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‘A Modicum of Blood, Shed Deliberately and Carefully Husbanded’
Ghost Stories---Treat them Gently.
If you truly need to be taken out of yourself, there’s nothing like a ghost story---a real ghost story, written by someone who understands the art---to make you forget your free-floating anxiety through the study of dread sufficiently subtle and menacing and separate from you to bring your ordinary workaday stress into proper perspective. I’ve spent more years than I care to count searching out the best. But the best ones aren’t easy to track down. Many are out of print or available only in anthologies which are also out of print. You have to track them down, in libraries and used bookstores (now thankfully accessible online). The ones I discuss are well worth the trouble.
Since college, I've been 'collecting' ghost stories. I don’t mean campfire tales nor yet the sort of stories written by Stephen King or Peter Straub. With a couple of notable exceptions---The Shining by King and Straub's early novels, If You Could See Me Now and Julia---very few of their writings fit my definition of a 'ghost story.' Straub in particular has written some brilliant fiction (along with some that isn't), but both are writers in the so-called 'Horror' genre and it's not the same thing. Even Straub's novel Ghost Story wasn't what I call a ghost story, though it mixes in some terrifying moments some that are simply ludicrous.
The greatest ghost story writers according to me are probably Henry James, M.R. James (no relation),and Edith Wharton, though Sheridan LeFanu deserves honorable mention. All of them wrote a number of ghost stories and some of the ghost stories they wrote are among the greatest there are. On the other hand, it’s probably a bit misleading to focus on 'ghost story writers’---a list of great ghost stories would be more to the purpose. Some writers whose other work has been forgotten are the authors of some of the greatest ghost stories---Oliver Onions, for example, the author of the incomparable The Beckoning Fair One.
James, successively Fellow, Dean, Tutor, and Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, set out the criteria for ghost stories in a 1931 essay in The Evening News entitled “Ghosts---Treat them Gently.” The quotation that follows is from Casting the Runes and Other Stories, a ‘World’s Classics’ anthology assembled by the (to me and to ghost story connoisseurs the world over) indispensable Michael Cox and published in 1987 by Oxford University Press.
The ghost story can be supremely excellent in its kind, or it may be deplorable. Like other things, it may err by excess or defect. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a book with very good ideas in it, but---to be vulgar---the butter is spread far too thick in it. Excess is the fault here: to give an example of erring by defect is difficult, because the stories that err in that way leave no impression on the memory….
Since the things which a ghost can effectively do are very limited in number, ranging about death death and madness and the discovery of secrets, the setting seems to me all-important, since in it there is the greatest opportunity for variety.
It is upon this and upon the first glimmer of the appearance of the supernatural that pains must be lavished. But we need not, should not, use all the colours in the box. In the infancy of the art we needed the haunted castle on a beetling rock to put us in the right frame of mind…. It cannot be said too often that the more remote in time the ghost is the harder it is to make him effective, always supposing him to be the ghost of a dead person. Elementals and such-like do not come under this rule.
Roughly speaking, the ghost should be the contemporary of the seer. Such was the elder Hamlet and such Jacob Marley. The latter I cite with confidence and in spite of critics, for, whatever may be urged against some parts of A Christmas Carol, it is, I hold, undeniable that the introduction, the advent, of Jacob Marley is tremendously effective. …
Setting or environment, then, is a principal point, and the more readily appreciable the setting is to the ordinary reader, the better. The other essential is that our ghost should make himself felt by gradual stirrings diffusing an atmosphere of uneasiness before the final flash or stab of horror.
Must there be horror? you ask. I think so. There are but two really good ghost stories I know in the language wherein the elements of beauty and pity dominate terror. They are Lance Falconer’s ‘Cecilia de Noel’ and Mrs Oliphant’s ‘The Open Door’. In both there are moments of horror; but in both we end by saying with Hamlet, ‘Alas, poor ghost!’…
On the whole, then, I say you must have horror and also malevolence. Not less necessary, however, is reticence…..Of course, all writers of ghost stories do desire to make their readers’ flesh creep; but [some] are shameless in their attempts. They are unbelievably crude and sudden, and they wallow in corruption. And if there is a theme that ought to be kept out of ghost stories, it is that of the charnel house. That and sex…spoil the whole business. James, Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories at 338-40 (ed. Michael Cox, Oxford University Press 1987). James, Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories at 338-40 (ed. Michael Cox, Oxford University Press 1987).
James, Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories at 349-350 (ed. Michael Cox, Oxford University Press 1987).
And in an introduction to a collection of ghost stories (I’m quoting from the source cited above), he wrote,
Often I have been asked to formulate my views about ghost stories and tales of the marvellous, the mysterious, the supernatural. Never have I been able to find out whether I had any views that could be formulated. The truth is, I suspect, that the genre is too small and special to ear the imposition of far-reaching principles. Widen the question, and ask what governs the construction of short stories in general, and a great deal might be said, and has been said. There are, of course, instances of whole novels in which the supernatural governs the plot; but among them there are few successes. The ghost story is, at its best, only a particular sort of short story, and is subject to the same broad rules as the whole mass of them….
[W]hile I cannot undertake to write about broad principles, something more concrete is capable of being recorded. Well, then: two ingredients most valuable in the concocting of a ghost story are, to me, the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo. I assume, of course, that the writer will have got his central idea before he undertakes the story at all. Let us, then be introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings, and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage. It is not amiss sometimes to have a loophole for a natural explanation; but, I would say, let the loophole be so narrow as not to be quite practicable. Then, for the setting….For the ghost story a slight haze of distance is desirable. ‘Thirty years ago,’ ‘Not long before the war,’ are very proper openings. …On the whole (though not a few instances might be quoted against me) I think that a setting so modern that the ordinary reader can judge of its naturalness for himself is preferable to anything antique. For some degree of actuality is the charm of the best ghost stories; not a very insistent actuality, but one strong enough to allow the reader to identify himself with the patient; while it is almost inevitable that the reader of an antique story should fall into the position of the mere spectator.
James, Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories at 338-40 (ed. Michael Cox, Oxford University Press 1987) (Emphasis added).
The slow creeping incursion of malevolence into the victim’s ordinary life is the element that makes James’s short stories so remarkably shocking, even at this distance in time from the original setting.
This final bit of advice from ‘Some Remarks on Ghost Stories’ reprinted from The Bookman (December 1929) exactly explains why I have so little time for modern ‘ghost’ stories and horror fiction.
Reticence may be an elderly deoctrine to preach, yet from an artistic point of view I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it, and there is much blatancy in a lot of recent stories. They draft in sex too, which is a fatal mistake; sex is tiresome enough in the novels; in a ghost story, or as the backbone of a ghost story, I have no patience with it.
At the same time, don’t let us be mild and drab. Malevolence and terror, the glare of evil faces, ‘the stony grin of unearthly malice,’ pursuing forms in darkness, and ‘long-drawn, distant screams’, are all in place and so is a modicum of blood, shed with deliberation and carefully husbanded, [without] the weltering and the wallowing….
The greatest ghost story writers according to me are probably Henry James, M.R. James (no relation),and Edith Wharton, though Sheridan LeFanu deserves honorable mention. All of them wrote a number of ghost stories and some of the ghost stories they wrote are among the greatest there are. On the other hand, it’s probably misleading to focus on 'ghost story writers’---a list of great ghost stories would be more to the purpose. Some writers whose other work has been forgotten are the authors of some of the greatest ghost stories. Oliver Onions, for example, the author of the incomparable The Beckoning Fair One.
Over time, I will be compiling a list of some of the best ghost stories I’ve read with perhaps a short ‘review’ to whet the appetite sufficiently to prompt interested persons to do the necessary work of seeking them out. But if you are interested now, here are some you can check out now.
One of the greatest, most terrifying, and most restrained, of all the great ghost stories ever written was written by an American, Shirley Jackson. I read The Haunting of Hill House when I was 12, but all these years later, I can’t read it before bed if I expect to sleep. The beauty of The Haunting of Hill House is that you never have more than the vaguest of vague notions as to the reason for the terrible manifestations of Hill House. (And if you think you have seen the movie, think again, because no film could do justice to the book---so much of the terror springs from Shirley Jackson’s inimitable narrative voice---gentle, detached, ruthless, and infused with subtle menace from the very first line. The Haunting, the original 1963 version was adapted from the Shirley Jackson book, and is a tremendous film in its own right, but it is not the same as the book. The 1999 version, The Haunting of Hill House, was a waste of a wonderful cast on a ridiculous, mainly unfrightening farce which was nothing at all like the book in any respect, except for an incidental correspondence between the characters’ names. As I said, I doubt that any film could do justice to the book.
