The Joys of Youth: Boris Vian – Mood Indigo / Froth on the Daydream

Oh, how wonderful it is to be young and happy, rich and idle. Such is, in some sense, the first impression I got from the French writer Boris Vian’s novel, Mood Indigo (after one of its film adaptations), originally translated as Froth on the Daydream. The work is absurd, and at first glance meaningless – people hop on clouds, the sunlight makes pleasant sounds. For the first third of the book I had thoughts of dropping it and getting on with something serious. Who actually likes to read about happy people? Certainly not me. And especially when that happiness is located in a world of absurdity, where nothing seems to matter or have a connection to our own world… in short, the book started to annoy me.

But Vian is playing a game in Mood Indigo. His characters are indeed happy, their world is indeed absurd. But this is just the setup. Because soon enough, a rot appears under the joyous façade, and all that was wonderfully absurd now becomes terrifyingly absurd, and the initial messages the book trumpeted now struggle to sustain themselves once things have started going wrong. And they go very wrong in this book. In the end, Mood Indigo moves on from its silly initial impression to become a brilliant reflection on mental health and more.

Our Colourful Cast of Characters

The silliness of Mood Indigo is in evidence from the very first words – “Colin finished his bath”. It is a meaningless phrase; its lack of drama subverts our expectations for what an opening line normally looks like. Our hero, Colin, is joined by Nicholas the butler and cook, Chip his friend, and Alyssum and Chloe to make up our main characters in Mood Indigo. They have silly names and lead silly lives. Colin has a lot of money and does nothing all day except enjoy himself. His world is yellow – the colour of positivity, of energy. Sunbeams flood his house with joyous sounds (as part of the way everything is connected in Mood Indigo, even normally soundless things all make noises).

The overall impression, come to think of it, is similar to a children’s television show. Colin not only eats strange things, such as an eel found in his sink, but he also has a huge store of Rube Goldberg machines, including a drinks mixer that doubles as a piano. Everything is possible in this world, and everything is positive. Colin’s great anxiety is over finding himself a girlfriend – both he and Chip are in their early twenties. Other than that, we might say that “life is but a dream”.

A Rube Goldberg machine. Colin has lots of devices that make his life exciting and pleasurable.

Things Go Wrong

Until it isn’t. At a party Colin meets a young lady, Chloe, and falls in love with her. His courtship of her is, as with everything else, an extreme affair – the world reforms itself to suit his new mood of infatuation. He finds that a “street led straight to Chloe”, and when they are together they can literally step onto clouds to enjoy themselves. In a moment of kindness Colin gives Chip part of his fortune – Chip doesn’t have money of his own – so that Chip can, in his turn, marry Alyssum, another friend of theirs. In the meantime, Colin and Chloe celebrate their marriage. It’s a wonderful, expensive, lavish affair – Vian enjoys describing everyone’s clothes in Mood Indigo – marred only by the sudden death of a music conductor when he falls from his perch in the church. But we don’t pay such things any mind. Death doesn’t bother us.

On their honeymoon Chloe begins to get sick, and it is here where Mood Indigo becomes really interesting. At first it’s a sickly, overly happy story about young love – but now darkness begins to creep in. Chloe has a disease of the lungs. There is a waterlily in her right lung, and the only way to save Chloe is to surround her by other flowers in the hope that they will scare the waterlily away. It is not a cheap affair, and Colin spends more and more of his money in trying to save Chloe from her illness. But nothing seems to have any effect, and soon Colin finds himself running low on funds and forced to find work for himself. Meanwhile, Chip and Alyssum’s relationship is also under strain – Chip hasn’t used Colin’s money on the wedding, as planned, but on his obsession with the writer, Jean Pulse Heartre, instead.

Objects and Objectification

Chloe’s illness, and Chip’s increasing obsession – he spends his money on everything possibly connected to Heartre, from books to old clothes the writer might once have worn – both mark the novel’s decline from its cheery beginning into gloom. Both of these events are also important because the decline in Mood Indigo can be partly explained as stemming from its treatment of people and objects. What I mean, is that in some way the novel is an argument against objectification, overt and covert. We can think about this through the example of Chloe’s illness. Chloe’s personality is pretty non-existent in Mood Indigo. She is simple, concerned only with objects – at one point she says she wants to buy: “things and things and things”. Every time she is described its by reference to her beauty – at first this annoyed me, but now I see it was deliberate.

“Chloe’s such a pretty girl,” one character says of her. “I can’t imagine her being ill.”

