Ghoul Brittania Page 2

  As for the near moon, he tells me there’s a Charles Addams cartoon on that theme… And I am certainly not alone in being somehow undermined by seeing things that are out of scale…

  A friend of Lawrence’s once had a nasty turn on catching sight of the masts and rigging of the Cutty Sark from the streets of Greenwich, and the Cutty Sark isn’t so disproportionately large; nothing compared to the huge ships that used to tower over the two-up-two-down terraced houses of the London Docklands.

  Somebody looking down at the ground while walking south along The Avenue in London N10 might also be disturbed to look up suddenly and see the way the central facade of Alexander Palace looms at the end of the street like a monstrous, battered version of the Victorian villas on either side.

  David doesn’t really have any susceptibilities of his own, so once I’ve told him of mine, we might talk about why we’re interested in ghosts and stories of ghosts at all. To David, ‘it is an intellectual game.’ Ghost stories, whether fictional or real, either create a frisson or they don’t. It’s a no-bullshit medium. The test is pleasingly simple, and universal. As the novelist L.P. Hartley wrote: ‘There is no intermediate step between success and failure. Either it comes off or it is a flop.’ (And many of his were flops). The ghost story must be focused and because it comes from an oral tradition – the medieval ballad – it is usually short; terse, indeed. The narrator is often embarrassed at what he has to say. He does not ‘milk’ the story, but wants to make his point, and get it over with. Ghost stories in fiction or fact are – or ought to be – full of phrases like, ‘I will briefly set the scene’, ‘There is no need to describe him further’, ‘There is really no more to tell.’ In Victorian ghost stories especially, the haunted house is in ‘B---- Street’; the man who lets it is ‘Mr Y----’; the man who rents it ‘Captain D----’.

  For Lawrence, the ghost story is an antidote to the ‘emotional incontinence’ of our times. But, for all the economy of ghost stories, he finds ‘wildness’ in them. Each one is like an attempted gaol-break. In one of his ghost stories, M.R. James (and I am going to explain about this fellow in just a minute) has a yokel about to quote from Hamlet to the effect that ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy’, but he cuts him off because he can’t bear the cliché. That line of Shakespeare’s does nail it, however.

  Lawrence also finds ghost stories ‘relaxing’, and this reminds me of what the shop assistant said when I bought the DVD of ‘The Night of the Demon’ (1957) – which is one of the top four British films with a supernatural theme, and concerns a psychopathic Satanist: ‘It’s a lovely one for when you’re just recovering from flu.’

  The ghost story, like the crime story, points up the listener’s own relative security. Then again, the best of them do tend to revisit you at about three o’clock in the morning, like an over-rich dinner.

  Lizzie’s Ghost Story

  [Lizzie, who is not actually called Lizzie, is an actress currently appearing in a lead role in the West End].

  ‘It happened in Nottinghamshire in the mid-nineties. It was a house that took in theatricals – a house in the middle of a large estate, but half this house was fourteenth or fifteenth century, the other half was a new extension. It was quite cottage-y, but also quite bland: MFI furniture, wood veneer, Flotex carpet in the kitchen. The family who owned the place openly talked about the cold spots – there was one at the foot of the stairs. ‘Oh, it’s probably a ghost,’ they’d say. They were quite proud of it. The husband had been decorating a room once, and he’d had to stop and walk out because of a strong feeling of being watched. You know, the hairs on the back of his neck had stood up. As soon as I got there I sensed something homing in on me. I’m quite sensitive to these things, and interested in them too. I might go to psychic fairs with a girlfriend for a laugh.

  There were three of us from the same production staying in the house. We were appearing in a musical version of A Christmas Carol. I was one of Scrooge’s housekeepers. He had about three in this version, whereas I don’t think he has one in the novel. I seem to remember the show was written by the DJ Mike Read, so…go figure.

  I was in the modern extension, which you’d think would be the least ghostly part of the house, but I was terrified every night. It was very difficult, somehow, to get to my room. As I walked along the corridor it seemed to be further and further away, like a Kafkaesque nightmare. I’d started sleeping with all the lights on, and the radio, because I knew something was coming, and one night when I was half asleep I heard a voice in my ear: ‘Hello Lizzie’.

