13 December

E.M. Forster finds salvation

1913 The most important event in the personal life of E.M. Forster was his meeting with Edward Carpenter – the early evangelist for gay (or, as he called it, ‘Uranian’) emancipation – in 1913. The 35-year-old Forster discovered Carpenter to be his ‘saviour’. It was, however, another of the ‘Carpenterians’, as Forster later recalled, George Merrill (Carpenter’s lover), who worked the saving miracle on him:

Carpenter … was a socialist who ignored industrialism and a simple-lifer with an independent income and a … believer in the love of comrades, whom he sometimes called Uranians. It was this last aspect of him that attracted me in my loneliness. … I approached him … as one approaches a saviour. It must have been on my second or third visit to the shrine that the spark was kindled as he and his comrade George Merrill combined to make a profound impression on me and to touch a creative spring. George Merrill also touched my backside – gently and just above the buttocks. … The sensation was unusual and I still remember it as I remember the position of a long-vanished tooth. It was as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving my thoughts.

As Sheila Rowbotham recounts (in her 2009 biography of Carpenter), Merrill’s touch triggered a creative release in the novelist. On 13 December 1913 he commemorated it in his diary, with the jubilant entry: ‘Forward rather than back, Edward Carpenter! Edward Carpenter! Edward Carpenter!’

One result of this new forward-looking mood was his Bildungsroman about growing up gay in Edwardian England, Maurice. The novel transcribes much of Forster’s experiences growing up, and at Cambridge. As obviously, Maurice’s proletarian lover, Alec Scudder, is based on George Merrill.

Maurice was completed at high speed and the manuscript sent to Carpenter in August 1914 (when, as history records, even more important things were happening). It could not, of course, be published. Forster tinkered with the manuscript over the subsequent years. He had particular problems with the conclusion (that published, in which Maurice and Scudder live together in a happy ever after, is extravagantly optimistic, a mere two decades after the martyrisation of Oscar Wilde).

Maurice was not published until after Forster’s death in 1971, after the 1960 acquittal of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (in which Forster was a witness for the defence) had made its theme inoffensive and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act had made the love it describes between consenting males legal.

In a 1960 postscript, inscribed on the cover of the manuscript, Forster noted that the novel was now ‘publishable’ but asked himself, quizzically, whether it was ‘worth it’? It had ‘dated’ sadly over the years. The world had moved on far beyond any relevance it might have. Maurice belonged, he thought, ‘to an England where it was still possible to get lost. It belongs to the last moment of the greenwood’ – the England, that is, destroyed in the First and Second World Wars.

Maurice finally saw print in the authoritative ‘Abinger Edition’ of Forster’s work, and a successful film was made by Merchant and Ivory in 1987.