Word: forster
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Forster was discreetly homosexual. That would mean little to us, had it not meant much to him. As things were, a 1913 visit to Edward Carpenter--socialist, ex-clergyman, homosexual--seems to have awakened in Forster a sense of his sexual deviance as a kind of sublime alternative to the philistine morality of his age. The novel Maurice (1914) is a product of that awareness; and now, fifty-seven years later, it has been published...
Chronologically Maurice comes between what must be considered Forster's two greatest novels, Howard's End and A Passage to India. It in no way has their literary merit. It has neither their complexity nor their satiric edge. But it has more of the man that was Forster, and it is to be read...
Things patch up and a two-year homosexual affair follows. Forster handles love scenes with exquisite tact, neither prudish nor extravagant, but by even the broadest of erotic standards, the novel is decidedly small-time stuff--gentle rather than sensual...
...Forster is no mere apologist for homosexuality, thus Maurice agonizes. But there is something of redemption in the agony. Maurice, suffering, is no longer the dull adolescent, prisoner of his class and social consciousness. His moral separation turns him to introspection, and the movement of the novel becomes for Maurice (and, one presumes, for Forster) a self-examination of the implications of homosexuality--the sterility, the social exile, the ethical renunciation...
...this is the lesson of Maurice. Salvation can only be won through a personal involvement that cares nothing for the unthinking yellow-grey morality of suburban conformity. And in ways, that is the lesson of all Forster's moral philosophy. In 1939, he wrote an essay called What I Believe, and what he believed in was Personal Relations. He had an individualist's fear of drowning in the teeming masses. So the solution was to be Personal, individual to individual, beyond politics, beyond class, beyond morality. That is what he meant when he wrote...