  It was a little girl’s voice, quite mischievous – naughty. The next day I left. The landlords were pissed off – they thought I’d been unreasonable. After I left, I heard second-hand, from one of the other performers, that there’d been a fire in the house a hundred years ago or so, and that a little girl had died in the fire.

  A few months later, when I was appearing in Guys and Dolls at the National Theatre, a friend of mine came to stay in my house in London. Now this friend is a doctor, and I’d say he was quite ‘sensitive’, in the sense of having psychic abilities. He wasn’t a boyfriend or anything, just a house guest, and he was sleeping in the spare room. After that night, he said to me over breakfast, ‘Lizzie, I can’t sleep in your house. I saw a little girl standing on the threshold of your bedroom, and she’s like a little Rottweiler – very protective of you, doesn’t want anyone else near.’ Now the point is that I hadn’t told him anything about the episode in Nottinghamshire, and he could have had no knowledge of the little girl from me.’

  [We were speaking by phone early in the evening, and at this point Lizzie broke off, saying, ‘You know, I’m sweating like a pig telling you this.’]

  THE FORMATION OF THE ELEMENTS

  When somebody tells my friend David a ghost story, he will never raise an eyebrow at the end and say, ‘Are you sure?’ He is inclined to believe them… Because why would they lie? Perhaps to entertain, in which case the question becomes, ‘Did they succeed?’, and if they did, then it doesn’t matter either way. There is a virtuous circle in that the more entertaining a ghost story is, the truer it sounds, and vice versa. Fictional and ‘true’ ghost stories have long since been chasing each other around that circle, and this is the last time you will see those arch inverted commas around the word ‘true’ and I will try also try to avoid words like ‘allegedly’ and ‘purportedly’. Instead, I will take my cue from a line in ‘The Captain of the Pole Star’ (1890), an atmospheric if not very frightening ghost story by Arthur Conan Doyle: ‘Mr Manson, our second mate, saw a ghost last night – or, at least, says that he did, which of course is the same thing.’

  This book concerns itself with both fictional and true ghost stories, and the word ‘ghostliness’ spans the two. Three writers were particularly important in defining the elements of British ghostliness, which will dictate the structure of the rest of the book. It might be as well to look briefly at the particular kinds of ghostliness they popularised.

  Charles Dickens (1812-70)

  Just as Dickens was energetic enough not only to produce his vast output of novels, but also to enact them before audiences on his speaking tours, so he both wrote about ghostliness and pursued it in his life. He practised mesmerism, forerunner of hypnotism, which posited the existence of an invisible universal fluid, which could be manipulated by the force of animal magnetism. Directing this force by a waving of hands, and use of his ‘visual ray’ (staring into the subject’s eyes), Dickens could put people into trances in order to soothe their anxieties and ailments. Mesmerism was probably, although its practitioners didn’t know it, a by-product of Michael Faraday’s work connecting electricity and magnetism.

  In his magisterial biography, Peter Ackroyd also asserts that Dickens attended séances, and quotes him as saying, of the supernatural, ‘I have always had a strong interest in the subject and never knowingly lose an opportunity of pursuing it.’ Ackroyd reports that Dic
kens ‘dreamed of a lady in a red shawl who turned to him and said, “I am Miss Napier.”’(A very powerful image, both in its speed and its eroticism). ‘The next evening,’ Ackroyd continues, ‘he met the same lady, wearing the same shawl and bearing the same name.’

  In the early summer of 1854, just after he’d finished Hard Times, Dickens was walking past the Burlington Hotel when ‘I suddenly (the temperature being then most violent) found an icy coolness come upon me, accompanied with a general stagnation of the blood, a numbness of the extremities, great bewilderment of mind, and a vague sense of wonder.’ He then recollected that he had had exactly the same experience once before on the same spot. What was the Burlington Hotel is now 19 Cork Street, the site of an art gallery called Browse and Darby. One fine, late spring day I stood outside it for a while to see whether anything happened. I did not find that spot on the pavement to be particularly cold, but then a car drove up; some women climbed out of it and carried lilies into the gallery. Aren’t lilies the flowers of the dead? Encouraged, I walked into the gallery, where some pretty good, very English-looking figurative oils were on display. I asked the man behind the desk whether he knew that the place had once been a hotel. He did know. I told him that supernatural phenomena had been detected around the building. ‘Who by?’ he asked. ‘Charles Dickens,’ I replied, and he didn’t flinch, but just said, ‘Well, I’ve never noticed anything… And I’ve spent many a night here.’