Chloe is treated like an object by everyone around her, and in a way it kills her. Colin loves her, but the treatment she gets is all through objects – in the end, she is left fading away on a bed, surrounded by plant pots. It is a strange image, but a striking one – she is literally being destroyed by beauty. Chip’s case is similar. In his obsession with objects connected with Heartre, he neglects the human he is supposed to love – Alyssum. All of the girls in Mood Indigo, by the way, have names connected with flowers (Chloe is from the Greek word for fertility). And like flowers, the girls are left to blossom and then die, without the water of true affection. They are never treated like people, like individuals with personalities.  

Money and Emptiness

Connected with objects is the way money is used in Mood Indigo. At first it seems to be a source of liberation for Colin, letting him do whatever he wants. He goes ice skating and kills people (by accident) without facing any consequences. He goes to parties and meets pretty girls. The characters of Mood Indigo seem to enjoy the fullness of youth. Chip, when he gets Colin’s money, is able to pursue his passion for Heartre without any limits. Chloe is able to buy all the things she wants. But as Mood Indigo continues the emptiness of their lives becomes harder to avoid.

Chloe’s things are worthless once her illness takes hold, and Chip’s passion soon morphs into an addiction, excluding everything else in his life which once he had valued. Finally, as soon as Colin’s money starts running out, his entire house and world begin shrinking, growing dark and unhealthy in reflection of his inner state. By spending, by not paying attention to the consequences of their actions – most noticeably they random deaths of the early parts of Mood Indigo – the characters avoid trying to grow, to develop themselves or find a real and lasting happiness.

Boris Vian, the French author of Mood Indigo, was a multitalented person, producing not just novels but also songs and poetry. He was an important figure in the French jazz scene, connecting American artists with their French counterparts, and knew how to play himself. Source: Photomaton Archives Cohérie Boris Vian” (propriétaire du cliché), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Conclusion

It is a wonderful thing to be young, to be rich and live irresponsibly. At least it seems so, while it’s happening. The horrors of the world, its terrifying absurdity, barely affect us or our happiness. Mood Indigo perfectly captures that mood of joy. But the novel goes further, in showing us that under our pleasure there lurks someone else’s pain, that the happiness we think we have is often bought at the price of someone else’s. Ultimately, happiness comes in part from choosing not to see the world. During Chloe and Colin’s honeymoon, at the last stage of Mood Indigo’s “happy part”, Chloe finds herself unable to look through the window of their car onto the world outside – the sight is too distressing. Fortunately, there is an easy solution. You can just put a filter on the window, see only what you want to see, and everything will be okay.

Ultimately, Mood Indigo is about the dangers of easy solutions, of turning the world into your playground, of treating others as objects and shirking responsibility. You will have a great time, at least at first. But soon enough something will happen that you could not have predicted – like an illness – and you will find how little you are prepared for the world hiding behind your dreams. I wasn’t expecting to like Vian’s novel, but I did. It’s intelligent, fun, and has much more to say than I have written about here. I’m grateful to my girlfriend for recommending it.

The title of Mood Indigo comes from a piece by the legendary (and repeatedly namedropped in Mood Indigo) jazz artist, Duke Ellington. Here’s a version on Youtube.

Temptation and Pride in Tolstoy’s Father Sergius

Although I’ve been having a go at Tolstoy lately, I still admire him, and would probably rank his writings above those of anyone else. Unfortunately, Tolstoy’s novella, “Father Sergius”, is another one of those frustrating prophet-Tolstoy pieces, so today’s post will be stained once again with disappointment. It shouldn’t be, in a way. Father Sergius, like Hadji Murat, was not published while Tolstoy was alive. Tolstoy shied away from publishing both works because they revealed too much about himself – at least, I remember reading that view somewhere among the criticism on Hadji. But whereas Hadji Murat revealed that Tolstoy still knew how to write cracking fiction even after he was old, “Father Sergius” reveals that Tolstoy was an awful egotist who thought he was better than everyone else. Because that’s basically what the novella is about: Tolstoy, Tolstoy, Tolstoy.

Leo Tolstoy, at about the time he was writing “Father Sergius”. The story was finished in 1898.

I recently read George Orwell’s essay on Tolstoy, “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool”. To my knowledge, Orwell hadn’t come across “Father Sergius”, but the two pieces go together quite well. Orwell argues that the lives of Tolstoy and King Lear are curiously similar. Both were men who, in their old age, renounced their power, but then became bitter and angry for it. Both Lear and Tolstoy practiced self-denial – something normally associated with saintliness and goodness – for selfish reasons. In renouncing their earthly power, both men aimed to gain spiritual power and with it a greater sway over hearts and minds. Tolstoy gave up his copyrights, he neglected his fiction, but he did not give up the idea that he ought to influence people. Quite the opposite, as the torrent of moralistic pamphlets he produced evidences.

