Reading Queer: Maurice by E M Forster

An abridged extract from John Venning's lecture on E M Forster, as part of the 'Queer Art Lectures' programme.

Forster had not wished his sexuality to be revealed in his lifetime. It was only in 2008, however, that restricted material, including his ‘Locked Diary’ were made available to scholars by King’s College who inherited his literary estate. We all owe a great debt to Professor Wendy Moffatt who published a new biography of Forster in 2010, written using this new material. As Christopher Isherwood said after he received a parcel of unpublished writings after Forster’s death: ‘Unless you start with the fact that he was homosexual, nothing’s any good at all.’

In 1913, after his return from India, Forster visited one of the most important of gay icons in the history of liberation, Edward Carpenter, and his partner, George Merrill, a working class labourer twenty-two years his junior. Since 1898, Carpenter and Merrill had lived openly as gay men, which was the more surprising as the Wilde trials of 1895 brought hysterical condemnation and punitive legislation down upon homosexual men. Carpenter absorbed, explained and synthesised practically every advanced idea of the time: the themes of some of his books include the abolition of class distinction, socialism, free love, sexual and social equality for men and women, and for gay men and women.

Forster was still a virgin of thirty-four in 1913. He had formed strong emotional friendships with contemporaries at Cambridge, but the conventions of his time and the neuroses of his upbringing led him to chaste frustration. His visit to Carpenter and Merrill at their home in the village of Millthorpe  changed him for ever. He did not sleep with either man, and returned dutifully to his mother, but he began immediately to write the novel he had wanted to write, and which remained with him as an important talisman for the rest of his life, shown to friends revised and edited, but not published until after his death.

Maurice is about a young man, educated at Cambridge, who falls in love with a contemporary, Clive Durham, who introduces him to the ‘unspeakable vice of the Greeks’ theoretically and platonically, but marries for social and political reasons. Maurice becomes a stockbroker, but meets his friend’s gamekeeper, Alec Scudder, when visiting his country estate and they begin an affair which leads to Maurice abandoning his job and his class to live with Alec happily ever after in a Carpenterian classless world of free sexual expression.

Yes, of course it’s sentimental wish-fulfilment. That’s precisely the point. Forster was determined to show that it was possible to be homosexual, fulfilled and happy. If he had shown his lovers humiliated, arrested, vilified, he might have found a publisher, and would have been able to cope with the ensuing publicity. As it was, he could not imagine it being published.

And remember it was not a cliché when Forster wrote it. D H Lawrence’s gamekeeper, who took on the class system by educating Lady Chatterley in the meaning and application of four-letter words, was fifteen years later and was not published in this country until 1960, after a trial for obscenity in which Forster gave testimony in favour of its literary merit, just as he had done for Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness in 1928. Forster and Virginia Woolf, herself bisexual, wrote to the press that: ‘a novelist may not wish to treat any of the subjects mentioned above, but the sense that they are prohibited or prohibitable, that there is a taboo-list, will work on him and make him alert and cautious instead of surrendering himself to his creative impulses.’

Forster’s contemporary friends included the greatest economist of the age, John Maynard Keynes, also a Fellow of King’s, and some of the greatest writers. The list of those to whom he showed the manuscript of Maurice is one of the identifiers of friendship, and similar sexuality. Let us call it, as Carpenter did, homogenity, because he abhorred the coinage ‘homosexual’s illiterate blending of Greek and Latin. At various times the manuscript was offered to Edward Carpenter, Forrest Reid, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Lytton Strachey, Siegfried Sassoon, Lawrence of Arabia, Stephen Spender, Joe Ackerley. Ackerley was very keen that it should be published, and held out the example of Andre Gide who had written Corydon in praise of homogeneity, and Si le Grain ne Meurt, in which he was frank about his sexual practices, including cruising with Oscar Wilde. Forster’s response was telling: ‘But Gide hasn’t got a mother!’

The novel’s longest standing advocate was Christopher Isherwood. He provoked Forster into revising the novel in 1952 and putting in the scene in the hotel where they have sex for the first time. Forster would eventually entrust him with the task of publishing it in America, should it not be possible to do so in England, even after his death. Isherwood was moved that Forster, ‘imprisoned within the jungle of pre-war prejudice, put those unthinkable thoughts into words.’ He became devoted to Forster, admiring his integrity and defence of values they shared. In Down There on a Visit (1962) he described his friend thus, set in 1938 just before the outbreak of WW2:

‘(Forster is) immensely, superhumanly strong. He is ‘strong’ because he doesn’t try to be a stiff-lipped stoic like the rest of us, and so he’ll never crack. He’s absolutely flexible. He lives by love, not by will. His simplicity is beautiful because it expresses love and is the reverse side of his passionate minding about things. We need (Forster)’s simplicity more than ever now. It gives courage.’