I thought E.M. Forster was the poet laureate of a certain kind of Edwardian middle-class gentility, all vicars’ tea parties and maiden aunts traipsing off to Italy to appreciate Renaissance art, as captured best in his 1908 novel, A Room With A View – so Forster’s collected short stories come as a real surprise and almost a shock. I had no idea they would be so weird, really weird, fantastical and almost incomprehensibly strange, some of them.

Forster published two collections of short stories in his lifetime, The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories (1911) and The Eternal Moment and Other Stories (1928). All the stories from both volumes were then brought together into the current collection in 1947. Forster’s brief introduction explains that all of them were written before the Great War.

The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories (1911)

1. The Story of a Panic
2. The Other Side of the Hedge
3. The Celestial Omnibus
4. Other Kingdom
5. The Curate’s Friend
6. The Road from Colonus

The Eternal Moment and Other Stories (1928)

7. The Machine Stops
8. The Point of It
9. Mr Andrews
10. Co-ordination
11. The Story of the Siren
12. The Eternal Moment

1. The Story of a Panic (25 pages)

A miscellaneous group of Edwardian middle-class ladies and gentlemen, including the pompous narrator, his wife and his two children, Mr Sanbach the curate, Mr Leyland the artists, the two Miss Robinsons and their spoilt nephew Eustace, are staying at a discreet hotel in Ravello. One afternoon they go for a walk up into the surrounding hills. A conversation about the view leads the artist in the group (there’s always an artist) to go on about how the ancient gods are all vanished from the disenchanted landscape, not least the great god Pan. But mention of the god’s name brings a brief shiver to the narrator who notices a cat’s paw of ripples passing over the fields opposite. Suddenly it becomes ominously silent. And then with no explanation, all the adults in the group experience the same hysteria, at the same moment and, without knowing how it happened, find themselves running down the hillside.

When they come back to their senses they realise they’ve left Eustace behind. Reluctantly they return to the clearing to find their picnic things scattered and Eustace lying unconscious. When they wake him he is a changed boy, become more and more frolicsome, skipping through the woods on the way back, gathering wild flowers and mouthing strange hymns to nature, ‘attempting to tackle themes which the greatest poets have found almost beyond their power’. In brief: he has been possessed by the spirit of the god Pan.

That night Eustace wakes them all by cavorting around the hotel garden, giving more vent to hymns to the sky and stars etc and letting out howls. The pompous narrator and Leyland, with the reluctant help of the hotel’s slovenly waiter, Gennaro, who has some kind of deep understanding of what Eustace’s going through, grab the boy and lock him up in his room, despite his protestations that his room looks out on the opposite wall, is small like a cell and will crush his spirit.

Gennaro warns the others that Eustace will die there, tonight, which the others take to be hysterical Italian hyperbole, but next thing they know, he unlocks Eustace’s door and frees him to escape through the pompous narrator’s bedroom, leaping from the balcony into the garden and then into the olive groves beneath, running off shouting and laughing as his helped, Gennaro, incongruously, falls dead at their feet.

Comments

You’d have thought this was a florid story for the period, but then again this was the decade of Saki with his outrageous animal stories. The story announces the fundamental dichotomy which runs through all Forster’s work: between the buttoned-down, stifled conventionality of the respectable English middle class and something wild and primal. There are the similar primal moments in ‘Howards End’ (the fantastical description of the Beethoven concert) and in ‘Passage To India’ (in the famous opening scene at the Marabar caves where Miss Quested has her vision of sensuality), and the Italian novels are built on the same basic binary: buttoned-down Britishers encountering the spirit of life and sensuality in hot Italy.

In a way, the most striking character in the story isn’t the possessed boy but the pompous narrator himself whose voice the story’s told in. Mr Tytler is the kind of person that thinks that every remark he doesn’t like is impertinence and whose self-satisfied pomposity emerges in a series of carefully planted comments and asides.

I always make a point of behaving pleasantly to Italians, however little they may deserve it…

Taking Miss Robinson aside, I asked her permission to speak seriously to Eustace on the subject of intercourse with social inferiors.

It is no good speaking delicately to persons of that class. Unless you put things plainly, they take a vicious pleasure in misunderstanding you.

And so on. Tytler’s character is every bit as important to the story (and enjoyable) as the actual narrative.

2. The Other Side of the Hedge (7 pages)

A short, powerfully strange fable. The unnamed narrator is struggling along an endless dusty track between high prickly hedges on what initially appears to be a particularly arduous country walk. But the weird reference to his pedometer in the opening words indicates something is very amiss which is quickly confirmed by other details. He has in fact been trudging along this track for his entire life which, his pedometer tells him, is 25 years, focusing solely on the struggle to forge ahead, to pass others and not be passed by too many. The ruthlessness of this quest is suggested by the casual remark that he left his brother back behind at some bend two years earlier.

Anyway, he stops to rest at a milestone and sees a glimpse of light through the thick hedge and, on an impulse, forces his way through, quite an effort as it is so thick.

Emerging on the other side he tumbles into a moat and is pulled out by someone who says ‘Another!’ Briefly, he finds himself in a landscape unlike anything he’s known before.

‘All kinds come through the hedge, and come at all times—when they are drawing ahead in the race, when they are lagging behind, when they are left for dead. I often stand near the boundary listening to the sounds of the road—you know what they are—and wonder if anyone will turn aside. It is my great happiness to help someone out of the moat, as I helped you. For our country fills up slowly, though it was meant for all mankind.’

The man who’s caught him, 50 or 60, then proceeds to show him round this strange new world. He sees a man who runs across to a lake, strips off and jumps in to swim, later a woman singing from some long grass. Where are the others, he asks, because he can only conceive of life as a competition. There are no others, the man explains: here people express themselves and take pleasure for its own sake.

The host explains that this place is intended to fill up, slowly but steadily, with all mankind. The hedge racer just can’t understand, because for him there is only the race and the competition. His credo is:

‘Give me life, with its struggles and victories, with its failures and hatreds, with its deep moral meaning and its unknown goal!’

