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

essays but small pieces for the
Basileon
and other Cambridge undergraduate magazines. Morgan adopted the pseudonym of Peer Gynt, the Ibsen character whose dark search for identity ends in despair, burying his head in his mother’s lap. But despite the serious pen name, his incidental essays were light ephemera: “On Bicycling”; “On Grinds,” a whimsical skit based on
Agamemnon
. In letters home to Lily he was already beginning to display a distinctive sensitivity to literature; he was reading Shaw’s plays, he told her, and they were “wonderfully clever & amusing, but they make me feel bad inside.” Alongside his syllabi for lectures and essays, Morgan was greedily reading for pleasure. He plowed through Milton and Shakespeare; Sophocles and Pindar; Robert Browning and Rosetti; Housman’s new book of poems,
A Shropshire Lad
; Tennyson, Maeterlinck, Pinero, and Ibsen; and all the great eighteenth-century English novels.
    He developed a knack for pulling together a compelling essay, provided he could choose the subject. At the end of his second year, Morgan won a college prize for a stylish paper on the history of the novel. But he faced the unrelenting Tripos in his third year, and Wedd was not sanguine about his chances of doing well. His poor performance on the interim exams in May 1899 rendered him ineligible for the plum home civil service jobs, like the one his friend Leonard Woolf would take on in Ceylon. Morgan wrote Lily that Wedd “advises me to think of journalistic work as one of the things I might do . . . I don’t think I shall be good enough.” Though he could live frugally on the legacy from Aunt Monie, it began to be clear that he must choose some sort of profession. When the marks for the Tripos were announced,Morgan was relieved to have earned a solid upper-second-class Honours. But still, what to do? He had little confidence and no vocation.
    The better part of valor is discretion, Falstaff mutters as he tentatively pokes Hotspur’s corpse with his sword. In the absence of any solid idea about the future, Morgan decided to stay on at King’s for another year. He changed his subject to history. Though he hoped to work with Wedd, Oscar Browning buttonholed him instead, insisting he must supervise his reading. Browning was viewed by most students as entertaining but harmless, but as a tutor he was nugatory: “While his pupil read out his essay he would put a red spotted handkerchief over his face and go to sleep. Awakened by the cessation of the droning, he would exclaim ‘My boy, you’re a genius!’”
    Morgan later wrote charitably, “I came towards the end of O. B.’s glory, nor was I ever part of its train.” Which is to say that by the time they encountered each other—when Browning was in his sixties and Morgan just twenty-one—Morgan was neither seductive enough for the old man nor callow enough to be seduced by Browning’s dodgy ideas of romantic boy-worship. In any case, Browning’s instruction was beside the point. For his birthday, Aunt Laura Forster had bought him a sensitive and fortuitous gift—a life membership in the London Library. In Morgan’s last year at King’s, Wedd and HOM opened new doors for him.
    It was not so much
what
Wedd taught him as
how
Wedd encouraged his intellectual hunger that Morgan remembered in later years. He “had helped me” by casually observing “in a lecture that we all know more than we think. A cry of relief and endorsement arose from my mind, tortured so long by being told that it knew less than it pretended.” Gently, understatedly, Wedd encouraged Morgan:
He tells me that I might write, could write, might be a writer. I was amazed yet not overawed. Like other great teachers of the young, Wedd always pointed to something already existing. He brought not only help but happiness. Of course I could write—not that anyone would read me, but that didn’t signify . . . I had a special and unusual apparatus, to which Wedd called my