PARTISAN REVIEW
117
biography
(My Father and
J)
of E. M. Forster's friend,
J.
R. Ackerley,
who although thinking himself to be, like Maurice, forever
in
search of
the "perfect friend" in fact always pursued soldiers, sailors and other
working-class young men. He tried really to discover identity (the perfect
friend) and difference in the same person: a pursuit
in
which, though
driven to it by his own psychology, he was not intellectually wholly
serious, though, failing to find such a friend, he was deeply disappointed.
I mention Ackerley's work only
to
demonstrate that
Maurice,
while
rejecting the world of normality, does not really describe a homosexual
world as an alternative. What it describes is the discovery by the hero
of his vocation for a friendship which is ideal; and which is then modi–
fied when he realizes his own psychological makeup and that the
ideal love leads to sex. Maurice and Alec "share" - to use Alec's term
for performing sexual acts. This means that the ideal has been trans–
formed into the idyll of a homosexual "marriage." But if this marriage
were to have any future, Maurice and Alec would have to accept that
there
is
a world of other homosexuals. This they don't do. Maurice
regards Risley and his world as cynical. Nor, of course, can Maurice
introduce Alec to Clive's "normal" world. The novel ends, indeed, with
a highly enjoyable dressing down of Clive by Maurice, who confronts
him
in
his garden and tells
him
that he has seduced his gamekeeper
in the guest bedroom, much as Ansell at the end of
The Longest Jour–
ney
denounces the Pembrokes
in
their school. The thinness is that al–
though Maurice has justified his love
it
remains a special and separate
department even of his own life, still more of the world, and it does
not have room for more than two people.
Stephen Spender
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