
Halloween – The Night of Dark Spirits
David Stuart Davies selects some titles that suit All Hallows’ Eve
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Oct
29
Oct
31
As the nights grow longer
and colder and we move inexorably towards Halloween,
the readerly mind turns naturally towards the ghost story. And while pumpkins
are carved and displayed as an invitation to trick-or-treaters, let us not
forget that their original purpose was to ward off the evil spirits that walk
on All Saint’s Eve, the same night as the ancient Gaelic festival of Samhain. Originally
carved from turnips, the tradition of the Halloween Jack O’Lantern began in
Ireland as a symbolic representation of a soul in purgatory. According to Irish
folklore, the original ‘Jack’ met the Devil on the way home from a night’s
drinking and trapped him up a tree by cutting the sigh of the cross into the
bark. Before releasing him, Jack strikes a bargain that the Devil will never
claim his soul. After a life of debauchery, Jack’s soul is barred from Heaven,
but Hell won’t take him either. To make him go away, Satan hurls a burning coal
like a publican discouraging a stray dog. Freezing, Jack places the coal in a
hastily hollowed-out turnip and fashions a lamp. His lost soul has been
wandering Ireland ever since carrying his lantern – lit by the eternal fire of
Hell – and looking for a resting place. (The pumpkin was adopted by Irish
immigrants to America, being more physically impressive and a lot easier to
carve than a turnip.) According to Irish mythology, during Samhain the door to
what the Celts called the ‘Otherworld’ swung open, letting supernatural beings
and the souls of the dead into the world of men. While ‘Bealtaine’ (May Day)
was a summer festival for the living, Samhain was a festival for the dead. It
is thus in every way appropriate that the father of the modern ghost story,
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, was an Irishman…
If you’ve not read Le Fanu yet, chances are you’ve
come across one of the film or television adaptations, especially if you’re of
my generation and therefore cut your gothic teeth on Hammer Films and the BBC’s
Ghost Stories for Christmas in the 1970s. I got into Le Fanu as a kid
having been traumatised by the BBC dramatization of Schalcken the Painter.
The vision of the young artist’s first love, Rose, cavorting with the ‘livid
and demoniac form of Vanderhausen’ in the catacombs beneath Rotterdam gave me
nightmares for weeks. I, of course, immediately searched out the original
story, and picked up a second-hand anthology with Peter Cushing on the cover
published to promote The Vampire Lovers, the Hammer version of Le Fanu’s
vampire story, Carmilla. I was still using this copy at university,
which raised a few eyebrows, I can tell you, and Hammer went on to produce
their ‘Karnstein Trilogy’, following The Vampire Lovers with Lust for
a Vampire and Twins of Evil. Not that these were the first Le Fanu
movies; there is also the haunting German Expressionist Vampyr (1932),
directed by Carl Dreyer. Who’d have thought lesbian vampires would have had
such enduring appeal?
The descendant of a noble Huguenot family, Dubliner J.S.
Le Fanu (1814–1873) was in his own time a bestselling author. He was known for
his historical, mystery, and sensation fiction (he is credited with inventing
the ‘locked-room mystery’ with his story ‘A Passage in the Secret History of an
Irish Countess’ published in 1838, three years before Poe’s ‘The Murders in the
Rue Morgue’), and above all horror. Described by his friend
Alfred Perceval Graves – the father of Robert – as ‘one of the greatest masters
of the weird and the terrible’, after his early death at the age of 58, Le
Fanu’s reputation was crowded out of Victorian literature by his
contemporaries, Dickens, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, and the Brontës; all of
whom he in some form influenced and whose sales he frequently rivalled.
Although called to the bar, Le Fanu chose instead to
devote himself to writing, following in the footsteps of his great-uncle, the
playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a precarious profession he later
described in his novel All in the Dark:
Literary work, the ambition of so
many, not a wise one perhaps for those who have any other path before them, but
to which men will devote themselves, as to a perverse marriage, contrary to
other men’s warnings, and even to their own legible experiences of life in a
dream.
He began contributing articles, ballads, and short
stories to the Dublin University Magazine in 1838 including his first
supernatural tale, ‘The Ghost and the Bone-Setter’, which is played for laughs,
and the chilling ‘Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter’, which
isn’t. From 1840, he began acquiring financial interests in several Irish
newspapers. Le Fanu had been fascinated by folklore and superstition since his
childhood, the Irish journalist Samuel Carter Hall writing of him:
I knew the brothers Joseph and
William Le Fanu when they were youths at Castle Connell, on the Shannon … They
were my guides throughout the beautiful district, and I found them full of
anecdote and rich in antiquarian lore, with thorough knowledge of Irish
peculiarities.
William became a civil engineer, Joseph never gave up
on those ‘Irish peculiarities’, becoming, in the words of E.F. Benson, one of
his twentieth century disciples, an ‘unrivalled flesh-creeper’ whose ‘tentacles
of terror are applied so softly that the reader hardly notices them till they
are sucking the courage from his blood.’
Prior to his marriage to Susanna Bennett in 1843, Le
Fanu wrote prolifically for the Irish magazine market, producing a series of
gothic, historical and humorous short stories for the Dublin University
Magazine later collected as The Purcell Papers. These were written
under the framing umbrella of being ‘extracts’ from the ‘MS. Papers of the late
Rev. Francis Purcell, of Drumcoolagh’, a fictitious Catholic priest,
posthumously collected and edited by an unidentified friend, adding both a
sense of authenticity and gothic ambiguity to the narratives. These include the
story ‘A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family’ (1839) which shares
significant similarities of plot – aristocratic bigamy and the ‘madwoman in the
attic’ – with Jane Eyre (1847). The best of the rest of Le Fanu’s early
ghost stories were anthologised by M.R. James in Madam Crowl’s Ghost and
Other Stories in 1923, marking the beginning of a revival of interest in Le
Fanu’s supernatural fiction. James’ introduction is expansive, declaring that
Le Fanu ‘stands absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories’,
continuing ‘Nobody sets the scene better than he, nobody touches in the
effective detail more deftly.’ James chooses twelve tales that are
representative of Le Fanu’s art, including haunted houses (‘An Account of Some
Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’); Faustian pacts (‘Sir Dominick’s
Bargain’); Irish legends (‘The Child that went with the Fairies’); warnings
from Hell (‘The Vision of Tom Chuff’); bitterly contested inheritances (‘Squire
Toby’s Will’); portents of doom (‘The White Cat of Drumgunniol’); historical
curses (‘Ultor de Lacy’); and terrible, long concealed crimes (‘Madam Crowl’s
Ghost’). The dying
caste of the Protestant Anglo-Irish – like Le Fanu’s own
family line – is a recurring motif, as is the similar decline of the Catholic
aristocracy, symbolised by the ruined castles that dot Le Fanu’s textual
landscape. There is also a dark sense of humour running through these tales,
which sets Le Fanu’s style apart from his contemporary, Edgar Allan Poe. Like
James’ own stories, these are presented as first-hand accounts of events
occurring in living memory, usually related to, or collected by a gentleman scholar
or antiquarian. Elegantly structured, the stories follow James’ prescription
for the perfect ghost story:
Two ingredients most valuable in the
concocting of a ghost story are, to me, the atmosphere and the nicely managed
crescendo … Let us, then, be introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us
see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings,
pleased with their surroundings; and into this calm environment let the ominous
thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently,
until it holds the stage.
James notes that these tales are now ‘forgotten’ and
were frequently published anonymously. He therefore concludes with the appeal
that, ‘I shall be very grateful to anyone who will notify me of any that he is
fortunate enough to find.’ In comparing the style and tone of James’ famous Edwardian
ghost stories with those of Le Fanu, it is clear how much of a debt was owed.
After a promising start, Le Fanu largely abandoned fiction
in favour of political journalism and a growing family (Susannah bore him three
daughters and a son), although he did write two minor historical novels in the
manner of Walter Scott and Harrison Ainsworth, The Cock and Anchor
(1845) and Torlogh O’Brien (1847) and publish the collection Ghost
Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851). By birth and inclination a
Conservative, Le Fanu broke ranks and supported Nationalist politicians John
Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher in lobbying the indifferent British
government to intervene during the Great Famine. As a newspaper proprietor, he
was courted as an advocate by William Smith O’Brien, and it was through these
connections that he found himself inadvertently on the fringes of the failed
1848 ‘Famine Rebellion’ which saw Mitchel, Meagher and O’Brien transported for
sedition. This cost Le Fanu his nomination to be Tory MP for County Carlow,
effectively ending his political ambitions and leaving him, like many other
Irishmen, caught between the opposing forces of Protestant Ascendancy and
Catholic Nationalism. This tension, subtly allegorised, can be felt in much of his
later writing in an ambivalent stance towards religion, while the destructive recurrence
of history in the present is a key motif, as it is in Northern Ireland to this
day.
