The Rather Haunted World of Shirley Jackson

When Shirley Jackson was nine her family moved from San Francisco city out to the expanding fashionable suburb of Burlingame, south of the city and within commuting range of downtown. They moved into a handsome two story brick house in a neighbourhood aimed at the aspiring middle class and in which respectable lives could be well lived in all the comforts of a rich suburban community. That in her first published novel 'The Road Through the Wall' this setting could be transformed into a nightmarish world of racism, prejudice, snobbery and outright malice perhaps best exemplifies Shirley Jackson's ability to see the horror underlying outwardly respectable lives and to delve into areas of the human psyche most of us either don't see or steer carefully round, perhaps like the 'dangerous corners' of J B Priestley's play of that name.

'The Road Through the Wall' centres on the lives of the comfortably-off residents of Pepper Street, at the end of which is a wall that seals it off from the dangers that might otherwise spread from the estate beyond the wall. When a road through the wall is proposed linking Pepper Street to the road system beyond (and hence simplifying everyone's journeys) the dangers of contamination entering their community is obvious. The conversations in the book are mainly between women and the children who pick up from their parents the prevailing prejudices. One girl, Caroline, is immune to this and, alone, befriends the otherwise friendless. The disappearance of a girl, its outcome, and the completion of the wall shatter the complacency of Pepper Street.

By the time 'The Road Through the Wall' was published, its author was living a respectable life as a wife and mother in North Bennington, Vermont, where her husband Stanley Hyam was a English academic. She had left Burlingame at the age of 16. As has been pointed out the book could be about any American small town and the sometimes claustrophobic life in small town America and her feelings of 'otherness' to it are at the root of all Jackson's work. 

Shirley Jackson published five other novels during her lifetime as well as numerous short stories and other pieces for magazine publication (and a useful source of revenue for the family).

It is a tribute to her versatility and particular genius that at least one of the the novels 'The Haunting of Hill House' (1959) is an established American classic and at least one of her short stories 'The Lottery' (1948) is amongst the most anthologised of all American short fiction and has become a core part of the school curriculum. 

In some ways all her work has an underlying theme of the menace hidden behind the ordinary. In fact a posthumous collection of her short work published by two of her children in 1997 32 years after her death is somewhat ironically entitled 'Just an Ordinary Day':- in fact the days lived out by her characters are anything but.

'The Bird's Nest' (1954) is one of the most original. A traditional English nursery rhyme begins:

 "Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy and Bess', they went together to seek a bird's nest".

In the novel there are also four children, Elizabeth, Beth, Betsy and Beth, but they are different personalities of a single girl, Elizabeth Richmond, whose mind splits into four different personalities each with its own particular qualities. The story is told through different perspectives, including Dr Richmond, a specialist in personality disorder. There are moments of pure horror in the story particularly when the sadistic Betsy holds centre stage and the skill with which the author sustains the different voices is remarkable.

Hangsaman (1951), an earlier novel, dwells on the horrors of isolation and focusses on a young girl, Natalie Waite, unsure of her college friends and of those who should be keeping her secure. 'The Sundial' (1958) has an apocalyptic theme in which the new occupants of a house receive an announcement that the world is ending and only those in the house will be saved. 

It has been noted that houses, their histories and, often, their sheer strangeness are central to much of Shirley Jackson's world so it is fitting that her best known (and much filmed) novel is 'The Haunting of Hill House'. Between the famous opening lines

".....Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hill, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more."

to its equally renowned final lines:

"Within, its walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there walked alone."

lies a classic ghost story. Ostensibly, it is the familiar trope of a scientific investigator offering to live for a period in a house reputed to be haunted. Such a theme dates back at least 200 years to the much anthologised 'The Tapestried Chamber' by Sir Walter Scott, but under the pen of Shirley Jackson it is treated with such psychological insight, that, of course, you cannot be certain whether, as stated on the dust wrapper description of the first edition "the ghosts at Hill House caused the fear, or the fear created the ghosts". In any event the investigator Dr Montague and his chosen three companions, including two girls Theo and Eleanor, are rendered suitably afraid. The film 'The Haunting' with Claire Bloom starring appeared in 1963.

Shirley Jackson's late novel 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' (1962) is also suitably terrifying, but in this case the terror has an all too natural origin. The story is told by Mary Katherine Blackwood (Merricat) who is eighteen years old and lives with her sister Constance, the four other members of the family having died eating a poisoned meal, we assume poisoned by Merricat (who announces to us that amongst her likes are her sister Constance and "Amanita phalloides, the death-cap Mushroom". The story tells of the sisters living in their large house keeping out the villagers who hate and fear them. Again, a story of isolation from the community, recalling the embattled survivors of 'The Sundial'. 

Before passing on the short stories her two memoirs of her home life with her husband and four children must be included. First, 'Life Among the Savages' (1953) and then 'Raising Demons' (1957). Only Shirley Jackson could introduce such elements of strangeness and at times fear into ostensibly autobiographical descriptions of raising children. For example when the family move into their new house in the suburbs of North Bennington how exactly have the local tradespeople and neighbours acquired so much knowledge of them? And I find the scene where the family insist on a place being set for their daughter's invisible companion in a restaurant distinctly unnerving. There is much to enjoy in these books, which reveal the author's acute sense of the absurdities and uncertainties of much of domestic life.

'The Lottery' first appeared in 'The New Yorker' in 1948 and immediately caused a sensation. It is only some ten pages long but not a word is wasted and the climax is devastating. It is the day of the lottery in a village of some 300 people. We are introduced to the arcane, perhaps incorrectly remembered, rituals of the lottery. There is even some dissension when Mr. Adams says "They do say that over in the north village they're talking of giving up the lottery". This is met with derision:

"Pack of crazy fools. Listening to the young folks nothing's good enough for them. Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves ..... used to be a saying about 'Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon .... There's always been a lottery."

 And according to ritual the lottery proceeds to its grisly conclusion, with the victim's mother screaming "It isn't fair, it isn't right" as the villager's blows descend on her daughter.

Of course, it isn't right or fair, but according to tradition it is inevitable, as so many of the patterns of life are in order to fit into the mores and customs of what counts for civilised living. 'The Lottery' was collected in book form in 'The Lottery and Other Stories'.

