Recuperating E. M.

Forster's Maurice
Matthew Curr

MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, Volume 62, Number 1, March 2001,

pp. 53-69 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/22883
MLQ 62.1-04 Curr 2/9/01 2:07 PM Page 53

Recuperating E. M. Forster’s Maurice

Matthew Curr

T he critical reception of Forster’s work is a curious analogue to,

and a marked indictment of, certain key theoretical schools in the
last century. The main corpus of his work is revered for its subtle
ironies: it is researched, prescribed, and examined regularly; it is
esteemed as art. Yet his novel Maurice has been consistently rejected as
weak. Because it was published posthumously, recent critics have even
accused Forster of cowardice. A Room with a View and Howards End are
threaded through with an evasive, paradoxical humor ideally suited to
analysis of balanced polarities that apparently dissolve in turn under
the mirthful indirection of Forster’s deft telling. The underpinning
criteria of New Criticism have flourished in an encounter with such
texts. Each novel is regarded as an artistic, Coleridgean whole, all of
whose parts contribute pleasingly to the greater work, without any sin-
gle, reducible dictum. The New Critic has thus been able endlessly to
applaud opalescent changes of tone and intimation.
Maurice, however, is not teasingly vapid as in a crucial Marabar cave
scene: the boathouse meeting between Scudder and Maurice is deci-
sive and unambiguous. Maurice lacks the sly humor that just ripples
the surface of the other novels. Forster is held guilty on two counts: for
not reinscribing his publicly approved technique of artistic, witty inde-
terminacy in Maurice, and yet for not “coming out” early enough in
this novel or determinedly enough in the earlier ones. Maurice may be
weak, that is, weakly written, according to certain reading conventions
dominant in the first half of the twentieth century, just as it may be
branded weak, that is, cowardly, by criteria advanced in the second
half. In fact, the very clash of such systems may point up blind spots in

Modern Language Quarterly 62:1, March 2001. © 2001 University of Washington.

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54 MLQ ❙ March 2001

the criticism of both periods rather than in the object under scrutiny.
The plight of Maurice may not be proof of a lapse in Forster’s skill or of
his treachery to other homosexuals. Its rejection from both critical
sides may be an endorsement of his keen assessment of the public’s
unreadiness for a new kind of writing. Placing key points in the recep-
tion of Forster’s work in historical perspective may reveal telling short-
comings in fashionable schools of interpretation in our time rather
than in the book itself.

Reception

Between 1905 and 1928 Forster was regarded as a pioneer of new tech-
niques of prose fiction. As a result, his press was uneven. Later he was
fully accepted, put on reading lists, and canonized. Later still his iden-
tity as a homosexual writer created dissonance among critics. Most
damaging were the events of the middle period, in which he became a
revered great. An important first date in this phase was 1943, when
Lionel Trilling’s E. M. Forster appeared. “For more than a decade,”
Philip Gardner notes, this book remained “for critically-minded read-
ers the main avenue to a fuller understanding of Forster’s fiction.”1
Emphasizing that “Forster is not only comic, he is often playful,”
Trilling reads him as endlessly deferring his target:
They [liberals] can understand him when he attacks the manners and
morals of the British middle class, when he speaks out for spontaneity
of feeling, for the virtues of sexual fulfilment, for the values of intelli-
gence; they go along with him when he speaks against the class system,
satirizes soldiers and officials, questions the British Empire and attacks
business ethics and the public schools. But sooner or later they begin
to make reservations and draw back. They suspect Forster is not quite

1 Gardner, ed., E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage (London: Butler and Tanner,

1973), 32.

Matthew Curr is senior lecturer in English literature at the University

of South Africa. He has published a collaborative translation of Wil-
liam of Conches’s Dragamaticon (1998) and has completed a book-
length manuscript on the legacy of the elegy in Milton, Gray, and Ten-
nyson. He is now researching the life and works of a Renaissance Latin
poet, Casimir.
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Curr ❙ Recuperating Forster’s Maurice 55

playing their game; they feel that he is challenging them as well as what
they dislike. And they are right. For all his long commitment to the doc-
trines of liberalism, Forster is at war with the liberal imagination.2

