When Sir Richard Conway [in "Arthur Snatchfold"], surveying the remainder of his dull, country weekend, thinks to himself: "The visit, like the view, threatened monotony," he gives perfect expression to Forster's sense of ordinary existence in The Life to Come. Not the metaphysical terror of the caves [in A Passage to India] but the monotony of "normal" life serves as the background of these stories, and their heroes, unlike Mrs. Moore or Fielding, who react by a movement inward, accept that monotony as an inevitable part of life's texture, while actively accommodating themselves to what are now seen (in a dramatic reversal of Forster's attitude in his last novel) as the intermittent pleasures of life's surface. At least, most of them do. Of the stories I am concerned with (those which, according to the dates offered in Oliver Stallybrass's admirable edition, were composed at about the same time as or later than A Passage to India), three deal with love. Significantly, "The Life to Come," "Dr. Woolacott," and "The Other Boat," which I'll examine in greater detail later on, are closer in feeling and strategy to Forster's earlier work. More ambitious and morally more ambiguous than the other five stories, they are also more obviously sentimental, sometimes, as in the opening of "The Life to Come," embarrassingly so. And in the first two at least, the attempt to render love leads to a style that is poetic by intention, yet curiously flat, thin, and conventional.

More striking is that fact that each of these stories ends with death. And although it is possible, given their orthodox psychology, to regard the endings as inevitable effects of causes specified in the stories, it is difficult to avoid the sense that what is being revealed more clearly still is a psychological pattern in Forster. If Maurice is predicated on a happy ending, these stories express the more typical lure of failure in matters of homosexual love. Or, rather, not homosexuality as such but, as I've suggested, the conflation of love and sex. To combine the two is, in Forster's imaginative world, to invite, indeed to ensure disaster. To the last, as "The Other Boat" makes clear, Forster was unable to envisage the stability of complete human relationships in a universe of temporal and psychological change. What his imagination sought and intermittently found was a nondynamic world, freed from the impersonal determinations of causality as from the more subtle connections of love. It is, in part, the world to which the endings of many of the earlier fantasies (and of "Dr. Woolacott") unsatisfactorily point; it is also the world of the remaining five stories: "other kingdom" brought down to earth.

The deliberarte avoidance of love in this second group has as its corollary the acceptance of sex as sex and for the moment. What Forster is after is described perfectly in "Arthur Snatchfold" as "the smaller pleasures of life," a one-time affair conducted "with a precision impossible for lovers." "Equality of character" gives way totally in The Life to Come to a series of unequal confrontations; and now that physical contact is out in the open, the abrasiveness I spoke of earlier is still more apparent. Indeed, the looser, freer structures of most of the sexual stories create, for the first time, a fictional world congruent with the asymmetric relationships they celebrate—one in which the new allegiance to surface is revealingly defined by means of the curious psychological discontinuity that marks their heroes. Even in "The Other Boat," Lionel, in the midst of his affair, forgets "any depths through which he might have passed." In the sexual stories this habit of mind is endemic: characters forget the men to whom they have been attracted, with whom they have had an affair, indeed by whom they have been raped—thereby ignoring or refusing the depth implied by memory and created by continuity of feeling. In all these stories, depth—spatial, temporal, and psychological—is inessential, inimical, or impossible: a force operating against the disequality of character that is now more than ever a positive good, a barrier not to be minimized or ignored but to be pleasurably overcome.

But the relationships achieved make for an "equality of manners" that needs to be further defined with reference to Forster himself. Furbank' s comment: "He valued sex for its power to release his own capacities for tenderness and devotion, but he never expected an equal sexual relationship" indicates that equality is, in fact and paradoxically, inequality: a peculiarly limited, discrete moment, in which connecting becomes coupling and love, of course, sex. It is in the contact alone that the participants are leveled—equal in their enjoyment of their unequal pleasures. And so it is in the stories. Freed from sentiment, if not from sentimentality, they represent a movement from Forster's familiar "as if to a very different "as it is": self joining with world in an unresonant acceptance of amoral pleasure.

