Laurence Scott: rereading Maurice by EM Forster

This year marks the centenary of one of the best known gropes in English letters. A hundred years ago, the writer Edward Carpenter's young lover George Merrill placed a hand on the indeterminate region between EM Forster's buttocks and back. Shortly thereafter, Forster began his novel Maurice, and in a "Terminal Note" written almost 50 years later he identified Merrill's touch as its inspiration. While this genesis story gets a lot of press in Forster circles, for me what is more striking is Forster's description of Maurice as belonging "to an England where it was still possible to get lost". The militaristic demands of two world wars – the extensive mapping of England in the name of security – had, for Forster, robbed the island of its wild places. In Maurice, the ability to become lost in "the greenwood" provides the book's homosexual lovers their escape from society's punishments, and indeed even this happy ending can be traced back to the upper slope of Forster's bottom. As well as sparking a novel, Merrill's caress further initiated Forster into the comradely haven of his and Carpenter's rural domesticity: a Derbyshire homestead, safe from public scrutiny.

Throughout his life, Forster kept Maurice from mass consumption. Today it isn't widely considered a literary success, but, despite its failings, both the book's plot and its life as a secret manuscript have something to say about a major debate of our times: the extent to which the bounds of privacy are being redrawn. By means of the posthumous publications of Maurice and the homoerotic short stories of The Life to Come, Forster's ghost fought in the battle against censorship. The decriminalisation of homosexuality was tied to its demystification, and the fact that same-sex love now has a public dimension is a triumph of civilisation. But while the publishing history of Maurice engages with the politics of free expression and visibility, the novel's text radiates a nostalgia for reticence and a desire to fall off the grid. This instinct for withdrawal and obscurity speaks to present critiques of digitised life. In a world increasingly patrolled by online analytics and social media, Maurice's political dilemma still resonates: how might you not be in hiding while not being on display?

In Maurice, to borrow from Brass Eye, there's good darkness and bad darkness. The book begins with the bad sort: Maurice's adolescence is a descent into "The Valley of the Shadow of Life", Forster's image for the ignorance of puberty in which Maurice and his schoolmates blunder about, unable to fathom their own feelings. At various paces they scramble up the slopes into some form of enlightenment. The novel suggests that some lives may be lived out in spiritual obscurity, a perpetual half-sleep. Its crises or climaxes tend to involve a character being awoken from dreams; the book contains more than one amorous Peter Pan at the window. The motif of the dark trek appears when Maurice meets his Cambridge sweetheart Clive Durham for the first time, in a college room at the end of an unlit corridor. We're told how "visitors slid along the wall until they hit the door".

Never escaping the murk becomes a moral and spiritual failure. After Clive outgrows his Cambridge gay phase – a pretentious, celibate period fuelled by gauche interpretations of Plato – he eventually marries Anne, but Forster portrays their marriage as an extended fumble in the dark: "He never saw her naked, nor she him. They ignored the reproductive and the digestive functions … the actual deed of sex seemed to him unimaginative, and best veiled in night." Maurice, meanwhile, is terrified of mouldering in respectable suburbia, dragging some poor virgin into the sepulchre with him.

Unable to sever ties with his former love, Maurice becomes the reluctant, neutered house guest of Clive and Anne. But darkness also offers another sort of obscurity. In this good darkness you aren't drowsy but alert, and through it you can move unchecked. During one restless night, tormented by the suffocating air of Clive's decaying country seat, Maurice yearns to become fully invisible to a society that can only ever partially see him. "Ah for darkness," he thinks, "not the darkness of a house which coops up a man among furniture, but the darkness where he can be free!" He is overwrought and half-asleep, and so Forster risks giving him purple cravings for "big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science can reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend".

Having found his "comrade" in the form of the gamekeeper Alec Scudder, Maurice starts planning how they might escape forever into the shadows. He feels ready for the challenge, believing that "the forests and the night were on his side". When, after some misunderstandings and mutual cruelty, the men reunite in London, they wander the streets of Bloomsbury seeking "darkness and rain".

