bly wrong and must be corrected. Directors must think horizontally, expanding their attention to encompass everyone on the set, all those actors and crew members who are thinking and working vertically. So he tries to hire the best actors and designers and camera crew he can find, then lets them do their thing. Though Ivory’s description of his process may be oversimplified, it does explain why he is known as “an actor’s director” and why the designers on his films have won so many awards. Solid Ivory is not without some dross. Who needs portraits of people like Susan Sontag, Kenneth Clark, or George Cukor, all of whom Ivory only encountered once or twice? Why show himself a “star fucker” when he himself is celebrity enough? Why spend fifteen pages on a dinner party at an English country house that Prince Charles happened to attend or on an unmemorable dinner in India, however star-studded, that took place years ago? The inclusion of these pieces makes one wonder if Ivory the writer has forgotten the lessons he learned as a director. Sometimes one must leave some of one’s favorite scenes on the cutting room floor because they impede the flow of a film. Still, this is a remarkable book. To anyone who ever knew or worked with James Ivory or loved his films, here he is, warts and all—fussy and fastidious and snobbish, gutsy and generous, aggressive in trying to live the life he wanted and brilliant in transforming words and ideas into gorgeous images flowing across the screen. Here also is his testament to how difficult and how important it is just to keep working year after year. Whether the product was the brilliant Remains of the Day or the forgotten Hullabaloo over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures, Ivory shows us that the creative journey is what one remembers rather than the tangible result. We just “carried on” making films, he says, without stopping for long to bask in their success. January–February 2022 17 COURT STROUD I ’M SEATED in an art theater and, as the credits end, the houselights rise, and cleaning crews sweep popcorn from the floor. My chest heaves with each sob. The year is 1987, and I’m watchingMaurice, a new Merchant-Ivory film based on E.M. Forster’s novel of the same name. In the final scene, two men, wealthy stockbroker Maurice Hall and gamekeeper Alec Scudder, clasp each other and kiss. Then Alec whispers into his lover’s ear a line that wrecks me. A closeted college student living in my Southern hometown, I had to muster all my courage to buy a ticket to my first gay movie. People might catch me, I feared— and in my hometown, people talked. I ran a red light once in high school. The next day, a friend told me her father recognized my car and said he’d rat me out to my parents if it happened again. At least the cinema was in the wealthy, far northern part of town. The chance I’d encounter anyone I knew was small since my family hailed from the wrong side of the river. Why was I so moved at the end of Maurice? I may never have watched an LGBTthemed movie or read a book with gay protagonists, but I had seen queer characters in media before. The names and faces changed but the story remained the same: We were twisted figures destined for lives of solitude and misery, pitiable characters if we were lucky, but more often than not we were either the villain or the victim, sure to die at the hand of the hero or, just as frequently, by our own. Maurice, both the film and the novel, was different. Forster wrote the first draft in 1913 and 1914 and revised it twice in the subsequent decades. He showed the book to very few people, believing the work unpublishable while male homosexuality in the U.K. remained illegal. Forster died in 1970, and his hidden treasure found publication the following year—although to mixed reviews. The Financial Times write-up called the ending “artistically quite wrong.” Forster defended the novel’s conclusion, stating: “A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. 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, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.” Though the story was imaginary, it nonetheless gave a glimmer of hope. If the tale of Maurice and Alec offered the promise of finding love and acceptance in the arms of another man, perhaps then it might be possible for me. Soon after seeing the movie, I inhaled the book and exited my closet. Fifty years after the book’s initial release, readers now have the opportunity to reunite with the fictitious couple in a new work. Written by playwright William di Canzio, Alec (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is the equivalent of running into long-lost friends in a restaurant. “Sit down,” they seem to say. “Grab a chair. Let’s talk.” Di Canzio begins by recounting the history of how the couple came together, but unlike the source work, this time from the gamekeeper’s point of view. If some lines seem eerily familiar to readers of the original novel, it’s probably because King’s College, Cambridge, and the E. M. Forster Estate granted di Canzio permission to quote from the original work. He interweaves the old and new with such skill, especially in the first two parts (“St. John’s Bonfire” and “Kingfisher”) that at times it’s easy to imagine one was reading a long-lost manuscript by Forster himself. Most of the book, including an epilogue, is devoted to advancing the plot beyond Maurice. The men attempt to create a life together while navigating the era’s expectations of class division and heteronormativity. Then the Great War arrives, disrupting their plans to live happily ever after in the greenwood. Thirty-five years have passed since I sat in that theater and again—at the end of chapter ten—Alec leaves me teary-eyed when he says: “Now, we shan’t never be parted. It’s finished.” Court Stroud is a 2021 Lambda Literary Fellow and lives in New York City. What Ever Happened to Alec and Maurice? ART MEMO Alec, played by Rupert Graves, in the 1987 film.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTk3MQ==