To M.R. James,
most ecomonical of writers,
who could coax horror
out of a ragged blanket.
James had been dead for some fifty years when this collection was first published, making Westall's inscription more homage than 'gift' to the master of the ghost story.
There are three parts to the dedication that fairly define the Jamesian style:
1) "most economical": James had an exceptional (and exceptionally influential) prose style. In his ghost stories, hardly ever longer than 7,000 words each, the voice is inimitable: a diffident, donnish plainness simply recounting a story once heard over sherry in the Combination rooms of a Cambridge college; a barely contained, sly humour, inwardly laughing at the silliness of the innocent protagonist; a ruthless, razor-sharp nastiness at the climax.
2) "coax[ing] horror": the verb here is perfect. James himself wrote:
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.
The "ominous thing" is always "coaxed", lured out of hiding, unobtrusively, hardly noticed...until it is too late. The prose, of course, has a lot to do with it - that calm, level, logical tone only once allowing itself to reveal the terror beneath the surface...by which time, as the reader, you're trapped. It's a very clever - and utterly addictive - style.
3) "a ragged blanket": in so many of James' ghost stories, the central stimulus of the supernatural terror, often comes from something very mundane, something we would all be familiar, something homely, unimpressive, ordinary. Westall is referring to "Oh, Whistle, and I'll come to You, My Lad" where the finding of a little pipe in the sands calls the 'thing' to the bedroom of the protagonist which then manifests itself physically in the raising of twisted bedsheets. It's a horrible moment, doubly so in that the bed represents the place of personal safety, peace and calm, but which has been invaded. Elsewhere, James draws on the most commonplace of objects - a pair of binoculars, a library book, a framed picture - to let loose the most terrifying of shocks.
I will be reading a fair few of Westall's ghost stories this Easter vacation and, as I have done before with the short fiction of E Nesbit and Philippa Pearce, will regularly blog my thoughts. But it will be the Jamesian influence that I shall explore specifically, the economy, the coaxing...and the ragged blankets of Westall's development of the master's style.
"The Devil and Clocky Watson" (from Antique Dust)
A haunted clock comes into one man's possession and then very quickly leaves it to wreak a different kind of effect on the life of a more unscrupulous antiques dealer.
There is an overtly sexualised atmosphere in this story which James, who although it might be said infers it in his stories, would never have made so explicit:
They [contemporary ghost stories] drag in sex too, which is a fatal mistake; sex is tiresome enough in the novels; in a ghost story, or as the backbone of a ghost story, I have no patience with it. [JAMES, 1929]
Ghost stories can, however, very successfully break this standard. Certainly the exceptional work of John Gordon, for one, calls out James' rather prudish ruling; in any case, I can't think that James expected 'his' kind of ghost story would develop in the hands of other writers if all of his pronouncements were kept to the letter.
I'm trying not to hold up Westall's tale unfairly against James, despite the dedication at the start of the book, but if I didn't know the M.R. James connection with the volume, I'd be hard-pressed to establish a Jamesian influence. Overall, I found "Clocky Watson" an uncomfortable story. The 'possession' of Ashden after buying the clock felt distasteful; and I wasn't particularly taken by the ending, with Clocky hardly falling foul of the ghost/devil. Surely this was meant to follow the intended formula, or have I missed something? What was particularly good, though, was the grubby depiction of the the world of antique dealing. I'm sure James with his obsessive detailing of ancient manuscripts and dusty tomes - his daily bread and butter - would have been pleased with Westall's invocation of his own world, too.
"The Woolworth Spectacles" (from Antique Dust)
Before I begin reading this one, I've seen the title in a few reprint anthologies and immediately thought of "A View From a Hill", James' very eerie story about a cursed pair of binoculars which can see into the past. Let's see if there's a connection...
...well, certainly there was a 'curse' of a kind, on the sort of everyday object that James liked to invest with malice. However, Westall breaks the 'no sex please, we're Jamesians' rule again. I liked the antique trade setting - Mr Hazlitt here taking the place of Ashden - and the enticing possibility that something rare and wonderful (or evil!) could be waiting hidden in the local junk shop or cash-and-carry. That is very in keeping with James' formula and Maude takes the role of that innocent bystander caught up in something terribly dark through no fault of her own. I found the ending quite terrifying and felt Maude's horror more acutely for all her original goodness. There's something about this story, too, that makes for a better 'explanation' than the straightforwardly supernatural one posed rather abruptly on the last page: James would have stuck at a straightforward curse; Westall shifts things forward quite a bit, focusing on character more than his dedicatee would have done.
"Woman and Home" (from The Call and other strange stories)
A boy skives from school, his last resort from a group of bullies, and finds himself drawn to an old house that both tempts him and, at the same time, withholds its secrets.
This was a very successful story, largely from its burgeoning sense of something very wrong going on but ultimate lack of any supernatural explanation. The description of the smell of rottenness, likened to the pork that went off when the boy's parents' freezer broke down, is an especially horrid touch; in fact, for me, it was the most uncanny thing about the story. I like that something so rationally possible holds a heavily nasty influence on the reader, inexplicably so when the smell returns later in the story...but this time, fainter. This is what 'coaxing' of horror means!
"The Making of Me" (from Echoes of War)
Memories of a boy's grandfather that go deeply into long-lost stories...and how the past comes to affect us all.
There is nothing supernatural about this but it has made me consider what a ghost story is for. I guess one reason for their telling is to connect us to our past; M.R. James, one of the great masters, used it predominantly as a warning against arrogance (not curiosity, as one of his stories might lead one to believe!). In "The Making of Me" it's a similar message, how the past when 'treated gently' might bring peace to the present. There is a line near the end of the story:
The world goes forward to drugs and violence and fruit machine addiction. I go backwards, to where I am truly free.
A line that rather sums up James' own view of life in way, a man who spent his life in libraries cluttered with ancient manuscripts, within cloistered walls of equally ancient colleges - Eton and King's, as even his own memoir establishes - and whose private, inward-looking real self was kept in check behind a deceptively donnish exterior. While the grandfather in Westall's story is a very far distance from James, there is perhaps more of that Cambridge academic lying not far beneath the surface than may at first appear.
One further line:
But he's done enough. Taught me that every object tells a story, and every dent in every object tells a story.
Yes. Westall puts it very well indeed.
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