the big three

Edwardian Transcendentalism ... Maurice, by E.M. Forster

Posted 27th June 2014 by Nick Campbell

Maurice took me entirely by surprise. I knew that it was begun by Forster in the early twentieth century, hidden away until after his death in 1970. I did own a copy once, a hardback with a jacket like a World of James Last LP. I never even started reading it. What could a novel so dislocated from history say to anyone?

Probably it's best that I read it this year, as one of the three novels of Morgan Forster available in Dulwich Library during my sudden yen for Edwardian literature. I knew A Passage to India, but I didn't know the ecstatic fairy tale of post-Victorian liberation, A Room with a View, and I didn't know the Modernist slash Neo-Romantic slash Fabian deconstruction of Bloomsbury (one possible interpretation) Howards End. Having made their acquaintance, my heart was alight somewhat, and I prepared myself for a touching, heavily coded, faintly homoerotic account of a confirmed bachelor's lonely development of self.

But I wasn't prepared for Maurice.

It all comes of underestimating the late Victorians. I should have thought of the Uranian Society. I should have thought of Lytton Strachey, who makes a cameo in the novel wearing a false absence-of-moustache. I should have thought of Duncan Grant. I should, particularly, have thought of Edward Carpenter, that transcendentalist of so many worlds: a socialist, a vegetarian, and a man who wrote about male-male love and lived monogamously with a man called George Merrill.

I only thought of Forster, whose longest lasting love affair was with a married man - Forster who was careful not to frighten his mother - Forster who kept Maurice a secret, even till after his death. But Forster once visited Carpenter and Merrill, and Merrill 'touched my backside - gently and just above the buttocks ... The sensation was unusual and I still remember it, as I remember the position of some long vanished tooth. It was as much psychological as well as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back and into my ideas, without involving my thoughts.'

This gesture, which belongs entirely to the intimacy of homosexuals (between a man and a woman it would lose all meaning) which is and is not erotic, which identifies, reassures and stimulates, which releases Forster from a spell of sadness like the tap of a magic wand, demonstrates how in advance of their peers Carpenter and Merrill were. It still seems too Utopian for our time, actually. It inspired Maurice, and it is the sign that Forster's heroes or heroines find impossible. It's the opposite of a muddle.

Maurice himself is in a muddle for much of the book. It's not a muddle with the artistic richness of Lucy or the complexity of the Schlegels: it's a solitary muddle, almost a documentary one. I've read other novels about similar muddles from decades later. When Maurice suddenly entered a period of insight and delight with Clive Durham, I was giddy. Forster portrays their attraction with all his usual subtlety, that sleight-of-hand that is so vivid, so exciting.

But I fully expected one of them (at least) to have killed himself, or the other one, before the end.

It doesn't happen! There are more twists and turns to come, some less convincing, some still more exciting, but this is a world away from code. It's a novel about a man who needs to ask what the name of his condition is, utterly isolated from the work of people like Carpenter - because he is not like Forster, Strachey, or Grant. Maurice isn't the sort of man we've heard know about. He doesn't even have much imagination.

When he sits in the hypnotist's chair, and tries to submit to another's will, tries to become straight, I was moved to tears. There are countless, nameless men who wanted that too, who didn't have the luxury (little though it may seem sometimes) of an identity to belong to. When he finds he is unable to submit, he feels that he has failed, but he has done something utterly heroic, and he has done it for love.

Something in me is dissatisfied. I understand him not having this published when he wrote it - it would have destroyed his reputation, and killed his mother. It's not the novel he wished to write - it's a young adult novel, for a cause still in adolescence. But just imagine if it was published pseudonymously, or in translation.

Critically, it had missed its time, but now, as a record of an era, of that obscure gesture that meant everything to Forster in that garden in 1908, I think it's a book we should treasure.

To a Happier Year

By Peter Fulham June 26, 2013

In 1971, a full fifty-seven years after it was written, “Maurice,” E. M. Forster’s novel of young romance between two men in prewar England, was finally published. Forster had been yearning to write this kind of love story for years, but he was justifiably apprehensive. His final comment on “Maurice,” attached to the manuscript, which was hidden inside a drawer, read, “Publishable. But worth it?” The subtext, of course, was clear: the release of such a book could have meant the end of Forster’s career and reputation. He left instructions that it not be published until he died.

“Maurice” is now widely read and taught. The novel is remarkable not only for its beauty as a work of literature but for its bravery. I remember vividly when I first read it, about a year after I came out, and it served as a hopeful plea from another era: “Don’t give up.”

Today’s Supreme Court decisions, though far from definitive, are an answer to that plea. With the addition of California, roughly thirty per cent of Americans now live in states where gay marriage is legal. And now, the federal government must afford the same rights to married gay couples as it does to their straight counterparts.

These victories are incomplete. Marriage equality is still non-existent in thirty-seven states, and gay people still face a lack of employment protection throughout the country. But today is a day of real triumph.

It is a surreally moving experience to grow up at the same time your country, in incremental steps, begins to validate your existence. When Vermont introduced civil unions, in 2000, I was ten years old. I was thirteen when the Supreme Court overturned the Texas law banning gay sex. When I came out, in 2009, it would be three more years before President Obama endorsed marriage equality. Even for the most jaded cynic, it’s tough not to get swept up in the audacity of the gay-rights movement, in its highly American insistence that it will not pause until its cause is fulfilled.

Comparisons between the gay-rights movement and the civil-rights movement can be too simplistic, but in at least one respect there is an unmistakable commonality. I remember hearing Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in middle school and being thrilled by his simple, lucid metaphor of dreaming. But it didn’t occur to me just how literal King’s words probably were.

The idle mind of a marginalized person spends a lot of time dreaming. King’s dream was of a world in which black children and white children co-existed together, uninhibited by racism. For a lot of L.G.B.T. people, I suspect the dream is also of children: the gay middle-schooler no longer terrified by the wrath of bigoted parents, the two high-school girls who no longer have to hold hands in secret.

I also know there are champions of gay equality alive today who, even as they celebrate, are also mourning the loss of some of their bravest friends and allies. Full equality for gay Americans now seems to be the country’s determined course. But a bitter truth taught by the civil-rights movement is that many of those you most wish could accompany you to equality don’t make it. The Stonewall riots have long been quiet, and many of the men and women who stood up to brutality are now resting in graves.

“Maurice,” it’s worth noting, concludes happily, with its two heroes, Maurice and Alec, eloping for life. Forster explains why he conceived this kind of finale in the afterward he wrote in 1960:

It was a melancholy kind of generosity: men who loved other men couldn’t be happy in Forster’s world, so he gave them the virtuosity of his imagination. In America, the happier year, perhaps, has not yet arrived. But we’re getting closer.

Peter Fulham is a writer living in Washington, D.C.

Photograph of E. M. Forster by J. Wilds/Keystone/Getty.

