Ghost Stories of Henry James Read online

  GHOST STORIES

  Henry James

  Introduction and Notes by

  Martin Scofield

  University of Kent at Canterbury

  Ghost Stories first published by

  Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2001

  Published as an ePublication 2011

  ISBN 978 1 84870 539 5

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  For my husband

  ANTHONY JOHN RANSON

  with love from your wife, the publisher

  Eternally grateful for your unconditional love,

  not just for me but for our children,

  Simon, Andrew and Nichola Trayler

  GENERAL INTRODUCTION

  Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write wide ranging, jargon-free introductions and to provide notes that would assist the understanding of our readers rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, it is suggested that you may find it more useful to read the Introduction after you have read the book.

  General Adviser

  Keith Carabine

  Rutherford College

  University of Kent at Canterbury

  INTRODUCTION

  1

  Henry James (1843–1916) is mainly remembered and read today as a great realist novelist, the analyst and explorer of English and American morals and manners, perhaps the subtlest of all commentators on the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century social scene. By ‘realist’ is meant, broadly, that he takes recognisable characters who inhabit the world of his time and puts them in situations which have the plausibility (if often also the oddity) of actual historical occurrence. James himself spoke of this quality (in a letter where he expressed a disinclination to ‘cherish’ the ghost story as a ‘class of fiction’) as ‘a close connotation, or close observation, of the real – or whatever one may call it – the familiar, the inevitable’ (Letters, Vol. III, p.277). [1] His chosen form of the novel also allows that expansiveness and capaciousness, the exploration of character and event developing over time, that intricacy and complexity of relationships which we find in novels like The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Ambassadors (1903). But there was another side to his imagination that was drawn to the paranormal, the occult and the supernatural; to events and situations outside the ordinary expectations of experience; worlds of which the reality was called into question, and which perhaps exist only in the mind or in fiction. And to render this imaginative realm he also tends towards the more concentrated form of the short story or the ‘novella’. This volume contains all the stories by James which can strictly be described as ghost stories, in that they all contain an apparition, or at least, in the case of ‘The Private Life’ and ‘The Jolly Corner’, a ghostly ‘double’.

  James was only partially interested, though he was aware of, that part of nineteenth-century scientific enquiry which explored the paranormal. His brother William James, the distinguished philosopher and psychologist and author of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), founded the American Society for Psychical Research which investigated ghostly and other paranormal phenomena. For two years he was president of the British Society of that name; and Henry James once read a paper by his brother to the British Society. Their father, Henry James Senior, was a writer on religious and social matters: in the 1840s he became a follower of the mystical writings of Swedenborg and underwent a kind of religious conversion. One of the factors contributing to this was a ghostly experience in which he was one evening beset by extreme terror at the sense of a ‘damned shape’ squatting invisibly in the corner of the room where he sat, ‘beat upon meanwhile by an ever-growing tempest of doubt, anxiety and despair, with absolutely no relief from any truth I had ever encountered, save a most pale and distant glimmer of the Divine existence’, a state of mind that it took him ‘a good long hour’ to get under control (James, ed. Edel, 1949, p. vi). Henry James himself records no such encounters of his own. But his famous dream of the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre Museum in Paris, in which he resisted a hostile force on the other side of a closed door and followed with a counter-attack leading to the routing of a figure who fled down the great expanse of the gallery, is recorded in his Autobiography as having the effect of ‘a love-philtre or a fear-philtre which fixes for the senses their supreme symbol of the fair or the strange’ (James, 1956, p. 196); and the dream’s figure of a kind of double, the pursuer who becomes the pursued, the ‘appalling’, as James puts it, who becomes the ‘appalled’, is surely related, by whatever mysterious psychological connections, to a similar doubling in ‘The Jolly Corner’.

  Above all, however, James’s sense of the ghostly is a matter of literary imagination and artistry rather than any personal experience of or belief in the paranormal. Following his great predecessor Nathaniel Hawthorne, James often associated the supernatural with the genre of ‘Romance’. In Romance the purely imaginary could co-exist alongside the everyday, and ghosts, spirits, demons and other creatures of a shadowy other world could suddenly rub shoulders, uncannily and shockingly, with creatures of flesh and blood. Hawthorne defined Romance as ‘a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other’. [2] This meeting of the actual and the imaginary is crucial in James’s ghost stories. His stories are never pure fantasy: the supernatural always has a bearing on the world of human action, psychology and morality; and indeed it is the interpenetration of the two worlds that gives the stories their particular interest. ‘It is as difficult . . . to trace the dividing-line between the real and the romantic,’ James wrote, ‘as to plant a milestone between north and south’ (James, Vol. 2, 1984, p. 1067). And in another place: ‘A good ghost-story . . . must be connected at a hundred points with the common objects of life’ (James, Vol. 1, 1984, p.742; cited in Lustig, 1994, p. 50). In his Preface to Volume XVII of the New York Edition of his works (1909), he spoke of that ‘note’ of ‘the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy’ and, in relation to ‘Sir Edmund Orme’, of ‘the indispensable history of somebody’s normal relation to something’ (James’s emphasis; see below). It is notable that Sigmund Freud, in a famous essay, found the essence of the ‘uncanny’, that characteristic effect of many ghost stories, in the presence of the strange in the midst of the familiar or homely (heimlich) (Freud 1991, p. 220). Henry James’s emphasis on ‘somebody’s normal relation to something’ is expressing a similar idea, and James adds to it later in the same essay when he writes: ‘The extraordinary is most extraordinary in that it happens to you and m
e, and it’s of value (of value for others) but so far as visibly brought home to us’ (see below).

