Classic Ghost Story Writers: Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Blackwood: The Wendigo and Other Stories (2023)

'The Wendigo' (1910) remains my favourite story by Algernon Blackwood, and - indeed - one of my favourite horror stories of all time.

I know that H. P. Lovecraft preferred the earlier 'The Willows' (1907), and I certainly acknowledge the wonderfully atmospheric effects achieved by Blackwood in that story, but it just can't compare with the sense of cosmic terror, as well as the intensity of his descriptions of the Northern woods, in 'The Wendigo'.

M. Grant Kellermeyer: Classic Horror Blog (2019)

"Oh, oh! This fiery height! Oh, oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of fire!"

If you haven't read the story (you can find an online text of it here), those words will sound very strange to you. If you have, they'll be only too meaningful.

But what exactly is a wendigo (or windigo, as it's also called)?

The wendigo is often said to be a malevolent spirit, sometimes depicted as a creature with human-like characteristics, which possesses human beings. It is said to cause its victims a feeling of insatiable hunger, the desire to eat other humans, and the propensity to commit murder. In some representations, the wendigo is described as a giant humanoid with a heart of ice, whose approach is signaled by a foul stench or sudden unseasonable chill.

- Wikipedia: Wendigo

This is far from Blackwood's description of it as a "moss-eater", with huge misshapen feet from its bounds up into the fiery upper air. In general he is careful to avoid its associations with cannibalism, a perennial problem for many of the Northern First Nations tribes, who often ran short of food in winter if the harvest had been bad the year before, and who therefore tended to be accused of acts of cannibalism by missionaries and colonisers (as historian Francis Parkman records in his 1865 account The Pioneers of France in the New World).

Here's a typical Windigo folktale, collected from a Chippewa informant by Lottie Chicogquaw Marsden:

One time long ago a big Windigo stole an Indian boy, but the boy was too thin, so the Windigo didn't eat him up right away, but he travelled with the Indian boy waiting for him till he'd get fat. The Windigo had a knife and he'd cut the boy on the hand to see if he was fat enough to eat, but the boy didn't get fat. They travelled too much. One day they came to an Indian village and the Windigo sent the boy to the Indian village to get some things for him to eat. He just gave the boy so much time to go there and back. The boy told the Indians that the Windigo was near them, and showed them his hand where the Windigo cut him to see if he was fat enough to eat. They heard the Windigo calling the boy. He said to the boy "Hurry up. Don't tell lies to those Indians." All of these Indians went to where the Windigo was and cut off his legs. They went back again to see if he was dead. He wasn't dead. He was eating the juice (marrow) from the inside of the bones of his legs that were cut off. The Indians asked the Windigo if there was any fat on them. He said, "You bet there is, I have eaten lots of Indians, no wonder they are fat." The Indians then killed him and cut him to pieces. This was the end of this Giant Windigo.

Sophia Cathryn: Wendigo (2022)

As you can see from the illustration above, Wendigos are generally depicted as being cadaverously thin, ravenously hungry, and prone to eating their own faces and limbs if no other food is available - hence their blood-stained teeth. They can also pass on this curse to others, which may account for the return of the French Canadian guide Défago in altered form at a crucial point in Blackwood's story. They don't always have horns, so it's not necessarily easy to identify them at first.

It's just one of many stories Blackwood set in the wilds of Canada. One of the best of the others is "A Haunted Island" (1899), though "Skeleton Lake" (1906) runs it a close second.

Algernon Blackwood: John Silence, Physician Extraordinary (1908)

Probably the most impressive of his many collections of mostly fantastic and supernatural stories is John Silence, Physician Extraordinary. John Silence is clearly an heir to Sheridan Le Fanu's Dr. Martin Hesselius, the psychic physician, as well as Bram Stoker's Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, bane of vampires everywhere.

John Silence is, however, more of a spectator than an active participant in the events he witnesses. He's probably at his best in "Secret Worship," set at a haunted boys' school in the Black Forest of Germany, but all of the six stories he figures in (five in the original book; another, "A Victim of Higher Space," collected later) are well worth reading.

Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936)

It's true that many of Algernon Blackwood's fictions offend against one or other of the three rules for effective ghost stories laid out by his close contemporary M. R. James in the preface to his own collection More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911):

I think that, as a rule, the setting should be fairly familiar and the majority of the characters and their talk such as you may meet or hear any day. A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself, ‘If I’m not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me!’ Another requisite, in my opinion, is that the ghost should be malevolent or odious: amiable and helpful apparitions are all very well in fairy tales or in local legends, but I have no use for them in a fictitious ghost story. Again, I feel that the technical terms of ‘occultism’, if they are not very carefully handled, tend to put the mere ghost story (which is all that I am attempting) upon a quasi-scientific plane, and to call into play faculties quite other than the imaginative.

Algernon Blackwood: Ancient Sorceries (2022)

1. the setting should be fairly familiar and the majority of the characters and their talk such as you may meet or hear any day ...
Blackwood, by contrast, is fond of setting his stories in Canada, or on the lower reaches of the Danube, or on an island in the Baltic, or in a mysterious small town in France. That is, in fact, part of their attraction. One feels, in almost every case, that he's writing about a place familiar to him, and describing the kinds of characters encountered by him in his adventurous early life.


2. the ghost should be malevolent or odious ...
This is probably true of the Wendigo itself (though that's debatable), but as a general rule, Blackwood's ghosts and occult manifestations of various kinds tend to be largely indifferent to mankind: they operate according to their own rules, for reasons that remain largely obscure to us. The danger comes from the intersection of these otherwordly entities with our own quotidian concerns.


3. the technical terms of ‘occultism’ tend to put the mere ghost story upon a quasi-scientific plane, and to call into play faculties quite other than the imaginative.
It seems probable that James had Blackwood specifically in mind when he wrote this sentence. There's a lot of 'quasi' (or pseudo-) scientific discourse in a good many of his stories, particularly the ones which star John Silence, though in this he was following the example of such classic supernatural novellas as Edward Bulwer-Lytton's "The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain" (1859).

Algernon Blackwood: The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories (1906)

There's an expansiveness and range to the best of Blackwood's early stories which far surpasses his later work in the genre, influenced (as it was) by the need to provide stories short enough to broadcast or to fit into the increasingly restrictive demands of magazines.

Despite this, over time he built quite a reputation as a reader of his own stories on radio, and (eventually) on the burgeoning medium of television. But he should really be seen - along with Wilkie Collins, M. R. James and Sheridan Le Fanu - as one of the principal ornaments of the golden age of ghost stories, roughly from the mid-nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War.

It's a shame that there's no really comprehensive collection of his work in this genre, uneven in quality though it undoubtedly is. Perhaps the best introduction to his work remains E. F. Bleiler's careful selection, published by Dover in 1973.

E. F. Bleiler, ed.: Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood (1973)

Mind you, the wendigo itself has gone on to become one of the standard 'cryptids' - along with Bigfoot, the chupacabra, the Loch Ness monster, and the Jersey Devil - investigated by proponents of the pseudoscience known as Cryptozoology. It also bears an obvious resemblance to the Slender Man figure in contemporary pop culture.

It's even inspired a couple of feature films, as well as numerous stories, comics, novels and even role-playing games.

