I recognised the signs - The Turn of the Screw is what it absolutely is not

Nothing was more natural than that these things should be the other things that they absolutely were not.  (Ch. 6)

Yesterday I suggested what I called the second-most productive way to read The Turn of the Screw.  The most productive way is to read it as exactly what you want it to be.  If you want ghosts, you can have them.  If you prefer madness, there is definitely that, of several varieties.  Maybe the ghosts drove the governess mad; maybe her sexual hysteria creates the ghosts.

That quotation up above does a lot of good work.  The text is naturally deconstructionist, my favorite example being the long passage in Chapter 13 where the governess explains how the absence of the ghosts proves their presence:

I recognised the signs, the portents – I recognised the moment, the spot.  But they remained unaccompanied and empty, and I continued unmolested; if unmolested one could call a young woman whose sensibility had, in the most extraordinary fashion, not declined but deepened.

Edmund Wilson, when he created his meticulous Freudian exorcism of the story’s ghosts, built his theory in part on a complete reading of Henry James, pulling in evidence from across his writing. Any text became fair game to explain this text.  Why he needed all that for a Freudian reading of, for example, the first time the governess sees the ghosts, atop the house’s towers, I don’t know.  Thoroughness.

I admired them [the towers], had fancies about them, for we could all profit in a degree, especially when they loomed through the dusk, by the grandeur of their actual battlements… (Ch. 3)

Or when the governess thinks that she and the ten-year-old boy are like

some young couple who, on their wedding-journey, at the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter.  (Ch. 32)

I reach for just one other story, a recent one, “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896), which is directly about searching through literary texts in search of solutions to imaginary puzzles, or even to real puzzles to which the author has deliberately omitted necessary clues.  Other stories from the same period – “The Way It Came” (1896) and “The Real Right Thing” (1899), for example – pursue the theme.

James appears to be working through not just an aesthetic but a metaphysics of ambiguity, writing stories where the density of signifiers is so thick that real and false clues are indistinguishable.  Readers hack their way through the thicket with the strongest tool they have, their freedom to ignore any detail that gets in the way of moving forward.  Ignoring the frame, or the odder features of the governess’s prose, or the amusing abruptness of the story’s ending, the ending that seems designed to baffle all theories.

As I work on a Jamesian puzzle, is my sensibility deepening, or declining?  Again, though, it is not that the figure in the carpet is not there – it is in an important sense there if I see it – but rather that it is so hard to get anyone else to see it.

We lived in a cloud of music and love and success and private theatricals.  (Ch. 9)

I am not sure why the Turn of the Screw has become the single most famous and most cited James story, but I suppose it is partly because it can be made to do whatever is needed.

jokes perpetrated in higher spirits than ever - the dreadful dreadfulness of The Turn of the Screw

Henry James and his friend Douglas are guests for an extended time at a country house Christmas gathering, the old-timey English kind where ghost stories are told every evening.  James and Douglas collaborate on a hoax, a prank, whereby Douglas tells the guests that he knows a ghost story which is true and has never been told and blah blah blah and makes a great show of sending for the manuscript and so on.  James, who of course wrote the story, eggs everyone on as needed.

“Nobody but me, till now, has ever heard.  It’s quite too horrible.”  This, naturally, was declared by several voices to give the thing the utmost price, and our friend, with quiet art, prepared his triumph by turning his eyes over the rest of us and going on: “It’s beyond everything.  Nothing at all that I know touches it.”

“For sheer terror?” I remember asking.  [See?]

He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be really at a loss how to qualify it.  He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little wincing gesture.  “For dreadful – dreadfulness!”

The most dreadful kind of dreadfulness of all, dreadful dreadfulness.  Ghost stories are hilarious.  Delays are introduced to turn the screw of the audience’s tension, thus the title.

The whole thing took indeed more nights than one, but on the first occasion the same lady put another question.  “What is your title?”

“I haven’t one.”

“Oh, I have!” I said.  But Douglas, without heeding me…

James about gives away the game there.  The manuscript, the story follows.  At this point, readers simulate joining the audience, which is now listening to a ghost story written by James that they believe is written by a character in the story, although if they had any sense of literary style they would be deeply suspicious:

But there was everything, for our apprehension, in the lucky fact that no discomfortable legend, no perturbation of scullions, had ever, within anyone’s memory, attached to the kind old place.  (Ch. 6)

I mean, “perturbation of scullions,” it’s like a signature.  Meanwhile, the reader knows full well the whole thing is a fiction created by James but generally pretends that the longer story, in which a deranged governess in an isolated country house has her fun scaring the hell out of a superstitious housekeeper and two bizarrely perfect, demon-haunted children, is true.  “They performed the dizziest feats of arithmetic, soaring quite out of my feeble range, and perpetrated, in higher spirits than ever, geographical and historical jokes” (Ch. 18).  Weird kids.