It is part of the donnée of The Life to Come that pleasure remains the object of general disapproval, and so Forster continues to attack his old enemy Mrs. Grundy and her relations, who, in the chronological progression of the stories, go down to increasingly violent defeat. Each of the stories has its villain; all are the object of Forster's sometimes unpleasant satire, the corollary to the singleminded assertion of his ideal relationship. Where sex is refused or scorned or rejected, there is, in all eight of the stories, an eruption of violence and vengeance, darkened at times, as in the curious nastiness of "The Classical Annex," by the shadow of sado-masochistic impulses. But Forster's antipathies are more wide-ranging still. The cruelty directed at Hilda in "The Obelisk" derives presumably from Forster's rejection of her rhetoric of salvation, which, whether or not it was so intended, comes across as an inversion and parody of almost identical language in Where Angels Fear to Tread. Philip's attitude is clearly no more acceptable by now than his sister's. The search for romance and the mating of character, like the transformation of sex into idealized love, define the attitudes of those who cannot accept the smaller pleasures of life.

The passage of time obviously made imaginative assent to his sexual ideal more of a possibility for Forster. In "Arthur Snatchfold," the first of the group, Forster seems unable as yet to conceive of pleasure triumphant and unpunished, and the story in fact registers a defeat for the smaller pleasures. In the second story, the obelisk that symbolizes them may, in its fallen state, undermine the sense of phallic potency—though one would hardly judge so from the activities of its two sailors. But there is, in any case, no question about the other three stories, which are in every sense tumescent. Forster's rising joy is, however, no guarantee of the reader's sympathy. Unless one accepts the criteria that determine Forster's approval (and which so markedly exclude large areas of human needs and desires), it is hard to accept the repulsive Ernest of "The Obelisk" or the sadistic gladiator of "The Classical Annex" or even Mirko, Forster's generally attractive porteparole in "What Does It Matter?" who includes among the things that do matter "baiting the Jews." All three are presumably meant to be "natural," but from Gino and Stephen Wonham onward, naturalness is more than a little suspect in Forster's writings: a Nietzschean temptation unrelieved, as it is in Gide, by a consistent moral alertness. And it is at the least curious that Forster can accept, if not approve, Mirko's statement.

Still, it is easy enough to see what Forster is after. "What Does It Matter?" is subtitled "A Morality," and, along with Sir Richard and the Roman Marcian, Mirko is the most genial expression of Forster's ethic: the need for diversity and tolerance, especially in sexual matters. The Pottibakians, "do[ing] as they like" inhabit Forster's utopia of activity and participation and acceptance. And so too does Marcian, after the destruction of the basilica and its virgo victrix in "The Torque." The movement of the story's final pages is, by way of the animals, who "clucked and copulated as usual," away from Christianity and ascetic morality toward a "natural," sexual life, in which where he is is enough for Marcian. "There was nothing to exorcize," the Bishop unhappily discovers, "and Marcian became gay and happy as well as energetic, and no longer yearned nostalgically for the hills." Despite its misplaced touch of fantasy at the end, "The Torque" attains to Forster's final vision of the here and now. Marcian, with his take-it-as-it-comes philosophy, is, along with Mirko, a natural inhabitant of a world "equally dispossessed of good and evil" and thus immune to conventional ethical categories.

Taken together, the sexual stories in The Life to Come define the final stage of irony in Forster's work: an acceptance of contingency that is perhaps best illustrated, by its absence, in the figure of Count Waghaghren, the villain of "What Does It Matter?" and a man "unaccustomed to incidents without consequence." Obliquely, the description hints at the suspensiveness of Forster's irony and at the priapic ethos of the sexual tales. For Forster's late figures are, to repeat, men unconcerned with consequences; and the stories explore and celebrate, precisely, a world without causality, sequence, or depth. The results of this change of attitude, apparently so striking, need to be recognized and understood. In the movement from cosmos to chaos and, further, from the melancholy awareness to the feverish acceptance of surface; from redemptive moments to desperate snatches of pleasure; from "the power to love and the desire for truth" of "Albergo Empedocle" (and Where Angels Fear to Tread) to the truth of that discordant sexuality heretofore at least partly concealed in Forster's fiction, what has most strikingly disappeared is the all-embracing ideal of connection set forth in Howards End. Along with the asymmetry of relationships comes, or seems to come, the acceptance of randomness and multiplicity as the very definition and condition of life and its satisfactions; and, in the light of Forster's earlier work, the acceptance is as radical as it is surprising. In The Life to Come, Forster goes beyond not only A Passage to India but the prewar fiction of his chief disciple, Christopher Isherwood. The Berlin Stories take place, as it were, "in the cave": cosmos is gone, chaos is unthinkable; one tries (uncomfortably) to live in time and space. But the overriding concern of Isherwood's novels with disconnection and discontinuity implies the ability still to imagine the theoretical possibility of wholeness and unity as an ideal.

