Selected Stories (9781440673832) (2 page)

 

The “great sunlit rock” upon which the scholar and the fisherman are briefly stranded in this story recalls that ideal of an ex-urban “greenwood” of which Forster wrote so eloquently in
Maurice:
a safe space in which two men could “share” unimpeded by the moral strictures of Edwardian society. Yet such a space, in Forster, is never free from threat. Thus when the fisherman speaks of an English lady who has written a “book about the place” as a result of which “the Improvement Syndicate was formed, which is about to connect the hotels with the station by a funicular railway,” the narrator's response is swift and decisive: “Don't tell me about that lady in here,” he declares, as if the mere mention of this do-gooder (a
Mezzogiorno
version of Miss Raby in “The Eternal Moment”) amounts to an act of trespass.

As it happened, half a century later, Forster would write about “The Story of the Siren” in an introduction to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's story “The Professor and the Mermaid,” observing:

 

Ever the prophet, Forster foresaw the moon landing: evidence of how far the invasive do-gooder's influence would ultimately penetrate.

A longing for homosexual love also informs “The Point of It,” a story in which the locus of solitude and intimacy is a boat in which two boys, Micky and Harold, are rowing. Harold has a weak heart, and when Micky encourages him to row harder, he dies. No inheritor of the Freud tradition will fail to perceive in Forster's description of the rowing episode a metaphor for strenuous and joyful sex:

 

Coming as it does at the culmination of this powerful and erotic scene (“the rushing ether stream of the universe, the interstellar surge that beats for ever”), Harold's death recalls the “little death” that was orgasm for the metaphysical poets. Yet this is not—as it might have been for Donne—the end of the story. Instead, “The Point of It” leads us from this transcendent episode on through the entirety of Micky's life, regarding him with a typically Forsterian mix of skepticism, benevolence, and reserve as he marries, grows up into the respectable Michael, then Sir Michael, and has three children: Catherine, Henry, and Adam, who flees England for the Argentine as soon as he can. In a revealing piece of dialogue, Sir Michael expresses to his other son, Henry, his bewilderment at Adam's decision to leave:

 

That “At least I have heard so” suggests that Henry is willing to acknowledge the impulse to claim freedom; he is even willing to envy the bravery of his brother, Adam, who has done so; and yet when it comes to taking action himself, he remains, like his father, impotent. Even Forster's choice of the name “Adam” contributes to the sense of primal struggle that underlies this otherwise polite story, especially toward the end, when the locale shifts from London to a Dantean purgatory and finally to a misty heaven that in the last paragraphs resolves itself into the very boat on which Harold died. Once again Michael is Micky, and he and Harold are rowing: “The sky was cloudless, the earth gold, and gulls were riding up and down on the furrowed waters.”

Water (and boats) flow through Forster's fiction, offering his male characters rare opportunities.
Maurice
concludes with Alec Scudder awaiting Maurice in a boathouse; in
The Longest Journey,
the closest Ricky and Stephen come to true and literal brotherhood is when they set a crumpled rose of flame afloat on a Wiltshire stream; in
A Room with a View,
George's swim in “the sacred lake” with Freddy and Mr. Beebe is “a holiness, a spell, a momentary chalice for youth.” That in memory these episodes become eternal moments for the characters who live them—moments of union the effects of which they will feel for the rest of their lives—is, finally, the point of “The Point of It,” summed up by Forster in one of his most haunting and mysterious passages:

 

Although Forster's stories have often been analyzed in terms of his literary evolution, little or no effort has been made to assess their role in the evolution of the short story as a genre. Certainly, critics have tended to dismiss the stories as a relatively minor affair, a sort of sidelight to Forster's greater achievement as a novelist. And yet such responses may say less about his gifts as a writer than about the English tendency to belittle the short story in favor of its richer and more cosmopolitan cousin. Even though numerous British writers were at the time finding homes for their stories in such journals as
The Independent Review
(later called
The Albany Review)
and
The English Review,
both of which provided forums for Forster's own work, the short story had not become the mainstay of popular culture in England that it was in late-nineteenth-century America. Indeed, the only English writers to have achieved recognition in the short story by 1911 were the Scottish-born Saki and Henry James (who would become, in 1915, a British subject).

Where there is little in the way of tradition, however, there is the opportunity for innovation and a rare degree of freedom. In Forster's case, perhaps because its very shortness meant that it required less of a time commitment from him than the novel, the story allowed him to indulge an experimental and sometimes whimsical spirit that one finds nowhere else in his work. He was being neither coy nor flippant when he described these stories as “fantasies.” In
Aspects of the Novel
(1927), he defines fantasy as fiction that “implies the supernatural, but need not express it.”