The text has been picked to pieces in search of clues to solve various puzzles, to prove that the ghost is “real” and the governess crazy or that the governess is merely crazy – surely no one, given this text, thinks her sane.  After this reading, I am mostly convinced that the second-most productive way to read The Turn of the Screw is to work through the ghost story for clues - winks, jokes – that solve the puzzle of the frame story.

they perfectly availed to make what he saw portentous - later Henry James ghosts

Be warned, there’s some scary stuff in this post.  It’s about “The Third Person,” a Henry James ghost story from 1900.

Miss Susan Frush and Miss Amy Frush are second cousins and old maids of the not-so-old variety.  They inherit a house and decide rather than to sell it and split the money to live in it together.  They get along well, except that Miss Susan takes her naps at the wrong time and Miss Amy hogs the sofa cushions.

Does the house come with a ghost?  “Yes; the place was h----- but they stopped at sounding the word.”  A figure with a strange tilt of the head has been appearing in Miss Susan’s bedroom, perhaps an 18th century ancestor who was “’Hanged!’ said Miss Amy – yet almost exultantly.”

Poor Miss Amy, the younger cousin, has not seen the ghost at this point.  The older Miss Frush has, in her bedroom, looking at her, with his oddly bent head.  “’It breaks their neck,’ she [Miss Amy] contributed after a moment.”  Amy begins to sound a bit bloodthirsty, but this is a gentle story of ghostly jealousy.  Poor Amy wants to see the ghost, too.  Why won’t her cousin share it?

Perhaps Amy does not possess the same degree of sublimated sexual hysteria as Susan.  I can imagine a critique of the old maid clichés of this story, but again, the overall effect is gentle.

“The Third Person” ends with an exorcism of the ghost that bookish folk, and who would read this, ought to find pretty funny.  It turns out James was writing a shaggy dog story about international copyright.  Pretty scary!

“The Jolly Corner” is from 1908, but is practically from a different writer.  The style of Late James is fully deployed:

It had belonged to that idea of the exasperated consciousness of his victim to become a real test for him; since he had quite put it to himself from the first that, oh distinctly! he could “cultivate” his whole perception.  (Ch. 2)

And also the Late James concerns, the “Beast in the Jungle” theme.  The ghost in “The Jolly Corner” is the protagonist’s other self, who he would have been if he had stayed in New York City rather than abandoning America for Europe thirty years ago.  He searches for this other self – and encounters it – by prowling around in his childhood home.  This all sounds autobiographical, except that the character for some reason imagines he would have been “monstrous,” and would have damaged eyesight, and would be missing two fingers from his right hand.  Well, maybe that is exactly what James imagined.  It is a very specific vision.

As abstract as the concept might be, the story is actually frightening in the manner of ghost stories, or at least the protagonist is frightened he spends eight or nine pages in the middle absolutely freaked out because a door that he thinks ought to be open is closed.  He nearly throws himself out of a window, he is so scared.  The thickness of the prose meant that I felt like I was with the character, in this condition, for a long time.

It was with these considerations that his present attention was charged – they perfectly availed to make what he saw portentous.

Yes, they do; they did.

Two more Henry James ghost stories - previewing "The Turn of the Screw" in "The Way It Came"

Two Henry James ghost stories that, unlike the last two I read, are ghost stories.  Or they are closer.

The strangeness in “Owen Wingrave” (1892) is less the ghost, or its possibility, than the number of elements unusual for James.  Wingrave is some kind of pre-cadet, from a long line of military men.  He is being trained by something like a crammer, except that the preparation is not for Oxford but for a military academy; a tutor for new military officers.

Wingrave decides that he will discontinue his cramming, perhaps due to a new pacifism.  He “despises” “’I think, military glory.  He says we take the wrong view of it’” says a friend who may well have no idea what he is talking about.  “’He hates poor old Bonaparte worst of all.’”

Wingrave’s family, incapable of understanding a principled objection, fears cowardice.  Luckily their country house features a ghost, an angry old officer, allowing Wingrave to prove that he is courageous.

I can imagine James working backwards when thinking about this ghost story: ghost – fear – cowardice – bravery – battles (wait, don’t know enough about that) – military – etc.  “Owen Wingrave” is the closest thing I have seen to a James ghost story written to solve as much of a commercial as an artistic problem.

James can lay it on amusingly thick:

She characterized it as “uncanny,” she accused her husband of not having warned her properly.

And:

As she confessed for her own part, in the dreadful place, to an increased sense of “creepiness,” they spent the early part of the night in conversation…

This, quotation marks and all, from a minor character who is very much an outsider in the story, looks like James winking at his readers, or at himself.

“The Way It Came” (1896), later retitled “The Friend of the Friends,” is a whole ‘nother critter.  A man and woman both saw visions or ghosts of their dead parents, a common enough ghost story, friends, including the narrator, think they should meet.  Is this perhaps a romance story, with ghosts as the meet-cute?  No, the characters somehow never meet, at least while they are both alive.  At the woman’s death, the man claims that he finally did see her.  He is by this point engaged to the narrator, who is jealous of the dead woman.  Is her fiancé having an affair with a ghost?  Is the woman just jealous of his gifts, his visions?

