The Second Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

INTRODUCTION by Robert Aickman

In my Introduction to the first Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, I tried to define what seem to me to be the basic facts about the genre. I pointed out that the ghost story must be distinguished both from the mere horror story and from the scientific extravaganza. I suggested that the ghost story draws upon the unconscious mind, in the manner of poetry; that it need offer neither logic nor moral; that it is an art form of altogether exceptional delicacy and subtlety; and that, not surprisingly, there are only about thirty or forty first-class specimens in the whole of western literature.

The ghost story is mainly a late romantic form, most of the best examples having been written at the end of the nineteenth or beginning of the twentieth centuries. On the other hand, the interest in and demand for ghost stories has never been greater than now. This is a not uncommon contemporary situation: today’s mass audiences for nineteenth century music, coming again and again to hear the same works, would have flabbergasted the impecunious and often slighted composers. Critics rail at the public indifference to music in new forms, but the only likely result is a diminution in musical interest altogether. For there is real doubt whether the romantic composers have successors of remotely comparable quality; and a strong probability that the new forms of society are responsible. A world in which everything is officially susceptible to reason, and also capable of improvement, is not a good world for writing new ghost stories either. It is only to be expected that the most distinguished living practitioner represented in the present volume, Miss Bowen, was long and exceptionally linked with a shadowy castle in Ireland. But as the reasonable part of the mind is a very small fraction (and the improvable part probably more of a fiction than anything in this book), the main consequence of undue emphasis upon reason has been a vast and uncontrolled irrationality, mainly taking the form of violence-worship. The good ghost story gives form and symbol to themes from the enormous areas of our own minds which we cannot directly discern, but which totally govern us; and also to the parallel forces of the external universe, about which we know so little, much less than people tell us.

Thus, in its way, it brings peace, as Aristotle said of tragedy. In a world mainly devoted to the production of junk (work) and the making of loud noise (leisure), it reassures us with reminders of love and death, of our own ignorance, of the continuing possibilities of drama and astonishment. Oddly enough, it is these shadows which offer permanency and make us men again. German has a word for the total effect: Ehrfurcht, or reverence for what one cannot understand. If there is one thing that modern man needs more than anything else, it is that. No wonder there is a big new readership for the supernatural. The phantoms have almost come to serve a social purpose.

We know that we do not know, and many of us do not take long to discover that confronting and admitting our ignorance is better than reliance on experts. How Love Came to Professor Guildea, one of the best ghost stories ever written, reminds us that we do not even know who or what is in the room with us. We go out into the town, where Nightmare Jack indicates what awaits us. We escape to the fields and hills and The Damned Thing may be what we meet. Not even in a place of sanctuary are we secure, perhaps there least of all: the sanctified stones have their dire claims upon us, as Man-Size in Marble proves. The important ingredient in Afterward is not the past offence but the truth, reaching far beyond ethics, that we can none of us identify what is crucial until it is too late. Many of us know ghosts that, like this one, change their identity but retain a single menace.

At first there may seem a certain justice about it all, even though crass and inflexible, like an earth-mover: somehow, when we come to think of it, we have erred, either morally or in judgment or both, so that trouble is only to be expected. The Inner Room goes far to wipe out even that tortuous comfort, so hard is it to discern where the error lay, whether indeed there had been an error. After all, few would have thought to have behaved otherwise. Our situation, or at least the situation of the sensitive among us (and who could read ghost stories that is not sensitive?), resembles that described in Our Distant Cousins; a superb allegory about cousins who are really quite close, are simply the good and beautiful everywhere. Always the reminder that we live precariously, and circumscribed by the mysterious and the omnipotent. Playing With Fire shows what happens when we attempt too much, and carry technique into areas about which we know too little for technique alone to be an adequate guide. A. V. Laider shows that, to the surprise of many, an occasional door to deeper knowledge is quite wide open; but that deeper knowledge does us little good. As Goethe observed, wisdom includes a recognition of what cannot be found out or usefully looked for. An exceptional man or woman can hold off fate for a spell, as in The Case of M. Valdemar. It does not seem to do much good in the end, but possibly it is all there is. Only for a spell are we here at all. It is almost certainly better than slacking off, as in The Demon Lover, and trusting that the sheer confusion and difficulties of life, culminating supremely in a second war, will absolve us.

They are called ghost stories, and no other suggested name that has come my way, seems to me better, but connoisseurs are aware that often there is no actual ghost. In this collection, the ghosts reach a high proportion; and include at least two animal ghosts. These are quite common in the outer world as can be confirmed from the pages of Apparitions and Haunted Houses, the excellent collection of what are sometimes called “real-life ghosts,” assembled by the late Sir Ernest Bennett. In fiction, the truth is that the straight ghost of supposed tradition, full-bloodedly bloodless, with skull, shroud, chains, and perhaps groans, has been difficult to achieve since he (or often she) was, as it were, done to death by the repetitiousness of Miss Radcliffe, Monk Lewis, and their many colleagues, British and foreign. At that time, every nobleman, even if impoverished, retained at least one spectre (often more) to keep him in mind of his misdemeanours and of his destiny, rather as, to epitomise his misanthropy and despair, he kept a hermit, if he could afford one, in his park, if he had one. The common lot of young women from all classes was rape, incarceration in a convent (sometimes of diabolists), assassination, and return. These ideals changed as, with the discoveries of Marx, Darwin, and Freud, people pushed farther and farther from them fears of sin and thoughts of death, together with the fascination of both. Ghosts became shifty and occasional. They began to destroy without Shakespearean warning. Thurnley Abbey makes a spirited return to the older form. Here is the ghost head on (or off) and in the middle of the target: now a rarity, and difficult to accomplish with such success. The story shows that a definite ghost, with seeming form and outline, can be every bit as unpleasant to encounter as any more apparently modern manifestation.

It is of interest to note how directly every story in this book is told, literary artifice being used only to clarify. In the right hands, the ghosts can stand a surprising amount of clear, strong light; and be all the more disturbing for it, because less escapable. The stories are works of art, transcending and illuminating the factual evidence; but it is surprising how much raw material there is. The field is strewn with it, almost for the picking up. After he became an institution, Harry Price, the ghost hunter, whom I knew quite well, and who was neither so good nor so bad as various posthumous accounts allege, used to receive twenty odd letters a day from total strangers claiming to have seen an apparition, or enquiring whether the bumps heard on Wednesday night could be a message from a son who had died on the Somme. (He replied to all of them by return of post, from the Reform Club, and in holograph.) He said that many of the cases were surprisingly good, and, of course, followed up some of them. I myself lecture from time to time on ghosts: when questions are invited, one can always be certain of three or four stories from the body of the hall, and several more told privately at the end; and I can confirm that a large number are convincing, unexpected, and dramatic. I have often thought that the lecture is unnecessary. The speaker could well begin with the enquiry, Any Questions?, and the audience be relied upon for an interesting session.

Some people hope there are ghosts. Some people hope there are not. Most people, I suspect, manage to combine both these aspirations, hoping and dreading at the same time. They are the true initiates, to whom this book will yield the most.