Maurice, by E.M. Forster: Maurice draws a portrait of the eponymous protagonist, in the process of self-realization of his homosexuality while struggling with the taboos and social restrictions of his time. I’ve read Forster’s A Room With a View and Howards End a while ago, and somehow I felt the prose style in Maurice was rather different from what I remembered of Forster. (Or perhaps my memory’s just foggy?) Maurice is almost deceptively straightforward; the novel almost has the quality of a psychological case study, albeit with a more sympathetic touch.

In the beginning, Maurice is very much unaware of his desires, which express themselves confusedly in dreams and the usual cruelties among boys at public school. He only begins to “awaken” when he arrives at Cambridge and meets Clive, who is more self-aware but also conflicted about his sexuality in a way that Maurice, for all his obtuseness, is not. Clive tries to channel his attraction to Maurice into a sort of transcendent Platonic relationship, in what he interprets as the ancient Greek fashion, without allowing any physical consummation. Maurice easily follows Clive’s lead at first, but Clive abruptly decides after a trip to Greece that he no longer has any homosexual feelings and loves only women.

I found this part of the story to be the most bewildering and difficult to interpret. I was under the impression that most people who identify as gay or lesbian speak of their sexuality as something that they’re born with, something that they can’t just change or will away simply by wanting to. So is Clive simply going back into the closet? Or was his flirtation with “the Greek vice” merely an adolescent phase, the result of over-romanticizing classical times? How do you suddenly wake up one day and realize that your sexual identity has changed?

It’s interesting though how Clive and Maurice’s relationship starts in Cambridge and ends after they leave: the university as this highly artificial environment where Maurice comes to know himself but is unable to find fulfillment. It is only when he moves on from Cambridge and from Clive that he starts being an individual. At first he tries to ignore his desires, then tries to “cure” himself by consulting a doctor and even a hypnotist. But in the end, he does finally end up becoming sexually involved with Alec—Clive’s gameskeeper and a social inferior—and despite Maurice’s ambivalent reaction, one gets the sense that he has stopped trying to deny himself.

The ending felt a little abrupt—what happens to Maurice and Alec?—and there were quite a few unresolved issues left. Maurice and Alec are no ideal couple, and though their attraction seems much more tangible, they don’t seem to communicate any better than Maurice and Clive had. Forster wrote a terminal note, which made me wonder if the novel is unresolved because the larger social issue was unresolved at the time.

The Invention of Love, by Tom Stoppard: The play is set at the death of A.E. Housman, known for being a classical scholar as well as poet. As he crosses the Styx, ferried along by Charon, he sees moments from his life as a student at Oxford, where he met Moses Jackson, for whom he developed a lifelong unrequited love. Housman was also the contemporary of Oscar Wilde, whose shadow slips in and out of the play before making one appearance at the end to converse with Housman’s younger self.

I loved reading the play: Housman’s obvious passion for the classics delighted me, and I enjoyed the neurotic squabble of the academics who are his professors and colleagues. I really regret not being able to see an actual performance though, and I think I would have had a better appreciation for the play if I knew more about Housman himself (e.g. if I had read his famous cycle of poems, A Shropshire Lad). I got the sense that Stoppard quoted extensively, though I could only really note the quotes he attributed, and I think I would have a better understanding of the play’s structure and direction if I knew the references.

Stoppard’s language is delightful. There’s a particularly funny dialogue among Oxford academics, which incidentally makes for nice commentary on education and the purpose thereof:

Pattison: The modern university exists by consent of the world outside. We must send out men fitted for that world. What better example can we show them than classical antiquity? Nowhere was the ideal of morality, art and social order realized more harmoniously than in Greece in the age of the great philosophers.

Ruskin: Buggery apart.

Jowett: Buggery apart.

Pater: Actually, Italy in the late-fifteenth century…Nowhere was the ideal of art, morality and social order realized more harmoniously, morality and social order apart.

Ruskin: The Medieval Gothic! The Medieval Gothic cathedrals which were the great engines of art, morality and social order!

Pattison (at croquet): Check. Play the advantage.

Pater: I have been touched by the medieval but its moment has passed, and now I wouldn’t return the compliment with a barge-pole. As for arts-and-crafts, it is very well for the people; without it, Liberty’s would be at risk, in fact it would be closed, but the true Aesthetic spirit goes back to Florence, Venice, Rome—Japanese apart. One sees it plain in Michelangelo’s David—legs apart. The blue of my very necktie declares we are still living in that revolution whereby man regained possession of his nature and produced the Italian Tumescence.