Becoming gay in E.M. Forster's 'Maurice'.

by Harned, Jon Dec 22, 1993

The term "homosexuality" appears only twice in Maurice, both times in pronouncements by the psychiatrist Dr. Lasker Jones. Otherwise when the narrative requires that Maurice's sexual orientation be designated in some way, terminology from another, older discourse about sexuality is used, that of ecclesiastical and civil law, as when Maurice describes himself to Dr. Barry as "an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort" (159), a confession that Dr. Barry could discount because he "had read no scientific works on Maurice's subject" and thus believed that "only the most depraved could glance at Sodom" (160). Were Dr. Barry familiar enough with the contemporary medical/psychiatric literature to have known the term "homosexual," which had been introduced into English in 1892 through a translation of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia sexualis (1887), he might have regarded Maurice's disclosure in another light, for "sodomy" designated acts that any sinner might commit from time to time, whereas in the voluminous scientific writing on sexual abnormalities in the nineteenth century, the "homosexual" had become a species of people (Foucault 43). By the time Maurice was composed, the creation of a new discourse about the "homosexual" had also brushed aside the nineteenth-century term "sexual inversion," which selected a reversal of gender roles as the defining feature of sexual pathology, and thus even more firmly established sexual preference as an identity - an identity, according to David M. Halperin, "polarized around a central opposition rigidly defined by the binary play of sameness and difference in the sexes of the sexual partners; people henceforward belonged to one or the other of two exclusive categories" (16).

This immensely influential reconceptualization also gave rise to "reverse" discourses, as Michel Foucault has called them (101), and to an extent Maurice is such a creation, a plea for the acceptance of homosexual desire as a "natural" condition. It is important to note, however, that unlike many "reverse" discourses, the novel does not fall into the trap of confirming the very legitimacy of the normative medical/psychiatric discourse that stigmatized homosexuals. Some of its characters prefer sex with partners of the same sex and some with partners of the opposite sex, but it does not represent homosexual desire as the essence of a timeless identity or homosexuality as one of two mutually exclusive sexual categories. Clive Durham accepts the first of these premises and most of the characters the latter, but Forster was too shrewd a psychologist not to recognize the inextricability of the two categories and his novel insistently undermines their opposition.

One challenge to the new taxonomy of sexual orientation emerges from the bits and pieces of information we are given about the relationship between Maurice and his father. In the first chapter the elder Hall is said to have "recently died of pneumonia" (11) when Maurice is fourteen and graduates from the same preparatory school that his father had attended twenty-five years before. Maurice's father must thus have become fatally ill at the relatively young age of thirty-nine or forty. In the next chapter we learn that at about the same time as his father's death Maurice experiences homoerotic longings for the garden boy, George. Forster does not explicitly advance a theory to explain why Maurice becomes homosexual, and one cannot plausibly invoke the misogynistic and homophobic cliche of post-world War II American psychiatry that he is the victim of an overly devoted mother and an absent father, for Maurice is not portrayed as a "mama's boy," emotionally close though he is to her as an adolescent. On the contrary, the novel emphasizes his masculinity - his fondness for sports, his indifference to aesthetics, his likeness to his father in manner as well as appearance. Indeed, the close temporal connection implied between the death of the elder Hall and Maurice's first inklings of his homosexuality suggests that Maurice might best be understood symbolically as his father's repressed Other, the sign of a fracture within the father that results in his illness and early demise.

Certainly the novel indicates that Maurice's father as a young man was, like the early Clive, homosexual.(1) What appeared primary in him was actually secondary. He had "supported society and moved without a crisis from illicit to licit love," and once Maurice has come to seek a life true to his sexual desire, the ghost of the elder Hall "is touched with envy.... For he sees the flesh educating the spirit, as his has never been educated" (151-152). If in the immediate aftermath of his breakup with Clive Maurice is unaware of his father's secret life and ghostly presence, his confession to Dr. Lasker of his encounter with Alec in the Rustic Room seems to bring him an intuition of them. The narrator comments that Maurice's exhaustive description to Dr. Lasker of his night with Alec cast its "perfection" in the light of "a transient grossness, such as his father had indulged in thirty years before" (213). As Maurice later debates with himself the propriety of his conduct, one side of him agrees with Clive that sexual desire ought to comply with social norms and says, "Night is coming - be quick then - take a taxi - be quick like your father, before doors close" (215).

These references to the father's pre-marital sexuality and Maurice's uncanny awareness of it as he becomes more aware of his own erotic desire serve to remind the reader of the similarity as well as the difference between father and son. The elder Hall acquiesced without protest to society's law that he live as a heterosexual, and he became indistinguishable from other fathers of his class. The story of his son, initially indistinguishable from other sons of his class, suggests that time may diminish society's power to exclude that difference. As a child, however, Maurice can only feel the terror that his inner division creates. Alone in his dark room at night once his mother has kissed him good-night, he is frightened by the image of his own shadow on the wall reflected in the mirror.

A similar dis-ease pervades Maurice's preparatory and public schools, those vehicles of transition between the micro-political world of elite families like Maurice's and the adult homosocial worlds of business, government, and the like. Mr. Abrahams is an "old fashioned" (9) patriarch who does not push the boys of his prep school too hard in sports or study, but sensing a threat to the ancien regime, he has in effect turned over the reins of the school to the more vigilant Mr. Ducie, who suits the times better because he is "not incapable of seeing both sides of a question" (9). He is more aware, that is, of the complexities of the world yet still "orthodox" (9) and would thus seem to be an effective agent of the establishment. Yet his subtlety comes across more like confusion in his lecture to Maurice. "One mustn't make a mystery of [sex]" (14), he tells the boy, but swept away by his own rhetoric and thoughts of his impending marriage, his peroration does just this, transporting it into the hazy realm of the ideal: "It all hangs together - all - and God's in his heaven, All's right with the world. Male and female! Ah wonderful!" (15). Underlying this rapture is surely a prudishness about sex, evident as well in his dismay at forgetting to scratch out "those infernal diagrams" (15). Mr. Ducie's intellectual flexibility evidently rests on his unresolved inhibitions.

Indeed, there is the possibility of yet deeper conflicts. In Foucault's revisionist interpretation, the stern Victorian prohibition against sex other than for the purpose of procreation betrays an obsessive fascination with it in all its forms. From this perspective, Mr. Ducie, who is "soaked in evolution" (10), ironically falls victim to the very strategy by which endless discussion about sex was provoked, that of banishing it from the realm of acceptable public discourse. Sex had to become the sin to be confessed, the unknown that science must discover. It thereby became the secret of the nineteenth century and thus the very essence of knowledge itself, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick seems justified in claiming that the Victorians constituted homosexuality as the most closely guarded secret (Epistemology 73-4). In the wake of Freud's formidable challenge to the heterosexual/homosexual binarism, one cannot now help but wonder who finally Mr. Ducie is trying to convince that God created a heterosexual world in this oration to the handsome boy during their private walk on the beach. And when Maurice suggests that he will not marry, does Mr. Ducie invite Maurice and his future wife to dine with him and his wife in ten years because this pedagogue regards Maurice's announcement as adolescent naivete or because intuitively he has sensed all along that Maurice is not the marrying kind and wishes to save die boy - and himself? We do not know the answers to these questions, of course, but the novel invites us to ask them. The lives of Maurice's father and Clive are abundant testimony to the invisibility and plasticity of erotic desire.

