The timing of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory's latest film Maurice is curious to say the least, and certainly not without its ironies.
Maurice, of course, is E.M. Forster's famous posthumous novel written 1913, after Howard's End, but only published after the author's death in 1971. The novel, "dedicated to a happier year," tells of an upper middle-class Englishman's gradual discovering of his homosexuality culminating in meeting the boy of his dreams and their going off to live happily ever after somewhere outside Great Britain.
The novel was conceived and written at a time when homosexuality in Great Britain was against the law, when men were persecuted, even flogged, and sent to prison for its practice. Oscar Wilde's pathetic story is all too well known. Even when Forster wrote his "terminal note" in 1960 to Maurice, he was convinced that Parliament would reject the Wolfenden recommendations and that, of his characters, Clive on the bench would continue to sentence Alec in the dock, but that Maurice might get off. The Wolfenden recommendations--sexual activity between consenting adults not being a cause for prosecution--were not rejected, and English social mores were henceforth changed.
No Interest in Women
The novel is a low-key study of the young years of Maurice Hall, who just never was interested in women. At Cambridge in the early years of the century, he finds himself powerfully drawn to handsome, well-born Clive Durham. With much hesitation and many misunderstandings, eventually the two young men declare their love for one another. Apart from stroking one another's hair, and a chaste kiss or two, the relationship remains on a purely spiritual plane, at Clive's desire, although Forster describes both men as serenely, blissfully happy in their love.
Some three years or more after university, with Maurice still utterly contented with their chaste companionship, Clive begins to have doubts. He falls sick, goes off to Greece for a long holiday, refusing to write Maurice, and on his return, attempts embarrassingly to convert Maurice to the notion that they now should turn their interests to women.
Maurice, following a violent row with Clive, remains desperately lonely, taking up boxing and football with underprivileged youth in his spare time, still mourning his great love. A call comes from Clive announcing his engagement--Maurice is the eighth friend to be called, he learns. Death in his soul, Maurice goes on, sloughing along though a celibate life.
He does eventually, however, accept an invitation to come down to Clive's country home to stay with him and his new bride. There, a youthful gamekeeper, Alec Scudder gradually impinges on his consciousness. Until one night, unable to sleep, Maurice leans out his window and cries into the darkness, "Come!" And up a ladder, and into his room comes "someone he scarcely knew and knelt beside him and whispered, "Sir, was you calling out for me? … Sir, I know. … I know," and touches him.
The remaining few chapters are concerned with Maurice trying to be hypnotized out of his "unnatural" desires, his return to Alec Scudder, Scudder's decision not to emigrate to the
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