Art and Ardor

by Cynthia Ozick

  Except for those absent sex scenes—one feels them struggling to be born, and Forster stamping them regretfully out at their earliest gasp—Maurice has no reason to be. It is a novel, if one can say such a thing, without a cause. Or, rather, the only genuine cause for it, the force that got it written, was a fresh and potent interest in all those matters that did not get written: the caresses in detail, the embraces, the endearments precisely depicted. Instead we are only handed plot. And to be handed plot is, in the case of Maurice, to be handed something worn out almost to risibility. It is not that Maurice has no plot; it does, and I suppose I am bound to recount a little of it; but it is a plot that Forster has dealt with at least twice before in the two novels of which Maurice is the shadow-novel, and, in fact, in what may have been the very first short story he ever wrote.

  In all of these—“Albergo Empedocle,” The Longest Journey, A Room with a View—a poetic but naive hero (or heroine) falls in love with a woman (or man) who appears at first to be even more sensitive and poetic, but who betrays by turning out to be unable to love with equal tenderness or sincerity. In The Longest Journey Ricky, charmed by the ecloguelike scene he witnesses of the “Greek athlete” Gerald kissing Agnes in the dell, marries Agnes and finds instead that he has surrendered his spirit to coldness and cynicism. In A Room with a View Lucy, whose poetic nature is expressed in music, becomes engaged to Cecil; Cecil is brilliant, and therefore seems to be in love with art, Leonardo, and Italy, but is in reality “like a Gothic statue,” which “implies celibacy, just as a Greek statue implies fruition.” “Albergo Empedocle” describes the breakup of an engagement between Mildred, a young woman intellectually immersed in Hellenism, and Harold, who suddenly feels himself to be the reincarnation of a Greek youth. For the moment Mildred is romantically enraptured at the notion. But she ends up thinking her fiancé mad—whereupon he displays his love for another youth, ancient Greek-style. All these tender lovers, genuinely won to the Greek ideal of the body, are betrayed by a capricious and false Hellenism.

  Maurice too finds his hard-earned Hellenism betrayed. In the joyfully liberating atmosphere of Cambridge he is introduced to music, Plato, and Clive Durham, a worshiper of Greece and a lapsed Christian. Like the others, they have their day in the dell and become lovers, though mainly sentimentally (Clive “abstained . . . almost from caresses”). Then Clive goes on a pilgrimage to Greece, and there—in Greece; irony!—“becomes normal.” He has “turned to women,” and enters the life of conventional county society, marrying coldly and growing more and more worldly and opportunistic. Maurice’s outlook darkens. He too tries to “become normal.” There follow relatively good, though thin, Forsterian scenes with a doctor (who can only say “Rubbish” to the idea of homosexuality) and a hypnotist (who decides the case is hopeless). Then comes the happy ending. Just as Lucy in A Room with a View flees from Cecil to marry the Panlike figure of George Emerson, Maurice flees his family, his work, and society altogether, going off to live tenderly ever after with a rough-mannered but loving gamekeeper.

  “There is no pornography.” In short, a daydream without pictures. But what Maurice lacks, and what is necessary to it because it belongs at the heart of its imagining, is the pictures, is the “pornography”—or what Forster significantly continued to think of as pornography. What surely was not necessary was the reflex of Forster’s ineluctable plot—the same story of compulsive attraction and callous faithlessness that he was driven to manipulate again and again, looking for some acceptable means to tell what he really wanted to tell about the importance of the body. 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. Forster did not show it truly. It is clear enough that he longed to show it truly—he lingers over those blurry passages in which he might have shown it truly, and instead reaches desperately for the expedient of poetry. “And their love scene drew out. . . . Something of exquisite beauty arose in the mind of each at last, something unforgettable and eternal, but built of the humblest scraps of speech and from the simplest emotions.” And of the flesh. But it is the flesh that Forster omits.

  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 (Gide in France had already launched Corydon, but that was France), and not even that Forster still belonged mentally to the England of 1897. No. 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. (The Terminal Note admits that Maurice “certainly dates” in other respects, and mentions its “half-sovereign tips, pianola-records, norfolk jackets.”) But if Maurice is a fairy tale, it is not because two men do not ever, then or now, out of fiction as well as in, live together happily and permanently, but because Forster himself believed that except in fiction and daydream they ought not to. Against his deepest wish he set his still deeper belief. They ought not to: despite the fact that he was always openly in favor of the liberalization in England of laws concerning homosexuality, despite the fact that as early as 1928, beginning with the Well of Loneliness case, he went to court to testify against the suppression of a homosexual novel, the first of a succession of such books he publicly defended and praised.

