i want to know you forever and i wish i’d never met you
waiting room, phoebe bridgers | true stories, margaret atwood | cleopatra, the lumineers | unfortunately, it was paradise: selected poems, mahmoud darwish | chinese satellite, phoebe bridgers | crush, richard siken | maurice, e.m. forster | waiting room, phoebe bridgers
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1: If you were a teacher, I would fail your class Take it over and over ‘til you noticed me If you were a waiting room, I would never see a doctor I would sit there with my first aid kit and bleed
2: I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed & that necessary.
3: But I must admit it, that I would marry you in an instant Damn your wife, I’d be your mistress just to have you around.
4: We are captives of what we love, what we desire, and what we are.
5: But you know I’d stand in the corner Embarrassed with a picket sign If it meant I would see you when I die.
6: You said I could have anything I wanted, but I just couldn’t say it out loud.
7: I should have gone through life half awake if you had the decency to leave me alone. Awake intellectually, yes, and emotionally in a way; but here–” He pointed with his pipe stem to his heart; and both smiled. “Perhaps we woke up one another. I like to think that way.
8: I know it’s for the better Know it’s for the better (x19)
The girls were damned ugly, which the man wasn’t: somehow this made it worse, and he stared at the trio, feeling cruel and respectable; the girls broke away giggling, the man returned the stare furtively and then thought it safer to touch his cap; he had spoilt that little game. But they would meet again when he had passed, and all over the world girls would meet men, to kiss them and be kissed; might it not be better to alter his temperament and toe the line? He would decide after his visit—for against hope he was still hoping for something from Clive. - Maurice E.M. Forster, ch. 34
InMaurice, Forster writes ‘damned ugly’ only twice: here, and then again in Ch 37 when the Reverend Borenius slags off Alec: ‘If the parson hadn’t looked so damned ugly he wouldn’t have bothered, but he couldn’t stand that squinny face sneering at youth.’
Both times, ‘damned ugly’ is Maurice’s subjective feeling. The phrase arises only when he desires Alec but doesn’t realise, or when he feels an urge to defend Alec. I love the way Forster expresses Maurice’s growing but subliminal/disavowed attraction in double negatives. The girls were damned ugly, which the man wasn’t.
Alright, that was really nice! I actually liked the ways in which it deviated from the novel, i think it fleshed everything out just a tad more.
To readdress the carding/R rating saga, it’s 100% rated R where I live bc of full frontal, not the story as I had originally presumed.
(Can someone explain to me how ‘Maurice’ becomes 'Morris’)
Acting was great! i think they did Rupert a lil dirty with the dialogue and the accent (Alec doesn’t have a specific accent in the book does he?) Hugh grant was hugh grant but with a strange mustache. I’ve never seen James Wilby before but I really liked him!
Sets and costumes were nicely done and thank god there wasnt the usual English-film-pitch-black-fucking-lost-the-gaffer lighting!
I’m on a quest to read every Forster novel and watch every Merchant-Ivory film!
“I was yours once ‘till death if you’d cared to keep me, but I’m someone else’s now - I can’t hang about whining forever - and he’s mine in a way that shocks you, but why don’t you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness?”
The great Judy Davis in her first Oscar-nominated performance as E.M. Forster’s troubled heroine Adela Quested, a repressed English tourist on a transformative journey, in the lush screen adaptation A Passage to India (1984, David Lean)
Thinking about E.M. Forster! He really gave Alec and Maurice a happy ending! He really implied that the world wasn’t ready for gay interracial couples at the time, but one day it would be! Also he really lost his virginity to a wounded soldier on the beach and stopped writing fiction after that, holy fuck is that dramatic!
Although it’s commonly claimed that EMF/Morgan ‘stopped writing fiction’, really he just stopped publishing fiction during the rest of his lifetime (after publishing A Passage to India in 1924, a few years after he’d ‘parted with respectability’ on the beach in Alexandria with a soldier during WW1). As Kate Symondson expands upon in this excellent blog post for the British Library, ‘E.M. Forster’s Gay Fiction’ (2016):
In a diary entry of 1964, [Forster] reflected that ‘I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more, but sex has prevented the latter’. His wording here is key. At King’s College Cambridge, Forster had left behind a hoard of unpublished material, including a wealth of unseen fiction: a novel [Maurice], two substantial fragments [including his uncompleted novel Artic Summer], stories, plays, poems. He might not have published any more fiction in the years since A Passage, but he had been writing. It is the subject of those stories, however, that kept them hidden. Forster hadn’t been writing about ‘sex’ in the broad sense of the word, but, more specifically, the ‘sex’ which meant something to him: sex and love between men. [X]
The ‘stories’ centrally included EMF’s brilliant, snarky, queer short stories published posthumously in The Life to Come and Other Stories in 1972 (the year after Maurice, two years after EMF’s death). Tragically, these stories seem to be far less widely known today than Maurice itself, sometimes leading to false assumptions (for example, that EMF only ever wrote tepidly about sex: the psychological, and sometimes physical, erotics in some of these stories are powerful). The timing of his writing of the posthumous short stories (and less-available fragments such as ‘Ralph and Tony’) is quite protracted and not always clear. e.g. Some accounts claim that ‘The Other Boat’ dates from the 1950s when other evidence points to it being written earlier. ‘Doctor Woolacott’, from 1927, was read privately by T.E. Lawrence, who was so blown away by it that he was scared to read Maurice when EMF offered. But, basically, EMF kept on writing.
Then there’s the writing of Maurice. Morgan first-drafted it in 1913-14, but even at that stage there were variant versions in private circulation. He revised it twice in the early 1930s (after meeting Bob Buckingham), and revised it again during the 1950s (after Christopher Isherwood had nagged him into agreeing to Maurice’s publication after his death, and, significantly, also around the time of the Wolfenden Commission which would – belatedly – lead to the 1967 partial decriminalisation of m/m gay sex in England). Did you know that EMF didn’t bring Maurice and Alec together at the hotel until the 1950s? It’s in this context that his afterword, ‘Notes on Maurice’ wasn’t written until Sep 1960.
Meanwhile, in the 1940s, EMF had also collaborated on the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd, and scripted the documentary A Diary for Timothy (Humphrey Jennings, 1945), the last of the official WW2 documentaries produced by the British Government’s Crown Film Unit. Full film here.
A Room with a View doodles! I can’t say I think it’s a fantastic book, but I enjoyed it immensely. And I’m really starting to get into Forster in general.
Alec being kissed and lifted off the ground mid-kiss, his arm wrapped around Maurice.
So many scenes in gorgeous film I had to go back and view again (and again and again)
I remember reading from James Wilby that this scene was actually filmed on only day three or four , so they didn’t really even know each other!
They had dinner at a restaurant and spoke on everything but that scene.. James asked “do you think we should just go for it?” And, in Rupert’s typical, wonderful fashion, he just said “yup” and they did it.. James’ actual quote was along the lines of “he stuck his tongue down my throat, and that was the end of that!”
(Rupert also caused the bed to break in the other scene… Good Lord..)
Maurice as a book will always be my favourite and the film was bloody fantastic too! The cast were gorgeously chosen and suited the characters perfectly. Forster would have been so proud.. I even have a tattoo of Forster himself I just love it all
(And this kissing scene at the end makes me cry so much because we didn’t get that in the book, but it was so beautiful I’ve never been more happy that they strayed from the novel )
