Forster’s Maurice and the Birth of a Genre
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Of all those books, the one that has remained most profoundly with me is the one written before the genre of the coming out story even had a name: E. M. Forster’s posthumously published Maurice. In one summer, I devoured all of Forster’s novels—in order of publication, so that Maurice, though not written last, was the final one I read. In it, the themes that seemed submerged in the other works came to the surface. If other characters—the dandyish Cecil in A Room with a View, Freddy in Howards End—had struck me as having a gay sensibility, here at last was a protagonist who acknowledged that sensibility in himself and who, over the course of the novel, chose to accept and act upon his homosexual feelings.

Written in 1913–14, Maurice follows its hero through all the stages of a kind of coming-out process. He has these sexual feelings, which he’s puzzled by and tries to submerge. He goes off to college and meets a like-minded guy, Clive, with whom he falls in love, albeit platonically. Clive, though comfortable with affection, is not as eager as Maurice to let the relationship go further. When Clive finally breaks it off, believing himself to be “cured” of homosexuality, Maurice has a breakdown, questioning his own feelings, denying them, resolving to change. Only a new love—this time, Maurice is the pursued—saves him and brings him to full acceptance of his sexuality.

Knowing he couldn’t publish the novel at the time (if ever), Forster dared to give Maurice a happy ending—a romantic escape from society with his new lover Alec. The irony was not lost on the author. In a “terminal note” to the novel, he acknowledges that the ending is somewhat unrealistic: “A happy ending was imperative,” Forster writes. “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.”

If this ending was unusual for its time, publication of the book was out of the question. In 1914 England, such exposure would have destroyed Forster’s reputation—and perhaps led to a fate similar to that of Oscar Wilde, whose shadow is palpable in the novel. (In one of the most evocative moments, when Maurice goes to a doctor for help, he refers to himself as “an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.”) Maurice, like the rest of Forster’s explicitly gay-themed works (including a number of short stories later collected under the title The Life to Come) remained unpublished until after his death in 1970 at age 91.

Maurice is very much a product of its time, a vivid portrait of British life just before World War I. From a modern standpoint, the setting also lends an air of romanticism that may explain the book’s continuing appeal. When I first read it at 22, just barely out of the closet, I felt a kinship with Maurice’s innocence and uncertainty. Like Evelyn Waugh’s similarly idyllic Brideshead Revisited, written three decades later but setting its initial chapters around the same era, Maurice draws much of its energy from its depiction of college life—a somewhat cloistered time when anything seems possible, before the so-called real world has had a chance to dash one’s illusions.

Lest we get too cocky about our current state of enlightenment, it is well for us to remember that it wasn’t until 1967—just three years before Forster’s death—that the homosexuality was legalized in the U.K. This historical reality check makes Forster’s achievement even more remarkable. It seems quite fitting, actually, that Maurice’s publication followed so closely upon Stonewall. For a novel composed more than fifty years before that seminal event, Maurice offers a surprisingly astute depiction of the psychology of the closet. Indeed, part of Maurice’s appeal to me is as a counter to the prevailing pre-Stonewall notion that homosexual life was inherently pathetic at best, tragic at worst.

In the novel, Forster dares to show that liberation can be found through simple self-acceptance. At the book’s end, embracing his natural impulses at last, Maurice frees himself from the chokehold of society: he goes happily off into the fabled greenwood with his lover by his side and his integrity intact. Clive, on the other hand, who continues to suppress his sexual feelings—and thus, his true self—emerges as the novel’s tragic figure. Thus, it is not homosexuality that creates tragedy, but its repression.

Forster took this point to heart, at least as far as his writing went. After A Passage to India (1924), when he was only 55, he stopped publishing fiction—not because he had lost interest in writing per se, but because he had lost patience with the literary closet. From that point on, his efforts at fiction were limited to homosexual subjects, which he never intended for publication, at least not in his lifetime. In a late diary entry, he expresses some regret about the circumstances of his writing life: “I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more, but sex has prevented the latter.”

With the realism of its painful story and its admittedly fanciful ending, Maurice feels as if it were as a modern fairy tale. Like The Wizard of Oz, it speaks to us of our own struggle and gives us hope for overcoming it. And in the end, we realize along with the hero that the only change we need to effect is acceptance of ourselves as what we are. I like to think that Forster would be gratified to know that the happy ending he imagined—“the ever and ever that fiction allows”—is no longer so fantastic.

Lewis DeSimone is the author of the novel Chemistry. This piece first appeared in the May-June 2007 issue.