I should have supposed it more gratifying to be the subject of one of those inexplicable occurrences that are chronicled in thrilling books and disputed about at learned meetings; I could conceive, on the part of a being just engulfed in the infinite and still vibrating with human emotion, of nothing more fine and pure, more high and august than such an impulse of reparation, of admonition or even of curiosity. That was beautiful, if one would, and I should in his place have thought more of myself for being so distinguished.

The narrator writes a little bit like middle-period James.  But not quite.  When she goes for a scene, for dialogue, she sounds just like James, but when describing events more generally, or when describing her impressions, something is off about her.  It is possible that she is nuts.  None of the characters have names, which in a James story is as odd as anything else.  The story begins with a frame where an editor, or James, says that the story is unpublishable – “can you imagine for a moment my placing such a document before the world.”

The tale James published before this one was “The Figure in the Carpet.”  The next one would be “The Turn of the Screw,” with its frame, odd narrator, etc.  Boy am I glad I read this one.

“People don’t care for what you write” - some Henry James ghost stories of the non-Halloween variety

How are imaginary readers doing with my imaginary readalongs?  Great, I imagine.  I’ve taken Goethe to Sicily in Italian Journey, where he is horrified by the Villa Palagonia, a baroque folly near Palermo.  “[Y]ou will sympathize with anyone who has to run the gauntlet of this lunacy.”

As for Henry James, I thought I would cover a couple of his ghost stories now, gentle ones, though, not scary, completely inappropriate for Halloween, “The Private Life” (1892) and “The Real Right Thing” (1899).  Both are examples of James using ghosts to literalize a metaphor.  Both are about – what else – writers.

The earlier one may be the least ghostly ghost story ever.  The conceit is that people can be different in private and in public, which is true.  One character has no private self.  When not with people, he vanishes.  Another, a successful writer, is so different that he simultaneously exists in private and in public.  While his public self is socializing, his private self is back in his room, writing.  “[B]ut why was he writing in the dark?”  Because the private one is the supernatural creature, I guess.

The emphasis on the mechanics of the supernatural activity, once it is discovered by the Jamesish narrator and another character, an actress, is what makes the story a real ghost story.  They take the business seriously enough to learn how it works and then cynically exploit it.

“I wish you’d let an observer write you a play!” I broke out.

“People don’t care for what you write: you’d break my run of luck.”

And this is before James had his smashup writing for the theater.  There’s quite a bit of good self-deprecating writer comedy in “The Private Life.”

“The Real Right Thing” is of an entirely different hue, black to be specific.  This is the deceased author’s wife:

her large array of mourning – with her big black eyes, her big black wig, her big black fan and gloves, her general gaunt, ugly, tragic, but striking and, as might have been thought from a certain point of view, “elegant” presence.

Middle James is transforming into Late James here, isn’t he?  Mrs. Doyne wants the young writer Withermore (!) to write a biography of her husband:

It alarmed Withermore a little from the first to see that she would wish to go in for quantity.  She talked of “volumes” – but he had his notion of that.

Some writer humor here, too, although this story’s tone is generally sad.  Because Doyne is so recently deceased, all of his papers are in his study, so that is where the biographer works.  He feels at times that he is in the presence of the dead writer, is even assisted by him.  This “fancy” is so strong that he finds himself “waiting for the evening very much as one of a pair of lovers might wait for the hour of their appointment.”  On the one hand, the biographer is so immersed in his task that he feels he is in the presence of his subject, on the other, he is having an affair with his subject’s ghost.

Unlike in “The Aspern Papers,” where the biographer becomes an outright villain, it is never clear in this story what “The Real Right Thing” might be.  Should the biography be written or not?  Is there really a ghost, or is the biographer’s experience all psychological?  If there is a ghost, it is a gentle, undemonstrative one, who just wants to be left alone.  This is a ghost story where the only fear (“’he makes us dim signs out of his horror’”) is experienced by the ghost.

It was quite unbearable - an Oscar Wilde ghost and some other stuff

Alongside whatever else I have been doing, I have been reading Oscar Wilde, both The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde and The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, but in snatches, as the mood strikes me, so the books never seem to move to my “Currently Reading” list.  I read a book review or a couple of months of letters and set the books aside.  The pace seems to suit the subject.

I am at October 1888, roughly, a strange period for my received idea of Wilde.  He is married, has two infant children at home, and is the editor of a magazine titled Woman’s World.  Most of his letters are requests for contributions – how about 4,000 words on Concord, Massachusetts, with photos, or 2,500 on Goethe’s house, with photos?  Woman’s World sounds terrific.

Wilde’s wife, Constance Lloyd, sounds terrific, too.  “[A] grave, slight, violet-eyed little Artemis, with great coils of heavy brown hair which make her flower-like head droop like a flower, and wonderful ivory hands which draw music from the piano so sweet that the birds stop singing to listen to her” (Letter to Lillie Langtry, Jan. 22, 1884).