Forster’s revolutionary animus is precisely controlled in its subversive

strategy; he is, from the earliest works, a cunning saboteur. Ironically,
however, Trilling’s popularizing of Forster as the playful, witty racon-
teur leads his liberal-humanist successors to venerate passages that ide-
ally suit the high point of New Critical investigation: the correspon-
dence of syntactic details to the outlines of well-wrought art. Forster is
proved to be a great and subtle artist, yet he is tamed of his “war with
the liberal imagination.” While New Critics strive to demonstrate the
aesthetic quality of a work as an end in itself, Forster’s aesthetic is indis-
sociable from his draft for a new society. To him, art and life are insep-
arable: the individual soul, enlightened by love and aesthetic sensitiv-
ity, creates an open-minded community. But New Critics who succeed
Trilling flourish in the examination and praise of Forster’s verbal arti-
fact not as a means to a larger social revision but as an exercise that
extols art for art’s sake. Harold Bloom’s quotation of Michael Orange’s
1979 analysis “Language and Silence in A Passage to India” is typical:
Professor Narayan Godbole stands in the presence of God. God is not
born yet — that will occur at midnight —but He has also been born
centuries ago, nor can He ever be born, because He is the Lord of the
Universe, who transcends human processes. He is, was not, is not, was.
He and Professor Godbole stood at opposite ends of the same strip of
carpet.
“Stands” [writes Orange] in the course of three sentences becomes
“stood.” The change of tense indicates the co-presence of time and eter-
nity. The antitheses “is, was not, is not, was,” which further interfuse his-
tory and the present, are syntactically without meaning: Forster has
exchanged the prose of reason and understanding for language as mys-
tery, which modulates naturally into chant.3

Bloom also quotes Barbara Rosecrance’s 1982 essay “Howards End.”

By now demonstrating Forster’s alchemical prose has become a fervid

2 Trilling,
E. M. Forster (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1943), 14.
3 Bloom, ed., E. M. Forster’s “A Passage to India” (New York: Chelsea House,
1987), 72.
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56 MLQ ❙ March 2001

critical activity. So a moment of verbal projection is described by Rose-

crance: “In the deliberate ambiguities of ‘perhaps,’ Forster implies a
multiple sense of possibility, the simultaneous existence of a complex
array of motives or factors, the difficulty of rational comprehension of
the universe, and the limitations of man’s ability to achieve earthly unity
or comprehend a divine one” (80).
Forster himself might have smiled at this attribution of genius and
remarked dryly: “All this in one word? Who’d have thought it?” By this
stage a critical habit has become merely mechanical. Just when an old
theory is exhausted, however, new work arises to replace it. So in 1979
Glen Cavaliero introduces a significant point of view:
If Forster is a major homosexual novelist it is because he put . . .
estrangement and hurt to positive use, and, to quote [Samuel] Hynes
. . . “made out of self-deprecation, transference, and evasion, a personal
and functioning style.” The transfer of a private and personal estrange-
ment into an engaged concern with the very society which implicitly
rejected him is one of Forster’s triumphs as humanist and artist. And he
effects this not by political attack or ethical polemic, but by tracing the
process through which men and women move from self-imprisonment
to joy.4

Cavaliero returns us to Trilling’s earlier question of why Forster writes,

what actuates him, before it was lost in the great analytic mill of how
Forster constructs his mystical icons, or what were made into them.
But not all gay theorists of the 1970s view Forster in the slightly patron-
izing light of Cavaliero. In 1979 Andrew Hodges and David Hutter
drub Forster for not coming out:
Throughout his life Forster betrayed other gay people by posing as a
heterosexual and thus identifying with our oppressors. The novel which
could have helped us find courage and self-esteem he only allowed to
be published after his death, thereby confirming belief in the secret
and disgraceful nature of homosexuality. What other minority is so
sunk in shame and self-oppression as to be proud of a traitor?5

4 Cavaliero,A Reading of E. M. Forster (London: Macmillan, 1979), 130.

5 Hodges and Hutter, With Downcast Gays: Aspects of Homosexual Self-Oppression, 2d
ed. (Toronto: Pink Triangle, 1979), 24 – 25, quoted in Richard Dellamora, “Textual
Politics/Sexual Politics,” MLQ 54 (1993): 162.
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Curr ❙ Recuperating Forster’s Maurice 57

