[In the following essay, Sullivan provides an overview of the English ghost story from Le Fanu to Blackwood, focusing primarily on the writers who have received little attention.]

In the past ghosts had certain traditional activities; they could speak and gibber, for instance; they could clank chains. They were generally local, confined to one spot. Now their liberties have been greatly extended; they can go anywhere, they can manifest themselves in scores of ways. Like women and other depressed classes, they have emancipated themselves from their disabilities, and besides being able to do a great many things that human beings can't do, they can now do a great many things that human beings can do. Immaterial as they are or should be, they have been able to avail themselves of the benefits of our materialistic civilization.

—L. P. Hartley¹

T. S. Eliot once complained that Yeats's only two interests during their early acquaintance were “George Moore and spooks.”² That Eliot was haunted by “spooks” of his own is demonstrated by his collapse, first into a nervous breakdown and later into Anglicanism. As Hartley's delightful statement suggests, twentieth-century spooks “manifest themselves in scores of ways.” Nevertheless, Eliot's reaction is important, for it reflects an embarrassment with Yeats's occultism which still is a commonplace in the academic world. Critics have labored diligently and ingeniously to concoct theories explaining away Yeats's earnest, lifelong interest in the supernatural. Rarely mentioned are Yeats's ghost stories, even though he published some fifty-eight of them.

Since (with one or two striking exceptions) Yeats's ghost stories are not particularly good ones, their obscurity is at least partially deserved. Consisting chiefly of Irish folk tales retold in the affectedly “simple English” of Lady Gregory, they are effective propaganda for the Celtic revival of the nineties, but little else. The marriage of self-conscious simplicity and swooning eloquence in Yeats's prose style is not a happy one, particularly for ghost stories. What is important is that a figure of Yeats's stature would write these stories (not to mention his many ghostly poems) and take them seriously. At the turn of the century, supernatural chillers were very much the fashion. Several major English writers—including Conrad, James, Hardy, and Forster—turned out supernatural tales. Some of these, such as Hardy's “The Withered Arm,” James's “The Turn of the Screw,” and Conrad's “The Idiots” show considerable care, control, and ingenuity; they are minor masterpieces by major artists. Given the quality of the prose, it is reasonable to conjecture that these writers did not see themselves as slumming when they wrote tales of terror.

In a sense, the ghost story represents the most concrete (if somewhat vulgarized) manifestation of definitive trends in the major fiction of Lawrence, Joyce, Conrad, Hardy and Woolf: the fascination with darkness and irrationality, the focus on unorthodox states of consciousness and perception, the projection of apocalypse and chaos, and above all the preoccupation with timeless “moments” and “visions.” As developed by Sheridan Le Fanu, the English ghost story offered a trim, ready-made apparatus for all of these themes. Narrators and characters in ghost stories always confront darkness and irrationality; the narrator usually seems to think that how something is seen is more significant than what is seen. At the same time, the characters really see things; they have visions and epiphanies which change everything.

The contributions of major writers to the ghost story constitute only a small part of a remarkable eruption of ghostly tales which began in the late nineteenth century and continued unabated through World War I. I am concerned with the efforts of specialists, beginning with Le Fanu, who contributed the bulk of these tales and mapped out the boundaries of supernatural horror in English fiction. A complete list of these writers—including those who produced tales on an occasional basis after the war—would be formidable. E. F. Benson, M. R. James, Oliver Onions, L. P. Hartley, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Quiller-Couch, A. C. Benson, William F. Harvey, William Hope Hodgson, Walter de la Mare, E. G. Swain, R. H. Malden, Cynthia Asquith, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Charlotte Riddell, May Sinclair, and many others would be on it.

There has been occasional speculation about why ghost stories proliferated during this period, most of it an appendage of the larger question of the Edwardian obsession with ghostly societies, experiments, and manifestoes. The apocalyptic quality of these stories—the sense of a gradual building of uncontainable forces—is part of a spirit of dissonance and restlessness embodied in such diverse forms as the music of Stravinsky, the fiction of Huysmans, and the essays of Freud. Like so much art of the transitional period between the late nineteenth century and World War I, the tale of terror was symptomatic of a cultural malaise which some historians view as a premonition of the Great War.³ The recent American interest in all things occult and horrific may possibly grow out of a similar fetish for disaster occasioned initially by the escalation of Vietnam and Watergate: when things appear to be falling apart, supernatural horror stories provide their authors and readers with a masochistic, but relatively safe means of fantasizing the worst.