In short, Tolstoy’s renunciation was incomplete. Or, as Orwell puts it, “if you live for others, you must live for others, and not as a roundabout way of getting an advantage for yourself.”

What does all this have to do with “Father Sergius”? Quite a lot, actually. Tolstoy’s novella is essentially a dramatization of this conflict. Our hero, Father Sergius, becomes a famous monk, but he remains unsatisfied with his life. Though he is supposedly serving God, he finds that in reality he is serving other people – the people who come to his refuge, the other members of his monastery. And of course, he is also serving his own pride. But, as with Hadji Murat, “Father Sergius” is also the story of how its central character reaches enlightenment of a Tolstoian sort. What happens?

A Bad Breakup – The Opening of “Father Sergius”

D’ya ever have that thing where you go off and become a monk just because your girlfriend turned out to have had a previous partner? Nobody? Tolstoy, with his many children with peasant girls, of course knew a thing or two about previous partners. But after his religious conversion he became very anti-sex, which we can see most clearly in The Kreutzer Sonata, but which is also on display in “Father Sergius”. Our hero is Prince Stepan Kasatsky, a young man at the story’s beginning, but one who has already risen almost to the peak of society. Apart from his one weakness, sudden bursts of rage (amazingly, Tolstoy suffered from this also), he’s a model man. He is the best at everything he tries, and has rather gotten used to that feeling of superiority. True, he’s not admitted to the very highest reaches of society, but otherwise he can’t complain.

He has a good role in the military, and has made an excellent match to a young lady. But here is where his problems start. What he doesn’t know is that this girl has been the lover of Nicholas I. In the second chapter we’re taken into her garden, a little while before the wedding. Everything seems perfect – even the nightingales are a-twitter. But “Mary” (a foreignized name in Russian literature almost always means something’s wrong) is in a state. She needs to admit to her past before the marriage, but it’s hard. Eventually manages to work up the courage, but Kasatsky is not willing to give her a hearing at all. (I’m pretty sure if the Emperor of all the Russians wanted to bed you, you didn’t have much choice in the matter). He gets up, gets angry, sells his estate, leaves his job, and becomes a monk.

As you do, of course.

Monk Days

Why does he become a monk? There are two reasons, we’re told. The first is that it lets him “stand above those, who thought they could look down on him”. The second is a real religious feeling, which is mixed up with pride and a desire to be the best. Anyway, Kasatsky becomes Father Sergius, but his problems do not end there. One day, while helping at a service, he is recognised by some ladies, who point him out to each other in French. Then, after the service his superior calls him round back to chat with a general who used to know him. Father Sergius is angry at the fact that even being a monk doesn’t save him from the people he was trying to escape. What is worse, the monks themselves aren’t as good as they’re supposed to be. There’s only one thing for it – to become a hermit!

A still from the 1918 film adaptation of Father Sergius.

A Hermit and his Temptation

Father Sergius gets permission to go to another monastery, further from civilization, and there he occupies the quarters of a recently deceased hermit. All seems well, and a few years pass. But one night a group of revellers is passing by, and one of their company, Makovkina, a young lady, decides to go and see Father Sergius, whose old identity they are all familiar with. Makovkina comes up with a plan to seduce him. (As you do). Anyway, she makes her way to his rooms and asks for shelter, saying she’s lost. At first, Father Sergius can’t believe she’s real – he thinks she’s an apparition, or else the devil. (“For the devil always appears as a woman”). But eventually, he lets her in.

Father Sergius has been a hermit all this time but he is still weak to “lust”. This woman causes a resurgence of his old feelings. Her power is that she is a normal human being. Her laughter, “cheerful, natural, kind,” has an effect on him. But normal human beings are evil people, Tolstoy would have us know, and this woman is a temptress! There is a great moment here, when the woman is drying herself and getting warm (Father Sergius refuses to see her more than he needs to), and we only hear her, just as Sergius does. It’s nice to remember that Tolstoy does know how to write.

Anyway, Father Sergius knows he has to see her, but he’s scared he will be unable to defeat his lust. So what is the logical solution? He cuts off his finger with an axe. Of course, when you have cut off your finger you end up a little distracted, with the result that temptresses can’t bother you. He goes in to see her, with his hand bleeding, like some axe murderer from a horror movie, and says: “dear sister, why did you want to destroy your eternal soul?” Amazingly, instead of being terrified, she leaves the hovel, changes her life, and becomes a nun. Cool, huh?

