Spook Stories by E.F. Benson

Would you like to read some ghost stories by the fire with a cup of hot chocolate resting on the hob? Try the Spook Stories by E.F. Benson available at
Spook Stories
They are nicely written with careful characterisation as you would expect from one of the Benson boys. Take this introduction to Naboth’s Vineyard

Ralph Hatchard had for the last twenty years been making a very good income at the Bar; no one could marshal facts so tellingly as he, no one could present a case to a jury in so persuasive and convincing a way, nor make them see the situation he pictured to them with so sympathetic an eye. He disdained to awaken sentiment by moving appeals to humanity, for he had not, either in his private or his public life, any use for mercy, but demanded mere justice for his client. Many were the cases in which, not by distorting facts, but merely by focusing them for the twelve intelligent men whom he addressed, he had succeeded in making them look through the telescope of his mind, and see at the end of it precisely what he wished them to see. But if he had been asked of which out of all his advocacies he was most intellectually proud, he would probably have mentioned one in which that advocacy had not been successful. This was in the famous Wraxton case of seven years ago, in which he had defended a certain solicitor, Thomas Wraxton, on a charge of embezzlement and conversion to his own use of the money of a client.

There’s a certain sort of diction that goes with a good ghost story. It’s slightly elevated, superior and authoritative. Individuals are encountered, not met.

Hatchard was a bachelor; he had little opinion of women as companions, and it was enough for him in town when his day's work was over to take his dinner at the club, and after a stern rubber or two at bridge, to retire to his flat, and more often than not work at some case in which he was engaged till the small hours.

small hours begs for single quotes as an advertent lapse into the demotic.. His ghouls are not commonplace creatures.

Ellen Terhune by Edmund Wilson (from Memoirs of Hecate County)

I always felt, when I went to the Terhune house, that I was getting back into the past – or rather, perhaps, that an atmosphere which had first been established at the beginning of the eighties, when the house in which she lived had been built, had been preserved there as a vital medium down into the nineteen twenties.

Pay close attention to that opening sentence for in it is established the house as time machine or the projective vehicle of its chatelaine Ellen Terhune who is subject to strange absences. The story in its way is an exploration of that puzzle beloved of time travel theorists, the grandfather paradox. In this case the target is more the mother paradox. Go back to that stage to halt her marriage and thus the pregnancy which issued in Ellen. The time traveller is the narrator of the tale and as he goes back his modern clothes are noted much as he notes the retro styles of the 'persons' that he encounters. To cross into this imaginal domain he has to physically enter the Terhune place and be transported by Ellen who is one of her spells. (Hecate how are you) She tells us:

I've always been a little bit scared by these states that I was telling you about, and I thought it might be a good thing to take hold of them and deliberately exploit them – to try and put them outside myself.

Her intention is to alter her own past definitively so that she no longer exists in an unacceptable present in which she is creatively stuck. She is a composer and Wilson describes her impasse through the rendering of a sonata that is working on.

At the end, the ghost of a second theme limped off and dropped away in irremediable speciousness and impotence, and we were back with the same confounded phrase, which was never satisfactorily resolved, but simply repeated eight times at precisely the same loudness and tempo.

As I mentioned in a previous postgrail cup one can be in one of those imaginal realms and not know it so the narrator does not get spooked by the change in the appearance of the house. There is no immediate confrontation with another plane that is known to be such. To me the element of changing the future by altering the past is the predominant feature of the tale so I would put it into the category of time travel fiction.

To alter a phrase; yes I know, one that was never uttered, Beam me up Scot, there are little notes which put us in mind of the man for whom he was the conscience.

I turned away my mind, I confess, with a certain complacent relief to a big party I looked forward to that evening; one of those gathering where great quantities of tan-backed girls and scarlet-faced men, with highballs fizzing in their hands, lift laughing and strident voices among glass-topped cocktail tables and lamps that give indirect lighting.

There's that jaded lost generation note, the seed of Carraway so to speak:

I would feel suddenly after lunch or dinner that living in the country was hopeless, that I had no communication with other people, and that nothing I was doing meant anything; yet on the other hand I could not see any hope in living in the city or travelling: I knew what other human beings were – they might be more or less picturesque in their various environments and climates, and to the young this was a source of excitement; but to me, on the verge of thirty, it was desolatingly, incontrovertibly evident that people under any conditions, were the same wry pathetic freaks, and why should I go to the trouble of moving about among them in order to observe the shapes which their defects and distortions could take?

That's shown as one long sentence though there might be a misprint of a colon for a full stop after 'travelling'. Still he can't be faulted for his mastery of the archetectonic of narrative balance. He moves along very smoothly in a manner that is old-fashioned in the best way.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

I could only get on at all by taking "nature" into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue.

I’ve seen it denied that this is a ghost story. That makes nonsense of so much of the internal evidence that I can only interpret it as a rationalist attempt to shrink the data to fit a view that of course there are no such things as hauntings or possession. James himself as outlined in the opening quote above makes a conscious decision to contain the attempt at combating the evil force of Quint and Jessel within the personal power of the Governess. Why was an exorcist not used? The service of exorcism is available within the Anglican Liturgy and even in modern times people have recourse to it. James may have been personally sceptical but being early exposed to the teachings of Swedenborg through the medium of his father, as it were, was well aware of the arsenal of spiritual combat. Why the daughter of a Vicar would not call in the service of a priest of the church that is within walking distance is a mystery but it makes for a more dramatic tussle for the souls of Flora and Miles.