Maurice's society relies for the enforcement of obligatory heterosexuality on what D. A. Miller, following Foucault's lead, calls the "open secret," the function of which is "not to conceal knowledge, so much as the knowledge of the knowledge" (206). Such a secret polices the boundary between public and private, between what may be discussed and what not. As Alan Sinfield puts Miller's point, "It keeps a topic like homosexuality in the private sphere, but under surveillance, allowing it to hover on the edge of public visibility. Homosexuality must not be allowed fully into the open, for that would grant it public status; yet it must not disappear altogether, for then it would be beyond control and would no longer effect a general surveillance of aberrant desire" (50). At Sunnington the masters are especially unsettled by the open secret of homosexuality since a scandal just before Maurice's arrival led to the expulsion of a scapegoat, the "black sheep" (23), and to a heightened regimentation. Yet the vigilance of the masters is a far less powerful force of control than the wariness of the boys themselves. The school spirit is a calculated meanness. As he rises in the ranks, Maurice bullies the younger boys, not because he enjoys cruelty, but because "it was the proper thing to do" (21). Only later at Cambridge does he discover that other young men do not routinely break his plates or insult his mother's photograph. Already the double bind described by Sedgwick has formed that will entangle Sunnington's graduates as adults, obliging them to spend the bulk of their lives in close contact with other men yet always be frightened that they have crossed over the slippery threshold between identification and desire, or be thought to have done so by others. The energy generated by the homophobia latent in this double bind emerges in the competitiveness, fear of intimacy, and proneness to violence necessary to the maintenance of the modern capitalistic, imperialistic state and the patriarchal system itself (Between Men 83-90). Maurice, even more insecure than the other boys at Sunnington, blends in all the more, doing nothing to draw attention to his secret.

By the time Maurice enters Cambridge he has virtually succumbed to the heterosexualism of his upbringing, terrorized by its relentless homophobia, convinced that he suffers from a unique affliction. Society has kept from him the knowledge that he is not alone in the same way it polices other open secrets, by using its collective power to silence those who, by way of contrast, are indispensable to its own definition. A major topos of the novel is the foreclosed conversation, the refusal to discuss matters beyond a certain limit, the harsh, intimidating dismissal of dissident voices. Mr. Ducie, not surprisingly, first employs this tactic by ordering Maurice to "just shut them up" (13) when the boys at his next school mention sex to him and then quickly dismisses Maurice's candid remark that he will never marry by the joke of inviting Maurice and his wife to dinner with him. Maurice recognizes that he has been the victim of a cover-up, but says nothing. At the next opportunity for Maurice to speak truthfully about himself, the scene in which he learns that George has left, he cannot explain his distress to his mother, murmuring only, "I don't know ... I don't know" (18). Mrs. Hall avoids searching for the true cause of his sobbing by telling Maurice that he is overtired. The men in the novel tend to be more blunt in their knowing repressiveness, as when the Dean orders a student in his translation class to "Omit: a reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks" (51). And when Dr. Barry reprimands Maurice for his conduct toward his mother as "a disgrace to chivalry" (85), which in Victorian parlance amounts to a slur on Maurice's masculinity, he refuses to listen to any explanations: "Don't answer me, sir, don't answer. I want none of your speech, straight or otherwise" (85).

Maurice might never have broken through the wall of secrecy about homosexuality had it not been for Risley's inquisitiveness. Dean Cornwallis, Chapman, and initially even Maurice scorn Risley's endless flow of unconventional opinions during the cozy dinner party in the Dean's rooms where Maurice meets Risley, yet Risley will not allow himself to be shut up, and Maurice is "stirred ... incomprehensibly" by his insistence that one should "talk, talk" (35), recognizing the sincerity and humanity in this Lytton Strachey-like undergraduate. In listening and responding to the others at the dinner, Risley seeks not so much to impose on them new dogmas as to compel them to question old ones: "It was as important for him to go to and fro as to them to go forward, and he loved keeping near them" (33).

The liberation that Risley's irrepressible practice seems to offer leads Maurice to visit Risley's rooms, where his friendship with Clive begins, and it gives Clive the confidence to act on his agnosticism by refusing to communicate at Christmas. His conspicuous absence in church humiliates his mother and precipitates a row, but as he explains to Maurice, "When I came to know Risley and his crew it seemed imperative to speak out. You know what a point they make of that - it's really their main point" (43). And because Clive's intellectual poise wins Maurice's heart, Maurice "wanted to show his friend that he had something besides brute strength, and where his father would have kept canny silence he began to talk, talk" (46) about religion. He easily abandons his faith in Christian doctrines because Clive's self-assured logic demystifies them and also because he knows that talk brings him and Clive closer together, so that in losing the intellectual battle he wins the romantic war.

Not surprisingly, Maurice, who learns slowly, reacts to Clive's confession of his love for Maurice by the same tactic others have used to marginalize him, by abruptly cutting off their conversation: "it's the only subject absolutely beyond the limit as you know, it's the worst crime in the calendar, and you must never mention it again" (59). And even when Maurice, recognizing his mistake, seeks to regain his friend's affection by drawing him into conversation - "I only want to discuss" (64), he pleads - and Clive agrees to "discuss if you like" (65), he cannot bring himself to explain to Clive what he means when he says he has always been like the Greeks without knowing it: "Words deserted him immediately" (66). Yet the truth is finally spoken between them in the simplest possible way when Maurice, relying on instinct, climbs through Clive's window to hear his name spoken in Clive's dream, and he answers by saying Clive's name.

Forster no doubt wants the reader to feel the poetry of this romance after a lifetime of loneliness and fear, but to see at the same time its inherent instability. Its demise comes two years later when "through a blind alteration of the life spirit" (118) Clive begins to be sexually attracted to women and to find Maurice's embraces repulsive. The novel presents this shift in Clive's erotic leanings as a mystery, an eruption of inexplicable workings of the body in Clive's otherwise orderly life. Forster's narration of the period of Clive's change dramatizes its irrationality by inverting chronological order, presenting the outward signs of the struggle within Clive - his pessimism, his rudeness to Maurice, his fainting at the dinner table, and so on - before revealing its cause in the letter he writes to Maurice from Greece.

At the same time the novel suggests that the change is less absolute and less purely biological than it might appear. As a boy Clive felt himself damned as a Sodomite, a homophobia he never fully overcomes even after his conversion from Christianity to Hellenism. For Clive absorbs two contradictory lessons from his master Plato, only one of which is the moral legitimacy of homosexual love. Nineteenth-century homosexuals who came from well-to-do homes and could thereby afford a classical education frequently read this same message in the Symposium and the Phaedrus and helped create the mystique of classical Greece as the spiritual home for men who love other men. It is only recently that revisionist classicists under the influence of Foucault have drawn attention to the ideological implications of Greek homosexuality by linking its pederastic orientation to the subordination of slaves and women in a culture that was pervasively hierarchical and patriarchal (Halperin 15-40). With his customary independence of mind, Forster seems to have reached much the same conclusion about the Greeks, for Maurice clearly shows that Clive turns to Plato not just as the advocate of homosexuality, but also as the celebrant of the spiritual and rational over the material and the carnal, a philosophy that effectively turns against his own homosexuality. With Maurice Clive feels that "[t]he love that Socrates bore Phaedo now lay within his reach, love passionate but temperate, such as only finer natures understand" (98).

In Maurice as well as earlier novels Forster typically links sexual repression with medieval Christianity - Cecil Vyse is "Gothic" - but here its intolerance is also revealed as part and parcel of a cultural logic stretching back to Greek philosophy. Clive's life renders especially visible the thought implicit throughout the novel that homophobia is intrinsic to what Derrida has called the "metaphysics of presence."(2) Forster's previous novel, Howards End, is a sustained exploration of the complicity of logocentrism and phallocentrism, taking the gender binarism as the nexus of an extensive series of asymmetrical oppositions - public/private, realism/idealism, reason/passion, business/art, imperialism/pacifism, and so on - that largely structure the society of his time. The marriage of Henry Wilcox and Margaret Schlegel symbolizes Margaret's attempt to connect all these false antitheses, to accept differences rather than suppress them. Maurice enriches Forster's social analysis by placing the newly devised heterosexual/homosexual antithesis within the larger historical context of phallogocentrism.

