E.M. Forster
The New Collected Short Stories
E.M. FORSTER
The New Collected Short Stories
With an Introduction
by
P.N. FURBANK
SIDGWICK & JACKSON
LONDON
Original collection first published
by Sidgwick and Jackson Limited in 1947
This new enlarged edition first published in 1985
Collected Short Stories copyright © 1947 by E.M. Forster
‘Dr Woolacott’, ‘The Life to Come’ and ‘The Other Boat’ copyright © 1972 by the Trustees of the late E.M. Forster and first published in 1972 by Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd in The Life to Come and other stories
Introduction to the new collection copyright © 1985 by P.N. Furbank
ISBN 0-283-99195-X
Typeset by Tellgate Limited, London WC1
Printed in Great Britain by
Biddles Ltd of Guildford
for Sidgwick and Jackson Limited
1 Tavistock Chambers, Bloomsbury Way
London WC1A 2SG
CONTENTS
Publishing history of the stories 6
Introduction to the new collection by P.N. Furbank 7
Introduction to the original collection by E.M. Forster 14
THE CELESTIAL OMNIBUS
The Story of a Panic 18
The Other Side of the Hedge 40
The Celestial Omnibus 46
Other Kingdom 62
The Curate’s Friend 86
The Road from Colonus 94
THE ETERNAL MOMENT
The Machine Stops 108
The Point of It 141
Mr Andrews 157
Co-ordination 162
The Story of the Siren 169
The Eternal Moment 177
STORIES PUBLISHED POSTHUMOUSLY
Dr Woolacott 208
The Life to Come 221
The Other Boat 238
PUBLISHING HISTORY
The stories in this volume were originally published as follows:
THE STORY OF A PANIC
Independent Review, August 1904
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HEDGE
Independent Review, November 1904
THE CELESTIAL OMNIBUS
Albany Review, January 1908
OTHER KINGDOM
English Review, July 1909
THE CURATE’S FRIEND
Pall Mall Magazine, October 1907
THE ROAD FROM COLONUS
Independent Review, June 1904
THE MACHINE STOPS
Oxford and Cambridge Review, 1909
THE POINT OF IT
English Review, November 1911
MR ANDREWS
Open Window, April 1911
CO-ORDINATION
English Review, June 1912
THE STORY OF THE SIREN
Hogarth Press, 1920
THE ETERNAL MOMENT
Independent Review, 1905
DR WOOLACOTT, THE LIFE TO COME, THE OTHER BOAT
in The Life to Come and other stories, Edward Arnold, 1972
INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW COLLECTION
There was a time, early in his career, when E.M. Forster considered his short stories more satisfactory than his novels, and another time, not much later, when he slyly lampooned one of them, ‘Other Kingdom’, in The Longest Journey, teasing by implication the whole Edwardian school of fantasy to which they belonged.
‘Near the house is a little dell full of fir-trees, and she runs into it. He comes there the next moment. But she’s gone.’ [It is Rickie Elliot, trying to explain one of his stories to Agnes.]
‘Awfully exciting. Where?’
‘Oh Lord, she’s a Dryad!’ cried Rickie, in great disgust. ‘She’s turned into a tree.’
Neither the preference, nor the implied rejection, need to be taken too seriously. What is more important to bear in mind is that the two volumes of short stories published by Forster, though the second did not actually appear till 1928, belong almost entirely to his first writing period – the one which ended curiously and suddenly in 1910, the year of Howards End. Indeed he bid a kind of farewell to his stories in that novel.
To speak against London is no longer fashionable. The Earth as an artistic cult has had its day, and the literature of the near future will probably ignore the country and seek inspiration from the town. One can understand the reaction. Of Pan and the elemental forces, the public has heard a little too much – they seem Victorian, while London is Georgian – and those who care for the earth with sincerity may wait long ere the pendulum swings back to her again.
Short-story writing was to become important for him again, however, and in an unexpected way. During the long interval between Howards End and A Passage to India he took to writing frivolous erotic stories on homosexual themes. It was done for purposes of relief, and he did not regard the stories as ‘literature’; but it had an important consequence. For, with A Passage to India completed, and feeling convinced that he would write no more novels, he found himself composing stories on erotic themes of quite a different kind: serious stories, very much ‘literature’ in his eyes – though they would not be published during his lifetime. Momentarily, indeed, encouraged by lavish praise from T.E. Lawrence, he convinced himself that one of these stories, ‘Dr Woolacott’, was the most powerful thing he had ever done.
This spurt of creation belongs to the middle and late 1920s. Thirty years later still, when he was in his late seventies, he embarked on the long short-story or novella ‘The Other Boat’, finding to his great excitement that he was creating with as much resourcefulness and vigour as ever. It is with this story that the present collection ends.
