E. M. Forster

Sur les bancs de Cambridge, dans les années 1920, le jeune Maurice Hall rencontre l’élégant et intellectuel Clive Durham. Bientôt, l’amitié entre les deux jeunes gens va se transformer en un amour platonique mais sincère, qui durera plusieurs années. Lorsque Clive décide de se marier avec une jeune femme de la bonne société, Maurice tente de combler le vide de son existence en donnant des leçons de boxe et en cherchant à « guérir ». Mais c’est lorsque l’amour se présentera de nouveau à lui qu’il parviendra, défiant la société puritaine de l’époque et acceptant enfin qui il est, à accéder à la véritable liberté. Publié en 197, Maurice est un roman posthume en grande partie autobiographique. Cette histoire magnifique et poignante d’une quête de soi a été adaptée au cinéma par James Ivory en 1987, avec James Wilby et Hugh Grant dans les rôles-titres. Traduit de l’anglais par Nelly Shklar.

Maurice

Rebecca Moraglia

They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon.

'I should have gone through life half awake if you'd 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 anyway.'

'[…] and since you've brought it up I think you’re beautiful, the only beautiful person I've ever seen. I love your voice and everything to do with you, down to your clothes or the room you are sitting in. I adore you.'

When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else. Blessed are the uneducated, who forget it entirely, and are never conscious of folly or pruriency in the past, of long aimless conversations.

Yet he was doing a fine thing - proving on how little the soul can exist. Fed neither by Heaven nor by Earth he was going forward, a lamp that would have blown out, were materialism true. He hadn't a God, he hadn't a lover - the two usual incentives to virtue. But on he struggled with his back to ease, because dignity demanded it. There was no one to watch him, nor did he watch himself, but struggles like his are the supreme achievements of humanity, and surpass any legends about Heaven.

There was something better in life than this rubbish, if only he could get to it - love - nobility - big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend…

'[…] 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 for ever - and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness?'

Then darkness rolled up again, the darkness that is primeval but not eternal, and yields to its own painful dawn.

. . . while deceiving others he had been deceived, and mistaken them for the empty creatures he wanted them to think he was. No, they too had insides. "But, O Lord, not such an inside as mine." As soon as he thought about other people as real, Maurice became modest and conscious of sin: in all creation there could be no one as vile as himself: no wonder he pretended to be a piece of cardboard; if known as he was, he would be hounded out of the world. 

Am immense sadness—he had believed himself beyond such irritants—had risen up in his soul. He and the beloved would vanish utterly—would continue neither in Heaven nor on Earth. They had won past the conventions, but Nature still faced them, saying with even voice, "Very well, you are thus; I blame none of my children.“ 

Maurice quotes

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