The most interesting historical speculation about the growth of these stories in relation to the culture that spawned them is found in Samuel Hynes's The Edwardian Turn of Mind. Hynes views the ghost story as one aspect of a cultural crisis which impelled artists into increasingly bizarre and subjective modes of expression. He contends that the ghostly tale is the fictional counterpart of William James's attempts to yoke religious experience with apparitions, hallucinations, and mindchanging drugs. He also sees the ghost story as a reaction against the sprawling realism of Dickens and Thackeray: “After the social realism of the Victorians, from Dickens to George Moore, Edwardian novelists (some of them, at any rate) turned toward the mysterious and the unseen, just as the psychic researchers turned from the natural sciences to spiritualism.”⁴

Most of the commentary on causes, however, is typified by Philip Van Doren Stern's assessment:

Fine stories were written before and since that time [the turn of the century], but never has there been such a flood of them within so short a period. … It is not easy to understand why this brief period at the turn of the century was so rich. Perhaps one clue lies in the fact that it marked the beginning of science's dominance of the world. It was then that the automobile began to replace the horse; man first learned to fly; and he found out how to talk through space and look through solid substance. Before such miracles, ancient ways of thinking went down. A fierce, new technological civilization then in in the throes of birth was to bring horrors of its own upon mankind. Skepticism and disillusionment followed in the wake of wars and violent upheavals. Like the beginners of the Romantic movement, the men who were writing the supernatural literature of the early years of the century probably did not know that they were singing the swan song of an earlier way of life.⁵

Virtually every supernatural fiction anthology contains a variation on this statement, perpetuating the notion that ghost stories represent a fond, fireside vision of the nineteenth century, “a swan song of an earlier way of life.” One of the questions I address myself to in this study is whether this is so—or whether ghost and horror stories embody that very “skepticism” they allegedly combat. Do ghost stories belong in the twentieth century or are they, like the music of Rachmaninoff, endearing throwbacks?

Stern's sentimentalizing is closely related to a more sophisticated argument frequently advanced by apologists for orthodox Christianity. T. S. Eliot, a ghost story fan, states that supernatural horror stories become “inferior” when the “supernatural world is not really believed in, but is merely exploited for an immediate but very transient effect on the reader.”⁶ Russell Kirk carries the argument a few steps further. Stating that ghost stories preserve “hierarchical” Christian values, he goes on to interpret the “truth” of this “innately conservative” form: “Now it can be said of the better ghostly tale that it is underlain by a sound concept of the character of evil. Defying nature, the necromancer conjures up what ought not to rise again this side of Judgment Day. But these dark powers do not rule the universe; they are in rebellion against natural order; and by bell, book and candle, literally or symbolically, we can push them down under.”⁷ One of my main projects is to see whether these stories imply a “natural order” in the universe and whether the horrors they unleash are such that “we can push them down under.” Is it true, as Edmund Wilson claims, that these “injections of imaginary horror … soothe us with the momentary illusion that the forces of madness and murder will be tamed?”⁸

One of the most original statements made about the question of “belief” in these stories comes from a surprisingly early and unlikely source: H. P. Lovecraft in his 1927 essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” Lovecraft's view, the inversion of Eliot's and Kirk's, is that “materialists” write the most frightening stories. The writer who denies the existence of the supernatural sees in the supernatural invasion “an absolute and stupendous violation of the natural order” whereas the believer views the supernatural as a natural, “commonplace” phenomenon.⁹ My interest is not in whether a given writer is a thorough-going skeptic (although several were), but in whether the literature tends to present the supernatural as an ominous validation of a suspected “violation” in the cosmos. Taking this question a step further, I am interested in whether the ghostly experience points toward a fundamentally disordered universe. This is a crucial question, and one which has not been explored.