What might perhaps strike a reader encountering Forster for the first time through his early short stories, is just how strewn they are with deaths – or, more to the point, how curious it is that death should thus pervade stories so joyful and insistently optimistic. We can do a little categorizing in regard to these deaths. There is a class of death, like that of the waiter Gennaro in ‘The Story of a Panic’, which seems obscurely necessary in some scheme of rescue or salvation. ‘The Road from Colonus’ depicts a proper death, a death which is a boon, but which tragically is missed. Then, in ‘The Point of It’, we find a false death, followed by a true one. Death is here doubly a rescuer. As the hero Micky’s last chance to come spiritually awake, his death seems fated to be wasted:
One fact remained – the fact of death. Hitherto, Sir Michael had never died, and at times he was bestially afraid. But more often death appeared as a prolongation of his present career. He saw himself quietly and tactfully organizing some corner in infinity with his wife’s assistance; Janet would be greatly improved.
This first death of his is, in consequence, most terrible, a descent into ‘immense and superhuman cynicism’. Micky however is redeemed from the sandy hell to which he has doomed himself, by a second death, the remembered death, casual and heroic, of a boyhood friend. The pattern recurs, in more light-hearted guise, in ‘Mr Andrews’, where the first death and ‘life to come’ of Mr Andrews and his Turkish acquaintance prove a fearful mistake – for in that heaven to which their casual deed of altruism gains them the entrée they find only an extension of themselves: ‘Their expectations were fulfilled, but not their hopes’. By mutual agreement they ask permission to leave, and they find their proper and transforming death outside.
As soon as they passed the gate, they felt again the pressure of the world soul. For a moment they stood hand in hand resisting it. Then they suffered it to break in upon them, and they, and all the experience they had gained, and all the love and wisdom they had gen
erated, passed into it, and made it better.
That death should have this large role in Forster’s stories should not surprise us, when we consider how central to his philosophy was the paradox, attributed by him to Michelangelo, that ‘Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him’. It is hard to think, moreover, of another novelist who so exclusively writes in order to ‘say’ a certain thing. We may call this thing a philosophy, or even a ‘message’, and as such it is certainly most coherent; but it is also more concretely a specific novelistic vision. In his fiction certain features are continually recurring and seem to add up to an archetypal plot. Repeatedly, there is the figure of the spiritual rescuer. Again there is the panic scene: some sudden irruption of disorder or scandal, which may be beneficent (as in ‘The Story of a Panic’) or maleficent (as in ‘The Eternal Moment’) but is at all events an irresistible necessity, imposing its own laws. His characters will pass, characteristically, through a certain state of apathy or hebetude, full of portent for their future. And time and again a character will meet some turning-point, at which salvation hangs upon standing up and unsaying some self-stultifying lie. Or, to come even closer to the texture of narrative: there is a continual insistence on the fact of change – swift, unforeseeable and capable of transforming all things. The suddenness of the deaths in Forster is the most obvious example of this, but by no means the only one. The lightest conversation in Forster has a way of spiralling towards some quite unexpected destination.
The function of his short stories, therefore, is essentially to offer new ways, unavailable to the novel proper, of affirming or embodying the same single message or vision. The ways are very various and include caprice, allegory, utopian prophesy and realistic novella. At one pole stands, in his words, ‘the little god Pan, who presides over social contretemps and unsuccessful picnics’, at the other the admirably solid psychological method, with affinities to Thomas Mann, of ‘The Eternal Moment’. The stories seem to me a very important part of his oeuvre, and if I wanted to put my finger on one story to confirm this, I would choose ‘The Road from Colonus’. This most moving and inspiring story was written very early, well before the completion of his first novel, and was, as he tells us, one of the only three which came to him directly as ‘inspiration’. (It ‘hung ready for me in a hollow tree not far from Olympia’.) I think it is as fine as anything he ever wrote. Not even in A Passage to India does one feel a stronger sense of language and sentence-movement under intense pressure of control. We experience this in the very opening sentences, in that unobtrusive word ‘perhaps’.
For no very intelligible reason, Mr Lucas had hurried ahead of his party. He was perhaps reaching the age at which independence becomes valuable, because it is so soon to be lost.
The ‘perhaps’ (repeated a few sentences later) decisively distances the narrator from his character, making him a subject for impersonal enquiry and speculation, and at the same time aligns this narrator – or pretends to align him – with the reader. There was never an author so apt to vary his distance from his characters, nor one more irresistibly didactic or prone to exploit aphorisms (like the one slipped into the second sentence here). The point of his apparent complicity with the reader, however, is that we are not to trust it: at each new sentence, almost, we have to ask ourselves how much we are meant to concur in it, and much of the power of the story lies, exactly, in the sense that it may be us that it is talking about. A continual flicker takes place. Forster is all around us as we move in and out of Mr Lucas’s consciousness and pass from a judging attitude to one of identification. The style thus conditions us for those swift surprises of which Forster is a master. How much, allegorically, is said – I will not trouble to spell it all out – by that half-sentence depicting the beginning of Mr Lucas’s attempt to ‘die fighting’: ‘He took two steps forward, and immediately cold waters were gurgling over his ankle.’