  This ‘bringing home to us’ lies of course at the heart of the matter, and also raises the question of form and style. The chosen form for James’s ghost stories is the short story or (in the case of ‘The Turn of the Screw’) the novella, or ‘beautiful and blest nouvelle’ as James called it, [3] using the French term rather than the Italian for that story of somewhere around a hundred pages, longer than the ‘short story’ but not so long as a novel. The short story, one which may be read at a single sitting, has that advantage of unified impression and single effect which Poe famously saw as its great strength (May 1994, pp. 59–64). Or as James put it, speaking of one class of fairytale, it seeks an effect ‘short and sharp and single, charged more or less with the compactness of anecdote’ (see below). For the ghost story, which aims to give a pleasurably disturbing shock, a frisson of the uncanny, to the reader, this quality would seem indispensable. The nouvelle prolongs this somewhat – though it is notable that ‘The Turn of the Screw’ was first published in twelve weekly instalments, each adding its ‘short and sharp and single’ effect.

  Virginia Woolf, in her suggestive and elegant essay on James’s ghost stories, points out how the element of disturbing shock, or frisson of the uncanny, is often mild and subtle (Woolf, 1966; Edel, 1963, pp. 47–54). In ‘Sir Edmund Orme’ the ghost does not terrify the narrator (though that is not to say it does not have its uncanny effect on the reader), and he comments: ‘I am ready to answer for it to all and sundry that ghosts are much less alarming and much more amusing than was commonly supposed’. More significantly, perhaps, the narrator feels a great sense of distinction and privilege in being vouchsafed a vision of the ghost of Sir Edmund. The ghost of Mrs Marden’s wronged lover appears as a kind of moral guardian, both to punish Mrs Marden and to protect her daughter from committing a similar wrong, and perhaps too from being wronged herself. This last possibility is the cue for the narrator’s involvement: he too, as the eventual wooer of Charlotte Marden, is being watched and warned. But the uncanny is still there in the quiet appearance of the ghost, a distinguished, soberly clad and human figure, at the church service. And it is there too, all the more effective for its impinging so surprisingly on the bustling scene of the sea-front in Brighton, in the sudden strange anxiety of Mrs Marden. It is ambiguous as to whether she sees Sir Edmund at this point, or whether her pang of guilt and anxiety arises simply from the conversation with the narrator: but if so, this is a large part of the point. Henry James’s ghosts are liable to arise as much from within as from without: whatever their vivid perceptibility, they are often as much emanations from the psyche as visitants from ‘another world’. Indeed, it is precisely the equivocation between the two that gives them their imaginative power.

  2

  In James’s earliest ghost story, ‘The Romance of Certain Old Clothes’, the title suggests the Hawthornean influence. But the story suffers perhaps from the way the supernatural element is brought in only on the concluding page. The story of the rivalry between the two sisters is in the vein of a gentle comedy of manners, and the triumph of the younger and the jealousy of the elder are not given sufficient strength or virulence to give motive to the melodramatically violent ending. One feels the need of a more demonic hatred between the sisters to give some kind of psychological link with the supernatural revenge. As Woolf said (with less justification) of ‘Owen Wingrave’: ‘The catastrophe has not the right relation to what has gone before.’

  In ‘The Ghostly Rental’, on the other hand, although the atmosphere of the ‘haunted’ house is subtly done, the supernatural element is deliberately subverted by the revelation of the truth about the ‘ghost’: this could be seen as an anti-ghost story, a debunking of the genre. Nevertheless, despite its rationalistic explanation it does retain a haunting atmosphere, and the real guilt and transgression which lie behind the story, and the narrator’s uneasy sense of trespassing upon a private tragedy, preserve a sense of ‘haunting’ which is metaphorical, but which raises the whole question of the status of metaphor in this realm: what does it mean to be ‘haunted’ by the past? The ghostly and the figurative are closely connected: ghosts are already ‘figures’ – whether in a supernatural, psychological or simply literary sense – and they can be seen as metaphors which suddenly become literal. Ghosts in James are constantly crossing these boundaries of definition. Even the living can become touched, through metaphor, with a ghostly unreality: so that in ‘Sir Edmund Orme’ the haunted Mrs Marden, appearing at a window, is momentarily taken for ‘an apparition’ by the narrator, who later describes her as ‘a flitting presence behind the pane’.

