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256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
The second dream is more difficult to convey. Nothing happened. He scarcely saw a face, scarcely heard a voice say, “That is your friend,” and then it was over, having filled him with beauty and taught him tenderness. He could die for such a friend, he would allow such a friend to die for him; they would make any sacrifice for each other, and count the world nothing, neither death nor distance nor crossness could part them, because “this is my friend.”
“A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't 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.”
“You do care a little for me, I know... but nothing to speak of, and you don't love me. I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now... and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness.”
“I think you’re beautiful, the only beautiful person I’ve ever seen. I love your voice and everything to do with you, down to your clothes or the room you are sitting in. I adore you.”
“A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't 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.”
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.
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?
“No tradition overawed the boys. No convention settled what was poetic, what absurd. They were concerned with a passion that few English minds have admitted, and so created untrammelled. Something of exquisite beauty arose in the mind of each at last, something unforgettable and eternal, but built of the humblest scraps of speech and from the simplest emotions.”