Activity Report: The Novel You Write In Secret About A Secret
On the novels you write and hide and yet don't give up on, and my upcoming class on E. M. Forster's Maurice.
During my sabbatical year in 2021-2022, which seems so far away now, I was unable to do much of the travel I hoped to do and instead stayed home and read essays for Best American Essays 2022, and went through my old files. I found two partial novels I hadn’t recalled starting. One was in an email I’d sent to myself back in 2008, a chaotic practice I was so proud of at the time and which has me at times searching keywords in my gmail, hoping I can find something—which is exactly what I was doing when I found this. The document I found that way was titled Other People’s Husbands, and I laughed and asked myself, “What the hell did I call this?” And opened up a manuscript I had basically whited out in my mind. That became the novel I’m now finishing.
The other I found in a folder in a box on a dot matrix printout so faded I could barely make it out. I was looking for a group of stories I’d written during my MFA and thinking I should turn them collectively into a novel. But it turned out I had done this, back in 1994 sometime, around the time I began writing what became my first novel, Edinburgh, and gave up on it in order to write and finish Edinburgh. In that novel, I was trying to write about something I had kept a secret at the time from everyone I knew except for one person, which, it turns out, was also approximately how Edinburgh began as well. I do intend to finish this one also.
When E. M. Forster wrote his posthumous gay novel Maurice, he was writing about feelings that were illegal, and while the punishment for homosexuality in the UK was no longer death, he could have been imprisoned. When Forster wrote the first draft in 1913, he had not yet had enough sex to make his first draft sex scenes credible to his private readers. In the 57 years between when he wrote the first draft and publication, he sought many readers including his young friend Christopher Isherwood, who helped him revise the sex scenes and the ending, and tried and failed to get him to publish the novel while he was alive. What makes me especially interested in the novel’s art now is the way his main character, Maurice, conceives of escaping the machinery of the British Empire entirely. He has a fantasy of escaping from the system of compulsory heterosexuality and living apart from society in the woods, like a sort of Robin Hood of gay sexual freedom and love. It isn’t just that he wants to love a man, he wants a whole new world in which to do so. In the class, I’ll address how he approaches this, based on the novel and the biographical record as well.
It makes me think of a writing exercise I’ve never tried but which I did have a class do once: everyone had to write down a secret they could never write about and put it into a hat, and then the hat was passed around, offering the secret to someone else, for whom it would only be an idea. Everyone in that class acted as if they didn’t pull their own secret, but the chance was there.
This class isn’t about that, though. I think any class about Maurice will be at least partly about how to try to write fiction about your secrets that you can publish while you’re still alive—a good meditation for Pride month. We meet online next week, Tuesday June 18th, 6PM-7:30, through the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. The course is a fundraiser for them. Please join us if you can.
My TBR:
In Tongues, by Thomas Grattan, just out from FSG
Nicked, by M. T. Anderson, due out this July from Pantheon
Toward Eternity, by Anton Hur, also out this July, from Harper Collins
Currently reading:
The Vulnerables, by Sigrid Nunez
The Collected Stories of Grace Paley, by Grace Paley
Christopher Isherwood Inside Out, by Katherine Bucknell, out in late August from FSG
Just finished reading:
Recognizing The Stranger, by Isabella Hammad, out this October from Grove. A slim volume, it contains this essay of hers published at the Paris Review, and a new afterword written last January. Hammad’s essay is about the Palestinian performance art of getting people to see they are human, about the long necessity of it, and as it was her Edward W. Said memorial lecture at Columbia in 2023, given in the last days of September, it has an uncanny prescient feel even as it is based on some ancient ideas of narrative and classical Greek literature.
Recently watched:
Scavengers Reign My new favorite science fiction series (I am already rewatching it). Originally from MAX, it was cancelled after one season and moved to Netflix, where, if it is viewed enough, Netflix will consider a second season, rumor has it. It has been called a cross between Studio Ghibli and Moebius, but I think there’s some Akira in there as well.
Ted Lasso I don’t know how I’m still watching this and yet here I am.
Coming soon, an episode of American Letters, and a long answer to a reader question about Tarot, and a new novel prompt for subscribers based on Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous.
Until next time,
Alexander Chee
We will talk about the happy ending in the novel and the idea of the happy ending, why it was political and correct, and what it came to mean to my generation, I’d argue.
I love Forster and wish he could have lived a more open life. I remember he said this, about Maurice: “A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.”