The Life to Come and Other Stories by E. M. Forster

Recently reading Forster’s A Room With a View made me curious to re-read this collection of short stories by E. M. Forster that I first read fifty years ago, shortly after it was published, in 1972. I had bought a first edition some time ago from a used bookstore downtown so it was on my shelf.

Forster lived a long time. He died in 1970 at the age of 91. But the last novel he published during his life was A Passage to India, in 1924. But he hadn’t stopped writing. He left behind a large number of unpublished manuscripts estimated to be about half of all that he wrote. Among them was the novel Maurice, which Forster had written before World War I, at the same time as his other, early, novels, but had withheld from publishing due to its homosexual content. He also wrote and withheld from publishing several gay-themed short stories. Some of those he burned while he was alive. Those that survived, along with other unpublished short stories and two stories which had been published in magazines but not in Forster’s two books of collected short stories, comprise The Life to Come.

It was the gay-themed stories that led me to read the collection fifty years ago, when I was a teen. I remembered three of them pretty well: two of them playful: “The Classical Annex”, and “The Obelisk”; a third “Arthur Snatchfold”, heart-tugging. The sex is understated, nearly not stated at all. It evoked for me then, and again now, a smile but nothing more exuberant. This isn’t pornography. The stories were written to amuse Forster and the friends he shared them with, but it’s amusement for the drawing room, not the boudoir. Some of the gay-themed stories, the ones I enjoyed, like the three mentioned above, portray sex between men as mutual, healthy, fun for all involved, as Samuel Steward does with his Phil Andros stories. But it’s a mixed bag. Most of the men are married to women, or were, or will be. The participants are never of the same class. The gay sex is a lark but not a life any of them could or would embrace. Lasting homosexual relationships are only a possibility for the next world. And, though Forster is clearly on the side of sex positivity, his gay characters sometimes face the same fate as most other homosexual characters in early twentieth century literature: social condemnation, suicide, prison. These stories are very early, after all, most Edwardian, all pre-Stonewall. I wasn’t cheered by reading these stories as a teen. They’re easier to appreciate now.

In most of the stories, including the gay ones, there’s an element of the supernatural: ghosts, reincarnation, a statue that comes to life. Perhaps Forster withheld some of these stories from publication because he recycled the same plot devices into his published novels: a note from a deceased woman giving instructions about the distribution of her property which is ignored but then made right, a la Howards End; English folks on tour in Italy, a la A Room with a View; attractive gamekeepers, a la Maurice; race relations where the white folks are shown to be hypocrites and snobs, a la A Passage to India.

The quality varies widely. A few are excellent, not all. The book includes a lengthy introduction, which is helpful for dates and so on, and also explains the editor’s work to pull together publishable versions of stories which had been frequently edited and re-edited as they sat in drawers sometimes over decades. Here are the stories:

Ansell (1903). A young scholar brings a load of books to his family’s country house in order to finish his thesis. The books are lost when the horse-drawn cart overturns on a bridge. The thesis remains unfinished, but it doesn’t seem to have been worth much anyway, and the loss releases the scholar to a better life, represented by a hired hand on the property who the scholar had known as a child. There’s a hint of homosexuality in the relationship between the hired man and the scholar similar to the arrangement in Maurice, but it’s unexpressed.

Albergo Empedocle (1903). A man and his fiancee travel together through a part of Sicily that had once belonged to Ancient Greece along with her parents and her sister. While there, the man has a psychic episode where he feels that he has lived there before as a Greek. He descends entirely into identification with his presumed former self and ends up in an asylum. The story is narrated not by any of the people on the trip but by a male friend of the afflicted man. There’s a hint of homosexuality in this story, too, with the ancient Greek references and the male friend caring for the man and even concluding, “I think he knows that I understand him and love him: at all events it comforts me to think so.”