There are many excellent short stories in this and subsequent collections, but one story to me stands out as her finest. This is 'The Summer People', (first published in 1949 in 'Charm'). Every summer the Allisons (he now 60, she 58) take the same country cottage seven miles from the nearest town. They are people of habit and invariably leave the Tuesday after Labor Day. This year they decide to break this habit and take advantage of the fine weather a bit longer before returning to New York. This is duly noted by the locals after they communicate this intention:

The grocer, Mr. Babcock: "Nobody ever stayed at the lake past Labor Day before". 

Mr. Walpole of the general store: "Heard you were staying on. Don't know about staying on at the lake. Not after Labor Day."

Mrs Martin at the newsagents: "I don't guess anyone's ever stayed out there so long before. Not after Labor Day anyway."

Then they find they can get no more oil for the heating "After Labor Day, the man said, I don't get so much oil myself after Labor Day."

Then the mail stops, then they are asked to pick up their groceries which had always been delivered "Not after Labor Day, Mrs. Allison. You never been here after Labor Day before, so's you wouldn't know, of course."

Then the car won't start and there is no-one to fix it. 

When they find the car has been tampered with and the telephone wires in all probability cut, realisation dawns on them that there is no escape from whatever will be their fate, which they resign themselves to with surprising and heroic stoicism:

Mrs Allison turned and smiled weakly at her husband. "I wonder if we're supposed to .....do anything", she said.

"No", Mr Allison said consideringly. " I don't think so. Just wait."

And so to the shattering climax:

'The wind, coming up suddenly over the lake, swept around the summer cottage and slapped hard at the windows. Mr. and Mrs. Allison involuntarily moved closer together, and with the first sudden crash of thunder, Mr. Allison reached out and took his wife's hand. And then, while the lightning flashed outside, and the radio faded and sputtered, the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and waited."

I think this a finer story than 'The Lottery' because in that story the hapless child victim has no agency in her fate, her name just happened to pop out of the ancient ritual as the tickets were drawn. The Allisons, however, for once ventured outside their established custom and will inevitably meet severe punishment for this apparently innocent infraction of established ritual. Shirley Jackson had to face down her own demons in the sometimes stifling atmosphere of a small college town with a sometimes unfaithful husband and her demanding children, brilliantly recounted in Ruth Franklin's 2016 biography 'Shirley Jackson: a Rather Haunted Life'. 

However, since her somewhat early death at the age of 49 the industry preserving her legacy still grows. The Letters edited by her son Laurence appeared in 2021 and a new collection of previously unpublished stories and essays 'Let Me Tell You' again edited by two of her children appeared in 2015.  Her importance in American literature was cemented by the 2010 publication of her major works in the 204th volume in the Library of America. 

But despite her belated recognition by the literary establishment Shirley Jackson was not an establishment figure - her writings all place her and her protagonists constantly at the boundary between the safe space provided either physically by the home or psychologically by the limits set by society's expectations of what constitutes acceptable behaviour. You step outside those boundaries at your own risk and will then have to face whatever has always been waiting for you in the unknown spaces beyond.

The Bibliomysteries of John Dunning

It was in the Book Farm at Henneker, New Hampshire in the mid 1990s that I was recommended to read John Dunning's 'Booked to Die' by the amiable owner, who ran this rambling store full of treasures deep in rural New England. This was good advice because John Dunning's books are a rare treat for all lovers of books and bookshops. 

Born in 1942, in Brooklyn, John Dunning moved to Denver, Colorado in his twenties and after working as a journalist and writer, opened the Old Algonquin Bookstore in Denver in 1984. He resumed writing in the  early 1990s and created the hard-edged Cliff Janeway, a retired cop who has opened his own rare bookstore in Denver. The first of the series 'Booked to Die' contains all the features that make all these books so compelling for book lovers. Bookscout Bobby Westfall is found murdered. He was known to Janeway as someone with an extraordinary talent for hunting out precious volumes, which would end up in rare bookstores such as Janeway's. The killer is suspected by Janeway to be a villain known to him from his policing days. The story then moves through visits to booksellers in the high and low ends of the trade until the mystery is solved. Full of booklore and infused with a deep knowledge of the second hand book trade this was a very good start to the series.

'Booked to Die' appeared in 1992. In 'The Bookman's Wake' (1995) we are into the rarefied world of private presses, in this case the highly collectible Grayson Press, and in particular a supposed Grayson Press 1969 edition of Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Raven'. The problem is that the bibliography of the press does not mention this book, hence if it is a real book and does exist it would be worth a fortune to a collector. The hunt for the book takes Janeway on a tour of the book shops of Seattle in the company of a woman suspected of having stolen 'The Raven'. 'The Bookman's Wake' provides insights into the deep desire for possession that fine books can generate in those handling them and seeking them. 

'The Bookman's Promise' (2004) begins with Janeway buying at auction a signed first edition of a rare travel classic by Richard Francis Burton. The problem is that the ageing Josephine Gallant believes this copy is out of her grandfather's legendary Burton collection that mysteriously disappeared after his death. Janeway is assigned the task of finding this collection before Josephine Gallant dies and being an honourable bookman makes the promise to her that he will find the collection, which included Burton's handwritten Journal detailing an undercover trip he made into the American South in 1860. When a friend of Janeway's is murdered as a result of the search it becomes clear that forces to frustrate the finding of the Journal are at work. Dunning appends a short bibliography of books about Burton for those wishing to delve deeper.

In 'The Sign of the Book' (2005) we are into the world of signed editions and the enormous increase in value a book can have if it has been signed by the author. In this case a suspicious number of rare signatures have begun appearing on the market. The trouble is that the very best experts all confirm the signatures are genuine (and Dunning uses his knowledge of the book trade to introduce actual well respected book dealers into the story to act as verifiers). Of course the signatures are too good to be true, but there is a clever twist in the story to reveal how the deception was carried out.

With 'The Bookwoman's Last Fling' (2006) we reach the end of those so far published. Janeway is called to Idaho to look at a collection of children's books collected by the late Candice Geiger. The problem is that many valuable items in the collection have been replaced by cheap reprints. Janeway teams up with Candice's daughter Sharon to solve the mystery, but is concerned that she may be in danger because her house in Idaho contains half of her mother's valuable books. Sharon has a ranch in Idaho where she treats sick horses and in pursuit of the missing books Janeway has to become involved in the racehorse world travelling to racetracks to find links back to Sharon and the books. 