Larry Fessenden, dir. & writ.: Wendigo (2001)

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Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Henry Blackwood
(1869-1951)

Books I own are marked in bold:

Novels:


1. Jimbo: A Fantasy (1909)
2. The Education of Uncle Paul (1909)
3. The Human Chord (1910)
4. The Centaur (1911)
5. A Prisoner in Fairyland [sequel to The Education of Uncle Paul] (1913)
6. The Extra Day (1915)
7. Julius LeVallon (1916)
   • Julius LeVallon: An Episode. London: Cassell and Company, Ltd., 1916.
8. The Wave (1916)
9. The Promise of Air (1918)
10. The Garden of Survival (1918)
11. The Bright Messenger [sequel to Julius LeVallon] (1921)
12. Dudley & Gilderoy: A Nonsense (1929)

Children's Books:


13. Sambo and Snitch (1927)
14. The Fruit Stoners: Being the Adventures of Maria Among the Fruit Stoners (1934)

Plays:


15. [with Violet Pearn] The Starlight Express. Music by Edward Elgar (1915)
16. [with Violet Pearn] Karma: A Reincarnation Play (1918)
17. [with Bertram Forsyth] The Crossing (1920)
18. [with Violet Pearn] Through the Crack (1920)
19. [with Bertram Forsyth] White Magic (1921)
20. [with Elaine Ainley] The Halfway House (1921)
21. [with Frederick Kinsey Peile] Max Hensig (1929)

Short story collections:


22. The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories (1906)
23. The Listener and Other Stories (1907)
24. John Silence (1908)
    • John Silence, Physician Extraordinary. 1908. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1912.
25. The Lost Valley and Other Stories (1910)
26. Pan's Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories (1912)
27. Ten Minute Stories (1914)
28. Incredible Adventures (1914)
29. Day and Night Stories (1917)
30. Wolves of God, and Other Fey Stories (1921)
31. Tongues of Fire and Other Sketches (1924)
    • Tongues of Fire and Other Sketches. 1924. London: Herbert Jenkins Limited, n.d.
32. Shocks (1935)
33. The Doll and One Other (1946)

Short Story Selections:


34. Ancient Sorceries and Other Tales (1927)
35. The Dance of Death and Other Tales (1927)
    • The Dance of Death and Other Stories. 1927. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1973.
36. Strange Stories (1929)
37. Short Stories of To-Day & Yesterday (1930)
38. The Willows and Other Queer Tales. Ed. G. F. Maine (1932)
39. The Tales of Algernon Blackwood (1938)
40. Selected Tales of Algernon Blackwood (1942)
    • Selected Tales: Stories of the Supernatural and Uncanny. 1943. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948.
41. Selected Short Stories of Algernon Blackwood (1945)
42. Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural (1949)
    • Included in: Tales of Terror & Darkness: Part One: Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural / Part Two: Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre. 1949 & 1967. Spring Books. London: The Hamlyn Publishing Group, 1977.
43. In the Realm of Terror (1957)
44. Selected Tales of Algernon Blackwood (1964)
45. Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre (1967)
    • Included in: Tales of Terror & Darkness: Part One: Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural / Part Two: Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre. 1949 & 1967. Spring Books. London: The Hamlyn Publishing Group, 1977.
46. Ancient Sorceries and Other Stories (1968)
    • Ancient Sorceries and Other Stories. 1906-1908. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
47. Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood. Ed. Everett F. Bleiler (1973)
    • Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood. Preface by the Author. 1938. Ed. E. F. Beiler. New York: Dover Books, Inc., 1973.
48. The Best Supernatural Tales of Algernon Blackwood. Ed. Felix Morrow (1973)
    • The Best Supernatural Tales of Algernon Blackwood. 1929. Introduction by Felix Morrow. New York: Causeway Books, 1973.
49. Tales of Terror and Darkness (1977)
    • Tales of Terror & Darkness: Part One: Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural / Part Two: Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre. 1949 & 1967. Spring Books. London: The Hamlyn Publishing Group, 1977.
50. Tales of the Supernatural. Ed. Mike Ashley (1983)
51. The Magic Mirror. Ed. Mike Ashley (1989)
52. The Complete John Silence Stories. [with "A Victim of Higher Space"]. Ed. S. T. Joshi (1997)
53. Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories. Ed. S. T. Joshi (2002)
54. Algernon Blackwood's Canadian Tales of Terror. Ed. John Robert Colombo (2004)
55. Ancient Sorceries and Other Stories (2022)
56. The Wendigo and Other Stories. Ed. Aaron Worth. Oxford World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.

Matt Fox: Illustration for The Wendigo (2015)

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The King in Yellow

Michael Cimino, dir. & writ.: Heaven's Gate (1980)

"Heaven's Gate - like the movie?"

- Elizabeth Knox, The Absolute Book
(Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2019): 217

Elizabeth Knox: The Absolute Book (2019)

[WARNING: this post contains significant plot spoilers - proceed no further unless you don't care about such things, or are not actually intending to read the book]:

One of the most interesting lapses in Elizabeth Knox's latest novel The Absolute Book comes quite early on, where her heroine Taryn Cornick is discoursing learnedly to an M.I.5. spook:

"... The Necronomicon is a fictional forbidden book, like M. R. James's Tractate Middoth or Robert Chambers' Yellow Sign. Someone handing me a card with Abdul Alhazred on it would mean to say: 'I am the master of forbidden knowledge'." [76]

Abdul Alhazred: The Necronomicon

Alas, not so. Mind you, H. P. Lovecraft's imaginary Necronomicon, ostensibly composed by the "mad Arab Abdul Alhazred" is indeed precisely what Taryn claims, but M. R. James's allegedly "forbidden" book is not. It is, rather, a perfectly respectable and well-known portion of the Jewish Talmud, as a few minutes of online searching should have revealed:

Dalia Marx: Tractates Tamid, Middot and Qinnim: A Feminist Commentary (2013)

Tractate Middot (Hebrew: מִדּוֹת‎, lit. "Measurements") is the tenth tractate of Seder Kodashim ("Order of Holies") of the Mishnah and of the Talmud. This tractate describes the dimensions and the arrangement of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and the Second Temple buildings and courtyards, various gates, the altar of sacrifice and its surroundings, and the places where the Priests and Levites kept watch in the Temple.

- Wikipedia

Robert W. Chambers: The King in Yellow (1895)

The Robert W. Chambers error is more interesting - and possibly more revealing. The book in question is not called The Yellow Sign but The King in Yellow.

It's notorious among fans of supernatural fiction not so much for the quality of its prose, which is fairly standard 1890-ish Wardour Street tushery, but for the sheer force of the idea behind it. Each of the first four stories references The King in Yellow, a "forbidden play which induces despair or madness in those who read it."

Aaron Vanek, dir.: The Yellow Sign (2001)

It's true that one of those four stories is entitled "The Yellow Sign." More to the point, though, The Yellow Sign was the name of a 2001 movie based on Chambers' stories, made by indie film director Aaron Vanek.

The idea of the literally unreadable book has been used many, many times since - perhaps most amusingly by Martin Amis in his 1995 novel The Information, where his writer protagonist's novel Untitled - "No, it's not untitled, that's the book's name: Untitled," as he is forced to explain again and again throughout the narrative - causes nosebleeds, nausea and even brain tumours in anyone who attempts to read it.

Dan Gilroy, writ. & dir.: Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)

Another, more recent twist on the idea can be found in the netflix movie Velvet Buzzsaw where an unscrupulous art critic (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) is destroyed by a set of paintings he has connived in stealing from a dead artist's apartment. Unsurprisingly, various references to The King in Yellow can be seen in the paintings themselves.

Elizabeth Knox

At first sight there do seem to be an unusual number of simple errors of nomenclature in Knox's book. For instance, when describing a large public sculpture outside a library in Aix-en-Provence which the heroine is visiting, she says:

Three giant-sized books had been reproduced in enamelled steel ... In order, they were The Little Prince, leaning; Molière's Les Malades in the middle; and Camus's The Stranger, which was nearest to Taryn. [89]

Why are two of the titles in English, and the other one in French? More to the point, though, what's this "Molière's Les Malades" when it's at home? Molière did indeed write a play called Le Malade imaginaire [The Imaginary Invalid, or - if you prefer - the Hypochondriac] - it was, in fact, his very last work for the stage - but he never wrote one called Les Malades.

