Elsewhere . . .

In recent weeks, when I've mostly been failing to write in this space, I have at least made a couple of contributions to Open Letters Monthly. The first was a sheer pleasure to prepare for and write: a review of Ruth Jackson's excellent new biography of Shirley Jackson, the writing of which gave me an excuse to re-read the Jackson books I'd read before and dig up all the ones I hadn't.

One thing that's always surprised me about Jackson is that people have had trouble reconciling the light, loving manner of her family memoirs and the darkness of her other fiction. And perhaps I would have, too, fifty years ago, when boundaries between genres were more rigidly policed, preventing serious fiction and the light diversions of women's magazines from ever polluting each another. Seen from our vantage, however, the two styles are clearly kin: humor is shot through both--rarely do even Jackson's most frightening novels fail to have moments of black comedy--and they share an appreciation of oddity and an attention to language, and in particular its rhythms.

At the same time, though, there is a distinct difference in prose style, one that I didn't have room to get into in my review. Take a look at this, from early in one of Jackson's creepiest, least explicable stories, "The Man in the Woods":

The cat had joined him shortly after her entered the forest, emerging from between the trees in a quick, shadowy movement that surprised Christopher at first and then, oddly, comforted him, and the cat had stayed beside him, moving closer to Christopher as the trees pressed insistently closer to them both, trotting along in the casual acceptance of human company that cats exhibit when they are frightened. Christopher, when he stopped once to rest, sitting on a large stone at the edge of the road, had rubbed the cat's ears and pulled the cat's tail affectionately, and had said, "Where are we going, fellow? Any ideas?", and the cat had closed his eyes meaningfully and opened them again.

You can find pleasantly showy passages throughout Jackson's writing; this one is fairly sedate, but it serves my purpose. The sentences are long and fluid, clause following on clause as cause on effect, and an aphoristic phrase ("the casual acceptance of human company that cats exhibit") is thrown in with the air of an afterthought.

Now look at this, chosen all but at random from Raising Demons, Jackson's second volume of family memoir:

Usually, whenever Beekman drove, Sally wanted to come too. And whenever Sally came, Jannie thought she had better come along. And when Beekman and Sally and Jannie came, Laurie figured that we might just sop in at a movie or some such, and if we did he wanted to be along. As a result, whenever I went shopping in the new car, everyone came except my husband, who could not, for a long time, look at the new car without telling me how we were going bankrupt in style. One Saturday morning I almost got off without Beekman, who was learning from Sally how to cut out paper dolls, but before I was out of the driveway they were calling to me to wait a minute, and by the time I finally tuned the car and headed off toward the big supermarkets I had all four of them with me, Sally accompanied by her dolls Susan and David and Patpuss, all dressed entirely in cleansing tissue, and carrying--though I did not know it when she got into the car--a pocketbook containing four pennies and a shilling stolen from her father's coin collection.

Oh, how it builds! As each child is added, the sentences get longer and longer, trailing more impedimenta in their wake. Whereas the sentences in the previous passage were long, but explicit in their structure, these pretend to embody chaos: they just go. The book is like that throughout, written as if in the rush of conversation with children and the confusions of parenting, a hard task of writing made to look casually effortless. If you're looking for light entertainment this holiday season, you could do far worse than Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages.

The other bit I wrote for OLM was much less involved: a brief note on my year in reading, focused on Alexandra Harris's wonderful Weatherland: Writers and Artists under English Skies. "English summers take their identity from the stretches of grey on either side," writes Harris. In the depths of a gray and dark Chicago winter, I feel strong kinship. If you're looking for a holiday gift for a bookish Anglophile, your shopping may be done.

Now, you cannot ask a man to meet a ghost, because ghosts are not to be counted on.

{Robert Boursnel, "Self-Portrait with Spirits" (1902)}

From a 1958 lecture, "Experience and Fiction," by Shirley Jackson

I have always been interested in witchcraft and superstition, but have never had much traffic with ghosts, so I began asking people everywhere what they thought about such things, and I began to find out that there was one common factor--most people have never seen a ghost, and never want or expect to, but almost everyone will admit that sometimes they have a sneaking feeling that they just possibly could meet a ghost if they weren't careful--if they were to turn a corner too suddenly, perhaps, or open their eyes too soon when they wake up at night, or go into a dark room without hesitating first.