Just before the possibility of the editorship arose, Wilde had begin publishing comic fiction, just four stories that I know of.  All were originally published in 1887 but not collected into a book until 1891 as Lord Savile’s Crime & Other Stories, I presume as a quick cash-in on the success of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).  The two shortest stories seemed like trivia, but “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” is a good bit of vicious fun, and “The Canterville Ghost” is something more than that, a parody of ghost stories so forceful and thorough that I am surprised people still continued to write them.

This is Lady Windermere, a minor character in “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime.”  “She looked wonderfully beautiful with her grand ivory throat, her large blue forget-me-not-eyes, and her heavy coils of golden hair.”  Kinda funny given that letter.  Great artists are masters of recycling.

In “The Canterville Ghost,” an American minister and his family move into an English haunted house.  The Americans are either firm in their beliefs, or gross materialists, or both.  The first encounter with a haunting, a recurring blood-stain:

‘This is all nonsense,’ cried Washington Otis; ‘Pinkerton’s Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent will clean it up in no time,’ and before the terrified housekeeper could interfere he had fallen upon his knees, and was rapidly scouring the floor with a small stick of what looked like a black cosmetic.  In a few moments, no trace of the blood-stain could be seen.

‘I knew Pinkerton would do it,’ he exclaimed triumphantly…

Cold Comfort Farm owes a lot to “The Canterville Ghost.”  The great moment in the story, though, is when the point of view switches from the Americans to the poor, confounded ghost, who first feels “grossly insulted,” then frustrated, and finally openly terrified of these horrible modern people.  The ghost is an artist; the descriptions of his greatest hauntings are high points of the story:

With the enthusiastic egotism of the true artist he went over his most celebrated performances, and smiled bitterly to himself as he recalled to mind his last appearance as ‘Red Reuben, or the Strangled Babe,’ his début as ‘Gaunt Gibeon, the Blood-sucker of Bexley Moor,’ and the furore he had excited one lovely June evening merely by playing ninepins with his own bones upon the lawn-tennis ground.  And after all this, some wretched modern Americans were to come and offer him the Rising Sun Lubricator, and throw pillows at his head!  It was quite unbearable.

I wish I had read “The Canterville Ghost” twenty-five years ago and feel resentment towards every short story anthologist who failed to include it in whatever short story anthologies I happened to read.

William Henry Harrison Murray invents the American vacation - You feel as if the very air was God

Today’s book is minor as literature but major as history: Adventures in the Wilderness: Or, Camp-life in the Adirondacks (1869) by William Henry Harrison Murray, a Boston preacher who loved nothing more than fishing, hunting, and canoeing in the forests of northern New York state, so much so that he wrote this book, cover on the left.

The book became a surprise best-seller, during tens of thousands of city-dwellers into the forest to “get a glimpse of the magnificent scenery which makes this wilderness to rival Switzerland” (9), which you might think would ruin it all but as of now has preserved it; Adirondack Park is the largest U.S. park outside of Alaska.  Murray “broached the then-outrageous idea that an excursion into raw nature could actually be pleasurable,” as Tony Perrottet writes in his outstanding April 2013 Smithsonian article on Murray and the Adirondacks.  I will direct readers there for more on the book’s significance.  The article makes the case better than the book itself does.

It is such an odd book.  I urge anyone curious to page through it (this is the Google books version of the original that I read – many thanks to the Harvard Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology).  Murray begins with sixty pages of nominally practical advice – when to visit, how to hire a guide, how to avoid the nightmarish black flies (“a myth, – a monster existing only in men’s feverish imaginations,” 56, but maybe skip the woods during June), which hotel features “that modern prolongation of the ancient war-whoop modified and improved, called ‘operatic singing,’ in the parlors” (44) and which has “such pancakes as are rarely met with” (45), and where you should buy your tackle and flies.  The answer to the latter: J. C. Conroy &Co., No. 65 Fulton Street, New York (see right).  Another firm sells “’Bronze Yacht Guns,’ One-pounders, Mounted on Best Mahogany Carriages” (238), useless in the woods.

Then follows a collection of what are obviously short stories.  A canoeing exploit, a fishing exploit, a hunting exploit, a hunting failure in which Murray and his guide chase a loon around a lake – why on earth do they want to shoot a loon of all things?  One story, about a Union officer and his beloved horse, has nothing whatsoever to do with the Adirondacks.  Another is an imitation of Mark Twain (“Now Southwick was the best dancer there; that is, he covered the most ground,” 95).  Another is, of course, a ghost story, but really another excuse to brag about canoeing.  Murray and his guide chase a spectral Iroquois maiden in a canoe over a twenty-five foot waterfall.  There is way more about the handling of paddles than about the ghost.

And there is “Sabbath in the Woods,” the heart of the book, a day of wilderness experience as communion with God.

Even the Bible lies at your side unlifted.  The letters seem dead, cold, insufficient.  You feel as if the very air was God, and you had passed into that land where written revelation is not needed; for you see the Infinite as eye to eye, and feel him in you and above you and on all sides.  (195)

Murray was writing Emerson for tourists.  Tourists, it turned out, wanted Emerson for tourists.

