THIS YEAR MARKS the centenary of E.M. Forster’s completion of his initial version of the novel Maurice. The most autobiographical of Forster’s six novels, Maurice stands out for its forthright depiction of a homosexual hero whose journey culminates in his embracing his sexual identity and finding a male life partner. In the decades that followed the novel’s completion, Forster occasionally revisited and added to the original manuscript. What remained unchanged was the author’s decision not to attempt publication, even long after he became widely known as England’s greatest living novelist. Ironically, his fame and stature may have augmented his fears that the novel would be greeted with hostility and would destroy his literary reputation.
Nevertheless, Forster continued to believe that Maurice might play a role in a future era, as hinted at by the novel’s dedication: “Dedicated to a Happier Year.” The terms of his will provided for the possibility of the novel’s publication, along with other stories and personal documents, after his death. On June 7, 1970, he died at the age of 91 at the Coventry home of Bob Buckingham, the love of his life with whom he had shared a long, complex relationship, one that endured even after Buckingham’s marriage. Forster surrounded himself with a circle of gay authors, artists, and composers, including writers Christopher Isherwood and J. R. Ackerley and composer Benjamin Britten. He showed the manuscript of Maurice to many of these friends; it was Isherwood who would rescue the novel after its author’s demise.
In her superb biography of Forster, A Great Unrecorded History (2010), Wendy Moffat describes Isherwood’s crucial role in bringing Maurice out of the literary closet: “For Isherwood, shepherding Forster’s gay fiction posthumously into print was both a sacred trust and a political adventure. He believed that publication would give Forster a second life as a pioneer of gay writing.” When Maurice finally emerged into the public eye in 1971, Forster’s long-held fears proved legitimate: the novel received generally tepid reviews and was considered inferior to his other novels. Reviewers took pains to make it clear that their lack of enthusiasm had nothing to do with its subject matter, but they protested too much to be convincing.
The negative response was not, however, the end of Maurice’s journey. Publication coincided with the burgeoning gay freedom movement in the 1970s and 1980s, and gradually the novel assumed cult status in the gay community. The novel emerged into mainstream consciousness in 1987 in a superb screen adaptation directed by James Ivory and starring James Wilby, Rupert Graves, and Hugh Grant. The second of Ivory’s three adaptations of Forster, Maurice was one of the first mainstream films to depict not only an openly gay love story but one with a happy ending. The film was also notable for its sexual candor, which included lingering full-mouth kissing and male frontal nudity.
A Double Literary Life?
While the overt homophobia that plagued Forster’s professional aspirations has been dramatically reduced in estimations of his work, the author is perennially undervalued, and the role of homosexuality in his impressive body of fiction continues unrecognized. Even admirers of Forster see him as leading a double literary life: enjoying a pre-eminent reputation for novels with heterosexual romantic scenarios such as A Passage to India while in private tinkering with Maurice and writing erotically charged short stories for the amusement of his friends. This dichotomous view of the author does as much of an injustice to his legacy as did the decades of homophobia that prevented him from publishing Maurice in the first place.
The increased openness about homosexuality in literature of the 21st century has, ironically, created new barriers to achieving a fuller understanding of Forster’s accomplishments. Forster does not use the word “homosexual” in any of the novels and short stories published in his lifetime; nor are there scenes that explicitly portray same-sex sexual relationships. Some literary critics have used the term “coded” to describe the subject of homosexuality in Forster, but the term fails to do justice to an author who courageously challenged a host of social norms.
Forster’s complete body of fictional works deserves to be revisited from the perspective of an enlightened, gay-affirmative consciousness, one that also respects the historical context of his work. What emerges from a reinterpretation of this kind is a remarkably rich body of work in which numerous gay characters and same-sex relationships are presented in a humanistic, insightful light. A look at several of his most celebrated novels and stories published in his lifetime illuminates the central role that his homosexuality played throughout his literary career.
Oppressive Masculinity in The Longest Journey
Forster’s second novel, The Longest Journey, was first published in 1907 while the author was still in his late twenties and edging closer and closer to embracing his homosexual identity.