He is shown a gate of ivory and a gate of horn, which are conscious echoes of the same gates in classical mythology. As the sun starts to set people lie around on the grass to go to sleep, in a relaxed easy-going way the narrator can’t understand. An older man passes carrying a scythe and a billycan of drink and the narrator attacks him, grabs the can, and drinks it thirstily, but the other simply remarks:

‘This is where your road ends, and through this gate humanity—all that is left of it—will come in to us.’

What does that mean? In the last few paragraphs the narrator becomes drowsy and the man whose drink he stole gently lays him down. With his last flickers of consciousness the narrator recognises him as the brother who he told us he left behind so many years ago.

Thoughts

See what I mean by strange and fantastical? Quite clearly it’s a fable with just enough detail to tease our minds but not too many to make it too specific. Surfing the internet I’ve come across two distinct interpretations of it, one specifically Christian, the other more generally secular. The Christian interpretation is that the narrator is a human soul trudging through the vale of sorrow which is this life, who goes through the momentarily painful experience of death (the thorny hedge) to emerge into Paradise. Here, instead of a narrow arid existence, everyone fulfils themselves, singing or swimming for the sheer joy of it.

The more secular one is that it is a warning against the arid, driven barrenness of what a later generation would call the Rat Race. Abandon endless striving and competition for a world where people simply are and enjoy pleasures for their own sake. The drawback with this simpler interpretation is the parts where the guide or the other man make great generalisations about all of humanity being destined to arrive in the garden, which push the Christian, or religious, interpretation.

3. The Celestial Omnibus (18 pages)

A delightful children’s story. The unnamed little boy narrator lives in boring Surbiton. He is talked down to by his mother and father and even their nice friend, Mr Bons (pompous President of the Surbiton Literary Society), gently patronises the little boy.

Nonetheless, the boy is intrigued by the lane opposite his suburban home where someone long ago stuck up a tatty notice reading ‘To heaven’. One day he is brave enough to go a bit further into the lane to discover it is a blind alley, but there is a piece of paper stuck to the wall giving details of what appears to be a bus service, apologising for interruptions to the service but saying that sunset and sunrise buses will still be working. Puzzled, he exits the lane only to run into the arms of his father who asks what he was doing down there, and when the boy tells him about the sign, falls about laughing, as does his mother when they get home. They are avatars of those stock characters, the unsympathetic and disbelieving parents.

Next morning he wakes up before dawn, still mortified by his parent’s ridicule, then remembers that the announcement promised a dawn service, so sneaks out of the house in the foggy dawn, across the road, up the little lane and discovers…

The Celestial Omnibus, drawn by two horses steered by a coachman wearing a cape, lit by two lamps which shine the light of fairyland over the bleak little cul de sac. He has barely climbed aboard before it starts moving? But how, and where? The lane ends in a brick wall! But it keeps on moving.

The sign above the driver says his name is Browne and when he speaks in a very ornate baroque old-fashioned style any bookish author starts to suspect what is soon confirmed, which is that he is Sir Thomas Browne, famous to literary types as the author of 17th century classics ‘Religio Medici’ (1643), ‘Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial’ (1658) and ‘The Garden of Cyrus’ (1658). Which explains why he speaks like this:

‘Tickets on this line,’ said the driver, ‘whether single or return, can be purchased by coinage from no terrene mint. And a chronometer, though it had solaced the vigils of Charlemagne, or measured the slumbers of Laura, can acquire by no mutation the double-cake that charms the fangless Cerberus of Heaven!’

As you might expect the omnibus clops on, surrounded by fog, which prevents the boy seeing where they’re going. There are cracks of thunder, the mist clears and the boy is amazed to see rainbows spreading out from under the horses’ hooves, and then a gorge stretching down to a river in which three maidens are frolicking. When the narrator says they are playing with something that looks like a ring, the educated reader of 1910 would realise in a flash this is a reference to the first of Wagner’s mighty Ring series of operas, The Rhinegold, in which three mermaids frolic in the Rhine.

So it’s a fantasy, seen through the eyes of a child, but whose elements (Browne, Wagner) are very much targeted at an adult, literate audience.

Anyway, the story suddenly cuts to the boy back at home, in disgrace, having told his parents a cock and bull story about a magical omnibus and rainbow horses and the rest of it, and been caned by his father for his trouble and locked in his room. He’s allowed out later to see friend of the family Mr Bons. It’s a sort of joke that the boy is given poetry to memorise as a punishment, and Mr Bons is to test him. (The poem he has to memorise is To Homer by Keats.) To his disappointment, Mr Bons also disbelieves him, but then delights him by agreeing to accompany him that evening at dusk, just to show him there is no such thing as a magic bus.

Except there is. The boy and Mr Bons arrive in the alleyway to see a new, different magic omnibus, pulled by three horses and the coachman ‘ a sallow man with terrifying jaws and sunken eyes.’ It is Dante. At this point it becomes clear that the point of the story is to humiliate the pompous Mr Bons. As the boy reels off the names of the people he met on his previous trip (Achilles, Shakespeare) Mr Bons tells him off for not making the most of talking to these Immortals and tells him to behave, keep silent, and leave everything to him!

But instead, when the omnibus reaches the ravine and rainbows spread from the horses’ hooves across it to form a rainbow bridge, Mr Bons sees nothing, denies these exist. When the boy calls out the voices of literary figures call back in celebration. When they reach the other side of the ravine, he sees the great Achilles who invites him to leap up onto his marvellous shield.

Yet all through this Mr Bons hears nothing and sees nothing. So only the young and pure in heart can see the world’s wonder and beauty. And, in a very Bloomsbury message, even art and literature are secondary to the ultimate aesthetic value, which is to live and love and experience the world directly and passionately, unblinkered by pompous conventions.

Mr Bons crawls from the omnibus in distress and fells through the rocks and disappears even as the boy is apotheosised, a laurel wreath placed on his brow. A cheesy postscript purports to be a quote from the Kingston Gazette noting that the body of Mr Septimus Bons has been found in a shocking state, as if fallen from a great height, near Bermondsey gasworks.