These tensions were also present in Le Fanu’s domestic
life. His father-in-law, George Bennett QC, the son of the even more
formidable Tory MP Judge John Bennett, was a bastion of the Anglo-Irish
gentry and unimpressed with his son-in-law’s indirect flirtation with the ‘Young
Irelanders’. This put Susannah, already a nervous woman, between husband and
father and undoubtedly contributed to her growing anxiety and depression. This
was compounded when Le Fanu ceased to attend church due to his increasing
interest in the writings of the Swedish philosopher and Christian mystic Emanuel
Swedenborg (1688-1772). Susannah’s fragile mental state was made worse by the unexpected
death of her father in 1856. From then on, she became increasingly neurotic, Le
Fanu recording in his diary that:
If she took leave of anyone who was
dear to her she was always overpowered with an agonizing frustration that she
could never see them again. If anyone she loved was ill, though not
dangerously, she despaired of their recovery.
The crisis came to a head when Susannah had a vision
of her dead father:
She one night thought she saw the
curtains of her bed at the side next the door drawn, & the darling old man,
dressed in his usual morning suit, holding it aside, stood close to her looking
ten or (I think) twelve years younger than when he died, & with his
delightful smile of fondness & affection beaming upon her [he said] ‘There
is room in the vault for you, my little Sue.’
(Twelve years earlier was when Susannah married Le
Fanu, from which she presumably dated the breach with her father.) Not long
after, in April 1858, she died suddenly from a ‘hysterical attack’ aged only
thirty-four. The grief-stricken Le Fanu stopped writing entirely for the next
three years.
It was another death, this time that of his mother in
1861, that triggered the next, most significant, and final stage in Le Fanu’s
literary career. That year, he bought the Dublin University Magazine for
£850 and becoming both its editor and principal contributor. A period of
intense productivity followed, as Le Fanu vanished from Dublin society so
completely that his friends dubbed him the ‘Invisible Prince’, Graves later
recalling that:
He was for long almost invisible,
except to his family and most familiar friends, unless at odd hours of the
evening, when he might occasionally be seen stealing, like the ghost of his
former self, between his newspaper office and his home in Merrion Square;
sometimes, too, he was to be encountered in an old out-of-the-way bookshop
poring over some rare black letter Astrology or Demonology. To one of these old
bookshops he was at one time a pretty frequent visitor, and the bookseller
relates how he used to come in and ask with his peculiarly pleasant voice and
smile, ‘Any more ghost stories for me, Mr.—?’ and how, on a fresh one being
handed to him, he would seldom leave the shop until he had looked it through.
There followed an uninterrupted run of serial novels,
commencing with the eclectic historical mystery The House by the Churchyard (1863,
later a key point of reference in James Joyce’s even madder Finnegans Wake).
This was followed by Wylder’s Hand and Uncle Silas (1864); Guy
Deverell (1865); All in the Dark (1866); The Tenants of Malory
(1867); A Lost Name and Haunted Lives (1868); The Wyvern
Mystery (1869); Checkmate and The Rose and the Key (1871);
and Willing to Die (1872). The majority of these novels reflected the
current popular trend for Sensation Fiction (with the exception of All in
the Dark, which was a satire on Spiritualism), and the author with which Le
Fanu was most often compared was Wilkie Collins.
Le Fanu’s son, Brinsley, later described his father’s
writing process to the literary historian Stewart Marsh Ellis:
He wrote mostly in bed at night,
using copy-books for his manuscript. He always had two candles by his side on a
small table; one of these dimly glimmering tapers would be left burning while
he took a brief sleep. Then, when he awoke about 2 a.m. amid the darkling
shadows of the heavy furnishings and hangings of his old-fashioned room, he
would brew himself some strong tea – which he drank copiously and frequently
throughout the day – and write for a couple of hours in that eerie period of
the night when human vitality is at its lowest ebb and the Powers of Darkness
rampant and terrifying.
As the Rev. Jennings, the haunted protagonist of
‘Green Tea’ proclaims, ‘I believe that everyone who sets about writing in
earnest does his work, as a friend of mine phrased it, on something—tea,
or coffee, or tobacco.’ Brinsley believed the excessive caffeine intake
contributed to the nightmares that plagued his father, and that these bad
dreams were the source of many a story. It is difficult to read this anecdote
and not think of the malevolent black monkey of ‘Green Tea’, glaring, blaspheming,
and shaking his tiny fists at the doomed Jennings.