There’s something particularly poignant about Housman’s love for Jackson. As in Maurice, Oxford becomes the place where Housman first discovers love but is unable to realize it; unlike Maurice, he returns to the academic world, keeping his passion suppressed by burying himself in classical scholarship. A lifetime spent loving one person without hope of ever being loved in return, and the way Housman preserves his love by remaining in the timeless cloister of academia appeal to my romantic sensibilities I suppose.

Faces Under Water, by Tanith Lee: I was bemused once I started reading Faces Under Water, which is the first book in the quartet, to find that the book was riddled with grammatical mistakes and ungainly prose. The lush, almost gothic descriptions that I remembered from Lee’s other writing were there, but I also saw missing periods, misuse of parentheses, half-finished sentences, and a fondness for repeating sentence fragments, all of which occurred too often to be excused as a writer’s liberty to break the occasional rule. On the other hand, A Bed of Earth, which was written four years after Faces Under Water, doesn’t show such egregious errors, so I’m inclined to chalk them up to a bad editor.

As for the story itself, the book focuses on the more sordid side of Venus, with descriptions of orgies, alchemist-magicians, and corpses. Even the beautiful is also slightly horrific, like the paralyzed face of Eurydiche, whom the protagonist falls in love with. I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I’d hoped; some of more grotesque moments were just grotesque enough to make the book fall short of being the indulgence that I expected it to be. My impatience with Furian, the main character, didn’t help: in Siddharta-like fashion, he abandons the life of wealth and ease to which he was born and chooses to live in the gutters of Venus instead. I imagine Tanith Lee wanted to evoke the usual dualities inherent in the element of water (each book is based on an element): beauty and corruption, life and death, purity and filth, etc. But mostly I just felt irritated at Furian’s lack of personality and Eurydiche’s passiveness.

Hangman’s Holiday, by Dorothy L. Sayers: I seem to be reading a lot of short story collections these days. Although the choice was inadvertent; I thought Hangman’s Holiday was a full novel. The first four stories feature Wimsey, two of which I’d already read before from Lord Peter; six focus on Montague Egg, another amateur detective whose profession is traveling salesman to a wine and spirits firm; and the last two are not properly mysteries at all and describe instead the crime as it takes place. Of the latter category, “The Man Who Knew How” came off as darkly ironic, but the very last story, “The Fountain Plays”, sent a shiver up my spine. As for Monty Egg, he’s a very different character from Peter Wimsey, and his stories seem to have a much more lighthearted quality although the crimes are no less severe. It’s surprising how much social class makes a difference in the character. Both Wimsey and Egg seem comical on first impression—Wimsey with his flippancy, Egg with his earnest devotion to selling his product—but have keen, observant minds and good insight into human character. Both are also always ready with an apt quotation, although where Wimsey cites a classic or a poem, Egg has his Salesman’s Handbook memorized by heart instead. In the end, I find Wimsey the more thoroughly developed character, which is only natural given that Sayers gave him several novels’ worth of development, while Egg (as far as I know) only gets a handful of short stories. The Montague Egg mysteries are self-contained “drawing-room murders”; the solutions are deft and clever but the setting is still everyday. Wimsey, even in short story form, seems to encounter more bizarre and more complex crimes.

World of Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse: I think I started reading this omnibus before because I recognized the first half of the stories compiled in this volume. They’re organized in more or less chronological order too, providing a nice survey of Jeeves and Wooster’s literary lives. Wodehouse never fails to make me laugh. Each story also has a predictable pattern: Bertie has a falling-out with Jeeves, usually over a matter of fashion or proposal of vacation; he then ends up pledging to help a friend out of a (often romantic) predicament; Jeeves eventually saves the day and by the end, Bertie gives in, no matter how strongly he made up his mind to not be managed by his valet. It really is amazing how manipulative Jeeves can be: several times, he actually engineers an unsuccessful outcome but convinces Bertie that it was for the best.

What an artificial life Bertie leads! In an artificial time and artificial society. But it’s comforting to look at this rarefied bubble of time: when “going to school together” meant one could rely on the obligations of friendship, when young bachelors of a certain class had nothing better to do than to dress well and enjoy themselves (at least until their allowance was cut off by an irate relative) and fall in love every other week, when the most terrifying prospect that one could imagine is the visit of a tyrannical aunt. I’m certain that even in Wodehouse’s time, the world was nowhere near so simple. But isn’t it pleasant to imagine that it was, for just one short moment?