Forster's is a further step: not merely from logical sequence to simple succession but from surface conceived of as the limited and limiting prison of the self to the perception of it as the open ground of the self's sporadic but total fulfillment—an area something like what Wylie Sypher describes as "a visual field, which is quite unlike the visual world we 'know' . . . [and which] cannot be perceived all at once." In other words, we have moved into a world where, although everything continues to exist by contiguity alone, that state of affairs is now for the first time accepted and indeed welcomed. Looking back at the prewar years, W. H. Auden described the need for the writers of his generation to adopt irony as a style of writing and, it is implied, of living:

And where should we find shelter
For joy or mere content
When little was left standing
But the suburb of dissent?

The Life to Come positions itself quite differently: situated neither between heaven and hell, nor in the shadow of infinity, nor yet "in the cave," it exists, by intention at least, firmly in the midst of the suburb of assent.

To invoke the notion of assent at this point is to trespass on the problem of the anironic .. . ; but there is no easy way of separating into discrete bundles the complementary visions of acceptance and assent: the ironic and anironic impulses that together define Forster's ultimate response (or, since my concern for the moment is still with the sexual stories, one aspect of it) to his world. The fact is that just as Forster's acceptance of contingency leaves behind, or seems to leave behind, mediate and disjunctive irony altogether, so it provides the basis for the anironic counterpart of suspensive irony, namely, the desire for unmediated experience, for direct participation in the world. And indeed, despite the continuation of satiric impulses, Forster is essentially the celebrator, not the critic, of the world he fictionalizes in his final stories. Furthermore, the total collapse of Forster's characteristic distance from his subject matter is, far more than in the love stories (though without their rhetorical infelicities) an assent to a unity achieved through "equality of manners" and "the smaller pleasures of life."

But as one begins to examine more closely the nature of these pleasures, something odd and unsettling emerges, which calls into doubt, as it does in the case of those later and lesser writers Forster adumbrates in The Life to Come, both the thoroughgoingness of his acceptance and the vitality of his assent. To begin with the latter: as one surveys the opposite ends of Forster's career, taking as terminal points the stories in The Celestial Omnibus and those in The Life to Come that I've been discussing, it becomes clear that if the early ones express the need for love (compare again too the "human love" of Where Angels Fear to Tread) and the later ones for sex, still what is central to both is the idea: the idea of love, the idea of sexuality—"Maîtresses de l'âme, Idées." And as the early stories subdue Pan, their tutelary and informing presence, into an urgency made conformable to the demands of consciousness, so the later, priapic tales, for all their often attractive exuberance, remain equally and curiously theoretical: blueprints of desire, amusing schemata of passion, which, because of their abstractness, qualify, in their comparatively decorous way, as at least quasi-pornographic.

Forster's assent is, then, something less than it seems at first glance: not genuine participation but, again, the idea of participation. But that is not all. Like the early stories, the later ones achieve their ends through a process of exclusion or substitution. Which is to say that Forster's suspensiveness is less genuine, less comprehensive than it appears; that a world of insupportable density and facticity has been replaced by a more manageable, because more abstract, version of it. Consequently, Forster's response to the dilemma of A Passage to India is less a transfiguration than an evasion of his earlier problem: the awareness that "everything exists, nothing has value" is not so much overcome and faced as it is neutralized by the foregrounding of occasional intensities at the expense of the random, incoherent world they imply. What purports to be a movement toward inclusion is in fact the extreme of exclusion: a spurious unity superimposed on a still fragmented world, whose fragmentation is only partly acknowledged. In short, the inadequacy of the sexual stories is twofold. On the one hand, Forster's earthly paradise speaks of assent, of passion, vigor, and sexuality, but the thinness of the dream belies its reality—if not the longing for it. On the other hand, and more importantly, the naturalization of Eden, which is what, in the context of Forster's career, the sexual tales represent, refuses at the last to recognize or to accept fully the background against which the new Eden is made to arise: the contingent world that is in fact its source and meaning. The resolute and deliberate affirmation of a small part of life's possibilities may be stoic or tragic—even and especially the origin of a limited joy. But to act, while celebrating local and discrete pleasures, as if the whole had been embraced and all its parts connected is a delusion and an illusion: the ground equally of pathos and, for the reader aware of the discrepancy between intention and result, of an irony of an altogether conventional kind.

