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PARTISAN REVIEW
Of these shorter pieces of Forster's, most of them fantasies, one
might ask with propriety the question that Forster in
Aspects of the
Novel
amazingly asks himself about Joyce's
Ulysses.
"Does it come off?"
he wants to know and then answers immediately, "No, not quite." I
daresay Joyce has never been approached so simply and yet Forster,
after his chilly beginning, warms up considerably and calls
Ulysses,
"a
dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud ... a simplification of
human character in the interests of Hell.. .. The Night Town scene
does not come off except as a superfetation of fantasies, a monstrous
coupling of reminiscences . . . the aim of which is to degrade all things
and most particularly civilization and art, by turning them inside out
and upside down."
In a sense these stories of Forster's do for Heaven what Forster
imagined Joyce did for Hell, but this particular heaven is, in spite of the
great variety of possibilities Forster finds there, monotonously literary.
People are killed for being too academic about art ("The Celestial Or.mi–
bus") or doomed for praising the mediocre ("The Point of It").
As Lionel Trilling has pointed out, Forster stories are not very
successful in themselves, but chiefly interesting in connection with the
author's novels. Forster himself in a new preface compares them with
the god, Hermes Psychopompus, who, "Lightly built, ... can anyhow
stand in the prow and watch the disintegrating sea, the twisted sky."
And yet the themes used here are far from slight. On the one hand
they deal with the meaning of art, the false use of it by schoolmasters
and the indifferent public; on the other hand they are allegories about
the challenge of life and the fact that man must heed the most daring
and alive part of himself, the song of the siren and the athlete's jump.
In "The Road to Colonus" the promise that life holds for the courageous
is beautifully treated in a highly symbolical and complex way; and in
"The Point of It" the notion that only those who take great risks can
know the meaning of existence is deeply felt in the fate of a young
boy, an invalid, who is aroused by the challenge of the sea, determined
to express his true nature, and literally rows himself to death. It is
puzzling that Forster didn't like Henry James any better than he did
since James too was obsessed by the necessity to live, take the dare and
greet the moment when it comes. But James's stories are strengthened
and deepened by the hinted evidence of immense and violent passions,
the beast in the jungle, for which Forster too often substitutes the faun
in the curate's garden.
Forster's reputation has of course been built, not on these stories,
but upon his five novels which, though outstanding and full of vitality,
are also bewilderingly
minor
in a way difficult to evaluate. Perhaps the
novels, with their expert construction and wonderful subtleties of char–
acterization, only tell us why Forster is good and his other work, his