  Forster’s own books are full of veiled2 portraits of repressed or hidden or potential homosexuals, from Ansell in The Longest Journey to Tibby in Howards End (who warms the teapot “almost too deftly,” is called “Auntie Tibby” for fun, and is declared not to be “a real boy”). The description of Cecil in A Room with a View fits not only what the young Tibby will become, but what Maurice’s lover Clive already is: “He is the sort who are all right as long as they keep to things—books, pictures—but kill when they come to people.” Many of Forster’s clergymen are seen to be embittered ascetics who, had they not suppressed the body, would have loved men. Mr. Borenius, the rector in Maurice, jealously accuses the gamekeeper of being “guilty of sensuality.” It is because Forster himself is always on the side of sensuality, of “fruition” as against “celibacy,” that all his spokesmen-characters, with profound sadness, eventually yield up their final judgment—on moral and natural grounds, and despite Forster’s renowned liberalism—against homosexuality. Maurice, where the wish for lasting homoerotic bliss is allowed to come true, is no exception to Forster’s moral conviction.

  It is precisely on this issue of sensuality that Forster’s reservations rest. Forster believes, with Christianity, that the opposite of sensuality is sterility. And not sterility in any metaphorical sense—not in the meaning of an empty or unused life. With Christianity, Forster believes that sensuality is designed to beget progeny. The most melancholy passage in Maurice occurs at Maurice’s most ecstatic moment—when he is at last physically in possession of Clive:

  An immense sadness—he believed himself beyond such irritants—had risen up in his soul. He and the beloved would vanish utterly—would continue neither in Heaven nor on Earth. They had won past the conventions, but Nature still faced them, saying with even voice, “Very well, you are thus; I blame none of my children. But you must go the way of all sterility.” The thought that he was sterile weighed on the young man with a sudden shame. His mother or Mrs. Durham might lack mind or heart, but they had done visible work; they had handed on the torch their sons would tread out.

  And it is Ansell in The Longest Journey who gives the homosexual’s view of progeny, which is renunciation. He is strolling in the British Museum talking of “the Spirit of Life” when he is told that Ricky and Agnes are expecting a child. His response: “I forgot that it might be.” Then: “He left the Parthenon to pass by the monuments of our more reticent beliefs—the temple of the Ephesian Artemis, the statue of the Cnidian Demeter. Honest, he knew that here were powers he could not cope with, nor, as yet, understand.” Artemis the protectress of women, Demeter the goddess of fertility. Thus Ansell. And thus Auden. Somewhere
Auden has written that homosexual men do not love their sterility; that homosexuals too would welcome parenthood; but out of decency and selflessness forgo it.

  “Be fruitful and multiply.” That Forster alone perhaps of all homosexual writers is willing to take seriously the Biblical injunction, and is left feeling desolated by it, is a measure of how attached he remained to Christian morals. In this attachment he was unlike any homosexual in his Cambridge generation, and possibly unlike any English-speaking homosexual in the generations afterward, Auden excepted. The Gay Liberation argument that homosexual activity is a positive good in a world afflicted by overpopulation would not have won Forster over.

  Homosexuality did not begin with Lytton Strachey, but homosexual manners did. All those habits and signals that we now associate with the educated homosexual sensibility can be said to have had their start in Cambridge when Strachey was an undergraduate; and Strachey set the style for them. Sects and persuasions, like nationalities, have their forerunners and traditions: presumably Franciscans still strive to retain the mind-set of Saint Francis, Quakers recall George Fox, the white American South continues to feel itself patrician. Forster himself was influenced in liberal thinking by his ancestors in the Clapham Sect, an abolitionist group. The recollection need not be conscious; we inherit, rather than mimic, style. So with educated homosexual manners. The passion for beauty and distinction, the wit with its double bur of hilarity and malice, the aesthetic frame of mind, even the voice that edges thinly upward and is sometimes mistaken for “effeminacy”—all these are Stracheyisms. Strachey at Cambridge and afterward was so forceful in passing on Stracheyism that he founded a school, active to this day. It had, and has, two chief tenets: one was antiphilistinism expressed as elitism (one cannot imagine Strachey making a hero of a gamekeeper with no grammar, or addressing, as Forster did, a Working Men’s College); the other was a recoil from Christianity. In these tenets especially Forster did not acquiesce.