When I mentioned reading it, a friend said it was a childhood favourite of theirs and wondered whether J.K. Rowling got the idea from it for her Knight Bus in the Harry Potter books. Unlikely. a) Certain fantasy tropes tend to recur across different stories because they are based on common aspects of life, such as magic buses (or Hagrid’s flying motorbike or the Hogwarts Express). b) Rowling’s aim was to entertain, whereas this is a very didactic story.

In fact all the stories, fantasies though they are, point a moral, albeit a sometimes muted or obscure moral.

4. Other Kingdom (27 pages)

Part 1

Opens with a blizzard of dialogue from people who are undescribed and unexplained. It takes a few pages before we get it clear that Mr Inskip is the narrator and he is a young tutor teaching Latin to nubile young Miss Evelyn Beaumont, older Mrs Worters and Mr Jack Ford, a boy who is being coached to pass his public school entrance exam (so 12 or 13 years old). They are at the house of Harcourt Worters who is Mrs Worter’s son, the guardian of young Ford and fiancé to Miss Beaumont and the man who hired and is paying Inskip.

(Worters is pronounced ‘waters’.)

This slow revealing of details is an interesting play with the power of a text, the conventions of narrative. Because it’s only on the fourth page that Mr Worter, entering on the lesson, reveals that it’s not taking place in a room (as you’d assumed, lacking any definite description), but outdoors on the lawn. This deliberate slow revealing is a playing with, a toying with the magic of stories.

It is significant that they are, at that moment, parsing a line from one of Virgil’s Eclogues, ‘Quem fugis ab demens habitarunt di quoque silvas’, ‘From whom do you flee, O you madman? Gods have also lived in the woods’ (Eclogue 2, line 60). The bucolic note echoes the Panic story and all the other rural themes.

So young Mr Worters arrives on the lawn at the jolly little Latin lesson being given by Mr Inskip and announces to his mother, younger brother and fiancée that he has just purchased a bit of woodland abutting his estate named Other Kingdom Copse. Spot the heavy symbolism of the name? And then, in a gracious gesture, he presents it to his fiancée as a second engagement present. There is a little quibbling about the fact that the lease for it last ‘only’ 99 years, then these privileged people go inside where the servants have prepared tea.

Part 2

In part 2 of the story Miss Beaumont leads this entourage plus a few other posh guests across the bridge over the little stream and into her ‘kingdom’ for a picnic. This develops into a genteel argument. Everyone gets to see Hartley and his fiancée interacting and realise that they don’t quite mesh. She is penniless, a ‘crude, unsophisticated person’ from Ireland, from whence he plucked her to be his bride. But as the picnic goes on we see she is empty-headed and wilful.

That said, their little squabble is amazingly civilised. She says she likes the classics while Hartley thinks they are cold, lack a certain something, and goes on to mention ‘Dante, a Madonna of Raphael, some bars of Mendelssohn’…Hard to imagine anyone these days having the same kind of conversation.

After more ragging the picnickers break up, Ford goes off with the ladies leaving the narrator alone with Mr Worters. He is not stupid. He knows his job is to humour his employer. So he cautiously assents when Harcourt points out that Miss Beaumont is not too bright and is probably holding back the lessons for young Ford.

They have just agreed this when Miss Beaumont returns, happily yelling them that she has counted and her wood contains 78 trees! Unfortunately, Harcourt goes on to ruin the mood by explaining all his plans for ‘her’ wood, which include laying an ugly asphalt path from the house across the meadow to it and enclosing it in a fence with just one gate, with a two keys for him and her.

Predictably, Miss B doesn’t like this at all, and goes further. Harcourt doesn’t like the way the local yokels come up to the wood and carve their names into it. Surprisingly, Miss B knows this is part of local folklore, that the carving of names is part of local wooing customs, and if couples get married they come back and carve the initials of their children.

Something strange happens. She goes into almost a trance as she insists that she mustn’t be fenced in, she needs to be free. Harcourt tries to reconcile the quarrel by saying they can cut their initials into a tree now and Miss Beaumont (I think) utters almost visionary words:

‘E.B., Eternal Blessing. Mine! Mine! My haven from the world! My temple of purity. Oh the spiritual exaltation—you cannot understand it, but you will! Oh, the seclusion of Paradise. Year after year alone together, all in all to each other—year after year, soul to soul, E.B., Everlasting Bliss!’

This echoes the ‘there is a spirit in the woods’ motif announced in the Panic story and recurring through most of them.

Part 3

Cut to another scene (the story is in 4 distinct parts). Young Ford had been keeping a journal, with poems and sketches and so on. Unfortunately, Hartley discovered it and read some things about himself in it. Now Hartley is threatening to send him away. The narrator counsels complete prostration and abject apology. Unfortunately he does it loud enough for interfering Miss Beaumont to over hear and come over to them. When she hears about it, she promises to go see Hartley immediately and insist that Ford be allowed to stay.

There then follows a scene which reminded me very much of something similar in Roald Dahl’s story ‘Neck’, where he and the owner of a grand country house watch the owner’s wife and her lover walking and cavorting in the landscaped garden. Here, the narrator watches Miss Beaumont walk over to Hartley who is supervising workmen laying down the asphalt path to the woods (Miss Beaumont lost her arguments over that) and then, far enough away so he can’t hear them, watches the gestures as she remonstrates with her fiancé who mimes the part of a tall, decisive man whose mind is made up.

What followed was a good deal better than a play. Their two little figures parted and met and parted again, she gesticulating, he most pompous and calm.

As part of her presentation she took a few steps backwards and fell into the stream. Oops. Comedy. She’s fished out and sent back to the house with muddy skirts, to get changed and go straight to bed (to prevent a cold etc).

Part 4

Cut to the fourth and final part of this tale. Ford has been banished. Miss Beaumont is considerably subdued. And the narrator has been kept on as Harcourt’s personal secretary and so is more servile than ever.

