"But how does not believing in them help me?"

In Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel uses a startlingly successful description that I recall her using before: she writes that Cromwell's adopted son Richard is "rinsed with relief" on learning that he won't be marrying into the Boleyn family. She had used a variation on that phrase before, in her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost (2003), describing herself as "rinsed with nausea" on seeing a devil, or some force of pure evil, in her backyard as a girl.

I've never encountered that construction in any other writer's work, but it has now become a permanent part of my mental makeup, for it describes the sensation so perfectly--that inescapably liquid release of chemicals that accompanies, and helps us interpret, sudden, overwhelming changes in the world before us. We can feel their very movement as they course through our bodies, a cocktail of complicated feelings and sensations in their wake.

"Rinsed with fear" would seem a particularly suitable way to imagine an encounter with a ghost: it is as if at the very moment when the sight before us should be calling into question all our assumptions about the inextricable link between the corporeal and the incorporeal self, the body--with its flood of adrenaline, its horripilations, its shivers, the whole mess of reactions that Dickens located in "an agreeable creeping up our back"--is forcing us to acknowledge that for now, at least, we are here in a physical body, and its processes are the movements of our minds and emotions, whatever contrary evidence that thing in the doorway may be offering.

Which is, ultimately, what's so scary about the idea of seeing a ghost: not what it may do, but merely that it is, and the challenge that offers to our daily rationality. Which brings me to Kafka, and a passage from his story "Unhappiness" that I found in D. J. Enright's Oxford Book of the Supernatural (1994):

"What can I do?" I said. "I've just had a ghost in my room."

"You say that with the same sort of distaste as if you'd found a hair in your soup."

"You jest. Mark my words, though: a ghost is a ghost."

"Very true. But what if one doesn't believe in ghosts in the first place?"

"You don't think I believe in ghosts, do you? But how does not believing in them help me?"

"Very simple. You no longer need be frightened when a ghost actually appears."

"Yes, but that's only the incidental fear. The actual fear is fear of what causes the phenomenon. And that fear there's no getting rid of."

And now to crawl under the covers and not emerge for any sound that's not clearly made by a cat. A living, familiar cat, that is.

Longfellow on haunted houses

{Photo by Flickr user Stitch, reproduced under a Creative Commons license.}

For the past few Octobers, I've turned again and again to a pair of indispensable anthologies that D. J. Enright assembled: The Oxford Book of Death and The Oxford Book of the Supernatural, and you'll be hearing from both throughout the month. The former touches on ghosts only in proportion to their importance to our literature on death, whereas the latter deals with death throughout--for what role could the supernatural play in a world of immortals?

When I was searching for the lines from Nathaniel Hawthorne that I quoted in Sunday's post, I turned to the latter anthology, and on the same page with Hawthorne I found the following passage from a poem by Longfellow, "Haunted Houses" (1858), which seems an appropriate addendum to Sunday's exploration of the intersection of ghosts and real estate:

All houses wherein men have lived and died
    Are haunted houses. Through the open doors
The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,
    With feet that make no sound upon the floors.

We meet them at the doorway, on the stair,
    Along the passages they come and go,
Impalpable impressions on the air,
    A sense of something moving to and fro.

There are more guests at table, than the hosts,
    Invited; the illuminated hall
Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts.
    As silent as the pictures on the wall.

The stranger at my fireside cannot see
    The forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear:
He but perceives what is; while unto me
    All that has been is visible and clear.

We have no title-deeds to house or lands;
    Owners and occupants of earlier dates
From graves forgotten stretch their dusty hands,
    And hold in mortmain still their old estates.

The spirit world around this world of sense
    Floats like an atmosphere, and everywhere
Wafts through these earthly mists and vapours dense
    A vital breath of more ethereal air.

This was far better, meatier stuff than I remembered from my limited exploration of Longfellow: though carefully rhythmic, it carries none of the creak of the rocking horse that dogs his more famous poems, and some of its lines--the consonance of "From graves forgotten stretch their dusty hands" and the push of "Impalpable impressions on the air"--are masterly.

Further exploration, however, revealed that Enright had presented only the first half of the poem--and it was a wise decision, at least for our skeptical era, for in the second half Longfellow trades ambiguity for meaning, presence for purpose:

Our little lives are kept in equipoise
    By opposite attractions and desires;
The struggle of the instinct that enjoys,
    And the more noble instinct that aspires.

These perturbations, this perpetual jar
    Of earthly wants and aspirations high,
Come from the influence of an unseen star,
    An undiscovered planet in our sky.

And as the moon from some dark gate of cloud
    Throws o'er the sea a floating bridge of light,
Across whose trembling planks our fancies crowd
    Into the realm of mystery and night,--

So from the world of spirits there descends
    A bridge of light, connecting it with this,
O'er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends,
    Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss.

On this cloudy night, as the wind whips and howls around my house, I'll stick to the first half, opting for uncertainty, for the invisible floating of the ghosts, purposeless but carrying on regardless, just like us the living.

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.

"There are terrible spirits, ghosts, in the air of America."

{Etching for The Inferno by Gustave Doré}

So said D. H. Lawrence in a 1924 piece on Edgar Allan Poe. One would think that Lawrence ought to know a thing or two about vampires. He suffered from tuberculosis, the disease often thought to be at the root of a lot of vampire lore, and he was relentlessly concerned with issues of sex, power, the will, and transgresion, concepts that are central to vampire stories. Who knows--maybe Lawrence even was a vampire? Maybe I should ask Geoff Dyer what he thinks?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the other hand, was a determined skeptic, taking up the topic in a letter to Christophe de Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris, in 1763:

If there is in the world one attested story it is that of the Vampires. Nothing is missing: proces-verbaux, certificates from Notabilities, Surgeons, Priests, Magistrates. The juridical proof is most complete. With all this, who believes in Vampires? Shall we all be damned for not having belived?

