From Myth to Scripture: An Approach to Forster's Later Short Fiction

206 From Myth to Scripture: An Approach to Forster's Later Short Fiction By Judith Scherer Herz (Concordia University) It is unlikely that there are many readers of the short stories who prefer them to the novels, and the posthumously published stories, with the possible exception of "The Other Boat," have for the most part elicited a similar response. To the long standing criticisms of cuteness, mere whimsicality, fashionable myth making (in Agnes Pembroke 's flat words: "How could . . . anyone make a living by pretending that Greek Gods were alive or that young ladies could vanish into trees"),! has been added a new element, that of an uneasiness with their overt sexuality. This uneasiness sometimes expresses itself as distaste, sometimes as embarrassment, or what is worse, as a pretense that we are in the presence of a pathology rather than a fiction, that in Stone's words the stories record Förster·s "despair and . . . utter via fictional indirection his cry for help."2 Now one need make no extravagant claims for these stories to counter either the literalism of Agnes or the psychologizing of Stone. Although Forster still seems to me at his best in the novels where manners tug against metaphysics (for this master of the speaking voice is not always at ease with the purely vatic), all the stories - early and late - repay our study. There are countless pleasures - an often gleaming humour, the beautifully turned sentence, a word that discovers itself to be the only word. However, in the later stories not only do we encounter much the same mythic core that acquired such resonance in the earlier fiction, but a handling of language at once familiar and experimental. We still hear Forster's voice, but it is now so closely tuned to his materials that often, particularly in "The Life to Come," it merges with them completely. The result is a powerful parable that sees and speaks in a single visionary idiom. It is important that we do not read the stories with expectations formed by the novels. The stories, nonetheless, strike me as far closer to the sources of Forster's imagination, even if we may finally value more the transformation of that material into the novel's social gesture than into the short fiction's parables, visions and prophecies . Rickie Elliot, justifying his liking for the unsuitable Mr. Jackson, provides the essential metaphor for the distinction between social gesture and prophecy. Mr. Jackson, he explains, "tries to express all modern life in terms of Greek mythology, because the Greeks looked very straight at things, and Demeter and Aphrodite are thinner veils than 'the survival of the fittest' or 'a marriage has been arranged ' and other draperies of modern journalism" (LJ, 189)■What Forster accomplished and Rickie could only partially do (and that posthumously) was the creation of a fictional mode in which Pemeter and Aphrodite share the same space as those smart sociological phrases, i.e. "a marriage has been arranged." The two realms co-exist in the novels so closely and subtly that one never has the sense that one has left the knowable world for some "other kingdom," but in the short fie- 207 tion, although they are both present, one can find oneself on the other side of the hedge at the sudden turning of a sentence. This is precisely what happens in "Dr. Woolacott," a story that turns, midway, into myth, in which Clesant's encounter with Death as the beautiful boy, Death as Hermes, conductor of souls to the underworld, rewrites "The Point of It" in an even darker, certainly more passionate fiction. But death in this story is not only the "charming new friend" but Clesant's wasting disease, his death in life, those social assumptions that deny the boy ("disease says he does not exist, he is an illusion ").-^ The psychomachia played out over the dying Clesant between these two versions of death reaches a wonderfully paradoxical conclusion where death asks for life, i.e. Clesant's life from the dying Clesant ("pour life into me" he demands). Thus the actual death is a triumph over the disease and Dr. Woolacott, who, in an ironic inversion...