Post by Salzmank on Jul 20, 2018 14:37:48 GMT
Kirk, one of my long-time favorite writers, wrote two excellent essays on the ghostly tale, but I prefer this second and less-often-reprinted (apologies for the length, but it may serve rather as a manifesto for this sort of thing):
Elaborated from certain encounters of mine with life and death, these stories were not written for children. Some of my perceptions, impressions, or experiences occurred three or four decades ago — which dusty fact accounts for the very modest prices and wages incidentally mentioned in a number of my yarns. Worse, a few of my stage-settings and backgrounds — from Los Angeles to Stari Bar, from Pittenweem to Marrakesh — have been knocked about, since I wrote, by urban renewers and other misguided evangels of Progress.
Such nostalgic archaism (though unintended when I wrote these stories) has its literary advantages. As M. R. James remarked while praising Sheridan Le Fanu, “The ghost story is in itself a slightly old-fashioned form; it needs some deliberateness in the telling; we listen to it the more readily if the narrator poses as elderly, or throws back his experience to ‘some thirty years ago.’”
Alarming though (I hope) readers may find these tales, I did not write them to impose meaningless terror upon the innocent. The political ferocity of our age is sufficiently dismaying: men of letters need not conjure up horrors worse than those suffered during the past decade by Cambodians and Ugandans, Afghans and Ethiopians.
What I have attempted, rather, are experiments in the moral imagination. Readers will encounter elements of parable and fable. Gerald Heard said to me once that the good ghost story must have for its kernel some clear premise about the character of human existence — some theological premise, if you will. Literary naturalism is not the only path to apprehension of reality. All important literature has some ethical end; and the tale of the preternatural — as written by George Macdonald, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and other masters — can be an instrument for the recovery of moral order.
The better uncanny stories are underlain by a healthy 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: by bell, book, and candle, symbolically at least, we can push them down under.
Because the limbo of the occult has no defined boundaries, remaining terra incognita interiorly, the imaginative writer’s fancy can wander there unburdened by the impedimenta of twentieth century naturalism. For symbol and allegory, the shadow-world is a better realm than the mechanized empire of science-fiction. The story of the supernatural or the mystical can disclose aspects of human conduct and human longing to which the positivistic psychologist has blinded himself. The more talented fabulists of the occult and the crepuscular — among these, Mircea Eliade and Robert Aickman, in their different fashions — piece together into a pattern those hints and glimpses offered fragmentarily by mystical vision, second sight, hauntings, dreams, wondrous coincidences.
As a literary form, then, the uncanny tale can be a means for expressing truths enchantingly. But I do not ask the artist of the fantastic to turn didactic moralist; and I trust that he will not fall into the error that the shapes and voices half-glimpsed and half-heard are symbols merely. For the sake of his art, the teller of ghostly narrations ought never to enjoy freedom from fear. As Samuel Johnson lived in dread of real torment beyond the grave — not mere “mental anguish” — so the “invisible prince,” Le Fanu, archetype of the literary men of this genre, is believed to have died literally of fright. He knew that his creations were not his inventions merely, but glimpses of the abyss.
In an era of the decay of religious belief, can fiction of the supernatural or preternatural, with its roots in myth and transcendent perception, succeed in being anything better than playful or absurd? The lingering domination of yesteryear’s materialistic and mechanistic theories in natural science persuades most people that if they have encountered inexplicable phenomena — why, they must have been mistaken. How is it possible to perceive a revenant if there cannot possibly be revenants to perceive?
Take George Orwell. In 1931 he wrote to a friend “about a ghost I saw in Walberswick cemetery.” He described his encounter in considerable detail, including a plan of church and graveyard. But he concluded, “Presumably an hallucination.” Ghosts did not square with Orwell’s rather belligerent denial of the possibility of the life eternal. Yet he would have liked to believe. And what is an hallucination? On reading Orwell’s letter, I was reminded of an acquaintance of mine who accounted for several astounding simultaneous occurrences in a house as “entropy.” What is entropy? I inquired. “Oh, things like that.” A scientific term sufficed him.
Most people nowadays continue to share Orwell’s uneasy rejection of “psychic” phenomena. An English aficionada of the ghostly tale instructs us at considerable length that the ghost story has died: Sigmund Freud slew the poor thing. Wisdom began and ended with Freud.
But did it? C. G. Jung’s theories about psychic phenomena differed radically from Freud’s. Startling personal experience converted Jung from his previous belief that such phenomena were subjective “unconscious projections” to his later conviction that “an exclusively psychological approach” cannot suffice for study of psychic phenomena of the ghostly variety. And no wonder! For while Jung was staying in an English country house, there abruptly appeared on his pillow “the head of an old woman whose right eye, wide open, was staring at me. The left half of her face, including the eye, was missing. I leapt out of bed and lit a candle” — at which point the head vanished.
