Soldiers and Ghosts

“A Baffled Ambuscade” and “Two Military Executions”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?)
From Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs

Interesting Links

“The Weirdness of Ambrose Bierce: From ‘Owl Creek Bridge’ to Horror and Satire” (Anthony Aycock, Reactor)

“Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War” (Jim McWilliams, The New York Times)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Ambrose Bierce
• “A Horrid, Hellish Dream,” George E. Chamberlin
• “The Nameless Dead,” Kate Cumming
• “War” Jack London

Buy the book
Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs
880 pages
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $30.00

“‘It means this,’ he said, throwing open his coat.” Illustration by American artist Charles B. Falls (1874–1960) for “Two Military Executions,” the second of two “Soldiers and Ghosts” stories by Ambrose Bierce in the November 1906 issue of Cosmopolitan.

---

In the aftermath of the Battle of Nashville in December 1864, Union General Samuel Beatty received word that one of his brigades, in pursuit of the retreating Confederate forces, had become separated from the main army and was in danger of being routed. First Lieutenant Ambrose Bierce was assigned to lead a force to reinforce the isolated brigade. Two decades later, he mockingly recalled and embellished his role in the “rescue”:

I never felt so brave in all my life. I rode a hundred yards in advance, prepared to expostulate single handed with the victorious enemy at whatever point I might encounter him. I dashed forward through every open space into every suspicious looking wood and spurred to the crest of every hill, exposing myself recklessly to draw the Confederate fire and disclose their position. I told the commander of the relief column that he need not throw out any advance guard as a precaution against the ambuscade—I would myself act in that perilous capacity, and by driving in the rebel skirmishers gain time for him to form his line of battle in case I should not be numerically strong enough to scoop on the entire opposition at one wild dash. I begged him, however, to recover my body if I fell.

Arriving at the destination, Bierce quickly realized that Confederate forces had fled the scene and that the detached “troops were holding their ground nobly, reading dime novels and playing draw poker.” His commander later learned the report had been the result of a misunderstanding but, Bierce joked, “my unusual gallantry elicited the highest commendation in general orders, and will never, I trust, be forgotten by a grateful country.”

Several biographers and critics have suggested that this expedition and Bierce’s illusory bravery probably inspired “A Son of the Gods,” one of the most popular of his stories during his lifetime. A “young officer on a snow-white horse” with a bright scarlet saddle blanket suicidally gallops onto the open field in the hope of learning if and where Confederate forces are hidden on the other side. The officer and his horse are shot and killed, thus revealing the hidden enemy, but his suicidal bravery unexpectedly motivates the soldiers to rush out to avenge his death, resulting in the “many, many needless dead” the hero had hoped to avoid by his selfless act.

“A Son of the Gods” is not Bierce’s only story featuring a protagonist who gives up his life to save his fellow soldiers. Late in his career, he used another of his war experiences to create a second tale with a self-sacrificing hero. In April 1863, Bierce took part in an expedition to raid the Confederate camp in Woodbury, Tennessee, and to chase the fleeing soldiers into an ambush. The Union troops marched fourteen miles through a territory notorious for soldiers and snipers hiding in the forest. Although the concluding ambush had to be called off, the Third Ohio Cavalry commanded by Major Charles B. Seidel successfully raided the camp. Colonel William B. Hazen, Bierce’s commanding officer, reported “three of the enemy killed (his wounded is not known)” and the capture of “twenty-five prisoners, fifty horses, four wagons, eight mules, with all their baggage and provisions.”

This nighttime raid forms the basis of “A Baffled Ambuscade,” in which Bierce portrays Major Seidel under his real name. As in “A Son of the Gods,” the tale spotlights a soldier who bravely risks his own life to reveal the enemy hiding in the woods, yet Bierce adds a supernatural element to what would otherwise be a straightforward report of a skirmish. The ghost is so ambiguously and subtly introduced that many readers who encounter the story on its own are perplexed about what happens. When “A Baffled Ambuscade” was originally published in the November 1906 issue of Cosmopolitan, however, it appeared with another tale under the heading “Soldiers and Ghosts,” thereby letting readers know that they were about to read two ghost stories. In addition, the appearance of the ghost-like figure in the magazine version is less ambiguously (and more gruesomely) the image of a dead man, “his face showing a great gout of blood.” When Bierce reprinted the story in the 1910 edition of Can Such Things Be?, he eliminated the gore, perhaps calculating that readers wouldn’t need everything spelled out in a book collecting three dozen tales of the supernatural.

