Written in 1913, Maurice is a bildungsroman which tells the story of the homosexual awakening of the young suburban stockbroker, Maurice Hall. As an undergraduate student at Cambridge University, Maurice meets and falls in love with the aristocratic Clive Durham. Their relationship ends after 2-3 years when Clive declares to Maurice that he is ‘normal’ and is to marry Anne Woods. Soon after, Maurice makes an appointment with a hypnotist in an attempt to ‘cure’ himself of being an ‘unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort’. When his treatment ultimately fails to ‘cure’ him, Maurice meets Alec Scudder, a gamekeeper on Clive’s country estate. After a difficult start to their relationship in which Maurice suspects Alec of wanting to blackmail him for being a homosexual predator, the two fall in love and live a happy life together.
So much for the plot, but what interests me more about Forster’s novel is how the middle class Maurice finds true happiness with a working class man, as well as the similarities between Maurice & DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
The desire to cross the strict class boundaries of Edwardian Britain and to ‘only connect’ is evident in many of Forster’s novels, including A Room With A View and Howards End. In A Room With A View, for example, the upper middle class Lucy Honeychurch falls in love with and marries the lower middle class railway clerk, George Emerson. And in Howards End, the upper middle class Schlegal sisters desire to help and support the lower middle class insurance clerk, Leonard Bast, who hesitatingly displays an artistic soul beneath his brusque exterior. Indeed, after a brief affair with Leonard, Helen Schlegal gives birth to their baby; a baby who will eventually inherit the Howards End property that gives the novel its title. The offspring of an upper middle class woman and a lower middle class man therefore inherits modern England if we are to see Howards End (the house) as a symbol for the nation.
With the loving relationship between the middle class, Cambridge-educated Maurice and the working class gamekeeper, Alec Scudder, Forster’s belief that we should ‘only connect’ and ‘live in fragments no longer’ also pervades Maurice. The edition of the novel I read comments on how Forster conceived of his love story after visiting the homosexual author Edward Carpenter and his younger, working class partner, George Merrill in 1912 at their Yorkshire cottage. The story goes that during this visit, Merrill touched Forster’s backside ‘gently and just above the buttocks’. In his diaries, Forster goes onto describe the sensation of being caressed in this way as making ‘a profound impression on me and touched a creative spring’. Carpenter’s thwarting of class and sexual convention thrilled Forster so much that he set to work on his next novel almost immediately. He completed a first draft of what later became Maurice by 1913-14 but only dared show it to his close circle of friends. In a letter to one of these confidants he declared the novel to be ‘unpublishable until my death and England’s’. Indeed, Maurice remained unpublished until 1971, the year after Forster died aged 91 and 4 years after the passing of Sexual Offences Act in Britain in 1967. This act decriminalised homosexual acts in private between two men, both of whom had to have reached the age of 21.
The similarities between Maurice and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover are stark. Whilst studying at Cambridge, Maurice meets and falls in love with the aristocratic Clive Durham. Their loving yet sexless affair ends after Clive announces that he is ‘normal’ and wants to marry a woman. Maurice then meets Alec Scudder, a gamekeeper on Clive’s estate, and lives a happy and sexually fulfilling life with him. In Lawrence’s novel, first published in 1928, the upper middle class Connie Chatterley falls in love with and marries the aristocrat, Clifford Chatterley. Unable to live a fulfilling sexual life with Clifford after he is paralysed from the waist down due to an injury sustained in the Great War, Connie meets and has a passionate affair with the gamekeeper on Clifford’s estate, Oliver Mellors.
Lawrence’s novel was published 15 years after Forster wrote Maurice. So I was left asking myself, ‘did Lawrence manage to get hold of a copy of Forster’s unpublished story and modify it into one which featured a passionate heterosexual relationship between an upper middle class woman and a lower class gamekeeper?’ That is, were the characters of Maurice and Alec precursors to those of Connie Chatterley and Mellors?
There is evidence, albeit circumstantial, that this is indeed what happened. A 1982 article by Dixie King assesses the similarities between Forster’s and Lawrence’s novels as well as the friendship between the two authors who came from very different social backgrounds. Forster and Lawrence knew one another and met ‘three or four times in the spring of 1915’.[1] And in a letter he sent to Forster around this time, Lawrence thanks him for copies of his books which included Howards End (1910) and The Celestial Omnibus (1911). King postulates that it is ‘extremely likely’ that Forster pressed between the jackets of these two novels a copy of the unpublished Maurice.
So like the protagonists in their novels, the upper middle class Forster & working class Lawrence reached across the Edwardian class divide. And it was a meeting which likely conceived Lawrence’s most famous novel. That is, the willingness of the two authors to ‘only connect’ led to a creative spring within Lawrence’s imagination, the result of which was Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
ArtsEater 