THE BOOK OF LOVE

Reimagining the Victorian reformers who defended same-sex desire.

- NIKHIL KRISHNAN

E. M. Forster’s friends tried more than once to persuade him to publish “Maurice.” The novel, which he wrote when he was thirty-five, moldered in a drawer for decades afterward, with a note attached that read, “Publishable. But worth it?” In other words, was it worth the risk to career, friendships, and family for someone with his literary reputation and social standing to publish a novel whose main character was an “unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort”? “I am ashamed at shirking publication,” he told Christopher Isherwood, “but the objections are formidable.” One friend put it to him that the French writer André Gide’s memoirs made no secret of his homosexuality. “Gide hasn’t got a mother,” Forster replied ruefully.

He meant, of course, a living mother, to be shocked and anguished by the revelation. But the death of Forster’s mother made no difference. Formidable new objections arose, concerning the risks to the reputation of Bob Buckingham, the manly policeman who was Forster’s almost-lover for many years. As the Freudians have long told us, the real censor isn’t so much the flesh and-blood mother as the one inside. Meanwhile, cowardice is good at masquerading as prudence or social responsibility or simple kindness. Whatever will the neighbors think? What about the children? And what will it do to poor Mama?