James is a master of voice and he can perfectly render the pluck of a girl who
unlike the other applicants for the job that declined the extra money and the onerous conditions, plunged on. She is never to bother her employer and she is to take the full responsibility for the children. She is on her own which is I suppose a psychological rationale for the curious containment of the struggle.
I proffered the idea that James may have created a slightly unrealistic scenario in which a vicar’s daughter does not seek the aid of an exorcist to combat the forces of evil but is not her isolation a part of the predator’s strategy: Like a pair of wolves Peter Quint and Miss Jessel cut out the Governess who is disabled by the conditions of her employment. Is this not a recurrent theme in the novels of James, a young woman cut out of the herd by a wolf couple for their prey? That these predators are, for the moment, discarnate makes her cornering apparently inevitable for how can you fight invisible evil? Somehow by her pure love of the children she can enter into their sensibility, see for herself, not be overcome, and retain her freedom to forestall. She has the care of their souls and it is never absolutely certain whether she will prevail.

But does she?

Addendum: 1/11/12
The connection between the Bensons and James is further established by the fact that The Turn of the Screw story had its genesis in an anecdote told by Benson Pere, the Archbishop of Canterbury to James in 1895. As related above in my post on Expiation E.F. Benson aka 'Fred’ took up the lease of Lamb House after the death of James.

Having purposely not read anything about the anti-apparitionist school of criticism in relation to the story I remedied that deficit by a perusal of the rather complete history of the critical reception of the story from the earliest times at turnofthescrew.com
Edmund Wilson it was that famously Freudianized the interpretation ingeniously subverting in a determined manner the plot and James’s intentions. Others have followed him into that labyrinth and having lost the clew remain trapped. I wonder if it is possible for the noonday mind to enter into a true reading of stories which involve limens, portals and parallel realities. I trail my ectoplasmic coat.

‘So get thee gone Von Wilson but with a blessing on thy head’. I have a copy here by me of Memoirs of Hecate County which I read some years ago but as a public service I will read Ellen Terhune again and see whether it is worthy of the haunted house seal of approval or drops into a bucket of whimsy.

The Jolly Corner by Henry James

Obviously the ghost story was a nice little earner. No one was too proud to pick up the spectral shilling. Henry James, Edith Wharton, George Eliot, The Benson Boys all condescended. My reading today was James’s The Jolly Corner which is very good on every level, metaphysical indeed in both the vulgar and the special sense.

In his marvellously controlled sidling manner of indirection by precision and elaboration James constructs the portrait of a man intent on grasping his alternate might have been self.

Spencer Brydon recognised it—it was in fact what he had absolutely professed.  Yet he importantly qualified.  “He isn’t myself.  He’s the just so totally other person.  But I do want to see him,” he added.  “And I can.  And I shall.”

There is danger in meeting that stayed behind who may be the dark other and less than other. It is called by the Tibetan yogis a tulpa and of course the adepts can control this manifestation and concretisation of their own power. The hero of James’s story calls up or tries to call up by a constant revisiting of the house and a wandering through its dark passages always leaving the doors that communicate between the rooms open. It is a mark of this symbolic and practical detail that it operates at a subliminal level.

As related by Alexandra David-Neel in her book With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet these tulpas have been known to elude the control of their creator and take an independent and rebellious life.
Tulpa

She writes:

However, the practice is considered as fraught with danger for every one who has not reached a high mental and spiritual degree of enlightenment and is not fully aware of the nature of the psychic forces at work in the process.

Once the tulpa is endowed with enough vitality to be capable of playing the part of a real being, it tends to free itself from its maker's control. This, say Tibetan occultists, happens nearly mechanically, just as the child, when his body is completed and able to live apart, leaves its mother's womb. Sometimes the phantom becomes a rebellious son and one heahears of uncanny struggles that have taken place between magicians and their creatures, the former being severely hurt or even killed by the latter.

That the form may exist in the subtle plane is shown by his friend Miss Staverton’s experience of him in two dreams.

“I’ve seen him in a dream
Oh a ‘dream’—!”  It let him down.
“But twice over,” she continued.  “I saw him as I see you now.”

This intrigues Bryden but before he can absorb the delicious effect of his being dreamed of they part and the next chapter opens in which he begins to stalk the resident of the old house. What is he trying to catch? No more and no less than the Ka that is locked up in the tomb of the past.

 His alter ego “walked”—that was the note of his image of him, while his image of his motive for his own odd pastime was the desire to waylay him and meet him.

The hunt or haunt is on and it is a success:

On his return that night—the night succeeding his last intermission—he stood in the hall and looked up the staircase with a certainty more intimate than any he had yet known.  “He’s there, at the top, and waiting—not, as in general, falling back for disappearance.  He’s holding his ground, and it’s the first time—which is a proof, isn’t it? that something has happened for him.”

James’s special gifts of circling allusiveness, of vague palping of reality are especially suitable to this sort of tale. It is amongst his best writing.

Umbriel

But what are ghost stories to Brother Data with his ‘rational beliefs, reasonably held’? Can he move away for a brief holiday from the ‘space of reasons’? I suggest, probably not, that would be too uncanny. Brother Data remains strictly tied to a natural world bounded by naturalist type explanations. The idea that there might be an anomalous residuum is one which bounces off his deflector shield and clearly for the transporter to beam wraiths and spooks it would have to be switched off momentarily. An overriding of the frequency as one moves too close to Umbriel the dark moon of Uranus might allow penetration. It’s a theoretical possibility that there might be haunted sectors of the Cosmos subject to advanced disorder. Here your bright certainties are gloomed.
Umbriel by NASA