Selected Stories (9781440673832)

Table of Contents

 

 

 

SELECTED STORIES

Edward Morgan Forster was born in London in 1879, attended Tonbridge School as a day boy, and went on to King's College, Cambridge, in 1897. With King's he had a lifelong connection and was elected to an Honorary Fellowship in 1946. He wrote six novels, four of which appeared before World War I:
Where Angels Fear to Tread
(1905),
The Longest Journey
(1907), A
Room with a View
(1908), and
Howards End
(1910). An interval of fourteen years elapsed before he published
A Passage to India
(1924). It won both the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Maurice
was finished in 1914 but not published until 1971, after Forster's death. Forster also published two volumes of short stories (with a third appearing posthumously); two collections of essays;
Aspects of the Novel,
a critical work;
The Hill of Devi,
a fascinating record of two visits Forster made to the Indian State of Dewas Senior; two biographies; two books about Alexandria (where he worked for the Red Cross during World War I); and, with Eric Crozier, the libretto for Britten's opera
Billy Budd.
He died in June 1970.

 

David Leavitt is the author of several story collections and novels, including
Martin Bauman, or A Sure Thing.
With Mark Mitchell, he wrote
Italian Pleasures
and
In Maremma: Life and a House in Southern Tuscany.
He lives in Italy and Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches at the University of Florida.

 

Mark Mitchell is the author of
Virtuosi: A Defense and (Sometimes Erotic) Celebration of Great Pianists
and the editor of
The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing.
With David Leavitt, he edited
The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories
and
Pages Passed from Hand to Hand: The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English from 1748 to 1914.
He is at work on a biography of the pianist Vladimir de Pachmann.

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First published in Penguin Books 2001

Introduction and notes copyright © David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell, 2001

All rights reserved

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Forster, E.M. (Edward Morgan), 1879-1970.
[Stories. Selections]
Selected stories / E. M. Forster ; edited with an introduction and notes
by David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN : 978-1-440-67383-2

I. Leavitt, David, 1961- II. Mitchell, Mark (Mark Lindsey) III. Title.
PR6011.058 A6 2001
823'.912-dc21 00-045664

 

 

 

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INTRODUCTION

In 1947, the English firm Sidgwick and Jackson published a volume entitled
Collected Short Stories,
by E. M. Forster. This edition brought together twelve stories, all of which had already appeared in book form—the first six in 1911 as
The Celestial Omnibus,
the second six in 1928 as The Eternal Moment. (In the years between, Forster completed his last two novels
—Maurice,
written in 1914, though not to be published until 1971, and
A Passage to India,
published in 1924.) Although Forster himself sanctioned the title
Collected Short Stories
—he was famously indifferent to titles—this most subtle of writers served notice in the very first sentence of his introduction to the collection that there was less to the matter than met the eye. “These fantasies were written at various dates previous to the first world war,” he wrote, “and represent all that I have accomplished in a particular line.”

“All that I have accomplished in a particular line”: the posthumous publication of
The Life to Come and Other Stories
described that line. Quite simply, the “collected” stories were the ones Forster had felt comfortable bringing into print during his lifetime. Of the ones that would later appear in
The Life
to
Come,
four were early efforts, one (1903's “Albergo Empedocle”) the author himself had adjudged “not good enough” to include in
The Celestial Omnibus,
one was his contribution (the fish course) to “Three Courses and a Dessert: Being a New and Gastronomic Version of the Game of Consequences,” a sort of writing game organized by
Wine and Food
in 1944, and eight concerned themselves explicitly with homosexuality. These eight define the second, and in some ways more particular, “line” of Forster's short fiction. When he was alive, he shared them only with friends he trusted. Along with
Maurice,
though, he refused even to consider publishing them.
¹

One might think that the appearance of
The Life to Come,
in 1972, would have elicited, if not a full-fledged reassessment of Forster's work as a story writer, at least some considered retitling; nonetheless, almost thirty years on, the stories from
The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment
continue to appear under the misleading and outdated title
Collected Short Stories.
²
Nor has a
Complete Short Stories
been attempted.

Why is this? For what reason, or reasons, have Forster's stories been subjected to such strict separation, at least in print? Forster is a writer beloved, especially in England, by the literary establishment, and there is no challenging the fact that the posthumous publication of
The Life to Come
disturbed its assessment of his achievement as a short story writer (just as the posthumous publication of
Maurice
disturbed its assessment of his achievement as a novelist). Even those readers and scholars who had been aware of the existence of the homosexual stories were unprepared for their candor. Oliver Stallybrass, editor of the first several volumes of the Abinger edition of Forster's works, wrote in his introduction to
The Life to Come:

 

In actual fact, of course, homosexuality is also a presence in that part of Forster's work that was published during his lifetime. What devastates Philip Herriton in
Where Angels Fear to Tread
(1905), for instance, is that he loves Gino, his sister-in-law's husband, more than Caroline, the girl he asks to marry him, while both Lucy Honeychurch in
A Room with a View
and Helen Schlegel in
Howards
End serve as surrogates for the homosexual hero Forster longed to invent. As early as 1911, he was expressing his “Weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat—the love of men for women & vice versa.” Though Lucy's and Helen's struggles to transcend the conventions of the society into which they have been born are not expressly homosexual, the transcendence they seek was one felt keenly by men “of the Oscar Wilde sort” (as Maurice describes himself). Indeed, Margaret Schlegel's defense of her sister Helen (who has returned to England pregnant and unmarried) is equally a defense of the homosexual:

 

Paradoxically, the homosexual perspective that inheres in Forster's “heterosexual” novels is often more eloquently and positively stated than in his explicit homosexual works. This is true for the stories as well: here, too, it is not to the harshly cynical tales in
The Life to Come
³
but rather to the “collected” stories in the present volume—the ones of which (if Forster's introduction is to be believed) an absence of homosexual content is the “particularizing feature”—that we must turn to find a more redemptive treatment of homosexual sentiment. For though these stories may lack the blatancy, say, of “Dr. Woolacott” or “The Other Boat,” nonetheless a current of homoerotic longing runs just beneath the surfaces of many, much as in “The Story of the Siren,” the narrator's drowned notebook on the Deist Controversy lies at the bottom of the sea, where “unseen fingers fidgeted among its leaves.” This is evident from Forster's description of the young Sicilian fisherman who rescues the notebook: