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:
“Look, in the first place,” he replied, “how intolerably straight against the sky is the line of the hill. It would need breaking up and diversifying. And where we are standing the whole thing is out of perspective. Besides, all the colouring is monotonous and crude.”
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”:
For there is nothing ultimate in Hell; men will not lay aside all hope on entering it, or they would attain to the splendour of despair. To have made a poem about Hell is to mistake its very essence; it is the imaginations of men, who will have beauty, that fashion it as ice or flame.
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.
The antagonism between the mercantile and the artistic spirit—so dear and tormenting to Forster—resurfaces in “Other Kingdom,” one of his most memorable and disturbing fantasies. As this story begins, Harcourt Worters, a handsome young industrialist and precursor of Mr. Wilcox in Howards End (1910), buys a copse of seventy-eight beech trees called “Other Kingdom” and presents it as a gift to his fiancée, Miss Beaumont. Trouble ensues, however, when Harcourt—ever practical—proposes not only building a bridge and a path to the copse, but also fencing it in: a suggestion to which Miss Beaumont reacts with horror.6 To complicate matters, Mr. Ford, Harcourt’s ward, is in love with Miss Beaumont, while the story’s narrator, a classics tutor called Inskip, whose caustic wit belies both despair and suppressed homoerotic longing, adores Ford but cannot bring himself to say so; of Miss Beaumont, he remarks with typical edginess, “If it were my place to like people, I could have liked her very much.”
As the story progresses, its Ovidian conclusion begins to seem more and more inevitable, so much so that by the time we reach the last page, Forster’s decision not to give us the formulaic finale that we were anticipating comes across as a stroke of genius: though Miss Beaumont has indeed disappeared, no scene is offered in which Inskip counts seventy-nine instead of seventy-eight beech trees in the copse. Instead, the distinction that Forster draws between his two radically divergent beau ideals—Harcourt, all willed muscle and intention, and Ford, whose muscles came without effort “while he was reading Pindar”—lingers unexpectedly: another example of the degree to which homosexual desire clings to the scaffolding of Forster’s fiction, and sometimes even undercuts his putative intentions.
A suppressed desire for communion between men also informs “The Curate’s Friend,” a brief and generally forgettable allegory in which the friend is a faun who offers to do all he can to make the curate happy. When the curate proposes that the faun make his fiancée happy instead, the faun promptly arranges for the girl to fall in love with someone else. Yet this is not the end of the story, either for the “priest” or for the “poor woodland creature,” with whom he ends up forging a bond that lasts the rest of his life; nor is “The Curate’s Friend,” in the end, so much a meditation on paganism’s influence over Christianity as a portrayal of homosexual marriage in which all that threatens the curate’s happiness with the faun is the predictable disdain of a world that would gladly destroy them: “For if I breathed one word of that, my pre
sent life, so agreeable and profitable, would come to an end, my congregation would depart, and so should I ...” (One can hear in this passage Forster’s reasons for never publishing his homosexual stories.)
The Celestial Omnibus concludes with “The Road from Colonus,” the author’s saddest story as well as one of the only works of fiction in which he treats of old age. Here instinct loses wholeheartedly to the demands of convention, with tragic results for the story’s elderly hero, Mr. Lucas, who receives at the end of his life a glimpse of his destiny in Greece only to have its fulfillment taken from him forever. What he wants is simple: to stay (and presumably to die) at a tiny Greek inn with whose occupants he has felt a mysterious and perhaps supernatural kinship: in their presence, “something unimagined, indefinable, had passed over all things, and made them intelligible and good.” His daughter—a voice of “propriety”—will not allow it, however, and more or less kidnaps him away.7 “Ah! If we could only do what we wished!” her friend Mrs. Forman cries wistfully at one point in the story, thus giving voice not only to Henry’s impotence in “The Point of It” but also to the straitjacket morality that sentences poor Mr. Lucas to a rancorous and pettish dotage.
The Eternal Moment opens with “The Machine Stops,” a vision of the future at once bleak and disturbingly prescient. Critics have noted the influence of H. G. Wells on this story, the lone specimen of “science fiction” in Forster’s oeuvre; what is more surprising, and vivid, is the influence of Oscar Wilde. In light of the catholicity of Forster’s tastes, as well as the wide swath he cut across English literature in his critical writings, the almost complete absence of references to English literature’s most famous homosexual in Forster’s work is striking. There is something monolithic about this absence, a willful avoidance, as if the author of an essay about Roman architecture had failed to mention the Pantheon. Nonetheless, Wilde makes himself felt at several points in these stories, most notably in “The Machine Stops,” which can be read, at least in part, as a response to “The Critic as Artist” (1890). In this famous dialogue, Wilde posited a theory of progress according to which, as “we become more highly organized, the elect spirits of each age, the critical and cultured spirits, will grow less and less interested in actual life, and will seek to gain their impressions almost entirely from what Art has touched.” This might be a description of Vashti, the anti-heroine of “The Machine Stops,” a woman whose devotion to the purely intellectual has atrophied not only her spirit but also her body: “And in the arm-chair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh—a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus.”
