The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

INTRODUCTION

There are only about thirty or forty first-class ghost stories in the whole of western literature.

The ghost story must be distinguished from the scientific extravaganza on its left, and from the horror story on its right. The writing of science fiction demands primarily the scientific aptitude for imagining the unrealised implications of a known phenomenon. Its composition is akin to the making of an actual scientific discovery, and it is well known that many of the scientific developments first promulgated as fiction, all too soon become fact. The horror story is purely sadistic; it depends entirely upon power to shock. To-day, of course, de Sade has defenders in high places, such as Madame Simone de Beauvoir; and existentialism contends that life itself is properly to be seen as a sequence of minute-to-minute shocks, inducing “nausea” and “vertigo”. The ghost story, however, seems to derive its power from what is most deep and most permanent. It is allied to poetry.

Dr. Freud established that only a small part, perhaps one-tenth, of the human mental and emotional organisation is conscious. Our main response to this discovery has been to reject the nine-tenths unconscious more completely and more systematically than ever before. Art reflects disintegration on the one hand, and commercialised fashion on the other. Religion concerns itself more and more exclusively with ethics and politics. Love is rationalised and domesticated. The most advanced psychologists have begun even to claim that the unconscious mind has no existence, and that unhappiness can be cured physically, like, say, cancer. The trouble, as we all know, is that the one-tenth, the intellect, is not looking after us: if we do not blow ourselves up, we shall crowd ourselves out; above all, we have destroyed all hope of quality in living. The ghost story, like Dr. Freud, makes contact with the submerged nine-tenths.

The ghost itself reminds us that death is the one thing certain and the thing most uncertain; the bourn from which no traveller returns, except this one. The majority of ghost stories, however, have no actual ghost. A better title for the genre might be found, but the absence of the ghost seldom dispels the alarm. It can be almost worse if someone else apprehends the ghost, as in Seaton’s Aunt; or if you cannot tell whether it is a ghost or not, as in The Trains; or if you yourself somehow evade the ghost, at least provisionally, as in The Wendigo; and as for the ghost that at first seems, like the things in the shops, useful, as in Three Miles Up and The Rocking-Horse Winner, then you can be quite certain that it is you who are being sold, without being able to withdraw, that you will reach, and far sooner than seemed possible, the cliff edge, screaming. For what the ghost story hints to us is that there is a world elsewhere, as Coriolanus put it (meaning something rather different, but that is just like a ghost); that as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; that luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure; that achievement and comfort are (like the poor ghosts themselves) immaterial.

Not that the true ghost story tells us any of these things. The specifically moral tale of the supernatural, such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (which is all the more moral because we do not know what Dr. Jekyll did wrong), belongs to a subspecies, lesser in stature. The Voice in the Night is a terrible allegory, not a tract. Squire Toby’s Will tells us only that conscience is a pecking vulture that ever waits its chance to feed: the story offers grimly little alternative, as the working moralist must do. But for man standing naked on the disregarding uplands, morals are, of course, a cloak, however ragged and patched; and perhaps the main reason why The Travelling Grave is one of the greatest stories in its field, is that it burns up the cloak in a single brimstone flash, and travels, if not above good and evil, then certainly far beyond them. The reader has a garish vision of all life’s elements seen for the first time, as in an El Greco. Perhaps it is Satanic. Perhaps it is merely the truth. Humour is prominently there, which is outside the scheme of most practitioners, except, sometimes, as contrast. In The Travelling Grave we make the discovery that humour is, on the contrary, near the very heart of that synthesising attitude known as the occult.

For, of course, the ghost, though not moral, or useful, or adaptable, is assuredly not evil. The Ghost Ship shows how much positive good he can do us, in the right circumstances and for a time; and in The Crown Derby Plate he perhaps even manages to do a little good for himself, which is something beyond most of us. The ghost is neutral, and when he thwacks us or gnaws us to death, the doing (not necessarily the fault) is ours. In his true manifestation, the ghost is an intimation of that wider world than custom, which we disregard at our extreme peril, and in which we should at least try to move without clumsiness and neck-breaking, for it and not the fish-bowl of history, is our real world. Rightly approached, with awe and feeling, the ghosts in this book will help, though less, no doubt, than Keats and Yeats.

