On happy endings – Peter Parker in TLS:

‘“Publishable – but worth it?”, E. M. Forster wrote in 1960 on the typescript of Maurice, the novel he had begun writing in 1913 and frequently revised thereafter, but still had no plans to publish during his lifetime. This laconic note has sometimes been taken as Forster’s modest literary assessment of the book; but it is much more likely that “worth it?” referred not to the novel itself but to the fuss its publication would inevitably cause because of its homosexual theme.’

(…)

‘Frank Kermode was equally unenthusiastic in the Atlantic Monthly: “In a measure greater than any other of his novels, this one is a fairly simple wish-fulfilling fantasy”.
The fantasy Kermode was referring to was that the novel’s homosexual couple, the middle-class Maurice and his working-class lover, Alec, could set off happily into the future together, a conclusion many other critics found implausible. Although the novel’s resolution had caused Forster all kinds of technical problems, in the “Terminal note” he appended to the published text he explained: “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”. He had also explained how the book was “conceived” when, during a visit to Edward Carpenter in 1913, he had been touched “gently and just above the buttocks” by Carpenter’s lover, George Merrill. The sensation, he recalled, “seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving my thoughts”, and he began writing Maurice immediately. More important, perhaps, than this gentle goosing was the fact Carpenter and the working-class Merrill had lived together for twenty years, thus demonstrating that a long-term homosexual relationship that cut across the barriers of class was in fact possible in life as well as in fiction.’

(…)

‘ “Nothing is more obdurate to artistic treatment than the carnal”, Forster confessed to Siegfried Sassoon, who had read Maurice in 1920 and wanted to write his own homosexual novel, “but it has to be got in I’m sure”. No one would have expected from Forster sexual details of the kind that were commonplace in novels by 1971, but their absence suggested to some critics not so much timidity as disapproval. “It was pointless to write a book like Maurice unless the body in its exact – not implied, not poeticized – male lineaments could be truly shown”, Cynthia Ozick declared in Commentary. “The reason for this omission, it seems to me, is not that in the England of 1913 Forster still did not dare to put it explicitly in … The reason – unlikely though it may appear at first hearing – is that Forster thought homosexuality wrong: naturally wrong, with the sort of naturalness that he did not expect to date.”’

(…)

‘Hynes went even further, claiming that Forster’s delineation of Maurice and Alec’s relationship fails because the author “could not imagine sex that was neither furtive nor repulsive”. He adduces no evidence for this allegation, and both he and Ozick seem not to have noticed that the whole point of the novel is that Maurice’s priggish suburban values, including those relating to his view of himself as “an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort”, are overturned by his happy sexual relationship with Alec, which is shown to be infinitely superior to his sexless one with Clive. As Forster characteristically remarked in his “Terminal note”, the latter relationship is “precarious, idealistic and peculiarly English: what Italian boy would have put up with it?” In 1971, of course, neither Ozick nor Hynes had access to Forster’s diaries and letters, which show comprehensively just how wrong their assertions were. It is no coincidence that Forster started work on revising Maurice shortly after he had spent three years serving with the Red Cross in Alexandria during the First World War. It was there, at the age of thirty-seven, that he had his first sexual experience, but more importantly he also embarked on an affair with an Egyptian tram conductor, Mohammed el Adl. In a series of touching letters to his frequent confidante Florence Barger, he explained what this meant both for him and for his novel. In particular, he felt that “to be trusted across the barriers of income, race and class” represented “a triumph over nonsense and artificial difficulties” – and this, race apart, is what Maurice and Alec achieve in the novel. “I wish I was writing the latter half of Maurice now”, he lamented. “I know so much more. It is awful to think of the thousands who go through youth without ever knowing. I have known in a way before, but never like this. My luck has been amazing.” There is no sense here, or in the memoir of el Adl he wrote in the 1920s, that Forster regarded homosexuality as “repulsive” or “naturally wrong”. Instead, he told Barger, “I see, beyond my own happiness and intimacy, occasional glimpses of the happiness of 1000s of others whose names I shall never hear, and know that there is a great unrecorded history”.’

(…)

‘Damon Galgut’s novel Arctic Summer (2014) affectionately and skilfully reimagines the author’s life from 1910 to 1924, including the period he was writing Maurice. By contrast, William di Canzio’s Alec(2021) not only provides a sequel to Maurice, but unwisely fills in Alec’s earlier life in an Edwardian England where trams obligingly trundle out of Dorchester to out-lying villages, the gentry shoot quail and ferrets, and local men run the Brenford Midsummer Footrace stark naked. Forster is more convincingly evoked in The Inheritance (2018), Matthew Lopez’s play inspired by Howards End, in which he appears onstage in order to guide a group of present-day gay Americans in telling their own stories. He is castigated by one of them for not publishing Maurice in his lifetime, but the book is the favourite novel of Eric Glass, the moral centre of the play. It also plays a crucial role in the life of Leo, a damaged, nineteen-year-old rent boy: “Leo understood the simple yet powerful connection of a gay man in the early twentieth century speaking directly to a young gay man in the early twenty-first. It was as if Forster were reaching a hand out to Leo to say: ‘I have felt as you feel. You are not alone. I am with you always’”. Forster himself could hardly have asked for a better endorsement of a novel that, above all others, he needed to write and which, despite its occasional absurdities, now seems worthy of him in a way most critics were reluctant to acknowledge half a century ago.’

Read the complete essay here.

A love affair with an Egyptian tram conductor, crossing ‘barriers of income, race and class.’ The profession of the love object can enhance the romantic aspect of the affair immensely. (I once was attracted to a woman who was married to a bus driver.)

Marriage is merely and above all a practical and economical endeavor. But eroticism is by nature a matter of crossing barriers of income, race, age, language et cetera.
No transgression, no eroticism.