Before I abandon Murray, I want to note a stylistic quirk I enjoyed.  I only noticed it three times:

With the thunder of the falls filling the air with a deafening roar, barely thirty rods away, with the siz-z of the current around me as we dashed down the decline, I felt as calm and confident as though the race was over and we were standing on the bank.  (163, in the ghost story)

But all of a sudden, when heart and hope were about to fail, some distance ahead of us we heard the well-known sounds, k-splash, k-splash, and knew that a deer, and a large one too, was making for the shore.  (180)

The heavy thug of the boat against the bank…  (186)

A minor writer, but an attentive one.  “Siz-z”!

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.

Melville's ghost tortoises

Tortoises, I was going to write something about the tortoises in “The Encantadas.”  I suppose television has made Galápagos tortoises less exotic and bizarre than they would have been in 1854 when Herman Melville published this little whatever it is.

Melville makes the tortoises strange.  He is doing what he always does, mixing a naturalist’s accuracy with a metaphorical fantasia.  The tortoises are like the whales in Moby-Dick.  They are meant to mean everything, or as much as Melville is able to pack into them.  He is riffing on the Galápagos tortoise.

So the tortoise is food for the hungry sailor: “a merry repast from tortoise steaks, and tortoise stews”.  The tortoise is erotic: “remember the sudden glimpses of dusky shells, and long languid necks protruded from the leafless thickets”.  It is a text, a record of history:

lantern in hand, I scraped among the moss and beheld the ancient scars of bruises received in many a sullen fall among the marly mountains of the isle – scars strangely widened, swollen, half obliterate, and yet distorted like those sometimes found in the bark of very hoary trees, I seemed an antiquary of a geologist, studying the bird-tracks and ciphers upon the exhumed slates trod by incredible creatures whose very ghosts are now defunct.

They are the turtles that carry the earth on their backs.  They are the ruins of the Roman Coliseum.  They are

the victims of a penal, or malignant, or perhaps a downright diabolical enchanter, seems in nothing more likely than in that strange infatuation of hopeless toil which so often possesses them.  I have known them in their journeyings ram themselves heroically against rocks, and long abide there, nudging, wriggling, wedging, in order to displace them, and so hold on their inflexible path.  Their crowning curse is their drudging impulse to straightforwardness in a belittered world.

Not all of the metaphors are easily extendable to humans, but I suspect that this one is a self-portrait, Melville as tortoise, ramming each new book against the indifferent rocks.  The writer has been cursed.

In the strangest turn, the writer suspects he has been cursed by the Galápagos, the enchanted nightmare islands.  Even today, he is haunted by ghost tortoises. 

For, often in scenes of social merriment, and especially at revels held by candle-light in old-fashioned mansions, so that shadows are thrown into the further recesses of an angular and spacious room, making them put on a look of haunted undergrowth of lonely woods, I have drawn the attention of my comrades by my fixed gaze and sudden change of air, as I have seemed to see, slowly emerging from those imagined solitudes, and heavily crawling along the floor, the ghost of a gigantic tortoise, with "Memento * * * * *" burning in live letters upon his back.

I never get invited to revels  held by candle-light in old-fashioned mansions.  Maybe they are out of fashion.  Regardless, those asterisks are a wonderful mystery.  “Memento mori”?  A strange message from the long-lived tortoise (“What other bodily being possesses such a citadel wherein to resist the assaults of Time?”), and anyway there are too many asterisks.

No wonder everyone thought Melville was crazy.

I could have made anything out of it - Kipling's ghost stories

Two more ghost stories, both by Rudyard Kipling:  “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” and “My Own True Ghost Story.”  Both stories are circa 1888.  This is my elegant transition to a week of Kipling in 1888.

Also, neither of these ghost stories are actual ghost stories, at least according to the editors (Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert) of The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories (1986):

The ghostly protagonists must act with a deliberate intent; their actions – or the consequences of their actions – rather than those of the living must be the central theme; and most important of all, each ghost, whether human or animal phantom or reanimated corpse, must unquestionably be dead.  From this it follows that there can be no rationalization of the ghost, no explanation of events by natural causes.  (ix)

By this standard, The Turn of the Screw is not a ghost story nor are any of those I read last week.  Are editors of Oxford anthologies really this unsophisticated about fiction?  No need to answer that.

In “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” an Englishman in India is haunted by the ghost of a married woman he loved then spurned for the insipid but single Kitty, and not just be her but by her rickshaw (I will abandon Kipling’s extra apostrophe) and the four native men who pull and push it.  Obviously the ghost is just a projection of the narrator’s guilt, and everyone treats it as such, including, up to a point, the man who sees it:

I had originally some wild notion of confiding it all to Kitty; of begging her to marry me at once; and in her arms defying the ghostly occupant of the 'rickshaw.  "After all," I argued, "the presence of the 'rickshaw is in itself enough to prove the existence of a spectral illusion.  One may see ghosts of men and women, but surely never of coolies and carriages. The whole thing is absurd."

