cyphomandra

...perhaps shouldn't be the title of this post, because the material in volume 9 of the Abinger Edition of Forster's complete works was never published by him under that name: it's a various collection of previously-unpublished and largely unfinished writing put together and published posthumously and only in this edition. I picked it up mostly for Nottingham Lace, an abandoned early attempt at a novel, but I thought I might as well read the rest while I'd got the book (obtained semi-licitly from a local university library). In fact I finished reading it some time ago and never got round to writing up a review, but now that I've got some things to procrastinate on, here goes...

The pieces are arranged roughly in chronological order by composition, so Nottingham Lace is first (it's always annoying when the first thing in a collection is the one you like best, isn't it). I was interested in it because it's something of a precursor to The Longest Journey, and in that light it is thoroughly worth reading. Edgar Carruthers, the protagonist, is a younger and less endearing version of Rickie Elliot, still living at home with his aunt and uncle and, unlike Rickie, not going to a public school, not even the local one near where they live in Sawston. The plot commences when Edgar and his family meet Sidney Trent, a master at the school and a strange composite of Stewart Ansell, Stephen Wonham and perhaps a bit of Mr Jackson. His background is almost identical to Stewart's*, but reflects itself in a totally different way: Forster is, as so often, writing social comedy about clashes between characters of different class backgrounds (the opening line which provides the title, 'They are Nottingham lace!' is Edgar's aunt's disapproving comment on the Trents' ill-bred net curtains), and Trent is Vulgar in manners and personality in a way Stewart, despite his shopkeeper-class origins, never is, and which in TLJ is dealt with rather more complicatedly through Stephen. It's as if Forster is beginning to work out ideas that he'll later shuffle into a better pattern, and although TLJ is much better in basically every way (including fannish appeal and slashiness), this made for some really interesting context for it. Besides that, Nottingham Lace is frustratingly unfinished—it breaks off just as the plot is beginning to get nicely dramatic—and there is some potential for speculation in where it might have been going.

*With one exception: he's from Newcastle. I mourn the Geordie!Stewart that might have been.

Arctic Summer is the other longish fragment in this book, and unfortunately its title is metaphorical; I was rather hoping for Forster's take on polar travel. It's another incomplete novel, begun between Howards End and Maurice and dealing with themes familiar from the books Forster had published by that point: the conflict between what he calls the 'civilised' and the 'heroic', as expressed through the meeting of two Englishmen of contrasting background, character and values while on holiday in Italy. I think by this stage of his career Forster has moved more towards his idea of the 'heroic' than I'm really interested in, but what this piece was really worth reading for was an illustration of the writing process, albeit in an unsuccessful form. The Abinger volume prints three separate pieces: the 'Main Version', self-explanatorily titled; the 'Tripoli Fragment', a disconnected fragment related to but out of continuity with the Main Version; and the Radipole Version, a fascinating revision in which the same two main characters meet in a completely different way with a completely different plot and setting—that's so suggestive about how Forster thought of his stories. The Main Version itself is in two pieces, an early part which Forster later reworked fairly substantially in order to give a reading of it at a literary festival in 1951, and some more unpolished later chapters; in between is a note which he wrote to accompany the reading, explaining what he was trying to do and why it wasn't working, and both this and the revisions detailed by the Abinger edition make terribly interesting reading from a writer's perspective. Arctic Summer is also pretty subtextually queer, although not in a way I find particularly compelling; at this stage Forster was finding that the impossibility of writing openly about homosexuality was seriously hampering his writing in general—hence writing Maurice and then not publishing another novel for ten years, presumably.

Apart from these two there are four variously-complete short stories and then a set of short, disconnected fragments, which range widely in time of writing and subject matter. 'Ralph and Tony', probably my favourite of the longer ones, is another very subtextually queer story set in the Alps and featuring a thinly-veiled self-insert and a 'heroic' masculine character who's a medical student passionate about mountaineering. 'The Tomb of Pletone' is a historical story about a cult leader (?) in fifteenth-century Greece; 'Unfinished Short Story', which the Abinger editors didn't give a proper title, is set in Egypt and features a vividly-described aeroplane flight among other things; 'Little Imber' is bizarre kinky sci-fi which I found too squicky to appreciate its completely textual queerness. 'Stonebreaking' is worth a mention among the very short fragments for also being textually gay. The final, untitled fragment, given only in the Notes section at the back of the volume, is a set of beautifully mysterious part-sentences from two unrelated pieces preserved on either side of a single torn-out notebook page—Forster was evidently writing across facing pages of the notebook, so only half of each line survives.

—So, most of the stuff in this volume did not greatly work for me, as Forster's writing goes, but it was still completely worth reading for its fascinating variety and its insight into the writing process, both in itself and by comparison with Forster's completed novels. And I still haven't read all of those, by the way—onto A Passage to India next...