Maurice by E. M. Forster

I first read Maurice sometime in my teens, back in the 1970s. The writing dates from 1913, which would place it fifth among Forster’s novels, after Howards End, published in 1910, but Forster withheld it from the public until after his death due to the homosexual content, or rather a happy ending appended to homosexual content. Forster writes in a “Terminal Note”:

“If it ended unhappily, with a lad dangling from a noose or with a suicide pact, all would be well, for there is no pornography or seduction of minors. But the lovers get away unpunished and consequently recommend crime” (p. 250. I read a Norton paperback edition from 1981). Private homosexual acts were illegal in England until 1967. Forster died in 1970. Maurice was finally published in 1971, the manuscript having only previously been shared with a few personal friends.

Forster published one more novel during his life, A Passage to India, from 1924, which is a better book. Howards End is better, too. Maurice is far too personal a project. It has none of the humorous distance of the narrator of Howards End, or the dread of A Passage to India.

Though the novel ends with lovers united, it is not a love story. Rather it is a bildungsroman tracking Maurice Hall’s development from schoolboy, through university, through a conflicted erotic but platonic friendship with a university mate, Clive Durham: a not-quite love affair that Clive abandons after three years, claiming he has “changed” and marrying a woman. Maurice wishes for his own nature to change, but it will not. He suffers loneliness, despair, thoughts of suicide. And then, nearing the end of the novel a third character is introduced, Alec Scudder, who happens to be the gamekeeper at Penge, Clive’s country estate.

Maurice first spies Alec, eighty pages before the novel’s close: “as he drove through the park he saw a gamekeeper dallying with two of the maids, and felt a pang of envy. The girls were damn ugly, which the man wasn’t: somehow this made it worse, and he stared at the trio, feeling cruel and respectable” (p. 166).

Alec continues to appear before Maurice as he stays a few days at Penge. Alec is summoned to move a drawing room piano so it won’t be damaged by a leak coming through the roof during the rain. He attends Maurice and a second gentleman as they go shooting, followed by a bit about him refusing a tip for his service. Knowing what’s coming, these glimpses are rather fun.

Finally, on page 192, Alec appears in the flesh. Maurice leans out from his bedroom window one evening at Penge and without knowing why shouts, “Come!” a yawp toward the future. He does it again the following evening. During the day between he keeps an appointment down in London with a hypnotist, seeking a “cure” of his homosexual desires. But following his second outburst, and with the help of a ladder conveniently laid against the house at exactly his window, Alec answers his call.

That scene ends Part III, of the novel. Part IV, the final part, begins with the two snuggling in bed the following morning. The novel’s four parts are further divided into 46 short chapters. It’s a quick read. There is a happy ending coming, but it takes a while to get there. The problem the lovers face is not just society’s disapproval of homosexual relations, but also that the lovers belong to different societies. Maurice is a gentleman and Alec working class. Alec, wishing to see Maurice again after their night together invites him to a further tryst in the Penge boathouse. But Maurice, fearing blackmail and knowing that Alec is scheduled to emigrate to Argentina in just a few weeks, declines to respond to Alec’s letters. Alec, then, pushes harder for a meeting and does hint at blackmail, forcing Maurice to arrange to meet him in London at the British Museum. They meet awkwardly. Alec’s threats are half-hearted and Maurice refuses to be intimidated. When interrupted by chance by a foolish old teacher from Maurice’s schoolboy days, the tension is broken and the two men admit their love for each other. They spend another night together in a London hotel and Maurice proposes that Alec abandon the plans for Argentina. Alec demures but when Maurice looks for him at Southhampton the day of the sailing, Alec doesn’t appear. The novel concludes with a final scene at Penge. Maurice finds Alec, in the boathouse, but the novel ends with Maurice and Clive; Maurice shocking his friend and meaning to, as an act of vindication, by telling Clive that he loves his gamekeeper and the two of them plan to make a life together, hidden away in some green corner of England.

That Alec is introduced so late in the novel makes the story really about Maurice’s development, with Alec’s final appearance only as the prize and proof that Maurice has at last sufficiently matured to be able to claim his happiness. The central relationship is not theirs, but that of Maurice and Clive. They meet at University. Clive is introduced on page 35, while Alec won’t appear for another 130 pages. Clive is rummaging through a friend’s rooms looking to borrow the piano rolls for Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony. Clive is intellectual and cold and a year older than Maurice. Maurice is decidedly average in every way, passable at school, dull, destined for a career as a stockbroker like his father. He is sent down from University before his last year and never earns a degree. Clive molds him and Maurice is easily molded. Clive loves Maurice but because he holds to a “hellenistic” model of same-sex affection, they never express their love physically. And then, on a trip to Greece no less, Clive meets Anne Woods, his future wife, and announces to Maurice on his return that he has “changed.”

By the end, Maurice has embraced his orientation. He has talked to a doctor and tried hypnosis. He has hoped for a sudden “change” as happened for Clive, or the willpower to force a change on himself. He has contemplated a long, lonely, and fruitless life, and thought of suicide. What he knows he needs and despaired of finding, but dreamed of from his schoolboy days was a companion. First he dreams of a playmate of his, George, who works in the garden (a child version of Alec).

“The second dream is more difficult to convey. Nothing happened. He scarcely saw a face, scarcely heard a voice say, “That is your friend,” and then it was over, having filled him with beauty and taught him tenderness. He could die for such a friend, he would allow such a friend to die for him; they would make any sacrifice for each other, and count the world nothing, neither death nor distance nor crossness could part them, because “this is my friend” (p. 22).

It’s a beautiful dream. I knew that longing myself when I read the novel the first time as a teen. It was hard then to find novels with homosexual content, and rarer to find one with a happy ending. But Forster, writing in 1912, was bound to an ambivalence that disturbed me sixty years later (but bothers me less, today). It disappointed me that even when Alec appears, their first happiness is immediately sullied by the blackmail threats. And though I believed in their physical attraction, I didn’t see much evidence of their love. I doubted that the university-educated, white-collar gentleman, and the uneducated son of a butcher, really could make a life together. The book ends only a few days after the two have met, yet they’re already talking about a life together. I can understand the passion leading them to renounce jobs and family, but it felt too much like a fantasy of what Maurice wishes could happen, and what Forster must have wished could happen for him. As a homosexual teen I had plenty of wishes; Forster’s fantasy wasn’t enough to make me believe wishes could come true.