All the books were published by Scribner and paperback reprints of at least 'Booked to Die' could be found at Barnes and Noble in the years since the series terminated. Dunning seemed to be a frequent inscriber of his books and all of mine, bought in US bookstores, have been signed. Bibliomysteries are a fascinating subset of the crime genre and Dunning is not alone in being a bookseller/mystery writer, another being Roy Harley Lewis with the superbly titled 'A Cracking of Spines', but his combination of a deep knowledge of books and bookselling and the ability to tell a good story makes this series particularly impressive.

The Butterfly Books - forging your own books.

 

Some years ago, in a collection of books we had acquired, we found a tiny, paper covered book with the front and back covers beautifully designed in the form of butterfly wings. The book was entitled "Poem", the author W H Auden, an 8 page booklet containing on three of the pages just the single poem "Hearing of harvest rotting in the valleys". 

A note at the back says that, of this poem, which first appeared in the 'Criterion' twenty-two copies were printed for the author. This particular copy, identified as Number 1, being one of five on Kelmscott paper. A spare title label was tipped in on the final page.

The booklet was indeed very beautiful, clearly hand-made - but why? - and by whom? The answers to these questions reveal a fascinating story involving deception and forgery, but most unusually a forger, who, when his financial circumstances demanded it, forged copies of his own genuine books. This makes it particularly difficult for collectors to separate the 'genuine' original issues (strictly limited in number) from the later forgeries.

These forgeries differ from those created some years before by Thomas J Wise (see 'Wise after the Event' in an earlier blog) in that Wise produced forgeries of books that never had existed (but might have) whereas the butterfly book forgeries are forged copies of pre-existing scarce volumes.

The producer of all these books was Wisconsin born novelist and poet Frederick Prokosch. In Cambridge during the thirties Prokosch met literary figures of the day, such as Auden, and conceived the idea of producing pamphlets of examples of their works. The Auden poem shown above was the first in an edition of 22 copies, all with distinctive paper covers with colourful 'butterfly' inspired designs. Often copies were presented to the authors as gifts, for example at Christmas. Our own copy came from the collection of a contemporary of Auden at Oxford. In all nearly 50 different titles were produced between 1933 and 1940, the final ones, including works of Joyce, Eliot and Yeats in Lisbon, in print runs of no more than 20 or so copies.

And there might the story have ended. One of the many fascinating cul-de-sacs of literary endeavour, being only remembered when one or more of the pamphlets appeared on the book market as the original recipients of Prokosch's gifts dispersed their collections, with, of course, values of the pamphlets that did surface increasing as the years passed.

What happened next is told in fascinating detail by Nicholas Barker in 'The Butterfly Books' (Bertram Rota 1987). In the sale rooms over the years from 1968 to 1972, sets of butterfly books began appearing, in particular at Sotheby's on May 1st 1972, when a complete set of the poetry pamphlets produced by Prokosch was offered for sale. Prices were, of course, high.

In his book Nicholas Barker details the forensic work carried out to show that some recently surfaced pamphlets had been printed at Paris after 1968 on paper supplied by Prokosch to forge more copies of the 1930s editions, in order to realise a belated income from what had begun as an altruistic venture. It was Prokosch himself who provided Nicholas Barker with the name of his printer.

So what is left? A dazzling set of small booklets with beautiful butterfly wing designs on the covers containing great literature from eminent 20th century poets and the nagging worry that what you hold in your hand may be an original from 1933 (perhaps handled by Auden), or maybe not. Either way these are gems to treasure, because first and foremost, like his great forging predecessor Thomas J Wise, Prokosch loved poetry and he loved books.

Books that Stimulate the Imagination

In the late 70's I developed a fondness for paperback books published by Pan under the Picador imprint. In a slightly larger format than typical Pan books, they had shiny attractively illustrated covers and distinctive white spines. Often shelved separately in rotating book stands they were perfect for browsing and it was on such a stand that I bought on impulse John Cowper Powys's massive 'A Glastonbury Romance', the first book in what became a rather large Powys collection.


Picador had a knack of publishing out of print and sometimes relatively obscure works, with an emphasis on fantasy and the imagination.

However, it was another Picador book that also demanded to be bought - this was 'The Road to Xanadu' by John Livingston Lowes. Subtitled 'A Study in the Ways of the Imagination', this book explores in some 400 pages of text and
an additional 200 pages of footnotes, the literary influences that led Samuel Taylor Coleridge to produce two of the world's greatest imaginative poems - 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and 'Kubla Khan'.


To my shame this book sat on the shelves for some 36 years, but now finally it has moved into the class of 'books now read'. And it was certainly worth the wait. Lowes' book asserts that the raw material for these poems was the confused jumble of images, phrases and fragments residing in the 'deep well' of Coleridge's memory. And Lowes piles reference upon reference in teasing out the source of this material. That may sound like pedantry in volumes but the hypnotic style of the book draws you into the quest. However, many of us have such a deep store of half-remembered fragments; Coleridge's supreme genius was in distilling them into so perfect a form that the poetic imagery thus created is still breathtaking.

And what were the books that inspired Coleridge, who had never sailed beyond the shores of England when in 1797 he was writing of a mariner crossing the equator to Antarctic ice before becoming becalmed in equatorial seas? Lowes provides bibliographic details of, to take one example, the narratives of voyagers compiled by the English clergyman Samuel Purchas into weighty volumes published in the 17th century. It was while reading Purchas that Coleridge fell asleep, the last sentence he had read being "In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately palace". Famously on waking from his dreams Coleridge began furiously writing, beginning "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree........", and so on, before the whole dream memory was shattered by a knock at the door and a visitor from Porlock. Only 54 lines had been written before the most unfortuate interruption in literature.

Lowes shows that almost all the images and episodes in both 'Kubla Khan' and 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' can be found in the books Coleridge owned or borrowed (many from Bristol Library) or can be found in Dorothy Wordsworth's journals, she and her brother being his constant companions in Somerset during this creative period. The books include all the standard travel books of the time, such as William Bartram's 'Travels through North and South Carolina', Cook's Voyages and of course 'Purchas his Pilgrimage'. Not to mention Dante, 'The Arabian Nights' and Milton.