Honoré Daumier: Le Malade imaginaire (c.1860)

[UPDATE (4/2/20): I've just found the image below online, on Pinterest]:

Cassandra Claims: Broken pencil tips

This clearly represents the scene described in the novel, and yet ... as I prognosticated above, not only are all three titles in French, but the middle one is, indeed, Le Malade imaginaire rather than the quoted "Les Malades." Vindication - of a sort, at any rate.

Again, we find further down:

According to folktales, and later literary productions, the fairy took pretty children, like the boy Oberon and Titania squabble over in A Midsummer Night's Dream. They stole away bards like Yeats's Ossian, or beautiful knights like Tamlin. [243]

Yeat's bard is named Oisin [pronounced Osheen], not Ossian. It's true that Ossian is a legitimate variant of the name - the one used by James Macpherson in his series of eighteenth-century epic poems adapted from the Gaelic, in fact - but Yeats's 1889 poem is called The Wanderings of Oisin (though in later editions he occasionally spelt the name 'Usheen' - perhaps for easier pronunciation). A small lapse, admittedly, but one which would definitely lose you the point in Mastermind or Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

W. B. Yeats: The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889)

Yet again, still further down, in a discussion of the disposition of the family library on which so much of the plot hinges:

'There were quite a few things your grandad packed up himself. With personal notes. ... And there were one or two large crated consignments of books, like his whole set of Gibbon. [547]

'Like his whole set of Gibbon.' Huh? Wha ...? Edward Gibbon's great work on The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire first appeared in six volumes between 1776 and 1789. Subsequent reprints have sometimes swelled this to seven or eight volumes, but seldom more than that. As for his other miscellaneous works, the most compendious (Swiss) edition of these ran to seven octavo (i.e. small) volumes (1796), but the more standard English edition of 1814 is in five volumes.

Edward Gibbon: Miscellaneous Works (3 vols: 1796)

Would you really need a separate crate for eleven books? Taryn's grandfather may, of course, have been a mad Gibbonian who collected innumerable different versions and reprints, but in that case why is the reference to his 'whole set of Gibbon' rather than his many, many copies of the same book?

I guess the problem here is that if you're not really familiar with his work, the mere fact that Gibbon is a classical historian famous for his verbosity and longwindedness ('Another damn'd thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?', as the Duke of Leicester reportedly remarked when presented with volume one of his long-awaited history) might lead you to suppose that his collected works would reach quite a bulk.

They do not. Gibbon is in fact the most terse and pithy of writers, with sentences packed to hold the utmost possible meaning.

Edward Gibbon: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1788-89)

A much better choice here would have been one of his more prolific contemporaries, such as Voltaire, the most recent edition of whose collected works runs to 144 volumes. He might well merit a packing case to himself. Or, for that matter, Diderot, whose Encyclopédie (1751-80) fills 35 huge volumes. As the Encyclopédie Méthodique (1782-1832), it was eventually expanded to 166.

Denis Diderot, ed.: Encyclopédie (28 vols: 1751-66)

We are left, then, with two alternatives - either the author (and editor) of The Absolute Book didn't bother to check any of the bibliographical 'facts' it contains, but instead decided to rely on the by-guess-and-by-God system of literary divination. Or, alternatively, that early reference to 'The Yellow Sign' is meant as a code for a system of hidden correspondences underlying this book, also.

Perhaps (I'm guessing here), as with the Navaho, intentional errors had to be inserted to stop the book starting to ... operate upon its readers?

Stranger things happen in the plot itself, after all: we've hardly got stably located in one world than we're dashing off to another - Fairyland, Purgatory, Auckland - you name it.

Perhaps, too, the long (and rather irrelevant) description of a celebrated session at the 2016 Auckland Writers' festival, is meant as a part of this coding. That conversation hinged on the subject of saffron (I know because I was there).

Paul Muldoon (2016)

Basically, the person she refers to as 'the Irish poet' (Paul Muldoon) was being interviewed - or, rather, subjected to a long rambling monologue - by C.K. Stead, who (in his defence) had been roped in at the last minute to replace Bill Manhire, who was ill. They somehow got onto the subject of saffron - "You mean, what I use to colour my rice?" observed Stead hopefully - and Muldoon claimed he could write a whole book about it, like "those books about salt, or coffee, or cod" [315].

Unfortunately this roused the ire of a young man in the audience who trooped down to the microphone at the front of the auditorium to ask a rather long and involved question:

"... the guy said he read feminist poetry, and poetry by people of colour, and trans people. Poetry with politics in it. How he made a point of doing that. And then he said, 'I haven't read your books and I might find they're full of beautiful poetry, but where is it coming from?'" [316]

Renee Liang's account of the event, posted at the time on The Big Idea, was somewhat different:

In One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, after the title of [his] most recent collection, Irish-US poet Paul Muldoon was interviewed by ‘last minute ring in’ CK Stead. Muldoon kicked off the session by announcing that Stead’s The New Poetic had profoundly influenced him as a young poet. The two old acquaintances then had a leisurely chat, seemingly forgetting the hundreds watching [my emphasis]. Muldoon on writing poetry with a jolt factor: “If I know what I’m doing, it’s almost certain everyone else will too. If I write what I don’t know, I might have the element of surprise.” He and Stead wandered gently around the subject of poetry, with seemingly unrelated side trips: “Now, saffron. You could write about saffron forever.”

Things became more lively when, with 20 minutes to go, Muldoon asked for the lights to be brought up on the audience. “Ah, there you are. You must have some things to ask?” Up first, a young man with a challenge: “I’m young, gay and Irish. Why are you talking about saffron? If you have that talent – do you not have a responsibility to use it?” Muldoon gently admonished him. “Subject matter is irrelevant. Any subject in the world could be illuminated through the prism of saffron. Or tea, for that matter. Now, a cup of tea is not a simple thing – it carries so much weight of history. Look at all the trouble tea caused in Boston Harbour.” It was hard not to admire a man who can turn anything into a metaphor ...

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

It reminds me a bit of that old anecdote about the London cabbie: "I have lots of famous people in my cab. The other day I had Bertrand Russell in there. The philosopher. And I said to him, 'Well then, Bertie, what's it all about?' And, d'you know, he didn't have an answer!"

Knox's account of the event concludes with a few bitchy put-downs of the PC young man, and some vaunting of the poet's 'gentle reply', with a suggestion that the whole thing could have been settled by asking, 'Excuse me, is there a question in your question?' [316].

Perhaps that's a stock author's perspective - motivated principally by the fear of getting just such a grilling oneself. Renee concludes with some oblique praise of Muldoon's ability to 'contort time' - and a suggestion that if he were a working mum, he might find it a bit harder to contemplate saffron in such a leisurely way.

For myself, I guess that the whole thing was just a huge disappointment. I adore Muldoon's poetry (which, unlike - I suspect - most of the other commentators, I have read, and taught, and discussed, at length). All this bullshit about saffron was so far from what I wanted to hear from the author of 'The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’ or 'Incantata' that I found myself resenting most of all the conference organisers' decision to pair him off in a 'conversation' rather than simply letting him read. But perhaps I'm the one going off at a tangent now ...

So what (if anything) links all of these things?

Robert W. Chambers: The King in Yellow: Annotated Edition

• Forbidden books (or works of art): - In this case, a book such as The King in Yellow, deliberately misnamed (or should I say misleadingly named) to draw the attentive reader.


