NOTES

1 Forster’s motives were practical as well as literary. Until the very end of his life, both sodomy and “acts of gross indecency” between men were crimes in England. In theory, by publishing the stories, he could have opened himself up to prosecution as well as scandal.

2 An exception is the recent Abinger Edition of the stories, for which editor Rod Menghem chose the title The Machine Stops and Other Stories.

3 The corrosive hopelessness of Forster’s frankly homosexual stories is exemplified by “The Obelisk,” in which a husband and wife are separated and seduced by two sailors: the wife ends up paired with a gallant and the husband with a buffoon. In “Arthur Snatch-fold,” by contrast, Conway (Sir Richard Conway) does find himself paired with a gallant—the story’s eponymous hero—yet proves unequal to his rustic lover’s dignity and, having had his pleasure, recompenses the boy, who has gone to jail to protect his identity, only by making a note of his name, which is both strange and ugly.

4 The title may allude to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Rail-road” (1843), an uninspired gloss on Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.

5 In The Cave and the Mountain (1966), Wilfred Stone observes that Bons is “snob” backwards.

6 In A Room with a View (1908), Cecil, Lucy, and Mrs. Honeychurch have a talk about fences, during which Cecil asks, “It makes a difference, doesn’t it, whether we fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?”

7 A propos Sophocles, Wilfred Stone has observed that “the old man plays at being Oedipus and the (despised) daughter at being Antigone.”

8 P. N. Furbank, his first biographer, does not, however, know when or how he learned to play the piano.

9 In the film adaptation of Gilbert Adair’s novel Love and Death on Long Island, the narrator attempts to see a movie of “The Eternal Moment”—which, more than any of Forster’s other stories, could indeed serve as the basis for a marvelous film.