Read A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster for Free Online Page B

girl,” Lily complained. “I wish he was more manly and did not cry so easily.” Once, when he was mistaken for a girl by a servant, he was told to go back and correct the misapprehension. Dutifully, he returned and announced, “I’m a little boy.” “Yes, miss,” was the reply.
    He was clever. By the age of four, he discovered that he could read. Thereafter he fiercely defended his interior life, commenting to Aunt Monie’s maid that it was “[t]iresome to be interrupted in my reading when the light is so good.” Learning to read opened a vista into a separate life—a life apart from Life, which he figured in a piece of juvenile fiction as a “secret place.” Here it was possible to slow things down to consider them, to magnify feelings, to roll them around in the brain, to hone the strange interior truths of being and feeling. In later years, he crystallized these insights into a very funny, very sad essay he called “Notes on the English Character.” “It is not,” Morgan wrote there, “that the Englishman can’t feel—it is that he is afraid to feel.” The essence of English character is to “measure out emotions . . . as if they were potatoes.” Even as a young boy, Morgan was both trapped in the English character and a connoisseur of its vagaries. When he was only four, he spent days earnestly studying an etiquette book for children. The book was titled
Don’t!
    He became a keen pupil of different
kinds
of knowledge. There was the bilingualism of women, their private talk and their careful, vicious, oblique wielding of social power. And there was dream knowledge, a magical, incantatory way to discover what is already known to be true. In
Maurice
, he would write, “Maurice had two dreams at school; they will interpret him.” The wishes that acted upon, or acted for, the passive Morgan were centered on affection for men. The warm, diffuse, disembodied yearning for connection and intimacy that appeared as a voice calling out in the dark, and the panicky, miserable jolt of fear when the yearning became embodied in any way. Thinking about things was relatively safe. Touching was not.
    So Morgan persisted in trying to figure himself out in a kind of vacuum. His earliest self-knowledge was sexual and tinged with homoerotic hunger. At Rooksnest, this island where there were no men, he sought the company of Ansell, a neighboring garden boy, confiding in him and relishing his unknowing touch. Decades later, in his fifties, Morgan recorded the memory in his undated “Sex Diary.” “We built a little house between a straw stack and hedge, and often lay in each other’s arms, tickling and screaming.” When he was eleven, the incantatory voice spoke to him at the scene of his father’s death:
[W]e all went to Bournemouth. There I remember a queer moment. I stood looking out of the sitting room at the deserted road and thought “It all depends on whether a man or a woman first passes.” From the right came a gentleman with a brown moustache. I was much relieved . . . This is the first
conscious
preference that I recall.
     
    The relief may have been conscious, but the queerness felt fateful. That he was attracted to men, Morgan had already known without knowing for some time.
    At Rooksnest he soon outstripped Lily’s capacity to tutor him and outlasted the patience of their housemaid, Emma, who turned in her notice after being imperiously instructed in botany, astronomy, cology—“about
shells
”—by a five-year-old. Lily turned to the village of Stevenage, where a pompous young Irishman named Mr. Hervey ran a mediocre day school he grandly called “The Grange.” She commissioned Mr. Hervey not only to teach the boy, but to assist him in masculine activities like climbing. Morgan instead used the trees to masturbate:
I used to hang on the branches, wind my legs about the curve and draw myself up and down. After a long time there would be a nice feeling between my legs, followed by tiredness,