To a Happier Year: On E.M. Forster and ‘Maurice’
Recently, my partner and I and a few friends gathered with somewhat ridiculous ceremony for a meeting of our book club devoted to E.M. Forster’s queer classic Maurice. That week, we were throwing a dinner party and screening the 1987 Merchant Ivory film adaptation starring James Wilby, Hugh Grant, and Rupert Graves. The whole party was animated by that high-concept, low-ambition, cockeyed wholesome glee that I associate (tellingly) with both adolescence and graduate school. The evening was themed almost to the point of Dadaism—the food prepared from Ismail Merchant’s 1994 celebrity cookbook Passionate Meals, unless brainstormed laboriously using the novel itself. (A dessert based on Alec’s stolen apricot? An homage to the chicken cutlet Risley uses to…demonstrate the tediousness of straight people, or something?) First orders of business were established over a lavish cheese plate: “We need to talk about all the hair-tousling,” someone said.
is, in many respects, a