This position is as recalcitrant as the far excesses of practical criticism/

adoring analysis. In 1977 another critic, Dennis Altman, both appeals
for sentimental reading, as Cavaliero does, and accuses Forster, in
whose writing “homosexual love is a constant spirit . . . requiring only a
sympathetic reading to materialise.” For Altman, “the real significance
of Forster’s homosexuality” is that “it forced him to be false to himself.
He was false in his writings, because he had always to describe hetero-
sexual relationships.”6
Richard Dellamora incisively defends Forster by aligning him with
“homosexual polemicists . . . such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde,
[who] critiqued the claims of identity, general consciousness, and
universal truth that one finds enforced within English studies and
other disciplines fashioned during the nineteenth century” (162 – 63).
Forster was not at all a celebrant of universal goodness or a writer in
need of a sympathetic reading, as his mushy critics suggest, nor was he
a traitor fag, as 1970s gay theorists contend. He was a card-carrying
renegade who played his audience, move for move, fictional expecta-
tion for writing delivery, throughout his life. Trilling’s evocation of the
ludic element is to be understood in this dark sense of playfulness.
There is vitality in the contest between the old fox of a novelist and the
hunter critics.
In studies of Maurice the ideals of liberal humanists who tend the
fires of close reading have not always been realized. Too often exeget-
ical fervor has created gratuitous explication rather than enlighten-
ment. Similarly, inflexible, even militant, theoretical positioning has
occasionally led to a tyranny of interpretation rather than to lively dis-
closure. (The present essay may be classified as an attempt at Leavisite
critique. F. R. Leavis himself was the first significant anti – New Critic in
England.) Dellamora is right to connect Maurice to Pater. By imagin-
ing, in a new kind of prose, a free and open society akin in spirit to Per-
iclean Athens, Forster’s posthumous novel captures for us the vision
felt so intensely by Pater through the inspiring mediation of Johann
Joachim Winckelmann’s Hellenism. In Maurice Forster refuses to sus-

6Altman, “The Homosexual Vision of E. M. Forster,” in Studies in E. M. Forster:

Cahiers d’études et de recherches victoriennes et édouardiennes, nos. 4 – 5 (1977): 91– 92,
quoted in Dellamora, 162.
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58 MLQ ❙ March 2001

tain the work of art as distant and objectified, ready for New Critical or
theoretical inspection; he insists instead on the integration of intense
personal reality and representative artifact as one: the process of redeem-
ing the public being, of reclaiming another country, through private
sublimity:
In that most disturbing and invigorating passage of all his prose [the
conclusion to The Renaissance], Pater urges the claims of the aesthetic
dimension to life, not as an abstract theory drained even of its intellec-
tual interest by a pallid and conventional philosophizing, but at its most
fundamental level, as aisthesis —sensation in all its sharp immediacy
and richest variety: “any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange
colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of
one’s friend.” . . .
Pater’s startling effacement here of the distinction between art and
life, between the artist’s work and the face of one’s friend, demands in
turn to be seen within the context of the Platonic pedagogy of the Sym-
posium. For it is there that Diotima declares, “it is only when he discerns
beauty through what makes it visible that a man will be quickened with
the true, and not the seeming, virtue,” and there that the heavenly lad-
der leading to universal beauty and virtue must always start in the frank
and shameless aisthesis of falling in love with the beauty of one individ-
ual body.7

Rereading Maurice

Any attempt to recuperate Maurice must turn on a rereading of the

concluding scene, the Greenwood idyll, which has come in for the
severest criticism. In it the victorious imagining of love between Mau-
rice and Alec is fulfilled at last:
Maurice went ashore, drunk with excitement and happiness. He watched
the steamer move, and suddenly she reminded him of the Viking’s
funeral that had thrilled him as a boy. The parallel was false, yet she was
heroic, she was carrying away death. She warped out from the quay,
Fred yapping, she swung into the channel to the sound of cheers, she
was off at last, a sacrifice, a splendour, leaving smoke that thinned into
the sunset, and ripples that died against the wooded shores. For a long
time he gazed after her, then turned to England. His journey was nearly

7
Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1994), 98.
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Curr ❙ Recuperating Forster’s Maurice 59

over. He was bound for his new home. He had brought out the man in
Alec, and now it was Alec’s turn to bring out the hero in him. He knew
what the call was, and what his answer must be. 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 compan-
ionship, was their reward. Her air and skies were theirs, not the timo-
rous millions who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls.8

The assertive conclusion to Maurice elicits especially vitriolic reviews.

