A Manly Type of Love

Forster is dead. I miss him and I should not. He died last year, a ninety-year-old man with a ninety-year-old vision--a product of English liberal humanism who believed in the old virtues. Individualism, tolerance, tradition, the Human Spirit, an aristocracy of the good, the Christian ethic with the Christianity left out. If history is to go anywhere, it must leave its Forsters behind. But now Maurice has been published, and Edward Morgan Forster deserves a backward glance.

The young Forster eased from the suburban middle-class of his childhood into the academic world of Cambridge where he chose liberalism for his politics and writing for his profession. In the first two decades of this century, his stories and novels achieved a narrow critical appreciation, and finally in 1924, with the publication of A Passage to India, Forster won fame and commercial success. His novels are wry and mannered, reflecting British culture from the inside out, compassionate and ironic. And the best of them are among the best of a great period in the English novel.

With Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes and Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Forster was a part of the elite Bloomsbury Group, where the world of intellect perched to watch the world of men stagger and fall. Everyone called him Morgan, and of those that knew him, he was loved by most.

Forster's was the great age of scruples that tried to save the world with decency and left it in the muck instead. It was a dying age; he knew it, regretted it and would not renounce it.

He was not blind to the movement of history and not unsympathetic. "The backward races are kicking," he once wrote, "and more power to their boots." (But, Mr. Forster, the poor have no boots). He did not belong to history; his temperament was too ironic to believe in the future and too traditional to want to. He was forever looking backward, fondly brooding over his disintegrating times. Too fascinated with the corpse to get on with the funeral.

He was a liberal humanist, and for that we can forgive him. And he was an ironist, for that we can thank him. The publication of Maurice is his last act of ironic humanism.

Forster was discreetly homosexual. That would mean little to us, had it not meant much to him. As things were, a 1913 visit to Edward Carpenter--socialist, ex-clergyman, homosexual--seems to have awakened in Forster a sense of his sexual deviance as a kind of sublime alternative to the philistine morality of his age. The novel Maurice (1914) is a product of that awareness; and now, fifty-seven years later, it has been published.

Chronologically Maurice comes between what must be considered Forster's two greatest novels, Howard's End and A Passage to India. It in no way has their literary merit. It has neither their complexity nor their satiric edge. But it has more of the man that was Forster, and it is to be read for the man.

Maurice Hall is an uncommonly ordinary human being who manages to pass without distinction through public school and on to Cambridge. He is one of the faceless, colorless many, bred in England's pockets of middle-class provincialism:

Church was the only place Mrs. Hall had to go to--the shops delivered. The station was not far either, nor was a tolerable day school for the girls. It was a land of facilities, where nothing had to be striven for, and success was indistinguishable from failure.

Maurice is a plodder and a sticker who can imagine no fate beyond the inevitable family ascension to Hill and Hall Stock Brokers. He is also, without for the longest time realizing it, a homosexual. At Cambridge he half-consciously involves himself with Clive Durham, a frail intellectual taken to gathering up prizes in the classics. Early on, Durham mistakes Maurice's receptiveness and blurts out, "I love you."

Maurice was scandalized, horrified. He was shocked to the bottom of his suburban soul, and exclaimed, "Oh, rot."

Things patch up and a two-year homosexual affair follows. Forster handles love scenes with exquisite tact, neither prudish nor extravagant, but by even the broadest of erotic standards, the novel is decidedly small-time stuff--gentle rather than sensual.

For Maurice, the idyll is not to last. Clive suddenly has a change of heart, marries, and returns to bourgeois respectability, the lord of a country estate. He pushes the past aside and urges his former lover to do the same. But Maurice's temperament is not so supple. He is left with the fact of his homosexuality and that is the core of his existence. It seizes and infects him.

Forster is no mere apologist for homosexuality, thus Maurice agonizes. But there is something of redemption in the agony. Maurice, suffering, is no longer the dull adolescent, prisoner of his class and social consciousness. His moral separation turns him to introspection, and the movement of the novel becomes for Maurice (and, one presumes, for Forster) a self-examination of the implications of homosexuality--the sterility, the social exile, the ethical renunciation.

For a time it appears that Maurice will come down on the side of sexual conformity. He tries to yield to Clive's advice, vows to marry, and at one point visits a hypnotist for 'correction'. But at a crucial time on Clive's estate, Maurice spends the night with a young gamekeeper, Alec Scudder. There follows a period of suspicion between the two; Alec threatens blackmail, and Maurice is afraid to meet again. But a crisis between them turns into a mutual confession of love, and as the novel ends, they are planning to live together. Alec having given up a future in America and Maurice surrendering pretensions to hollow respectability:

They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to one another till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millionaires who own stuffy little boxes but never their own souls.

And this is the lesson of Maurice. Salvation can only be won through a personal involvement that cares nothing for the unthinking yellow-grey morality of suburban conformity. And in ways, that is the lesson of all Forster's moral philosophy. In 1939, he wrote an essay called What I Believe, and what he believed in was Personal Relations. He had an individualist's fear of drowning in the teeming masses. So the solution was to be Personal, individual to individual, beyond politics, beyond class, beyond morality. That is what he meant when he wrote:

I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my friend.

It takes all one's ideological underpinnings not to admire a statement like that.

Forster appends to the novel a "Terminal Note," written in 1960, and there he comments on the romanticism of the work:

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.

The novel, then, is wish-fulfillment, and on strictly literary terms, it has all the limitations of slight and shallow romance. But far more than most novels, Maurice demands to be considered on extra-literary terms. It was, after all, an extra-literary factor that delayed its publication these fifty-seven years and an extra-literary spirit that compelled Forester to write in the first place. It is a social and personal document, and the society and person are interesting enough to deserve our attention.

True, in another and better world, where homosexuality would go uncensured and unnoticed, Maurice would be little more than sentimental tripe. But in our world, the sentiment achieves an ironic edge, and the fond and gentle narrative counterpoints the absurd prejudices which kept the novel so long unread.

Forster had to die so that we could read Maurice, and that is too bad. It is not an even trade. He could have better left us a finer work. But is is a good excuse to remember him and that cannot hurt.

In 1950, Forster wrote an essay on George Orwell who was in large measure his humanist heir. The description serves for both:

All nations are odious but some are less odious than others, and by this stony, unlovely path, he reaches patriotism. To some of us, this seems the cleanest way to reach it. We believe in the roses and the toads and the arts, and know that salvation, or a scrap of it, is to be found only in them. In the world of politics we see no salvation, we are not to be diddled, but we prefer the less bad to the more bad, and so become patriots, while keeping our brains and hearts intact.

Such is bourgeois humanism: exasperatingly scrupulous, often soft-minded, infuriating, but it is where we come from.