‘During and after my illness I must have been a delightful companion. But you were so wonderfully considerate. You never snubbed me as you did your family at dinner. [Clive throws the card at Maurice’s head.] What’s the matter now – are you tired?’
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!