The 4th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

INTRODUCTION

“Judge a man by his questions,” advised Diderot, “not by his answers.” This is at once useful guidance for any interviewer; and deep wisdom.

Answers are almost always insufficient. (There is, in fact, a famous ghost story which bears that very name.) They are almost always misleading. To go through life believing the common answers is to walk through a minefield in blinkers. The main reason why science has not made people happier is that the scientific approach asks the wrong questions and then gives incomplete answers. The more you know in that way, the less you know: as many of the wiser scientists have always acknowledged, and occasionally still do.

This is not merely a paradox. Every scientific answer raises more doubts than existed before the asking of the question; leaves the questioner even nakeder and chillier than he was before. It is in this way that science will end the world, rather than with a big bang. Even if there is no big bang, we shall destroy the world in no time, if we go on as we are. We shall crowd ourselves out; starve ourselves out; bore ourselves to bits; choke with protest against all the wrong things.

Knowledge lies within us. It is to be found nowhere else. It is a matter of delight and of inaccessible horizons, rather than of question and answer. Truth can be found only through the imagination, and those whose imaginations have been cramped with answers will never find it.

The so-called ghost story, the story of rare sensations, gives access to a modest, but extremely significant, section of the truth. As the scientist and his alter ego, the bureaucrat, close in the world around us, shutter by shutter, poetry and religion, which represent a fundamentally different way of life, seem to lose much of their authority. People abandon the quest for their own truth, in favour, at the best, of selecting or building up an external truth from ingredients offered by specialists, much of whose impressiveness lies, as they are the first to say, in their incomprehensibility to non-specialists. It is a curious road to truth for the common citizen. Ghost stories, believe it or not, are one of the last outposts of the spirit of man. Hence, undoubtedly, the quite remarkable rise in their popularity. Hence, equally, the great difficulty of finding new ones that qualify; that really are ghost stories.

The essential quality of the ghost story is that it gives satisfying form to the unanswerable; to thoughts and feelings, even experiences, which are common to all imaginative people, but which cannot be rendered down scientifically into “nothing but” something else. In a world of meaningless fact and meaningless violence, people shrink from admitting that they still harbour entities of the imagination. The element of form in the ghost story is, therefore, crucial. Hence the fact that so many of the best ones derive from the period, at the end of the last century and beginning of this, when form was a particular and conscious literary preoccupation. In the present collection will be found a conte by Oscar Wilde which is almost nothing but form, and which manages to carry suggestions going far beyond its precise ironical details and narrative. There is often something curiously extra-terrestrial about Wilde’s style of mockery: something much more poetical than satirical (even in the proper use of that vulgarized word). It is this innate, smiling concern with two worlds at once that largely accounts for the unique charm, going beyond standards of customary literary criticism, that so many, here and abroad, have always found in his ostensibly rather casual opus. “Under the common thing, the hidden grace,” as Lord Alfred Douglas put it, in one of the most beautiful sonnets ever written. No one can hope more from life than to find that particular grace, even occasionally. From Wilde it seldom absented itself, even through all his troubles.

The ghost story, like poetry, deals with the experience behind experience: behind almost any experience. Often, alas, as often as in life, the experience is of guilt; as here perhaps in Pargiton and Harby, The Accident, and When I was Dead. The first of these, by one of the greatest of English literary (and dramatic) critics, relates to the frenzy so often encountered in the community of professional letters, as excess sensibility and the compulsion to self-expression encounter little public interest and less comprehension. In all of us the passion of guilt is terrifyingly autonomous: related at once to everything we do and to nothing we have done; strong or weak in us by virtue of forces which have little connection with our actions or conscious thoughts: expressed, more often than not, so indirectly and obliquely as to build up rather than diminish in the seeming release. The Accident depicts this mystery against an apt and proportionate geographical background, most adroitly and compellingly portrayed; thus it was, we feel, utterly realistically, in every detail. When I was Dead is a very rictus or spasm of guilt; sudden and shattering. Vincent O’Sullivan was a master of this dyeing and soaking in guilt. The curious should try to find a copy of his novel, The Good Girl. The quest is difficult, but the product distinctive. O’Sullivan, having lived a longish life as a more or less well-to-do rentier, in latish middle age found himself ruined, wrote his last book (Opinions) under terrible conditions, and, dying in Paris, ended anonymously in the common pit for the cadavers of paupers.

But guilt is not the only human experience which has a soul. Vulgarity and parvenuism has a soul, and in several stories Saki bleached it white, but never whiter than in The Wolves of Cernogratz. The fancy that ancient lineage has no meaning is here deftly cauterized. So too in Pushkin’s immortal Queen of Spades: on the face of it, redbrick finds retribution, but the curiously mechanistic, matter-of-fact, man-of-the-world telling of the wild tale, offers little hope to the impure hearted of any persuasion. Modeste Tchaikovski, in adapting the story for his brother’s opera, widened the field of sympathy by working up the sentiment between Hermann and Lizavetta. This was quite legitimate, and the splendid Pique Dame would not have lasted with audiences as it has, if he had not done so; but people have become so familiar with the opera, and also with Mr. Thorold Dickinson’s, in its way, almost equally excellent film, that they may be taken by surprise at the dry-boniness of the original.

Not on the Passenger List appears to concern itself, indeed does concern itself, with something warmer and more positive, something almost cordial; though it is wholly typical of Barry Pain’s work in this field that he conveys to the reader at the same time a very faint feeling that the author himself is not unreservedly convinced by the soft rosiness of the message. The Snow relates to the inadequacy of good intentions. As we all know, we have to be right as well as more or less good. (And that is impossible?) Sir Hugh Walpole has been objected to, since his death, both as an artist and as a man; but in many stories, written from the far side of the fireplace, he excelled in depicting the more horrible injustices of life by projecting them slightly beyond the edges of this world. Carlton’s Father really deals, as much as does A School Story, with the cosmology of the schoolboy; with, that is to say, a world of the imagination from before the prison-house has closed upon him, which, if not fed and fostered by the grown man, brings about the man’s death with its own, and be the man never so assured and apparently in social demand. To my mind, certain of M. R. James’s stories contain an element of patronage: one becomes aware as one reads of the really great man. the Provost of Eton, the engineer of the inscription on the Unknown Warrior’s grave, relaxing; all too consciously descending a little, to divert, but also still further to edify, the company. A School Story I find free from this defect. The Provost knew about schoolboys.

And that leaves Mad Monkton; which by concentrating upon some very peculiar and exceptional events, has more to say about life as a whole, about the non-appearing aspects of life, than, possibly, any of the others. Wilkie Collins felt himself to be a man at variance with his epoch. This made his work very uneven, and his life very arcane. To this day, surprisingly little seems dependably to be known about him. Both in writing and in living, he hid his tracks; though perhaps leaving occasional toeprints detectable by the discerning. At its best, his work is so garishly penetrating that he seems to write by the light of gas flares. If he had lived at another time, he might have escaped the inner conflict that produces this effect. But art is so dependent upon conflict, that though he might have gained, we, his readers, would have lost.

I cannot pretend that these tales were not first called ghost stories because they were regarded as stories that dealt with the dead who returned. I should like to suggest that now the word “ghost” should be seen more as the German “geist”; that ghost stones should be stories concerned not with appearance and consistency, but with the spirit behind appearance, the void behind the face of order. Ghost stories inquire and hint, waver and dissemble, startle and astonish. They are a last refuge from the universal, affirmative shout.

ROBERT AICKMAN