While Merrill's touch catalysed the writing of Maurice, the novel's themes, such as its tribute to the passive anarchy of "the outlaw", were arguably cultivated during Forster's travels. Forster was spoiling for a spot of anarchy as he set sail to India in the autumn of 1912. On the SS Birmingham he met a young officer who, Forster wrote to a friend, "hates society, God, and authority. He suits me very well." One night during the same voyage the novelist found himself conspicuous for not having followed English etiquette. "We began all by not dressing" – for dinner – "but the others have gone over to Society." Forster has Maurice think: "It was a dinner-jacket evening … and though he had respected such niceties for years he found them suddenly ridiculous." In the novel's final scene, set in a dark grove in Clive's estate, Maurice tells Clive of his love for his gamekeeper. The shocked squire immediately thinks of a way to salvage Maurice's respectability. Inviting him to his London club for a crisis summit, Clive advises, "Dinner-jacket's enough, as you know." These are the last words Clive will ever say to Maurice, who has already slipped away from him unseen into the night.

The story of a young man's search for erotic companionship amid dinner jackets and Maggie Smith-style Edwardian sneers, Maurice is, it's true, far from Forster's best work. But it has a powerful contribution to make to a modern argument about the delights of obscurity, and how much should be sacrificed to perpetual illumination.

While many travel to India for enlightenment, it was the country's darkness that interested Forster. Towards the end of his Indian sojourn, during the first months of 1913, he became enchanted by caves. The ornate Hindu cave-temples at Ellora were "the most wonderful thing" he had seen in India, though "too diabolic to be beautiful". The chief danger within wasn't the wrath of the godly statues, but the prospect of encountering a leopard. While Ellora fascinated him, he used the plainer set of Buddhist caves in the Barabar Hills, visited a few months earlier, as the site of the Marabar caves in A Passage to India.

Forster began drafting his "Indian novel" at more or less the same time as he was writing Maurice, though he would not complete it for another 10 years. The liberating, asocial darkness of Maurice's wild woods intensifies in A Passage to India with the "black holes" of rock in the Marabar hills. In their disorientating, echoing blackness, the Englishwoman Adela Quested believes she has been assaulted by her Indian host. But even their mystery and otherness are endangered. The scandal occurs because it is easy to be lost inside the system of near-identical caves, and "in the future they were to be numbered in sequence with white paint". The mapping of the world continues. In Maurice's 1960 postscript, Forster unites the threat to wilderness that stalks both novels: "There is no forest or fell to escape to today, no cave in which to curl up."

Although Maurice explores the demand for bravery in a hostile world, Forster is also an indulgent friend to those who lament change and then feel reactionary or paranoid for doing so. In 1908, while in his late 20s, he responded to the news of a successful aeroplane flight with an apocalyptic diary entry: "It really is a new civilisation. I have been born at the end of the age of peace and can't expect to feel anything but despair … The little houses that I am used to will be swept away, the fields will stink of petrol, and the airships will shatter the stars. Man may get a new and perhaps a greater soul for the new conditions. But such a soul as mine will be crushed out."

I'm five years older than Forster was then, and in these words I recognise my own analogous reservations about cyberspace. I was born at the end of the age of solitude and can't expect to feel anything but claustrophobia. The privacy that I am used to will be swept away, the air will boom with tweets, and Big Data will fashion my tastes. While it would be perverse to romanticise a world of homosexual abjection, I'll always be grateful for Maurice's ode to the greenwood. The novel argues for the preservation of a space, physical or psychological, beyond any sort of scrutiny or public comment, homophobic or otherwise.

Reading Treasure Island as a child, I remember feeling the power, wielded in the opening lines, of knowledge withheld. The narrator Jim tells us he has been asked "to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island" but to keep back its bearings. This sentence, which outlined what would and would not be told, was also my first exposure to the convention of the severed date: "I take up my pen in the year of grace 17–." I can still picture that little slice of nothing cut into the page. There's something both dangerous and peaceful in that dash, a relinquishing of transparency and completion.

If the dash seemed quaint to a boy in a 1980s schoolroom, it seems Jurassic in a Google world of instant facts and co‑ordinates. Social media, too, constantly invites us to fill in the blanks, to populate empty fields with our particulars, our bearings. There's joy and solidarity and succour to be had in this form of togetherness, and you might well argue that the dangers of obscurity are not worth the liberations. Wild places are by definition unsafe, elusive, and potentially diabolic. At the end of a dark corridor Maurice meets Clive, whose eventual rejection almost tears him to pieces. Maurice ultimately finds in Alec a comrade with whom to share the wilderness. But Forster makes clear that a life of real connection and intimacy takes guts, and if you want to find a friend you must be willing to face a leopard.