Morrie & Licky

Have a good reading!

Thank you for sharing!

This one I had already read since the archive.ph works for this one. Maybe the paywall changed since then.

I also read in an article that Stéphane did not like this article, saying something like they wouldn’t do it if they were an heterosexual couple.

Having visited Edward Carpenter's house, where E.M. Forster initially conceived the idea for Maurice during his visit in 1913, I find it interesting that the Carpenter estate is located right next to a cricket club called "Holmesfield Cricket Club," established in 1905.

For those familiar with Maurice, cricket likely carries some significance—in the novel, it is through cricket that Maurice and Alec first experience their "us against the world" moment:

"Maurice played up too... and he felt that they were against the whole world, that not only Mr Borenius and the field but the audience in the shed and all England were closing round the wickets. They played for the sake of each other and their fragile relationship If one fell the other would follow. They intended no harm to the world, but so long as it attacked they must punish, they must stand wary, then hit with full strength, they must show that when two are gathered together majorities shall not triumph." - Maurice, E.M. Forster

This "us against the world" mentality is exactly what Edward Carpenter and George Merrill (the real-life models for Maurice and Alec) had lived by. The couple resided in this remote, secluded place, surrounded by forests and woods, outside society, like two brave outcasts, mirroring how Maurice and Alec live in their own fictional "greenwood'.

The cricket scene in the novel is obviously a foreshadow to that life as outcasts away from society, but I'd never really thought about why Forster chose cricket as a medium for Maurice and Alec to have their first pivotal "us against the world" moment. I simply assumed that cricket, being a popular sport, was an easy and natural plot device for Forster.

Then, I visited the Carpenter house, and saw the Holmesfield Cricket Club right next to it, and couldn't help but deduce that Forster, who had previously visited the house on a few occasions before 1913 and was inspired by Carpenter and Merrill during his 1913 visit to write Maurice, likely also noticed the cricket club. This observation might have sparked the idea of incorporating a cricket match into the story, thus establishing a direct connection between Maurice and Alec's "us against the world" moment and the Carpenter house—the very physical birthplace of the novel where the real-life models of Maurice and Alec lived.

This is just my theory. In fact, there isn't any mention of the Holmesfield Cricket Club in Forster's diaries and drafts related to Maurice. However, one thing I learned from reading Maurice is that there is no coincidence in the novel, so it's my personal belief that this connection between the fictional plot and the reality of the Carpenter house is also no coincidence—all the more reason why Forster was a freaking genius.

There also used to be a YouTube comment which claimed – also completely wrongly – that Alec is from the seaside town of Brighton and ‘ought’ to have a cockney accent.

Ignore this nonsense. The only place where Alec is Irish is in Fred Carrier’s notoriously dreadful, near-unreadable, unofficial sequel novel Maurice and Alec in America (2010). And possibly in some fanfic.

In Forster’s novel, Alec is from a village called Osmington in the county of Dorset in South-West England, on the coast very near the seaside resort/naval town of Weymouth – where, of course, the Scudder family are the local butchers. ((I have a non-Maurice original-fic-in-progress [X] [X] which plays with this location, if you’re interested!)

In Forster’s earliest drafts, he initially wrote that Alec was from a different village, Gillingham, in north Dorset – but by 1932 (for reasons unknown) he’d changed that to Osmington.

Either way, the point is that Alec is from the South-West of England, but from a different county a little distance away from Penge (which is in Wiltshire: the county of Salibury and Stonehenge, carrying deep resonances of ancient Englishness, not only for Forster). Thus Alec is described as an ‘importation’ to Penge because he’s from the next county, as opposed to the local village. :)

Re. “you, me, attempting to teach people media literacy”: historical literacy, too.

A further point the “Alec and Maurice's relationship was based on nothing but sex” snipers miss (along with sexual fulfilment being rather important and not negligible, for Forster and for Maurice) is that there’s a history of male–male relationships which do indeed start with the sex but flower into and endure as love – in that order. There’s so much more than “just sex” between Maurice and Alec – but also, the sex which brings them together is never “just” sex. For Forster, the meeting of bodies is profound (the “flesh educating the spirit”), not profane – and it certainly isn’t a “lesser” love than Clive giving Maurice blue balls for three years.

(1) Despite the ‘Begun 1913, Finished 1914’ dedication, Forster kept on revising Maurice up until almost 1960 to prepare it for planned posthumous publication

(2) There’s no blurb on the back cover because this is a hardback, therefore the blurb is inside the front flap

Also excellent editing and synchronisation so that Rupert gets his star credit at the exact moment when the dark-haired boy has snatched Maurice’s cap. <333

They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work, and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs...

The Woodcutters by James Hamilton Mackenzie (1875-1926), Williamson Art Gallery & Museum