Clive regards Maurice as someone to be refined by this elitist cultural tradition, and he deludes himself into thinking that he has succeeded, even though Maurice admits to not understanding Clive's endless philosophic disquisitions and even to disliking Greece. Their "new language" amounts to only the "humblest scraps of speech" (93) and the sharing of emotion because Clive restricts discussion of their sexual attraction to the barest minimum. When Maurice confesses to Clive on their first night together at Penge, "I adore you," Clive blushes and responds starchily, "Sit up straight and let's change the subject." The new subject turns out to be one that allows him to sublimate his sexuality, "the precise influence of Desire upon our aesthetic judgements" (92). Clive does not care that Maurice becomes lost in his arcane reasoning; for him, unlike Risley and Maurice, talk is a means to dominate others and he finds refuge in its tendency to conceal as much as reveal.

Ultimately the difference between the destinies of Clive and Maurice seems to derive from the inequality in their social backgrounds, a class distinction rendered psychologically palpable through the personalities of their mothers. Mrs. Durham and Mrs. Hall do have in common a mixture of blindness and insight about their sons. Neither fully comprehends the secret attraction between the two men, yet neither seems to lack an intuition about it. Mrs. Hall, the less worldly of the two, still recognizes that Maurice's refusal to communicate is a symbolic gesture and correctly interprets it as an implicit refusal to follow in the footsteps of his father, a train of thought that leads to her hilarious non-sequitur that Dr. Barry, who as Maurice points out does not attend church either, is "a most clever man, and Mrs. Barry is the same" (53). Mrs. Hall obviously does not consider herself clever, but her syntactical tangle may be occasioned as well by an uncomfortable, unthinkable chain of associations between her son, agnosticism, and sexual unorthodoxy. Similarly, Mrs. Durham, after trying to convince herself that Clive has a girlfriend by pressing Maurice for information at dinner, insists that Clive should not spend another year at Cambridge but instead take up his father's role at Penge and visit America, not Greece, which would be "travelling for play" (95). On the surface her meaning appears to be that Clive would profit more as a future candidate for his father's seat in Parliament by seeing America, but this vague logic may conceal another meaning, that it would be better for Clive's private life to visit hearty America rather than decadent Greece.

Worried as they both are about their sons, and apparently without fully knowing why, the two mothers react in different ways. Mrs. Durham, like her house guests at Penge, is always "doing things or causing others to do them" (87), and in her aristocratic manner she seeks to interfere in her son's life far more than the middle-class Mrs. Hall. When Clive fails to attend church there is a family row; when Maurice imitates him, Mrs. Hall puts up a mild protest. Mrs. Durham suffers the inequality of women - Penge is Clive's, not hers - but her position as a member of the local gentry gives her far more social standing than most men and she is accustomed to ruling and getting her way. In fact, she is even willing to marry Clive off to someone socially inferior, Maurice's sister Ada, because Ada is both rich and foolish, a combination of qualities that would allow her to run Penge as usual.

Through the first half of the novel Clive is in full revolt against her. His recognition that she cares more about the social stigma of his failure to communicate rather than the salvation of his soul makes him see her "for what she really was - withered, unsympathetic, empty" and, as the text goes on to say, Clive "in his disillusion found himself thinking vividly of Hall" (71). The suggestion that resentment against his mother motivates his affair with Maurice at least as much as affection for him is repeated later in his remark at Penge that "it served my mother right when I slipped up to kiss you before dinner" (90). He privately regards Maurice as "bourgeois, unfinished, and stupid - the worst of confidants" (71), but he receives from him a maternal affection and diffidence that his mother and no man have given him. His transition to heterosexuality is encouraged by similar maternal care-taking, the flirtations of the nurse who attends him during his mental breakdown and the solicitations of Ada as she practices on him the techniques of bandaging wounded soldiers.

Clive cultivates the manner of a man fully in control of himself, self-assured to the point of arrogance, yet his conflicts go deeper than Maurice's, for the intensity of his disgust with his mother registers the enormity of her influence over him. He both detests her and identifies with her. Her domination threatens to emasculate him; of the two friends, he is the more misogynistic. Nevertheless, he characteristically adopts a feminine position in relation to Maurice, enjoying Maurice's rough-housing and also sitting at his feet, his head leaning up against Maurice's trousers. Maurice is someone whom he can think circles around yet allow himself the luxury of being touched and cared for. "Home emasculate[s] everything" (52), Maurice complains, but he returns to Cambridge after the vacations in one piece, whereas Clive comes back emotionally pulverized, ill and "paler than usual" (56) on the last occasion. As Maurice grows older he remains fond of his mother, but she counts for little in his life. On the other hand, Mrs. Durham and all she represents - Penge, family, society, a political career - finally prevail over Clive and he gives way to homosexual panic.(3) Significantly, the mysterious alteration in his sexual life occurs just after he has passed his bar exams. The law - the law that forbids the mention of homosexuality and founds culture itself - must be obeyed. Socrates, who swallowed hemlock rather than violate this law, would have approved.

Once Clive converts to normality his tendency to ban talk on forbidden subjects becomes more pronounced. He does visit Maurice upon his return from Greece to explain the change in him, but tries to conduct the conversation on his own terms. Sensing that Maurice is in a fighting mood, he tries to postpone their discussion until the next day so that there will not be a row, and Maurice bitterly reminds him of their former credo, "One ought to talk, talk, talk" (127). Clive bolts the next day in his revulsion against Maurice, but sex is an "unmentionable" (165) topic between him and his wife as well. Still physically attracted to Maurice, he finds an excuse one night to kiss Maurice's hand, but he goes on to urge, "don't let's mention it again" (176). When Maurice does mention the incident later, Clive flashes out, "Don't allude to that" (243).

The forms of oppression in the novel are varied in structure and severity, but they are interconnected, one hierarchy legitimating another by means of analogy. It follows that the numerous manifestations of privilege cannot be successfully challenged one at a time, but that the attack must be directed against the entire system of stifling polarities. Neither Clive nor Maurice recognizes this necessity during their years of intimacy. Once Clive marries, however, a slow but profound alteration does begin in Maurice that is foreshadowed in the lives of his sisters. Attracted to Ada upon his return from Greece, Clive notices a change in them that Maurice, withdrawn into himself, has not, that "they were expanding in the absence of their man" (I 23), and they remind him of the primroses at Penge that flower at night, an image that will reoccur when Maurice falls in love with Alec. The symbolism of the primroses resonates with the mystical belief of Maurice's dying grandfather that "the Incarnation was a sort of sunspot" (137). Both the primroses and the idea of the sunspot imply a philosophy of absence rather than presence, and it is toward this understanding that Maurice moves in his dark night of the soul after Clive leaves him.

The first sign of his change comes in his apology to Ada for having accused her falsely of trying to seduce Clive, but it is only the miraculous intervention of Alec during his agony of self-loathing and loneliness that saves him. Significantly Alec seizes the initiative by grabbing Maurice's legs when Maurice is taking a walk before dinner at Penge and stumbles across him while Alec is trying to escape the zealous Mr. Borenius by hiding in the bushes. Their first physical encounter occurs under the cover of night and through Alec's attempt to avoid being coerced into undergoing confirmation. Unlike Maurice, Alec has no susceptibility to metaphysics.