A Healer in Need of Healing

Time passes. Father Sergius acquires a reputation as a healer. And his isolation is brought to an end. Instead of living on simple food, his monastery now ensures he eats properly and is kept healthy. He has a constant stream of visitors, but in all of this he feels a growing dissatisfaction. He is being driven away from God and among the people:

“He had become like a place where once there had been a stream. “There was once a weak trickle of living water, which quietly flowed from me, and through me. That was the true life… but now I have had no time to gather water, for the thirsty are always coming, closing in and pushing at each other. They have crushed everything – now there is only dirt left.””

Father Sergius doesn’t like the people he meets, and it’s not clear that he can actually heal them either. They come to him “with their selfish demands”, and he gives them what they want. One day a merchant comes to him, wanting him to heal his daughter. He agrees. But when she comes, alone, she seduces Father Sergius instead. The next day, acting on plans he had made long ago, Sergius flees the monastery.

Flight

Tolstoy also fled a life that didn’t satisfy him. He died at the railway station at Astapovo, that being as far as he could get from his family before his body failed. “Father Sergius” was written over ten years before Tolstoy’s death, but the idea of fleeing was not a new one for him, just as the suicide Sergius also considers wasn’t either. Sergius goes to an old acquaintance, Pashenka, who he had treated unkindly as a child. He discovers her living poorly, surrounded by family, and struggling to survive. But the meeting brings an epiphany to him. “I lived for people under the pretext of serving God, while Pashenka lives for God, imagining that she’s living for people.” This final revelation allows him to live freely as an unknown wanderer, before eventually he is stopped by police and sent to Siberia for not having identity documents.

And there he lives happily ever after.

Tolstoy and The Holy Life – Identity and Truth

There are some interesting bits and pieces in “Father Sergius”, but they are ideas more than the story itself. One of the main themes in the story is that of identity. “Father Sergius” as a title is not a reflection of Stepan Kasatasky’s ultimate identity, but only an intermediary stage in its development. When Kasatsky first becomes a monk people often refer to his past by using his pre-monastic name, such as the women in the church or else Makovkina. Later he becomes “Father Sergius” the healer. But he is not a holy person – the story’s title is in fact ironic: “He now had no love, no humbleness, not even any purity”, he thinks after becoming well-known.

When he eventually flees, he destroys all of those past ideas of himself and returns to his own childhood. Pashenka calls him “Stiva” (the familiar version of “Stepan”), marking a new stage in his development. Finally, once he is a beggar, he answers the question of his identity by saying he is simply “a servant of God”. At last, he has removed all those connections with his past that made him a selfish person, and he is “free” to enjoy himself.

In connection with the subject of identity, “Father Sergius” also contains a persistent critique of organised religion. This is perhaps unsurprising – Tolstoy was excommunicated by the Orthodox Church in 1901, a few years after he’d finished “Father Sergius”. In the story the other monks are just as concerned about power, fame, and wealth as everyone else. More importantly, though, they are not shown to be in touch with any real kind of faith, either. Father Sergius himself regularly prays, but there is no sense that his prayers are answered until he finally leaves the monastery after his night with the merchant’s daughter.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m not sure I’m glad I read “Father Sergius”. I had expected something like Hadji Murat or “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”, where Tolstoy manages to squeeze in a moral message into a brilliant story. “Father Sergius” is a moral with a story attached, and there’s plenty to dislike here. In particular I hate the misogyny underlying Tolstoy’s depiction of women, something which is even stronger than the general atmosphere of misanthropy that pervades the story. There’s so little positivity here. The moral that we should serve God/our hearts rather than other people is, I suppose, okay, but when it’s combined with such dislike for humanity it’s hard to take seriously.

It’s like Tolstoy forgot that God (in Christian cosmology) created the world and wanted us to enjoy it. The whole thing’s just stupid. Alas, just as Orwell suggested, once Tolstoy gained his new faith, he didn’t seem to realise that he often appeared a fool. He would have been a lot more convincing, both as a writer and as a moral writer, if he had a little more self-awareness.

Anyway, if you’re after Tolstoy, go read Hadji Murat, or Anna Karenina, or “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”, or War and Peace. And if you’ve read them already, read them again, and again, and again.

A Gay Old Time? Maurice by E. M. Forster

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.

A portrait of E. M. Forster
E. M. Forster, author of Maurice, only showed the novel to a few trusted friends during his lifetime. He hoped that once he was dead it would be possible to publish it; he had his wish.

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.