• Sickness (or disease generally): - This takes the form of Molière's Les Malades [the sick people] - an obvious distortion of the title Le Malade imaginaire to stress the fact that this particular malady is far from imaginary:

  In 1673, during a production of his final play, The Imaginary Invalid, Molière, who suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis, was seized by a coughing fit and a haemorrhage while playing the hypochondriac Argan. He finished the performance but collapsed again and died a few hours later.
  

  - Wikipedia

• Poetry (or bardic verse): - This is underlined by reference to the abducted Fenian bard Oisin (or Usheen, or Ossian) - clearly misnamed, despite the fact that this is one of best-known of Yeats's early poems.


• Size (or number): This arises from that passing reference to the bulk - or, in this case, otherwise - of someone's 'whole set' of Edward Gibbons' works. But Gibbon did indeed propose the publication of a collected edition of the historical materials used by him in reconstructing the history of Europe during the late Roman Empire, the Byzantine period and the Dark Ages. If Taryn's grandfather had access to Gibbon's list of works - or had taken the initiative to compile such a monumental collection himself - that really might have occupied an entire packing-crate.

Geoffrey Keynes: Edward Gibbon's Library (1940)

One could perhaps summarise as follows:

1. Madness
2. Disease
3. Abduction
4. Size

James Gillray: The Promis’d Horrors of the French Invasion (1796)

All in all, it sounds to me rather like a warning of some kind. I also note, parenthetically, the tendency of each of these works to group in the fin de siècle of each of the last few centuries: 1789 (the year of the French revolution) for Gibbon's Decline and Fall, 1889 and 1895 for (respectively) Yeats' and Chambers' books, 1673 for Molière's fatal last play ...

Burned Classical Scroll from Herculaneum

The ostensible subject (or should I say 'The MacGuffin'?) of Knox's work is a book referred to only as 'the firestarter', which is presumed to have been the cause of several of the most celebrated library fires in history. It takes the form of a sealed, almost indestructible box, which contains:

a scroll made from the skin of an angel. The skin is tattooed with words, in an ink made of the angel's own blood. The scroll is a primer of the tongues of angels, otherwise known as the Language of Command. A language which, like the language of the Sidhe, has no written form. The primer is ... in the Roman alphabet, with the phonetics of Latin used to approximate the sounds of the words of the language of Command [622-23]

It also contains, we discover a bit later - after the original scroll has been used to buy off the demons who have been making trouble throughout most of the book - 'in Latin as well as the language of angels,' a letter from the mother of the character Shift, a minor god who plays a major part in the action of the book:

She apologises for all the deceptions she practised on me. And for hiding me. [632]

"By virtue of its being the same text written in two languages, it is also a cipher key," comments Hugin, one of Odin's two ravens of wisdom, also an important character in the plot.

'The phonetics of Latin.' Well, even that is not quite so easy as it sounds. Anyone who's ever tried to learn Latin knows that it has at least two systems of pronunciation:

• The first is the established Continental system, used by the Catholic church, which roughly equates its sounds with those of a modern Romance language such as Italian.
• The second is the nineteenth-century British pronunciation which attempted to reconstruct the 'original' classical sounds of the letters by analogy with transliterations in other languages (such as Greek). Hence the infamous 'Wainy, Weedy, Weeky' sounding of Caesar's epigrammatic'Veni, Vidi, Vici' [I came, I saw, I conquered]. Hence, too, "Kikero" for "Cicero", and (of course) "Kaiser" for "Caesar."

What if you got it wrong? Surely a certain precision must be employed whilst intoning the sounds of this 'Language of Command'? Unless it's all a cunning plot on the original angel's part to make his scroll unusable by any but those previously initiated into his system of pronunciation?

Alan Garner: The Moon of Gomrath (1963)

In his author's note at the end of The Moon of Gomrath, Alan Garner remarks:

The spells are genuine (though incomplete: just in case)

Are Knox's instructions to initiated readers similarly "incomplete: just in case"? It's tempting to think so. It's hard, therefore, to conjecture just what the final message of the book might be.

It certainly involves danger (The King in Yellow) - though what that danger is is not quite clear. Is it madness, as in Chambers' original play? Abduction to the Other Side, to Fairyland (or, if you prefer, Swedenborgian space) - like Yeats's Oisin? Is it death, as in Molière's own play?

Joseph Noel Paton: The Reconciliation of Titania and Oberon (1847)

It's just a suspicion, but I feel that the question of size is crucial here. Opnions differ on the precise dimensions of Faerie. Modern writers have poured scorn on the idea that Fairies are of diminutive size, with gossamer wings and diaphanous dresses. Another world might well be ruled by an entirely different set of dimensions, however. Oisin may well have shrunk when he followed his fairy princess to the three islands of Yeats's poem - "Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose" - even though he resumed his original giant-like dimensions on his return to St. Patrick's Ireland.

Enough said, perhaps. I cannot say message received, as that would be mendacious in the extreme, but certainly I remain poised for further communications from the other side. Size, yes, and saffron. That particular reddy-yellow spice comes up again and again, and is perhaps the most important ingredient to be gathered from this colourfully encoded work.

Persian Saffron

Classic Ghost Story Writers: Michael Cox

Jerry Bauer: Michael Cox (1948-2009)

Admittedly this is rather a strange follow-up to Sheridan Le Fanu, but Michael Cox gets the nod because he's such an inspiration to nerdy bookworms everywhere.

In one of those classic don't-say-it's-over-till-it's-over turn-ups for the books, Cox published his first novel in 2006, in his late fifties, after a lifetime of compiling anthologies and chronologies and other humble aids to readers, only to find it a runaway success, sold to its eventual publisher John Murray at auction for £430,000!

Is The Meaning of Night actually any good? Well, perhaps not in the absolute sense, but it's a very competent and entertaining pastiche of High Victorian Sensation Gothic, not up to the mark of Wilkie Collins or Le Fanu at their best, but clearly the fruit of passionate adoration of their works.

I suppose my main problem with it is its hero, who veers from amoral Poe-like maniac ("William Wilson") to moony lover with scant consistency. Nor can I quite see why his aristocratic ambitions are of such great interest to so many of the people he meets (a criticism which applies even more sharply to its sequel, The Glass of Time).

I do in many ways prefer this second novel, though: Esperanza Gorst is a far more attractive and sprightly protagonist than her whining papa - though her taste in men is a little difficult to fathom (with the best will in the world, Cox is unable to make her ghastly pompous cousin Perseus seem in the slightest degree plausible as a love interest).

The great thing is, after editing all of those books of other people's work (including a very interesting biography of M. R. James), Cox finally nerved himself up to enter the arena himself. Then, tragically, he died of cancer a couple of years later.

Mind you, he credited his diagnosis with giving him the incentive to finish his long-meditated fiction project. Without it he might well have continued to pile up odd pages without ever finishing either book. However you take it, I think it has to be seen as a very encouraging story for all of those half-completed novels languishing in so many desk drawers. Never say die! Even without the worldwide success and the hugely swollen pre-publication price, Cox would still be a winner.

Seeing how others did it failed to intimidate him: he put himself out there, and his two books bid fair to become minor classics in their own right! Nor is his work as an editor and anthologist likely to be forgotten, either.

The list of his works below is not exhaustive - there are many anthologies missing: of golden age detective stories, thrillers, and a variety of other genres - but it does include all of the really significant highlights in his career as a ghost story writer and fancier (I hope):

•


Eiko Ishioka: Victorian Gothic Lolita (1983)

Michael Andrew Cox (1948-2009)

Biography:




M. R. James: An Informal Portrait (1983)



• M. R. James: An Informal Portrait. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Fiction:




The Meaning of Night (2006)



• The Meaning of Night: A Confession. London: John Murray (Publishers), 2006.




