not the end. No plant grows down to its roots! We must struggle upwards, we must put out shoots, even if they have thorns on them! Do you not see?”

“Perhaps I don't.”

Lawrence, who had just begun to calm, became excited again. On and on, quite literally for hours, until he was hoarse, he called his guest to account for all his multitudinous shortcomings. When eventually a silence fell, Morgan ventured to ask:

“And really—nothing in my books interests you? Not one of them is worthwhile? Or, not even that . . . nothing
in
them is worthwhile?”

“Well, I speak harshly. I speak in absolutes, because I . . . all right, yes. Leonard Bast. I give you Leonard Bast. That was courageous.”

Frieda Lawrence, who was seated nearby, tossed her head and laughed. “
Ja
,” she said. “Leonard Bast.”

It was by now fully dark and they hadn't eaten, but Morgan decided that he was indignant. “The two of you,” he said, his voice sounding even to his own ears like that of a maiden aunt, “I'm not sure you're both not just playing around my knees.” Then he stalked off to bed without saying good night, feeling sure for some reason that his hosts would soon be rutting like rabbits.

It was all so big, so final—surely the horrible demise of a friendship. But the next morning Lawrence was in an equable mood again. When they said goodbye, he told Morgan, “I hope you know I like you very much. And I also hope you will visit us again soon.”

But Morgan didn't ever go back. He was attracted to the man as much as repelled by him—all the hot, sandy-coloured, working-class vehemence of him—but there were only certain intimacies one could hope to survive. He would never inhabit Rananim, and in the meanwhile even Greatham seemed beyond him.

In the end, it wasn't Lawrence's fanatical certainties—either in conversation or committed to paper—that put Morgan off. Finally, when he reflected on it, the remark about Edward Carpenter had done for their friendship. An outdated mystical fraud? No, no, no—anybody who saw the old man that way was on the other side of some deep divide. Whatever his shortcomings, Carpenter was the future, and nobody could speak against him.

 

* * *

 

On a visit to Goldie in Cambridge, an incident occurred which made it clear how English life had broken into two. A group of Welsh soldiers, upon encountering the sight of an undergraduate in cap and gown, had collapsed in wild laughter—they had never seen a creature so outlandish. But the outlandish creature was a tradition that had given rise to Morgan, and he was appalled to have it laughed at.

When it was suggested to him that he might join an ambulance unit in Italy, the idea of trying to staunch wounds, repair broken bodies, pulled powerfully at him. George Trevelyan was working there and would take him on immediately. But Lily became querulous and morose. “It sounds
dangerous
,” she told him.

The danger was what attracted; it might justify his continued existence.

“Italy could never be dangerous. Don't you remember Florence? A nation that produces such wonderful art could never harm me.”

“Don't talk nonsense, Morgan. Not everybody was meant to fight. The idea of you killing people is simply ridiculous. You know it isn't in your character.”

“What is my character, do you think?”

“Why don't you stay at home and write?”

It was writing that felt most impossible then. Or more precisely, it was novels that were out of the question. To invent lives and dialogue, to dream up the unreal, when reality had taken on so much weight and ugliness: it would be like defying gravity.

Then he overheard a conversation between two nurses in the train. It seemed people were needed as searchers for the Red Cross in Egypt or Malta. “Searching”, as far as he understood it, meant interviewing the wounded in hospitals for information about those who might have gone missing or untraced. It sounded like work that he could do and could respect himself for doing.

He had to arrange an interview with Miss Gertrude Bell, who, despite her fame, turned out to be a severe and maudlin presence behind a desk. She brought with her the aura of deserts and disdain, not bothering to look closely at him after her first weary summing-up.

“I don't think you are quite suitable for this kind of work,” she said. “What are you doing at the moment?”

“I'm a cataloguer at the National Gallery.”

“I think that is far better for you. I think you should stick with it.”

“I very much want to go to Egypt.”

Miss Bell quivered. “
If
I can find you a place,” she said, “
then
I will get in touch with you.”

