Word: forstered
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...Tenants, Malamud (8) 10. Maurice, Forster...
...year after Forster's death and 58 years after it was written, here is the novel: Maurice. Forster was not quite fair to it. The boys actually kiss each other in bed, and at one heady moment a reference is made to some sort of physical "sharing." But most of the time they do indeed...talk. And very highmindedly, too, invoking Plato, the nobility of male friendship and "the triviality of contact for contact's sake...
...author's note, Forster writes that the inspiration for the novel arose from a 1913 visit to an evangelical mystic named Edward Carpenter. One of Carpenter's apostles gently touched Forster's backside, and the touch "seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas." Only those who can read that without a smile will be able to appreciate Maurice. The distance between the Edwardian love that dared not speak its name and the rhetoric of the Gay Liberation Front is simply too great...
...Maurice were first-rank Forster, it might have bridged this gap. As it is, for a book whose theme is liberation, it is a curiously willed performance. Forster for once displays a one-tract mind. He does not commit anything as crude as a case history, but he flogs the narrative along in a straight line largely unadorned by the surprises and ambiguities that enrich his other plots. Boy meets boy, boy loses boy, second boy meets girl and takes up "normal" life, first boy meets another boy and affirms homosexual values in the face of hostile society. A prim...
Unconsidered Trifle. The title story of Albergo Empedocle shows that Maurice was not the only occasion on which Forster wrote openly about homosexuality. However, the story, tucked away in an obscure periodical in 1903. has been understandably overlooked. Now, along with other previously uncollected writings from 1900 to 1915, it is gathered in Albergo. The book-lectures, jibes at philistines, reviews, youthful sketches-is a product of the scholarly passion for snapping up a great man's every unconsidered trifle. Like Maurice, it will be useful to specialists, interesting to Forsterites and dispensable to almost everyone else...