The Glass of Time (2008)



• The Glass of Time: The Secret Life of Miss Esperanza Gorst, Narrated by Herself. 2008. London: John Murray (Publishers), 2009.

Edited:




The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories (1986)



• The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories. Ed. Michael Cox & R. A. Gilbert. 1986. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.




The Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1986)



• The Ghost Stories of M. R. James. Ed. Michael Cox. Illustrated by Rosalind Caldecott. 1986. London: Tiger Books International, 1991.




‘Casting the Runes’ and Other Ghost Stories (1987)



• James, M. R. ‘Casting the Runes’ and Other Ghost Stories. Ed. Michael Cox. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.




The Illustrated J. S. Le Fanu (1988)



• The Illustrated J. S. Le Fanu: Ghost Stories and Mysteries by a Master Victorian Storyteller. Equation. Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Thorsons Publishing Group, 1988.




The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (1991)



• The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories. Ed. Michael Cox & R. A. Gilbert. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.




The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories (1996)



• The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories. Ed. Michael Cox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.




The Oxford Chronology of English Literature (2002)



• The Oxford Chronology of English Literature. Ed. Michael Cox. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Michael Cox

Two Jameses (3): "Two Doctors"

[M. R. James: A Thin Ghost and Others (1919)]

Would it be fair to say that the present-day mania for zombie movies is based on some kind of visceral fear of overpopulation?

Consider, for a moment, those times when you find yourself looking out over a crowd of human beings and feeling almost unable to conceive of each of them as harbouring a world of complex emotions and thoughts like you (and your soulmates and friends).

Hence all that stuff about "they don't feel it like we do" (because it would be so horrible if they did). Hence, too, the slavering mass of reanimated corpses which seems to spring up so readily in the contemporary imagination.

I know that I've already speculated that the vogue for vampires is based on their perfect complexions and inability to put on weight (which makes them alluring role models for more than just teenagers, I'm sorry to say). This idea probably sounds almost equally frivolous, but it isn't really.

I mean, what other theory can you advance to account for it?

I know that it might seem as if I've been maundering on about ghosts and ghost stories (and various examples of each by the two Jameses), but all this is gradually drawing to a point, I'm glad to say.

I fear that it's a point that I can only make by doing a bit of textual analysis (what we used to call "close reading"), though, so I propose to look through one particular story by M. R. James with a certain amount of attention to detail.

The story in question is called "Two Doctors", and it comes at the end of his strangest and most inaccessible book, A Thin Ghost and Others (1919)

Note the date of first publication, for a start: straight after the First World War. Note, too, that it's quite a thin volume, with fewer stories than either of its pre-war predecessors:

There's something a bit thin and apologetic about the preface, too:

"Not a great deal is risked" is a rather roundabout way of launching a new book into the world - far less weighty than that comment about sequels being "not only proverbially but actually, very hazardous things." What on earth is that supposed to mean? In what way are they "hazardous"? To one's reputation? One's mental health?

Perhaps ... some one's Christmas may be the cheerfuller for a story-book which, I think, only once mentions the war.

That last remark certainly fits the whole atmosphere of psychic distress so noticeable at the end of that appallingly wasteful war, with its slew of publications by spiritualists and eminent divines attempting to substantiate communication with loved ones on the Other Side ...

So, first of all, you'll notice that there is no story in the book called "A Thin Ghost."

The textual justification for the title in fact comes towards the end of the story above, "The Residence at Whitminster," with its "cruel child" Saul who becomes (apparently) a strange insect-like ghost felt only once, in passing, in the dark:

"A withered heart makes an ugly thin ghost" [pp. 45-46]

All the stories in the book are interesting. The first three, about (respectively) a scrying glass, a haunted diary, and a vampire, have been frequently reprinted. The second-to-last, "The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance," uses the iconography of the Punch and Judy show to great effect, though at times the story becomes almost too allusive to grasp - almost in the manner of late Kipling, strange stories such as "They" or "Mrs Bathurst."

It's the last story I want to talk about here, though: "Two Doctors." It's pretty obvious even to the casual reader that it's constantly teetering on the edge of ceasing to be a "story" in the conventional sense altogether.

Is there more to it than that, though?

TWO DOCTORS

[Full text available here.]

It is a very common thing, in my experience, to find papers shut up in old books; but one of the rarest things to come across any such that are at all interesting. Still it does happen, and one should never destroy them unlooked at.

[Compare the opening of HJ's “The Turn of the Screw”:

"The story's written. It's in a locked drawer - it has not been out for years. I could write to my man and enclose the key; he could send down the packet as he finds it."
…
"Then your manuscript--?"

"Is in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand." He hung fire again. "A woman's. She has been dead these twenty years. She sent me the pages in question before she died."
…
he opened the faded red cover of a thin old-fashioned gilt-edged album.

Here the assumption seems to be that the story is interesting because it's been concealed so sedulously from the world up till now.]

Now it was a practice of mine before the war occasionally to buy old ledgers of which the paper was good, and which possessed a good many blank leaves, and to extract these and use them for my own notes and writings.

["MRJ is describing his own habits at this point", according to Rosemary Pardoe's useful set of annotations to the story (first published in Ghosts & Scholars 15 (1993), and available online here [henceforth marked RP]).

Note, too, the one "mention of the war” referred to in his preface above.]

One such I purchased for a small sum in 1911. It was tightly clasped, and its boards were warped by having for years been obliged to embrace a number of extraneous sheets. Three-quarters of this inserted matter had lost all vestige of importance for any living human being: one bundle had not. That it belonged to a lawyer is certain, for it is endorsed: The strangest case I have yet met, and bears initials, and an address in Gray’s Inn. It is only materials for a case, and consists of

137

138 A THIN GHOST AND OTHERS

statements by possible witnesses. The man who would have been the defendant or prisoner seems never to have appeared. The dossier is not complete, but, such as it is, it furnishes a riddle in which the supernatural appears to play a part. You must see what you can make of it.

The following is the setting and the tale as I elicit it.

Dr. Abell was walking in his garden one afternoon waiting for his horse to be brought round that he might set out on his visits for the day.

["The similarity between Quinn and Abell, and Cain and Abel, is probably not coincidence, although in "Two Doctors" it is Abell/Abel who is the murderer" [RP].

It's certainly notable that we first encounter "Abel" in a garden, from which state of calm he is abruptly transported by his servant's resignation.]

As the place was Islington, the month June, and the year 1718, we conceive the surroundings as being countrified and pleasant. To him entered his confidential servant, Luke Jennett, who had been with him twenty years.

[Note the lawyer-like particularity of time, place, and personnel. The figure of twenty years may also prove significant to our reading of the story. Henry James died in 1916, during the First World War, approximately twenty years after the publication of "The Turn of the Screw" (1898). M. R. James's first ghost story, "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book was written in 1894 and printed soon after in the National Review" (The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1931): p.ix).]

“I said I wished to speak to him, and what I had to say might take some quarter of an hour. He accordingly bade me go into his study, which was a room opening on the terrace path where he was walking, and came in himself and sat down. I told him that, much against my will, I must look out for another place. He inquired what was my reason, in consideration I had been so long with him. I said if he would excuse me he would do me a

TWO DOCTORS 139

great kindness, because (this appears to have been common form even in 1718) I was one that always liked to have everything pleasant about me.

