BOOKS
fORSTER'S QUEER NOVEL
MAURICE. By E. M.
Forster. Norton.
$6.95.
I first read
Maurice
thirty-five years ago, when
it
was circu–
lated in typescript among Forster's friends. It seemed to me then to be
a homosexual tract, sympathetic, but with that kind of thinness, when
compared with Forster's other fiction, which appalls the reader of the
moralizing stories which Tolstoy wrote late in life, if one approaches
them with expectations based on
War and Peace.
However Forster must have put in a great deal of work on
Maurice
since 1935. It is now a Forster novel with developed characters, ironic
descriptions of upper-class English family life, countryside, shrewd ob–
servation, uneducated hearts and a vision of civilization based on friend–
ships fonned at Cambridge. A certain thinness remains. This is partly
due to the homosexual theme being cutlined in such high relief that
the characters and descriptions not directly involved in it fall into
shadowy background.
The story is that of Maurice, a stolid, unimaginative, handsome
young man, seemingly undistinguishable from other hearty undergrad–
uates, discovering that he is congenitally homosexual. In one way,
Maurice
is an
Erziehungsroman:
for the effect of making this discovery
about himself is to make Maurice - within the limits of his frustration -
loving, imaginative, truthful; and to make him see two English upper–
class families - his own and that of Clive Durham, his Cambridge
friend - in a sharply satiric light. Behind the special story of Maurice's
vocational homosexuality, there is a greater story, which Forster does
not develop: that of a rather stupid man forced by circumstances to
know himself, who through understanding the difference between him–
self and others, understands life better. Although there are signs that
Maurice might do this, the idea is not sufficiently developed. All he really
acquires is a kind of enlightened self-knowingness which he is ready to