One, released shortly after the novel’s publication, is spitefully titled
“Fairy Tale.”9 Yes, gay men are called fairies, and in many ways the
novel is a fairy tale. The happy ending is a wish. Forster stated his
desire for this final happiness in his own melancholy words: “A happy
ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I
determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and
remain in it for the forever and ever that fiction allows.”10 It is precisely
the radical intrusion of the personal and autobiographical that unset-
tles the received phrasing of a “good” literary work. In one review after
another Gardner chronicles the hostile press given to this scene in par-
ticular. The immediacy of Forster’s presence in it and his obvious wish
for happiness in life mark the book’s ending as a different kind of writ-
ing. It is freighted with autobiographical pain and the weight of social
proscription: elements safely inflected in the fictional construct of the
“straight” novels, which center on the societal difficulties of such char-
acters as Lilia. In Maurice inferred messages about one man’s feelings
for another man are made surface text. Rereading the ending of Mau-
rice and taking it seriously cause us to reread the whole novel and, log-
ically, prompt a rereading of the whole oeuvre.
In contrast to Forster’s other five novels, this one lacks an ending
veiled with evasion or fascinating inconclusiveness; instead it issues
an affirmative blast that erupts through the surface of the received
Forster canon. Departure from England is a metaphoric constant in
the novels, and the matter of which England and whose England is the
plainsong that reverberates about the country Forster loved to hate yet

8 Forster,Maurice (London: Arnold, 1971), 223. All references are to this edition.
9 Julian Mitchell, “Fairy Tale,” Guardian, 7 October 1971, rpt. in Gardner, 439.
10 Forster, “Terminal Note,” in Maurice, 237.
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60 MLQ ❙ March 2001

loved to have changed, not superficially but radically, from its farthest
reaches, till it became the England he knew it could be. Maurice, and
particularly its closing scene, is the detonator of Forster’s explosive
social revision. His voice comes from another country, from an Italy of
expatriation, because the country of his birth, he knew, would not
know him. That farthest country, the bourn of death, was the only land
from which he was truly safe to speak of a hope for another England, a
completely transformed place where the imagination of the individual
was free and the variety of life was celebrated.
The novel’s rapturous closing scenes are a climax to Forster’s work.
There will be no more departures, no more need of departures, to
other countries, no more expatriations of rebel souls or escapes from
barbarous British rule. The ship that is to take Alec to another country
and dissolve the ties between him and the man he loves finally lacks its
expatriated passenger. In this world of Arcadia, of Theocritean idyll,
there is no need to leave for an Italy abroad. Here Pan is heard to pipe
his rural song, and Alec repatriates the England that Forster loved
from his heart. Here there will be life and truth. Forster both enrap-
tures the imagination with the promise of such vitality, the joy cele-
brated in the festivals of Shri Krishna, and throws down a challenge
from this prototype of what we could be as human beings and what
we, alas, allow ourselves to dwindle into.
Moments of such triumphant return, and being, are, most signifi-
cantly, rare in other Forster novels. Instead scenes of departure punctu-
ate some of the most memorably graphic moments in them: the leav-
ing often tells of an ethical and existential failure in Sawston, England.
There is, in the first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, the unforgettable
incident of the footwarmer: sedulously fetched by Mr. Kingcroft and
brought just in time to be too late. Lilia’s train has already started, her
journey to Italy has begun, and she disappears into the fog, laughing,
while Kingcroft is left on the platform, alone with his polite offering.
Lilia cannot breathe in Sawston; she is expatriated, and the station
becomes the locus of expulsion. Then there are other planned escapes
that are never completed. The first Mrs. Wilcox almost makes it back
to Howards End. Margaret, too, suddenly waking subliminally to the
importance of the journey down, joins her at King’s Cross. But the
restraining hand of Mr. Wilcox intercedes and keeps the two women
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Curr ❙ Recuperating Forster’s Maurice 61

