Alec and Maurice in Maurice: A Study of a Couple

This summer, I read and watched a fair amount of Forster (Maurice, A Passage to India, and A Room with a View as well as Aspects of a Novel and Forster's guide to Alexandria). I also read a fair amount about Forster, including Furbank's seminal biography as well as a smattering of literary analysis.

Furbank's seminal biography is well-worth the read. The literary analysis reminded me of the problem with literary analysis.

Maurice has a happy ending--in his terminal notes to the manuscript, Forster remarks with typical drollness, "[I]t has made the book more difficult to publish . . . if it ended unhappily, with a lad dangling from a noose or with a suicide pact, all would be well, for there is no pornography or seduction of minors. But the lovers get away unpunished and consequently recommend crime."

Not only is Forster's note a dig against the current laws (circa 1960) in England, it is a dig at Ivory Tower intellectualism (and yes, Forster would have been aware of that), which supposes that a classic cannot be a classic unless everyone at the end is depressed, separated, or dead.

And if you don't believe me, take a look at any high school "classics" list.

Forster's friends who read Maurice in unpublished form almost all liked the happy ending but were uneasy about it. There's a reason for this unease, which I address below. What I had forgotten about literary analysts is how utterly sycophantic and lemming-like they are. This is the acceptable way to think. Thank goodness I didn't mess up and write something different! We must all remember to denigrate Maurice in our analysis and act condescending about the ending.

Maurice does have the slightly sketchy feel of something not written for publication precisely because publication forces one to see a work differently (a point that Furbank, alone among Forster critics, seems to have perceived).

I do not, however, find it necessary to disparage the book. Forster does some fine things with Maurice--from the characterization of Clive to some of the more infinitely subtle/insightful moments, such as the opening chapter, Clive's breakdown and Maurice's reaction, the piano scene, the cricket match, and the museum sequence between Maurice and Alec, which last I consider utterly brilliant.

I also don't consider the ending false.

I am an American woman in her 40's. I am aware of class systems re: money and education but not as an intrinsic force of nature. I intellectually understand the British class system (Richardson to Austen to Forster); I've never lived it. Forster's friends did. As one film analyst--Earl Ingersoll--rightly points out, American audiences may not realize how unusually Maurice behaves towards Alec before they become lovers. My favorite example is when Maurice challenges Alec (referred to by his last name, Scudder, throughout this portion of the novel) for apparently holding out for a larger tip. His tone is harassing and familiar. It is not the tone of a person ticking off a servant; it is the tone of an equal badgering a potential friend or lover. (He later calls Alec out for threatening blackmail also from the position of an equal--he challenges Alec's notion "I'm as good as you" on moral grounds, not class ones.)

Forster's friends immediately picked up on the class issue--their strongest objection was that the gap in class would get in the way of the relationship.

Forster's friends had a point. Unfortunately, contemporary literary critics have taken hold of this objection as a sign of an "unrealistic ending" and argued that Alec and Maurice don't fit personality-wise, which is highly inaccurate. Forster understood human nature better than that:

Alec and Maurice are more like each other than they are like everyone else.

Maurice willingly assisting an ill Clive.

Maurice is a doer, a guy who thinks actions ultimately matter more than words. It is Maurice who wants to push the relationship with Clive to the next level. He accepts the platonic solution because he is (1) romantic; (2) somewhat naive; (3) the kind of guy, like Forster, who prefers to invest in a relationship long-term.

But Maurice, like Alec, is more than willing to run through the rain, take care of someone when he is ill, go see someone off on the boat rather than simply wishing that person well...and so on. That Maurice guesses where Alec is waiting at the end of the book is beautifully romantic and no error in characterization

Maurice and Alec exchanging grins across the aisle.

The scene in the museum illustrates the rapport between the characters excellently. They are both taken with enjoying the lamassu, not interpreting it. They both remark on HOW the thing was made rather than dismissing that side of art as plebeian and low-class. They both get a kick out of the fifth leg.

The entire end of the book was fleshed out by Forster after initial feedback. I suspect the most useful feedback was from Lytton Strachey, who thought Maurice and Alec were acting on "curiosity and lust and would only last six weeks." Prior to revision, Strachey had a point, even if an unpopular one among intellectuals (ironically enough): one contemporary critic castigates those viewers/readers who argue that Mellors and Lady Chatterley from Lady Chatterley's Lover need to have a reason to be together/get along beyond sex. Well . . . since they're going to start a freakin' farm together at the end of the book, my answer would be "yes, they do need a reason."

If Maurice and Alec are going to start a life together, then yes, they need more than sex--though that helps. And Forster more than prepares us for that possibility, especially since Forster himself desired compatibility of temperament, not merely a roll in the sack.

Alec demonstrates that no-holds-barred approach that

resembles Maurice's approach to life--yet he uses a

"gentleman's" tool (a letter) to try to reach Maurice.

Both men are willing to adapt to the other's methods.

He did refrain from including the original "us two living alone in the woods together" epilogue, which he was right to do. Forster was oddly enough too educated and too upper middle-class to perceive an obvious solution to Alec and Maurice. He was right to leave them alone at the end (the book turns to Clive's p.o.v).

My version of where Alec and Maurice end up is this:

World War I (1914) starts soon after Alec and Maurice meet. Alec joins up (it's fairly unimaginable that he wouldn't--the pressure in England to "help" the war effort was tremendous, far greater than the mild, persistent social pressure of Forster's novels: Forster himself helped out during WWI with the Red Cross). I think life is more interesting than death, so Alec survives.

Maurice--who has demonstrated an almost blithe tolerance of disease and illness, teaches boxing, and is quite physically strong (all Forster's characterizations)--volunteers as a medical assistant. In the field, after some fighting, Alec comes down with the flu pandemic and is transferred to a base hospital in Portsmouth. Maurice is either already there or gets himself transferred there. Alec survives (there were survivors of the flu pandemic!), and Maurice eventually moves him away from the hospital to his lodgings.

Alec's attitude towards his job is rather

caustic--and not only due to

his employers' snobbery.

By the time the war ends, the populace is shell-shocked enough that Maurice getting an apartment for himself and Alec (his lodger) in London is not remarked on. As Forster himself knew, an English man could remain an "eccentric" bachelor without causing too much of a stir--so long as he was discrete (I'm not saying this was fair; I'm saying it was better than jail or chemical castration).

Maurice could easily go back to being a stockbroker; his character is less fastidious than Forster, who would have liked more "noble" and "earthy" employment for his characters (the D.H. Lawrence influence).

Alec could become a mechanic or a newspaper writer/photographer (the guy who gets called out to report on fires and murder scenes). One of Forster's most insightful points in Maurice is that Alec's class could be as ambitious, class conscious, and strictly moral (even moreso) as anyone in the upper-classes, a perspective backed up by historians. Alec acts as an undergameskeeper in Maurice because it is a job, not because he loves the soil. I think he would attend the Working Men's College (where Forster actually lectured) after the war and get enough education to do something non-agrarian.

If they HAVE to become woodsmen, they could always go to America and move out West to work as  ranch hands (although even that, if Brokeback Mountain is any indication, required a measure of discretion).