Maurice Book

"Begun 1913
Finished 1914
Dedicated to a Happier Year"

Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) wrote Maurice (*) as a relatively young man, aged 34, at a time when old Europe was starting to fall apart. However, it was not published until 1971, a year after his death. Maurice is probably the first literary work of fiction to deal with male homosexuality in such an open, sincere fashion. At the time it was written, men in the UK could still be imprisoned for 'acts of gross indecency', as in the Oscar Wilde trial. Publishing this book at that time would have destroyed the deeply admired English novelist. Of course, E. M. Forster's readers had no idea that the author of very successful novels such as Howards End and A Passage to India loved men. Nevertheless, he let his work be reviewed by his literary friends who knew of his sexuality: He was loosely connected with the 'Bloomsbury Group', the literary and artistic circle with such prominent members as Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant and Lytton Strachey. For the time, the members of the Bloomsbury Group had a very open and unconventional approach to sexuality, and among this group E. M. Forster's novel could be discussed openly. In public, however, he successfully covered up his sexuality, and I wonder if this might be one of the reasons why I found Forster's Howards End rather frigid and detached. I second Katherine Mansfield when she complains about Howards End: "E.M. Forster never gets any farther than warming the teapot. He's a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain't going to be no tea " (Introduction p. xxiv).
Well, in Maurice, E. M. Forster pours hot boiling water over spicy tea leaves.

Forster intriguingly describes Maurice Hall's journey of self-discovery and his sexual awakening. Maurice comes from a conventional middle-class background with a lukewarm mentality. He is very much an average guy (even though Forster describes him as rather good-looking and athletic): not very intellectual, and a bit arrogant. His being sexually different initially comes across as a hindrance to his plans to follow in his deceased father's footsteps: "Maurice was stepping into the niche that England had prepared for him." (p.45). Nevertheless, early in the novel Forster gives hints that Maurice has always known he is 'different': Maurice remarks early on "I think I shall not marry", and he is rather baffled when he realises that he is overwhelmed by the fact that his mother's garden boy George - with whom he used to play in the 'woodstack' when he was a boy - gave notice and left. Maurice is, after all, a snob and he would never consider himself a friend of George. Nevertheless, George's departure unsettles him and he does not really know why he has these special feelings.

Feelings of this kind become clearer when he moves to Cambridge for his studies and meets Clive Durham, with whom he fells in love. Clive's pedigree is more sophisticated: he descends from landed gentry. Clive is deeply torn about his sexuality, even though he makes the first step in admitting his feelings for Maurice. Foster does not shy away from describing romantic moments between the two and he shows perfectly his skills in evoking beauty:

'I knew you read the 'Symposium' in the vac,' he said in a low voice.
Maurice felt uneasy.
'Then you understand - without me saying more -'
'How do you mean?'
Durham could not wait. People were all around them, but with eyes that had gone intensely blue he whispered, 'I love you.' (p. 48)

Clive considers himself a Hellenist and he celebrates "the love that Socrates bore Phaedo…love passionate but temperate" (p.85). They both set out on a philosophical journey of self-discovery about their sexuality and their place in society. Forster tries to be as open as possible in his depiction of them. We learn that both, especially Clive, have misogynistic tendencies. Alas, it is Forster himself who does not give the reader the opportunity to appreciate a fully rounded female character in his book.

This brings me to Forster's theory of flat and round characters. In E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, he explains: "The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way" (p.81). Maurice in particular passes his creator's test with flying colours. Even though he might be snobbish, arrogant and misogynistic at the beginning of the narrative, the reader cannot ignore how he develops into a more tolerant and self-aware person, capable of tender feelings. What made this reader root for Maurice was his sincerity towards himself and thus his integrity. Despite all his inner struggles, he allows himself to be who he is; this makes him such an attractive character, not only to the reader but also to others characters in the book. Of course, only we as readers know his innermost thoughts and feelings. Forster offers us a deep insight into these thoughts, where we can learn how sincere and full of integrity Maurice becomes:

"He would not deceive himself so much. He would not - and this was the test - pretend to care about women when the only sex that attracted him was his own. He loved men and always had loved them. He longed to embrace them and mingle his being with theirs. Now that the man who returned his love had been lost, he admitted this." (p. 51)

Indeed, he loses his first love to conformity. Clive decides to adapt to his family's requirements and "beautiful conventions" and grows slowly away from Maurice. Ironically, it is on Clive's journey to Greece that he lets Maurice know by letter that "…I have become normal, I cannot help it" (p.101). Not long after, he marries and settles in at Penge (his late father's estate) as the squire everybody expected him to become. Forster gives us only a few glimpses into Clive's inner thoughts and monologues, but they are enough to make the reader understand that Clive lives in denial and self-deception.