[The editorial intrusion here seems unusually heavy-handed: nor is it quite clear whether it's "liking to have everything pleasant about me" or "doing me a great kindness" which appears (to MRJ) anachronistic for 1718.]

As well as I can remember, he said that was his case likewise, but he would wish to know why I should change my mind after so many years, and, says he, ‘you know there can be no talk of a remembrance of you in my will if you leave my service now.’ I said I had made my reckoning of that.

“‘Then,’ says he, ‘you must have some complaint to make, and if I could I would willingly set it right.’ And at that I told him, not seeing how I could keep it back, the matter of my former affidavit and of the bedstaff in the dispensing-room, and said that a house where such things happened was no place for me.

[What is this "matter of the bedstaff"? In a conversation about this story at the SFF website (henceforward SFF), "The Judge" replies to "Fried Egg's" perplexity on the subject as follows:

Firstly, I checked out 'bedstaff' to see if that gave a clue - apparently it's a wooden pin that used to be stuck at the side of a bed to stop the bedclothes slipping ...

There's a good deal more about bedclothes and pillows later in the story.]

At which he, looking very black upon me, said no more, but called me fool, and said he would pay what was owing me in the morning; and so, his horse being waiting, went out. So for that night I lodged with my sister’s husband near Battle Bridge and came early next morning to my late master, who then made a great matter that I had not lain in his house and stopped a crown out of my wages owing.

[His reluctance to spend the night there is not unmotivated, as will later become apparent.]

“After that I took service here and there,

140 A THIN GHOST AND OTHERS

not for long at a time, and saw no more of him till I came to be Dr. Quinn’s man at Dodds Hall in Islington.”

There is one very obscure part in this statement, namely, the reference to the former affidavit and the matter of the bedstaff. The former affidavit is not in the bundle of papers. It is to be feared that it was taken out to be read because of its special oddity, and not put back. Of what nature the story was may be guessed later, but as yet no clue has been put into our hands.

[Whether the "nature" of the story really "may be guessed" is (as you will see) extremely debatable.

Rosemary Pardoe is of the opinion that "'Two Doctors' is MRJ's weakest and most difficult story." she sees this statement, along with the earlier one that "The dossier is not complete, but, such as it is, it furnishes a riddle in which the supernatural appears to play a part. You must see what you can make of it" as "a kind of apology for the fact that the tale is so confused." [RP].

Whether this "confusion" is accidental or deliberate remains to be seen, however.]

The Rector of Islington, Jonathan Pratt, is the next to step forward. He furnishes particulars of the standing and reputation of Dr. Abell and Dr. Quinn, both of whom lived and practised in his parish.

“It is not to be supposed,” he says, “that a physician should be a regular attendant at morning and evening prayers, or at the Wednesday lectures, but within the measure of their ability I would say that both these persons fulfilled their obligations as loyal members of the Church of England. At the same time (as you desire my private mind) I must say, in the language of the schools, distinguo.

["I distinguish." [RP].]

Dr. A. was to me a source of perplexity, Dr. Q. to my

TWO DOCTORS 141

eye a plain, honest believer, not inquiring over closely into points of belief, but squaring his practice to what lights he had. The other interested himself in questions to which Providence, as I hold, designs no answer to be given us in this state: he would ask me, for example, what place I believed those beings now to hold in the scheme of creation which by some are thought neither to have stood fast when the rebel angels fell, nor to have joined with them to the full pitch of their transgression.

["Dante placed the creatures in the anteroom of hell, endlessly pursuing a shifting banner and stung by wasps and hornets (Divine Comedy, Canto III, lines 34-69). But according to Celtic tradition these not-quite-fallen angels became fairy folk (The Vanishing People: Fairy Lore and Legends by Katherine Briggs [Pantheon 1978]." [RP].]

“As was suitable, my first answer to him was a question, What warrant he had for supposing any such beings to exist? for that there was none in Scripture I took it he was aware. It appeared – for as I am on the subject, the whole tale may be given – that he grounded himself on such passages as that of the satyr which Jerome tells us conversed with Antony;

["In Jerome's "Life of St Paul the Hermit", he recounts how St Antony encountered a satyr while journeying to visit St Paul. This "dwarfish figure...its nostrils joined together, and its forehead bristling with horns: the lower part of its body (ending) in goat's feet" wants nothing more than for Antony to intercede for him and his tribe with God. Jerome adds "And this, lest any hesitation should stir in the incredulous, is maintained by universal witness during the reign of Constantius". For an English translation, see The Desert Fathers by Helen Waddell (Constable 1936), p.33." [RP].]

but thought too that some parts of Scripture might be cited in support. ‘And besides,’ said he, ‘you know ’tis the universal belief among those that spend their days and nights abroad, and I would add that if your calling took you so continuously as it does me about the country lanes by night, you might not be so surprised as I see you to be by my suggestion.’ ‘You

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are then of John Milton’s mind,’ I said, ‘and hold that

Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.’

["Milton's Paradise Lost, Book IV, line 677." [RP].]

“‘I do not know,’ he said, ‘why Milton should take upon himself to say “unseen”; though to be sure he was blind when he wrote that. But for the rest, why, yes, I think he was in the right.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘though not so often as you, I am not seldom called abroad pretty late; but I have no mind of meeting a satyr in our Islington lanes in all the years I have been here; and if you have had the better luck, I am sure the Royal Society would be glad to know of it.’

["The premier scientific society, founded in the 1660s, was by the early 1700s much concerned with classification of species; hence the Reverend's quip about the Society's interest in satyrs." [RP].]

“I am reminded of these trifling expressions because Dr. A. took them so ill, stamping out of the room in a huff with some such word as that these high and dry parsons had no eyes but for a prayerbook or a pint of wine.

“But this was not the only time that our conversation took a remarkable turn. There was an evening when he came in, at first seeming gay and in good spirits, but afterwards as he sat and smoked by the fire falling into a musing way; out of which to rouse him I said pleasantly

TWO DOCTORS 143

that I supposed he had had no meetings of late with his odd friends. A question which did effectually arouse him, for he looked most wildly, and as if scared, upon me, and said, ‘You were never there? I did not see you. Who brought you?’ And then in a more collected tone, ‘What was this about a meeting? I believe I must have been in a doze.’ To which I answered that I was thinking of fauns and centaurs in the dark lane, and not of a witches’ Sabbath;

["Abell was clearly not a lone dabbler, but a member of some sort of coven. This distinguishes him from MRJ's other black magicians." [RP].]

but it seemed he took it differently.
“‘Well,’ said he, ‘I can plead guilty to neither; but I find you very much more of a sceptic than becomes your cloth. If you care to know about the dark lane you might do worse than ask my housekeeper that lived at the other end of it when she was a child.’ 'Yes,’ said I, ‘and the old women in the almshouse and the children in the kennel. If I were you, I would send to your brother Quinn for a bolus

["A pill." [RP].]

to clear your brain.’ ‘ Damn Quinn,’ says he; ‘talk no more of him: he has embezzled four of my best patients this month; I believe it is that cursed man of his, Jennett, that used to be with me, his tongue is never still; it should be nailed to the pillory

["The pillory was a wooden device in public places where offenders would be restrained at the neck and arms. It was common for blasphemers to have their tongues nailed to the crosspiece." [RP].]

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if he had his deserts.’ This, I may say, was the only time of his showing me that he had any grudge against either Dr. Quinn or Jennett, and as was my business, I did my best to persuade him he was mistaken in them. Yet it could not be denied that some respectable families in the parish had given him the cold shoulder, and for no reason that they were willing to allege. The end was that he said he had not done so ill at Islington but that he could afford to live at ease elsewhere when he chose, and anyhow he bore Dr. Quinn no malice. I think I now remember what observation of mine drew him into the train of thought which he next pursued. It was, I believe, my mentioning some juggling tricks which my brother in the East Indies had seen at the court of the Rajah of Mysore. ‘A convenient thing enough,’ said Dr. Abell to me, ‘if by some arrangement a man could get the power of communicating motion and energy to inanimate objects.'

