Maurice: It's OK To Be Gay

Like all EM Forster books, Maurice is about English social norms and mores and how they fuck with people's happiness.  Unlike most EM Forster books, though, Maurice is easy-to-read: you can easily finish it in a week.  That's why it's a great book for taking on your morning commute or a retreat vacation.

Maurice is, at its heart, a classic doomed love story: Maurice meets Clive; they fall in love; they pursue a secret relationship because Society doesn't approve; Clive breaks Maurice's heart by eventually marrying someone acceptable so that he can have a career in politics.

Clive never gets over Maurice, really.  But Maurice can't hang around forever being Clive's Secret-on-the-Side.  In many books (and modern movies), these two would buck society and reunite, living happily ever after.  I can just hear the dramatic music that would play during the Hollywood Ending!  Would Justin Timberlake be too old to play Maurice?

But EM Forster was a realist.  He knew that Clive would never stay "a confirmed bachelor", or even keep Maurice "on the side".  His political career was way too important for that.  Plus, Clive did a pretty decent job of lying to himself.

Instead, Maurice elopes with the gamekeeper.  Personally, while I love a happy ending -- and I love this happy ending -- I feel that Forster kinda tacked it on at the end to make a point.

And that's the thing with Maurice: aside from it being a really sad doomed love story, it's also a discussion on how being gay shouldn't be a crime.  Maurice spends a good deal of the novel trying to become "normal", but he can't do it.  He can't undo his own nature.  The whole point of showing Maurice doing this is to make him sympathetic and show that even though he doesn't want to be this way (it's not a lifestyle choice), he can't help it.  He's born this way, baby!

Now, as for the gamekeeper, Alec:  I would have liked it to have taken more than 10 pages for Maurice and he to go from "who the fuck are you?" to "you wanna come fuck my brains out?", but given that Lucy and George in A Room With A View go from sharing Meaningful Glances to macking in a field also within about 10 pages, all is forgiven.   Plus, George and Lucy have to elope to get married and who knows what happens after with them, either?  Just like Lucy and George, Maurice and Alec will end up living at the edges of society, not really ever fitting in.

Of Human Bondage: Philip Deserves Better

After writing that last post on Of Human Bondage, I felt pretty bad.  I wasn't really fair to the book or Somerset Maugham. Also:  I read the foreword.

The cover art is the best thing about my copy.

I know, I know, I should have read the foreword to begin with, but I never read forewords or introductions to novels.  Anyways, from the foreword it seems that the book is loosely autobiographical.  After reading that, I surprisingly hated the book more.

Mr Maugham, Mr Maugham, Mr Maugham!  Why the self-loathing?

Poor Philip! He's orphaned and spends his childhood living in the austere environment of his aunt and uncle's home.   No one really loves him, even though his Aunt Louisa is rather fond of him.  He's just a sad lonely boy.

He gets sent to a good school, but he has a club foot and gets tormented for it.  He finally strikes up a friendship with a boy, falls in love with him (the book doesn't say that outright, but you can tell).  Then gets all inexplicably (to himself) jealous after their relationship "cools down".  
 
He's dissatisfied with his life and doesn't want to go to Oxford just because he's supposed to.  He runs off to Germany instead, where he falls in love with Hayward (the book doesn't say that outright, but you can tell).

Then he has to go home. He becomes an accountant (or something) and hates it.  Then he decides to move to Paris to paint.  He's an OK painter, but he's not spectacular.  After Fanny Price commits suicide, he decides that he's not going to be stupid and be a suffering bad artist; he's going to become a doctor.

And that's where I stopped reading.  Because Mr Maugham, he is full of recrimination and lack of sympathy for poor Philip.  He takes every opportunity to tell us how Philip is being a moron because he's young, naive, and not the sharpest tool in the shed.

The whole book is "Philip is young, stupid and doesn't realize that everyone around him is just bullshitting him.  He's impressed because he's a simple.  And, like most youth, he's an obstinant hot-head who lets his emotions get the better of him."

Now, I don't mind reading autobiographies where people look back on their lives critically, but this is supposed to be a work of fiction.  Yes, it's loosely based on Somerset Maugham's life, and I'm sure he looked back on his life (Philip's life) and realized he had been, well, stupid.   But how am I, the reader, supposed to feel anything for Philip when the author/narrator is telling me that the guy's a loser?

I feel bad for Philip that no one --  not even the narrator, who ostensibly thinks Philip's story is worth telling -- thinks that he is anything but sad and pathetic.

Are we not supposed to like Philip?  Is this like those paintings that are ugly, but you're supposed to find beauty in ugliness?   Or is this some kind of manifesto of self-loathing on the part of Somerset Maugham? 

I don't know.

But I know that I can't feel interested in the protagonist's life if the narrator/author thinks the protagonist is a loser who is barely deserving of our contempt.

Why Am I Reading Of Human Bondage?

I first read Of Human Bondage when I was...Actually, I can't remember when I read Of Human Bondage the first time.  It didn't really stick with me.  What I recalled about the book was (SPOILER ALERT!):

• Philip, the protagonist, has a club foot.
• Philip goes to Paris to become a painter.
• While there, this chick falls in love with him, but he hates her because she's gross and eats the crust of her brie instead of cutting it off. (I didn't know you were supposed to cut it off.  I like the crust of the brie.)
• She subsequently commits suicide.
• Philip falls in love with some hussy named Mildred.
• Mildred's hair was "flaxen", a word I needed to look up in the dictionary because I read the book before the advent of the internet.
• Ultimately, Philip becomes a doctor and marries some chick he knocks up.

The book was so useless to me that it just became a string of facts.  I didn't remember if I liked the writing.  I couldn't remember if I read it in the subway or the park.  I couldn't even remember if I had to read it for a class (I might have).

Then last November I was sitting in the break room at work and I mentioned that thing about the brie.  I couldn't remember how it went, so I downloaded the (free) eBook and tried to find it.  I couldn't.  I ended up having to read the stupid book.

What struck me about the book this second time around, was that Philip was gay.  I don't remember him being gay.  Then again, maybe he wasn't gay; maybe men were just closer and more intimate in the early part of the 20th century than they are now.  And of course W. Somerset Maugham was bi, so maybe Philip was bi.

In any case, Philip was totally enraptured with Hayward in Germany and didn't give a flying fig about the womenfolk. 

By the time Christmas rolled around, I still hadn't gotten to that passage about the brie, mostly due to the fact that I only read the eBook during lunch at work.   I decided to find my physical copy of the book at my parents' place and start reading it outside of my lunch hour.

It's March and I've finally found the stupid passage I was looking for.  The reason I couldn't find it by doing a search is that Fanny Price eats the crust off her camembert not her brie.  I was going to keep reading to the end, but then it occurred to me that this book is boring me to bits.  I don't like Philip and I don't care what happens to him.  I'm not emotionally invested in it at all.  It's leaving me cold.  This is why I can't remember reading it the first time: it wasn't because I was young and immature, it was because the book didn't speak to me at all.

Even the realization that Philip may be a bi man living in a very queer-unfriendly time doesn't make it any more engaging.

Nope.  I think I'm gonna just stop where I am and move on to another book.  Actually, I have moved on already.  I'm onto E.M. Forster's Maurice.  If I'm gonna do olden days gay, I might as well do it right.