In addition to The Haunting of Hill House, you might see if you can find a copy of Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man, another of the few ghost stories I’ve ever read that works as a full length novel. If you didn’t already have to read it in college---or if you did--- The Turn of the Screw is one of the most terrifying novels of all time.
If you want a connoisseur’s anthology, The Oxford Anthology of English Ghost Stories and The Oxford Anthology of Victorian Ghost Stories (both published by Oxford University Press and edited by Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert) will introduce you to some of the best of the best. There are many anthologies, but most have mixed in with one or two legitimate gems a hell of a lot of crap. It’s worth it to me, but it might not be to you.
And of course, the M.R. James collection is definitely worth the cover price if it’s still available. From these collections only, here are what I consider to be the ‘top twenty’ from these three anthologies. I’ve omitted stories by some of my favorite ghost story writers because the stories included aren’t among those I like best in these collections. Furthermore, some of my all-time favorites are missing from these anthologies, but never mind; these will do to be starting with. I put them in alphabetical order because which I like best depends entirely on my frame of mind.
An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street (Sheridan LeFanu)(OBVGS)
An Eddy on the Floor (Bernard Capes)(OBVGS)
At the End of the Passage (Rudyard Kipling)(OBVGS)
A Visitor from Down Under (L.P. Hartley)(OBEGS)
A Warning to the Curious (M.R. James (COLLECTED STORIES)
A Wicked Voice (Vernon Lee)(OBEGS)
Bosworth Summit Pound (L.T.C. Rolt)(OBEGS)
Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook (M.R.James)(OBVGS & COLLECTED STORIES)
Casting the Runes (M.R. James)(COLLECTED STORIES)
Count Magnus (M.R. James)(COLLECTED STORIES)
The Clock (W.F. Harvey)(OBEGS)
The Friend of the Friends (Henry James)(OBEGS)
‘To Let’ (B.M. Croker)(OBVGS)
The Lost Ghost (Mary E. Wilkins)(OBEGS)
The Shadows on the Wall (Mary E. Wilkins)(OBVGS)
Mr. Jones (Edith Wharton)(OBEGS)
Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You My Lad (M.R. James)(same + OBEGS)
Rose Rose (Barry Pain)(OBEGS)
Smee (A.M. Burrage) (OBEGS)
Thurnley Abbey (Perceval Landon (OBVGS)
Missing from the list---sadly--- are certain all-time favorites which are anthologized in a book I’ve had since I was a teenager called Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. I can’t lay hands on it so I can’t give any more exact information, but---among many rather dull or fairly lame anthologies---it’s one of the best.
The stories I've listed below are definitely worth a little trouble to find (if you’re serious about enjoying what Edith Wharton called ‘the fun of the shudder’). The Great God Pan, I admit, isn’t exactly a ghost story---it involves what James referred to in his essays as ‘elementals’, which in their way are possibly more terrifying. All are in my top ten list of all-time greatest stories (with Casting the Runes and An Eddy on the Floor.)
Some libraries may have this anthology. I’ve seen it here and there.
Green Tea (J.S. LeFanu)
How Love Came to Professor Guildea (by I don’t remember whom, but unique and uniquely terrifying)
The Beckoning Fair One (Oliver Onions)
The Great God Pan (Arthur Machen)
Finally, an incomparably terrifying story, if you can find in your library, as I could in mine, a collection of stories by Algernon Blackwood:
The Willows (Algernon Blackwood)
RELATED POSTINGS
“A Modicum of Blood, Carefully Husbanded”: Famous Ghost Stories---How to Find the Good Ones
Comfort Food for the Psyche: Why I Love Anne Tyler’s Novels.
Updike for the 21st Century [book review; fiction]
Second-Hand Bookstore Gold: The Short Stories of H.H. Munro. [book review]
Lynda Barry Rocks My World: The Greatest of Marlys, One Hundred Demons, and Cruddy. [book review; graphic novel; fiction]
Umberto Eco: Foucault’s Pendulum---It’s Always About the Templars
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