In the end, he had to pull strings with an old Cambridge acquaintance to get her overruled. To round off the whole business, he found himself in front of her again, to have his papers approved and signed. She was resigned to him now; his persistence had triumphed.

He leaned towards her to ask, “What are they like, the inhabitants of Alexandria?”

“You will have no opportunity to find out. You will only see them in the streets, in passing, as you go to and fro on your work.”

His visit to India emboldened him to say, “In foreign places, I like to mix with the locals.”

“Not in Alexandria. There are parts of the city that will shock you.”

“Those are the parts I want to see.”

“No,” she said, glancing sharply up at him. “I suggest you look neither right nor left, only keep your head down, and walk directly to where you are going.”

Her tone was very strict. But she did give a tiny dry smile, and he decided that he liked her after all.

T
he two men were angled slightly past each other in their armchairs, sipping cheap whisky, and their conversation hovered a little above the surface of the earth, never quite touching anything. They spoke of Mediterranean civilisation, especially the Greeks, but the talk was desultory and drifting, and there were occasional silences.

It was only their third meeting. Previously their encounters had been in public, at the Mohammed Ali Club, and both gentlemen had studied one another courteously, from a distance. But tonight a gesture had been made; Morgan had been invited, with two friends, back to the poet's home for a drink. The friends had long since departed, and now only Morgan remained. There was a brief moment of awkwardness as both of them adjusted to the new situation, but then it passed. He liked his new acquaintance, about whom he'd been hearing for some time, and was keen to deepen their relations. More immediately, he was curious to see where Cavafy lived.

He hadn't been disappointed. The Rue Lepsius was in the Greek quarter and had perhaps once been a good address, but it had obviously fallen on harder times. Below Cavafy's flat was a house of ill repute, which men furtively approached at all hours. “I have watched them from my balcony,” he told Morgan, “and there are many monsters, oh, many! But not all of them are bad. There are some young men, whose faces, believe me, are angelic.”

Like the street outside, the interior of his flat, too, had an air of dilapidated grandeur. The large salon in which he entertained Morgan on that first occasion was cluttered with furniture and vases and hangings and ornaments, none of it very clear in the light of the petrol lamp. But the effect was of relics and remains, the traces of a better, higher life that had now fallen away.

Or perhaps that was merely his reputation. Morgan had heard too many stories about the poet by now, little flashes and fragments from different sources. In the miniature world of Alexandrian cultural life, Cavafy was famous—which was to say, people
talked
about him, sometimes admiringly, sometimes in low-voiced asides. It was well known that he came from a good family, originally from Constantinople, which had lost its fortune through bad luck and worse investments. One by one the various progeny had floated away or died, leaving the youngest son, now middle-aged and alone, among the lingering left-over debris of their lives. And there were other little anecdotes, about the shadowy corners of his life, which stirred envy and disgust in different quarters.

The night was cool. Cavafy had a half-cigarette in his holder, unlit, and he was waving it about as he talked in a long-suffering tone about his employment in the Ministry of Public Works. His department was the Third Circle of Irrigation and he was pained by the stupidity of his colleagues. “I have to check their grammar,” he told Morgan, “in every memorandum, every letter. And no matter how many times I explain the correct use of the comma, they simply repeat their mistakes. And let us say nothing of the apostrophe! But I do not give up. I call them in and explain it all again, in the hope that one day the light may dawn. What a happy day that would be! But I doubt it will ever come. There is no atom of poetry in any of them, not one.”

The mention of poetry seemed to trouble him; he reflected for a long moment, then looked mournfully at Morgan through his spectacles. “You have not asked to read my poems,” he said.

“I haven't presumed. But I very much want to read them.”

“They will all be Greek to you, precisely because they are written in that language. But more than that . . . ” He gave a shrug that was half a sigh. “My concerns are not those of most people, I am an unusual man. I am drawn to the past, you see, the very old past, or else to the margins of current life. I am . . . oh, what is the use?” His eyes had left Morgan and were roaming beyond the corners of the room.