On the other hand, this metaphorical interpretation tends to overlook the real homoeroticism that appears with remarkable clarity in the text. Equally strong is the theme of disillusionment with the stereotypical masculine role. The Longest Journey presents life at public boys’ schools as dehumanizing and brutal. Forster’s scathing description of Sawston, the boys’ school modeled on Forster’s own unhappy experiences at Tonbridge School, depicts the callousness of the rituals that mold boys into English men.
Years later, Rickie is equally disheartened by his failed marriage to Agnes Pembroke, an unimaginative woman who increasingly despises her husband’s sensitive nature. The specifically sexual failure of their marriage, and Rickie’s unsuitability for the role of husband, is one of the powerful motifs in the novel. In the years after he graduated from Cambridge University, Forster was surrounded by examples of former classmates such as Hugh Meredith, with whom he had been deeply in love for many years, conforming to social traditions by marrying eligible English women. Through Rickie’s emotionally barren marriage to Agnes, Forster sends a potent message to young gay men that heterosexual marriage may be a terrible mistake.
Throughout The Longest Journey, Rickie’s feelings for the men in his life are depicted as deeper than anything he ever feels toward Agnes. Rickie’s years at Cambridge are bathed in a romantic, homoerotic glow. In the Cambridge section of the novel, the bonds of love between the male students are idealized. Thus, for example: “He and his friend were lying in a meadow during their last summer term. In his incurable love for flowers he had plaited two garlands of buttercups and cow-parsley, and Ansell’s lean Jewish face was framed in one of them.”
Ansell is a breakthrough character in English literature in the early 20th century. In his intellectual acuity, his pride in his Jewish heritage at a time of virulent anti-Semitism, and most of all in his open expressions of love and devotion for Rickie, Ansell emerges as a new kind of hero. He is clearly a gay man who has discarded the rigid religious, social, and sexual norms of Edwardian England. And yet he remains true to the Cambridge ideals of intellectual exploration and male camaraderie. What’s most striking about Ansell is his visionary wisdom, his instinctive understanding that happiness depends upon being true to oneself. If Rickie had heeded Ansell’s advice not to marry Agnes, or indeed any woman, the tragic ending of the novel might have been avoided. Ansell is a symbol of Rickie’s conscience and his deepest self, and their relationship is a precursor of the romance between Maurice Hall and Clive Durham in Maurice.
A Room With A View: Sexual Awakening
While The Longest Journey pays homage to the homosexual mystique of the all-male culture of Cambridge, Forster’s romantic comedy A Room With A View, published in 1908 to great acclaim, is his most ardently feminist novel. Forster lives, moves, and breathes with his heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, and rarely has a male novelist achieved such an authentic portrait of a rebellious woman. Lucy’s struggle to express her emotions and sexuality in a constrained environment, her courage in bringing her inner self out into the open, resonates strongly with women and has made the novel enduringly popular in the tradition of works such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Forster breaks new ground, however, by imbuing Lucy’s journey and eventual awakening with resonance for gay readers. He surrounds Lucy with a gallery of men, each of whom has a connection to homosexual identity or desire. Cecil Vyse is the priggish, condescending man to whom Lucy becomes engaged, but by the end of the novel his heterosexuality is revealed to be a pose. Freddy Honeychurch is Lucy’s boisterous, athletic younger brother, a youth who proposes to George Emerson on their first meeting that they go swimming naked together. (Freddy embodies Forster’s abiding sexual attraction to the kind of innately masculine, down-to-earth man that he recreated as Alec Scudder in Maurice.) George Emerson is the ostensibly straight man who wins Lucy’s heart. Modeled on Hugh Meredith, Forster’s great love from his Cambridge days, the handsome George is remarkably free-spirited in his thinking as well as in his uninhibited physicality. His delight in the nude swimming scene with Freddy and Mr. Beebe hints at a polymorphous sexuality. Reverend Beebe, the rector of Windy Corner, is the prototypical “confirmed bachelor,” but Forster makes it clear that Mr. Beebe is a gay man who’s frustrated by his celibacy and hostile to marriages between men and women.
