In the New Yorker...

[southendmd]

I know! Who says "shall" but also uses double negatives? British people in those days, I guess. It's funny -- I can live with the double negative; it's the "shan't" that bothers me.

I would probably forgive it in this context, but I find it really off-putting when modern people say "shall."

For some reason, in a question, it's OK. "Shall I make coffee?" wouldn't bother me. But I have a friend who, on Facebook, writes things like "I shall watch 'Maurice' tonight" and it always makes me roll my eyes.

I had understood that "shall" was traditionally used only in the first person; "will" was preferred in the second and third.

However, there's much more nuance, and reading this hurt my brain:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shall_and_will

[Jeff Wrangler]

I would probably forgive it in this context, but I find it really off-putting when modern people say "shall."

For some reason, in a question, it's OK. "Shall I make coffee?" wouldn't bother me. But I have a friend who, on Facebook, writes things like "I shall watch 'Maurice' tonight" and it always makes me roll my eyes.

I think that just makes you a typical American.

At work I keep a copy of Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage (2002) on my bookshelf. Webster has almost 2-1/2 pages on shall and will. The article begins:

The old distinction between these words is no longer observed by most people. Shall, which was once considered the only correct form for the expression of the simple future in the first person, has been replaced by will in the speech and writing of most people. ... In a few expressions, shall is the only form ever used and presents no usage problem: Shall we go? Shall I help you? [Shall I make coffee?] To use will in these expressions would change the meaning. [Will I make coffee? Heck, no!] With the exception of these special uses, will is as correct as shall.

The bracketed material in the quotation is my interpolation, of course, but the citation in the Webster for the paragraph I just quoted is "Warriner 1986." That would be the 1986 edition of John E. Warriner, English Grammar and Composition: Complete Course. "Warriner" is an old, old junior high and high school English textbook that in its original goes back at least as far as 1951. A former colleague, who used to be an English teacher, continued to swear by it as a grammar reference because it's simple, concise, and traditional. She impressed the rest of us on my team here at work so that a few years ago I bought several copies cheap on eBay as Christmas gifts for my team. I have the 1957 edition on my own desk. We need these things here because the "editors," who are computer people and not real editors, want a simple rule for every grammar change we proofreaders make. They won't take our word for it, even though we're supposed to be experts on this stuff.

In speaking I don't bother worrying about the shall-will distinction, except in such cases as in the examples, but in my writing I still try to observe the traditional difference. I guess you can take me out of 1960s-1970s public school English, but you can't take the 1960s-1970s public school English out of me.  

Of course, in speaking, when it comes to something about watching Maurice tonight, I'm more apt use a a contraction, where you can't tell the difference between shall and will.

[southendmd]

[Jeff Wrangler]

Don't forget Rodgers and Hammerstein in The King and I.

Last month, when I met one of the boys from the PA Ballet corps, I asked him, "Will you be dancing in the May program?"

In that context, shall would have sounded ... queer. 

[Front-Ranger]

Apparently, in the book, Alec says, "And now we shan't be parted no more and that's finished."
https://never-be-parted.dreamwidth.org/7265.html

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Apparently, in the book, Alec says, "And now we shan't be parted no more and that's finished."
https://never-be-parted.dreamwidth.org/7265.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Merrill_(gay_activist)

George Merrill
(gay activist)



George Merrill (1866 – 10 January 1928) was the lifelong partner of English poet and LGBT activist Edward Carpenter.

Merrill, a working-class young man who had been raised in the slums of Sheffield, had no formal education. He met Edward Carpenter on a train in 1891, and moved into Carpenter's home at Millthorpe outside Sheffield in 1898. His arrival was commemorated by Carpenter in the poem Hafiz to the Cupbearer.

The two lived openly as a couple for thirty years, until Merrill died. Carpenter died the following year and was buried beside Merrill.

The relationship between Carpenter and Merrill formed the motivation for E. M. Forster's novel Maurice, and the character of the gamekeeper Alec Scudder was in part modeled after George Merrill.

Carpenter and Merril c. 1900.

Edward Carpenter
     


Edward Carpenter (29 August 1844 – 28 June 1929) was an English socialist poet, philosopher, anthologist, and early activist for rights for homosexuals.