  As a young man Dickens read many Gothic novels. These promoted atmosphere, and from them, and from his own insecure childhood, Dickens developed his interest in terrible weather, and the counteracting comforts of home and hearth. These moods could be juxtaposed in ghost stories, of which there are two within Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1837). The second of these, ‘The Bagman’s Tale’, is told around a Christmas fireside, and most of those ghost stories that have a cosy frame – with the narrator urging the landlord to charge the glasses and ‘Throw another log on the fire’ before settling down to his tale – owe a lot to Dickens.

  He did more than anyone to make the British Christmas ghostly, and most of his ghost stories appeared in the Christmas numbers of the magazines he edited: first ‘Household Words’ and then ‘All The Year Round’. Other writers contributed, and Dickens established a sort of production line of ghost story writers that included his friend Wilkie Collins and a team of women, Rosa Mulholland, Amelia Edwards, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Rhoda Broughton. He was a man for ‘a round of ghost stories around the fire’ (to quote the title of the Christmas 1852 number of ‘Household Words’), as though they were to be produced as readily and with the same certainty of giving satisfaction as glasses of punch. Dickens’s best-known Christmas ghost story, A Christmas Carol (1843), does most of the things a ghost story is capable of doing. It has the atmosphere, the sceptical interjections (‘It’s humbug still!’ cries Scrooge, having suffered the opening volley of supernatural effects), the steady mounting of tension, and the small possibility of subjective explanation (Did Scrooge dream it all?) that were becoming established as requirements.

  Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-73)

  Le Fanu, a relation of Sheridan the playwright, was born into the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. His early ghost stories were widely scattered in Dublin journals, and he became successful in his lifetime as a writer of mystery novels, the best-known being Uncle Silas, in which the eponymous villain is demonic but not ghostly. Some of Le Fanu’s ghost stories were collected in Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery, edited in 1923 by M.R. James (very close now – see directly below), who, like Dickens, regarded him highly.

  Le Fanu was steeped in Gothic literature and Irish folk myths, the latter being reflected in the appearance of some of his ghosts in animal form. In the best known of his ghost stories, ‘Green Tea’, a bookish, retiring bachelor-cleric called Mr Jennings is haunted by a small, libidinous monkey, which first appears to him on a bus. He pokes at it with his umbrella, which goes right through it. (Le Fanu is a modern ghost story writer in that his ghosts appear in everyday contexts). It might be that the monkey has biological causes lying in Jennings’s addiction to green tea. This has caused the opening of his ‘inner eye’, which allowed him to perceive the monkey. The notion of the inner eye comes from the Swedish mystic, Swedenborg, who fascinated Victorian ghost story writers, including Dickens, who wrote to Le Fanu, seeking elucidation on certain of Swedenborg’s theories, especially those about exactly how mesmerism might trigger an opening of the inner eye. (Anyone seeking relief from the bustle of the West End might bear a little eastwards, towards Bloomsbury Way, just off New Oxford Street, and The Swedenborg Society Bookshop, which usually has a blackboard outside it, announcing that it is dedicated to ‘The Most Extraordinary Person in Recorded History.’ I often go in and browse through the books by or about the man. His accounts of his meetings with aliens are particularly interesting. For instance, Swedenborg conversed regularly with a man from Venus, who revealed that the inhabitants of that planet are so markedly different from the people of earth that they actually sleep the opposite way in their beds – with their feet at the head.)

  Alternatively, the monkey in Green Tea might be psychological, an emanation of Jennings’s id or subconscious. The story is narrated by a Dr Hesselius, a ‘medical philosopher’ – a psychiatrist, in other words. Great play is made of his scepticism, his intelligence and his learning, and he is much given to saying things like, ‘I reserve all that borders on the technical for a scientific paper.’

