Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
The Story of a Panic
The Other Side of the Hedge
The Celestial Omnibus
Other Kingdom
The Curate’s Friend
The Road from Colonus
The Machine Stops
The Point of It
Mr Andrews
Co-ordination
The Story of the Siren
The Eternal Moment
EXPLANATORY NOTES
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SELECTED STORIES
Edward Morgan Forster was born in London in 1879, attended Tonbridge School as a day boy, and went on to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1897. With King’s he had a lifelong connection and was elected to an Honorary Fellowship in 1946. He wrote six novels, four of which appeared before World War I: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howards End (1910). An interval of fourteen years elapsed before he published A Passage to India (1924). It won both the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Maurice was finished in 1914 but not published until 1971, after Forster’s death. Forster also published two volumes of short stories (with a third appearing posthumously); two collections of essays; Aspects of the Novel, a critical work; The Hill of Devi, a fascinating record of two visits Forster made to the Indian State of Dewas Senior; two biographies; two books about Alexandria (where he worked for the Red Cross during World War I); and, with Eric Crozier, the libretto for Britten’s opera Billy Budd. He died in June 1970.
David Leavitt is the author of several story collections and novels, including Martin Bauman, or A Sure Thing. With Mark Mitchell, he wrote Italian Pleasures and In Maremma: Life and a House in Southern Tuscany. He lives in Italy and Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches at the University of Florida.
Mark Mitchell is the author of Virtuosi: A Defense and (Sometimes Erotic) Celebration of Great Pianists and the editor of The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing. With David Leavitt, he edited The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories and Pages Passed from Hand to Hand: The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English from 1748 to 1914. He is at work on a biography of the pianist Vladimir de Pachmann.
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First published in Penguin Books 2001
Introduction and notes copyright © David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell, 2001
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Forster, E.M. (Edward Morgan), 1879-1970.
[Stories. Selections]
Selected stories / E. M. Forster ; edited with an introduction and notes
by David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-440-67383-2
I. Leavitt, David, 1961- II. Mitchell, Mark (Mark Lindsey) III. Title.
PR6011.058 A6 2001
823’.912-dc21 00-045664
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INTRODUCTION
In 1947, the English firm Sidgwick and Jackson published a volume entitled Collected Short Stories, by E. M. Forster. This edition brought together twelve stories, all of which had already appeared in book form—the first six in 1911 as The Celestial Omnibus, the second six in 1928 as The Eternal Moment. (In the years between, Forster completed his last two novels—Maurice, written in 1914, though not to be published until 1971, and A Passage to India, published in 1924.) Although Forster himself sanctioned the title Collected Short Stories—he was famously indifferent to titles—this most subtle of writers served notice in the very first sentence of his introduction to the collection that there was less to the matter than met the eye. “These fantasies were written at various dates previous to the first world war,” he wrote, “and represent all that I have accomplished in a particular line.”
“All that I have accomplished in a particular line”: the posthumous publication of The Life to Come and Other Stories described that line. Quite simply, the “collected” stories were the ones Forster had felt comfortable bringing into print during his lifetime. Of the ones that would later appear in The Life to Come, four were early efforts, one (1903’s “Albergo Empedocle”) the author himself had adjudged “not good enough” to include in The Celestial Omnibus, one was his contribution (the fish course) to “Three Courses and a Dessert: Being a New and Gastronomic Version of the Game of Consequences,” a sort of writing game organized by Wine and Food in 1944, and eight concerned themselves explicitly with homosexuality. These eight define the second, and in some ways more particular, “line” of Forster’s short fiction. When he was alive, he shared them only with friends he trusted. Along with Maurice, though, he refused even to consider publishing them.1
One might think that the appearance of The Life to Come, in 1972, would have elicited, if not a full-fledged reassessment of Forster’s work as a story writer, at least some considered retitling; nonetheless, almost thirty years on, the stories from The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment continue to appear under the misleading and outdated title Collected Short Stories.2 Nor has a Complete Short Stories been attempted.
Why is this? For what reason, or reasons, have Forster’s stories been subjected to such strict separation, at least in print? Forster is a writer beloved, especially in England, by the literary establishment, and there is no challenging the fact that the posthumous publication of The Life to Come disturbed its assessment of his achievement as a short story writer (just as the posthumous publication of Maurice disturbed its assessment of his achievement as a novelist). Even those readers and scholars who had been aware of the existence of the homosexual stories were unprepared for their candor. Oliver Stallybrass, editor of the first several volumes of the Abinger edition of Forster’s works, wrote in his introduction to The Life to Come:
Where sexual themes are concerned, critical responses are notoriously subject to distortion by personal—or tribal—prejudices; and not every reader will find it easy to assess coolly a group of stories in which buggery is an almost unvarying feature ...