A poet and writer, he was a close friend of Rabindranath Tagore, and a friend of Walt Whitman. He corresponded with many famous figures such as Annie Besant, Isadora Duncan, Havelock Ellis, Roger Fry, Mahatma Gandhi, Keir Hardie, J. K. Kinney, Jack London, George Merrill, E. D. Morel, William Morris, Edward R. Pease, John Ruskin, and Olive Schreiner.

As a philosopher he was particularly known for his publication of Civilisation, Its Cause and Cure in which he proposes that civilisation is a form of disease that human societies pass through.

An early advocate of sexual freedoms, he had an influence on both D. H. Lawrence and Sri Aurobindo, and inspired E. M. Forster's novel Maurice.


(....)


On his return from India in 1891, he met George Merrill, a working class man also from Sheffield, 22 years his junior, and the two men struck up a relationship, eventually cohabiting in 1898. Merrill had been raised in the slums of Sheffield and had no formal education. Their relationship endured and they remained partners for the rest of their lives, a fact made all the more extraordinary by the hysteria about homosexuality generated by the Oscar Wilde trial of 1895. Carpenter remarked in his work The Intermediate Sex:

Eros is a great leveller. Perhaps the true Democracy rests, more firmly than anywhere else, on a sentiment which easily passes the bounds of class and caste, and unites in the closest affection the most estranged ranks of society. It is noticeable how often Uranians ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranian ) of good position and breeding are drawn to rougher types, as of manual workers, and frequently very permanent alliances grow up in this way, which although not publicly acknowledged have a decided influence on social institutions, customs and political tendencies.


(....)


E. M. Forster was also close friends with the couple, who on a visit to Millthorpe in 1912 was inspired to write his gay-themed novel, Maurice.  Forster records in his diary that, Merrill, "...touched my backside - gently and just above the buttocks. I believe he touched most people's. The sensation was unusual and I still remember it, as I remember the position of a long vanished tooth. He made a profound impression on me and touched a creative spring."

The relationship between Carpenter and Merrill was the template for the relationship between Maurice Hall and Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper in Forster's novel. Carpenter was also a significant influence on the author D. H. Lawrence, whose Lady Chatterley's Lover can be seen as a heterosexualised Maurice.



Later life


(....)


In 1915, he published The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife, where he argued that the source of war and discontent in western society was class-monopoly and social inequality.

After the First World War, he had moved to Guildford, Surrey, with George Merrill. In January 1928, Merrill died suddenly.

In May 1928, Carpenter suffered a paralytic stroke. He lived another 13 months before he died on 28 June 1929, aged 84. He was interred, in the same grave as Merrill, at the Mount Cemetery at Guildford in Surrey.

The grave of Merrill and Edward Carpenter at the Mount Cemetery, Guildford, Surrey.

Apparently, in the book, Alec says, "And now we shan't be parted no more and that's finished."
https://never-be-parted.dreamwidth.org/7265.html

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://mauriceficlist.livejournal.com/18027.html

01 JUNE 2013 @ 22:30

Update: Forster’s 1914 Epilogue to Maurice (full text)  



The ‘Epilogue’ was a feature of some of Forster’s earliest 1913-14 drafts of Maurice, but not the 1971 published novel. It remained unpublished until 1999, when it was included as an Appendix in the (definitive, scholarly) Abinger Edition of Maurice, edited by Philip Gardner (London: André Deutsch).

In a letter to the poet Stephen Spender (25 August 1933), Forster himself wrote of his ‘Epilogue’:

‘One wants to know more about him and Alec for every reason, and there was an epilogue, featuring them x-years later, but all who read it thought it bad, so did I, so I scrapped it in the final version.’

Forster’s ‘Epilogue’ used to be available to read online at the Dreamwidth journal of devo79 (see Endnote), but no longer. In view of this, mauriceficlist is re-posting the full text here for the benefit of readers, fans and scholars unable to access the Abinger Edition. (Style and punctuation are as in the Abinger Edition.)

