The 7th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

INTRODUCTION

In this, my seventh, collection, I have still contrived to include no author who has appeared in any of the preceding six; to offer no story which does not to one man (this man) seem of significant literary merit; and to purvey only variations on the theme of the truly supernatural, rejecting both the merely scientific, flying saucers and mutating monsters, and the merely shocking, rods and rapes.

In the world around us, needless to say, scientific advance and naked horror are rapidly becoming hard to differentiate. Within these pages is an alternative, a recurrent suggestion that in the universe are forces that may never be understood and mastered (and thus degraded). I believe the great increase in the popularity of ghost stories relates to the increasing demand for ‘a world elsewhere’; because, the way things are going, only if there is such a world can we be in any sense free.

Much winter reading lies behind the process of selection, and much summer winnowing. While the number of good ghost stories is very small indeed, the volume of bad ones, as of bad plays, has to be encountered professionally in order to be credited. Moreover, it is an interesting aspect of the subject that an author often achieves two or three good ghost stories in a lifetime, and is then compelled by business need to submerge them in merely routine collections. I doubt whether this often happens unawares: the really good ghost story is so luminous a product, and so mysterious in its origins, that its author must usually know that this time the depths have spoken. Here, as in other respects, the true ghost story is akin to poetry. I believe that there are certain authors whose names will live into the indefinite future solely by virtue of one single ghost story; so limited is the supply and so potent the spell.

There are certain rules for assembling a collection of ghost stories; an anthologising which has become almost a minor art form on its own. If these rules are disregarded, the collection tends either to drag or to float: to depress rather than enchant, or, alternatively, to vaporise into whimsy. Perhaps rather than rules they are intuitions. Certainly, they are difficult to formulate with precision. But then nothing capable of being formulated with precision can have much life in it.

For example, the best collections will be found to be based upon a blazing and obvious masterpiece; a story one has had in the forefront of one’s mind for the purpose, at least for a year or two. I shall not be expected to indicate which this is of the stories in the present collection. Then, I think, one proceeds to settle upon one’s anchor stories: normally, a work by an established master of literature, a ‘classic’; and, next, one of those solidly built ghost stories of the nineteenth century, which are among the best ever written, and likely to remain so. Here our classic is Washington Irving’s ‘Governor Manco and the Soldier’, with its almost Beckford-like vision in the cave and its splendidly teasing conclusion. It is taken from Irving’s beautiful book about the Alhambra: to be seen in every other Granada shop window, but though often bought by passers-through, less often read. Irving’s sympathies were closely with the Moors, whose last capital Granada had been, and especially with their much abused and thereby much wronged last ruler, Boabdil; but his studies of the Spaniards around him have seldom been bettered for sympathetic but unsentimental veracity. Moreover, Irving was one of those few writers of simple English prose whom one might dare to commend as exemplar.

Mrs Riddell, who wrote our nineteenth-century story, was one of those numerous Victorian ladies who ‘lived by their pen’ in no uncertain, and assuredly no effortless, way. For them, life was often a hard struggle. Mrs Riddell wrote no fewer than thirty novels, some of them under a male pseudonym; but at the end was compelled to fall back upon literary charity. Old Mrs Jones, her present phantom, becomes an exceptionally convincing apparition through solid literary craftsmanship and professionalism.

Ralph Adams Cram was one of America’s leading architects; builder of cathedrals and sponsor of the Gothic revival. Though he wrote much art criticism, he is believed to have written only a handful of stories. ‘The Dead Valley’ deals with two kinds of experience that, one or both, happen to many people, without being always clearly recognised, still less acknowledged. The first is the mysterious change that sometimes overcomes one’s awareness of an environment with which one thought oneself familiar. The second is the occasional apparently physical occurrence which one knows to have happened, because one was there and saw or heard it, indeed reflected about it; but, at the same time, knows could not possibly have happened—and so never mentions. Cram describes the border landscape between the outer vision and the inner, and does it with first-hand knowledge.

W. C. Morrow, a Californian, is likewise famed for a small collection of very curious tales. I am in no doubt that ‘Over an Absinthe Bottle’ is the best of them. Many readers will, I think, remember it for a long time.

Gerald Bullett was a sensitive, careful, judicious writer, who excelled in criticism; a writer of the Georgian School, one might say, or neo-Georgian, in the sense associated with Sir Edward Marsh and his next of singing birds. The central idea in ‘Dearth’s Farm’ has affinities with H. G. Wells’s ‘Island of Doctor Moreau’ and even with Saki’s frequent observation that people grow so to resemble their pets as to be hard to distinguish from them; but its particular power lies in the crushing and terrifying contrast between unbridled strength (the epithet being exact) and gentle weakness. We feel it to describe something that might happen without notice to any of us, unless we are very lucky.

A. E. Coppard is everywhere accepted as a great master of the short story; and what a terrifying tale is his, because, again, so plausible and likely! If ever one ventures across the English Channel, this is the very feeling that at intervals comes upon one, disclaim as one will! These six of my contributors have gone before, as have so many writers of great ghost stories; and I do not feel it my task to comment in the same way upon my respected contemporaries. Mr Nabokov is an author of world fame, and knows only too well that of which he here writes. (But, once more, how persuasive in detail is that small provincial museum!) An exile not merely from Old Russia but thereby almost from this mundane globe, Mr Nabokov’s genius unites the searchlight with the microscope. ‘Esmeralda’ is a story very much for men, many men. ‘Where the Woodbine Twineth’ shows the power that can dwell in four words, not even unfamiliar words, one would say, but here lighted upon by inspiration. ‘Levitation’ is based upon an idea of such simple, horrifying brilliance (but strange and beautiful also) that it will be reprinted many times. I am proud to be among the first of the many.

I have included a story of my own, first because it is almost an editorial tradition, but second because so many have asked me to resume doing so. I much appreciate their concern, and the support which this series has received.

Robert Aickman