David's Reviews > Maurice

Vladimir Nabokov wrote in Pnin:

Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.

This is true for me as well. While of course I was cheering for the titular hero through the course of his internal and external struggle for identity, I can't help but feel, after finishing the book "well, that was very nice, but life is not like that!" Endings are very particular thing, there is no sense of an ending in a novel, that is excepting for death. Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Lolita, etc. are all very satisfying in their fatal finales. It is the sad ending, the nadir and despair which is reached as the hero comes to the final fall, that is what satisfies a reader. It is the bottom which gives us the sense of completion, and not the peak. We are never finished with a full glass, only an empty one. The ending for Maurice is a happy one, and deliberately so, as was the intention of Forster, but I am not sure it is the right one. The whole story of Scudder to me seems a bit forced, a bit sudden, and a bit melodramatic; the reason to love this book is rather for the first half with the slow but genuine kinship between Maurice and Clive.

This is, of course, a "gay novel" - perhaps the early prototype of the pandering, panegyric course which that genre has taken: the road from internal struggle to external/societal struggle, to personal acceptance and then to the (not reached in Maurice) ultimate acceptance and embrace from the society or community at large. To be sure it is an interesting story, but with inevitable issue of being pigeonholed by its very protagonist's proclivities. I have been thinking very much about the statement that "gay novels don't sell" - and I would largely agree with this sentiment. For the same reason gay movies don't sell, etc. Of course there is the significance of numbers: homosexuals (apparently) constitute only ten-percent of the population at large, a small market. But if you consider the proliferation of successful black-novels, for example, certainly there success rides not on their portrayed demographic, but rather the entire market. I'm sure very few of the devout readership of the Harry Potter series are wizards or other magically inclined persons, but they buy and read them nonetheless. How important is it to share the characteristics of the protagonist or narrator? I enjoy Lolita although I am not a pedophile and if anything have an aversion to children (messy and whiny cretins that they are), I can read Jane Eyre and enjoy it despite my lack of female accouterments. There are bestsellers about blind kids and autistic kids and black folks and Asian-Americans and all sorts of minority demographics which the overall market for literature devour, with that "minority voice" being consider a testament to the literary value of the work. So why isn't it the same for queer literature? I confess that even I am not frequently moved by it, unremoved as I am, unless it is an otherwise moving narrative, such as Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.

Homosexuality is a unique struggle, I think, and should make for compelling literature, but yet it is hard to portray. Unlike race, gender, ethnicity, it is a very internalized characteristic, which can't be seen with the eyes at all (without a high percent of false-positives, anyway!). It is a matter of the heart, a matter of desire. A novel can be written with a black protagonist and they can desire anything: success, love, freedom, etc. - anything. But for a novel to be a gay novel that particular sexual desire is prone to the foreground, as in the present novel, as in Giovanni's Room et cetera. Perhaps the best portrayal of homosexuality is The Great Gatsby, wherein I would contend that Nick Carraway is gay - something alluded to indirectly if not obtusely throughout the novel, but far from canonically agreed upon. But even Fitzgerald's ambiguous narrator fails to address the particular queer experience, and as such appeals to a wider audience. Is it that the queer experience is too different, or is it that it is not different enough? Perhaps it has the sense of being self-indulgent? I am not sure. How can anyone be sure how their plight relates to anyone else's? Perhaps literature helps, but certainly no one's struggle, real or fictional, is exactly the same.

And maybe it is for that reason that queer novels fail, as they do? I don't feel that Fitzgerald (or Melville, or Twain, or Lee, or whomever wrote what is considered the top contender) meant to write the "Great American Novel" when he wrote The Great Gatsby (or Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn, etc.) - he wrote the story of Jay Gatsby, of Nick Carraway et al. That book, which is a compressed carbuncle of the human condition of one man, is one which appeals to many individuals, Americans etc., because we can see in another's struggle a glimmer of our own individual struggle. Same in Jane Eyre, we see not an orphan struggling a very specific struggle, but rather an individual struggling against the every extrapolating problem of life. I think it is perhaps the problem of the "Gay novel" that it tries to extrapolate itself, it is not internalized and it is not specific, it aims from the starting point to be universal to a small subsection of the population. It tries to generalize the struggle of gay men (or women, which is not the case in Maurice), and so loses its individual power. Search for identity, for love, for acceptance, etc. are all universal struggles, even for the most "normal" of individuals. While the goal of literature may be to make the particular universal, it is only implicitly done. It is impossible to make the universal particular.

The plight of Maurice is both particular and generalized, and so maybe it is a half-failure or a half-victory. Maurice's struggles are particular to him: the dynamic between he and Clive in particular is very much the friction between two individuals, the family pressure for Maurice to become the glittering replacement of his father in all ways is a problem unique to his family dynamic and the characters of his mother and sisters. But his desires and feelings of alienation seem general, his fear of social rebuff seems general, roving, imprecise. His initial self-loathing does not seem to be informed, it is confused, misguided, it is not quite a religious affectation nor a societal concern, but a sort of fear of self. This first apprehension to the idea of his love for Clive is believable, sympathetic, sincere. But this phase lacks resolution - Clive goes away and comes back changed, whether sincerely or insincerely as a matter of course. Maurice pines for him, hates him, resents him, but ultimately his feelings for him are essentially the same at the heart of the matter, a sort of kinship. But a lost fellowship. Maurice's drive is not for love but rather for companionship. This is by no means particular to the homosexual struggle, but poignant nonetheless. Where the story begins to falter is the introduction of Scudder. The reader must suspend his disbelief and take that love-in-a-glance kind of love for granted. The character of Scudder is scarcely fleshed out, and the reasons for Maurice's attraction seem to be vague at best. The issue of gay-love becomes highly generalized. We have Maurice, who although fully fleshed out in character, his motives with Scudder seem to me to be missing. Scudder on the other hand is almost a stock character, poorly characterized, maybe some form of Forster's ideal, which he imbues into Maurice's affections. Whether their attraction is mutual loneliness or true love is left unclear, there is little or no rhetoric of love, there are few bases for attraction beyond the physical. Yet we are left to believe in their mutual happiness, their rebirth and acceptance of each other: washed clean of their sins and histories, their prejudices and prides.

His ideal of marriage was temperate and graceful, like all his ideals, and he found a fit helpmate in Anne, who had refinement herself, and admired it in others. They loved each other tenderly. Beautiful conventions received them — while beyond the barrier Maurice wandered, the wrong words on his lips and the wrong desires in his heart, and his arms full of air.

Perhaps this is ultimately the point which Forster wants to make? Is Maurice's 'arms full of air' any worse than the marriage of convention and convenience achieved by Anna and Clive? Is it better? While Maurice is borne away on a seemingly generalized happy ending devoid of individual passions, Clive enjoys (or suffers) the same general fate. Is Maurice happy at the book's resolution-- truly happy? Or satisfied? And what of Clive? Have Clive's passions truly inverted during his trip to the Mediterranean?

While we are meant to believe that Maurice and Scudder have found in each other a lasting love and companionship, happiness, it is rather the passions between Maurice and Clive which endure in the reader after completing the novel. It seems at one and the same time that the story of Maurice is both too long and too short. Too long to be the story of Maurice and Clive, too short to be the story of Maurice and Scudder. And so I am doubly dissatisfied. That said it is a wonderful novel: where it shines it truly is a wonder of literary craft, but where the brush is dropped there are prominent smears which disfigure the art.