I'm thankful it's into your hands I fell

Might be acquiring a first edition print of Maurice soon, I can hardly contain my excitement!! 🥰

Excuse me while I hyperventilate 🥲

“But as he returned to his bed a little noise sounded, a noise so intimate that it might have arisen inside his own body. He seemed to crackle and burn and saw the ladder’s top quivering against the moonlit air. The head and the shoulders of a man rose up, paused, a gun was leant against the window sill very carefully, and someone he scarcely knew moved towards him and knelt beside him and whispered, “Sir, was you calling out for me?… Sir, I know…. I know,” and touched him” (Maurice, Ch. 37, E.M. Forster).

(screen caps via screenmusings.org).

Maurice (1987), dir. James Ivory, cinematography by Pierre Lhomme.

(Source)

“As soon as my body developed, the obscene imaginings began. I thought that some individual curse had descended on me.”

Maurice (1987) dir. James Ivory

“England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.” Maurice (1987) dir. James Ivory 

maurice (dir. james ivory, 1987)

England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.

maurice (dir. james ivory, 1987)

Yess @siochembio, a fine choice 😊

For everyone who’s ever strived to be even-handed about Clive Durham in Maurice (James Ivory, 1987), let’s be thankful that this, the most corrosive of all Maurice’s deleted scenes (‘The Night Before Greece’) wasn’t included in the released cut.

I’m not entirely thankful, because the acting in this scene is agonisingly superb, and makes it painfully clear how toxic Maurice/Clive’s relationship has become before their break-up.  But it also shows us a Clive who’s not merely irritating and contemptible but a cruel, goading bitch.

I’m absolutely guilty of liking Clive— well, I can’t say it’s so much liking him as it is appreciating him and his role in the story, if that at all makes sense. Admittedly my ideal Clive is one that’s a mix of movie-Clive & book-Clive. To me, he’s the most human character in the whole story. Unlike Maurice, he can’t find it in him to risk it all for sake of love. He’s too frightened about what it would to do his social standing (with Risley being the prime example, in the movie at least), his name, and his own conscience. He’s really a master of self-deception, and I find his faults (if not somewhat unheroic and just plain stupid) completely humanizing and believable. 

Clive understood his sexuality and aversion to the church very early on in his life— he suffered because of this and taught Maurice to suffer, too. However, Maurice being the more sentimental of the two, this self-pitying state wasn’t good enough to survive on. The fact that Maurice climbed above the mountains and Clive remained shrouded beneath them, thus without living honestly to himself, makes me feel for Clive. He’s a complete dick, yes, and I adore Alec & his relationship with Maurice, but they likely wouldn’t have happened if Clive didn’t provide a perfect foil for Maurice and his ultimate sacrifice. 

In my mind, Maurice kept Clive awake and true to himself. After Clive got ill and went away by himself, fear got the better of him. By the end of the book, Clive has grown backwards into what Maurice once described as ‘flat pieces of cardboard.’ Like Forster wrote in the afterword of the book, Clive intends no evil, but is just so consistently damn infuriating because he keeps making the wrong choices! And I helplessly find that equally endearing and frustrating.

So there’s my completely uncalled for two-cents!

Maurice (1987) dir. James Ivory

this carries some very powerful emotions

I was clutching at my heart before I even read the caption!

I KNOW THIS IS NOT WHAT FORSTER MEANT BUT THIS IS MY NEW FAVORITE PASSAGE IN THIS BOOK:

“Straight?” He trembled as he asked this supreme question.

“Scudder? A little too smart to be straight. However Anne would say I’m being unfair.”

It’s true that in this passage ‘straight’ means honest – but there are good reasons to suspect that Forster WAS aware of the double meaning. Like much else in Maurice, the wording delivers a knowing wink – to his queer friends/readers during his lifetime, and to all his later readers who learn to read Maurice queerly.

‘Straight’ originated as gay slang for heterosexual, and its first known usage was in the early 1940s. Even though Forster first-drafted Maurice in 1913-14, he kept on revising it (most substantially, in the early 1930s and in 1952–60) – the version he intended for posthumous publication wasn’t finalised until 1959–60. As a gay man, Forster would have been aware of such slang and its 20th-century evolution during his lifetime.

A similar issue/assumption arises around Forster’s use of ‘queer’ in Maurice. From what we know of Maurice’s textual evolution, there’s at least one scene in which Forster originally wrote ‘queer’ – but revised that (in the 1950s) once ‘queer’ became well-known slang for ‘gay’. When Alec takes Maurice’s hand following their dispute at the British Museum, ‘they deserved such a caress – the feeling was strange’ actually started out as ‘…the feeling was queer’. Forster‘s revision of that sentence shows that he was aware of the ‘new’ meaning. But, alongside that change, he left ‘queer’ in place elsewhere in the novel, in contexts that play knowingly on the double meaning. e.g. At the Wigmore Hall, Maurice replies to Risley, ‘Queer things you know’ – when Risley has indeed just told him queer things about Tchaikovsky’s personal life.

IMO, the ‘“Straight?” He trembled as he asked this supreme question’ passage GETS EVEN BETTER if Forster put the double meaning there (i) because he knew his queer friends would get it and love it, and (ii) for us to THINK we thought of it for ourselves. :) Just picture Christopher Isherwood reading this part…

　　maurice (1987) x

James Ivory: Maurice (1987)

　　maurice (1987)