I admire people who know on which side their bread’s buttered.

A strong wind blows up but Harcourt decides to defy it and take Miss B and the household’s other women down the new path to the Other Kingdom. On the way Miss B comes to life, shimmers and twirls in the strong wind, looks almost like a strong tree covered in foliage, spouts the pagan sentiments uttered by Eustace in Panic, runs flirtatiously ahead of Harcourt and disappears into the copse. And disappears altogether. She has been transformed into a tree. The entire story turns out to be the modern-day equivalent of one of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

A ferocious storm drives the search party back to the house, Harcourt conceives the notion that she has eloped with Ford (how old is this Ford?) and he and Inskip travel speedily up to Ford’s seedy lodgings in Peckham, but the studious boy just mocks them, saying Miss Beaumont has escaped (Harcourt’s patriarchal tyranny) ‘absolutely, for ever and ever, as long as there are branches to shade men from the sun.’

Comments

Although there’s obviously a plot etc, as in ‘The Story of A Panic’ it’s also an experiment in tone of voice. This time the narrator is a lowly Latin tutor with a well-developed sense of his place in the social hierarchy.

If it were my place to like people, I could have liked her very much.

…I must keep in with Harcourt.

He is sly and calculating and self aware:

For us the situation was intolerable. I had to save it by making a tactful reference to the view, which, I said, reminded me a little of the country near Veii. It did not — indeed it could not, for I have never been near Veii. But it is part of my system to make classical allusions. And at all events I saved the situation.

The words themselves are not exactly funny, but Forster’s dry characterisation of this cautious pedantic man is. Drily judgemental. And droll:

Her discourse was full of trembling lights and shadows — frivolous one moment, the next moment asking why Humanity is here. I did not take the Moral Science Tripos, so I could not tell her.

As in story 1, Forster’s characterisation of the narrator is a central part of the pleasure.

5. The Curate’s Friend (9 pages)

Are there curates any more? Does the role exist? They are very Forster, with his vicar’s tea party timidity. This is another story based on the dichotomy between the strait-laced values of Edwardian middle classes and something wild and pagan and untamed. It’s announced in the first sentence:

It is uncertain how the Faun came to be in Wiltshire.

The deadpan comic tone of this reminded me of Saki’s bland statement of the most outrageous fantasies.

The story is narrated by a curate named Henry (‘Harry’). He goes for a picnic on the Downs with his wife and her mother and an unnamed male friend. Somehow the Faun erupts beside them, making Harry shriek with surprise and go running into the trees. Here he finds, bizarrely, that everything is talking to him, the air, the trees, the earth, and the voice of the Faun. When the Faun says: ‘For years I have only spoken to children, and they lose sight of me as soon as they grow up’ I thought of Peter Pan, the boy who never grows up who first appeared in a J.M. Barrie story in 1902 i.e. a few years before this.

The dialogue isn’t realistic but in the arch contrived (and deliberately dated) style of a fable:

‘Poor woodland creature!’ said I, turning round. ‘How could you understand? It was idle of me to chide you. It is not in your little nature to comprehend a life of self-denial. Ah! if only I could reach you!’

The curate demands the Faun prove his powers by making the wife he’s come on the picnic with happy. The Faun promptly does this but it turns out to involve making the wife and the male friend overcome with desire and fall into each others’ arms – as in so many fairy stories, Greek myths or fables where a wish is granted but turns out not to be, in practice, what the wisher intended.

What’s strange is that this betrayal does, in fact, make the curate happy. The Faun commands him to laugh, the hill holds its breath (nature is personified like this throughout) and then Harry bursts out laughing. A coda indicates that he has for many years now spread the happiness and joy the Faun showed him to his parishioners.

Comment

It strangeness of it reminded me of Ted Hughes’s eerie and strange fantasy about a possessed vicar, Gaudete.

Also, it is surely blasphemous. At the end the curate announces that he has now graduated from curate to have a ‘living’ (I think this means he has become a vicar) and goes on to claim that he is only able to preach joy to his miscellaneous congregation because of this great pagan experience which came to him. If serious Anglicans read this in 1910, wouldn’t they have been offended that a Christian preacher is made to base his confidence and preaching on a thoroughly unchristian revelation?

Was it symptomatic of the great loosening of cultural ties Roy Hattersley attributes to the Edwardian age? Or would this story have been acceptable earlier, in the 1890s or 1880s?

6. The Road from Colonus (14 pages)

Part 1

Another story where something strange, a kind of pagan epiphany, occurs to a very English figure.

Mr Lucas is on holiday in Greece with a group who consist of his daughter, Ethel, nagging Mrs. Forman, polite and helpful Mr. Graham, and the English-speaking dragoman (‘an interpreter or guide, especially in countries speaking Arabic, Turkish, or Persian’). They are all riding mules through the parched landscape.

Lucas has married, raised his children, grown old and, now, as we meet him, is lapsing into ageing indifference. But all his life he’s harboured fantasies of travelling to Greece and now, now he experiences an epiphany. Arriving on muleback ahead of the others at a wooden inn in the sun-scorched landscape he spies an ancient plane tree from whose roots a pure spring is babbling. The tree has been hollowed out by generations of worshippers and Lucas stumbles into the inner darkness and has one of Forster’s pagan epiphanies:

When he opened his eyes, something unimagined, indefinable, had passed over all things, and made them intelligible and good…in a brief space of time [he] had discovered not only Greece, but England and all the world and life…

When the others catch up with him, to their astonishment Lucas insists that he stop there, in this place, near this grove of trees and the dirty old inn and the tree with a spring magically bursting forth. The title of the story comes from the family joke that Lucas’s daughter, Ethel, is like Antigone, daughter of the grown-up wandering Oedipus. And since Oedipus met his end at a place called Colonus, Mrs Forman makes a joke that this dusty place in the back of beyond is Mr Lucas’s Colonus.