  The way in which being ‘haunted by the past’ – in the sense of past tradition – can suddenly become literal is illustrated by ‘Owen Wingrave’, which is at the same time an example of the frequent concern in James’s ghost stories with strongly felt social and moral dilemmas. This is a story about conceptions of courage and soldiership, a critique of a military ideal that looks back through the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries to the origins of ideas of heroism in the classical period of Greece and Rome. The story, as James relates in his Preface, was prompted by the glimpse of ‘a tall quiet slim studious young man of admirable type’ in Kensington Gardens (see below). And the strengths of the story lie as much in its characterisations of the protagonist, his tutor, his fierce old grandfather and his formidable aunt, and in its evocation of the military traditions of the ancient house of Paramore, as in the supernatural element. Indeed the aunt, and (as Julia Briggs comments: Briggs, p. 150) even more the figure of the young Kate Julian who urges Owen on to his ghostly fate, are perhaps more disturbing figures than the unseen ghost itself. It was, after all, not so long after this story was written, that well-born ladies were giving white feathers to conscientious objectors and non-enlisting young men at the outset of the First World War, and the Daily Mail’s ‘Little Mother’ was exhorting the mothers of Britain to ‘pass on the human ammunition of “only sons” to fill up the gaps’. [4] ‘Owen Wingrave’ is a remarkable study of British military family tradition, and its ghostly element can be seen simply as an uncanny dimension of the latter. It also perhaps indicates James’s own relation to this tradition, his feeling for a ‘studious’ young man (not so unlike himself, perhaps) who aimed at a different kind of honour but who died sacrificed to the ghosts of the past. George Bernard Shaw’s criticism of the story (in its later form as a play), made in a letter to James, is however very shrewd and telling: he argued forcefully that James had given in to the ‘incubus’ of the past in letting Owen be defeated. [5] James defended the story on the grounds of the artist’s imaginative freedom (against Shaw’s idea of art as ‘encouragement’); and later responded with a note of exasperation: ‘Really, really we would have howled at a surviving Owen Wingrave who would have embodied for us a failure – and an ineptitude’ (James, Letters IV, p. 515). And so Owen is seen – surely effectively in terms of the atmosphere and sentiment of the story as a whole – as touching and heroic at the end. And in James’s revised version, which emphasises the ‘victory’ of Owen’s courage, the phrasing is surely more in keeping with the rest than the first version: ‘He was like a young soldier on the battlefield,’ becomes, ‘He was all the young soldier on the gained field’. [6]

  Responsibility to the dead, and to past tradition (the trammels of which have a tragic effect in ‘Owen Wingrave’), is seen more positively in ‘The Third Person’ and (perhaps) in ‘The Real Right Thing’ – indeed in the former with a charming light comedy. In ‘The Real Right Thing’, George Withermore, the young friend and admirer of the writer Ashton Doyne, is asked by their mutual publisher, and at the insistence of Doyne’s wife, to write a Life of the deceased. As he begins to work on the Life, among Doyne’s papers and in Doyne’s own study, he is immediately aware of how ‘the place was full of their lost friend’. ‘ “It’s here that we’re with him,” ’ s
ays Mrs Doyne; but Withermore feels rather that ‘it was there he was with themselves’. These still mainly figurative expressions of haunting presence gradually become more insistent and more literal. Withermore seems actually to encounter Doyne in his researches: ‘Was it a matter of ’67? – or but of the other side of the table?’. He seems to be helped in finding papers, and as the narrative goes on the figurative casting of these events drops away and he ‘heard documents on the table behind him gently shifted and stirred’ (the use of passive past participles, rather than intransitive verbs, subtly helps to shift our perception). The ambiguity between metaphoric and literal haunting is increased by the way in which Mrs Doyne, whom he encounters unexpectedly on staircases and in corridors, seems herself to ‘haunt’ the protagonist. Gradually Withermore comes to be reassured and encouraged by the presence of Doyne, and when he begins to miss that feeling the way is open to the quiet climax of the story. Doyne’s presence, which never for Withermore becomes quite visible, begins to intimate the former’s hostility to the Life. The story is about the biographer’s awareness of his responsibility to his subject, and perhaps suggests James’s reservations about that form of writing.

  In ‘The Third Person’, on the other hand, the responsibility to the past is carried out with a charming robustness. The two middle-aged spinsters who inherit a house and decide to live in it together become aware of a ‘third person’ who seems to be enjoining some task upon them. Marr, the story’s location, is based on Rye in Sussex, James’s home from 1907 to 1913. Rye had once been on the coast until the sea retreated, and was full of legends of smuggling: hence the nature of the ghost. This is James’s one ghost story where the mood is gently comic: the character of the two ladies, one timid and retiring, the other more forthright and with more of a ‘past’, are done with great nicety; the ghost has a gruesomeness (its head has ‘a dreadful twist’) which prompts a smile more than a shudder, and its appeasing is the opportunity for a very minor but distinctive act of daring by one of the ladies. The supernatural presence here enjoins not guilt and sorrow, but a stimulus to adventurousness and almost to the recapture of youth. The influence of a past tradition is here not stifling but enabling and liberating.