Extracts from E.M. Forster: A New Life by Wendy Moffat
Maurice was a revolutionary new genreâa gay love story that ended happily. It was Morganâs cri de coeur. For him, âa happy ending was imperative. I Âshouldnât 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.â
But Morganâs earlier skepticism about the progress of tolerance for homosexuality was well founded. In October 1952, Christopher [Isherwood]âs first copy was shepherded by hand, from Cambridge to London to New York to Chicago to Los Angeles, by trustworthy friends, all gay men. They chose this method of delivery to protect both the book and its author. On both sides of the Atlantic, the cold war fueled anxiety about the loyalty and patriotism of homosexuals, and the machinery of the state was being used to gather evidence and entrap gay men. In the United States, the House Un-American Activities Committee had begun a âlavender scareâ to root out homosexual men in government, who were deemed a security risk because their sex lives made them vulnerable to blackmail. The U.S. postmaster general revived the eighty-year-old Comstock laws to prosecute gay men who used the mail to convey âobscene, lewd, lascivious or filthyâ materials. In London, police sting operations against gay men were intensifying, and men who were arrested often found their personal papers confiscated without a warrant. Morgan jocularly called the packet enclosing the typescript âthe main goodsâ to emphasize their clandestine machinations. He dotted Âevery i, composing a contract that expressly permitted Christopher to have the American rights, and formally requesting a special waiver from his literary executor.
The men who arranged this pony express were not being paranoid. Even very eminent men who were homosexual were being prosecuted and humiliated. The actor Sir John Gielgud was caught up in a sting operation in a public lavatory when he was at the height of his career on the London stage. Just months before the Maurice manuscript was spirited to CalÂiÂfornia, the famous mathematician Alan Turing, whose solution to the Nazi Enigma code machine had materially helped the Allies win the war, was caught in the net. He was forcibly given female hormones to âcureâ him of his homosexual desires as part of a plea bargain to avoid imprisonment under the same laws used to convict Oscar Wilde in 1895. Two years later, Turing killed himself. None of Morganâs friends wished to risk the loss of Maurice or the liberty of its author in those perilous times. There were still plenty of âbeasts and idiots who . . . prowl in the darkness, ready to gibber and devour.â
In Christopherâs study, late into the autumn night, Christopher and John Lehmann discussed the mechanics of publishing Maurice in America. The thought of Morganâs death evoked a bit of black humor: John drily called the pages Forsterâs âliterary remains.â But the men shared a reverence for the novelâs place in gay patrimony. The typescript was weighed down by the care so many had taken to preserve it for so long. It was heavy with a history of stealth. For six decades Forster had nurtured it in secret, painstakingly revising and adding chapters. He commissioned two wondrously named lady typistsâMrs. Jones and Mrs. Snatchfoldâto copy the contraband manuscript in pieces, to protect them from the novelâs secrets. He carefully kept track of each copy of the typescript, requesting that the chosen reader return it to a safely neutral locationâusually the Reform Club. Late in old age, when he was almost eighty-five, Forster reflected on the cost of this lifetime of effort: âHow annoyed I am with Society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal. The subterfuges, the self-consciousness that might have been avoided.â
All his long life Morgan lived in a world imprisoned by prejudice against homosexuals. He was sixteen when Oscar Wilde was sent to prison, and he died the year after the Stonewall riots.
TL;DR: Please keep writing gay happy endings. Please fight against censorship. We can't go back.
Also, read Maurice by E. M. Forster. There's some absolutely beautiful sentences in it. And men climbing through windows for kisses.
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