--------------------

‘Epilogue’ (1914) to Maurice, by E. M. Forster

First published in 1999 by André Deutsch Ltd, London.
Copyright 1999 The Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge

--------------------



“The axe is laid unto the root of the trees…” This text, so well expressing her own state, rose unbidden into Kitty's mind. It had been induced by a distant sound of wood-cutting but she was unconscious of this. She was bicycling alone through a haggard country. All leaves had been stripped from the branches by an earlier gale, and now the wind boomed in monotonous triumph under a light brown sky. In such weather, the world seems emptied of good; warmth has gone, ice and snow, splendid in their own fashion, have not yet arrived. And Kitty had nothing to do, did not know where she was going, and did not care. She had left the high road because it wearied her, and turned into plantations; the track sloped, but into the wind, so that she still had to pedal, and over a worse surface. After an hour more she would get back to the inn where she was stopping, and eat her solitary tea.

“The axe is laid … therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down … but no one wants to be barren”, she thought. “No one asks to be cross and sad, or five years older. Some of us might have brought forth fruit if we'd been nourished properly.” And sighing she cycled on, while the sound of the chopping grew more distinct. At twenty seven Kitty was as old as most women at forty; youth had found no resting place either in her body or mind. Since Violet Tonks had married – that rather than her brother’s disgrace had been the crisis –she had lost her vigour, no longer attended concerts, lectures on hygiene &c, or cared for the improvement of the world; but looked after her mother or helped the Chapmans wearily. Now and then she “struck”, as she termed it; must have a “real holiday alone”, as on the present occasion. But she never came home refreshed. She could not strike against her own personality.

“Can I get out this way?”, she called to the woodman.

He nodded, and replied in an independent voice “If you see my mate, Miss, will you ask him to bring up a saw he has, please”.

“Yes, if I see him,” said Kitty, who felt that a liberty had been taken with her. But speech had interrupted her thoughts, and when the axe recommenced, it was as a human sound.

Half a mile on, she saw the second man. He was piling logs at the side of a clearing. She called to him, and as he approached, she recognized her brother. He seemed a common labourer –not as trim as he who had accosted her.  His trousers were frayed, his shirt open at the throat: he began to button it with hard brown fingers when she cried “Maurice”. But beneath the exterior a new man throbbed – tougher, more centralised, in as good form as ever, but formed in a fresh mould, where muscles and sunburn proceed from an inward health.

“What, you’re never still in England … disgraceful … abominable…” She spoke not what she felt, but what her training ordained, and as if he understood this he did not reply, nor look her in the face. He seemed to be waiting – like the woods – till her sterile reproofs were over. “We none of us miss you,” she continued. “We never even mention you. Arthur tells us not to even ask what you did. I shall not tell mother I’ve seen you for she’s had enough to bear. A man further up gave me a message to you about a saw, or I wouldn’t have spoken otherwise.”

“Which saw?” These were the only words he uttered: his voice was rougher, but still low, and very charming.

“I don't know and I don't care,” she said, flying into a rage. Maurice picked up two saws, listened to the noise the axe made, and moved away carrying the smaller. It was her last view of him. The road twisted out of the wind, and before she had recovered her temper she was coasting away far below. The evening grew more dreary, and sky tree hedges acquired a granulated appearance, as though rust were forming on them, and announcing the earth’s extinction.

As the tea brought warmth to her mind, Kitty began recalling her brother’s disappearance. She had never thrashed it out. “Something too awful” had been hinted by her brother-in-law, who knew most, and had been in secret communication with Clive. Clive would make no pronouncement, and had refused point blank to see Mrs Hall and be questioned by her. The two families drifted apart – the more quickly because old Mrs Durham and Pippa spread a rumour that Maurice had speculated on the Stock Exchange. This annoyed the Halls, for the boy, like his father, had always been most careful, and Kitty was allowed to write one of her sharp letters; she remembered its wording very clearly now, in the solitude of this Yorkshire inn.

But what was the “awful thing”? Why should a sane wealthy unspiritual young man drop overboard like a stone into the sea, and vanish? – drop without preparation or farewell? The night of the wonderful sunset he had not returned – to the vexation of Aunt Ida, now dead, who desired a motor-ride, and on the morrow he was not at the office, nor at a dinner appointment with Clive. Beyond that she knew nothing, for masculinity had intervened. It was a man’s business, Arthur had implied: women may weep but must not ask to understand, and he warned them against communicating with the Police. She had wept duly, and comforted poor mother, but emotion had now been dead there – many years, and Oh what was it? She longed to know. What force could have driven her brother into the wilderness?