["A power which Abell himself would appear to have, judging from his movement of the poker. This may also go some way to explaining the mystery of the bedstaff in the dispensing-room ..." [RP].]

‘As if the axe should move itself against him that lifts it; something of that kind?’ ‘Well, I don’t know that that was in my mind so much; but if you could summon such a volume from your shelf or even order it to open at the right page.’

TWO DOCTORS 145

“He was sitting by the fire – it was a cold, evening – and stretched out his hand that way, and just then the fire-irons, or at least the poker, fell over towards him with a great clatter, and I did not hear what else he said. But I told him that I could not easily conceive of an arrangement, as he called it, of such a kind that would not include as one of its conditions a heavier payment than any Christian would care to make;

["The loss of one's soul." [RP].]

to which he assented. ‘But,’ he said, ‘I have no doubt these bargains can be made very tempting, very persuasive. Still, you would not favour them, eh, Doctor? No, I suppose not.’

“This is as much as I know of Dr. Abell’s mind, and the feeling between these men. Dr. Quinn, as I said, was a plain, honest creature, and a man to whom I would have gone – indeed I have before now gone to him for advice on matters of business. He was, however, every now and again, and particularly of late, not exempt from troublesome fancies. There was certainly a time when he was so much harassed by his dreams that he could not keep them to himself, but would tell them to his acquaintances and among them to me.

["I assumed the dreams were procured in some way by Abell as part of his supernatural powers - after all, if you want revenge, it isn't enough to kill the person quickly, you want them to suffer for some time. A dream of digging up any swaddled corpse would be unpleasant, but to have an image of one's own dead body is, I'd have thought, much worse." [SFF].]

I was at supper at his house, and he was not inclined to let me

146 A THIN GHOST AND OTHERS

leave him at my usual time. ‘If you go,’ he said, ‘there will be nothing for it but I must go to bed and dream of the chrysalis.’ ‘ You might be worse off,’ said I. ‘ I do not think it,’ he said, and he shook himself like a man who is displeased with the complexion of his thoughts. ‘I only meant,’ said I, ‘that a chrysalis is an innocent thing.’ ‘This one is not,’ he said, ‘and I do not care to think of it.’

“However, sooner than lose my company he was fain to tell me (for I pressed him) that this was a dream which had come to him several times of late, and even more than once in a night. It was to this effect, that he seemed to himself to wake under an extreme compulsion to rise and go out of doors. So he would dress himself and go down to his garden door. By the door there stood a spade which he must take, and go out into the garden, and at a particular place in the shrubbery somewhat clear and upon which the moon shone, for there was always in his dream a full moon, he would feel himself forced to dig. And after some time the spade would uncover something light-coloured, which he would perceive to be a stuff, linen or woollen, and this he must clear with his hands. It was always the same: of

TWO DOCTORS 147

the size of a man and shaped like the chrysalis of a moth, with the folds showing a promise of an opening at one end.

“He could not describe how gladly he would have left all at this stage and run to the house, but he must not escape so easily. So with many groans, and knowing only too well what to expect, he parted these folds of stuff, or, as it sometimes seemed to be, membrane, and disclosed a head covered with a smooth pink skin, which breaking as the creature stirred, showed him his own face in a state of death.

[This "chrysalis" seems a little more than just a prevision of his own body wrapped for burial -- there's something very phallic about the imagery of that membrane-wrapped "head covered with a smooth pink skin", and the "state of death" referred to could as easily be orgasm as death.

"Why [after all] was Dr. Quinn having dreams about digging up a chrysalis of himself? Was he a regular purchaser of goods stolen from mausoleums? Why introduce that concept at all? Dr. Abell had a grudge against Dr. Quinn for supposedly stealing his patients and therefore I suppose a motive for killing Dr. Quinn. What did stolen bed furnishings have to do with anything?" asks "Fried Egg" on the SFF site.

All this evidence about bedclothes, soiled, aristocratic or otherwise, reminds one of that other legal cause célèbre of the late 1890s: the Oscar Wilde trial (much of which hinged on the evidence of hotel servants about the state of the bedclothes in various hotel rooms ...]

The telling of this so much disturbed him that I was forced out of mere compassion to sit with him the greater part of the night and talk with him upon indifferent subjects. He said that upon every recurrence of this dream he woke and found himself, as it were, fighting for his breath.”

Another extract from Luke Jennett’s long continuous statement comes in at this point.

“I never told tales of my master, Dr. Abell, to anybody in the neighbourhood. When I was in another service I remember to have spoken to my fellow-servants about the matter of the bedstaff, but I am sure I never said either I or he were the persons concerned, and

148 A THIN GHOST AND OTHERS

it met with so little credit that I was affronted and thought best to keep it to myself. And when I came back to Islington and found Dr. Abell still there, who I was told had left the parish, I was clear that it behoved me to use great discretion, for indeed I was afraid of the man, and it is certain I was no party to spreading any ill report of him. My master, Dr. Quinn, was a very just, honest man, and no maker of mischief. I am sure he never stirred a finger nor said a word by way of inducement to a soul to make them leave going to Dr. Abell and come to him; nay, he would hardly be persuaded to attend them that came, until he was convinced that if he did not they would send into the town for a physician rather than do as they had hitherto done.

“I believe it may be proved that Dr. Abell came into my master’s house more than once. We had a new chambermaid out of Hertfordshire, and she asked me who was the gentleman that was looking after the master, that is Dr. Quinn, when he was out, and seemed so disappointed that he was out. She said whoever he was he knew the way of the house well, running at once into the study and then into the dispensing-room, and last into the bed-

["Lance Arney (... "An Elucidation (?) of The Plot of M.R. James's 'Two Doctors'", in Studies in Weird Fiction 8 (Necronomicon Press, Fall 1990), pp. 26-35) assumes that Abell put some sort of magic spell on Quinn's bedclothes. This may be the case, but the fact that Abell visited the dispensing-room before the bed-chamber suggests that he could have reinforced the spell in a chemical manner, so that Quinn would experience sufficient discomfort to necessitate the purchase of new bedding." [RP].]

TWO DOCTORS 149

chamber. I made her tell me what he was like, and what she said was suitable enough to Dr. Abell; but besides she told me she saw the same man at church and some one told her that was the Doctor.

“It was just after this that my master began to have his bad nights, and complained to me and other persons, and in particular what discomfort he suffered from his pillow and bed­clothes. He said he must buy some to suit him, and should do his own marketing. And accordingly brought home a parcel which he said was of the right quality, but where he bought it we had then no knowledge, only they were marked in thread with a coronet and a bird.

["I see Quinn as being directed to buy the bedclothes from the fence by Abell's powers - since this is seen as something strange by Quinn's servants. I assume that more than just the pillow is bought in order for James to show us the fine thread of the linen itself with its embroidered coronet. And it is the stolen pillow - with its deep filling of soft, noble feathers - which suffocates Quinn after it has (presumably) been manipulated by Abell." [SFF].]

The women said they were of a sort not commonly met with and very fine, and my master said they were the comfortablest he ever used, and he slept now both soft and deep. Also the feather pillows were the best sorted and his head would sink into them as if they were a cloud: which I have myself remarked several times when I came to wake him of a morning, his face being almost hid by the pillow closing over it.