Shakespeare's ghosts have distracted me for a few days from my efforts to convince every single one of you to go to your nearest used bookseller and buy a copy of D. J. Enright's The Oxford Book of the Supernatural, from which I've taken Shirley Jackson's dead-on assessment of shaky skeptics. I've also drawn today's headline from the book; it appears in Oliver St John Gogarty's As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1936) in a description of a haunted evening with the Yeatses, during which Yeats, unflappable, makes the following 2 a.m. demands of a ghost:

1. You must desist from frightening the children in their early sleep.
2. You must cease to moan about the chimneys.
3. You must walk the house no more.
4. You must not move furniture or horrify those who sleep near by.
5. You must name yourself to me.

That doesn't leave a ghost much scope for activity. I suppose he could blow on Yeats's tea and make it cool extra-quickly.

Though Yeats may be the poet best-known for trafficking with spirits, he's not alone by any means. John Donne appears in Enright's collection via a story of a dark vision featured in Izaak Walton's early biography. Having made a trip to Europe despite his (yet again) pregnant wife's "divining soul bod[ing] her some ill in his absence," Donne is found by his patron Sir Robert,

in such ecstasy, and so altered as to his looks, as amazed Sir Robert to behold him; insomuch that he earnestly desired Mr Donne to declare what had befallen him in the short time of his absence. To which Mr Donne was not able to make a present answer: but, after a long and perplexed pause, did at last say, "I have seen a dreadful vision since I last saw you: I have seen my dear wife pass twice by me through this room, with her hair hanging about her shoulders, and a dead child in her arms this I have seen since I saw you." To which Sir Robert replied, "Sure, sir, you have slept since last I saw you." To which Mr. Donne's reply was, " I cannot be surer that I now live, than that I have not slept since I saw you: and I am as sure, that at her second appearing she stopped, and looked me in the face, and vanished."

The vision proves at least partially true: Donne soon learns that the child was stillborn and his wife, though alive, is very ill.

Then there is the poet who is a ghost, as Enright presents Harold Owen recounting in the third volume of his memoir, Journey from Obscurity (1965). On a naval ship during World War I, he enters his cabin to find his brother Wilfred--who should have been at the Western Front--sitting in Harold's chair:

I felt shock run through me with appalling force and with it I could feel the blood draining away from limbs stiff and slow to respond. I did not rush towards him but walked jerkily into the cabin--all limbs stiff and slow to respond. I did not sit down but looking at him I spoke quietly: "Wilfred, how did you get here?" He did not rise and I saw that he was involuntarily immobile, but his eyes which had never left mine were alive with the familiar look of trying to make me understand; when I spoke his whole face broke into his sweetest and most endearing dark smile. I felt no fear--I had not when I first drew my door curtain and saw him there; only exquisite mental pleasure at thus beholding him. All I was conscious of was a sensation of enormous shock and profound astonishment that he should be here in my cabin. . . . . I loved having him there: I could not, and did not want to try to understand how he had got there. I was content to accept him, that he was here with me was sufficient. . . . I must have turned my eyes away from him; when I looked back my cabin chair was empty. . . .

I felt the blood run slowly back to my face and looseness into my limbs and with these and overpowering sense of emptiness and loss. . . . Suddenly I felt terribly tired and moving to my bunk I lay down; instantly I went into a deep oblivious sleep. When I woke up I knew with absolute certainty that Wilfred was dead.

From now on, any time I read about World War I and the swathe it cut through a whole generation I'll remember the sense of deep, ultimately frustrated longing in that passage; whatever hopes or fears in Harold Owen generated that vision, they are of a piece with those that drove the postwar efforts by Conan Doyle and others to search out a spirit world that might reveal some trace of their lost loved ones. So many millions of young men were gone, and the desire on this side of the veil for any contact at all was so powerful that the bereaved of World War I would surely have agreed with this passage that Enright quotes from Margaret Oliphant's A Belaguered City (1879):

Why should it be a matter of wonder that the dead should come back? The wonder is that they do not. Ah! that is the wonder. How one can go away who loves you, and never return, nor speak, nor send any message--that is the miracle: not that the heavens should bend down and the gates of Paradise roll back, and those who have left us return. All my life it has been a marvel to me how they could be kept away.

For as often as we hear stories of ghosts who need something from us, in fact it is we who need them--need them not to forget, not to stop caring for us. It's no wonder that such a strong desire sometimes generates a response, whatever questions we might harbor about its reality.