"One cannot write those words too often: Maurice's loneliness: it increased."(p.124)

In the meantime, Maurice goes through hell. He begins to doubt his own sexuality and increasingly feels lonely. Forster's description of Maurice's journey of self-loathing and loneliness gets directly under the reader's skin. These are powerful passages which help enormously in empathising not only with Maurice, but with thousands of other men in real life who have had to go through a similar hell.

"Yet he was doing a fine thing - proving on how little the soul can exist. Fed neither by Heaven nor by Earth he was going forward, a lamp that would have blown out, were materialism true. He hadn't a God, he hadn't a lover - the two usual incentives to virtue." (p.126)

He eventually seeks advice from a doctor he has befriended, confessing that he is "an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort". I don't want to spoil the doctor's answer, but I can assure you that it did not help Maurice's self-esteem at all.

It is on the peak of his crisis that he meets the third important character in the book: Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper at Penge, Clive's estate. Forster likes to let different characters from different social classes bump into each other, as his novel Howards End shows brilliantly. Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper, who everybody in Maurice's circle simply calls 'Scudder', belongs to the 'class of outdoors-men'. He is a man of nature with natural instincts. The reader cannot really unravel his inner thoughts; Forster leaves us almost in the dark. This is certainly deliberate: Scudder remains the active, pushy, slightly aggressive and sexually attractive, almost mysterious 'country lad' for the reader. Today he would probably be categorised as bisexual. He instinctively feels Maurice's pain and reacts accordingly to his nature. With Alec Scudder, Maurice eventually reaches sexual fulfilment.

"They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward." (p.212)

Alec Scudder, who in the book represents carnality, the rural and nature (in comparison to Clive, who stands for the intellectual and platonic love) will eventually be the key to Maurice's 'liberation'. Together with Maurice, the reader discovers, after several bumps in the road, the route to Maurice and Alec's happiness. This happy ending to Forster's novel has much been discussed. I was not entirely convinced, even though it has its roots in real life: namely in the concept of 'Uranian love'(**) and the relationship between Edward Carpenter and George Merrill, who Forster visited in 1913 and who were an inspiration for this book. I am not sure if it is really a happy ending for Maurice and Alec, but I think it was the best possible end to the book, given the socio-political situation at the time. Forster writes in his Terminal Note: "A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise" (p.220). I, for my part, tend to agree with Forster's Bloomsbury friend Lytton Strachey, who wrote in a letter to E.M. Forster that "the relationship of the two rested upon curiosity and lust and would only last six weeks" (Terminal Note, p. 222). I can sympathise with Strachey's train of thought: Maurice and Alec are first and foremost attracted sexually to each other and only later recognise that "what unites them is the need to fight a common enemy" (Introduction, p. xxii).

Despite these minor flaws, Maurice is still an important novel. E. M. Forster wrote it in 1913/14 and revised it in 1960. In his Terminal Note, written in 1960, he recognises a change in the public attitude towards homosexuality: "the change from ignorance and terror to familiarity and contempt" (Terminal Note, p. 224). Still, it took another seven years until the laws criminalizing acts of 'gross indecency' by men were abolished in England. Today, the legal situation in Europe has improved significantly; one could only have dreamed of it fifty years ago. This is of course a very positive development. In the meantime, we should be aware that there are still nations where LGBT people are persecuted, incarcerated and even put to death for their sexuality. The human race still has a long way to go.

Let me thus go a step further and suggest that it is not enough to implement legally protected equality, even though this must be an unalienable right. We as a society ask our governments for rights which guarantee equality. But, I ask myself, does society really embrace and integrate diversity in everyday life? Forster writes pointedly: "We had not realized that what the public really loathes in homosexuality is not the thing itself but having to think about it" (Terminal Note p. 224). I can only speak for my part of the world and my generation, but I feel part of a monolithic world where sexual diversity has not yet reached unconscious acceptance and self-evident equality, and where definitions such as 'gay' and 'homo' are still used (unconsciously?) as an insult. Just look at the advertising industry, mainstream TV or cinema: one rarely finds 'rainbow families' or same-sex couples. And of course the male action hero is supposed to be heterosexual. While there has been constant change for the better during the past few years, it is still slow; and I am afraid we still have a long wait before there is a gay James Bond and nobody thinks anything of it.

Until then, books like Maurice have lost none of their relevance.

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(*) I highly recommend the Penguin Classics Edition with an introduction and notes by David Leavitt.

(**) "Uranians: The term has its origins in Plato's Symposium, in which Pausanius argues that men who are inspired by Heavenly Aphrodite (Aphrodite Urania) as opposed to Common Aphrodite (Aphrodite Pandeumia) "are attracted to the male sex…their intention is to form a lasting attachment and partnership for life". In the 1860s and 1870s, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs promulgated the German Urning, the English version of which was subsequently put into circulation by Edward Carpenter and the art historian John Addington Symonds." (Notes by David Leavitt, p. 232).