Selected Stories (9781440673832) Read Free Page A

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    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 present 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