Read The New Collected Short Stories Online
Authors: 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
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 Other Side of the Hedge 40
STORIES PUBLISHED POSTHUMOUSLY
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
INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW COLLECTIONin
The Life to Come and other stories
, Edward Arnold, 1972
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 generated, 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.’