The book is a labour of love and one of the most detailed studies of particular poems ever made. It delves at times into the psychology of memory. Lowes also has little time for those who write off 'Kubla Khan' as the product of an opium induced 'trip'. Yes, Coleridge did use opium but in a controlled way, often for pain relief, but these two poems are testaments to the amazing capacity of the human mind to distill beauty out of everyday experiences (such as seeing the old moon cradled by the new) and order out of the chaotic jumble lying deep in the well of memory.


'The Road to Xanadu' was published in 1927. Some 80 years later, Kevin J Hayes acknowledged this work as one of the inspirations for his own book 'The Road to Monticello'. This is a study of what Thomas Jefferson read and how these books shaped his life. Sub-titled 'The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson', it is a fascinating study of Jefferson's reading life, how he acquired his books and, of course how he organised his several libraries (the chief one of which formed the core collection of the Library of Congress and to which we paid homage when in Washington last year).

The use to which Jefferson put his books was, of course, totally different to that of Coleridge. In Jefferson's case the writings of thinkers such as Locke and Paine informed his political views, culminating in the Declaration of Independence. Histories, natural history and travel books informed his own description of Virginia and the classics broadened his mind into one of the most original of his time.

Two very different writers, but in each case the rich soil of the mind cultivated and nourished by reading the great works of others produced a rare and imperishable harvest.

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The Ghost Stories of E F Benson

The dinner table has been cleared, the servants dismissed for the night and the remnants of the party assembled for a few days shooting (or fishing) gather round the dying embers of the fire for a last cigar and perhaps one more whisky. The wind will almost certainly be rattling the shutters and the trees tapping on the window. Inevitably, the conversation turns to ghost stories and again inevitably, at least one of the party will have a story to tell. The ladies having long retired to bed, no detail, however horrific, need be omitted - standard preamble to many a fictional ghost story and a setting instantly familiar to many of the protagonists in the ghost stories of E F Benson and, of course, to their author.


In Benson’s lifetime four volumes of his ghost stories were published, the earliest 'The Room in the Tower' in 1912, the last 'More Spook Stories' in 1934. Benson’s stories followed a particularly brilliant era for the traditional English ghost story, an era that may be said to commence with Henry James’ ‘The Turn of the Screw’ in 1898 and which encompassed some of the best writing in this tradition notably, M R James’ 'Ghost Stories of an Antiquary' 1904), Algernon Blackwood’s 'The Empty House' (1906), and Oliver Onions’ 'Widdershins' (1911).

It is perhaps in comparison with his great contemporaries that Benson’s reputation as a writer of ghost stories may fall below the highest standards. Thus, whilst M R James is the undisputed master of the antiquarian ghost story, Algernon Blackwood of the atmospheric ghost story and Walter de la Mare of the psychological ghost story, E F Benson’s stories do not appropriate for their author any particular sub-category of the genre. However his stories have continued to be plundered by anthologists for the last seventy years or so although it took until 1992 for his collected ghost stories to appear in a single volume.

Famously, E F Benson, as a member of the Chitchat Society at Cambridge, was one of the small group who heard M R James make his first ghost story reading in October 1893, when MRJ read two stories, including the much reprinted ‘Lost Hearts’. M R James would go on to produce four collections of ghost stories in his lifetime, as would Benson. They would remain friends for the rest of their lives.

Uniquely amongst his four volumes of ghost stories, 'The Room in the Tower' contains a short preface. Here the author summarises his reasons for writing them:

"These stories have been written in the hopes of giving some pleasant qualms to their reader, so that, if by chance, anyone may be occupying in their perusal a leisure half-hour before he goes to bed when the night and the house are still, he may perhaps cast an occasional glance into the corners and dark places of the room where he sits, to make sure that nothing unusual lurks in the shadow. For this is the avowed object of ghost-stories and such tales as deal with the dim unseen forces which occasionally and perturbingly make themselves manifest. The author therefore fervently wishes his readers a few uncomfortable moments."

This passage is extremely useful in understanding Benson’s intent and explains much about the stories themselves. Each story is relatively short, between 7 and 18 pages long in the collected edition, obviously intended for reading in a single sitting. Such a length precludes the detailed character development found, for example, in Henry James and Walter de la Mare or the extended landscape descriptions found in writers such as Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen. However, the strictures Benson placed on himself ensure a concise and rounded story with little distraction from the main effect. It may also be noted that many of the stories were first published in popular magazines such as Pearsons and Hutchinsons, the stories sometimes being illustrated, notably by Edmund Blampeid. Unfortunately, when the stories appeared in book form said illustrations were not included.

Clearly for a magazine appearance short stories had to be written to the length allowed by the editor. This is not to say that Benson was incapable of writing on ghosts and the supernatural in longer works and several of his novels, for example 'The Luck of the Vails' and 'David Blaize', have occult or supernatural content. However, these are outside the scope of this article, except for the light this aspect of Benson’s novel writing throws on his short ghost stories. Clearly, both were evidence of an interest in occult and supernatural forces that was shared by many of his contemporaries, notably Arthur Conan Doyle, another prolific author of supernatural stories. Benson was clearly aware of the fraudulent practices of some supposed clairvoyants, as revealed in stories such as ‘Mr Tilly’s Séance’ and ‘The Psychical Mallards’. In the former, Mr Tilly is killed in an accident while on his way to a séance. In his new spirit form he decides to attend the séance, where he reveals himself to the medium, discovering that she is a fraud. However, he astonishes the group by speaking through her. So amazing is the experience that the Psychical Research Society send independent investigators to check the facts and they conclude that the whole thing was fake, which as the narrator concludes “was a pity, since, for once, the phenomena were absolutely genuine”. This is perhaps the most humorous of the stories and is written with a light touch, with none of the atmosphere of impending catastrophe usually prevalent in the stories.


Famously, E F Benson reported seeing the ghost of a man in the garden of his home at Lamb House, Rye, the Vicar of Rye also being present on this occasion and corroborating the sighting. For a house formerly occupied by Henry James, Lamb House was clearly maintaining a ghostly tradition. In her short novel 'The Haunting of Lamb House' Joan Aiken presents three separate hauntings involving first Toby Lamb, the original owner, then Henry James and finally E F Benson.