“I had never any communication with Dr. Abell after I came back to Islington, but one

150 A THIN GHOST AND OTHERS

day when he passed me in the street and asked me whether I was not looking for another service, to which I answered I was very well suited where I was, but he said I was a tickle­minded

["mercurial." [RP].

I suspect that there's a little more to his choice of words, though. Abell is, after all, "tickling up" his victims by playing with them before he seal the deal. Jennett has escaped the bedstaff, but Quinn will not escape the bedclothes.]

fellow and he doubted not he should soon hear I was on the world again, which indeed proved true.”

Dr. Pratt is next taken up where he left off.

“On the 16th I was called up out of my bed soon after it was light – that is about five – with a message that Dr. Quinn was dead or dying. Making my way to his house I found there was no doubt which was the truth. All the persons in the house except the one that let me in were already in his chamber and standing about his bed, but none touching him. He was stretched in the midst of the bed, on his back, without any disorder, and indeed had the appearance of one ready laid out for burial. His hands, I think, were even crossed on his breast. The only thing not usual was that nothing was to be seen of his face, the two ends of the pillow or bolster appearing to be closed quite over it.

["In a sense, ... there was no need for James to introduce the pillow and other bedclothes from the mausoleum. Quinn could have been suffocated by Abell's powers pulling up the ordinary blankets around him or something. But the idea of using the winding sheet of a corpse as the victim's bed linen, and its pillow as the murder weapon adds a frisson to the story." [SFF].]

These I immediately pulled apart, at the same time rebuking those present, and especially the man, for not at once coming to the assistance of his master. He, however, only

TWO DOCTORS 151

looked at me and shook his head, having evidently no more hope than myself that there was anything but a corpse before us.

“Indeed it was plain to anyone possessed of the least experience that he was not only dead, but had died of suffocation. Nor could it be conceived that his death was accidentally caused by the mere folding of the pillow over his face. How should he not, feeling the oppression, have lifted his hands to put it away? whereas not a fold of the sheet which was closely gathered about him, as I now observed, was disordered. The next thing was to procure a physician. I had bethought me of this on leaving my house, and sent on the messenger who had come to me to Dr. Abell; but I now heard that he was away from home, and the nearest surgeon was got, who however could tell no more, at least without opening the body, than we already knew.

“As to any person entering the room with evil purpose (which was the next point to be cleared), it was visible that the bolts of the door were burst from their stanchions, and the stanchions broken away from the door-post by main force; and there was a sufficient body of witness, the smith among them, to testify

152 A THIN GHOST AND OTHERS

that this had been done but a few minutes before I came.

[Presumably by the servants, rather than by any supernatural intruder, since Abell's powers of psychokinesis would presumably be sufficient to manage Quinn's death.]

The chamber being moreover at the top of the house, the window was neither easy of access nor did it show any sign of an exit made that way, either by marks upon the sill or footprints below upon soft mould.”

The surgeon’s evidence forms of course part of the report of the inquest, but since it has nothing but remarks upon the healthy state of the larger organs and the coagulation of blood in various parts of the body, it need not be reproduced. The verdict was “Death by the visitation of God.”

Annexed to the other papers is one which I was at first inclined to suppose had made its way among them by mistake. Upon further consideration I think I can divine a reason for its presence.

It relates to the rifling of a mausoleum in Middlesex which stood in a park (now broken up), the property of a noble family which I will not name. The outrage was not that of an ordinary resurrection man. The object, it seemed likely, was theft. The account is blunt and terrible. I shall not quote it. A dealer in the North of London suffered heavy penalties as a receiver of stolen goods in connexion with the affair.

["How Abell engineered matters so that Quinn would buy the bedding from this particular dealer is one of the unexplained mysteries and frustrations of the story." [RP].

"... the Middlesex mausoleum belongs to a noble family. This suggests to me ducal - which also suggests crowns/coronets, which links up to the very fine bedding with its coronet and bird. A mausoleum means the noble bodies are entombed rather than buried, so it's possible one was coffined with the bedding. The not-quite resurrectionists ransack the tomb (resurrectionists were body-snatchers - they removed new corpses to give to medics for dissection practice/research) and steal what they can, and Quinn then buys the bedding from the North London fence who gets convicted later." [SFF].]

Printed in Great Britain by
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON

[Two Doctors]

So, is "Two Doctors" just a terrible story? "His weakest and most difficult," says Rosemary Pardoe; while "Fried Egg" at the SFF site, concludes his long Q & A session about it by saying "Thankfully he doesn't always leave that much for the reader to fill in the blanks because he would find me wanting!"

It's true to say that all truly original writers are forced to create and train their own ideal readers. An MRJ-trained reader can easily fill in a lot of the dots and hints in the story. The fact that there's little there but hints and allusions does strain his method to its utmost limits, though. In that sense the story (like the whole book, really) could be said to be "experimental" - designed to test his method to its breaking point.

The "test" is to see if his readers will (or even can) construct a story out of so little material. Lance Arney, Rosemary Pardoe, and the "Judge" at the SFF site, prove that it is possible to disentangle a narrative from these hints and evasions. Have they missed the larger point of "Two Doctors," though?

After all, what other famous ghost story, concerned with two ghosts (male and female), two children (male and female), and one governess, similarly tests its reader with evasions and complicated levels of framing and obfuscation?

It seems to me only too probable that Henry James's death, in the middle of the war, would have reminded his greatest rival in the "paranormal" line, of the almost ridiculous extremes to which the former had taken the "psychological" type of ghost story.

Might that not have prompted him to attempt a similar extreme in his own, more "traditional" vein? "Two Doctors," after all -- two authorities -- two (if you like) Jameses ...

The materials of the actual story are sordid enough:

• a bedstaff
• a chrysalis
• a poker
• a monographed pillow & sheets

Most of these are phallic or at least suggestively bedroom-related in nature. The fact that all the relationships in the story are male does tempt one to read it in terms of the Oscar Wilde scandal (almost contemporaneous with "The Turn of the Screw" -- the title itself containing a suggestively sexual choice of words).

Or is that yet another decoy? Edwardian ghost stories do almost insist on being read in terms of repressed sexuality - perverse or otherwise. "Two Doctors" refuses to commit itself beyond the suggestive on this level just as every other.

In their very triviality, though, the tendentious bric-a-brac on which this story hinges also seem to recall H. G. Wells's famous denunciation of HJ's methods in his wartime cri-de-coeur Boon (1915):

His vast paragraphs sweat and struggle. … It is leviathan retrieving pebbles. It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost even at the cost of its dignity upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den. Most things it insists are beyond it but it can at any rate modestly and with an artistic singleness of mind pick up that pea …”

I doubt that Monty's story will ever attract the almost feverish thirst for closure so characteristic of interpretations of Henry's "Turn of the Screw" almost from the moment of its publication. In its own pared-down, economical way it seems to me almost as interesting a story, though.

I read it as a metafiction, a story about the process of its own reading, its own "construction" out of the blank leaves of an old ledger, Borgesian avant la lettre. The ghosts in "The Turn of the Screw" may or may not be real, the governess may or may not be psychotic, but the relations between Drs Abell and Quinn (reversed Cain and Abel, as Rosemary Pardoe notes) will continue to defy reduction even to so simple a set of questions as that ...

Is Abell intended to be read as Monty, striking his greatest rival dead from a distance (or rather, encouraging him to choke himself in the snobbish clouds of his own verbiage)? Or is it the other way round? Is it the unscrupulous psychologist, intent on causing movement-at-a-distance who chokes the innocent, undesigning Quinn in his own bed?

One thing's for certain, the actual materials of the story itself will never be sufficient to enable us to decide.

[Benjamin Britten: The Turn of the Screw (2003)]