The Purple Envelope (1905). A young man, on his twenty-first birthday, receives a gun as a present from an anonymous woman. His grandmother died and left the property not to him as would be expected (apparently his parents are also dead) but to one of the boy’s uncles instead. The uncle and his siblings are prissy spiritualists and vegetarians, quite unlike the boy who is active, coarse, and violent. Uncanny messages begin to appear each morning on the boy’s shaving mirror revealed by the condensation. The boy suspects an intruder. The uncle believes the boy is doing it himself in his sleep. The aunts are convinced it’s a message from beyond. In the climatic scene the boy confronts his uncle in his room at night and shoots him with the gun he received as a birthday present. But the uncle wasn’t there; it was a phantom. Instead the uncle is discovered dead in his own bed. The mirror messages refer to a purple envelope which when discovered reveals that the grandmother had meant the estate for the boy all along.

The Helping Hand (1904). A man is perturbed to discover that a woman friend has published a study of an artist using the man’s own research. He’s too much of a gentleman to accuse her, but his wife discovers the truth. She is moved by her husband’s grace and begins to subtly spread the word that the work belongs to him. The ironic twist that closes the story is that just as the man is assured of getting the credit for his work, a trusted authority proves that his theories about the artist, published in the woman’s book, are entirely false.

The Rock (1906). A man has a boating accident and is washed up on a rock off shore. Just as he’s about to slip into the water to his death, he’s rescued by some local fisherman. The fisherman expect some renumeration for saving his life but the man doesn’t give it. His wife, who is telling this tale later to a friend, suggests several strategies to resolve the issue but the man refuses. Finally, the man conceives what he considers a proper solution. Morally, he believes, the rescuers should receive nothing for their good dead, so he decides to give them nothing. He sells all of his property, and leaving his wife provided for, gives all of his assets to charities and then moves to the city where the accident took place, throwing himself on the beneficence of the villagers. They resent him at first, of course, but as the left-behind wife now explains to her friend, the villagers have now come to befriend and respect him.

The Life to Come (1922). A Christian missionary in Africa attempts to convert a local chief. The chief is attracted by the religious message of love and mistakes the missionary’s instruction as an invitation. They have sex. The chief wants more. The missionary puts him off. Ten years pass during which time the tribe is converted, not just to Christianity but to all of western culture: clothes and capitalism, pollution, disease (Forster lays it on pretty thick), with the chief accepting everything upon the promise that he and the missionary will eventually be united as lovers. Finally the chief is dying, of tuberculosis and the missionary comes to see him. The chief, with the promise that the two might be together in the next life, stabs the missionary to death before dying himself.

Dr. Woolacott (1927). A young man, an invalid with a vague diagnosis, befriends a local man. The man attempts to warn the frail young man that his doctor, Woolacott, is a quack who never cures anyone, which he knows because of an earlier experience he had with the doctor when he was wounded during the war. The two men fall in love and imagine a life together, but the frail man loses his nerve. At the end, the local man is shown to have been a ghost who died during the war due to Woolacott’s malpractice, but with that revelation the two men embrace and they carry each other into death where they can be together forever.

Arthur Snatchfold (1928). A man is spending a few days at the country home of some business friends. It’s boring. He’s bored. The stay is enlivened when he catches sight of the handsome milk delivery man. On his final day in the country he arranges to get up early and meet the delivery man as he passes through the local woods on his route. They meet and have enjoyable, perfect, satisfying sex and the man makes it back to the house undiscovered. Then, several weeks later, he meets his business friend for lunch and hears the story of an incident of “indecency between men” that happened back in the country. The man slowly realizes the incident was the experience he had with the milkman. They had been observed by a policeman who arrested the milkman but the milkman heroically insisted the other man, who got away, had been a guest at the hotel, thus sparing the man from ruin.

The Obelisk (1939). A husband and wife on holiday decide while they are waiting for a bus that they have time to take a hike and see a local sight, an obelisk. On the way, they are overtaken by two sailors on leave. The story is told from the wife’s point of view. She finds one of the sailors handsome and exciting in every way her husband is not. The sailor flirts with her. She’s charmed. Eventually, out of sight of the husband and the second sailor, he pulls her off the path and they have sex in the bushes. When they get back to the bus stop, they find the husband and the other sailor already there, who say that they reached the obelisk and hunted all over for them but couldn’t find them. The sailor counters that he and the wife had also reached the obelisk and couldn’t find them. They leave it a mystery and the sailors leave. Before the bus arrives the wife goes to a nearby kiosk and thinks to buy a postcard of the obelisk so she’ll know what it looks like in case her husband asks about it. But the lady at the counter tells her that the obelisk fell down the week before. The wife realizes that her husband lied about seeing the obelisk, and if she didn’t see it because she was in the bushes with a sailor, maybe it was the same with him.