Although a vulgarized Freudianism remains popular today, as an intellectual force Freudianism is nearly spent. The philosophical and ideological currents of a period necessarily affecting its imaginative literature, the supernatural in fiction has seemed ridiculous to most, nearly all this century. Yet as the rising generation regains the awareness that “nature” is something more than mere fleshly sensation, and that something may lie above human nature, and something below it — why, the divine and the diabolical rise up again in serious literature. In this renewal of imagination, fiction of the preternatural and the occult may have a part. Tenebrae are woven into human nature, despite all that meliorists declare.
“We have heard a whole chorus of Nobel Laureates in physics informing us that matter is dead, causality is dead, determinism is dead,” Arthur Koesder wrote in 1972. “If that is so, let us give them a decent burial, with a requiem of electronic music. It is time for us to draw the lessons from twentieth-century post-mechanistic science, and to get out of the strait-jacket which nineteenth-century materialism imposed on our philosophical outlook.”
Amen to that. Our literary assumptions and modes, like our philosophical outlook, were oppressed by the heavy hand of “scientific” materialism and mechanism, which regime in effect denied the existence of souls. It becomes possible to admit once more the reality of a realm of spirit. It does not follow necessarily that we will acquire a great deal more knowledge about shadow-land. “The limitations of our biological equipment may condemn us to the role of Peeping Toms at the keyhole of eternity,” Koesder concludes his slim book The Roots of Coincidence (1972). “But at least let us take the stuffing out of the keyhole, which blocks even our limited view.”
A reason why I write stories like those in this present collection — aside from the fun of the process, which scandalizes — is that I aspire to help extract the stuffing from the keyhole. The tales in this volume have retributive ghosts, malign magicians, blind angels, beneficent phantoms, conjuring witches, demonic possession, creatures of the twilight, divided selves. I present them to you unabashed. They may impart some arcane truths about good and evil: as Chesterton put it, all life is an allegory, and we can understand it only in parable.
But let me say also that my bogles are not to be taken lightly. I could offer you True Relations — my own experiences, or those of friends — quite as startling as my fictional narratives, though more fragmentary and inconclusive. I do tell such “true ghost stories” aloud to audiences; but the True Relation, a sudden puzzling phenomenon, does not make by itself a polished piece of humane letters; it must be embroidered and enlarged by literary art, to be worth printing.
No one ever has satisfactorily supported by evidence a general theory accounting for ghostly apparitions and similar phenomena. Yet a mass of testimony from all countries and all ages exists to inform us that strange happenings beyond the ordinary course of life and matter have occurred at irregular intervals and in widely varied circumstances.
Possibly we never will understand the character of such phenomena better than we do already. Suppose, suggests C. E. M. Joad, that we appoint a sober committee of three to sit in the haunted room at midnight and take notes on the appearance of the reputed ghost. But suppose also that one of the conditions essential for the occurrence of this particular phenomenon is that there not be present a sober committee of three: well, then, the very scientific method has precluded the possibility of reaching a scientific determination. Our human faculties may not suffice to extract the stuffing from the keyhole. If so, our mere inadequacy does not prove that nothing lies beyond the keyhole. From behind that locked door still may come thumps and moans, which some of us hear better than others do. It is well to be skeptical in such concerns — skeptical of the “light at the end of the tunnel” enthusiasts, but equally skeptical of the old-fogey doctrinaire mechanists.
Enough: I do not intend to let this preface to grimly amusing tales become a didactic treatise on a shrouded huge subject. I am merely a humble follower in the steps of Defoe, Scott, Coleridge, Stevenson, Kipling, the Sitwells; of Hawthorne, Poe, Henry James, Edith Wharton — and many other writers of high talent who did not blush to fancy that something may lurk on the other side of the keyhole. If I bring discredit upon their genre, I will deserve to be hounded to my doom by James Thurber’s monster the Todal (who, in The Thirteen Clocks [1950], smells like long-unopened rooms, and gleeps), “an agent of the Devil, sent to punish evildoers for having done less evil than they should.”
Nearly all these tales were published in periodicals or anthologies, over the years: Fantasy and Science Fiction, London Mystery Magazine, The Critic, World Review, Frights, Dark Forces, Whispers, New Terrors. They were written in haunted St. Andrews, in the Isle of Eigg, at Kellie Castie, at Balcarres House, at Durie House (which has the most persistent of all country-house spectres), and at my ancestral spooky house at Mecosta, Michigan — this last house totally destroyed by fire on Ash Wednesday, 1975; also nocturnally in my silent library (once a factory) at Mecosta.