It is perhaps something of an irony that ghost stories and reports of ‘real’ encounters with ghosts retained their popularity in an age when science was busily unlocking the secrets of life, the record of the rocks and the structure of matter itself. Perhaps they reflected a belief that there were questions of human experience and perception to which science alone could not provide the answers; or perhaps imaginary horrors provided some measure of escape from the all too real horrors of mechanized twentieth century warfare.

Benson, following his exposure to the readings of M R James and his own experience at Lamb House, had clearly thought about how best to write ghost stories. In his autobiography 'Final Edition' he noted that “by a selection of disturbing details it is not very difficult to induce in the reader an uneasy frame of mind which, carefully worked up, paves the way for terror”. He further suggested “that the narrator must succeed in frightening himself before he can hope to frighten his readers.” Clearly we should not be seeking comfortable, benign, ghosts in his stories, but rather those of a malevolent and threatening kind, very much in the M R James tradition.


I first encountered E F Benson at the age of eleven when I found two of his stories in the excellent Hutchinson anthology 'Fifty Years of Ghost Stories'. One of these, ‘Pirates’ made a deep and lasting impression. It is one of his finest tales and was included in 'More Spook Stories'.

In ‘Pirates’ Peter Graham, a successful middle-aged business man, returns on business to the Cornwall of his childhood and is haunted by memories of the idyllic time he spent there with his family, now all deceased. Finding his former home available, albeit sadly run down, he obtains the keys, and visits it, all the time encountering signs of his past life there; in particular he remembers the game of Pirates that they played in the garden. He buys the house, has it renovated and finally comes to take occupation. Waking from a dream, he hears his sister calling for him to join them in the garden and his mother’s voice - “They’re all out in the garden, and they’ve been calling you ….” Peter runs out to join them, knowing they will be playing the favourite game of Pirates.

"He scudded past the golden maple and the bay tree, and there they all were in the summer-house which was home. And he took a flying leap up the steps and was among them.

It was there that Calloway found him next morning. He must indeed have run up the winding path like a boy, for the new-laid gravel was spurned at long intervals by the toe-prints of his shoes."

His weak heart had finally failed. ‘Pirates’ is a magnificent story and unlike any other ghost story Benson wrote. It has been called his most autobiographical. Peter Graham is, perhaps, only a thinly disguised version of the author, who, in this story, may be returning to memories of his childhood in Cornwall when his father was Bishop of Truro. The story is full of the nostalgia for childhood and well-loved places of times gone by and Peter Graham is perhaps unique among Benson’s haunted heroes in finding in death a welcome release, rather than a terrifying nightmare.

Moving forward a couple of years I encountered another anthology, Faber and Faber’s 'Best Ghost Stories', selected by Ann Ridler, including Benson’s ‘The Face’. In my opinion this story, included in 'Spook Stories', is Benson’s most terrifying and ranks with the best of M R James. Hester Ward has a recurring nightmare, in which she is walking along a cliff which slopes steeply down to the sea. She comes to the tower of a ruined church, standing in a graveyard. She then sees a hideously distorted face, which, leering at her, says “I shall soon come for you now”. The nightmare has progressed since her childhood and the cliffs been eroded closer to the church tower. In her childhood she recalls the face saying “I shall come for you when you are older”. Sent away to the seaside to restore her nerves, she takes a walk along the cliffs one day and encounters the landscape of her nightmare. She rushes home, telegraphs for her husband to come and awaits his arrival in her hotel room. When the page-boy informs her that a man is waiting for her at the hotel door she rushes downstairs to meet her husband. However, when the visitor turns his face towards her “the nightmare was on her; she could neither run nor scream, and supporting her dragging steps, he went forth with her into the night”. When her husband arrives shortly after a search is made but Hester is never found.

There are, of course, further elements to this story, which make it a true classic of the genre. However, it is not typical of its author. Rarely does a female take centre stage in Benson’s ghost stories and unusually there is no reason for the haunting of Hester. She apparently has done nothing to deserve her ghastly fate. In my opinion, however, the apparent randomness of the choice of victim is a strength of the story. This could, perhaps, happen to anyone.

Both ‘Pirates’ and ‘The Face’ have been widely praised by critics. Indeed in his wonderful essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, H P Lovecraft describes ‘The Face’ as “lethally potent in its relentless aura of doom”. Other stories singled out by Lovecraft are ‘The Man Who Went Too Far’ which “breathes whisperingly of a house at the edge of a dark wood, and of Pan’s hoof marks on the breast of a dead man,” ‘Negotium Perambulans’, “whose unfolding reveals an abnormal monster from an ancient ecclesiastical panel which performs an act of miraculous vengeance in a lonely village on the Cornish coast” and ‘The Horror Horn’, “through which lopes a terrible half-human survival dwelling on unvisited Alpine peaks”.

We may compare the blameless Hester in ‘The Face’ with the generally thoroughly unpleasant males who bring their nemesis on themselves. Thus in ‘Naboth’s Vineyard’ Ralph Hatchard, a lawyer, sees an opportunity to force the purchase of a house he desires when he recognises its owner, Thomas Wraxton, as a man he defended in court, but was found guilty of embezzlement. Threatened with exposure, Wraxton sells his house to Hatchard and promptly dies of a heart attack. Inevitably, after Hatchard moves into his new house his problems begin. He is haunted by the footsteps of a limping man following him (Wraxton had a limp) and eventually in a terrifying climax he meets his fate, as his brother desperately tries to open his bedroom door, hearing screams from inside. Eventually the door is forced:

"His brother was in bed, his legs drawn up close under him, and his hands resting on his knees, seemed to be attempting to beat off some terrible intruder. His body was pressed against the wall at the head of the bed, and the face was a mask of agonized horror and fruitless entreaty. But the eyes were already glazed in death, and before Francis could reach the bed the body had toppled over and lay inert and lifeless. Even as he looked, he heard a limping step go down the passage outside".

The eponymous hero of ‘James Lamp’ is another man who invites his own destruction, in this case by murdering his wife. She returns to claim him and his body is found with his wife’s hands tightly locked round his throat. She had been dead for several days, he only a few hours.