  Though Forster knew Strachey well at Cambridge (he even confesses that a Cambridge character in Maurice was modeled on Strachey), he remained peripheral to the Strachey set. This astounding group was concentrated in the Cambridge Conversazione Society, better known as the Apostles, which mingled older alumni and undergraduates, never much more than a dozen at a time, and was devoted to intellectual wrangling, high wit, snobbery toward “bloods,” and, in an underground sort of way, homosexuality: its brilliant members kept falling in and out of love with one another. At one time Strachey and John Maynard Keynes were both furious rivals for the love of one Duckworth; afterward Keynes, like Clive Durham, “became normal” and married a ballerina. Through all this Forster kept himself apart and remote, “the elusive colt of a dark horse,” as Keynes called him. The Apostles churned out barristers, chief justices, governors of outlying parts of the Empire, dons, historians, economists, mathematicians, philosophers, many of them with family attachments to one another: in short, the ruling intellectual class of England more or less reproducing itself. The smaller “aesthetic” section of this privileged and brainy caste withdrew to become Bloomsbury; but from Bloomsbury too Forster held himself in reserve. One reason was his temperamental shyness, his inclination toward an almost secretive privateness. The more compelling reason was that he did not think or feel like the Apostles, or like Bloomsbury. He was more mystical than skeptical. The ideal of freedom from all restraint made him uncomfortable in practice. Unlike Strachey, he did not scoff easily or vilify happily (though it ought to be noted that there is a single radiant “Balls” in Maurice), and did not use the word “Christian” as a taunt. To the Apostles—self-declared “immoralists,” according to Keynes—and to Bloomsbury he must have seemed a little out of date. He never shared their elation at smashing conventional ideas; though himself an enemy of convention, he saw beyond convention to its roots in nature. Stracheyan Bloomsbury assented to nothing, least of all to God or nature, but Forster knew there were “powers he could not cope with, nor, as yet, understand.” Bloomsbury was alienated but not puzzled; Forster was puzzled but not alienated. His homosexuality did not divide him from society, because he saw that society in the largest sense was the agent of nature; and when he came to write A Passage to India he envisioned culture and nature as fusing altogether. Homosexuality led him not away from but toward society. He accepted himself as a man with rights—nature made him—but also very plainly as a deviant—nature would not gain by him. It is no accident that babies are important in his books.

  The shock of the publication of Maurice, then, is not what it appears to be at first sight: Forster as Forerunner of Gay Lib. Quite the opposite. He used his own position as an exemplum, to show what the universe does not intend. If that implies a kind of rational martyrdom, that is what he meant; and this is what shocks. We had not thought of him as martyr. For Forster, “I do not conform” explains what does conform, it does not celebrate nonconformity. He was a sufferer rather than a champion. Now suddenly, with the appearance of Maurice, it is clear that Forster’s famous humanism is a kind of personal withdrawal rather than a universal testimony, and reverberates with despair. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in a recent Times review remarks that Maurice’s homosexuality is “a symbol of human feelings.” But Forster would disagree that homosexuality stands for anything beyond what it is in itself, except perhaps the laying-waste of the Cnidian Demeter. Homosexuality to Forster signified sterility; he practiced it like a blasphemer, just as he practiced his humanism like a blasphemer. There is no blasphemy where there is no belief to be betrayed; and Forster believes in the holiness of the goddess of fertility: Demeter, guardian of the social order and marriage. The most dubious social statement Forster ever made is also his most famous one: if I had to choose between betraying my country or my friend, I hope I would have the guts to betray my country. He says “I”; the note is personal, it is not an injunction to the rest of us. Maurice instructs us explicitly in what he understands by “friend”; in Maurice’s boyhood dream the word “friend” foretells the love of a man for a man. We have encountered that charged word in Forster before. The statement about betrayal cannot be universalized, and Forster did not mean it to be. Declarations about bedmates do not commonly have general application.

  Does it devalue the large humanistic statement to know that its sources are narrowly personal? Yes. And for Forster too: he does not ask society to conform to him, because he believes—he says it again and again everywhere in his books, but nowhere more poignantly than in his novel about homosexual love—he believes in the eternal stream. He died among affectionate friends, but not harmoniously; he was not content to go the way of all sterility, to vanish utterly. Books are not progeny, and nature does not read.

  I append to my observations about Forster’s Maurice a reply to a correspondent who charged me with not loving Forster enough.

  Forster as Moralist: A Reply to Mrs. A. F.3

  Lionel Trilling begins his book about Forster with this observation: “E. M. Forster is for me the only living novelist who can be read again and again and who, after each reading, gives me what few writers can give us after our first days of novel-reading, the sensation of having learned something.” To this statement another can be added, virtually a corollary: Forster is also one of those very few writers (and since Forster’s death, there is none now living) who excite competitive passions—possessive rivalries, in fact—among serious readers, each of whom feels uniquely chosen to perceive the inner life of the novels.

  In recent years Forster has grown thinner for me, especially as essayist. Not that I would now deny Forster’s powers or his brilliance, or claim that the masterpieces are not masterpieces, still giving out, as Trilling said almost thirty years ago, “the sensation of having learned something.” But what we learn from the novels is not what we learn from the essays. The novels do not preach morality and the essays, in their way, do. Or, to put it differently, the novels preach a novelistic morality—in the early ones, the ethics of Spontaneity; in A Passage to
India, the anti-ethics of a mystical nihilism. But the essays—preëminently “What I Believe,” which Mrs. F. cites—tell us how we are to go about living from moment to moment. “Where do I start?” Forster asks. And answers: “With personal relationships.” Of this approach Mrs. F. says: “I like it well.”

  I do not, because it strikes me as incomplete and self-indulgent. Nevertheless I recognize Mrs. F.’s tone—it was once mine, and I think we can spot our erstwhile psychological twins—at the end of her letter, when she concludes that I do “not love [Forster] enough—for what he did do.” I withdraw from the contest and agree that Mrs. F. is right. She does love Forster’s ideas and qualities, if not more than I once did, certainly more than I do now.