There have been other studies of English ghost stories, but surprisingly few. Studies of Gothic novels abound, but the Gothic, as we shall see, is another matter. The modern ghostly tale is as much a reaction against the Gothic as an outgrowth of it. Despite endless (largely interchangeable) anthology introductions through the years, Lovecraft's essay remains the most empathetic and original study of the genre to date. E. F. Bleiler is quite right in calling it “the finest historical discussion of supernatural fiction.”¹⁰ It is not so much a critical essay as a collection of chronologically arranged reminiscences of Lovecraft's favorite (and not so favorite) tales. Lovecraft, who was naturally very fond of horror stories, had read widely and manages to cram an extraordinary amount of information and opinion into sixty-six pages. He covers the majority of writers (from all periods) in a sentence or two, so that the work reads like an annotated bibliography. The annotation is, to say the least, unorthodox. Lovecraft's chronic addiction to hyperbole is as much in evidence here as in his fiction, but is not as debilitating. Indeed the style makes the book a great deal of fun. His description of M. R. James's ghosts is typical: “In inventing a new type of ghost, he has departed considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition; for where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and hairy—a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and man—and usually touched before it is seen. Sometimes the spectre is of still more eccentric composition; a roll of flannel with spidery eyes, or an invisible entity which moulds itself in bedding and shows a face of crumpled linen.”¹¹ There is clearly more of Lovecraft than of James in this italicized hysteria. Although Lovecraft appears to be warming up for a tale of his own, he nevertheless manages to make the important contrast between the impotence of the largely decorative Gothic ghosts and the more actively loathsome, menacing quality of modern ghosts.¹²

Lovecraft's is not a Freudian study, and I should make it clear that this one is not either. While it is true that repressed or displaced sexuality functions as an element in some of these stories (especially in stories which feature vampires on the make), it is not necessarily true that this is the dominant or most arresting element. (Since Freud's theories purport to explain human behavior, any story is theoretically a Freudian story.) Natural explanations to supernatural tales are almost always a depressing let-down and Freudian explanations particularly so. To reduce the stories to case studies is to rob them of their charm and power. The best Freudian study is “The Uncanny,” by Freud himself, since it is enlivened by Freud's obvious respect for and enjoyment of the genre.

As for whom to discuss, I find myself in the classic dilemma of the anthology editors, that of having to justify omissions and slightings. From the many possibilities, this study will focus on three writers: Sheridan Le Fanu, M. R. James, and Algernon Blackwood. I have chosen these both for their quality and for their representative embodiment of patterns and boundaries. The study begins with a chapter devoted entirely to Le Fanu's “Green Tea,” a tale which represents supernatural horror in its purest and most revolutionary manifestation. I have also included a separate chapter surveying the more refined horrors of the M. R. James antiquarian school.

Since this study is frankly biased in favor of writers who have received little attention, I am devoting relatively little space to Henry James. A massive number of articles have already been churned out in the “controversy” over whether the governess in The Turn of the Screw sees ghosts or hallucinates ghosts because she longs to bed down her employer. We need not add fuel to that feeble but unquenchable fire. The most sensible and moving commentary on this intractably enigmatic tale is provided by Virginia Woolf: her perception of the great absences and “silences” in the work say more about its essence than all the “proofs” and counterproofs set off by Edmund Wilson's early Freudian manifesto.¹³ James's other ghostly tales have also received critical attention, especially “The Jolly Corner.” And Leon Edel has provided exhaustive critical and historical commentary on all of James's ghostly tales.¹⁴

