Some Thoughts on Ghost Stories

Around this time of year Montague Rhodes James’s friends must once have looked forward to an approaching delight –  his annual ghost story, recounted by candle-light, probably in some ancient panelled room at Cambridge or Eton.

 

James was (as I judge partly from his work and partly from what we know of him) a drily humorous man with a genuinely deep knowledge of many subjects. His study of the Apocryphal New Testament is still, as far as I know, the standard work on the subject 90 years after he wrote it. His entry in ‘Who was Who’ is mostly an enormous list of antiquarian or expert works on ecclesiastical and related matters.  

 

I imagine him having what C.P.Snow once described as a ‘creaky, vicarage voice’( his father was a Suffolk country rector), and generous with his wine.

 

The opening passage of what many regard as his best story ( I simply cannot decide which of many qualifies),  ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’,  is full of little jokes at the expense of academic colleagues, which grow better as you know more about such people.

 

But what is it that makes his stories so enduring, so capable of keeping the imaginative reader awake, as a couple of his stories did to me, long ago? They’ve lost (I think) their power to do this any more, but they certainly had it when I first read them all in my university years. Had I done so as a child, I might have missed the point of some of them. Now. Hmm. I wouldn’t open a locked room in an empty old house, even in broad sunny daylight. It might not be rats I found within.

 

I was stimulated into writing about this by the current BBC series ‘Remember Me’, which is probably the best ghost story to be transmitted on TV since ‘The Stone Tape’ more than 40 years ago. I can still make myself shudder by recalling the scientist hero of ‘The Stone Tape’  finding, stuffed into a crack in the wall of a haunted room, a small boy’s plea in childish writing on yellowed paper from decades before ‘All I want for Christmas is – please go away’.

 

‘Remember Me’ employs many of James’s weapons. There are lonely beaches at twilight. A horrid, flapping thing, its face concealed, rises unexpectedly and appears likely to pursue the watcher, first showing him its dreadful countenance.

 

There is a lot of darkness and dankness. Pictures , supposedly unalterable, come strangely to life. Apparently banal tunes or songs take on a sinister, even terrifying import. There is a strong feeling of having , by curiosity, aroused malevolent force which cannot be pacified or returned to the place from which it came – at least not without some horrible sacrifice or quest.

 

Penelope Fitzgerald, I seem to recall, had a go at a James-like story in her book ‘Gate of Angels’. It is pretty horrid, but too physical and clear, and also a bit too recent. Somehow these stories belong in the first half of the 19th century , though ‘A View from a Hill’ successfully revives a Regency-era monster in what must be Edwardian times.

 

 

I think James’s stories work because the horror is always at the edge of our vision, at least until we encounter it fully (if we ever do, sometimes it remains distant, recounted by others, or as in ‘An Episode of Cathedral history’ or Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ glimpsed for a fleeting moment). Thus our own imagination builds them. To me, the single most terrifying figure has always been Count Magnus, in the story of that name, summoned from his huge thrice-padlocked tomb (you’d think he was safe in there, wouldn’t you?) by a naively curious English traveller who (very mistakenly) imagines that it might be interesting to meet this grim old nobleman .

 

Even the lighter ones have a severe message – do we really know what we are trifling with when we make light of the unseen? The story of ‘Number 13’, in which a Danish hotel room mysteriously shrinks in the night,  is one of the least terrifying, but its explanation, if that is what it is, is such a warning.

 

James never claimed to have seen an actual ghost, though it has been claimed that he appeared, looking very much alive, in an Eton College photograph after he had been dead for some time. He wrote once that he was prepared to listen to evidence on the subject, but that was all. I know one person, a highly rational left-wing journalist, level-headed and humorous, who absolutely avers that he once saw the ghost of an old friend a short time after this friend had died. He is quite emphatic that it wasn’t any kind of hallucination, and that the apparition was quite clear, though it did and said nothing. I have never seen any such thing and hope not to, though I have been overcome, briefly,  by stark irrational terror in a dark wood at midnight, aged about 35,  for absolutely no material reason. I simply fought it down.

 

I shall be interested to see if ‘Remember Me’ manages to bring the story to a satisfactory end, both explicable and frightening . This is the hardest trick for a ghost story writer to pull off. Either you end up with an explanation which is banal and disappointing  - it’s all in the mind, or it might be (see Henry James’s ‘Turn of the Screw’)  it was a dream, someone was trying to frighten the hero away from the scene of a crime, etc etc. Or it just doesn’t obey the rules of the supernatural, as we imagine them to be,  in some other important way.

 

 It’s set in some of the loveliest parts of Yorkshire under glorious dark English skies, which give it an added appeal. The name makes me think of that desperately upsetting Christina Rossetti Poem ‘Remember’, which runs

 

Remember me when I am gone away,

         Gone far away into the silent land;

         When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

         You tell me of our future that you plann'd:

         Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

         And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

         For if the darkness and corruption leave

         A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

         Than that you should remember and be sad.

 

I wonder if it will turn out to matter.