as it is written in the book – as it is written in the book : ghost stories by Kipling, Wells, and M. R. James

I don’t know if A. S. Byatt’s Oxford Book of English Short Stories is truly eccentric or if I am imposing a pattern suggested by her clever misdirection.  But she says she developed a “dislike for the ‘well-made tale’” (xvi), and I see the evidence of it.  She likes stories that go screwy, that take a big swerve.  Hey, me too.  And she likes fantasy stories of many types.  I’ll glance at three of those, three ghost stories.

The M. R. James selection, “Two Doctors” (1919, maybe), is the most traditional ghost story, or else has no ghost at all but rather perhaps some other kind of hobgoblin.  Some readers might remember that two years ago I spent a week reading ghost stories, which was instructive even if I was “shaken a bit by the fact that 75% of the ghost stories I read this week were about haunted bedrooms and the mysterious movements of bedclothes.”  Hey, guess what’s in “Two Doctors”?  I can’t even.  This time it’s a pillow.

“Under the Knife” (1896) by H. G. Wells is a science fantasy on the theme of anesthesia.  The ghost is the narrator, who, certain that he will die during surgery, has what we now call a near-death experience, first watching his own surgery before dying – this is where the story swerves – and being flung into the cosmos:

At last a quarter of the heavens was black and blank, and the whole headlong rush of stellar universe closed in behind me like a veil of light that is gathered together.  It drove away from me like a monstrous jack-o'-lantern driven by the wind.  I had come out into the wilderness of space.  Ever the vacant blackness grew broader, until the hosts of the stars seemed only like a swarm of fiery specks hurrying away from me, inconceivably remote, and the darkness, the nothingness and emptiness, was about me on every side.  (136-7)

I have doubts about that jack-o’-lantern.  Maybe I should have saved this story for Halloween.  The cosmic journey climaxes with a vision of God, or perhaps Steve Ditko’s Eternity (see left).  Alan Moore pilfers the scene for Swamp Thing #50.  This is why people come to Wuthering Expectations.

In Rudyard Kipling’s “’Wireless’” (1902), the ghost is John Keats, or the electromagnetic spirit of radio, or some mix of both.  Whatever the source, which is never resolved, much of the latter half of the story is a description of a fellow in a trance composing Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes,” as uncanny a performance as I have ever seen a fictional ghost pull off.

He repeated it once more, using ‘blander’ for ‘smoother’ in the second line; then wrote it down without erasure, but this time (my set eyes missed no stroke of any word) he submitted ‘soother’ for his atrocious second thought, so that it came away under his hand as it is written in the book – as it is written in the book.  (123)

This ought to be the dullest story ever written.  We watch one fellow write a poem while another tinkers with a radio. But that was not my experience.  The story is of course a parable about creativity as Kipling saw it – magic and science, good luck and hard thinking, what is right in front of me plus what no one has ever seen.

And a-heaving and a-heaving with what? - two M. R. James stories

Today’s ghost stories are both by M. R. James, “’Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’” (1904) and “Rats” (1929) (the latter is likely not public domain in the United States, so do not click if you fear the copyright haunts).

“’Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’” begins as a comedy in voice, tone, and subject (a Professor of Ontography goes on a golf holiday).  A character on the first page gets a line but no description otherwise “since he merely appears in this prologue.”  His golfing partner has a bad day and “assumed a colouring so lurid that even Parkins jibbed at the thought of walking home with him from the links.”  Ah, here is my favorite joke:

“But it's your drive” (or whatever it might have been: the golfing reader will have to imagine appropriate digressions at the proper intervals).

More writers should have the confidence to adopt this device.  Why should they do all the heavy lifting?

No, I am wrong, that is only my favorite joke-as-such, but the great conceptual joke of the story is that the ghost of the story turns out to be – I suppose sensitive readers should not read further – in fact, they should disconnect from the internet – you know, just go ahead and turn off your computer for a few hours – the ghost turns out to be evil ambulatory bedclothes (italics mine):

Parkins, who very much dislikes being questioned about it, did once describe something of it in my hearing, and I gathered that what he chiefly remembers about it is a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen.  What expression he read upon it he could not or would not tell, but that the fear of it went nigh to maddening him is certain.

Italics his.  In other words, the supernatural creature is wearing a sheet as his ghost costume.  Is the form already decadent by 1904, succumbing to the rarefied pleasures of meta-fiction and parody?  From me, this is not a complaint.

The first sentence of “Rats” features the link to “Oh Whistle”:

'And if you was to walk through the bedrooms now, you'd see the ragged, mouldy bedclothes a-heaving and a-heaving like seas.  And a-heaving and a-heaving with what?' he says.  ‘Why, with the rats under 'em.'

This marvelous and insane bit of dialogue supplies the title and inspires the narrator to tell an entirely different story that, he specifies, has no rats in it at all, but does involve heaving bedclothes.  Neither the rats nor the coot who delights in them are ever explained or even mentioned again.

Instead, there is an old inn and a locked room and a lodger too curious for his own good.  “Rats” is short and punchy, so there is hardly room for the ghost, but when it appears it is efficient enough.  James’s descriptions of its movement are especially nice.  The matter of factness of the innkeeper at the end of the story is amusing: he leaves the ghost alone, it leaves him alone.  A sensible man.

I have come up with a new way to categorize ghost stories.  There are the characters who deny the ghost, who resist it, and those who accept its rules or existence.  Gaskell’s nurse is not even superstitious: she simply observes the spirits, learns their rules, and does her duty.  The nitwit in “Rats” and the skeptic in “Oh Whistle” nearly gets themselves killed because they do not believe their own senses.