At the heart of the homoerotic vision that parallels the central heterosexual love story in A Room With A View is chapter twelve of the novel, coyly named simply “Twelfth Chapter.” In this chapter, Forster describes the naked swimming activity shared by Freddy, George, and Rev. Beebe in a small pond known as “the Sacred Lake.” In this extended scene, the homoeroticism that has been subtly present throughout the novel vividly emerges. The nude male body is as admired by Forster as in the art of Michelangelo, whom Forster mentions in the chapter.
As pleased as he was by the warm critical and public reaction to A Room With A View, Forster may have been frustrated by readers’ failure to recognize its homosexual themes. It was only with the release of James Ivory’s brilliant film version of A Room With A View in 1986 that the public’s eyes were opened to the theme of homosexual awakening. On the big screen the extended sequence at “the Sacred Lake” is vividly homoerotic, featuring full-frontal male nudity by the actors Julian Sands, Rupert Graves (who would go on to play Alec Scudder in Ivory’s film of Maurice the following year), and Simon Callow. Ivory took full advantage of the freedoms offered by the burgeoning gay rights movement in the 1980s. Still, it should be kept in mind that this pioneering scene is a meticulously faithful rendering of Forster’s original novel. What Ivory captured in such memorable cinematic imagery had always been there, waiting to be savored by unbiased readers.
‘The Story of A Panic’ and ‘The Curate’s Friend’
In 1911, the year after the critical reception of Howards End catapulted Forster to national prominence, the author published his first collection of short stories, The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories. All six stories utilize elements of fantasy and the supernatural to illuminate the journeys of men and women towards freedom from the chains of repressive environments. Two of them were pioneering in the presentation of gay characters and themes: “The Story of A Panic” and “The Curate’s Friend.”
“The Story of A Panic,” a neglected masterpiece of its genre, was Forster’s first short story to be published, composed in 1902 in a rush of inspiration while he was vacationing with his mother in Italy. It tells what happens when the Greek god Pan appears to a startled group of tourists. But while the other tourists are nursing their terror, a teenage boy named Eustace has an epiphany and becomes wildly uninhibited and joyous.
Many authors and artists in Forster’s era used Pan as a way to represent a scantily clad male figure in a woodland. In Forster’s story, Pan’s sexual energy is patently homoerotic in its effects on the teenage hero. When Eustace returns to the hotel following the vision he becomes enamored of another teenager, the working-class waiter Gennaro. “Eustace sprang to meet him and leapt right up into his arms, and put his own arms round his neck.” The teenage boys form an instant bond of mutual affection and loyalty, to the consternation of the mostly male adults in the tour group. One of the first portraits of a gay teenager, Eustace is clearly a reflection of the author, who in his early twenties still remembered the bittersweet sensations of his homosexual attachments during adolescence. Youth is idealized as a time when people can explore their emotions before the constraints of adulthood set in.
Unlike Maurice, “The Story of A Panic” has a tragic ending. The waiter Gennaro risks everything to rescue the imprisoned Eustace, who has been confined by the adults to a room in the hotel where he is slowly suffocating. Gennaro’s bravery in freeing Eustace leads to his own death. Perhaps in 1902 Forster could not quite imagine a happy outcome to his own emerging sexual feelings. The story does include a note of hope for the future, however. Eustace survives and rushes off into the darkness, never to return, on fire with his newfound freedom, “and, far down the valley towards the sea, there still resounded the shouts and the laughter of the escaping boy.”
A supernatural visitation is also at the heart of “The Curate’s Friend,” in which a young minister’s life is forever changed by an experience while on a picnic with his fiancée Emily, her mother, and another young man. In this story, the fantasy character who suddenly appears in the woods is the Faun from Roman mythology. As in the earlier story, the Faun sparks an epiphany in the main character and brings his repressed sexual longings to the surface.
The curate is initially frightened by the Faun (who can’t be seen by the other characters in the story), in part due to the Faun’s partial nudity. But soon he comes under the Faun’s spell, causing him to break off his engagement to Emily and return home, having decided that he’ll never marry. The Faun stays with the minister eternally, a magical, mystical presence, and the curate forges an unbreakable bond with him, all the while becoming a more genuine minister to his parishioners.