Edel's tendency to overpraise James is endemic of the exaggerated quality of what little commentary exists on the ghost story. The battle lines have always been drawn quickly and sharply; commentators usually deliver either unqualified raves or unqualified jeers. Peter Penzoldt proclaims that supernatural stories are the products of “the greatest masters of all times … Their writings are among the finest and most profound in modern literature.” “Thus,” he assures us, “the reader must not consider his love for weird fiction a vice.”¹⁵ Actually, as Hartley points out, it may well be a vice, or at least “slightly abnormal,”¹⁶ and all the more pleasurable for being so. The negative side is typified by Samuel Hynes who (sounding more like T. S. Eliot than Eliot) dismisses the entire genre because it lacks “dogma”: “If you remove doctrine and dogma from the religious instinct, what you have left is a debased or sentimentalized supernaturalism, things that go bump in the night, and that is, on the whole, what this strain of writing amounts to: of all the examples that one could cite, only ‘The Turn of the Screw’ is a substantial work of art.”¹⁷ “Substantial” is of course not defined. What is most revealing is that Hynes does not cite any of James's other ghostly tales, several of which are “substantial” in any meaningful sense of the term. (Critics are often unaware that James wrote others: Stern, for example, speaks of “Henry James' single and superlatively successful essay into the field, ‘The Turn of the Screw.’”¹⁸ This statement will come as some surprise to anyone who has read Edel's four-hundred-page collection.) Perhaps the most amusing diatribe is Edmund Wilson's famous attack on Lovecraft: “The only real horror in these fictions is the horror of bad taste and bad art.”¹⁹ Although they have been counter-attacking Wilson for the past thirty years, Lovecraft's fans have never been able to undo the damage caused by that wonderful sentence. (Wilson is actually easier on horror stories than on detective stories: he at least likes Poe and de la Mare, but dismisses all detective stories as “rubbish.”) While these superlatives and denunciations are entertaining, they sometimes prevent the reader from assessing the distinctive strengths and flaws of writers who are neither as exalted nor worthless as critics insist.

In making selective judgments, my assumption is that a ghost story, like any story, is only as good as the author's prose style. Lovecraft is right when he maintains that “atmosphere is the all-important thing”²⁰ in the tale of terror: a compelling atmosphere can make us forget or overlook the banalities inherent in the genre. Atmosphere, however, is a function of style. Getting the atmosphere right takes considerable stylistic deftness, especially when the writer is trying for something more subtle than a stereotypical “Gothic” mood. Eschewing Gothic hyperbole, the best stories have elegant surfaces that gradually imply or reveal something not so elegant; the best chills are evoked with care and control.

Nevertheless, there is a popular mythology which insists that these stories are purely oral phenomena. According to this notion, the mere presence of the speaking voice displaces any need for form, structure, or verbal artistry. In Le Fanu's “Ultor de Lacy,” the narrator speaks of his intention to recreate the aura and environment of the ghost story experience: “the old-fashioned parlour fireside and its listening circle of excited faces, and outside the wintry blast and moan of leafless boughs.” He also complains of having to do this, stating that “the translation to cold type from oral narrative … is at best a trying one.”²¹ Basil Davenport, in his essay “On Telling Stories” carries this oral bias to its furthest extreme. “A story told even passably” (presumably with a different wording in any given telling), says Davenport, “is incomparably more effective than the same story read in solitude.”²² Is it true that the natural directness of the speaking voice counts for “incomparably” more than the admittedly prearranged, artificial techniques of metaphor, understatement, ambiguity, and irony? In confronting this question, I will also suggest a final compromise between hearing a story and reading it.

In using “ghost story” as a catch-all term, I am also compromising. All of these stories are apparitional, in one sense or another, and “ghost story” is as good a term as any. “Horror story” is not quite as all-inclusive and will be used more selectively. E. G. Swain, for example, keeps physical mayhem and revulsion out of his stories; he is strictly a “ghost story” writer and can be called a “horror story” writer only be stretching the term beyond comprehensible limits. There is little to be gained, however, by attempting to determine precisely what those limits are. It is enough to assume that a story like M. R. James's “Count Magnus” is both a ghost and horror story, for its ghosts do extremely nasty things to people. Most English tales fall into this class, and for them the terms can be used almost interchangeably. (Lovecraft's “supernatural horror” neatly fuses both terms.) Robert Aickman, one of the most skillful contemporary writers of supernatural tales, points out that even stories where we never see a ghost are still ghost stories: “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.’”²³

Finding the appropriate language and tone for discussing this fiction is trickly business. Like the music of Poulenc or the films of Arthur Penn, it lies in a strange intermediary class between “popular” and “serious” art. Although grounded in the sensational and the outrageous, the better stories have larger reverberations (almost in spite of themselves) and frequently return to haunt our minds and sensibilities.

