June 16: Maurice & Reviews

[kinetic_elaboration]

I’ve been going down a rabbit hole of Maurice reviews from the time of the book’s publication in the 70s and the experience is sort of giving me thoughts, sort of creating a blur in my head. I have probably reached the point, or past the point, of really getting anything out of them. I’m not going to go as far as to say that they do not have anything interesting to say by way of criticism or that they are not making any points that are new or stimulating to me. But they are starting to blur in a general mist of ‘I don’t think you really get it, do you?’ in my head.

I don’t think that the novel is perfect or that Forster as a writer is perfect, so definitely one could point out flaws. But the flaws most of these reviewers are picking out are just not very deep or illuminating to me, especially after having read so many. First of all, I think most of them are too caught up in the experience of reading a newly published novel that was written almost 60 years earlier, something that does not matter to me or change my experience as a reader almost at all. To me in 2025, it makes little difference if a book from 1914 was published in 1914 or 1971. ‘Oh it sure is dated now!’ Well, yeah, in the most superficial sense. In the sense that historical novels are ‘dated’ or the sense that novels written before one was born are ‘dated.’ There are plenty of ways in which the novel ISN’T dated, but I think most of these people weren’t ready for that conversation, for two reasons: first, they’re too straight and they don’t see themselves anywhere in the novel for that reason specifically, thus limiting their abilities to critique any aspect of timelessness or long-term relatability in it; and, second, they’re too stuck on the question of homosexuality, and too proud of their own increased tolerance of it. Maybe it is uncomfortable to say ‘in some ways it IS the same.’ And well–what if it is, in some ways, just the same?

 

And I suppose part of it is that they had a specific temporal relationship to Forster’s legacy that had much to do with his unique biography: becoming famous off a half-dozen novels, leaving the art of novel-writing entirely before 1930, and then remaining alive another 40+ years. Thus his presence was close–he had just died–and distant–he hadn’t published a novel since A Passage to India. A lot of the reviews were tinged with that particular critical retrospection of a life’s work that comes after an artist dies, with a bit less reverence perhaps, because the end of that work (at least the fiction) was decades in the past. There’s some interest in that. And yet it sure does miss a lot of this actual book that the reviews are allegedly about.

The only really, truly interesting critique or response to the novel was Lytton Strachey’s letter written in 1915–a letter very much defined by the friendly relationship between them, but also, at last, a response by a queer person that could take the work truly as it was, and not for what it Represented. Ironically, a recurring critique from the critics is that the novel is too much of a Thesis Novel, has too much of an Agenda, is too unrealistic and hard to connect with. And yet they don’t actually try to connect with it. I return again to the thesis that they don’t know how.

What’s hard to explain is that, for me as well, it’s hard to read the novel divorced from the person who wrote it. The history of the manuscript-as-manuscript is part of that. The knowledge that cannot be put aside, that this hidden gay novel was written by a gay man, and that it could not but be personal to him in a way that his other works were not. These connections to his personal life and identity are meaningful to me, too; I don’t want to fully set them aside, even if I could. A huge part of my experience reading is feeling like a queer person is speaking to me, another queer person, across time; he dedicated it to a “happier year” and there is much about the year in which I’m reading it that would be unbelievable to him, even from the vantage of 1970, let alone 1914.

But I do think you can be novel-first in your analysis, rather than person-first, and that only Strachey really was… He read Forster for filth within his critique of the depictions of sex, attraction, and intimacy in the novel, and he was detailed about it to a degree these published reviews would not dare, and in that critique he illuminated in a fairly direct way this elephant in the room about Forster, which is that he did have a lot of hangups. He had hangups about sex and intimacy and even his attraction to men, and all of that does come out in his texts, and not just this one. So you are not at all ignoring the man behind the book by discussing this aspect of the book, but when Strachey starts by grappling with the text itself, he is saying something of depth and detail instead of just ‘well this gay man’s desire to write a gay book is kind of boring because he just wants us to care about gay people or whatever,’ which is the somewhat uncharitable gloss I keep coming back to, contemplating these reviews as a whole.

Extra thoughts:

It’s also super interesting to me that so many people enjoyed Clive and Maurice more than Alec and Maurice, either finding their relationship more realistic or better drawn in some manner. Not everyone, though all the reviews are bleeding together in my mind now and I can’t find the exception. I… have mixed opinions myself, I suppose, but I do understand why. Much to think about there.

Paddy Kitchen, in The Times Educational Supplement had one of the better response of any of the published ones I read, in my opinion. 

I should be financially compensated for every reviewer who references Lawrence. Omggggg I do not care. Shush. 

All of my reading is from E.M. Forster: The Critical Heritage ed. Philip Gardner, from 1973.