Fables In Fantasy

THE COLLECTED TALES OF E. M. FORSTER (308 pp.)--Knopf ($2.75).

Few men have won so big a reputation on so small a body of work as Edward Morgan Forster (rhymes with divorced-her). Often described as England's foremost living novelist, he hasn't written a novel since A Passage to India (1924). The four other novels he wrote earlier, all fairly short ones, came in a feverish burst of activity--for him--between 1905 and 1910. The rest of his fiction includes only a dozen short stories, written before World War I and long out of print in the U.S. They have now been collected in one volume for the first time. Old as they are, they bear none of the scars of age; their disembodied timelessness is a witness to Forster's skill.

On the surface, Forster's tales trip the fantastic lightly, full of comic improbabilities which unite past & present, heaven & earth. They abound with pompous Englishmen on Italian holidays, Anglican curates who sport with pagan fauns, young ladies with good breeding and bad taste. But beneath their staid respectability lurks the irreverent demon of Pan, Greek god of nature.

Fantasy in the Open. In his introduction, Forster remarks: "Fantasy now tends to retreat, or to dig herself in, or to become apocalyptic out of deference to the atom. She can be caught in the open in this book, by those who care to catch her." Forster's boast is pretty well borne out by these twelve stories.

Throughout them Forster contrasts the simple instincts of people with the taboos and sophistries of social custom. In The Machine Stops--written as "a counterblast to one of the heavens of H. G. Wells"--he describes a world of push-button perfection in which men have lost their souls. Says one inhabitant of this Utopia under the surface of the earth: "Those funny old days, when men went for a change of air instead of changing the air in their rooms!" But when another character gets a brief look at the earth's surface, with all its imperfections, he sums up the Forsterian point of view: "For the first time . . . I felt that humanity existed, and that it existed without clothes. . . . It was naked . . . and all these tubes and buttons and machineries neither came into the world with us, nor will they follow us out, nor do they matter supremely while we are here."

Finders Losers. Forster sees this return to nature's nakedness as man's salvation. In The Road from Colonus, for example, an English tourist experiences an ecstatic vision of beauty on a primitive Greek roadside. He might just as well have died then, Forster implies; everything after was anticlimax. It is not the finding of beauty, but the seeking of it, that counts. The man who attempts to isolate his paradise in Other Kingdom loses the one thing that makes it worth having. In The Eternal Moment, a woman novelist captures the primitive beauty of an Italian village; but her book unwittingly turns the village into a tourist center, and destroys it. Says Christ, in one of the stories: "There is no abiding home for strength and beauty among men. The flower fades, the seas dry up in the sun, the sun and all the stars fade as a flower. But the desire for such things, that is eternal, that can abide, and he who desires me is I."

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