These lines are written at the hour of three, the witching hour, when most men’s energies are at ebb, “in the silent croaking night,” a cricket for company. “The small creatures chirp thinly through the dust, through the night.” Pray for us scribbling sinners now and at the hour of our death.
Such nostalgic archaism (though unintended when I wrote these stories) has its literary advantages. As M. R. James remarked while praising Sheridan Le Fanu, “The ghost story is in itself a slightly old-fashioned form; it needs some deliberateness in the telling; we listen to it the more readily if the narrator poses as elderly, or throws back his experience to ‘some thirty years ago.’”
Alarming though (I hope) readers may find these tales, I did not write them to impose meaningless terror upon the innocent. The political ferocity of our age is sufficiently dismaying: men of letters need not conjure up horrors worse than those suffered during the past decade by Cambodians and Ugandans, Afghans and Ethiopians.
What I have attempted, rather, are experiments in the moral imagination. Readers will encounter elements of parable and fable. Gerald Heard said to me once that the good ghost story must have for its kernel some clear premise about the character of human existence — some theological premise, if you will. Literary naturalism is not the only path to apprehension of reality. All important literature has some ethical end; and the tale of the preternatural — as written by George Macdonald, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and other masters — can be an instrument for the recovery of moral order.
The better uncanny stories are underlain by a healthy 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: by bell, book, and candle, symbolically at least, we can push them down under.
Because the limbo of the occult has no defined boundaries, remaining terra incognita interiorly, the imaginative writer’s fancy can wander there unburdened by the impedimenta of twentieth century naturalism. For symbol and allegory, the shadow-world is a better realm than the mechanized empire of science-fiction. The story of the supernatural or the mystical can disclose aspects of human conduct and human longing to which the positivistic psychologist has blinded himself. The more talented fabulists of the occult and the crepuscular — among these, Mircea Eliade and Robert Aickman, in their different fashions — piece together into a pattern those hints and glimpses offered fragmentarily by mystical vision, second sight, hauntings, dreams, wondrous coincidences.
As a literary form, then, the uncanny tale can be a means for expressing truths enchantingly. But I do not ask the artist of the fantastic to turn didactic moralist; and I trust that he will not fall into the error that the shapes and voices half-glimpsed and half-heard are symbols merely. For the sake of his art, the teller of ghostly narrations ought never to enjoy freedom from fear. As Samuel Johnson lived in dread of real torment beyond the grave — not mere “mental anguish” — so the “invisible prince,” Le Fanu, archetype of the literary men of this genre, is believed to have died literally of fright. He knew that his creations were not his inventions merely, but glimpses of the abyss.
In an era of the decay of religious belief, can fiction of the supernatural or preternatural, with its roots in myth and transcendent perception, succeed in being anything better than playful or absurd? The lingering domination of yesteryear’s materialistic and mechanistic theories in natural science persuades most people that if they have encountered inexplicable phenomena — why, they must have been mistaken. How is it possible to perceive a revenant if there cannot possibly be revenants to perceive?
Take George Orwell. In 1931 he wrote to a friend “about a ghost I saw in Walberswick cemetery.” He described his encounter in considerable detail, including a plan of church and graveyard. But he concluded, “Presumably an hallucination.” Ghosts did not square with Orwell’s rather belligerent denial of the possibility of the life eternal. Yet he would have liked to believe. And what is an hallucination? On reading Orwell’s letter, I was reminded of an acquaintance of mine who accounted for several astounding simultaneous occurrences in a house as “entropy.” What is entropy? I inquired. “Oh, things like that.” A scientific term sufficed him.
Most people nowadays continue to share Orwell’s uneasy rejection of “psychic” phenomena. An English aficionada of the ghostly tale instructs us at considerable length that the ghost story has died: Sigmund Freud slew the poor thing. Wisdom began and ended with Freud.
But did it? C. G. Jung’s theories about psychic phenomena differed radically from Freud’s. Startling personal experience converted Jung from his previous belief that such phenomena were subjective “unconscious projections” to his later conviction that “an exclusively psychological approach” cannot suffice for study of psychic phenomena of the ghostly variety. And no wonder! For while Jung was staying in an English country house, there abruptly appeared on his pillow “the head of an old woman whose right eye, wide open, was staring at me. The left half of her face, including the eye, was missing. I leapt out of bed and lit a candle” — at which point the head vanished.
