Perhaps my first feeling, on starting E. M. Forster’s Maurice, was one of excitement. This novel, published only after Forster’s death and taking the sexual development of a gay man as its subject, is so unlike everything else I have ever read that I couldn’t help but be excited about it. But Maurice is not just a novel about a gay man, for there are today many such novels – what makes it stand out, and stick in my memory, is the immediacy of it. There were so few clichés, so few reference points for Forster to have in mind while writing it in the early 20th century, that Maurice has a remarkable freshness to it. Just as the characters are discovering themselves, so too is the novel itself trying to discover a way of doing its story justice. And luckily that’s exactly what Maurice manages to do.
School Days
Maurice begins with prep school, the first stage of private education in England, which takes boys, and occasionally girls, and raises them from the age of about eight till they are thirteen. It is about as cosy an environment as one could hope for. I remember my own prep school days fondly, and as my school was of the traditional sort, I found in Maurice much to prompt a kind of déjà vu. The first chapter is the only chapter set at prep school, but it sets the foundations for the novel just as such schools set the foundations for the lives of the rich and privileged the world over. Our hero Maurice Hall goes for a walk with one of his teachers, and as he is soon departing into public school, the teacher thinks to do a little explaining of the birds and the bees to him:
“To love a noble woman, to protect and serve her – this, he told the little boy, was the crown of life.”
Maurice is not a hero in the traditional sense, for there is little about him that is heroic. He is average, normal. Nothing about him stands out. He has a “niche that England had prepared for him” ready and waiting. There is only one problem – he is gay. And though he crams himself, as best he can, into the niche, working at his father’s old firm and going to Cambridge, Maurice is the story of how even a little individuality can cause your entire pre-made individuality to collapse, with potentially catastrophic consequences. For Maurice is always being told how things ought to be, whether it’s that love is between a man and a woman, or that he ought to “grow up like your dear father in every way”.
So much isn’t bad, per se. Having our identity imposed on us from outside is fine, provided that that identity is compatible with our internal understanding of ourselves. But as Maurice discovers his sexuality, he learns it goes against his assigned role as head of the family and respectable citizen, and from this thought alone he finds himself turning against the society that had once nourished him.
Clive and Maurice
He finds other sustenance with Clive Durham, a student he meets at Cambridge. Maurice does not know he is gay, but he finds himself at a dinner with a student, Risley, who definitely is. Forster conveys this subtly, rather than openly. Risley “used strong yet unmanly superlatives” – by expressing himself fully, Risley has fallen out of the niche “man” that is valued by so many. Maurice is curious – he does not understand his own desires – but he decides to go to Risley’s rooms. There he meets another student, Clive Durham, and together they spend time in Durham’s rooms that evening, listening to music. They are not “together”, but Maurice finds himself “strok[ing] Durham’s hair”. A quiet intimacy is forming between them, but as far as Maurice is concerned this is simply manly friendship.
Durham has something else in mind. He gives Maurice Plato to read – a coded action that unfortunately Maurice is too stupid to understand. When Durham finally tells Maurice that he loves him, Maurice falls back on his training: “Durham, you’re an Englishman. I’m another. Don’t talk nonsense”. Englishness, in Maurice, becomes another layer of restrictions upon the full expression of the characters’ desires. But luckily, Maurice comes to realise his mistake. He cries, he goes back to Durham and confesses how he feels. And now the narrator tells us he “became a man”, not in the sense that society puts forward, of starting and ruling a family, but in the sense of becoming master of his destiny. And for a few moments all is well in the world.
The Gentry Under Threat – Durham and Penge
But it cannot last. I feel Durham’s character and story is actually the most one interesting in Maurice. Born as the local squire, he has an estate, Penge, that since his father’s death he now owns. Compared with Maurice, who is simply a well-off middle-class fellow from the suburbs, Durham is under a far greater pressure to conform. His estate will be lost if he does not marry and have offspring, and his respectability in the village will be lost if he has any whiff of non-conformity, sexual or otherwise, about him. For a man who wants to go into politics, this pressure is doubled.
