Back in May, I listened to the audiobook of E. M. Forster’s Maurice. I had picked up something of the story prior to reading it, most specifically that it was unable to be published in Forster’s lifetime due to containing a romantic relationship between two men that ended happily. And naturally the first half of the twentieth century would be having none of that.

These days, I listen to audiobooks significantly more than reading printed editions, due to most of my reading happening on walks or during my commute. In this case the experience of listening to the audiobook was particularly interesting to me. For one thing, I spent some time dithering between two versions of Maurice when deciding which narrator to listen to: Peter Firth or Ben Whishaw. I eventually landed on the latter, Whishaw being a slightly smoother voice. But having, through this elaborate selection process, listened several times to the opening preview of the book, in which Maurice is taken aside by a teacher at his boarding school for the Talk (anatomical drawings in the beach sand and all), it is one of the segments that remains most vividly in my memory. Whether I want it to, or not.

I also found that listening to an audiobook of the story dispelled me of my previous belief, from merely reading the word, that Maurice was pronounced in the French style (Mor-eese) – à la the father from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. It is, in fact pronounced Morris, like the dancer, which seems a less literary title, although perhaps that’s something of a strength.

The book itself follows Maurice Hall as he begins a relationship with a fellow university student, Clive Durham. The novel, having been written in 1913, unhelpfully alternates between first and surnames – so I was initially confused, thinking Maurice was attending Durham University rather than dating a lord of the same name.

I had just finished reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, which is, among other things, about a Greek Classics class getting manically caught up in the Dionysian revels of the Ancient Greeks they idolise. So it was amusing to hear Clive’s superior arguments using Classic same-sex relations to justify their own practices – which were kept ‘platonic’ on Clive’s insistence.

“What Italian boy,” E. M. Forster writes, “would have put up with it?”

I particularly enjoyed the bicycle sequence, wherein these two wealthy university students fool around so wildly they crash in the countryside, destroying the bicycle and making their way back on foot (of all things!), much to the indulging bemusement of the locals. Later Clive gets ill in Greece and, disillusioned with the ‘hellenic’ intellectualising of his youth, declares himself heterosexual, marries a (genuinely sweet) woman, and becomes some sort of magistrate. Forster admits that from this point in the novel his treatment of Clive deteriorates, declaring in the Terminal Note: “He has annoyed me.”

I liked Forster’s refusal to soften his characters. It was a common throughline that Maurice was not a particularly good person. E. M. Forster refers to him as “mentally torpid, not a bad businessman and rather a snob.” He’s also something of a misogynist – “he must either smash [his surroundings, mother and two sisters] or be smashed, there is no third course” – and it’s never quite clear how much of his disgust towards women is brought on by pressures to engage in heterosexual relations that disgust him, how much is an individual personal failing on Maurice’s part and how much merely a result being male in the early 1900s.

After Clive’s switch, Maurice goes to several doctors, including one infuriating hypnotist, to be medically treated for his homosexuality. He refers to himself as:

“An unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.”

which I think is an absolutely delightful (if existentially horrifying) phrase.

Maurice then sleeps with Alec, Clive’s gamekeeper. From the start, I was extremely worried for Alec, due to both the uneven class disparity and the fact that Maurice had, by this point, proven himself to be very much not the sort of person to think carefully about an uneven class disparity.

Alec was pretty great, however, and held Maurice both romantically and structurally accountable, which I think Maurice certainly deserved (although Maurice himself didn’t seem to think so!). Alec refused to let Maurice ghost him, and even sent delightfully passive aggressive letters highlighting, in no uncertain terms, the differences in their situations, and the unfairness of Maurice to have exploited that. Their making up scene, where they wander the British Museum for several hours together, is very sweet. They have agreed, once they leave the museum, to never see each other again. So they just don’t leave.

Regarding the happy ending, the impetus for my reading the book in the first place, E. M. Forster writes:

“A happy ending was imperative. I should not have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway, two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.”

That quote comes from the Terminal Note, written in September 1960 – still over a decade before the novel was published, and roughly forty years after it was first written. The Terminal Note is truly what made this reading (/listening!) experience particularly memorable for me. Forster discusses the impossibility of publishing a book where the same-sex lovers get away unpunished, and his support for the Wolfenden Report, that recommended (among other things) decriminalising homosexuality between consenting adults in private.

The first time I listened to the Terminal Note, I was on the tram. We got to the last section (I want to say paragraph – although with an audiobook, how can you tell?), and I genuinely slapped my hand to my mouth in shock. From an author’s afterword of all things!

Talking about the legalisation of homosexuality, Forster writes:

“If it could be slipped into our midst unnoticed, or legalised overnight by a decree in small print, there would be few protests. Unfortunately it can only be legalised by parliament, and members of parliament are obliged to think or to appear to think. Consequently the Wolfenden recommendations will be indefinitely rejected, police prosecutions will continue, and Clive on the bench, will continue to sentence Alec in the dock. Maurice may get off.“

The jibe at politicians is amusingly barbed, and the elegant marriage of class and sexuality politics, narrated almost as a throwaway in the Whishaw recording, devastated me (the bold is my addition). I immediately rewound and relistened to the entire Terminal Note (which on its own raised my Goodreads rating of the book from three to four stars), and have been showing that paragraph to anyone who will indulge me ever since. Including, now, you.

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Incidentally, the Wolfenden recommendations that Forster references were vetoed in parliament in June 1960 (four months before the Terminal Note was written), although the recommendations went on to advise the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, decriminalising same-sex relations between consenting adults over the age of 21 in their own home.

I actually did a placement with the National Library of Scotland during my Masters, through the British Library’s Unlocking Our Sound Heritage, where I was writing and quality controlling catalogue descriptions for a collection of sound recorded interviews with LGBTQ+ people in Edinburgh. One of the running themes in that collection was the harm caused by Section 28 (1988), which prevented local councils and schools from teaching or discussing LGBTQ+ issues or relationships.

What struck me at the time was the matter-of-fact manner the people in the interviews talked about it. I was seven when the act was repealed in 2000 (England & Wales even later, in 2003), and before working on the catalogues nineteen years later I hadn’t even encountered the term (although, I had unfortunately heard of “pretended family relationships”).

Twenty-one years was all it took for the Conservative government to undermine the marginal concession offered by that 1967 Sexual Offences Act. In that small 21-year span, Maurice was published in 1971 and the James Ivory film based on the book was produced in 1987. Then, in 1988, Section 28 struck.

Sometimes I fall into the trap of believing such backward attitudes are from an earlier time (the Eighties being pre-birth history). Looking at the dates around Maurice focuses, for me, the ease with which progressive changes can be quickly overridden. There were twenty-one years between the Sexual Offences Act and Section 28. Section 28 was fully repealed just twenty-two years ago.

Through that lens, the current political lasering of bigotry against transgender people has troubling temporal parallels, making any changes for the better since the ancient history of 2003 feel precariously fragile.