Vashti’s dedication to the pursuit of ideas renders her the perfect citizen of a world in which physical interaction has been all but abandoned, and where individuals sitting alone in underground cells communicate entirely by means of a vast and much reverenced machine: she is Wilde’s supreme critic of the future, giving “lectures” through the machine on such arcane topics as “Music during the Australian Period,” and like her contemporaries exhibiting a great distrust of anything primary. Indeed, Forster’s description of a culture for which the phrase “Beware of first-hand ideas!” serves as a credo can on one level be read as a parody of the idealized and contemplative future over which Gilbert, the visionary hero of “The Critic as Artist,” expends such enthusiasm: “It is Criticism, again, that by concentration makes culture possible. It takes the cumbersome mass of creative work, and distils it into a finer essence.”
For Gilbert, “Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilisation.” By the same token, Vashti’s faith in the machine never flags, even when it starts to break down. An “advanced thinker,” she takes to heart the advice of a lecturer who exhorts:
“First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element—direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine—the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these ten great minds the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives....”
This is Gilbert’s “finer essence” brought to a height of distillation that would have horrified the postprison Wilde. Yet Vashti, in certain ways, is a Wildean aesthete (and critic) gone mad. She even talks like a character out of one of Wilde’s plays, at one point exhorting the stewardess of an “air-ship” on which she is riding to pull down the blind over a view of the Himalayas:
“And that white stuff in the cracks?—what is it?”
“I have forgotten its name.”
“Cover the window, please. These mountains give me no ideas.”
The strain of admonishment that runs through “The Machine Stops” is rendered all the more disquieting by the fact that in hindsight, so many of Forster’s predictions have proven to be accurate. For example, Vashti’s study of the civilization that gave rise to hers (one whose goal was to “‘keep pace with the sun,’ or even to outstrip it”) brings her to recognize (and lament) “that it had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people.” Instead comfort has become civilization’s goal, and inadvertently the cause of its destruction:
But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had overreached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.
No doubt Forster demonstrated his prescience most acutely, however, in his anticipation of the Internet, for though the future “Machine” he imagines is mechanical rather than electronic, it shares with that of our own age the ambition of bringing about a connection between human beings and the ironic side effect of isolating them: “And there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.”
Like Mr. Floyd in A Room with a View, “Mr Andrews,” the third story in The Eternal Moment, “need not be described”; indeed, with its vague talk of the “world soul,” it is more a public service announcement for brotherhood than a full-fledged work of fiction, tedious save for this fascinating conception of heaven: “For in that place their expectations were fulfilled, but not their hopes.” It is followed by “Co-ordination,” a curious and funny fable of education into which Forster was able to deposit much of his passion for music, which seemed to him “more ‘real’ than anything, and to survive when the rest of civilization decays. In these days I am always thinking of it with relief.” Beethoven was Forster’s musical touchstone. He played Beethoven’s music himself, 8 and Beethoven is the presiding genius of both A Room with a View and Howards End, just as Wagner—who figures crucially in several of the stories, most notably “The Celestial Omnibus” —presides over The Longest Journey (1907). Beethoven is, besides, the subject of the 1941 essay “The C Minor of That Life,” while Forster’s papers at King’s College include analyses of several of Beethoven’s piano sonatas.
In “Co-ordination,” Beethoven is shown sitting in heaven surrounded by his clerks:
Each made entries in a ledger, and he whose ledger was entitled “‘Eroica’ Symphony: arranged for four hands, by Carl Müller” was making the following entries:—“3.45, Mildred and Ellen; conductor, Miss Haddon. 4.0, Rose and Enid; conductor, Miss Haddon. 4.15, Margaret and Jane; conductor, Miss Haddon....”
Naturally, Beethoven wants to know who “this Miss Haddon” is. He is informed th
at she is a teacher of “maidens of the upper middle classes, who perform the ‘Eroica’ in her presence every day and all day.” For the students at Miss Haddon’s school have been caught up in a newfangled educational movement that calls for academic “co-ordination,” and that evolves, under Beethoven’s influence, into a more profound and natural kind of “co-ordination”—one that Forster celebrates even as he makes gentle fun of the “civilisation” that preceded it.
The theme of the title story with which The Eternal Moment concludes, like so much in Forster’s work, has lost no potency with time: indeed, in this age of Peter Mayle and Frances Mayes, the subject of the writer who destroys, as it were, by appreciation a place that he or she loves may be more resonant even than it was at the time of the story’s publication.9 Yet what distinguishes Miss Raby—the novelist whose description of life in a tiny village in the Italian Alps has provoked both its “discovery” and subsequent transformation (by its natives) into a tourist mecca—is her grave skepticism. No romantic, she tries neither to inflate nor to soft-pedal her importance as both a literary figure and a source of contagion. (In this latter capacity, the echo of “rabies” in her name cannot be ignored, especially given England’s historical—and hysterical—paranoia regarding that disease.) Every facet of Miss Raby’s character is leavened by a witty and distinctly Forsterian modesty, from her declaration that “I don’t like transfiguring people’s lives” to her assertion that “I am too old to be a tragedy queen as well as an evil genius” to the fact that she loves “the Latins, as everyone must who is not pressed for time.” She also loves—still—a boy whose brief declaration of passion, during a mountain walk twenty years earlier, is the moment from which the story derives its title.