For the second of his “Soldiers and Ghosts” stories, Bierce once again mined one of his Civil War experiences. “Two Military Executions” describes a unit much like Bierce’s 9th Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment under General Don Carlos Buell, and the climax of the story occurs after the first day of the Battle of Shiloh in April 1863, when the regiment “ferried over the Tennessee River to assist in succoring Grant’s beaten army.” (Bierce disparaged Grant in numerous stories and essays and attributed the meager Union victory at Shiloh to the last-minute arrival of reinforcements commanded by Buell.) In this second story, the supernatural element seems more obvious—although Christopher Kiernan Coleman in an article on Bierce’s Civil War experiences in Tennessee intriguingly suggests that the story is ambiguous enough to be interpreted as an account about what we would now call fragging.

For our Story of the Week selection, we present both of the “Soldiers and Ghosts” stories together again, using the revised texts from the 1910 edition of Can Such Things Be?

Note: In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Sir Andrew Aguecheek is a vainglorious fool goaded into challenging Olivia (disguised as Cesario) to a duel: “I’d have seen him damn’d ere I’d have challeng’d him.”

*   *   *

C onnecting Readyville and Woodbury was a good, hard turnpike nine or ten miles long. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

The Romance of Certain Old Clothes

Henry James (1843–1916)
From Henry James: Complete Stories 1864–1874

Interesting Links

Henry James’s eighteen tales of the supernatural, as identified by biographer Leon Edel

“How The Haunting of Bly Manor Puts a Bittersweet Twist on The Turn of the Screw” (Megan McCluskey, Time)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Real Right Thing,” Henry James
• “Kerfol,” Edith Wharton
• “The Birth-mark,” Nathaniel Hawthorne
• “Absolute Evil,” Julian Hawthorne

Buy the book
Henry James: Complete Stories 1864–1874
The Last of the Valerii | A Landscape Painter | The Madonna of the Future | 21 other stories | 975 pages
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $32.00

Detail from The Bride, 1856, oil on canvas by English painter Abraham Solomon (1823–1862). (WikiCommons)

---

When Henry James was twenty-two years old, he published in the pages of The Nation a review of Aurora Floyd, the latest novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, an English author who three years earlier had published the extraordinarily popular Lady Audley's Secret. James criticized the excesses of Braddon’s “sensation novels,” as they were called: “Bigamy, murder, and arson are exceptional. Miss Braddon distributes these materials with a generous hand, and attracts the attention of her public.” He compared Braddon’s novels with other sensational romances and made a comment in passing that would inform all future discussions of his later novella The Turn of the Screw:

A good ghost story, to be half as terrible as a good murder-story, must be connected at a hundred points with the common objects of life. The best ghost story probably ever written—a tale published some years ago in Blackwood's Magazine—was constructed with an admirable understanding of this principle.

The unnamed tale praised by James, as many of his readers would have known, is Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s “The Haunted and the Haunters” (1859), in which its narrator enunciates the author’s view “that the Supernatural is the Impossible, and that what is called supernatural is only a something in the laws of nature of which we have been hitherto ignorant.” The implication, then, is that a tale of the inexplicable, to be successful, needed to have its basis in reality.

When James wrote his review, he had published only two of his 112 stories and novellas. Three years later, he published “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” his eighth work of short fiction—and the first of eighteen tales of a genre James referred to as “quasi-supernatural” or “gruesome,” ten of which are often categorized as ghost stories. While one can find in this ghostly tale subdued hints of his readings of sensational literature, the most obvious influence is the Gothic fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Four years earlier, when Hawthorne died at the age of 59, James was devastated: “I sit on my belated bed, I say, and yield to the pang that made me positively and loyally cry,” he recalled in his memoir Notes of a Son and Brother. For much of his career James would seem both to incorporate and to resist Hawthorne’s influence. “If you have a mind to, you can see Nathaniel Hawthorne in Henry James’s work at the very beginning, in the middle years, and perhaps most impressively in the last masterpieces,” the literary scholar Peter Buitenhuis more than half a century ago. “Everywhere you look in James you find Hawthorne.”

In 1879 James published Hawthorne, a book-length work of literary criticism, in which he expressed his mixed feelings about the stories and novels by the idol of his youth. “There is in all of them something cold and light and thin, something belonging to the imagination alone, which indicates a man but little disposed to multiply his relations, his points of contact, with society.” This lack of connection to the world outside Hawthorne’s door was, in James’s view, displaced by the confines of the imagination—and even the fantastic:

Hawthorne was a man of fancy, and I suppose that in speaking of him it is inevitable that we should feel ourselves confronted with the familiar problem of the difference between the fancy and the imagination. . . . I am often struck, especially in the shorter tales, of which I am now chiefly speaking, with a kind of small ingenuity, a taste for conceits and analogies, which bears more particularly what is called the fanciful stamp.