In actual fact, of course, homosexuality is also a presence in that part of Forster’s work that was published during h
is lifetime. What devastates Philip Herriton in Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), for instance, is that he loves Gino, his sister-in-law’s husband, more than Caroline, the girl he asks to marry him, while both Lucy Honeychurch in A Room with a View and Helen Schlegel in Howards End serve as surrogates for the homosexual hero Forster longed to invent. As early as 1911, he was expressing his “Weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat—the love of men for women & vice versa.” Though Lucy’s and Helen’s struggles to transcend the conventions of the society into which they have been born are not expressly homosexual, the transcendence they seek was one felt keenly by men “of the Oscar Wilde sort” (as Maurice describes himself). Indeed, Margaret Schlegel’s defense of her sister Helen (who has returned to England pregnant and unmarried) is equally a defense of the homosexual:
The pack was turning on Helen, to deny her human rights, and it seemed to Margaret that all Schlegels were threatened with her. Were they normal? What a question to ask! And it is always those who know nothing about human nature, who are bored by psychology and shocked by physiology, who ask it.
Paradoxically, the homosexual perspective that inheres in Forster’s “heterosexual” novels is often more eloquently and positively stated than in his explicit homosexual works. This is true for the stories as well: here, too, it is not to the harshly cynical tales in The Life to Come3 but rather to the “collected” stories in the present volume—the ones of which (if Forster’s introduction is to be believed) an absence of homosexual content is the “particularizing feature”—that we must turn to find a more redemptive treatment of homosexual sentiment. For though these stories may lack the blatancy, say, of “Dr. Woolacott” or “The Other Boat,” nonetheless a current of homoerotic longing runs just beneath the surfaces of many, much as in “The Story of the Siren,” the narrator’s drowned notebook on the Deist Controversy lies at the bottom of the sea, where “unseen fingers fidgeted among its leaves.” This is evident from Forster’s description of the young Sicilian fisherman who rescues the notebook:
If the book was wonderful, the man is past all description. His effect was that of a silver statue, alive beneath the sea, through whom life throbbed in blue and green. Something infinitely happy, infinitely wise—but it was impossible that it should emerge from the depths sunburned and dripping, holding the notebook on the Deist Controversy between its teeth.
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:
We are both of us out of date on the subject of sea. We assumed, as did the Greeks before us, that the sea was untamable and eternal and that strength could drown in it and beauty sport in it forever. Here we underestimated the mightiness of Man, who now dominates the sea as never before and is infecting its depths with atomic waste. Will Man also succeed in poisoning the solar system ? It is possible: generals are already likely to meet on the moon.
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:
[Harold’s] spirits also were roaring, and he neither looked nor felt a poor invalid. Science had talked to him seriously of late, shaking her head at his sunburnt body. What should Science know? She had sent him down to the sea to recruit, and Micky to see that he did not tire himself.... A fortnight ago, he would not let the patient handle an oar. Now he bid him bust himself, and Harold took him at his word and did so. He made himself all will and muscle. He began not to know where he was. The thrill of the stretcher against his feet, and of the tide up his arms, merged with his friend’s voice towards one nameless sensation; he was approaching the mystic state that is the athlete’s true though unacknowledged goal: he was beginning to be.
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:
“I have given him freedom all his life,” he continued. “I have given him freedom, what more does he want?” Henry, after hesitation, said, “There are some people who feel that freedom cannot be given. At least I have heard so. Perhaps Adam is like that. Unless he took freedom he might not feel free.”
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:
“Who desires to remember? Desire is enough. There is no abiding home for strength and beauty among men. The flower fades, the seas dry up in the sun, the sun and all the stars fade as a flower. But the desire for such things, that is eternal, that can abide, and he who desires me is I.”
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 sideli
ght 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.”
Often it does express it, and were that type of classification helpful we could make a list of the devices which writers of a fantastic turn have used—such as the introduction of a god, ghost, angel, monkey, monster, midget, witch into ordinary life; or the introduction of ordinary men into no-man’s-land, the future, the past, the interior of the earth, the fourth dimension; or divings into and dividings of personality; or finally the device of parody or adaptation.