Mr Lucas insists that he wants to stay there because he feels the truth of the landscape and the universe, the whispering leaves and trickling water, are worth more than his old life back in London, more than anything.

There’s some inconclusive bickering until young Ethel begs willing Mr Graham to help and the latter simply lifts Mr Lucas onto one of the mules and leads him off alongside the others and so off they go, with Mr Lucas suddenly rendered passive and powerless. From out of nowhere the children from the dirty little inn appear and throw stones at them (as if they are, somehow, spirits of the place, trying to retain Lucas there) but Mr Graham sees them off. All of this Mr Lucas observes with complete equanimity.

Part 2

Cut to the short second part of the story. They are back in London. Ethel is to be married soon. When Ethel moves out, they have arranged for Mr Lucas’s unmarried sister, Aunt Julia, to come to stay and look after him. He complains querulously about the noisy children next door and the dog barking and the sound of the pipes at night.

The post arrives, bringing a parcel from Mrs Forman who is still in Athens. It contains asphodel bulbs wrapped in local newspaper. Ethel is curious to see if she can still read modern Greek and so starts reading the old newspapers used as packing. Her eye falls on a news story about a remote rural inn by a stream. According to the article, one night recently a nearby plane tree fell over and crushed the inn, killing all the inhabitants. Then Ethel suddenly sees the date on the newspaper and realises that this tragedy happened on the night of the day they were there. If Mr Graham hadn’t forced Mr Lucas onto the donkey and Mr Lucas had stayed the night, he would have been killed along with the family.

The real import of the news, the thing the reader is left puzzling over, is that Mr Lucas had a genuine revelation, an overwhelming sense of understanding the universe. Did that refer to the way he would have died if he’d stayed? Was it a kind of siren song of fate trying to lure him to stay? Or was the full realisation of the secrets of the universe he felt he trembled on the brink of, is that equivalent to death? Is the full epiphany of the meaning of the universe the same as death?

7. The Machine Stops (38 pages)

Discussed in full in a separate review.

8. The Point of It (11 pages)

Part 1

A really strange, extended fantasy about life, death, hell and reincarnation. Young Harold and Michael are rowing off the Norfolk coast. They get caught in a fierce current and, overstraining himself, Harold drops dead of a heart attack. Doctors, the police and relatives call, but the story skips over time in a cavalier way, telling us Michael was 22 when this tragic incident happened, but lived to be over 70.

Part 2

There follows an eerily normal overview of this character, Michael, who goes on to become a civil servant, works at the British Museum, marries a supportive but unintellectual woman, Janet, has three children who grow up to be decent types, he writes some well-received essays, is knighted, Janet dies and, as he becomes a valetudinarian (‘a person who is unduly anxious about their health’) is looked after by his daughter. His death was absurd and random, for he was taking a short cut through a slum when he got involved in a fierce argument between two wives and when he tried to bring peace, was hit, fell and hit his head.

There’s a powerful scene in which we gather that Sir Michael is in a coma, in bed and being cared for by a nurse. He comes to consciousness thinking only ten minutes or so have passed but is unable to speak and hears his grown-up son and daughter discussing him quite brutally as if he can’t hear. Two of his grandchildren come in and are equally disrespectful. He is filled with a sense of the irony of the whole situation and abruptly dies in this mood.

Part 3

Now commences the really unsettling, upsetting part of the story, for Michael’s soul appears to live on into an afterlife but not at all the one we’re led to believe in. he finds himself embedded in a vast plain of sand across which a few pillars of sand move and disintegrate. He feels he has existed here forever and only a fraction of his soul was incarnated in his sorry body.

How long had he lain here? Perhaps for years, long before death perhaps, while his body seemed to be walking among men. Life is so short and trivial, that who knows whether we arrive for it entirely, whether more than a fraction of the soul is aroused to put on flesh? … It seemed to Micky that he had lain in the dust for ever, suffering and sneering, and that the essence of all things, the primal power that lies behind the stars, is senility. Age, toothless, dropsical age; ungenerous to age and to youth; born before all ages, and outlasting them; the universe as old age. (p.158)

There is a general atmosphere of spite and contempt, degradation and discomfort. He realises it is a kind of hell. He has a neighbour, another large sandy fungous form. They have a strange colloquy, Michael asking about this place. There are two heavens, he is told, the heaven of the hard and the soft. They are in the heaven of the soft, the afterlife ‘of the sentimentalists, the conciliators, the peace-makers, the humanists, and all who have trusted the warmer vision’. In the distance he can see cliffs of stone and realises his wife is there, in the heaven of the hard, with ‘the reformers and ascetics and all sword-like souls.’ He realises that:

the years are bound either to liquefy a man or to stiffen him, and that Love and Truth, who seem to contend for our souls like angels, hold each the seeds of our decay.

What on earth does this mean? Is it a kind of humanist rewriting of the Christian heaven and hell or a horrible modernist vision, in its grim bleakness not far from Kafka or Beckett? He regrets having lived such a ‘soft’ life, and missing the chance to distil the joy which is possible at the heart of human existence. But here everything is degraded and disgusting and mediocre. It completely lacks the excitement of the Christian vision, that is too flattering by far.

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 imagination of men, who will have beauty, that fashions it as ice or flame. Old, but capable of growing older, Micky lay in the sandy country…

I found this quite horrible and repellent. Then it gets worse. A voice comes from across the wide river on the other side of which dwell the damned. It crosses the river and shatters pillars of sand and preaches a wisdom which stabs Michael with pain.

‘I was before choice,’ came the song. ‘I was before hardness and softness were divided. I was in the days when truth was love. And I am.’

Is this Jesus, God, the Devil, what?

‘I have been all men, but all men have forgotten me. I transfigured the world for them until they preferred the world. They came to me as children, afraid; I taught them, and they despised me. Childhood is a dream about me, experience a slow forgetting: I govern the magic years between them, and am.’

I found it hard to understand. It has the shapes and rhetoric of religion but fits no religion I understand. I’m quoting it at such length because paraphrase would simplify it too much because it is so weird.