And so one day suddenly Durham turns on Maurice. He declares that he is not gay any longer – their relationship was never physical, only intellectual, so it seems possible – and marries “Lady Anne Woods”. In other words, he marries well. And since the girl has no sexual education, because the 1910s were not a good time for women either, Durham’s own sexual problems can be brushed under the carpet safely, and a sensible marriage concluded. His house and lands are both “marked, not indeed with decay, but with the immobility that precedes it”. But through the marriage, disaster is temporarily averted. Maurice gains extra poignancy when we know what Forster could not – that the First World War is just around the corner, and even Durham’s best efforts may turn out to be for naught.
It’s not clear whether Durham is actually not gay, or whether he’s forced himself to believe he isn’t. In either case, he attempts to help an unwilling Maurice with his own condition. When we compare the two men, it’s hard not to find things to envy about Durham. While Maurice eventually rejects his niche, Durham steps proudly into it, and though seen from the outside it is filled with snobbery and “the worldliness that they combined with complete ignorance of the World”, nonetheless, he seems to be happy.
Durham’s story is interesting in part because it cannot have been unique, and it is a great loss that the subject was not touched by the great writers of the 19th century. But it’s also interesting because unfortunately it remains relevant to this day. A few of my own friends within my class face similar problems to Durham. Though my own generation is much more tolerant, many of our parents (aged between fifty and sixty) and grandparents are still unwilling to countenance the idea that we might not fit perfectly into the niches they have prepared us. I have watched my own friends and acquaintances pretend, lie, and run away from the truth, hoping for a better season. And though progress is there, I can already see that not all of us will have a happy ending.
Not So Classy – Maurice the Man
Maurice is engaging in part because Maurice is decidedly normal, and thus relatable. He is not intelligent, and when faced with his “condition” he is unable to find some justification or solution through thought alone. He cries out, after asking the family doctor for help:
“What is it? Am I diseased? If I am, I want to be cured, I can’t put up with the loneliness any more”
His situation is tragic because he is not strong enough to fight it. He goes to another doctor and suffers hypnosis, but without any success. Not only has he internalised the homophobia of his time, he has also internalised a great deal besides. He is a classist pig, and a misogynist. I’m not sure I would like to drink tea with him if he came round for dinner. Reading Maurice is in some way also, therefore, an antidote to the occasional suggestion these days that one part of our identity, such as our sexuality or skin colour or class, can somehow override all others and smooth over our failures.
Love at Last? Alec
Maurice is, however, forced to confront at least a few of these prejudices when he meets Alec Scudder, a groundsman at Durham’s estate. At first class prejudices keep them apart, but eventually Maurice is overtaken by lust, and the two spend the night together. Their relationship is fraught with difficulties, because Alec can blackmail Maurice – an accusation of homophobia would destroy his reputation – and because Maurice himself resents him for it: “the police always back my sort against yours”. But eventually, they find a path that works for them, and in doing so they turn their back on society. A game of cricket provides the particularly English metaphor. We are told that when “two are gathered together majorities shall not triumph”.
That is the hopeful message that Maurice chooses to end with. And for its hope the book became unpublishable, as Forster writes in the “Terminal Note” at the end. By not punishing his heroes with suicide or unhappiness, he condones their deviance. Honestly, I was surprised to be faced with such an ending. Perhaps it’s just my experience of 19th century social novels (Anna Karenina, Anything by Fontane, even Henry James), but I’ve come to expect unhappiness to be inevitable when someone goes against society. In a way it’s heartening to be reminded that there are other possibilities too.
Conclusion
But simply going against convention does not make Maurice good, just like writing about gays doesn’t make it ipso facto interesting. Unfortunately, I found the latter part of the novel to be the weakest part. Honestly, I had the impression that Maurice and Alec were together because they both wanted to pursue a sexual relationship, and not because of any real human compatibility – and this struck me as not a good sign for their future beyond the pages of the book. And actually, that thought, which I can’t be alone among readers in having, probably undermines the book’s very message – that it is possible to go forth alone, so long as you have any-old partner.
In the “Terminal Note”, written in the early 1960s, Forster mentions “a change in the public attitude [to homosexuality]… from ignorance and terror to familiarity and contempt”. I am glad that the attitude has changed yet again since then, at least on the whole, and for the better. But we should not forget that many people, even today, deal with similar pressures to Durham, to conform according to the expectations of their families. Not all of us have an estate to inherit, but all of us have parents who have an idea for what they’d like us to be like, and not all of them are as flexible as perhaps they should be.
Anyway, I liked Maurice. Give it a read if you’re looking for something different from the usual early 20th century fare.