from embracing joy and liveliness: “They began to walk up the long
platform. Far at its end stood the train, breasting the darkness without.
They never reached it. Before imagination could triumph, there were
cries of ‘Mother! Mother!’ and a heavy-browed girl darted out of the
cloak-room and seized Mrs Wilcox by the arm.”11 In Forster’s last novel,
A Passage to India, Aziz’s expedition of largesse is almost ruined by God-
bole’s lateness in prayer. What happens after these departures — the
disastrous events of Lilia’s marriage in Italy and Miss Quested’s folly in
the caves, as well as the legal squabbles that follow on both — is of
a piece with the confusion with which they begin, if viewed from the
Sawston angle, that is, from the perspective of bourgeois control and
middle-class conformity that govern Mrs. Herriton in Where Angels Fear
to Tread, Herbert Pembroke in The Longest Journey, Cecil in A Room with
a View, Mr. Wilcox in Howards End, or Turton in A Passage to India. From
the opposite point of view, however, the departures into the heartland
of another country, be it India or Italy, herald not confusion of all that
is sober and sensible but exposure of the pedantic, the pompous, the
unimaginative and mercenary dulling of the human spirit. At least
Lilia’s flight from oppressive suburbia does take place; Aziz does suc-
ceed in bringing Mrs. Moore to the caves, resonant with an eternity
that dwarfs the petty schemes and minds of Sawston.
Maurice cannot simply be read in the same way as other Forster
novels, for two obvious reasons. First, the writing is of a different qual-
ity: it is suffused with the immediate force of autobiography, which
makes the text throb with the pain and desire of lived experience. Sec-
ond, because of its autobiographical nature, Maurice bears a unique
relation to the other novels. It is a revelatory and revolutionary inter-
text to them: a constant reminder of Forster’s suffering deflected into
imagined plots more proximate to the social conditioning of the read-
ers of his time.
If, as I claim, Maurice is a new kind of book — a front-runner in the
genesis of the gay novel in the twentieth century — and has been mis-
read, then there should be a place in it to which I can point and say,
“There, misread.” Then, of course, it should be possible to reread that
place in a new light. As it happens, there is exactly such a test-case sec-

11 Forster, Howards End, in Gardner, E. M. Forster, 498.

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62 MLQ ❙ March 2001

tion, where one can show critics going sadly awry by trying to force
Maurice into a pattern of interpretation that works well enough for the
other novels.
In Maurice Clive is ready to trade his soul for the accoutrements of
social blessing and propriety — that hallowed English word just after a
secure income in the litany of English desiderata. Apparently changed
or converted by Greece, Clive trades in his being for the comforts and
conveniences of social privilege. Of all the denials and untruths, this
one of the soul at its most vulnerable seems the darkest and is the
greatest impediment to embarkation for another country, for a bright
Italy within. The marriage of true minds between Clive and Maurice is
sanctified during their college days, and Forster places them in nature
to testify to their mutual bond. Nature and its beauty, fern and stream
and towering tree, is the right setting for their natural union. If their
love is sanctified in such scenes, the lie that Clive convinces himself
of, his marriage to Anne, is a sad desecration. Their time together is
unnatural and pallid:
When he arrived in her room after marriage, she did not know what he
wanted. Despite an elaborate education, no one had told her about sex.
Clive was as considerate as possible, but he scared her terribly, and left
feeling she hated him. She did not. She welcomed him on future nights.
But it was always without a word. They united in a world that bore no
reference to the daily, and this secrecy drew after it much else of their
lives. So much could never be ignored. He never saw her naked, nor
she him. (151)

It is amusing, if incredible, that a published researcher such as Jon

Harned should have believed the text of “what Clive says,” and missed
the undercurrent of Forster’s irony, so certainly as to think that Clive
really “goes straight” and does not force himself into the gelid prison
of social convenience. Thus Harned writes: “Forster no doubt wants
the reader to feel the poetry of this romance after a lifetime of loneli-
ness 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’ Clive begins to be sexually attracted to women and to find
Maurice’s embraces repulsive.”12 Surely the fact that Clive and his wife

12 Harned, “Becoming Gay in Forster’s Maurice,” Papers in Language and Litera-

ture 29 (1993): 56 – 57.
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Curr ❙ Recuperating Forster’s Maurice 63

never see each other naked, or want to, should have alerted Harned
that Clive’s alteration might be an imposed public requirement rather
than the outward sign of a spontaneous private passion. Surely Forster
exposes with this scene a myriad real-life dud marriages, contracted
but never truly consummated. Vasant A. Shahane, in his otherwise bril-
liant study E. M. Forster: A Study in Double Vision, is also taken in by Clive’s
marriage to Anne. He sees their false union as part of the greater mys-
tery of Forsterian subtlety: “Clive is drawn in homosexual relationship
as well as heterosexual involvement and these contraries in his psyche
are creations of Forster’s double vision.”13 Shahane provides a perfect
example of stubborn determination to sustain a particular mode of lib-
eral interpretation commonly applied to the main corpus in another
type of text where it will not function.
That such sophisticated readers should miss a crucial point in the
text signals the shortcomings of their approaches. We must read with
the knowledge that Forster is autobiographically present. Treating
Maurice as an isolated text to be assessed for its literary merit founders.
In this novel Forster impels love and aesthetic sensitivity as coextant in
the individual soul’s restitution, which is primary to the reconstruction
of a healthful society. Private passion and public art are one in Maurice.
Beauty and love are commingled; they form an ethical pedagogy. We
are reminded by the intense conjunction of personal and formal ele-
ments in Maurice that Forster’s fine prose is not there simply to be rated;
it lives in the life of the writer and its respondent reader. If practical-
critical methodology fails because it views only the literary, then gay
critics who accuse Forster of cowardice look too fixedly at the gender/
love issue; they lose sight of Forster’s commitment to aesthetics as a
path to social revision. Articulating the thought of his nineteenth-
century predecessors, such as Pater, Forster dispels the break between
art and life. The beauty of art finds its pulse and its enlightening