‘Death comes,’ the voice pealed, ‘and death is not a dream or a forgetting. Death is real. But I, too, am real, and whom I will I save. I see the scheme of things, and in it no place for me, the brain and the body against me. Therefore I rend the scheme in two, and make a place, and under countless names have harrowed Hell. Come.’ Then, in tones of inexpressible sweetness, ‘Come to me all who remember. Come out of your eternity into mine. It is easy, for I am still at your eyes, waiting to look out of them; still in your hearts, waiting to beat. The years that I dwelt with you seemed short, but they were magical, and they outrun time.’

And the narrator says that Mickey died another death, in pain, found himself standing in the plain (instead of lying half buried) staggered down the sand towards the river, was in the water bumping against some wood, and then…he is back in his young man’s body, in the rowing boat as Harry struggles against the tide. Apparently he has been reincarnated back to that crucial moment in his life, just as Harry is about to collapse. Apparently, he will live the next fifty years over again. And again?

This story confused and upset me, its fundamental unhappiness, the dreariness of the imagery, the sense of there never being completion but an eternity of sand-clogged old age and regret…Yuk.

9. Mr Andrews (5 pages)

Could be called ‘Mr Andrews goes to heaven’ for that’s what happens. It opens sounding like conventional Christianity only it isn’t:

The souls of the dead were ascending towards the Judgment Seat and the Gate of Heaven. The world soul pressed them on every side, just as the atmosphere presses upon rising bubbles, striving to vanquish them, to break their thin envelope of personality, to mingle their virtue with its own. But they resisted, remembering their glorious individual life on earth, and hoping for an individual life to come.

The Judgement Seat and the Gate of Heaven are Christian alright but the notion of the world soul isn’t and the idea that this world soul strives to burst the individual soul and absorb them is something out of science fiction.

Anyway, floating up to heaven he bumps into the soul of a Muslim, a Turk. They strike up a friendship, each under the impression they are heading for the heaven of their religion and that the other will be excluded. Sad about this, at the gate of heaven, rather than ask admittance for themselves they ask that their friend can be admitted. Of course they are both allowed in and given the accoutrements of their faith, a harp for Mr Andrews, a collection of nubile virgins for the Turk.

Mr Andrews goes wandering round heaven and sees many sights, including gods from all the religions, but is unsatisfied. He can’t find any friends, in fact the whole place seems curiously unpopulated. He experiences no joy or bliss (very reminiscent of Sir Michael in the previous story, who finds the afterlife grim, flat and depressing). When he stumbles across the Turk and his harem he discovers that he, too, is unsatisfied.

They decide to go back to the Gate of Heaven, Mr Andrew explaining on the way that maybe heaven is disappointing because it reflects his imagination and he’s never imagined anything so perfect:

‘We desire infinity and we cannot imagine it. How can we expect it to be granted? I have never imagined anything infinitely good or beautiful excepting in my dreams.’

So they ask to leave. The voice warns them but they insist. they have barely exited heaven before they feel the World Soul pressing against them and, this time, they abandon themselves to it.

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. (p.170)

I need someone to explain this to me. Is it a fable dramatising Forster’s essentially secular humanism? Is he saying conventional heaven is disappointing, what you have to do is give yourself… but to what? Is it a variation on the motto ‘only connect’ which is the epigraph and central theme of ‘Howard’s End’?

10. Co-ordination (8 pages)

A weird tale combining St Trinians with the afterlife.

Teachers at a girls private school are giving lessons in music and history. They are all focusing on one subject, Napoleon, as part of what the Principal describes as her new co-ordinative system.

Meanwhile, up in heaven, sits Beethoven surrounded by his clerks (?!) annotating every single performance of his music anywhere, by anyone, no matter how amateur. They are logging each of the lessons the school music mistress, Miss Haddon is giving. Beethoven is pleased.

Meanwhile, over on another cloud sits Napoleon surrounded by his clerks, who are recording every time he is mentioned or studied, and are recording the lessons being given at this school by the history mistress.

Bored of the daily routine, that evening while the girls are at prep Miss Haddon lifts a paperweight to her ear and has a transcendent vision of the sound of the sea. When the Principal comes in and asks her what she thinks she’s doing and takes the shell from her, she puts it to her ear and hears the sounds of a vernal wood (?!).

Somehow both women are changed. Miss Haddon reveals that she is no good at music, doesn’t like it and wants to stop teaching it. Instead of bawling her out the Principal offers to supervise her prep lesson. Next morning Miss Haddon still wants to leave and announces that she’s inherited a house by the sea. The Principal not only accepts this but praises her. they cancel lessons for the day and drive the girls out into the countryside where they play games, again in a relaxed and slightly anarchic way. The day climaxes when the Principal announces she is abandoning the co-ordinative system to cheers from the girls.

Cut to the last page where, in a comic or fantastical coda, Mephistopheles, having noticed this is flying, apparently to God (?) bearing a scroll listing these deficiencies (the Principal’s abandonment of the co-ordinative system?). He bumps into the archangel Raphael who asks him whither he is flying. Mephistopheles says he has a real case to put to God. The little incidents just described prove the futility of genius; prove that great men think that they are understood, and are not; and that men think that they understand them, and do not. Ha! Got ’em! This is how the story ends:

‘If you can prove that, you have indeed a case,’ said Raphael. ‘For this universe is supposed to rest on co-ordination, all creatures co-ordinating according to their powers.’
‘Listen. Charge one: Beethoven decrees that certain females shall hear a performance of his A minor quartet. They hear – some of them a band, others a shell. Charge two: Napoleon decrees that the same shall participate in the victory of Austerlitz. Result – a legacy, followed by a school treat. Charge three: Females perform Beethoven. Being deaf, and being served by dishonest clerks, he supposes they are performing him with insight. Charge four: To impress the Board of Education, females study Napoleon. He is led to suppose that they are studying him properly. I have other points, but these will suffice. The genius and the ordinary man have never co-ordinated once since Abel was killed by Cain.’
‘And now for your case,” said Raphael, sympathetically.
‘My case?’ stammered Mephistopheles. ‘Why, this is my case.’
‘Oh, innocent devil,’ cried the other. ‘Oh, candid if infernal soul. Go back to the earth and walk up and down it again. For these people have co-ordinated, Mephistopheles. They have co-ordinated through the central sources of Melody and Victory.’