I found both the above quotes in The Oxford Book of the Supernatural (1994), which is edited by D. J. Enright and, like any Enright production, is jammed full of endlessly quotable stuff. Sadly, it's out of print, but it's readily available used. I'll probably try to steal more from it between now and Hallowe'en, but for today I'll just give you Enright's rundown of some reported causes of vampirism:

The sins and misfortunes reckoned to lead to the condition have included some weird items: committing suicide, of course, but also working on Sundays, smoking on holy days, drinking to excess, and having sexual intercourse with one's grandmother; more innocently, those born on Christmas Day are doomed to the same fate in punishment of their mothers' presumptuousness in conceiving on the same day as the Virgin Mary.

Though I don't know any . . . ahem . . . grandmotherfuckers, a couple of other items on that list, if accurate, would lead me to conclude that there must be more vampires out there than I had previously thought.

Do you think that buzzing a vampire into the foyer counts as inviting him in? The Wikipedia is unhelpfully silent on the topic. Methinks I'll eschew the buzzer at least until Hallowe'en has passed. And regardless, I'm going to have to be more careful about whom I invite over to our baseball open house.

Entering October Country

{Purported nineteenth-century kit for killing vampires, made by a Professor Ernst Blomberg.}

After seeing Stephen King slagging Fox Sports during Friday's Red Sox-Indians game, I decided to honor his forthrightness by reading 'Salem's Lot (1975). Back in high school, I plowed through thousands of pages of King's novels, but aside from The Colorado Kid (2005), the novella he published with Hard Case Crime, which I wrote about here, I hadn't read anything by him for fifteen years. As a teenager, I had found his books terrifying, impossible to put down--even brilliant. But what would I think as an adult?

The verdict? Still frightening. Still hard to put down. And, while 'Salem's Lot certainly isn't brilliant, I'm not disappointed.

King made his name by injecting horror into carefully drawn scenes of everyday life. The nightmares in his novels are frightening precisely because he's locating them in the most innocuous of small towns--but, as writers from Sherwood Anderson on have reminded us, small towns teem with dark secrets. (King even name-checks Anderson and Edward Arlington Robinson--an odd coincidence, since I'd just been reading about both in Edmund Wilson.) He shows how easily an uncanny, supernatural evil can prey on, exploit, or even arise from the ordinary meanness and evils of small-town life. In the case of 'Salem's Lot, that evil takes the form of a millennia-old vampire, the perfect creature, metaphorically, to feed on the late-night, basement, and close-shuttered underbelly of a town.

In the early part of the novel, King depicts a Maine town that despite its 1970s setting seems trapped in the late '50s: boys still build models of Universal movie monsters, teens still hang out at the soda shop, men still live in a boarding house. Yet, as King himself acknowledges in his Introduction, where he admits, "I have always been more a writer of the moment than I wanted to be," the creeping malaise and toxicity of the early '70s are never far from the surface.

King spends a lot of energy and pages establishing the town and its people, and though his dialogue frequently ends up sounding a bit too much like Sheriff Tupper telling Miss Fletcher about the strange doings in Cabot Cove, for the most part his work establishing characters pays off. His creations don't always come to life--the three primary male characters are essentially interchangeable--but when they do they nudge us just enough farther in our suspension of belief to tip the scales from shock to horror. This line from a boy whose father has just been killed is a good example, rendered simultaneously sad and chilling by the fact that we've come to trust the boy's precocious perceptiveness:

It's better this way. My father . . . he would have made a very successful vampire. . . . He . . . he was good at everything he tried. Maybe too good.

Once the action starts, King slathers on the gore, as he is wont to do. But what's much scarier are the quiet moments when fear first enters a room. Take this scene, where a young woman sits in the kitchen of her old English teacher's house, trying to convince him that he had not heard a vampire sucking dry his houseguest the previous night. As they talk, he breaks in:

"Be quiet."
He had cocked his head forward. She stopped talking and listened. Nothing . . . except perhaps a creaky board. She looked at him questioningly, and he shook his head. "You were saying."

Moments later, midsentence,

He ceased again, listening.

This time the silence spun out, and when he spoke again, the soft certainty in his voice frightened her. "There's someone upstairs."

The "soft certainty" of those moments when the trustworthy and rational convince us that it's time we start believing the unbelievable are King at his best.

I was surprised to find that King is also quite good at describing the landscape and the play of the seasons. Though his prose in these passages sometimes tiptoes to the edge of purple, it rarely crosses over, despite his efforts to invest the whole of nature with a human dread. Here he writes of a Maine autumn:

It stays on through October and, in rare years, on into November. Day after day the skies are a clear, hard blue, and the clouds that float across them, always west to east, are calm white strips with gray keels. The wind begins to blow by the day, and it is never still. It hurries you along as you walk the roads, crunching the leaves that have fallen in mad and variegated drifts. The wind makes you ache in some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die--migrate or die. . . . And if there are no cars or planes, and if no one's Uncle John is out in the wood lot west of town banging away at a quail or pheasant; if the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform last rites.

'Salem's Lot gets less interesting as the ratio of humans to vampires begins to fall; it becomes a race to an end that we can see coming--there are only so many ways to kill a vampire, after all. But that's nothing like the galactic disappointment I felt at sixteen at the end of 1,100 pages of It, nor is it a disingenuous abjuration of the very idea of an ending, like he employed in The Colorado Kid, so I won't complain.

But now it's a drizzly, windy October night, and it seems wrong to read something that's not scary. Time to curl up with my well-loved copy of The Oxford Book of the Supernatural and some M. R. James. No sneaking up on me, please.