This I enjoy a lot.  The ghost of a lover – plausible; the ghost of a cart – preposterous.  But then it turns out that the rickshaw died I mean was destroyed under mysterious circumstances.  So this is among the least frightening ghost stories ever written, but is instead an almost moving story about a man punishing himself for a crime only he knows about.

Kipling is the “me” in “My Own True Ghost Story,” or anyway the supple version of himself he had developed in his early career as a writer in India.  After a prelude defending the seriousness of Indian ghosts (“The older Provinces simply bristle with haunted houses, and march phantom armies along their main thoroughfares”), he tells of the time he came across a ghost or two in an isolated government way-station.  As is typical in ghost stories, the narrator tells me how scared he was:

Do you know what fear is?  Not ordinary fear of insult, injury or death, but abject, quivering dread of something that you cannot see – fear that dries the inside of the mouth and half of the throat – fear that makes you sweat on the palms of the hands, and gulp in order to keep the uvula at work?  This is a fine Fear – a great cowardice, and must be felt to be appreciated.  The very improbability of billiards in a dâk-bungalow proved the reality of the thing.  No man – drunk or sober – could imagine a game at billiards, or invent the spitting crack of a "screw-cannon."

Yes, Kipling’s ghosts are playing billiards in the next room, a room with no billiards table.  Ghost billiards.  Perhaps he is not taking ghosts as seriously as he claims.  Perhaps he is the first great writer to be strongly influenced by Mark Twain.  Perhaps.

The story ends in tragedy:

Then the wind ran out and the billiards stopped, and I felt that I had ruined my one genuine, hall-marked ghost story.

Had I only stopped at the proper time, I could have made anything out of it.

That was the bitterest thought of all!

A tragedy for a world-class storyteller, at least.

The rest of the week, more of Kipling’s stories of India, all published, strangely, in 1888.

Then I connected up the battery - ghostbusting with Carnacki and William Hope Hodgson

The final ghost story of the week is William Hope Hodgson’s “The Gateway of the Monster,” the first story in the 1910 collection Carnacki, the Ghost Finder.

First, though, I want to thank everyone for their suggestions.  The recommendation-packed comments on that first post are now a treasure trove of terror.  Do you dare risk the Curse of the Comments?  Etc.

Second, some criticism of M. R. James specifically but ghost stories more generally from S. T. Joshi, weird tale expert, ghost story skeptic, drawn from his 1990 book The Weird Tale (University of Texas Press); the title of his chapter on James is “The Limitations of the Ghost Story,” so he makes his view clear enough:

They are simply stories; they never add up to a world view.  The tales are all technique, a coldly intellectual exercise in which James purposefully avoids drawing broader implications.  (140)

I discuss him here because he is clearly the perfecter of one popular and representative form of the weird tale; but in his very perfection of that form he showed its severe limitations in scope.  (142)

My initial hypothesis was that the ghost story is a flexible form capable of the usual range of purposes of fiction.  I will admit that the idea has been 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.  Ghosts also haunt ruins and alleys and, I don’t know, glaciers and so on, yes, not just beds?  I will admit that I am making an inference from a very small sample.  Still, it’s sorta weird – spooky, even.

Hodgson’s Carnacki is a prototype of a character I recognize from comic books like Hellblazer and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Doctor Strange.  Carnacki is not merely a ghost finder but a ghost slayer.  His world is full of magic and strange doings that are if not quite rationally understandable at least manageable. 

He spends the first part of “The Gateway of the Monster” proving that the mysterious phenomena in a haunted room are in fact supernatural – like the character’s in “The Upper Berth” he removes the furniture, searches for trap doors, and so on – and once he is satisfied that the ghostly effects are not produced by smugglers trying to scare off nosey kids he gets down to the business of dispelling the dangerous spirit, which he does in a similarly methodical manner.  Carnacki is not exactly a supernatural scientist, but is more like a technician.  Let him tinker with the ectoplasmic engine and he will figure out how it runs.

Thus, the greatest moment in the story,  the deployment of:

“the Electric Pentacle, setting it so that each of its 'points' and 'vales' coincided exactly with the 'points' and 'vales' of the drawn pentagram upon the floor.  Then I connected up the battery, and the next instant the pale blue glare from the intertwining vacuum tubes shone out.”

The Electric Pentacle, besides sounding like the name of an English folk-rock band, is an outstanding bit of pulpy inventiveness.  Good Lord, someone gave it a Wikipedia page.

Again, the narrator tells me how frightened he is:

“I shall never be able to let you know how disgustingly horrible it was sitting in that vile, cold wind!  And then, flick! flick! flick! all the candles 'round the outer barrier went out; and there was I, locked and sealed in that room, and with no light beyond the weakish blue glare of the Electric Pentacle.”