All the same, true ghost stories, to judge by their paucity, must be difficult to write. An American critic, Mr. Philip van Doren Stern, has put it well:—“The ghost story is an exceedingly difficult and delicate form to master, requiring a distinguished style, deftness in handling atmospheric effects, a wide background in psychology and anthropology, a mature attitude towards life, and, above all, a narrative ability that few authors possess. And it is a dangerous form to tackle—an inept word or phrase, a shade of emphasis wrongly applied, or the clumsy handling of its gossamerlike structure will quickly turn a tale of terror into a gross parody that arouses only smiles of derision. To make a reader accept things which his sense of reason bids him reject is not easy; only a really skilful writer can sustain illusion and maintain the spell to the end.” The technique, like the subject, is fragile but with a grip of iron. And a vital ingredient is beauty. In all beauty, said Hesiod, is an element of strangeness.

The ghosts are the returned dead whom once we knew, or our uncle knew. They are creatures we once knew, but now know no more, like The Wendigo (of which, however, actual cases are, infrequently, reported). They are, occasionally, creatures we never knew (or think we didn’t), like angels or devils or toys possessed by a spirit. They are things within us which we have, as psychologists say, projected outside us. There are little children beating on the glass. They are free; at least from us. They are real. We are glad to meet them when we are glad to meet ourselves, but that is to be one man (or woman) marked out of ten thousand.

There have been tales of them at all times and in all places, in both science and art. “A good case” by a proper standard of psychic research (and I write as one who worked at Borley, and have met Voirrey Irving, to whom the mongoose talked) is as rare as a good story by a proper literary standard—perhaps, indeed, no more and no less rare; but good cases there are, not to be shaken but by the unscientific, and, possibly, in their implications of much importance to man. The tale told in a letter from Pliny the Younger of an apparition in the basement, horridly unkempt and in chains, with its sequel of finding the privately interred body, has been paralleled ever since. White visitors have been among those to see terrifying ghosts in India, in Central America, among the Australian aboriginals. Those who attended Rashomon, will know what it is to consult a Japanese medium. There is evidence; but co-existing with the evidence has always been the art, and the worth of the art is not dependent upon the weight of the evidence, because art is its own evidence, assimilated intuitively and emotionally, or excluded as valueless, at least to the particular person. The good ghost story could probably not exist did poltergeists not exist, but it is much as Shelley’s Ode could not exist without real skylarks.

In The Old Nurse’s Story we find a fictional archetype, and of great style and grandeur. It was a product of an important period for ghost stories, the romantic age; several of the very best, including three in this book, being written, as one might expect of such a supersensitive art form, at the very end of it, in the early twentieth century, the pre-1914 Eden with the snake only just stirring. If we see fewer ghosts to-day, it should not for a moment be supposed that we are the wiser for it: rather is it that organisation, uniformity, and sheer noise have encroached that much further upon the imagination and the soul. Faculties of practical value to us, such as precognition, have decayed. The ghosts themselves have often been put to practical work in giving comfort to registered spiritualists.

The spirit that can perhaps be raised to order by a witch or mage, such as Faust or the late Aleister Crowley, and then made to give service, is far from the ghosts in this book, which come and go as they list, and cook for us, dance with us, bite us, entirely at their pleasure. There is no neat area, officially indulged as the ghostly. So it is, too, with writing the ghost story: like a poem, it cannot be summoned, or even expected. The poet can set himself to “exercises” (Mr. Masefield does them daily still), but the muse of the supernatural seems actually to prefer a moment when one is thinking of, concentrated upon, something quite different.

For those who wish to know more, much the best book is The Supernatural in Fiction, by Dr. Peter Penzoldt, a masterpiece of criticism which it is a pleasure and an honour to praise. Those who do not, can be left to walk with Madame du Deffand.

“Do you believe in ghosts, Madame?”

“No. But I fear them.”

Robert Aickman