The episode before dinner sends an "electric current" (188) through Maurice's memory, connecting the warm glow he felt while shooting with Archie London and Alec, the assistance he gave Alec in moving the piano on the previous night, and his reprimand to Alec for seeking a five-shilling tip that morning. So anaesthetized is Maurice by class prejudice that he even now does not recognize these incidents as signs of his attraction to Alec. The reprimand may perhaps be the most difficult for him to interpret, but surely it was a pang of resentment for having to pay for Alec's attention, a resentment that later reappears in his paranoid fear that Alec must be seeking to blackmail him by inviting him to the boathouse. Failing to connect all these incidents, Maurice allows the electric current to "smash back into darkness," though he returns to the dining room with his hair yellow from "evening primrose pollen" (188), defends Alec's failure to be confirmed by belligerently pointing out to Mr. Borenius and Mrs. Durham that he has been confirmed but does not communicate, and then goes for another walk after dinner "that he might inhale the evening primroses" (190). His unconsciously premeditated encounter with Alec appears inconsequential, but it leaves him longing for "darkness - not the darkness of a house which coops up a man among furniture, but the darkness where he can be free" (191). It is as if Maurice can only think of Alec through the medium of symbolic imagery. Fortunately Alec is more aware of his and Maurice's desires, and boldly crawls through Clive's window at night, having ascended to the window by a ladder that has been brought to patch the drawing room leak, a symbol both of the phallus and the decline of Penge and the class system, the logos and its dissolution. Ultimately he ends the quarrel between them outside the British Museum by rejecting the calcification of that class system in language: "|Oh let's give over talking. Here' - and he held out his hand" (226). Critics who scoff at the novel's ending would no doubt be more satisfied if Maurice had fallen in love with someone from his own social background and.thereby ignore Forster's political realism. It is only by breaking with society as cleanly as possible that Maurice can find any escape from the tightly interwoven discursive oppositions that prevent him from connecting with someone else.

Moreover, the novel shows a bond between the two men that might very well be able to resist the test of time, for at heart Maurice and Alec are very much alike. Alec climbs through a window at night to enter Maurice's bedroom,just as years before Maurice had found the only way of claiming Clive's love by climbing through his bedroom window at Cambridge. If Alec angled for tips, then Maurice, in the business of making money himself, comes to recognize his behavior as "natural" (189). Their participation in the cricket match brings out a silent, instinctive affinity and joy in the company of one another and in physical exercise, a rapport soured by Clive's arrival and his pedantic but inadvertently revealing reference to the match as the "Olympic Games" (202). The incoherent letter Alec sends Maurice with its mixture of threats, self-justification, and expressions of affection strikes Maurice with its resemblance to his own muddle-headedness. And when Alec shows up at Maurice's office, he sounds very much like Maurice himself once one discounts the difference in class: "I've always been a respectable young fellow until you called me into your room to amuse yourself. It don't hardly seem fair that a gentleman should drag you down" (221). At the British Museum they both admire a statue of an Assyrian Bull, a relic of Oriental culture, and if the Greek spirit in the form of Mr. Ducie, bent over a model of the Acropolis, nearly drives them apart by reminding them of class distinctions, Maurice's identification of himself by Alec's name marks another advance in his growing willingness to see the Other as he sees himself. When he realizes that Alec has threatened to blackmail him out of the same fear that has driven him, he experiences the exhilaration of this epistemological shift: "And he rejoiced because he had understood Alec's infamy through his own" (226). Perhaps most important to their union is the fact they have both suffered through the discursive habits of the Durhams, which have threatened to obliterate both. What Alec says about the way he has been treated applies in some measure to Maurice as well: "you wouldn't believe how servants are spoken to," he tells Maurice; "[i]t's too shocking for words" (229).

The novel's conclusion is satisfying as well in that the retreat of the two lovers into a vague, primordial "greenwood" (135) bespeaks in its very indefiniteness Maurice's hard-won recognition that he has no pre-ordained identity as a homosexual, that he must create one for himself out of the discoveries that he has made about himself and those around him as members of oppressed classes. He is in no mood for philosophizing or confrontation at the end. Clive can with typical certitude assert that "the sole excuse for any relationship between two men is that it remain purely platonic," but Maurice declines to defend himself on Clive's terms: "I don't know. I've come to tell you what I did" (244). Maurice and Alec achieve their isolated salvation in keeping with the dangers and opportunities Foucault has described:

we must be aware of... the tendency to reduce being gay to the question: "Who am I?" and "What is the secret of my desire?" Might it not be better if we asked ourselves what sort of relationships we can set up, invent, multiply, or modify through our homosexuality? The problem is not trying to find out the truth of one's sexuality within oneself, but rather nowadays, trying to use our sexuality to achieve a variety of different kinds of relationships. And this is why homosexuality is probably not a form of desire but something to be desired. We must therefore insist on becoming truly gay, rather than persist in defining ourselves as such .(4)

The novel does not end with Maurice's "coming out," his finding out the truth of his sexuality within himself The lower-class, bisexual Alec and the middle-class, homosexual Maurice must improvise a new kind of relationship out of the similarities and the differences in their experiences. The mysterious greenwood symbolizes not the nostalgic illusion of an original plenitude but the very lack of identity. In the words of another pastoral about youth in search of justification, they set out for "fresh woods and pastures new."

COPYRIGHT 1993 Southern Illinois University No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.

Copyright 2023 Gale, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

What an Ending

Considering E.M. Forster’s Maurice at four moments in time.

Image from page 69 of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1894. Flickr, British Library.

History does not reach us only in classrooms and via textbooks; movies, novels, songs, and even video games have shaped how we understand what came before the present for generations. Lapham’s Quarterly is exploring the history and allure of pop culture’s period pieces, artifacts that captivated audiences with their conceptions of the past—and the political and cultural contexts that made these historical fictions so compelling.

On September 5, 1987, under the spell of the sinking and watery city where Aschenbach first saw Tadzio emerge from the sea like some frail and golden god in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of E.M. Forster’s cross-class gay romance Maurice premiered at the Venice Film Festival. The production was chummily Anglo-American, making for a curiously polite protest (if protest it was) against the colonial nostalgia and reactionary homophobia of the Reagan-Thatcher years. As much an uncritically aestheticized portrayal of elite English Edwardianism as it was a melancholy glamorization of closeted gay life, the transatlantic confection cost £1.58 million, a sum that would have bought 262 AIDS patients a year’s worth of Retrovir (AZT), licensed for use that year at a price that made it the world’s most expensive drug to date. What are the politics of visual pleasure for a movie about nascent queer love filmed in the time of AIDS but set in the late imperial cocoon of clipped lawns and subfusc?

Forster began writing Maurice in 1913, when the British Empire governed nearly a quarter of the earth’s population and the question of nostalgia was beside the point. Forster was thirty-four, eighteen years had passed since Oscar Wilde’s conviction for “gross indecency,” and it would be another fifty-four years before “homosexual acts” were decriminalized in the United Kingdom. Completed in 1914 and subsequently revised several times, Maurice was published only after Forster’s death in 1970, a year after Stonewall; understandably fearing homophobic reprisal, he had refused to publish the novel in his lifetime, instead leaving the manuscript to his friend Christopher Isherwood, who subsequently oversaw its publication in 1971. The barely canonical novel circles around the story of Clive Durham and Maurice Hall, Cambridge undergraduates who fall in love reading Plato’s Symposium and listening to Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony. In a “Terminal Note” appended in 1960, Forster reveals that Maurice “was the direct result of a visit to Edward Carpenter,” the Cambridge-educated, sandal-wearing gardener, poet, and utopian socialist who lived with his much younger, rather more working-class boyfriend, George Merrill, in Millthorpe, a village in Derbyshire. Forster praises the intellectual example of Carpenter but credits Merrill’s ambient sensuality with instigating the novel:

The excessive repression evinced by this explanation of Maurice’s origins would be comical if its cause—the criminalization of gay life—had not been so cruel. A similarly breathless, faintly dusty atmosphere of sophomoric fumbling pervades the novel itself, at times sickeningly.