13 Shahane, E. M. Forster: A Study in Double Vision (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann,

1975), 98. June Levine traces the term double vision to Forster’s friend, G. Lowes
Dickensen. Levine, like so many other liberal critics, celebrates the uncertainties in
Forster’s canonical works: “No matter what polarity is stressed — reason-feeling, indi-
vidualism-communalism, realism-symbolism — Forster’s inconclusiveness, his refusal
to mediate among the significant possibilities of experience, has impressed many
readers” (Creation and Criticism: “A Passage to India” [London: Chatto and Windus,
1971], 124).
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64 MLQ ❙ March 2001

strength in the experience of love. This integration is at the heart of

Maurice, which is at the heart of all the other Forster novels. It really is
time to reread Maurice and reassess its relation to them.

Maurice and the Other Novels

Maurice stands in the same relation to such revered works as Howards

End as The Wide Sargasso Sea stands to Jane Eyre. Forster is unique, and
uniquely ingenious, in writing an intertextual novel to disrupt the
accepted pattern of his own works. He plays his own Stoppard to his
own Shakespeare: his own Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to his
own Hamlet. By holding back Maurice from publication, he rewrites
himself. His presence in the novel, in the contest of love between its
protagonists, projects Forster the man into the other novels. The
quickened body revives the corpus; the love of a friend informs and
reshapes the love of beauty in fiction’s art.
In Maurice the struggle for the soul is waged more bitterly and
dangerously than in any of the other novels. Alec and Maurice have to
fight for the love they know exists but are given cause to fear. The will
and identity itself struggle unforgettably in the British Museum scenes.
The radiance of Italy, of fulfillment and humanity, wanes and then
flares up behind them at every turn of the confrontation. Yet the
museum is a backdrop of beauty and enlightenment: it looms as an
ancient, prescient witness, dark in eternity like the caves. Finally, its
timeless truth prevails. Natural love triumphs, and imagination shines
in victory. The museum, the potentially sterile hall of art, is brightened
to life by human passion just as the contestants of potentially banal lust
are sensitized and humanized by the context of art. Not here the
defeated shape of Mrs. Wilcox led back docilely to her soul’s impris-
onment; not here the unnatural, furtive coition of Clive and Anne:
here the allegory of love and true marriage is played out full and loud.
Betrayal of another, like Mr. Wilcox’s crime against his wife or
McBryde’s against his, seems slight next to Clive’s betrayal of his inner-
most being. The complicated shroud of self-deception, of moral
sophistry enclosing and entombing natural passion, is thick with the
terms of death-bearing deceit. If an Italy of the self is a distant country
for Mrs. Herriton or Charles Wilcox, it is a world away for such as
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Curr ❙ Recuperating Forster’s Maurice 65

Clive. In the slow phrasing “He adopted it without regret” (151) there
is the funereal tone of smothering conformity — the soul laid out and
etherized into nonlife yet strangely self-righteous about its dignified,
socially approved numbness. Sameness is exposed not as the monu-
mental, whole identity of mainstream normality but as the refuge of
the cowardly social opportunist.
Mrs. Wilcox, in possession of an inner light as Forster defines it, is
described as engulfed in the elevator of her husband’s affluent apart-
ment block:
They parted at the Mansions. Mrs Wilcox went in after due civilities,
and Margaret watched the tall, lonely figure sweep up the hall to the
lift. As the glass doors closed on it she had the sense of an imprison-
ment. The beautiful head disappeared first, still buried in the muff; the
long trailing skirt followed. A woman of indefinable rarity was going up
heavenward, like a specimen in a bottle. And into what a heaven — a
vault as of hell, sooty black, from which soots descended! (497)