Both M R James and his great predecessor J Sheridan Le Fanu held the view that for a ghost story to be most effective there should be a certain distance between the present and the period in which the story is set: not a return to the gothic romances of crumbling abbeys, wicked uncles and fainting heroines, but sufficiently far back to avoid intrusions of modernity that may jar with the overall atmosphere, perhaps a return to the age of your grandparents when things may well have been sufficiently different that the suspension of disbelief on which the ghost story so critically depends may be achieved. Indeed commentators on the form wondered whether the ghost story could survive the age of electricity and cars, let alone that of the internet and cheap air travel. These questions have been triumphally answered in the affirmative by a new generation of writers, most notably the Liverpool writer Ramsey Campbell, who find in unvisited parts of the city, such as tunnels and underpasses, the supernatural horrors that were once the province of those much feared attics, cellars and red rooms that feature in so many Victorian and early twentieth century ghost stories.


Unlike many other authors of ghost stories in his time, Benson almost without exception set his stories in the present and was not averse to incorporating elements of modernity. Thus in ‘The Dust-Cloud’ we encounter a ghostly motor car doomed to re-enact the grisly accident its driver caused. In ‘The Confession of Charles Linkworth’ the ghost of a hanged man makes over the telephone to a priest the confession he could not bring himself to make before his execution. In the ‘The Bus Conductor’, a guest in a London town house sees a horse-drawn hearse in the street outside his bedroom window; the driver looks up and beckons to him with the words “Just room for one inside, sir”. No explanation for this appearance is offered the next morning and the guest attributes the episode to a dream. Some time later he is just about to board a London bus, when the conductor, exactly the figure in his vision, calls to him with the same words. Horrified he does not board the bus, which is then subject to a terrible collision with another vehicle. This episode was one of the stories incorporated in the excellent Pinewood Studios film ‘Dead of Night’ (1945), still one of the most frightening films made. For one more example of the incorporation of recent inventions into his stories consider ‘And the Dead Spake’, in which a brilliant surgeon, a latter day Victor Frankenstein, manages to reconstruct speech by inserting a needle into brain tissue and amplifying the sound from the traces etched into the brain by strong emotions, using the equivalent of a gramophone needle. This story anticipates some of the later science fiction where futuristic technology is employed. One of Benson’s strengths as a writer of ghost stories is his ability to use a range of methods by which the dead may communicate with the living, not just the tired medium induced table tapping so prevalent in stories of his time.

In her foreword to the 'Collected Ghost Stories' Joan Aiken makes the point that Benson’s almost exclusively male protagonists tend to come in pairs. Thus we have a first person narrator (who we may take to be the author himself) and a congenial male friend. The two are often spending summer holidays together, with no fixed plan but that of getting away for a while. Settings vary but they are predominantly in England, often on the coast, perhaps Norfolk, Sussex or Cornwall. The conversations between the two are often on the nature of psychical phenonema and how sensitive people can tune in to the impressions left by strong emotions and tragic events in the past. This discussion serves as prelude to the events to follow, which act as exemplars to the theory. It is perhaps in his attempts to ‘explain’ ghosts in these terms that Benson is at his weakest as a ghost story writer. The narrator’s companion is often a professional, such as a surgeon, psychologist or archaeologist, who can interpret the events as they unfold, or as in ‘The Temple’ walk straight into danger. In this story, the narrator and his friend, an archaeologist, contrive to rent a cottage in the middle of a Cornish ‘druidical’ stone circle. The altar stone is actually set amongst the flags of the kitchen floor and it is only the heroic efforts of the narrator against the forces of pagan evil that manage to drag his friend off the altar upon which, with a flint knife, he is attempting to cut his own throat.

Apart from the blameless Hester in ‘The Face’, there are very few women who have central roles in the stories, and where they do they are almost invariably cast in an evil light. ‘Mrs Amworth’ is a typical vampire story and it is not long after she moves into Maxley, West Sussex that strange events begin to happen. Fortunately, the narrator’s friend and neighbour, Francis Urcombe has had relevant experience and, following Mrs Amworth’s death in a motor accident, is able to drive the obligatory sharp implement through her heart, having opened her coffin in the time-honoured manner, thus forestalling an outbreak of anaemia in the village. Another example is the truly terrifying Mrs Acres in ‘The Outcast’, who causes a “sickening of the soul” in those she meets. After burial at sea, following her untimely death, she is washed up on the shore near her village and then, following burial, cannot even be contained in her grave. Malevolent women are also central to ‘The Wishing-Well’, in which a curse is turned back on its originator, and ‘The Bath-Chair’ where a frustrated spinster, in some form of psychic union with her dead father brings about the destruction of her brother who has treated them both so badly. A rare exception is Madge in ‘How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery’, who by her innate sympathy exorcises the ghosts of two murdered children who haunt the Long Gallery after dark and cause death to any who linger there too long and see them. Madge inadvertently falls asleep in the Gallery, but when the children appear her initial terror is replaced by maternal feelings towards the lost children and it is this act of kindness that saves her.

E F Benson’s ghost stories could be subject to the criticism that they are too rounded and predictable. Certainly in many of the stories it is clear from the outset what retribution will be forthcoming and to whom. But Benson is such a master of style and writes with such precision that even with a predictable outcome, the stories are eminently readable and enjoyable. There may be little of the ambiguity of other writers such as Walter de la Mare and, more recently, Robert Aickman, but there are a number of the stories that, even on successive re-reading, still carry that shock factor which all ghost stories require. In the stories will also be found some marvellous descriptions of the English countryside that their author knew so well – its woodlands, coasts and winding lanes and those hidden architectural gems nestling in the shadow of low hills protecting them from the cold winds. The houses are lovingly described in detail as prelude to the events to follow. But Benson is also at home in the suburban setting, where typically the house of interest is at the end of cul-de-sac, so its fortunate inhabitants are not at the mercy of passing traffic, tranquillity only disturbed by those unwelcome visitants who inevitably have a purpose shaped by some past event and seek to bring retribution to the inhabitant.

‘Roderick’s Story’ is unashamedly set at Lamb House in Benson’s fictional Tilling:

"It’s right at the top of the hill, square and Georgian and red-bricked. A panelled hall, dining-room and panelled sitting-room downstairs, and more panelled rooms upstairs. And there’s a garden with a lawn, and a high brick wall round it, and there is a big garden-room, full of books, with a bow window looking down the cobbled street."

As if to make the point more obvious Roderick’s host at Tilling is engaged in writing spook stories – “all about the borderland, which I love as much as you do”.