  In having connections with folk myths, and in anticipating the subjective and psychological explanations of later ghost stories, Le Fanu straddles the entire genre. But this would count for nothing if he couldn’t frighten, and his ‘An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’, published in 1853, is the haunted house that anyone hoping to contribute to the genre has to reckon with.

  In that story, two students rent a house in Dublin formerly occupied by a ‘hanging judge’. One of the two, lying in bed at night, sees the furniture in his room with a particular intensity. He feels the ‘tableau of horror’ being mustered. Presently, he finds his attention fixed upon the window opposite the foot of his bed: ‘I became somehow conscious of a sort of horrid but undefined preparation going forward in some unknown quarter and by some unknown agency…’ After this ‘lighting up of the theatre’, the first of the ‘infernal manifestations’ appears: ‘…a picture suddenly flew up to the window, where it remained fixed, as if by an electrical attraction… The picture thus mysteriously glued to the window-panes was the portrait of an old man, in a crimson flowered silk dressing-gown, the folds of which I could even now describe, with a countenance embodying a strange mixture of intellect, sensuality and power, but withal sinister and full of malignant omen.’

  (What clinches this for me is the word ‘preparation’, the malice aforethought).

  Le Fanu himself would sit up in bed anticipating, or trying to conjure, nightmare visions for use in his fiction, and the vision he all too successfully called up involved a large Victorian house collapsing on him as he slept. When he died in bed – of a heart attack and with a shocked expression on his face – his doctor observed, ‘That house fell at last’.

  At one of our ghost sessions in Vat’s Wine Bar, I discussed this aspect of ghostliness with my friend David. I told him that when I go to Scarborough, I can hardly bear to look at the north wall of the vast Grand Hotel, which is totally blank, without the relief of a window – so many bricks (most turned slimy and green by sea spray) that I can’t help but imagine what would happen if they came unstuck and fell down. But then The Grand, built in 1863 as one of the world’s first purpose-built hotels, is a true haunted house: a monumental anachronism, too large for the modern world, or at least for modern Scarborough. I stayed there once in October, in a room overlooking the dark thrashings of the North Sea (I had paid a five pound supplement for the view), and on neither occasion did I see anyone else on the same corridor, o
r even the same floor.

  That evening, I saw some of the other guests huddled in a corner of the great lobby, near the lights of a little stage located in an alcove, from where bingo numbers were being called by a desperate-sounding voice.

  I had a similar sense of being bullied by brickwork in Le Fanu’s home city of Dublin, where there are streets of frighteningly big red-brick terraced houses. A haunted terraced house would be inconceivable in an English city but not in Dublin. David heard me out and then, in his pithy way, quoted a line from Alan Bennett’s television play about Franz Kafka, The Insurance Man, in which Kafka mentions, apropos an accident claim, that bricks don’t fall on people in Japan because they have paper houses. He reflects, by contrast, on ‘the sheer weight of Prague.’

  M.R. James (1862-1936)

  Those are his dates, but the more I think of M.R. James the further back in time he seems to recede. Here was a reticent Cambridge don, a biblical scholar, the foremost expert on medieval manuscripts of his time and Provost of both King’s College, Cambridge and Eton, where he himself had been a precocious schoolboy, reading for pleasure ‘works of the greatest knottiness’ (‘I am reading Ethiopic,’ he wrote home at one point). Here was a godly man, a bespectacled and owlish self-declared ‘confirmed bachelor’; a tricyclist and smoker of briar pipes. The biography of him by Richard Pfaff devotes about five pages to James’s ghost stories, and the rest to his academic work. It’s likely that any future full length biography will be the other way around.

  James’s Collected Ghost Stories has been in print since 1931, and it sets the benchmark for the genre. The stories are economical, dry, droll. His protagonists are upper-middle-class men of sceptical and academic inclinations. Aiming to do some light historical research as a relief from the rigours of term time, they travel to the countryside, usually by implication East Anglia, alighting from an empty train at a deserted station with a bundle of books under their arms, and a faint suspicion of being watched, which of course they immediately dismiss.