Lucy Honeychurch, in A Room with a View, almost falls into the same
trap of half life so nearly closed on Gwendolen Harleth, perhaps the
classic figure of self-betrayal at the altar of social advantage, in George
Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. Yet Clive’s immolation of the self is harsher and
more final: it is as if, in their extreme form, the moral crises of Maurice
contain the distilled essence of predicaments in the other novels.
Beyond the strong Dickensian appeal for humanity, tolerance, and
social equity in Forster, there is in Maurice a far more radical indict-
ment of English society, particularly of the ethos that restrains Mrs.
Wilcox from her flight to a locus of imaginative triumph. The entire
structure of English thinking — imperialist, patronizing, and riddled
with pretense and hypocrisy as a result — is arraigned. The publication
of Maurice after Forster’s death silently convicted a society of intoler-
ance; it condemned a community that he knew could not tolerate, let
alone rejoice in, the full spectrum of variety, spoken of so perfectly at
the close of Howards End:
Margaret silenced her [Helen]. She said: “It is only that people are far
more different than is pretended. All over the world men and women
are worrying because they cannot develop as they are supposed to
develop. Here and there they have the matter out, and it comforts
them. Don’t fret yourself, Helen. Develop what you have; love your
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66 MLQ ❙ March 2001

child. I do not love children. I am thankful to have none. I can play

with their beauty and charm, but that is all — nothing real, not one
scrap of what there ought to be. And others — others go farther still,
and move outside humanity altogether. A place, as well as a person, may
catch the glow. Don’t you see that all this leads to comfort in the end? It
is part of the battle against sameness. Differences — eternal differences,
planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour;
sorrow perhaps, but colour in the daily grey.” (658)

By difference Margaret does not mean “deviation from an empowered

and unified sameness.” Rather, she dismisses sameness as a myth, a
desire for acceptance that blights people’s lives. Difference has, in her
terms, the full force of natural, fructifying “variety.” The words pre-
tended and supposed to tell mournfully of the kind of self-deception
undergone by Clive, who talks himself into being less individual, less
human. The pathetic desire to fit in, to belong colorlessly, all variety or
individuation shaded out, is exposed as a phantasm. Margaret shows
how sadly people comply with predetermined roles. Thus in A Passage
to India Ronny Heaslop takes on the part of a racist, prejudiced sahib.
In the pseudosiege scene of men protecting their womenfolk at the
club there is all the farce of what is supposed to be: human beings
ready to pretend rather than be the authentic, joyful individuals they
are meant to be — rather than rejoice in the Italy in us all.
Pitted against the dead and the deadening — against the spiritu-
ally dead, such as Harriet or Charles Wilcox, who murder the inno-
cent and the innocence of life with scant apology or remorse — there
is, in Forster’s metaphor of Italy or India, the recurrent celebration of
life as it is. There is, he doggedly insists, another type of country for
England to be and a country that invites another type of person, glad,
not embarrassed, to receive variety. A passage to India and a trip to
Italy are journeys to the destinations of a fortunate soul in life, to a
place in the imagination where joy is not a Sunday treat, Sawston-style,
awarded to the hardworking and not made much of, either. There is a
place, and England should be such a place, where life is a festival of
the human spirit. The carnival scenes that close A Passage to India
reclaim this aspect of life:
All laughed exultantly at discovering that the divine sense of humour
coincided with their own. “God is love!” There is fun in heaven. God
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Curr ❙ Recuperating Forster’s Maurice 67

can play practical jokes upon Himself, draw chairs away from His own
posteriors, set His turbans on fire, and steal His petticoats when He
bathes. By sacrificing good taste, this worship achieved what Christian-
ity has shirked: the inclusion of merriment. (842)

Aziz grants Mrs. Moore and her son, Ralph, a high honor: he calls
them Orientals, because they allow themselves not only to see the
materially visible but to trust the telepathic, the instinctual. The imag-
ination triumphs here, and the journey is not so much to India or Italy
as it is within. Forster invokes the forces of inner darkness and spiritual
light that contend for England. The England of Howards End must
win if there is to be freedom, not just tolerance; joy, not merely
permission.