Several of these novels were expanded rewrites of
earlier stories. His best-known novel, the gothic mystery Uncle Silas,
started life as ‘Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess’ via ‘The
Murdered Cousin’ from Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery. A Lost Name
was based on ‘The Evil Guest’ (also from the Ghost Stories), which
in turn was a revision of the early story ‘Some Account of the Latter Days of
the Hon. Richard Marston of Dunoran’. ‘A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone
Family’ became The Wyvern Mystery. It is as if the early short
fiction served as roadmaps for the novels, ways in which Le Fanu could explore
and interrogate the themes that clearly haunted him: his Swedenborgian views on
the afterlife, the destructive cycle of family history, that which is hidden
(locked rooms are a recurring device), doppelgängers, and the decline of
the Irish aristocracy. He also contributed to All the Year Round, and
was greatly admired by Dickens, who sought his advice on ‘spectral illusions’
when writing his seminal ghost story ‘The Signalman’ (1866). In addition to
these novels, Le Fanu also compiled his remarkable collection of supernatural
stories In A Glass Darkly (1872), comprising the stories ‘Green Tea’ (first
published in All the Year Round), ‘The Familiar’ (originally ‘The
Watcher’ from the 1851 Ghost Stories), ‘Mr. Justice Harbottle’ (a
prequel to ‘An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’ in which
the story of the hanging ghost is told), ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’ (a
tale of drug-induced catalepsy and premature burial that would give Poe a run
for his money), and the novella Carmilla, a forerunner of Dracula.
He was planning the novel The House of Bondage – a reworking of his
short story ‘The Mysterious Lodger’ – when he died, quite suddenly, in his
sleep on February 7, 1873, probably from a heart attack. Dublin legend has it
that he had been plagued by a recurring nightmare of a derelict house he feared
would bury him and that when his body was found, the attending doctor looked
into his dead, horrified eyes – like a character from one of his stories – and
declared, ‘So the house has fallen at last.’ His children always disputed this,
claiming the look on his face was serene.
It was M.R. James’ recommendation that all those
coming to Le Fanu for the first time should begin with In A Glass
Darkly, ‘where they will find the very best of his shorter stories.’ This
is very good advice. In A Glass Darkly is for scholars of the Victorian
gothic the definitive collection of nineteenth century ghost stories,
the zenith of the so-called ‘Golden Age of the Ghost Story’, the period roughly
between the last of the original gothic romances and the decline of
Spiritualism before the Great War when supernatural fiction became so
ubiquitous that it descended into cliché (much as it has again today through
the industrial output of television streaming services): the era of Poe,
Dickens, G.W.M. Reynolds, Charlotte ‘J.H.’ Riddell, Amelia B. Edwards, Robert
Louis Stevenson, Edith Wharton, Kipling, and, of course, Le Fanu.
‘In A Glass Darkly’ paraphrases the King James version
of 1 Corinthians 13:12: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face
to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’ The
original passage refers to our necessarily partial knowledge of God, which St.
Paul likens to a reflection in a dim or tarnished mirror, before the coming of
Christ will allow us to know God and his ways as he knows us now in full
revelation. Le Fanu, however, is giving this a much more Swedenborgian spin, as
explained by the collection’s framing narrator (framed, himself, by another
editor like Father Purcell before him), the occult detective Dr.
Martin Hesselius, an ancestor of Stoker’s Professor Van Helsing and William
Hope Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki, the ‘Ghost-Finder’:
Of those whose senses are alleged to
be subject to supernatural impressions—some are simply visionaries, and
propagate the illusions of which they complain, from diseased brain or nerves.
Others are, unquestionably, infested by, as we term them, spiritual agencies,
exterior to themselves. Others, again, owe their sufferings to a mixed
condition. The interior sense, it is true, is opened; but it has been and
continues open by the action of disease.
This is pure Swedenborg, as cited by the unfortunate
Rev. Jennings in ‘Green Tea’: ‘When man’s interior sight is opened, which is
that of his spirit, then there appear the things of another life, which cannot
possibly be made visible to the bodily sight.’
The essence of
Swedenborg’s mystical theology, outlined in his Arcana Cœlestia (Heavenly
Mysteries or Secrets of Heaven, 1749) is his ‘correspondence theory’ that there is a
relationship among the natural (‘physical’), the spiritual, and the divine
worlds. Swedenborg claimed to be able to see these other worlds as clearly as
his own as a result of a divine revelation and related these other planes of
existence directly to his interpretation of the bible. (Victor Hugo suggests in
passing in Les Misérables that Swedenborg, once a respected
Enlightenment scientist, had ‘glided into insanity’.) Le Fanu, however,
appreciated the more gothic possibilities of correspondence theory, as later
noted by W.B. Yeats in Explorations:
It
was indeed Swedenborg who affirmed for the modern world, as against the
abstract reasoning of the learned, the doctrine and practice of the desolate
places, of shepherds and midwives, and discovered a world of spirits where
there was scenery like that of earth, human forms, grotesque or beautiful,
senses that knew pleasure and pain, marriage and war, all that could be painted
on canvas, or put into stories to make one’s hair stand up.
