The 5th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

INTRODUCTION

The remarkable success of the preceding Fontana Books of Great Ghost Stories, and my own correspondence, leave no doubt that the series has happily enlisted a large following of regular readers. In Introductions to the four earlier collections, I have set forth my general view both of ghost stories and of ghosts; devoting thereto much care and considerable thought. The steady students would not wish me to go fully into the matter again. The previous books are still obtainable, and I must ask newcomers to accept here a brief summary. The following I believe to be the crucial points.

The ghost story should be clearly distinguished alike from the horror story on its right and from the science fiction on its left. The ghost story appeals primarily as little to sadomasochism as to scientific prediction. At its best, its true affinity is rather with poetry: it is a projection and symbolisation of thoughts and feelings experienced by most people (perhaps by all) but of their nature excluded from the common plod of ordinary prose narrative and record. These thoughts and feelings, though dependent for their expression upon suggestion rather than upon definition, are often, perhaps for that reason, among the strongest and most real within us.

Historically, the ghost story began as a tale of one returned from the dead; but its scope has widened to include much of the area which Keats described as “the truth of imagination”. Ghost stories are exercises of the imagination. Their importance lies partly in the fact that in all of us the imagination requires to be exercised, and today gets desperately little scope, so that society is in danger of madness in consequence. In particular, the ghost story is a great reconciler within the basic realms of love and death; the only things that really matter. Accordingly, the ghost story is very much a work of art: only an artist can induce the essential frisson and purgation. In a world ever more bound down and weighed upon with “facts”, the good ghost story offers the freedom of a lyric poem. It is not surprising that the number of first-class ghost stories is small.

An article in The Times kindly commending the successive collections assembled by Mr. Edmund Crispin and by myself, stated that both Mr. Crispin and I were opposed to “psychoanalytical” critiques of the supernatural. Speaking for myself, I would observe that Freud himself appears specifically to have excluded the unheimlich (splendid word) from the area open to analytical interpretation. (He was wary also about the—related—psychoanalysis of art; and when he embarked upon it, as in his attempt at a mock-analysis of Leonardo da Vinci, seems regularly to have fallen below the level of genius which sets him so immeasurably above all his associates and successors, and seems likely so to do into the considerable future.) Psychoanalysis itself is now widely complained of as insufficiently factual, statistical, and scientific. The dislike felt for ghost stories in many quarters relates to the fact that ghost stories cannot be reduced even to the scientific level of psychoanalysis. Their appeal is entirely emotional and imaginative; and therefore in a different order of importance. The steadily increasing market demand for ghost stories confirms this recognition. Mere facts, the tools of the sorcerer’s apprentice, are seldom lovable.

But here should be made one major affirmation. While it is true that serious psychic research (as distinct from psychological) and the ghost stories of fiction are far apart, yet the latter would lose much, and become mere playthings, if the former had nothing to investigate. It is my belief and my experience that “paranormal phenomena” do occur; and my opinion that the future well-being of man might be forwarded by more attention being paid to them. There is evidence that a mystical, clairvoyant faculty of a most practical kind is commonly taken for granted in many “primitive” societies, from pre-communist Tibet to the Hebrides; and is merely bred out and killed off by industrialism, compulsory education, and the belief that every question has an answer.

In my earlier Introductions, I have said a few words about each of the stories chosen; either linking them to a general philosophy of the ghost story, or at least using them to show how wide and varied the range of the best ghost stories can be. I have sometimes included one story with no precise supernatural or paranormal ingredient in it, but with a strongly spectral atmosphere: such a story will be found in the present group, and a masterpiece of its kind. Otherwise, I propose to comment upon two of the present stories only.

The late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries produced a large number of ghost stories described as Anonymous. Many of them are transcriptions of folk-tales and myths. Their authors (or editors) were entitled at least to the credit attaching to Tom Moore for his versions of Irish songs. Not a few of Anonymous’s ghost stories have something of the grandeur, poetry, and humanity we find in the equally anonymous Scottish Border Ballads. But I know of none more remarkable than The Mysterious Stranger, herein to be found. This German story is the work of an important artist: familiar elements are cunningly made unfamiliar; the important characters are fully human and authentically moving; the terror builds up irresistibly. There are overtones of Chamisso and of Frankenstein’s prophetic monster; even of Goethe himself, a great one for the unheimlich. I regret to say that research in Britain and America has failed to uncover the name of the almost equally skilled translator.

Secondly, a few words about my own story. In accordance with an indulgence that has become almost traditional, I included stories by myself in the first, second, and third collections; feeling also that the collection as a whole might become more alive and convincing if the person responsible for the choosing put a little of his own on view also. After the third collection appeared, a person wrote not to me but to the publishers: “How dare Mr. Aickman have the effrontery to include himself among the writers of great ghost stories?” or words to that effect. The thought had naturally occurred to me more than once already; and suspecting that the one critic spoke for many, I modestly omitted myself from volume four. I was rather pleased then to receive a number of expostulations and cries of disappointment. Probably it was solely that an accepted rule was being broken. I have now, with as few false fancies as possible, reinstated it.

There is one more thing to be said. Though the number of great ghost stories is indeed small, I have managed so far to include no other author, living or dead, more than once. We badly need more living writers of ghost stories with the right kind of imagination and a respect for the power and poetry of the quest.

ROBERT AICKMAN