The Life to Come bears most immediately on Forster's own earlier work, and it has already called forth reinterpretations and revaluations of it; but it has other implications as well, which become apparent when one views it in a larger context. The growing insistence in recent years that art is definitively rejecting depth involves not only an animus against ultimate realities and Newtonianly-ordered world views but a reassertion of the relationship between the self and the phenomenal world. "Il est clair, dès à présent," Francastel writes, celebrating the end of Renaissance space, "que le nouvel espace sera un espace construit davantage en fonction de nos comportements que de notre réflexion."

But the movement from Sein to Dasein, "the return to the surface," has assumed at least two radically different alternative forms. On the one hand, there are those writers who, beginning with an awareness of modernist irony, move beyond or transform it. In the writing of Merleau-Ponty, for example, with its repeated invocations of "horizons" or its notion of co-presence, there is implied, as in Between the Acts, a dynamic interaction of consciousness and world leading to a new kind of creation. The world suggested may be predicated on surface, but it is neither fragmented nor static nor flat—as Forster's so conspicuously is.

The Life to Come, on the other hand, predicts not phenomenological art and thought but figures such as Warhol and Robbe-Grillet, certain of the photo-realists, and, in general, those contemporary writers, both French and American, given to the celebration of reflexivity. As in the works of these novelists and artists, Forster presents a surface that is opaque and unresonant; and like the painters in particular, he points to the problem involved in the discrepancy between intention and response. Obviously less neutral than they, he resembles them, by way of his subject matter, in his manifest but not fully realized abandonment of the Arnoldian responsibility for seeing life steadily and whole. From "the smaller pleasures of life" to Campbell's soup cans the psychological and aesthetic leap is not that great; nor is it from Forster's ultimately drab assent to a comment made by one recent painter: "I'm not saying that what I picture is good or bad. It's up to the viewer to make his own response." Whether deliberately or not, the burden of commitment and subjectivity has been shifted to the reader or viewer—along with the recognition that in these cases the artist's uncertain acceptance of his content is the irony.

A less ambiguous but finally more evasive approach to the question of intention is to be found in the critical writings of Robbe-Grillet. The business of the novelist, he writes, is to record distances "and to insist further on the fact that these are only distances (and not divisions)." The implications of this statement are enormous. If there are no divisions, then all of the anguish of modernist literature is meaningless. Indeed, to see separation as disturbing is to assume that there is such a thing as depth or interiority or transcendence. But there is, in fact, only surface: "The world is neither significant nor absurd. It is, quite simply." The attitude is, again, one of acceptance, but the acceptance is achieved not, as in the case of Merleau-Ponty or the later Virginia Woolf, by a restructuring of the relations between self and world but by a semantic sleight-of-hand, whereby the ominous "division" becomes the neutral "distance."

Forster's strategy is the same: redefinition becomes the solution to the problem—in his case, the problem of connecting. The final irony of Forster's suspensive irony is, however, that in The Life to Come he does achieve a connection of sorts. But it is a connection by reduction: the joining of self and world at the expense of consciousness. Man is not incarnated in his body; he is body, his sexual self, finally an object, a thing. At the last, it is a sad, pinched, meager vision of life that The Life to Come expresses. "Give pain, give pleasure an outer body," a character thinks in The Years, "and by increasing the surface diminish them." The words suggest the impulse behind Forster's final stories, written one feels, not simply, as he acknowledged, "to excite [him]self ' but for personal salvation. They may well have served their purpose, but the diminishing of pain is, inevitably, the circumscribing of pleasure as well.