Rejecting Victorian portrayals of homosexuality as tragic and ruinous, Forster insisted that “a happy ending was imperative,” but most of the story is still pretty gloomy. When Maurice initially condemns Clive for his profession of love, the narration (couched in free indirect discourse) sounds straight out of the literature of homosexual doom Forster explicitly sought to avoid:

Even at the high point of the affair, when Maurice and Clive keep close but rather chaste company for a time in London together, the novel gives us only a very muted sense of mutual satisfaction: “During the next two years Maurice and Clive had as much happiness as men under that star can expect.” By the end of part 2, Clive and Maurice break as lovers when Clive, the more posh of the two and anxious to protect his class privilege, decides to marry a woman. They brawl on the floor, with Maurice weeping and saying, “What an ending, what an ending.”

Figure at a Window, by Julio González, 1936. Photograph © Tate (CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0).

It was not, of course, the novel’s ending, since Maurice goes on to fall in love with Alec Scudder, a young servant on the Durham estate. The unhappily married Clive greets the revelation of Maurice’s new entanglement with genteel contempt, barely comprehending what he has been told: “Intimacy with any social inferior was unthinkable to him.” But Forster did not celebrate the transcendence of social hierarchy he had so vividly witnessed in the Carpenter-Merrill household. A few chapters earlier, Maurice is disgusted to learn that his new lover was a son of the village butcher: “Maurice flung his hat on the floor of the car with all his force. ‘That is about the limit,’ he thought, and buried both hands in his hair.” So much for love that knows no bounds; though estranged, Clive and Maurice speak as class equals behind the back of Maurice’s new love, the butcher’s son. Though Clive, with his country estate and London house, clearly outranks Maurice, a mere stockbroker, their shared time at Cambridge sealed them together in a gentleman’s pact of noble sexlessness—highly dramatic, gloriously narrated, and later lushly filmed. Hypnotized by the sullen passion of the Clive-Maurice romance, we learn almost nothing about the ostensibly triumphant love of Maurice and Alec, which suddenly (and without any convincing characterization on either side) escapes the overwhelming constraints of class and sexual repression, ending the novel in an inchoate glimmer, a conditional possibility, an afterthought.

Sunset Sky over the Lake: The Boathouse on the Right, by J.M.W. Turner, 1827. Photograph © Tate (CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0).

There is a certain line of argument that would dismiss these skeptical reflections as hopelessly anachronistic, insisting that Foster was a lion in his own time, visionary in his imagining of still-unthought queer love. But the reactions of Forster’s friends and contemporaries, several of whom read drafts of the book, would suggest otherwise. Carpenter was lukewarm in his praise, telling Forster in an August 1914 letter that he didn’t “always like your rather hesitating tantalizing impressionist style.” He did appreciate that the ending is a happy one: “I am so glad you end up on a major chord.” Bloomsbury critic Lytton Strachey was more frank about the limits of the evasiveness that Carpenter called “tantalizing,” excoriating Forster for sexless scenes that appeared so primly anti-erotic compared to Strachey’s own exuberant homosexuality: “I really think the whole conception of male copulation in the book rather diseased—in fact morbid and unnatural.” Perhaps the harshest reaction came from Hugh Meredith, a married former classmate to whom Forster had dedicated A Room with a View: he was so indifferent to the manuscript that Forster felt their very friendship had been called into question. Even Forster was less than sanguine about the novel’s prospects, writing to his friend Florence Barger in 1915, “To you [Maurice] will reveal a new and painful world, into which you will hardly have occasion to glance again.” Major chords aside, to Forster the world of homosexuality was a painful one—how could it be anything but in 1915?

While Forster’s contemporaries saw Maurice as behind even their own times, the generation that followed him would come to see the novel as a precursor to gay liberation. Looking for a pair of fresh eyes for his old draft in 1932, Forster turned to the young Isherwood, only twenty-eight and already the author of two novels as well as a constant companion of W.H. Auden’s in the erotic, artistic, and intellectual playgrounds of interwar Berlin. In his 1976 autobiography Christopher and His Kind—itself a kind of coming out from the more winking, novelistic recounting of the same period in 1939’s Goodbye to Berlin—Isherwood evokes the scene of their first meeting in a deflective third person:

Paradoxically, a novel that seemed too stilted, “impressionistic,” “morbid” even to Forster’s contemporaries becomes a moving celebration of male love “without limit or excuse” to a leading writer of the ostensibly more liberated 1930s generation. Isherwood sees the older novelist’s hesitation as humility and the mildness of his experiment as prophetic of a still more permissive world to come. In contrast with Forster’s more critical Edwardian contemporaries, who saw him as something of a sexless fuddy-duddy, Isherwood blames the Edwardian period itself for Maurice’s chasteness, elegizing Forster as a “wonder” who, “imprisoned within the jungle of prewar prejudice,” could nevertheless put “those unthinkable thoughts into words.”

E.M. Forster, by Howard Coster, 1938. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

A decade later, Isherwood was dead and gay liberation was about to suffer its harshest test. Ronald Reagan was sworn into a second term in 1985 and Margaret Thatcher into a third in 1987. By the end of 1987, three months after Maurice screened at Venice, more than forty thousand had died of AIDS in the U.S. The number of reported cases had topped fifty thousand. On Reagan’s orders, noncitizens with HIV were barred from entering the country. The same year Larry Kramer founded ACT UP. Clearly, an opulent fantasy of gay Edwardian infatuation wasn’t in the zeitgeist. Or was it?

For those who had seen other film adaptations by the producing and life partners James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, Maurice’s ambiance was to be expected. Directed by Ivory (who cowrote the screenplay with Kit Hesketh-Harvey) and starring Hugh Grant as Clive, James Wilby as Maurice, and Rupert Graves as Alec, the Merchant-Ivory Maurice leans heavily, and predictably, into the atmospheric glitz of the antique, the precious, the privileged. True to Forster’s ambivalent eros, bodies are kept to a polite minimum, impeccably styled. Indeed, style itself becomes an object of attraction, and one is almost unsure whether to fall in love with the undeniably beautiful trio of lead actors or the surrounding furniture and houses.

Apparently Ivory wasn’t sure either. At one of the summits of the film’s over-exquisite longing, Grant rests his handsome head ever so suggestively on Wilby’s khaki knee to the plaintive strains of “Miserere mei,” Allegri’s 1638 setting of Psalm 50. Suddenly the music stops. A nape is stroked, locks twirl, and, as the protagonists shift, turning for a kiss, the creak of wicker is heard. An awkward noise for a collegiate kiss? Not so, thought the film’s director, who told The New Yorker in 2017, “The sound of that wicker chair is so sexy…it’s a fantastic sound. It just happened.” While probably not what ACT UP had in mind when its members chanted, “We’ll never be silent again! ACT UP!” in reference to its 1987 poster campaign “Silence=Death,” the creak of wicker and rustle of silk do capture the discreet aesthetic of the film’s version of gay life. Critics of Ivory’s too sunny, almost rose-colored view of the English high bourgeoisie (no one is quite an aristocrat) may be surprised to learn that this cold palette extended even to the cinematography, and quite deliberately. In his recently released memoir, Solid Ivory, Ivory recalls, “In later life I turned to chillier colors myself, and told my cameramen and art directors that I wanted certain films of mine to be predominantly cool in color, as for instance Maurice.” Thus the several paradoxes of Maurice compound: a deeply sad book built around a happy ending turned into an almost baroquely passionate film shot in self-consciously cool colors.

