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Whether this is a great collection, like Dubliners or Da Vinci's
Bicycle, I am hardly qualified to say, but it is a perfect collection--tonally
precise, surprising, witty, intelligent, evocative. And its
stories (which Forster later called "fantasies") must have seemed to make
up quite an oddball offering in 1911, when it was first published. By
that time Forster, barely into his 30s, had already delivered four of his
five novels--all but A Passage to India--but The Celestial Omnibus
is something else indeed. To be sure, he gives us incisive depictions of
the British upper and near-upper classes and their relations with each
other and their various servants and assistants. But in what fictional
settings!
 In "The Story of a Panic," we meet a small group of English men and
women vacationing in Ravello and rather enjoying themselves, except for
their exasperation with Eustace, a young teenager interested in nothing
but idling. The group sets off for a picnic in the woods nearby, and
here the panic occurs. As the narrator relates, "It is not possible to
describe coherently what happened next," by which Forster means that his
narrator--a proper middle-aged man--cannot explain it. But the title
and the subsequent narration make it clear--Pan has appeared. All the
adults run pellmell--without understanding why--from their beautiful
picnic site. Several minutes pass (and the panic subsides) before they
realize that Eustace is not with them. When they return uphill, they
find the boy unharmed and even more languid than normal. Soon, though,
he is charged with energy, running, whooping, capable of catching a hare
bare-handed. Eustace's behavior grows even more bizarre, and the adults'
confusion more pronounced, as the minutes pass, leading shortly to an
appropriately shocking and classical conclusion. Summarized, the story
suggests what might be called typical Forster characters thrust into a
Mel Brooks situation, but Forster's stuffed-shirt narrator--whose
deadpan recounting only heightens the humor--also keeps the events
firmly rooted in his own view of reality, encouraging--even forcing--
the reader to accept the events at face value. Hence the panic and its
cause, apparent to everyone but the British characters, are no more
ridiculous than the frenzy of the Bacchantes in Euripides' play.
Similarly in "Other Kingdom," named for a small wood in the story,
Forster restores the wood-nymph to the modern world. Here the influx of
the classical into the modern is slyer and is withheld, by all but
implication, until the story's climax. In the meantime, in laying the
ground for that climax, Forster presents us with a wealthy young man and
his intended, an Irish girl far "beneath" him; the rich young man's ward;
and the tutor (and narrator) who is preparing the ward for college and
the fiancee for upper-class status. The ever subtle notations of
inter-class interactions and the way in which everyone's future (and
future status) hang upon the goodwill of the rich young man are at the
heart of Forster's achievement in this tale, but his suggestive approach
to pagan survivals in Christian England is equally impressive and, as
with "The Story of a Panic," cheering and revivifying.
The same theme, and its accompanying optimism, run through the much
briefer "The Curate's Friend," in which a Roman faun befriends a young
bachelor curate who hopes to impress, and secure as his wife, his rather
more practical sweetheart. In each of these three stories, essential
encounters with the pagan past occur in natural settings, as if to
suggest that modern man need only to be removed from his offices, schools
and businesses in order to recover a more sensual and satisfying mental
health. But on closer look, the reader sees that Forster is not quite so
chipper. In each case, only one character receives the revelation and is
opened into the new life. The literally marvelous nature of the world
around them is lost on the other could-be participants.
In the justly famous "The Road to Colonus," which closes the volume,
Forster turns the joy of the three earlier stories on its head. Once
again, a contact with the natural world draws out and upward a sensitive
soul--in this case, the elderly Mr. Lucas, travelling in Greece with his
daughter and other Englishfolk. But the young Miss Lucas intervenes in
her father's awakening and prevents him from remaining at a small rural
inn and its grove which charms him. Thus he cannot take hold of the
grace offered to him, but is forcibly returned to the workaday world.
Forster drives his point more deeply and graphically home with the
story's brief coda: we see, a few months later, Mr. Lucas "restored" to
England, where he has become a crotchety old man. The reader's
disappointment in what Miss Lucas has wrought is then brought up short by
her accidental discovery that, later in the evening on the very same day
in which her father had attempted to remain at the inn, a storm knocked
one of the beautiful old trees into the inn and killed its inhabitants.
Aha! the reader thinks, a daughter's love saved an old man's life--the
obvious link to Oedipus and Antigone. But in the few remaining
paragraphs, Forster implicitly reverses the obvious lesson and makes the
allusion ironic--quite clearly Mr. Lucas would have been better off to
have died in his tiny Greek paradise than to continue to live as he now
does.
In the title story, Forster creates an analogous situation--the
interjection of a paradise into mundane reality--although here he does
not limit that paradise to the classical world, but rather forms it
within the world of literature. The explicit link is to Shelley, though
Thomas Browne appears--as a driver of the omnibus--along with Dante and
Achilles. Again the fortunate one, blessed with insight into the other
world, is a boy. It is important to note that only Mr. Lucas--of all
the enlightened ones--is over, say, 25 years old, and only he is
prevented from reaching his paradise.
"The Other Side of the Hedge," the second story in the collection,
likewise presents the clash of two worlds, though it is more difficult to
argue in this case that the other world is a paradise. It seems to be,
and yet it is also gated, locked away from the "real" world, which is
literally on the other side of the hedge. This fact, taken in
conjunction with the title's nod to the old proverb about greener grass,
suggests that even paradise might not be perfect. The most formally
modern of the stories, "The Other Side of the Hedge" begins without
prologue in the middle of a bizarre and unexplained situation, advances
without conventional allusion or background, and closes with cryptic--
and possibly threatening--words from one resident of the closeted realm.
Indeed, if published without attribution to Forster, the story might be
taken as a sort of science fiction parable a la Ray Bradbury.
Yet all of these stories--and the collection as a whole--merit a far
closer examination and appreciation than their whimsical plot elements
might indicate. For one thing, their linguistic skill and incisive
characterization place them among the very best stories of the 20th
century. For another, they inhabit a pivotal moment in literary
history--their exuberance and rejection of both realism and naturalism
point backwards to the fin de siecle and the art for art's sake movement
as well as forwards to the Modernism which was, in 1911, about to wash
across England and into the United States. Forster's novels may be seen
by some as powerful, if traditional, examples of the novelistic art, but
these stories are remarkably other--and remain, 90 years after their
initial publication, fresher and more convincing than anything you are
likely to read in The New Yorker or The Paris Review any time soon.
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