That “flick! flick! flick!” gives a good idea of Hodgson’s vibrant, resourceful narrator.  I would enjoy reading more of him.  I would enjoy more of everything I read this week, actually, with the exception of a generic Arthur Machen story (“The Happy Children”) that I tried, based on no one’s recommendation; it at least had the benefit of taking place outdoors and not featuring a single sheet, blanket, or quilt.

I had meant to end with Kipling, but I will postpone him until next week.  All next week:  Kipling in 1888.  Don't miss it.

And thanks again for all of the help with the ghosts!

It will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me - ghost stories by H. G. Wells and F. Marion Crawford

“The Upper Berth” (1886) by F. Marion Crawford and “The Red Room” (1896) by H. G. Wells.  The titles link the stories – both are in the “spend the night in a haunted house” ghost story sub-genre, sub-sub-genre “haunted room.”  If you are thinking that I’m slicing things a little thin, you are correct.  But I’m not the one who wrote the stories.

Crawford sets his ghost story on a passenger liner, and the haunted room is actually a haunted cabin.  A surprising amount of space is given to the mechanics of a cabin porthole which refuses to stay closed:

My eyes were riveted upon the porthole.  It seemed to me that the brass loop-nut was beginning to turn slowly upon the screw – so slowly, however, that I was not sure it turned at all.

One of the great benefits of the ghost story is that it forces writers to pay such close attention to objects and spaces and movement – a brass loop-nut, you don’t say.  Ghost stories are often so pleasingly material, much like good mysteries.

“The Upper Berth” is written like a mystery, and is a cousin of the “locked room” mystery sub-genre.  The narrator and his assistants dismantle the cabin’s furniture and test the walls to make sure there are no secret passages.  I have been wondering how some of these stories would seem if a reader did not suspect that they were ghost stories.  If I had not encountered Crawford in The English Book of Ghost Stories I might have read it looking for clues to the puzzle rather than signs of the supernatural.  I might have been disappointed by the ending, since an immaterial ghost is not really such an ingenious solution to a locked-room mystery.

Now, to read “The Upper Berth” this way I also would have had to skip the two-page frame in which I am directly told that this is a story about how the narrator saw a ghost.

H. G. Wells is even more direct in “The Red Room,” beginning the story with this:

"I can assure you," said I, "that it will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me."  And I stood up before the fire with a glass in my hand.

"It is your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm, and glanced at me askance.

The first line is pure irony.  The idea that a tangible ghost is more frightening than an intangible one is just the kind of youthful hubris a ghost story is meant to deflate.  This particular narrator, though, unlike Crawford’s, seems to overestimate his steadiness and rationality.  He is practically reduced to hysterics by the shadows in the corridor outside of the haunted room:

A bronze group stood upon the landing hidden from me by a corner of the wall; but its shadow fell with marvelous distinctness upon the white paneling, and gave me the impression of some one crouching to waylay me.  The thing jumped upon my attention suddenly.  I stood rigid for half a moment, perhaps.  Then, with my hand in the pocket that held the revolver, I advanced, only to discover a Ganymede and Eagle, glistening in the moonlight.  That incident for a time restored my nerve, and a dim porcelain Chinaman on a buhl table, whose head rocked as I passed, scarcely startled me.

And we still have another paragraph before he sets foot in the room.  “Scarcely startled” – it’s gonna be a long night, kid.

Wells does something curious and irritating at the very end of the story.  Questioned about his bad night, which had already been described in detail to the story’s reader, the narrator turns to allegory.  What was in the room? 

"The worst of all the things that haunt poor mortal men," said I; "and that is, in all its nakedness --Fear!"

Crawford’s narrator, late in his story, specifically tells us he was frightened.  M. R. James did the same thing; so did Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.  I wonder why this is necessary.

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.

Look! there is my poor little girl out in the snow! - ghosts by Elizabeth Gaskell and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

The first two ghost stories of the week are “The Nurse’s Story” (1852) by Elizabeth Gaskell and “The Southwest Chamber” (1903 or so) by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.  I am reading more or less randomly, which makes the similarities between these two stories almost uncanny.

The southwest chamber is where the old aunt died, the one who was “pitiless” towards her sister who married a poor man, and to her nieces, too, but they end up with the house.  They take in lodgers, but the aunt’s room turns out to be trouble.

“Well!” said Sophia, “of all the silly notions! If you are going to pick out rooms in this house where nobody has died, for the boarders, you'll have your hands full… I don't believe there's a room nor a bed in this house that somebody hasn't passed away in.”

But apparently none of those other people were so mean.

The amusing thing is that the aunt’s hauntings are entirely domestic.  She messes around with dresses and nightcaps and mirrors and, my favorite, her bed hangings, which she occasionally switches from a “peacocks on blue” pattern to “roses on yellow.”

This apparent contradiction of the reasonable as manifested in such a commonplace thing as chintz of a bed-hanging affected this ordinarily unimaginative woman as no ghostly appearance could have done. Those red roses on the yellow ground were to her much more ghostly than any strange figure clad in the white robes of the grave entering the room.