Although a vulgarized Freudianism remains popular today, as an intellectual force Freudianism is nearly spent. The philosophical and ideological currents of a period necessarily affecting its imaginative literature, the supernatural in fiction has seemed ridiculous to most, nearly all this century. Yet as the rising generation regains the awareness that “nature” is something more than mere fleshly sensation, and that something may lie above human nature, and something below it — why, the divine and the diabolical rise up again in serious literature. In this renewal of imagination, fiction of the preternatural and the occult may have a part. Tenebrae are woven into human nature, despite all that meliorists declare.
“We have heard a whole chorus of Nobel Laureates in physics informing us that matter is dead, causality is dead, determinism is dead,” Arthur Koesder wrote in 1972. “If that is so, let us give them a decent burial, with a requiem of electronic music. It is time for us to draw the lessons from twentieth-century post-mechanistic science, and to get out of the strait-jacket which nineteenth-century materialism imposed on our philosophical outlook.”
Amen to that. Our literary assumptions and modes, like our philosophical outlook, were oppressed by the heavy hand of “scientific” materialism and mechanism, which regime in effect denied the existence of souls. It becomes possible to admit once more the reality of a realm of spirit. It does not follow necessarily that we will acquire a great deal more knowledge about shadow-land. “The limitations of our biological equipment may condemn us to the role of Peeping Toms at the keyhole of eternity,” Koesder concludes his slim book The Roots of Coincidence (1972). “But at least let us take the stuffing out of the keyhole, which blocks even our limited view.”
A reason why I write stories like those in this present collection — aside from the fun of the process, which scandalizes — is that I aspire to help extract the stuffing from the keyhole. The tales in this volume have retributive ghosts, malign magicians, blind angels, beneficent phantoms, conjuring witches, demonic possession, creatures of the twilight, divided selves. I present them to you unabashed. They may impart some arcane truths about good and evil: as Chesterton put it, all life is an allegory, and we can understand it only in parable.
But let me say also that my bogles are not to be taken lightly. I could offer you True Relations — my own experiences, or those of friends — quite as startling as my fictional narratives, though more fragmentary and inconclusive. I do tell such “true ghost stories” aloud to audiences; but the True Relation, a sudden puzzling phenomenon, does not make by itself a polished piece of humane letters; it must be embroidered and enlarged by literary art, to be worth printing.
No one ever has satisfactorily supported by evidence a general theory accounting for ghostly apparitions and similar phenomena. Yet a mass of testimony from all countries and all ages exists to inform us that strange happenings beyond the ordinary course of life and matter have occurred at irregular intervals and in widely varied circumstances.
Possibly we never will understand the character of such phenomena better than we do already. Suppose, suggests C. E. M. Joad, that we appoint a sober committee of three to sit in the haunted room at midnight and take notes on the appearance of the reputed ghost. But suppose also that one of the conditions essential for the occurrence of this particular phenomenon is that there not be present a sober committee of three: well, then, the very scientific method has precluded the possibility of reaching a scientific determination. Our human faculties may not suffice to extract the stuffing from the keyhole. If so, our mere inadequacy does not prove that nothing lies beyond the keyhole. From behind that locked door still may come thumps and moans, which some of us hear better than others do. It is well to be skeptical in such concerns — skeptical of the “light at the end of the tunnel” enthusiasts, but equally skeptical of the old-fogey doctrinaire mechanists.
Enough: I do not intend to let this preface to grimly amusing tales become a didactic treatise on a shrouded huge subject. I am merely a humble follower in the steps of Defoe, Scott, Coleridge, Stevenson, Kipling, the Sitwells; of Hawthorne, Poe, Henry James, Edith Wharton — and many other writers of high talent who did not blush to fancy that something may lurk on the other side of the keyhole. If I bring discredit upon their genre, I will deserve to be hounded to my doom by James Thurber’s monster the Todal (who, in The Thirteen Clocks [1950], smells like long-unopened rooms, and gleeps), “an agent of the Devil, sent to punish evildoers for having done less evil than they should.”
Nearly all these tales were published in periodicals or anthologies, over the years: Fantasy and Science Fiction, London Mystery Magazine, The Critic, World Review, Frights, Dark Forces, Whispers, New Terrors. They were written in haunted St. Andrews, in the Isle of Eigg, at Kellie Castie, at Balcarres House, at Durie House (which has the most persistent of all country-house spectres), and at my ancestral spooky house at Mecosta, Michigan — this last house totally destroyed by fire on Ash Wednesday, 1975; also nocturnally in my silent library (once a factory) at Mecosta.
These lines are written at the hour of three, the witching hour, when most men’s energies are at ebb, “in the silent croaking night,” a cricket for company. “The small creatures chirp thinly through the dust, through the night.” Pray for us scribbling sinners now and at the hour of our death.