I literally don’t understand this. Is it some kind of satire on some Edwardian educational fashion? I don’t understand why the notion of ‘co-ordination’ needs a story like this. I don’t really understand what Mephistopheles is on about. And I don’t understand Gabriel’s rejoinder that ‘They have co-ordinated through the central sources of Melody and Victory.’

I really need a Sparks notes or some kind of explanation of what half these stories are about. This is much harder than Beckett or Kafka.

11. The Story of the Siren (9 pages)

Italy again, and the priggish narrator drops his notebook over the side of the boat he and his tourist party are being rowed in. Down into the Mediterranean it sinks to a chorus of comments from the various members of the group. One of their two sailors starts to strip to jump in and retrieve it, so one of the ladies suggests they leave him there to do so. In the event the narrator offers to stay as well. The Sicilian parks him on a bit of beach, reascends the rock and dives into the sea, a magnificent specimen of young manhood – maybe it’s my imagination that you can feel Forster’s gay sensibility in the description.

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… (p.180)

After he’s resurfaced with the book, the Sicilian says on such a day one might see the Siren. The narrator thinks he’s joking and plays along, claiming to have seen her often. But the Sicilian isn’t joking. He perfectly seriously describes how the priests have blessed the air and the rock so the Siren can come out to breathe or sit anywhere, but she can remain in the sea.

He knows this because his older brother Giuseppe once dove into the water without making the preliminary sign of the cross and he saw the Siren. He re-emerged huge and endlessly wet, they put him to bed and had the priests bless him but nothing would make him dry.

Giuseppe becomes a zombie, he won’t talk, won’t work. He stands in the street and cries because he knows everyone will die. When the Sicilian reads a newspaper story about a girl who came out of the sea mad, Giuseppe immediately sets off to find her, abducts and marries her. Then the Sicilian finds himself working for two masters of one mind.

Then the girl got pregnant and the villagers started whispering, throwing stones. An old witch prophesied that the child would fetch the Siren up into the air, she would sing her song and trigger the End of the World. A storm blows up and the pregnant girl (named Maria) insists on going out along the clifftops to see it and, predictably, one or some of the villagers push her over. The Sicilian grabs some kitchen knives and makes as if to find the killer but Giuseppe grabs his wrists and dislocates them so the Sicilian faints with the pain. When he comes round Giuseppe is gone and he’s never seen him since.

He knows it was the village priest who killed her but he emigrates to America. He hears that his brother Giuseppe is scouring the world for anyone else who has seen the Siren but at Liverpool he sickens and dies of tuberculosis.

Then in the last few sentences the Sicilian changes tack by saying that never again will there be a young man and woman who see the Siren and are capable of bearing the child who will call her up from the sea to save the world. Save? Yes, from its silence and loneliness, he says, but before he can explain further the daytrip boat comes into their little grotto with its cargo of yakking tourists and the explanation is lost forever.

Comment

Magic grottos, beautiful young men, an atmosphere of magic, a mythical figure, a legendary tale. Come to sunny Italy where you can release your uptight English inhibitions!

12. The Eternal Moment (35 pages)

Part 1

Miss Raby is a successful novelist so people expect her to be a bit unconventional and opinionated. Her success is based on her bestselling novel ‘The Eternal Moment’ which was set in the picturesque Tyrol village of Vorta and featured many of the real-life inhabitants. Now, over nearly 20 years after the place brought her fame and success, she is travelling back there in a carriage with her maid Elizabeth and Colonel Leyland.

They cross the border from Italy and reach Vorta perched on its hillside. Here the Colonel, Miss Raby and Elizabeth are appalled by the way all the hotels light up garish illuminated signs come nightfall. They check into the Grande Hotel des Alpes. Miss Raby asks her porter about the owners, Signor and Signora Cantù. They still live here at the hotel they own. And their mother? Ah, there has been a family breach and the older Signora Cantù has been exiled to the lesser of the family’s two hotels, the Biscione.

Miss Raby is unexpectedly upset by this news and surprises everyone by insisting that she and Elizabeth check out of the Grand Hotel straightaway. So all their gear is packed up and they pay for a room they haven’t slept in and for an evening meal they haven’t eaten, and have their stuff shipped down the hill to the Hotel Biscione.

Colonel Leyland doesn’t go with them and begs Miss Raby to explain to which she replies:

‘I must find out tonight whether it is true. And I must also’ – her voice quivered – ‘find out whether it is my fault.’

After he watches them go he reads a letter from his sister, Nelly, back in England. This is an intrusive request for him to clarify whether he is or is not engaged to Miss Raby, a clarification of their relationships as the conventions of the time dictated. Forster devotes a couple of subtle pages to teasing out what Colonel Leyland thinks his relationship with Miss Raby is, namely the companionableness of two like-minded souls, both a bit unconventional, who don’t give a damn if tongues wag about them … although Forster puts a sting in the tail by saying the thought of marrying £2,000 a year is not unappealing to the Colonel…

Part 2

Miss Raby’s arrival at the Biscione Hotel is an opportunity for Forster to contrast the style of the nouveaux riches and over-wealthy new hotels with their electric signs, with the quieter, older, more ‘civilised’ family-run atmosphere of somewhere like the Biscione, with something ancient and beautiful in every room – the kind of ‘authenticity’ the bourgeoisie have been chasing ever since they destroyed it as a result of the Industrial Revolution. By the time I was 17 I realised the world I was looking for, the South of France or Italy I’d read about in books, had disappeared. The world was ruined by the time I arrived in it and it has carried on getting more and more ruined. Even the greediest tourist resorts are realising the impact of over-tourism which have, in fact, been blighting many of them for generations.

