In his new essay marking 100 years since Forster wrote Maurice
"This year marks the centenary of one of the best known gropes in English letters. A hundred years ago, the writer Edward Carpenter's young lover George Merrill placed a hand on the indeterminate region between EM Forster's buttocks and back. Shortly thereafter, Forster began his novel Maurice, and in a "Terminal Note" written almost 50 years later he identified Merrill's touch as its inspiration. While this genesis story gets a lot of press in Forster circles, for me what is more striking is Forster's description of Maurice as belonging "to an England where it was still possible to get lost". The militaristic demands of two world wars – the extensive mapping of England in the name of security – had, for Forster, robbed the island of its wild places. In Maurice, the ability to become lost in "the greenwood" provides the book's homosexual lovers their escape from society's punishments, and indeed even this happy ending can be traced back to the upper slope of Forster's bottom. As well as sparking a novel, Merrill's caress further initiated Forster into the comradely haven of his and Carpenter's rural domesticity: a Derbyshire homestead, safe from public scrutiny."
Scott continues:
"...the novel's text radiates a nostalgia for reticence and a desire to fall off the grid. This instinct for withdrawal and obscurity speaks to present critiques of digitised life. In a world increasingly patrolled by online analytics and social media, Maurice's political dilemma still resonates: how might you not be in hiding while not being on display?
"In Maurice, to borrow from Brass Eye, there's good darkness and bad darkness. The book begins with the bad sort: Maurice's adolescence is a descent into "The Valley of the Shadow of Life", Forster's image for the ignorance of puberty in which Maurice and his schoolmates blunder about, unable to fathom their own feelings. At various paces they scramble up the slopes into some form of enlightenment. The novel suggests that some lives may be lived out in spiritual obscurity, a perpetual half-sleep. Its crises or climaxes tend to involve a character being awoken from dreams; the book contains more than one amorous Peter Pan at the window. The motif of the dark trek appears when Maurice meets his Cambridge sweetheart Clive Durham for the first time, in a college room at the end of an unlit corridor. We're told how "visitors slid along the wall until they hit the door".
"Never escaping the murk becomes a moral and spiritual failure. After Clive outgrows his Cambridge gay phase – a pretentious, celibate period fuelled by gauche interpretations of Plato – he eventually marries Anne, but Forster portrays their marriage as an extended fumble in the dark: "He never saw her naked, nor she him. They ignored the reproductive and the digestive functions … the actual deed of sex seemed to him unimaginative, and best veiled in night." Maurice, meanwhile, is terrified of mouldering in respectable suburbia, dragging some poor virgin into the sepulchre with him.
"Unable to sever ties with his former love, Maurice becomes the reluctant, neutered house guest of Clive and Anne. But darkness also offers another sort of obscurity. In this good darkness you aren't drowsy but alert, and through it you can move unchecked. During one restless night, tormented by the suffocating air of Clive's decaying country seat, Maurice yearns to become fully invisible to a society that can only ever partially see him. "Ah for darkness," he thinks, "not the darkness of a house which coops up a man among furniture, but the darkness where he can be free!" He is overwrought and half-asleep, and so Forster risks giving him purple cravings for "big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science can reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend".
Read the full essay here.
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