Next week, kids, Count Floyd will get a scary movie, he promises.

No, I joke, this is good.  The skeptical, tough niece learns that no matter how strong and sensible she is she cannot correct the sins of someone else’s past, even in her own family.  Just get away from it; move on.  A therapeutic ghost story.

Elizabeth Gaskell also conjures some ghosts from a sister’s old act of cruelty.  The nurse and her little ward end up in a house with the usual accoutrements – a sealed-off wing, a bitter old lady.  Gaskell employs James’s two turns of the screw (“what do you say to two children”), in this case one living and one  lost:

[B]y-and-by, without our noticing it, it grew dusk indoors, though it was still light in the open air, and I was thinking of taking her back into the nursery, when, all of sudden, she cried out, -

'Look, Hester! look! there is my poor little girl out in the snow!'

I turned towards the long, narrow windows, and there, sure enough, I saw a little girl, less than my Miss Rosamond dressed all unfit to be out-of-doors such a bitter night - crying, and beating against the window-panes, as if she wanted to be let in.

This is the pleasingly uncanny point where the reader interested in being frightened will enjoy himself.

The story’s end is a bit more thumping, with the story’s ghosts assembling before the living to re-enact the moment that created them many decades ago.

As soon as I saw the date of the story, I should have known what Gaskell was after.  “The Nurse’s Story” is another of her tales of female solidarity, with the nurse doing everything necessary to protect the little girl in her care, taking the ghosts in their own terms, figuring out their rules.  The evil act in the past is the opposite, one woman destroying another.  The only act of violence comes from a man, but a woman endorsing the violence against her own sister and niece is as worthy of a lifetime of guilt and ghosts.

So, two ghost stories that are feminist explorations of good and bad deeds within the family.

I doubt whatever else I read will pair up so nicely.

Give me thy foggy lips divine - please suggest some ghost stories

Here’s something I have never done before, a sort of invitation-only event where everyone is invited.  It is the season for ghost stories; I rarely read and know little about ghost stories.  Please suggest some ghost stories.  I’ll read a few and write ‘em up.  I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I do know I’ll end up with Rudyard Kipling.  So no need to suggest him.

More rules: to be read, the suggested story must be 1) short, 2) available, and 3) old.

It was not the season that got me thinking about ghost stories but a post at Book Around the Corner on The Turn of the Screw.  Emma had a number of objections to James’s ghost-or-not-a-ghost riddle, but the one that struck me was the suggestion that her Cartesian rationalism, a French cultural inheritance,  is immune to the charms of the ghost story:  “skepticism won the battle and I didn’t manage to accept the concept of ghost as a prerequisite to the story.”

Meanwhile the Argumentative Old Git writes about “The Turn of the Screw” from what looks to me like an opposed viewpoint.  The story is “frightening,” evoking a “powerful… sense of supernatural terror,” and “there is an immense evil lurking in these pages.”

Now, I am as skeptical as they come on the subject of ghosts, and I wonder just exactly what sort of ghost story could actually cause me the slightest sense of anxiety, much less frighten me.  No, never mind, I know the answer to that:  the ghost of Ralph Waldo Emerson haunts the author of a book blog, giving him terrifying advice about writing (“Good for that and good for nothing else”).  Why did I even bring that up.  Now I’ve got the sweats, I’ve got the chills, your basic waking nightmare.

I mean, I follow Nabokov in calling so-called “realism” like Madame Bovary a “fairy tale.”  It’s all made up; even the parts that are not made up are made up once they pass into the text.  I am a cold-blooded reader, I know.  A jolly literary lizard.

At the same time, I am a great admirer of the free exercise of the artist’s imagination.  I practically cheered when I discovered that Émile Zola, eminently French, not merely rational but scientific, slipped a ghost story into Thérèse Raquin!  No, I admit, I did not cheer, but rather laughed loudly:  “They could still feel pieces of him squashed revoltingly between them, freezing their skin in some places while the rest of them was burning hot.”  Ha ha ha ha ha!  Ghosts are wonderful!

If no one has any suggestion – “The Turn of the Screw” is much, much, much too long – I will browse around in an anthology, Masterpieces of Terror and the Unknown, ed. Marvin Kaye, 1993, with its marvelous Edward Gorey cover.  The flap insists that “this collection intends to terrify the reader.”  Sensitive readers may want to avert their gaze as I give a sample of the contents:

Come, essence, of a slumb’ring soul.
Throw off thy maidenly control
    Un-shroud thy ghastly face!
Give me thy foggy lips divine.
And let me press my mist to thine.
And fold thy nothingness in mine,
    In one long damp embrace.

That is the conclusion of “The Ghost to His Ladye Love” (1869) by W. S. Gilbert.  The lady ghost is also lovingly described as “Thou cloudy, clammy thing!” and being “rich in calico and bone.”  How can she resist these ectoplasmic endearments?  Of course she cannot.

So if anyone knows a (short, available, old) ghost story better than Gilbert’s, which I know sounds unlikely, please, let me know, and I will give it a try.