The Double Nature of Forster's Fiction: A Room with a View and The Longest Journey

254 THE DOUBLE NATURE OF FORSTER 'S FICTION; A ROOM WITH A VIEW AND THE LONGEST JOURNEY By Judith Scherer Herz (Concordia University, Loyola Campus) Love is clearly the key word for Forster. More than any other, it binds together his writing, makes it a body, filled with a vital substance, both passionate and spiritual.' Love is theory, love is practice, and sometimes in the fiction, it is difficult to distinguish between them. Love creates, love, indeed, ¿s the beloved republic, but even as abstraction, as idea, is speaks of the experience of touch, the contradictions of desire, the need to connect. In our reading we should leave a bit of our high-mindedness at the door. For that "petite phrase," that leitmotiv, love, that weaves its way through novel, essay, fantasy, biography, travel tale and bawdy tale is energy as much as idea, and sometimes, more bloody than bloodless. Forster himself can be something of a misleading guide here. His reticence and propriety led him, for example, to suppress all but the vaguest reference to Lowes Dickinson's homosexuality in his biography of 1934 (while in the recently published autobiography Dickinson seems to talk of nothing else), and, evidently, led him to destroy those "sexy" stories which he thought more privately useful as an easing of his frustrations than successful as "works of art." The editor of the Ackerley letters speculates that Forster's not reviewing or even mentioning Ackerley's Hindoo Holiday until 1953 stemmed from real shock at its contents. "It was one thing to enjoy in a letter, the 'crafty-ebbing' details of the Maharajah's sexual behaviour, but quite another to see them in print."! But he didn't burn all the stories. Reading them now, alongside all the novels, including Maurice, jolts one into realizing how much this sexual energy has been a component of Forster's fiction from the start, and how much the strategies invented to contain it - not necessarily to disguise it - are an important part of his accomplishment as a novelist. It is a point worth making, especially since this argument runs counter to several recent readings. Alan Wilde, for example, in a complexly argued essay claims that Forster's career moves toward an exhausted final stage, to a"peculiarly narrow and unresonant . . . world of triumphant sexuality."2 This notion of stages is difficult to accept, particularly when it is so heavily moralized, so full of extra-literary "judgment." Forster is not betraying his earlier beliefs in his later "homosexual" fiction. Indeed, the heterosexual/homosexual distinction is quite artificial, suggested by the posthumous publishing but not by the fiction itself. Forster's fictional career was, this essay will argue, all of a piece. At least as much as other writers he knew his motives 255 and his methods. He was not a victim of his homosexuality at constant fictional cross purposes with himself, and, most important , he was in control in his fiction in both the tales and the novels, early and late. Obviously some fictions work better than others, but the best succeed because Forster was able to control and manipulate the tensions generated by the collision of surface plot and under plot. There is always another story beneath the surface of the story he is telling. Forster's ability to control the two in a complex range of attitudes and tones from ironic to lyric to comic to tragic was his greatest novelistic strength and should prevent us from accepting the now fashionable version of a Forster who, somehow more than others, was a victim of his difficult unconscious . From first to last sexuality in all its guises is part of Forster's fictional world, but it is a contained energy. It forms the coil spring of the action as it does, for example, in "The Obelisk," a story which unfolds almost as if it were a diagram for the double plot structure. There the wife's story (the heterosexual "romance"), and the husband's story (the homosexual) contain the same characters, setting, events. But the stories absolutely oppose each other and because the wife's story finally includes the husband's (she "knows"; he doesn't), the...