Anyway, this story is in part a reflection of this feeling, or of the kind of person who thinks this way, circa 1905. In fact the Biscione is the site of an impressive Renaissance fresco which was discovered during renovations and now is a tired conversation piece among its ghastly English clientele, although not as insufferable as the American tourists who have come all this way to stop the priests ringing their 6am bell and to tell the peasants to stop staying up late singing their ghastly songs. Miss Raby trembles with rage.

She walked through the village, scarcely noticing the mountains by which it was still surrounded, or the unaltered radiance of its sun. But she was fully conscious of something new; of the indefinable corruption which is produced by the passage of a large number of people.

8 billion people now occupy the planet. It has been thoroughly polluted and poisoned but worse, much worse, is to come.

• Microplastics everywhere

Miss Raby goes to see the hotel proprietress, Signora Cantù who complains about the guests, about her staff, but most of all about her monstrously ungrateful son who kicked her and her husband (deceased) out of the Grand Hotel and now poach her guests and pay the villagers to badmouth her, him and his horrible wife are determined to ruin her etc.

The diatribe is interrupted by crashes from the street and they open the window to be engulfed by fumes from a motor car which has crashed into a guests’ table. Ah, the motor car, destroyer of our world.

Part 3

In the carriage, in part 1, Miss Raby had impulsively told the Colonel and Elizabeth that back on her original visit, a handsome young Italian lad, up in the mountains had told her he loved her. Now, 20 years later, Miss Raby climbs back up to the Grand Hotel, sits for afternoon tea, and realises that the swift and effective concierge is none other than the same lovely boy, now running to fat, suave and efficient at helping all the useless tourists with their problems.

It is a fraught and complex moment when she finally jogs his bad memory and he suddenly remembers his impertinence to her all those years ago. It threatens his entire position, his wife and child, he flusters, she reddens and at that precise moment the Colonel enters, adding layers of confusion. But in a flash she realises her love for this young man had been the one really true emotion of her life, nothing in all the years of her success had come close.

It is a peculiar intense conversation and suddenly she asks the man, Feo, whether she can have one of his three sons, to bring up as her own, to show that The Rich are not the as gullible, self-centred and corrupt as they seem. Strangely, the other two men accept this request and don’t find it strange. But when Feo very reasonably says his wife would never permit it, the Colonel loses his temper and shouts that he has insulted the lady. I didn’t understand the logic of this. There’s so much in these old stories we must miss.

Suddenly tired, old Miss Raby looks from fat terrified Feo to rigid unimaginative Colonel and realises she doesn’t like either of them. Miss Raby swishes out onto the terrace where she has an epiphany which echoes all the ones in this book of epiphanies:

In that moment of final failure, there had been vouchsafed to her a vision of herself, and she saw that she had lived worthily. She was conscious of a triumph over experience and earthly facts, a triumph magnificent, cold, hardly human, whose existence no one but herself would ever surmise. From the view-terrace she looked down on the perishing and perishable beauty of the valley, and, though she loved it no less, it seemed to be infinitely distant, like a valley in a star. At that moment, if kind voices had called her from the hotel, she would not have returned. ‘I suppose this is old age,’ she thought. ‘It’s not so very dreadful.’

But while she is having a transcendent moment, the two men close ranks against her. The Colonel is disgusted that Miss Raby has spoken so frankly to a member of the servant class, thus degrading him, and his entire class, in Feo’s eyes. Feo for his part is horrified because the scene was witnessed by plenty of the staff and some of the guests, the manager is hurrying to the scene, and there will be a great scandal.

The Colonel knows what to do. He takes Feo by the arm and with his other hand taps his forehead, indicating that Miss Raby is mad. Feo is pathetically grateful because the Colonel has found a way out of their dilemma whereby they are both redeemed and the blame falls entirely on the mad old lady.

Comment

I’m glad the entire volume ends on a realistic story as my incomprehension of some of the previous stories made me wonder if I was going mad.

Thoughts

It’s interesting reading Forster right after H.G. Wells. It highlights the way that Wells, although a very gifted writer, just wasn’t interested in the kind of thing Forster was. There may be a pretty simple pagan message running through Forster’s stories (the free, imaginative, pagan country life is more real, powerful and disruptive than the timid bourgeois manners of Edwardian aunts and curates) but the real interest in each of the stories is in Forster’s handling of them. He is interested in questions of technique, choosing the correct narrator, creating character carefully, and cutting irrelevant material back to the bones in order to make each story a honed and focused artistic product. Wells is always interesting, describes characters vividly and is especially good at conveying the mood and connotations of dialogue: but he is addicted to rambling digressions about his hobby horses and not at all interested in the overall artistic result. That’s why (to chance my arm) Forster is Literature but Wells isn’t.

Also, and probably more obviously, Forster is weird, genuinely impenetrable and even incomprehensible, which Wells never is. One of the scholarly introductions to Wells cites a critic joking that Wells was a journalist who endlessly wrote stories about his favourite subject, which was his own life. More to the point, Wells always writes with an aim on the reader, all-too-often to promote his hobby horses about universal education and the world government.

But what is Forster writing about in a story like ‘The Point of It’ or ‘Co-ordination’? I genuinely don’t know what they are about, what they are for, what they are trying to do.

Wisdom sayings

Something I do understand well enough is Forster’s addiction to wisdom sayings, to having his narrator or characters deliver pithy apophthegms and maxims about life:

The only thing worth giving away is yourself.

Toleration implies reserve; and the greatest safeguard of unruffled intercourse is knowledge.

It is inevitable, as well as desirable, that we should bear each other’s burdens.

It filled me with desire to help others – the greatest of all our desires, I suppose, and the most fruitless.

---

Credit

E.M. Forster’s Collected Short Stories was published by Sidgwick and Jackson in 1947. References are to the 1982 Penguin paperback edition.

Related links

• The Celestial Omnibus, and Other Stories online
• The Eternal Moment and Other Stories online

Related reviews

• E.M. Forster reviews
• Edwardian reviews