Part of their power can be attributed to a surprisingly large amount of ironic humor, an element which complicates their tone and increases their pungency. The most fascinating and adventurous attempt to classify this literature is Dorothy L. Sayers's in her Third Omnibus of Crime (a collection which is actually more an omnibus of ghostly stories than crime stories). Since she is a famous ratiocination fan, we would expect her to place more value on the detective story. Instead, using De Quincey's formulation, she assigns detective stories to the “literature of knowledge” and ghost stories to the “literature of power.” With this distinction, we can expect detective stories to merely teach (as would a cook book) and ghost stories to move the soul by evoking the unteachable and unknowable:

The horror-story (as opposed to the detective story) cares little for details of chemical composition. “Here,” it says, “is a body that is, or was, the dwelling-place of a soul. It was haunted when it was alive by strange lusts, and fears and cruelties, and when it is destroyed it is not finished with. Its power has still to be made manifest. ‘O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet!—Thy spirit walks abroad.’” It matters little whether we think of that power as a visible ghost or as a strange vindictive corruption fastening upon the murderer's heart. That is a matter for the writer's taste and fancy. But the dead will show their might, in some fashion or another—though how, we do not know.

“We know well enough,” replies the detective story, “The murderer will be detected and hanged, and there will be an end of it.”

“An end of it?” says the story of horror. “You will add corpse to corpse—and what then?”²⁴

Rarely is there “an end of it” in these tales. After the book is closed, the deadly apparition is still at large, both in the story and in the reader's mind.

Notes

1. L. P. Hartley, “Introduction,” The Third Ghost Book, ed. Cynthia Asquith (1955; rpt. New York, 1970), p. viii.

2. Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain (1967; rpt. New York, 1970), p. 90.

3. See, for example, William Pfaff and Edmund Stillman, The Politics of Hysteria (1964; rpt. New York, 1965), pp. 111-115.

4. Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (1968; rpt. Princeton, 1971), p. 147.

5. Philip Van Doren Stern, “Introduction,” Great Ghost Stories (1942; rpt. New York, 1947), pp. xvi-xvii.

6. T. S. Eliot, “Introduction,” Charles Williams, All Hallows Eve (1948; rpt. New York, 1967), p. xv.

7. Russell Kirk, The Surly Sullen Bell (New York, 1962), pp. 238-39.

8. Edmund Wilson, Classics and Commercials (New York, 1962), p. 173.

9. H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Fiction (1927; rpt. New York, 1973), p. 82.

10. Ibid., p. viii.

11. Ibid., p. 102.

12. Tzvetan Todorov's related structuralist study, The Fantastic (New York, 1970), is an analysis not of the supernatural, but of the “apparently supernatural” in fiction. “The fantastic” is a genre based on “hesitation.” Once a story moves into the world of the supernatural, it must be assigned to our genre, “the marvelous.”

13. Virginia Woolf, “Henry James's Ghosts,” in The Turn of the Screw: Essays in Criticism, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York, 1966), p. 179.

14. See Edel's commentary in Ghostly Tales of Henry James (New York, 1949) and Henry James, Stories of the Supernatural (New York, 1970).

15. Peter Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Fiction (London, 1952), pp. 254-55.

16. Hartley, p. vii.

17. Hynes, p. 147.

18. Stern, p. xvi.

19. Wilson, p. 288.

20. Lovecraft, p. 16.

21. Best Ghost Stories of J. S. Le Fanu, ed. E. F. Bleiler (New York, 1964), p. 444.

22. Basil Davenport, “On Telling Stories,” Tales to Be Told in the Dark (New York, 1953), p. vii.

23. Robert Aickman, “Introduction,” The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (New York, 1966), pp. 7-8.

24. Dorothy L. Sayers, “Introduction,” The Third Omnibus of Crime (New York, 1942), p. 5.