Selected Stories (9781440673832) Read Free

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:
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    â€œLook, 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.”
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    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.)
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    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”:
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    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