I'm thankful it's into your hands I fell

Maurice (1987), dir. James Ivory, cinematography by Pierre Lhomme.

‘During and after my illness I must have been a delightful companion. But you were so wonderfully considerate. You never snubbed me as you did your family at dinner. [Clive throws the card at Maurice’s head.] What’s the matter now – are you tired?’

For everyone who’s ever strived to be even-handed about Clive Durham in Maurice (James Ivory, 1987), let’s be thankful that this, the most corrosive of all Maurice’s deleted scenes (‘The Night Before Greece’) wasn’t included in the released cut.

Clive understood his sexuality and aversion to the church very early on in his life— he suffered because of this and taught Maurice to suffer, too. However, Maurice being the more sentimental of the two, this self-pitying state wasn’t good enough to survive on. The fact that Maurice climbed above the mountains and Clive remained shrouded beneath them, thus without living honestly to himself, makes me feel for Clive. He’s a complete dick, yes, and I adore Alec & his relationship with Maurice, but they likely wouldn’t have happened if Clive didn’t provide a perfect foil for Maurice and his ultimate sacrifice. 

In my mind, Maurice kept Clive awake and true to himself. After Clive got ill and went away by himself, fear got the better of him. By the end of the book, Clive has grown backwards into what Maurice once described as ‘flat pieces of cardboard.’ Like Forster wrote in the afterword of the book, Clive intends no evil, but is just so consistently damn infuriating because he keeps making the wrong choices! And I helplessly find that equally endearing and frustrating.

“But as he returned to his bed a little noise sounded, a noise so intimate that it might have arisen inside his own body. He seemed to crackle and burn and saw the ladder’s top quivering against the moonlit air. The head and the shoulders of a man rose up, paused, a gun was leant against the window sill very carefully, and someone he scarcely knew moved towards him and knelt beside him and whispered, “Sir, was you calling out for me?… Sir, I know…. I know,” and touched him” (Maurice, Ch. 37, E.M. Forster).