Let us turn for another example of prose mastery to ‘Dr Woolacott’. Forster was not an experimental novelist in the Joycean sense, yet on occasion he could go quite far in the dislocation of normal prose-conventions, and in ‘Dr Woolacott’ the theme of a self-induced haunting is enacted by quite strange verbal means – an ambiguous handling of the personal pronoun and a collapsing syntax. Introduced by no ‘He said’, we read:
‘I put her to sleep as I passed her, this is my hour, I can do that much . . . ‘ He seemed to gather strength from any recognition of his presence, and to say, ‘Tell my story for me, explain how I got here, pour life into me and I shall live as before when our bodies touched.’ He sighed. ‘Come home with me now, perhaps it is a farm. I have just enough power. Come away with me for an evening to my earthly lodging, easily managed by a . . . the . . . such a visit would be love.’
In these later shorter stories the artistic impulse is in a kind of competition with the erotic impulse. It is a problem that in ‘Dr Woolacott’ seems to me completely and most cunningly solved. For the story is, as you might say – and this makes it an original enterprise – an imaginative justification for that despised activity, erotic day-dreaming. The invalid Clesant recognizes at a certain stage that the young stranger from Wolverhampton is his own invention, the product of his sexual frustration, but – so the narrative manages to contrive – health and virtue and our own sympathies range themselves on his side as he desperately, resourcefully, prolongs the dangerous fantasy. Better, far better, death, we are persuaded, than half-life and Dr Woolacott’s ‘Do let me patch you up, oh but you must just let me patch you up.’ Humanism goes with the flouting of prejudice and the braving of taboos, and in this story Forster proves himself a true and adventurous humanist.
‘The Other Boat’, it seems to me, suffers a little more from the conflict I have mentioned. There is no doubt the descriptions of physical love in it are rather over-heated and self-indulgent: this is written into the contract according to which such stories are produced. But that said, the story is a memorable achievement. The way it came to be written is curious. Forster, a few years earlier, had come upon a forgotten fragment of an unwritten novel of his, dating from before the First World War. It concerned an Anglo-Indian wife and her children returning from India, and her children’s shipboard friendship with a half-caste boy. He thought it good and had it published in The Listener, but later he began to speculate as to what might have happened had the elder son Lionel and the half-caste met again in adult life. The theme that emerged for him could be said to be about insight. Lionel, now an Indian Army officer, has a romantic and ‘heroic’ lack of insight: he really knows nothing at all about himself and is altogether deceived when he thinks he has thrown off his social and sexual inhibitions. In Cocoanut (it is an original conception) a thoroughly unromantic practicality goes with insight and foreseeingness on a grand scale. And the third member of the triangle, Lionel’s absent but symbolically ever-present mother, presents a sinister combination: knowledge of a kind, indeed omniscience, joined to utter lack of insight. (‘She understood nothing and controlled everything.’)
Structurally, the story is masterly. So much is expressed – the whole conception of Lionel as, in several senses, between two worlds – by the simple opposition of deck to cabin: the deck where Lionel’s ‘light military guffaw’ rings out among his bridge-playing Anglo-Indian compeers, and the cabin where Cocoanut lies scheming. With what subtle effect, too, the ship’s motion, the symbol of ceaseless change, is quietly but repeatedly registered, taking on a quasi-magical significance in the final detail concerning Cocoanut’s dead body.
The native crew had become interested in it, no one understood why, and when the corpse was lowered were heard betting which way it would float. It moved northwards – contrary to the prevailing current – and there were clappings of hands and some smiles.
It is a very large design, and new for Forster in a certain way. As late as 1930 he noted in his commonplace book that ‘Two people pulling each other into salvation is the only theme I find worth while.’ Nevertheless, a
s some point he came to suspect this notion of spiritual rescue as perhaps a fraud. Thus it was fascinating to him to be depicting, in this story, two people pulling each other into destruction.
P.N. FURBANK
London, 1984
INTRODUCTION TO THE ORIGINAL COLLECTION
These fantasies were written at various dates previous to the first world-war, and represent all that I have accomplished in a particular line. Much has happened since; transport has been disorganized, frontiers rectified on the map and in the spirit, there has been a second world-war, there are preparations for a third, and Fantasy to-day tends to retreat or to dig herself in or to become apocalyptic out of deference to the atom-bomb. She can be caught in the open here by those who care to catch her. She flits over the scenes of Italian and English holidays, or wings her way with even less justification towards the countries of the future. She or he. For Fantasy, though often female, sometimes resembles a man, and even functions for Hermes who used to do the smaller behests of the gods – messenger, machine-breaker, and conductor of souls to a not-too-terrible hereafter.