Conclusion

The reviews of Maurice immediately after its publication in 1971 tar-

geted various “weaknesses.” Even today the elements of these reviews
remain crucial in assessing the debate over this novel. The matter of
the Greenwood idyll and the sense of Forster’s presence in the narra-
tive disturb many readers who are not familiar with the wider context
of homosexual writing. A summary of the main points of these reviews
provides an overview of the terms of critique. Regarding the romantic
ending, C. P. Snow writes: “It is a novel with a purpose, and the pur-
pose is to proclaim that homosexual love, in its fullest sense, can be
happy and enduring. Hence the ecstatic ending. It rings artistically
quite wrong, as a wish-fulfilment: and yet anyone who reads it will
hope, without any knowledge of the biography, that for the writer the
wish ultimately came true.” Julian Mitchell, on the other hand, is harsh
and unyielding: “Maurice ends like a fairy tale in the worst possible
sense.” Autobiographical intervention also elicits some keen and some
dull responses. “It now seems,” Philip Toynbee suggests, “that one of
the special restraints which Forster needed was precisely that he should
not express his homosexual feelings directly: that they should be subli-
mated, transmuted and confined within the banks of that millrace
which proved, in so many of his books, to be such an effective driving-
force.” An unsigned review from the Times Literary Supplement of 1971
contains some of the most acrid, if wrongheaded, pointers: “Forster
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68 MLQ ❙ March 2001

wrote the book rapidly because he was writing from experience, and
no doubt for the same reason he did not succeed in turning experi-
ence into literary reality.” Two of the most valuable comments from
the time of publication, however, strike an enigmatic note that is useful
in opposing the tide of negativity. Michael Ratcliffe concludes that
“Maurice is the least poetic, the least witty, the least dense and the most
immediately realistic of the six novels.” Alan Hunter similarly remarks
that “Maurice may not be the best book in the canon, but it belongs,
and is perhaps the most interesting” (quoted in Gardner, 435, 440,
464, 489, 443, 452).
What is “literary reality”? Ratcliffe balances the frustration of New
Critical readers, who look for playful tension and irony, against real-
ism, autobiographical presence, in this new type of writing. Toynbee
typifies the refusal to allow a direct voice; he insists on the inflection of
personal pain into a distanced fictional construct. Yet the phrase most
immediately realistic cuts away at this blinkered prerequisite of literary
reality. Ratcliffe’s summation is also useful in unseaming the critique of
a fanciful ending. It is exactly because the issue is so tender that Snow
answers Mitchell, and himself, in hoping that the writer may find in
life the truth he dreams of in fiction. Gay writing as genre recalls the
trial, injustice, and suffering of Oscar Wilde; it brings in the margins of
experience to create a new kind of writing that will not be silent about
social proscription. In his introduction Gardner picks up this aspect, as
well as Hunter’s comment:
Such diversity of opinion [among the reviewers he cites] makes it clear
that Maurice is not a book to be disregarded. Its posthumous publica-
tion has had the effect of confronting Forster’s audience with what was
for them a “new” novel, and so of producing as vital, if as mixed, a
response as Forster’s work elicited between 1905 and 1928. Thus the
material in this book comes round in virtually a full circle, proceeding
through the “instant criticism” of reviews to the more distant and more
pondered judgements of critical studies and back again to reviews
which enable one to compare the insights and errors of 1971 with the
insights and errors of 1905. From the “old man at King’s,” established
and explained, Forster has almost changed back again into the “young
rider into fiction.” (36)

Forster’s remarkable ability to reinvent himself and predict his readers’

expectations has been too much ignored. Byrne R. S. Fone, in a more
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Curr ❙ Recuperating Forster’s Maurice 69

recent estimation made within the context of gay writing, does well to
credit the author of Maurice: “Forster describes [his novel] as a new
creation, as a construction built in spite of moral disapprobation. They
[Maurice and Clive] write their passion — as Whitman had done — in a
new and invented tongue.”14 Fone understands well what renders gay
writing new: the immediacy of autobiographical and socially proscrip-
tive elements. He recognizes that Forster is a pioneer in establishing
the gay novel of the twentieth century. Fone’s appraisal is fair, not suf-
ficiently regarded, and conclusive:
Forster’s Maurice is the first modern homosexual novel, heir to those
who tried to make society think about homosexuality. Maurice marks
the end of what Whitman, Pater, and Symonds had begun. Maurice can
rightly claim to be the first and best homosexual novel because it pre-
dicts in every way what the best homoerotic novels of the twentieth cen-
tury written before Stonewall would ultimately achieve: confrontation,
with the intention of changing, society; the construction of a positive
identity for homosexual readers; a rewriting of social myths of sickness,
insanity, perversion, and universal effeminacy, without sacrificing the
essentiality of difference. (175 –76)

14 Fone, A Road to Stonewall: Male Homosexuality and Homophobia in English and

American Literature, 1750 – 1969 (New York: Twayne, 1995), 173.