What Does It Matter? A Morality (1930s). A fable about a fictional country. The President is married but has a mistress. The finance minister tries to ruin the President by exposing his infidelity but the wife doesn’t care. So then the finance minister tries to ruin the President by entrapping him with a handsome gendarme. He sets it up so the wife and the mistress discover the two men together but instead of creating a scandal the gendarme convinces them all that it doesn’t matter. They agree. The four of them publish a statement that they’ve all had sex and hope to do it again and usher in an era of sexual freedom which liberates the country and humiliates the financial minister.

The Classical Annex (1930-31). A museum director is disturbed by mysterious goings on in a neglected corner of the museum centering around a statue of a roman gladiator which seems to come to life when the lights are out. He locks up the museum planning to have it exorcised the next day. But when he gets home he discovers that his son has gone to the museum to look for him. The director rushes back to the museum. He hears from the classical annex the giggle of his son and a deeper male voice. When he switches on the light he discovers his son and the statue in passionate embrace but with the light on both of them turned to marble. There’s an epilogue, years later, after the museum director has retired, that the group sculpture, now called, “The Wrestlers” is the most popular item in the museum.

The Torque (1958). A story of early christianity at the time of the Romans and the Goths. The daughter of a pagan couple has decided to join the church as a perpetual virgin. Before she takes her vows she travels to receive a blessing from a respected elder woman and takes her younger brother along as an attendant. On the way home they encounter a trio of young Goth men who take them to their camp. The men eat and drink and are apparently only interested in a good time, not violence. But when the party turns toward sex, the virgin daughter refuses to participate and the handsome leader of the Goths has sex with the very willing brother instead. In gratitude, he gives the young man the gift of a golden, bejeweled torque. Back at the farm, the daughter tells the story as though she were a saint and her virginity was spared by a miracle. Her brother dreams of his Goth lover. In a powerful display of spiritual energy the virgin daughter is killed by a lightning strike and by the time the church officials return to the village they realize paganism has returned in force and they give up.

The Other Boat (1957-8). The story begins with a mother and her five children sailing home to England after her husband left her for a native woman in India. With the five children is another child, a dark-skinned boy they call Cocoanut. Then the story jumps forward in time to when the oldest of the children is now a young man, an army captain, sailing to India. Because he sailed at the last minute he ends up having to share a cabin with the same person, Cocoanut, that he knew as a boy. Cocoanut takes advantage of the situation to come on to the captain and after some time, and some champagne, they become secret lovers. The army captain is torn. He knows that the affair can’t continue once they land in India and feeling the pressure of the other English passengers and the catastrophe that would result if they were discovered, he decides to end the affair immediately. Cocoanut objects. The men struggle and the army captain kills Cocoanut and then jumps into the sea to commit suicide.

Three Courses and a Dessert (1944): Being a New and Gastronomic Version of the Old Game of Consequences. Four different authors write the four sections of this story, passing it from one to the next. The first section, by Christopher Dilke, sets up a complicated World War II story of a military aide tasked with setting up a dinner at a seaside hotel for himself and four others: two military men and an important prisoner of war, along with an actress who was a former lover of the prisoner and was instrumental in capturing him. Also in this opening section we’re introduced to a French chef, a barmaid, and a hotel manager. The opening ends with the group being forced from the restaurant to a bomb shelter as an invasion with parachutists commences. Forster takes up the second course in the bomb shelter. He adds yet more complications and ends with the lights going out and when they come back on revealing that one of the military men has been murdered with his throat cut. The third section, by A. E. Coppard, more or less marks time. The fourth section, by James Laver, quite impressively, ends the story with an epilogue several months later. The main character and the barmaid have wed. On their honeymoon in France they happen upon the chef from the earlier hotel married to the actress. The prisoner of war was executed for war crimes. The killer of the murdered military man turned out to be none other than E. M. Forster, who had been dining at another table that fateful night and due to a severe psychological aversion to soldiers had killed the guy in a fit of madness. I had never heard of the other three authors. Looking them up on Wikipedia I learned they were all three minor writers.