 

A strain of the supernatural is “implied,” as Forster would put it, even in the most outwardly realistic of these narratives—indeed, in all of them except for “The Eternal Moment.” For instance, in the first pages of “The Story of a Panic” (the opening story in
The Celestial Omnibus),
something happens to a boy called Eustace while he is on a picnic near Ravello. What exactly that something is Forster never reveals; we know only that afterward Eustace is found lying on the ground with a “peculiar” smile on his face, lizards darting inside his shirt cuffs and “some goat's footmarks in the moist earth beneath the trees.” Muddling things further, the story's narrator, a priggish English tourist called Mr. Tytler, maintains throughout a posture of cynicism and disbelief through which the occasional odor of perturbation, curiosity, and even attraction to the transformed Eustace nonetheless manages intermittently to slip. Yet rather than deadening the story, Mr. Tytler's narration, by its very omissions, invests it with vigor: his battles to convince himself do not convince us, and as a result the effect of unease and panic is heightened. This is one of several examples of the masterful and innovative use to which Forster put the first-person narration, and contributes to the “improvised air” of the story.

A preoccupation with the fundamental incompatibility of industrial progress and the human need for connection with the natural world runs through much of Forster's fiction. As a writer, he allied himself passionately with that school of literature that “committed itself too deeply to vegetation,” which may explain the oblique scorn he occasionally expresses toward Oscar Wilde and his “art for art's sake” aestheticism, most notably through the character of Leyland, the painter in “The Story of a Panic” whose disapproval of nature is rife with Wildean paradox:

 

 

Eustace's evolution, by contrast, into a singularly different sort of artist—implied when the narrator refers to his smile “on the photographs of him that are beginning to get into the illustrated papers”—derives entirely from an episode of intense
contact
with nature—a point emphasized, most movingly, when Forster likens the imprisoned boy's moans to “the sound of wind in a distant wood heard by one standing in tranquillity.” (Another homosexual foreigner alert to the mythological resonance of the Italian world was Baron von Gloeden, who dressed many of the Sicilian boys he photographed as fauns or satyrs, or even Pan himself.)

 

When Forster incorporates elements of the uncanny into a flexible, open-ended narrative, as he does in “The Story of a Panic,” he can achieve astonishing results. When, on the other hand, he emulates the sort of inelastic narration for which short story writers like Maupassant and Saki had become famous, the schematic rigidity of their methods fences him in. This is particularly true in “The Other Side of the Hedge,” the second story in
The Celestial Omnibus,
a cramped allegory in which a young man “of the road,” having chanced to break through the hedge that lines the avenue down which he has been barreling, quite literally, his whole life, finds on the other side a manicured Eden faintly resembling the grounds of a Cambridge college. Here Forster's anxious distrust of “progress” limits rather than frees his imagination, with the result that even the surprise ending—and like Maupassant's “The Necklace,” this is the sort of story that is written toward a particular ending—has a hollow ring.

Generally speaking, he fares much better when he gives himself room to breathe, as he does in “The Celestial Omnibus,” easily his most masterful early story and an example of the fantasist working at the height of his powers.
⁴
As the story opens, we find ourselves in Surbiton, that Ur-South London suburb with its “villas” named “Ivanhoe” and “Belle Vista.” A spirited and curious young boy takes a ride on an omnibus that carries him to a highly literary heaven where he meets Thomas Browne, Achilles, some Rhine maidens, and a variety of characters from English fiction, most notably Tom Jones, Dickens's Mrs. Gamp, and even the imaginary Mrs. Harris to whom Mrs. Gamp is always chattering in
Martin Chuzzlewit.
Later, when no one believes his story, he takes a ride on another omnibus, this time accompanied by his neighbor, the pedantic Mr. Bons.
⁵

Perhaps the most interesting facet of the story is its portrayal of Dante, whose vision of hell Forster would later critique in “The Point of It”:

 

 

In “The Celestial Omnibus,” Forster describes the second omnibus on which the boy rides—driven, as it happens, by Dante's shade—as being, like
The Divine Comedy
itself, “large, roomy, and constructed with extreme regularity, every part exactly answering to every other part,” yet instead of exhorting its tenants to “abandon all
speranza
(hope)” it urges them to “abandon all
baldanza”—
a little-used Italian word implying prideful self-confidence, even swagger. It is because of his swagger that Mr. Bons—a precursor of the stagnant Vashti in “The Machine Stops”—cannot discern the “moonlight and the spray of the river” that distinguish the rather Wagnerian paradise into which his child guide has led him: instead, at story's end, the heavens cast him out and down in a particularly gruesome and literal way.