"And when you get really close to the borderland, you see how enchanting it is, and how vastly more enchanting the other side must be. I got right on to the borderland once, here in this house …. and I never saw so happy and kindly a place."

Roderick takes some of his host’s stories to read:

"The stories were designed to be of an uncomfortable type: one concerned a vampire, one an elemental, the third the reincarnation of a certain execrable personage, and as we sat in the garden-room after tea, he with these pages on his knees, I had the pleasure of seeing him give hasty glances round, as he read, as if to assure himself that there was nothing unusual in the dimmer corners of the room…….I liked that; he was doing as I intended that a reader should."

This passage, in which the author is at his most self-referential, is perhaps a fitting place to leave the spook stories, with, of course, a last glance over the shoulder.

In addition to the four volumes published in Benson’s lifetime, a collection of previously uncollected ghost stories was published as The Flint Knife in 1988, edited by Jack Adrian, and over the period 1988 to 2005 the Ash-Tree Press published all the stories in five volumes, again edited by Adrian.


In his introduction to The Supernatural Omnibus, Montague Summers quotes Madame du Deffand, who when asked if she believed in ghosts, replied “No, but I am afraid of them” - a perfect frame of mind, I would suggest, in which to approach E F Benson’s ghost stories.

(This article first appeared in 'Dodo', the journal of the E F Benson Society.)




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The Best Ghost Story Collections

Winter is the season of ghosts, as doors rattle and creak in the wind and bare limbs of trees tap at the window pane. It is a time to huddle round the fire with a good book and what better reading could there be than a ghost story? It was a tradition when I was young to choose a volume of ghost stories for a Christmas present and that tradition to some extent lingers with me still, made easier nowadays by the collections published by the excellent supernatural small presses such as Ash-Tree Press, Tartarus Press and Swan River Press, not to mention the copious volumes reprinted by Wordsworth Editions in their 'Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural' series.

However, for all the ghost stories written, there are a surprisingly small number of books of ghost stories that can be considered truly great, and here I mean books by a single author, not anthologies with multiple authors (which I will cover at a future time).

Over the years, some of these books have found their place in the High Barn Library and I have chosen just nine, with one exception spanning the 60 or so years between 1872 and 1930, during which period the literary and psychological ghost story forms reached their zenith.

'In a Glass Darkly', J Sheridan Le Fanu, Richard Bentley (1872)


In this outstanding volume, Le Fanu probes the boundary between the supernatural and the psychological, particularly in 'Green Tea', one of the most anthologised of ghost stories, in which the unlucky Revd. Jennings is haunted by a green monkey. Other oustanding stories are 'The Familiar', 'Carmilla', with its lovely but deadly vampire, and 'Mr Justice Harbottle', the hanging judge who receives his death sentence from a terrifying supernatural court. Le Fanu wrote many other ghost stories, but it is in this volume that his powers are fully realised.

'Hauntings: Fantastic Stories", Vernon Lee, Heinemann (1890)


The lyrical prose and beautiful topographical descriptions in these four stories add considerably to the supernatural content. The author is equally at home in the Venice of 'A Wicked Voice' as in the Kentish countryside of 'Oke of Okehurst'. Montague Summers justly praised her genius in his excellent introduction to 'The Supernatural Omnibus', including two of these stories in that volume.

'Ghost Stories of an Antiquary', M R James, Edward Arnold (1904)



There is a problem here about which of the four collections of ghost stories written by M R James to include. My heart is perhaps with the second collection 'More Ghost Stories' (1911) containing 'Casting the Runes' and 'The Tractate Middoth', the first volume of James I encountered, aged about 10. However, with the head I have to select the first he published, which includes the incomparable 'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad', not to mention 'Count Magnus', 'Lost Hearts' and 'The Ash-Tree'.


This was the only of his first editions to be illustrated and the drawings of James McBryde (who died before its publication) add considerably to the book. In these stories we are shown the dangers inherent in raising the spirits of the dead and that too much intellectual curiosity can be a decidely dangerous thing.

'John Silence, Physician Extraordinary', Algernon Blackwood, Eveleigh Nash (1908)


I do not normally like stories involving supernatural sleuths, but Dr. John Silence is different and in the best of the five stories in this volume is an inconsequential figure. These are predominantly, as in much of Blackwood's ghost (or, more correctly weird) stories, studies of the influence of place on susceptible minds. From the sleepy northern French town of 'Ancient Sorceries' with its supernatural cats to the mysterious brotherhood in the sleepy southern German town of 'Secret Worship' and on to the Scandinavian islands of 'The Camp of the Dog', we follow Blackwood's susceptible travellers as they encounter forces beyond normal experience.

'Widdershins', Oliver Onions, Martin Secker (1911)


Oliver Onions wrote much besides ghost stories and those in this volume are of uneven quality, but the book is included chiefly on account of 'The Beckoning Fair One', one of the best long ghost stories ever written, in which the dangers of renting buildings long unoccupied are fully realised.

'Uncanny Tales', F Marion Crawford, Tauchnitz Edition (1911)


F Marion Crawford is the only American author in my list and is not chiefly remembered now for his ghost stories. However, I read 'Man Overboard!' at an early age and, as a story of ghostly revenge it has seldom been bettered. Also in this volume are the much anthologised 'The Upper Berth', the vampire tale 'For the Blood is the Life' and 'The Screaming Skull' based on a legend concerning a Dorsetshire farmhouse.

'The Room in the Tower', E F Benson, Mills & Boon (1912)


E F Benson presents a challenge since his best stories are scattered throughout the four volumes of ghost stories published in his lifetime. So, as with M R James, I chose the first. The title story concerns another vampire, but there are plenty of other types of hauntings, including a very strange telephone in 'The Confession of Charles Linkworth'.


Benson's best story, by some distance in my opinion, is 'The Face' contained in 'Spook Stories' (Hutchinson, 1928), in which the heroine opens her door not to the husband who is rushing to save her, but to the spectre who will lead her to her death.

'On the Edge', Walter de la Mare, Faber and Faber (1930)





De La Mare was considered by Julia Briggs, author of the excellent 'Night Visitors', one of the finest exponents of the ghost story and the title of this book perfectly encapsulates his technique. Ghosts are presented, if at all, obliquely with the reader struggling to rationalise what is behind the words. De La Mare was a poet and many of his narrative works have the form of prose poems, including even his full length ghostly novel 'The Return'.