A Conversation, by George Romney, 1766. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Though profoundly repressed, the Merchant-Ivory Maurice is in fact—and perhaps despite itself—a weirdly emotional movie, arguably outstripping the novel itself in this respect. The film’s principal characters are frequently seen weeping, passing out, breaking down. Shortly after his Cambridge friend Lord Risley is convicted and imprisoned for gross indecency, Clive has a fainting spell at the Hall family dinner table, collapsing to the floor in a crash of china, and has to be carried upstairs and put to bed by Maurice. When Maurice calls for a doctor, the man insists that the Halls call for a nurse. In the scene where Clive and Maurice have their parting as lovers, Wilby says the line “What an ending, what an ending” with tears streaming down his face, trembling, shaking, convulsing almost, falling back into a chair and curled into himself like a shattered and helpless infant. To Forster’s original dialogue, Ivory and Hesketh-Harvey add “What’s going to happen to me?” and “I’m done for.”

An aura of unraveling, anxious panic and indistinct, undiagnosable illness pervades the second half of the film, with Maurice seeking out first his family doctor and then a specialist in hypnotism, increasingly hysterical. Declaring himself an “unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort” to Dr. Barry (Denholm Elliott), Maurice asks, again teary-eyed, his voice quavering, “Am I diseased? If I am, I want to be cured.” Supine on the couch of the hypnotist Lasker Jones (Ben Kingsley), Maurice cries bitterly at the suggestion he envision a pretty girl, saying, “I want to go home to my mother,” and barely stammering out, “She’s not attractive to me” and “I like short hair best” through profuse tears. Ivory may have intended his response to the death and decay of the body that so grimly defined the AIDS era to be one of slick hair and perfect skin, white-tie attire, and, of course, wicker. But even in this nostalgic, romantic idyll of abstinent love and apparently inviolable privilege, queer love is never far from the three-headed Cerberus of medicine, law, and pseudopsychology. Sickness always finds its way in, hissing, “Et in Arcadia ego” in a crystalline whisper.

Maurice was released in the United States on September 18, 1987, thirteen days after its premiere in Venice and almost exactly five weeks after I was born. When I was a teenager, the film acted as a kind of code word for bookish, pre-Grindr gays: “Have you seen Maurice?” It’s since become something else, an escape, perhaps, from a new sickness, a new death. I watched Maurice most recently with my boyfriend in the third week of March 2020, hiding in dread and reading CDC press releases as a new pandemic shut down New York. Soon enough there were rumors that patients with HIV wouldn’t be given ventilators. I was thirty-three, he was twenty-three, and in all the years since we’d joined the unspeakables of the Oscar Wilde sort, not a day went by that we didn’t remember the pandemic of forty years and forty million, the one whose name was hard to speak even now, the one that cost a generation. Somewhere between Central Park’s Great Lawn under pastel skies and the bright terror of boyish love on England’s green and pleasant land, we walked alone and waited for what would come, watching as Maurice Hall sought doctors for a disease for which there was no cure and barely a name. For me this was the heart of what it meant to watch the film in our acutely vulnerable moment: so much promise, so much beauty, but never quite fulfilled. Because we were in love, we thought of love; because it was queer love and so many had died and so many more would die still, we thought of death. If Maurice was a tragedy in its own time, and a witnessing and memorial in ours, it was for this reason: that so much love had given rise not to life but to loss. That even the strongest bond could not protect us. That there would be few happy endings. That we might not last the night.

Wait so when Alec is awkwardly apologizing to Maurice for not accepting his tip, he says it’s because he thought it was too much and he didn’t feel comfortable taking that much money from him. Not long after this we learn that Alec was already falling in love with Maurice at this point, and was likely just happy for the chance to be around him for a while.

And then Archie tries to give him a bigger tip and he takes it with no hesitation. We also learn later that Alec HATES Archie (and pretty much everybody else at Penge, tbh). So, Maurice can hang out with him all day for free, but if Archie want to be within 10 yards of him he has to pay out the nose. It’s so fucking funny. Alec does not get enough credit for being the funniest motherfucker in that book.

#Alec has big retail worker energy #drops his two week notice and immediately fucks his boss’s ex

Annnd Forster loves parallels, so:

Maurice: takes one week’s ‘holiday’ from work to stay at Penge as a disguise for commuting back/forth to London to try/fail at gay-cure hypnotism

Alec: hands in his notice two weeks before ‘emigrating’ & immediately seduces his boss’s ex because ‘I’ve not much longer in this country’, predictably derailing Maurice’s hypnotism ‘cure’

Edward Carpenter's full response letter to E.M. Forster after reading Maurice in 1914.

(The images of the letter can be found here at King's College's archive. Below is my transcription followed by photocopies of the letter. )

PS: 1) "MS" is the abbreviation for "manuscript".

23 Aug. [1914?]

My dear & blessed E.M.,

(I wish you had a name. Why do you always hide behind initials? What do your friends call you? My name is Edward, or ‘chips’!)

I have read your ‘Maurice’ after all, and am very much pleased with it. I don’t always like your rather hesitating tantalizing impressionist style - though it has subtleties - but I think the story has many fine points. You succeed in joining the atmosphere with the various characters, and there are plenty of happenings which is a good thing. Maurice’s love affairs are all interesting, and I have a mind to read them again, if I can find time - so I won’t send the MS back for a day or two. I am so glad you end up on a major chord. I was so afraid you were going to let Scudder go at the last - but you saved him and saved the story, because the end though improbable is not impossible and is the one bit of real romance - which those who understand will love.

I wish I could write more, but I am devoured just now by innumerable things. I expect to be in and about London from the 1st to 8th Sep. - so give me a cue to see you.

Your Edward C.

Transcription of vertical writings on the second page of the letter: 

I am sending my birthday reply to the papers on Sep. 1 with a lot about the war in it. 

Only a small part of the letter has been transcribed then included in reviews, or different Maurice editions. Which is why I wanted to transcribe the whole response from the real-life Maurice to the author of fictional Maurice after he read Maurice. The entirety is far more interesting.

Below: Edward Carpenter in 1886 and 1897.

Some contexts: based on Forster's diaries, Maurice was first finished in June/July, 1914, so Carpenter did read the first complete MS—with or without the epilogue is unclear since there's no solid proof for when the epilogue was written (though it appeared in the novel by February 1915 at the latest.)

However, since Carpenter said he liked the happy ending he read (and fun fact: the first complete MS which he read actually had a fairly different ending between Maurice and Alec than the published version's), we know that even from the first draft, Forster remained unwavering about how a happy ending is imperative.

More contexts: according to a letter from Forster to a friend, he thought Carpenter was "too unliterary to be helpful"—meaning Carpenter probably wasn't much interested in reading literature. And Carpenter sort of confirmed that in writing "I read your 'Maurice' after all", implying he was indeed reluctant to read at first.

Still, it made absolute sense for Forster to send the story back to the man who, in a manner of speaking, held the copyright of Maurice in flesh before Forster even finished it.

So the question is: did Carpenter know that Maurice was inspired by him and his lover George Merrill? Did he know that he was the real-life Maurice and Merrill was the real-life Alec? Perhaps that was why he was reluctant to read the novel at first?