This ‘opening
of the interior sense’, as Hesselius calls it, means that some hapless
individuals – the subjects of his case studies, who he never saves – are alert
to the inhabitants of these other planes, which appear as apparitions, demons,
or hallucinations, depending upon the official explanation. (Doctors in Le Fanu
are always wrong, and priests aren’t much more reliable.) This is similarly
true for the protagonist of ‘The Familiar’, Captain Barton, who is, like
Jennings, stalked by something terrible:
The fact is, whatever may be my
uncertainty as to the authenticity of what we are taught to call revelation, of
one fact I am deeply and horribly convinced, that there does exist beyond this
a spiritual world—a system whose workings are generally in mercy hidden from
us—a system which may be, and which is sometimes, partially and terribly
revealed.
The implication is clear: When we can see them,
they can see us.
Hesselius’ strangest case, and probably his most
culturally influential (though ‘Green Tea’ is very popular with horror
anthologists), is that of Carmilla. It was, he wrote, ‘involving, not
improbably, some of the profoundest arcana of our dual existence, and its
intermediates.’ Originally published as a serial in the London
magazine The Dark Blue, the story is narrated by an elderly woman from
Styria in Austria, ‘Laura’, recalling the summer in her teens when a mysterious
young woman, ‘Carmilla’, a homeless and itinerant noblewoman, came to stay at
the family castle. Laura is lonely and Carmilla is the perfect companion, being
charming, affectionate, and beautiful. The two also share an affinity having
each, apparently, dreamed of the other as children, and Carmilla’s designs on
Laura seem to go beyond mere friendship:
Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my
strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond
pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with
languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell
with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardor of a lover; it
embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet over-powering; and with gloating eyes
she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and
she would whisper, almost in sobs, ‘You are mine, you shall be
mine, you and I are one for ever.’ Then she had thrown herself back in her
chair, with her small hands over her eyes, leaving me trembling.
Young women in the nearby village, meanwhile, are
dying of a mysterious illness while Laura dreams at night of being visited by
an enormous black cat…
Aristocratic vampires were not new in 1872. That
distinction goes to Byron’s physician Dr. John Polidori, whose 1819 short story ‘The Vampyre’
introduced the Dracula-like (and Byronic) ‘Lord Ruthven’. There had also been
the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood (1845–47)
by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest (the creators of Sweeney Todd,
the Demon Barber of Fleet Street). That said, the similarities between Carmilla
and fellow Irishman Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) are
striking. The name of Dracula’s insane familiar, ‘R.M. Renfield’, echoes Bertha
Rheinfeldt, a friend of Laura’s family and another of Carmilla’s victims. Both
stories have elaborate framing narratives and feature sexually magnetic antagonists
posing as descendants of themselves; Carmilla and Count Dracula target female
heroines, and both can transform into animals and pass through locked windows
and doors. (Stoker’s Lucy Westenra is also both a Laura and Carmilla figure,
being first human prey then undead predator.) Le Fanu’s ‘Baron Vordenburg’ is a
similar expert to Van Helsing, and their method of killing vampires is
essentially the same, as are the described symptoms of vampirism. The original
opening chapter of Dracula, cut from the final draft and published
separately as the short story ‘Dracula’s Guest’, features the female vampire Countess
Dolingen von Gratz, and is also set in Styria. Fans of Stoker tend to play down
the parallels, but why not read Carmilla and see for yourself? After
all, as Picasso famously said, ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal.’
Had Le Fanu lived longer, he would probably have entered the Victorian gothic pantheon alongside Stoker and Stevenson. But for our purposes, part of the fun of Halloween is finding something scary that we don’t already know off by heart, and, as M.R. James himself conceded, ‘I do not think that there are better ghost stories anywhere than the best of Le Fanu’s.’ So, this All Hallow’s Eve, settle back with Madam Crowl’s Ghost or In A Glass Darkly, preferably at dead of night and, even better, in a solitary chamber, and when the house creaks suddenly, a branch brushes the window, or a door swings slowly open by itself, it will be, as Le Fanu advised, ‘a pleasing terror’ that will thrill you.
Image: Engraving from Le Fanu's 1872 Carmilla Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo