596
PARTISAN REVIEW
wife's brutality. His bitter and unhappy marriage takes center stage, its
Shelleyan
sententia
an emblematic repudiation of the" familiar ideal."
Rickie is sacrificed
to
the "spirit of life" embodied in Stephen Won–
ham, who is a peculiar amalgam of Greek god, pastoral shepherd,
brutal toper, and Wagnerian hero (he was even named "Siegfried" in
an earlier draft). Using as excuse Rickie's propensity to self-deception,
Forster withdraws him from existence itself. A pattern is emerging,
visible both in Rickie's withdrawal and in his relationship with
Stephen. As in
Where Angels Fear to Tread,
the crucial connections are
unisexual, the touchstone a not very believable natural man. The ideal
of personal relations finds three important expressions in the novel, the
first in the friendship between Rickie and Stewart Ansell at Cambridge.
Pre-Maurice
critics have noted the intensity of this relationship and
how closely it resembles a love affair. Affection, jealousy, and the
necessary dash of brutality characterize the friendship (for example, as
the friends lie talking in a Cambridge meadow, Ansell forcibly re–
strains Rickie from keeping his appointment with Agnes) . The most
passionate outburst in a tempestuous novel is Rickie's plea for the
"legalization" of friendship:
Nature has no use for us: she has cut her stuff differently. Dutiful
sons, loving husbands, responsible fathers-these are what she
wants, and if we are friends it must be in our spare time. Abram and
Sarai were sorrowful, yet their seed became as sand of the sea, and
distracts the politics of Europe at this moment. But a few verses of
poetry is all that survives of David and Jonathan.
Forster might have borrowed his admired predecessor's title,
Love and
Friendship.
In
the covert world of
The Longest Journey,
friendship is
love. But the novel contains a unique example of successful heterosex–
uality in its brief portrayal of the union of Rickie 's mother and Robert,
a Wiltshire farmer. Their characters and relationship exemplify the
ideal qualities seen only in the male friendships. The aura that
envelops this couple reflects the inner dualism of Forster's position.
His voice speaks with sincerity through Rickie. But shame (which can
be documented at length in Forster's extraordinary humiliation of
Rickie) engenders the public ideology.
In
addition, Forster's sense of
sterility expresses itself, as elsewhere, in the obsession with continu–
ance. Mrs. Elliott and Robert are ultimately significant as parents and
spiritual progenitors. Heterosexual love is requisite for continuance,
but the public and private ideologies war within the novel: Mrs. Elliott