“The Curate’s Friend” attracted little attention when it was published, perhaps because the story is openly subversive of the institution of heterosexual marriage, showing the hero as leading a blissfully happy life after rejecting the role of husband. Even more radical is the depiction of a gay man coming out to himself and accepting the truth of his sexual nature. The curate describes his happiness as beginning on this first day on which the Faun appears to him: “The joy of that first evening is still clear in my memory, in spite of all the happy years that have followed.” The Faun possesses a shimmering masculine beauty; and he hovers delicately on the border between reality and dreams, a symbol of the homoerotic energy within the curate that will transform his life once he realizes it is a blessing, not something to be feared.
The ending of “The Curate’s Friend” stresses the need to escape sexual and social repression as a precondition for happiness, while dramatizing the obstacles that make this challenging in the real world. The curate attains inner happiness, but he can never share the truth about himself with his congregation: “For if I breathed one word of that, my present life, so agreeable and profitable, would come to an end, my congregation would depart.” Critics who see Forster as being a closeted author who confined his homosexuality to unpublished works would do well to reread “The Curate’s Friend,” which includes an erotic dream of a male lover and explores with remarkable clarity the bind experienced by homosexuals at this time.
‘The Point of It’
By 1928, the year in which The Eternal Moment and Other Stories was published, Forster was undoubtedly England’s most admired living novelist. The six stories in this collection are unified by their expansive fantastical elements, including envisioning life in the future as well as the place where human souls go after death. One story, “The Point of It,” chronicles the life and death of Micky, an intellectual aristocrat who lives a life of surface contentment and achievement while combating inner hollowness. After he dies he’s transported into a vast limbo, where he belatedly discovers the meaning of his life.
The story was baffling to many critics, and it is no wonder: what Micky comes to understand only after dying is that the one person he truly loved during his life was another man. The opening section is a lyrical description of the young Micky’s intense relationship with a young man named Harold. They enjoy a life-changing day together, alone in nature: “It had been a most glorious day. They had rowed out to the dunes at the slack, bathed, raced, eaten, slept, bathed and raced and eaten again.” Micky and Harold are two Adams in paradise, surrounded by blue sea and golden dunes. As in A Room With A View, the act of swimming together is symbolic of sexual intimacy and rebirth.
“The Point of It” illustrates the destruction that ensues when men pull back from their authentic (homosexual) feelings. That day in paradise, the budding romance, and indeed Harold’s life are ruined when Micky deliberately drives Harold, who has a weak heart, to row them home at a fevered pace. The result is Harold’s heart attack and death. The story depicts the pain of love denied and lives ruined by social convention and masculine posturing. Both of his male heroes experience epiphanies in which the truth of their love for one another is revealed. Harold’s epiphany occurs at the moment of his death, and he reaches out and grasps Micky’s hand in a final poignant gesture. For Micky, fifty years and a lifetime of meaninglessness must intervene before he realizes the truth. The story ends with a recapitulation of the glorious day that Micky once spent with Harold, as the two young men row their boat toward home.
Conclusion
While Maurice has been widely recognized as a pioneering work in the modern gay rights movement after decades in the dark, the rest of Forster’s published fiction has not been appreciated for its numerous gay characters and underlying gay themes. The misguided view of Forster as leading a double literary life has allowed the patterns of homophobia established by critics and reviewers of a hundred years ago to continue unchallenged.
The social revolution that has made the gay community a force to be reckoned with in politics, in the arts, and in the entertainment industry has also helped to revive the literary reputation of Forster and to make the subject of homosexuality central to our enjoyment of his fictional works. With any luck, reinterpreting Forster’s work will mean that future readers will no longer see homosexuality as irrelevant or a source of authorial frustration, but rather as a driving creative force that shaped many of his most passionate and sensitive characters and love stories.
Since its first completion in 1914, through its eventual publication in 1971, and continuing in the new millennium, Maurice represents the essence of E. M. Forster’s literary soul. But the novel also serves as a reminder that this same soul, and the author’s profound connection with homosexuality, is alive and vibrant in a host of his fictional works.
David LaFontaine is a professor in the English Department at Massasoit Community College.
