The Naturalisation of Eden

Abstract

Pan pandemic: not simply figured in Forster’s work but, at least until his final disappearance, submerged throughout, visible in his effects. Variously a symbol, an emblem, presence or force, Pan is, as he begins his career in The Celestial Omnibus, above all an idea — the abstraction of desire, an urgency made conformable to the demands of consciousness. So it is, most notably, in ‘The Curate’s Friend’. That the relationship described in the story is homosexual seems to me even more likely today than it did when I first suggested it some fifteen years ago.¹ The clues, indeed, are everywhere: in the Faun’s central act, which brings the curate to self-knowledge and thus to conversion and redemption by saving him from marriage; in the figure of the Faun himself, a peculiarly domestic creature, whom the curate, when he first sees him, takes for a man and who, when last referred to, is described as ‘sitting before the beech copse as a man sits before his house’;² and most of all, of course, in the curate’s deliberate indirection, his resort, as he puts it, to ‘the unworthy medium of a narrative’: ‘For if I breathed one word of that,’ he explains, ‘my present life … would come to an end … [and] I might find myself an expense to the nation’ (p. 124). Shades of the poorhouse, or the madhouse? Certainly. But of the prison-house too.