"Contrary to the prevailing current?" Homoeroticism and the voice of maternal law in Forster's "The Other Boat." - E.M. Forster

Style, Fall, 1995 by Tamera Dorland

In his posthumously published "The Other Boat" (1972), E. M. Forster seeks to transform proscribed desire into a "confession of the flesh."(1) Captain Lionel March's "stumbling confession" and "open avowal" of having "'fallen for'" his bunkmate Cocoanut ("Other Boat" 186-87) attests to Foucault's rather poetic claim in "A Preface to Transgression" that sexuality exposes "the limit of language, since it traces that line of foam showing just how far speech may advance upon the sands of silence" (Language 30). Liminally caught between speech and silence, confession and suppression, the narrative disclosure of Lionel March's "tribal" transgressions against Victorian puritanism and British imperialism adheres, in Foucault's words, to "the authority of a language that had been carefully expurgated so that [sex] was no longer directly named" but was relentlessly "tracked down" (History 20). In spite of its post-Victorian context, a rhetoric of indirection and discretion still inscribes the narrative's scenes of illicit homoerotic intercourse between the quintessential British officer and a "wog" ("Other Boat" 175). In effect, this discrepancy between literary form and pornographic content constitutes an "open avowal" that belies its own openness.

In his critique of Forster's typescript of Maurice in Christopher and His Kind, Christopher Isherwood personally notes in 1932 that his "Master's" prudish or "antique locutions bothered him, here and there," while he concedes that "the wonder of the novel was that it had been written when it had been written; the wonder was Forster himself, imprisoned within the jungle of pre-war prejudice, putting these unthinkable thoughts into words" (126). More than four decades after having completed the original draft of Maurice in 1913,(2) Forster appears "imprisoned" by continued prejudice and post-war proscriptions against homosexuality. In "The Other Boat," primarily composed during 1957 and 1958, the author still betrays a reluctance to let go of "antique locutions" that essentially expurgate the language but not the contents of the carnal narrative. Fashioned by conventions of euphemism and circumlocution, narrative descriptions of the captain's acts of sodomy and eventual homicide ironically seem to "date" themselves, despite the author's "franker declaration" of his "faith" (Isherwood 126).(3)

In the successive scenes of the lovers' illicit intercourse "below deck," the narrator on the one hand counts on concrete referents that obliquely expose yet mock the squeamish enterprise of finding figurative substitutes for depictions of sexual excitement, as in the following image suggesting intercourse: "Pop went a cork and hit the partition wall. Sounds of feminine protest became audible, and they [Lionel and Cocoanut] both laughed" ("Other Boat" 178). On the other hand, the narrator purges the erotic plot of concrete reference and clear personal agency by embedding descriptions of physical orgasm and coitus in mystic abstractions. For instance, the narrative reads, presumably from Cocoanut's perspective: "Meanwhile the other one, the deep one, watched. To him the moment of ecstasy was sometimes the moment of vision, and his cry of delight when they closed had wavered into fear" (178). Marked thus by shifts in tone and localization, Forster's narrative vacillates between identifying the various stages of homosexual intercourse and providing a screen for its pornographic content through a stylistics of evasion. Such subterfuge in turn mirrors the secrecy Lionel himself must vigilantly secure about his deviation from the normative ideal - from being "what any rising young officer ought to be" in the context of a threatened British imperialism ("Other Boat" 171; my emphasis). This subterfuge above all reflects the officer's wary concealment of his transgression from the British sahibs and memsahibs of the story proper.

The parliamentary resistance to accepting recommendations of The Wolfenden Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offenses and Prostitution, initiated in 1954 and published in 1957,(4) reveals the stylistic subterfuge of "The Other Boat" as an element of Forster's necessary concealment of "'a wrong channel for [his] pen'" (Forster, Life xii). In his biographical introduction to Forster's The Life to Come, Oliver Stallybrass offers an excerpt from Forster's diary, dated 8 April 1922, in which the author confesses that he has "this moment burnt [his] indecent writings" (xii). Whether apocryphal or not, this confession refers to the bulk of his pornographic stories, yet excludes his novel Maurice, which nonetheless remained unpublished until 1971, a year after Forster's death. Characterizing these "indecent writings" as clogs to his development as a recognized novelist, Forster refers to them as a channel for personal excitement rather than literary expression (xii).(5) Originally composed for a novel, the early pages of "The Other Boat" were drafted about 1913, during approximately the same period, says Norman Page, as Forster's initial completion of Maurice and his first incomplete start with A Passage to India (54). Clearly, these early pages were not among those burned writings, which, as Forster explains, included only "as many as the fire [would] take" (Life xii). Presumably abandoned until 1948, the initial fragment of "The Other Boat" was published under the titles "Entrance to an Unwritten Novel" in The Listener (23 December 1948) and "Cocoanut & Co.: Entrance to an Abandoned Novel" in the New York Times Book Review (6 February 1949).(6) Providing the groundwork for the first section of the completed "Other Boat," both publications focus on the childhood encounter of Lionel and Cocoanut on the original or "other boat," but neither features their later homo-erotic exchange as adults on the second boat. As the "abandoned" novel evolves into its final form as a story, "The Other Boat" acquires four additional sections that reconstruct the events precipitating Lionel's lapse from rigid British propriety into interracial and homosexual "abandon." While the novel-fragment provides the origins for the reunion of the British captain and "the wog" as adults, the ensuing four sections developing from this brief childhood interaction confirm retroactively the illicit sexuality that lies at and threatens the very surface of a colonial past played out in the voices of "little boys" who don "paper cocked hats" and die "stiffly" as proud soldiers. Moreover, the voice of the abandoned mother, so important in the completed story, can also be heard as she attempts to keep such play within bounds of "what is customary" and proper (166).