Then she thought “He's not alone there: he’s working under that other man”, and with a flash but without the slightest shock the truth was revealed to her. “He must be very fond of his mate, he must have given up us on his account, I should imagine they are practically in love.” It seemed a very odd situation to her, one which she had never heard of and had better not mention, but the varieties of development are endless: it did not seem a disgusting situation, nor one that society should have outlawed. Maurice looked happy and proud despite his cheap clothes and the cold. She remembered how his face had changed when she spoke of the saw: it was the only remark that had moved him: abuse, entreaties, sermons, were all powerless against his desire to work properly with his friend. “Which saw?” Nothing else mattered, and he had left her.

Well, and she didn't mind. He could if he liked. She had never cared for him, and didn't now, but she did understand him, and could dwell on him at last without irritation. She saw why he had always repelled her, in spite of surface generosities, why she and her sister, and even her [            ]m, and lived in a state of war. What were their thoughts now? And as the evening drew on, and the carpet bulged up in the wind, Kitty's own thoughts grew less sociological. In particular, she began to think of the unknown friend as a human being, and to be interested in him. She felt that though commoner than her brother, he might be nicer to a woman, she liked his strong loose body and the softness of his brave eyes, and wanted to see him again. He was “the sort of person in whom all meet” – so with unconscious felicity she expressed Alec’s nature, and she found herself asking the landlady about the men who worked in the woods through which she had bicycled. Her question was vague, as was the landlady’s answer: there were so many woods, she implied, and so many men, and some came and others went.

“It must be much too cold up there alone,” said Kitty, whose idea of love, though correct, remained withered: for Maurice and Alec were at that moment neither lonely nor cold. Their favourite time for talking had been reached. Couched in a shed near their work—to sleep rough had proved safer—they shared in whispered review the events of the day before falling asleep. Kitty was included, and they decided to leave their present job and find work in a new district, in case she told the Police, or returned. In the glow of manhood “There we shall be safe” they thought. They were never to be that. But they were together for the moment, they had stayed disintegration and combined daily work with love; and who can hope for more?



Maurice by E. M. Forster, The Abinger Edition (1999),
edited by Philip Gardner, pp. 221–4

[Jeff Wrangler]

Mrs. Patrick Campbell: "I don't care what they do, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses."

[Reportedly, "Mrs. Pat" said this to a young actress who complained that an older man in the cast of a play in which they were appearing was paying entirely too much attention to the leading man.]

[serious crayons]

In a few expressions, shall is the only form ever used and presents no usage problem: Shall we go? Shall I help you? [Shall I make coffee?] To use will in these expressions would change the meaning. [Will I make coffee? Heck, no!] With the exception of these special uses, will is as correct as shall.

I would easily say "Shall we go?" and possibly "Shall I help you?" but I might also say "Should we go?" or "Can I help you?" or "Do you need help?"

And good point, Jeff, if you use a contraction, "I'll," it could possibly pass for "I shall." How I wish my friend would say that! Even "I will" can sound a little stilted. She's a Facebook friend but she's also been a friend in real life for about 30 years, and I have never once heard her say "shall" in ordinary conversation. Which makes it all the more annoying. I hate when people present fake personas on Facebook. (Another reason for you to stay firmly lodged in the 20th century, Jeff!)

How interesting to realize that a word I find so annoying on Facebook is one I probably use fairly frequently myself without really noticing it in the "Shall we go?" structure. Probably because I kind of slur it to "Sh'we go?" in which case it passes for either "shall" or "should."

I have to get to work and no time to read the Forster passage yet, but I believe I spotted a "shall" in there.

[Jeff Wrangler]

I would easily say "Shall we go?" and possibly "Shall I help you?" but I might also say "Should we go?" or "Can I help you?" or "Do you need help?"

In speaking, this is probably the structure I actually use the most: "Should I make coffee?" And sometimes, depending on the situation, I actually use the negative: "Shouldn't we get going now?"

I have to admit that when I take time to think about it, I probably do try to observe the may/can distinction because some teacher drummed into me that may is permissive but can refers to ability. But I bet that distinction is another one no longer observed.