There are other De La Mare collections with equally fine stories, but this volume is chosen for two of my favourite ghost stories.


'Crewe' is a tale told in the waiting room at Crewe Railway Station, well known to me in my youth and as dreary then as in the story. I also can now never look at a scarecrow without remembering this story's haunting image of a scarecrow slowly getting nearer to its victim. 'The Green Room', set in a bookshop, is never far from my mind on any of those rare occasions where a bookseller has, as with the hero of the story, introduced me into a back room where only 'choicer customers' are allowed. But I have never (at least not to my knowledge) met the resident ghost.

'We Are for the Dark', Robert Aickman and Elizabeth Jane Howard, Jonathan Cape (1951)


From De La Mare we are led naturally to the book now widely recognised as marking a new beginning for the ghost story - no more spectres lurking on the stairs, but a new look at the strangeness within and around us. Aickman published six further volumes of strange stories after this collaboration with the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. In this volume each author contributed three stories. The best of Howard's is 'Three Miles Up' set on a decidedly strange canal, both authors at the time being closely involved with the preservation of England's waterways. But pride of place must be awarded to 'The Trains', perhaps Aickman's finest story, in which two women walking in the moors of northern England take shelter at what turns out to be decidely the wrong sort of house. This is admittedly a hackneyed theme but Aickman's treatment is original and masterly and it is no surprise that he went on to be recognised as the best writer of strange stories in the second half of the twentieth century.

Most admirers of ghost stories would have made other choices for a list of 'best books', and I would love to have included Henry James, Edith Wharton and Mrs Oliphant, but no list can be infinite. Henry James would, in any event, be excluded since he himself did not publish a volume of ghost stories. 'The Ghostly Tales of Henry James', a superlative collection, was published many years after the author's death by his biographer Leon Edel and hence the selection made was not the result of a conscious choice made by James himself.

So, time to settle down with a good ghost story, but wait - who on earth can be knocking on the door at this time of night and just when did that wind get up so?






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From one Author to Another

It is always exciting to find a book inscribed by its author, even more exciting when the book is inscribed to another author. This makes the book far more interesting than just another 'signed' copy or one inscribed to an unknown person who just happened to attend a book signing. Of course, to dream of finding a copy of 'Moby Dick' inscribed by Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne or of 'Frankenstein' inscribed by Mary Shelley to Byron is to indulge in the wildest of fantasies, but setting the sights at a much lower level it is possible to find interesting associations.

Browsing on the shelves of the High Barn Library reveals only a few examples, but these all have a special resonance.


The earliest we obtained was a copy of Walter de la Mare's 'Memoirs of a Midget' (in fact No. 1 of the limited Collins edition) inscribed by the author to Wilson Follett, who was his American publisher and author of 'Modern American Usage' and editor of the collected editon of Stephen Crane's works. In this copy de la Mare has transcribed in ink his lovely poem 'The Moth', included in 'The Veil and other Poems'.





Also included is a typed letter, dated 1923, to Follett signed by de la Mare thanking him for his assistance in seeing the book through its proofs and assisting with its success in America. This was a serendipitous find in Blackwell's antiquarian bookshop in its glorious one time home of Fyfield Manor near Oxford.


Another lucky find was in the excellent Petersfield Bookshop in Hampshire. This was a copy of Arthur Machen's 'The Children of the Pool', inscribed by Machen in September 1936 to Oliver Warner, who wrote widely on naval battles and was the author of works on Nelson and General Wolfe.


The Powys brothers were all great inscribers of books and signed copies of their works turn up frequently.


I choose one from our Powys collection - a copy of Elizabeth Myers' 'Good Beds - Men Only', presented after her death by her husband Littleton Powys to Walter de la Mare.


This copy came from the library of Walter de la Mare sold by the recently closed Oxford bookseller Robin Waterfield, where we spent many happy hours browsing.

The name of William Beveridge is often in the news. He was the architect of the so-called Welfare State, the set of social reforms introduced by the post war Labour Government in the UK. Helen Thomas, the widow of Edward Thomas wrote a memoir of her time with the poet.


This was published in the volume 'World Without End' and Helen inscribed the copy in our collection to Sir William Beveridge.


One of the great editors of Victorian fiction was Everett F Bleiler (1920-2010), who worked at Dover Publications for over 20 years, editing editions of the works of many supernatural fiction writers, including J Sheridan Le Fanu, Mrs J H Riddell, Arthur Conan Doyle and others. These attractive Dover paperbacks were early additions to the High Barn Library.


Bleiler was also the author of the monumental 'Guide to Supernatural Fiction', published by Kent State University Press and which provides plot synopses of thousands of ghost stories contained in over 1700 books identifying themes, motifs and genres.


Our copy was presented by its author to Sam Moskowitz and contains a generous tribute from Bleiler to Moskowitz, who was born in the same year as Bleiler and became a leading proponent and editor of science fiction. He also edited several volumes of the previously uncollected sea stories of William Hope Hodgson.

Finally, something very different. The Doves Press, over the period 1900-1916, produced some of the most beautiful books ever made, under the direction of T J Cobden Sanderson and Emery Walker, who was responsible for the type faces, based on 15th century Venetian models. Famously Sanderson threw the majestic type into the River Thames after he fell out with Walker, in order to prevent its further use by his former partner.





One of the simplest and most beautiful of the books produced by the Doves Press was Ruskin's 'Unto This Last'. Our copy of this book was presented by Emery Walker, its designer, to Robert and Sylvia Lynd.


Robert Lynd was born in Belfast and became a prominent Republican, joining the Gaelic League (at a meeting of which he met Sylvia), and was a supporter of Sinn Fein. Settling in Hampstead, the Lynds became prominent literary hosts entertaining J B Priestley, Hugh Walpole, Victor Gollancz and James Joyce amongst others. My first encounter with Robert Lynd's writing was in my teens when I read his excellent introduction to Algernon Methuen's 'Anthology of Modern Verse 1900-1920', published in 1924.

And so it comes full circle, from a poetry anthology bought in the sixties, to a work of Ruskin printed in a masterpiece of the private press movement with connections to James Joyce and Irish republicanism. So many connections - and all in one printed book.


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