I realized something rather unsettling about E.M. Forster’s Maurice: it would’ve never happened at all—in fact it was so close to never having been written. 

Why? Because the novel is a direct result of Forster's visit to Edward Carpenter and George Merril in 1913—specifically, a direct result of a Merril’s touch on Forster’s backside, but broadly of Carpenter’s philosophy and the happy life he had with his lover, the lower-class Merrill. But here’s the thing: Edward Carpenter and George Merril were almost charged, indicted, arrested, and/or imprisoned because of their sexuality and their relationship. 

Having published his controversial The Intermediate Sex which sought to justify homosexual love, Edward Carpenter came under fire and faced a large public reaction. Someone named D O’Brien, a member of a right-wing group, even instigated his own large-scale campaign against Carpenter. He printed out pamphlets and wrote letters accusing Carpenter, even sent them to the Home Office and the police who then started investigating Carpenter. The authorities evaluated Carpenter’s published books on homosexuality to determine merits of persecuting him based on the books’ contents, and whether to ban them.

However, the Director of Public Persecution at the time, Charles, decided not to open any legal proceeding. Even though Charles was disgusted by the books—and he was certain that Carpenter was a homosexual and that The Intermediate Sex could be used as evidence in court—he fully believed that, with the shadow of Oscar Wilde’s infamous trial still palpably felt in the society, drawing public attention to Carpenter and his writings would’ve led to another Oscar Wilde situation and done more damage to the society. (Basically, Charles did not want to stir any public discussion about sex or homosexuality). As such, no proceeding against Carpenter happened, and his books were not banned. This ended in 1909. 

But the investigation did not stop there. Charles was concerned with the books, but the Derbyshire police was concerned with—and anxious about—getting a case against Carpenter and Merrill as two homosexual men in love and living together. I think that since Carpenter was upper-class and had a solid reputation in Sheffield as well as Millthorpe of Holmesfield, the police went after Merrill instead, especially because O’Brien’s letters mentioned names of several people who knew about Merrill’s sexuality. But none of these people provided solid or useful evidence to the police. Hence, no incriminating evidence was found against Carpenter “beyond strong suspicion”, and before 1911, the whole thing was thus, finally, dropped. 

And Forster’s visit to the two men living together in Millthorpe happened in 1913. 

(Below: a 1911 census showing Edward Carpenter, the head of house, living together with George Merrill, the housekeeper)

Imagine: had Carpenter and Merril been caught—and imprisonment was most certain for Merril due to his lower station—they wouldn’t have been together at where they were in 1913. Forster probably wouldn’t have known them or Carpenter at all, and his visit to their cottage would’ve never happened—and thus, Maurice and its happy ending would’ve never been formed. The lives of the real life Maurice Hall and Alec Scudder could’ve been destroyed before their fictional counterparts had been conceived, and Forster would’ve never seen the happy gay couple he knew to write a gay romance novel with a happy ending. 

Forster could’ve written and even published another version of Maurice—albeit one with tragic ending and deaths of gay characters as illustrated in his own terminal note. But a happy gay ending would’ve never happened for sure if not for Carpenter and Merrill. 

I used to think Carpenter and Merrill evaded the laws and got through it all because they were smart and brave and discreet, but now I know they were also incredibly lucky, in the sense that it’s almost like Carpenter and Merrill were destined by some higher power to be together and live in a fairy tale of happily ever after; they were meant to survive as outlaws and to welcome Forster into their home and inspire him to write a gay novel with a happy ending. “Fate has mated it perfectly,” might I quote from Forster himself. Maybe, it's a combination of fate, luck, and human logics—the authorities simply could not prosecute them—that made this Edwardian gay fairy tale possible.

(Below: a 1921 census showing Carpenter and Merrill living together still)

Probably in an alternate universe, Carpenter and Merrill were indeed charged and arrested. Merrill went to prison and suffered the same as Wilde did; Carpenter however was let off due to his status (just like Forster had conjectured for Maurice and Alec in his terminal notes). In that reality, would they still be together after all this? Would Forster still find them living happily together somewhere and be inspired to write a gay novel with a happy ending? Would the same Maurice happen in that timeline? I don't want to wonder or ponder on that. For now, I'm just glad that I live in this timeline where a homosexual happy ending indeed happened in real life as well as in fiction, in the most impossible times.

Source: https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/edward-carpenter-free-love-advocate-and-lgbtq-rights-pioneer/

Thank you for finding this story from TNA’s blog! Really interesting! I didn’t know about Carpenter’s earlier love Ferneyhough and am now tempted to go looking for the two of them in the earlier censuses. :)

Rather than dwelling wholly on the ‘what if...’, it’s worth being a bit more optimistic, particularly if we scroll to the end and read the comments. As several commenters point out, (i) there is a whole Edward Carpenter Archive (held by Sheffield City Archives) which the blog author does not link to (and almost ignores), which tells a fuller, more rounded story of Carpenter’s life with George Merrill. And (ii) the blog author makes some errors. (I spotted a further one: they mis-spell Guildford, the town in Surrey in the south of England to which EC & GM later moved.)

Although Forster himself gives such primacy to the importance of George Merrill’s ‘touch on the backside’ as the moment when Maurice was (very suggestively) conceived, there is an additional view, proposed by Nicola Beauman in her 1994 biography Morgan, and also by Stephen Wakelam in his wonderful 2014 BBC radio play A Dose of Fame [listen here]. Beauman has a theory that Maurice had a slightly earlier, more tragic, stimulus: the unexplained suicide of a young bachelor, Ernest Merz, in 1909, shortly after a chance encounter with Forster via their mutual friend, Malcolm Darling. Wakelam’s play explores how this tragedy prompted Forster to reflect on his own situation as a closeted famous author as well as Merz’s own state of mind.

But, of course, it is the role model of Carpenter and Merrill, and Forster’s pilgrimage to Millthorpe, which complete the picture by showing Forster that a happy ending to Maurice was ‘not impossible’ (as Carpenter himself wrote to Forster in 1914).

While the (unfulfilled) investigation of Carpenter and Merrill by the Director of Public Prosecutions C.W. Mathews – in response to pressure from a right-wing campaigner, Mr D. O’Brien – caused both Carpenter and Merrill obvious distress, the detail of the decision not to prosecute gives us an interesting insight into the complexities of life for gay men in the UK in that era of illegality. To give a further example, did you know that Forster faced more than one blackmail threat during his lifetime (usually from the wives of men he’d been involved with)? He dealt with these threats by... paying the blackmailers off, and it seems nothing further came of it. This happy outcome reflects his economic (and gender) privilege, of course –and, without a doubt, all three lived lives of risk and caution – but the outcome didn’t have to be tragic. (Though the elderly Forster wrote in 1963: ‘How annoyed I am with society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal.’)

specifically about those annoying fucking tiktok maurice fans

Maurice Hall & Clive Durham

Maurice (1987)

So far 12 people have liked this playlist so I think I’m big brained enough to throw it out into Maurice Tumblr Fandom. If you’re feeling fancy, tag some song recommendations for me to put into it. I always want to add more!

The only rule for this playlist is vibes and vibes only. I don’t care if it’s period accurate or not, does it give off a Maurice 1914/1987 vibe? It’s goin in this bad boy. Is it goofy as fuck, but fit so well? My sweet child, I put a song from fuckin Dirty Dancing in here nothing is off limits. I even threw in a Hadestown song. That’s how vibes and vibes only this gets.

Anyways please send recommendations my way :)

— Maurice, E. M. Forster

So true...

— Maurice, E. M. Forster