James had foreshadowed this criticism in various places, included an 1874 review of one of the melodramatic novels of Hawthorne’s son:

Mr. Julian Hawthorne, who is doubtless weary of being contrasted with his father, has not the latter’s profundity or delicacy; but he looks at things in the same way—from the imagination, and not from observation—and he is equally fond of symbolisms and fanciful analogies.

“The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” was James’s first attempt to bridge the chasm between the real world and the imaginative one. Set in colonial Massachusetts, this Hawthorne-like story about sibling rivalry ends with an unambiguously supernatural element. Unlike most of James’s earliest stories, it was revised and reprinted in his story collections, once in 1875 and again in 1885. Yet the story fell short of the standards he later developed for himself—the supernatural twist is sudden, sensational, and explicit—and he excluded it from the 26-volume New York edition published between 1907 and 1909. As T. J. Lustig writes in Henry James and the Ghostly, “Opening the Pandora’s box of romance, James discovers that in practice there is a contradiction, or at least an incompatibility, between realism and the ghost story.”

Nevertheless, the story still has many fans: it has often been included in anthologies of Gothic and horror fiction (including American Gothic Tales, edited by Joyce Carol Oates), and it was recently one of several Henry James stories adapted as an episode of the acclaimed Netflix series The Haunting of Bly Manor.

Notes: The father of the Willoughby sisters names them after Shakespearean characters: Viola is the lead character of Twelfth Night, and Perdita (“the lost one”) is the daughter of the King of Sicily in The Winter’s Tale. The French expression belle jeunesse means “beautiful youth”; empressement translates as “alacrity.” The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), a novel by Oliver Goldsmith, tells the story of the burdens endured by the title character’s family after the bankruptcy of the firm in which much of his fortune is invested.

*   *   *

Toward the middle of the eighteenth century there lived in the Province of Massachusetts a widowed gentlewoman, the mother of three children. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Miss Mary Pask

Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
From Edith Wharton: Collected Stories 1911–1937

Interesting Links
“Ghost Hunting with Edith Wharton” (J. Nicole Jones, The Paris Review)

“Wendy Wasserstein on Edith Wharton’s ‘desire to love & to look pretty’ ” (Library of America)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Kerfol,” Edith Wharton
• “An Itinerant House,” Emma Frances Dawson
• “The Shell of Sense,” Olivia Howard Dunbar
• “Luella Miller,” Mary Wilkins Freeman
• “Golden Baby,” Alice Brown

Buy the book:
Edith Wharton: Collected Stories 1911–1937
Xingu • Roman Fever • A Bottle of Perrier • All Souls • 25 other stories • 848 pages
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $31.50

Save $25 when you buy both volumes of Edith Wharton’s stories.

Image of ghost produced by double exposure, 1899, photographer unknown. National Archives (UK).

---

When Edith Wharton was a child, she fell deathly ill with typhoid fever. While she was recovering, she begged to be allowed to read again, and two friends lent her a book with “robbers & ghosts,” which contained scenes that terrified her nine-year-old imagination and brought on a relapse. It was a book that would have never been permitted by her parents; Wharton’s father had even banned from his library the works of the Edgar Allan Poe, who he regarded as “an atheist and blasphemer.”

When she recovered from her illness a second time, “it was to enter a world haunted by formless horrors,” she wrote in “Life and I,” an autobiographical fragment published decades after her death. “I had been naturally a fearless child; now I lived in a state of chronic fear.” She suffered from hallucinations for several years and was stricken with terror whenever she had to wait “for the door to be opened . . . before It caught me!” She confessed that “till I was twenty-seven or eight, I could not sleep in the room with a book containing a ghost-story, & that I have frequently had to burn books of this kind, because it frightened me to know they were downstairs in the library!”

By the time she was forty, Wharton graduated from burning ghost stories to writing them. Between 1902 and her death in 1937, she published the eleven stories later collected in her final book, Ghosts, including “All Souls’,” the story she finished shortly before her death. Wharton’s supernatural tales had far more to do with disturbed (and disturbing) people and human interactions than with spectral images—and sometimes they resolved their mysteries without actually resorting to paranormal phenomenon. Like the rest of her fiction, many of her ghost stories featured women characters who, various readers paradoxically observed, were indecent or too sophisticated, vulgar or snobbish, immoral or prudish:

I received what is surely one of the tersest and most vigorous letters ever penned by an amateur critic. “Dear Madam,” my unknown correspondent wrote, “have you never known a respectable woman? If you have, in the name of decency write about her!” It seems a long way from that comminatory cry to the point of view of the critic who, referring the other day to the republication (in an anthology of ghost stories) of one of my tales, ‘The Lady’s Maid’s Bell’, scathingly said it was hard to believe that a ghost created by so refined a writer as Mrs. Wharton would do anything so gross as to ring a bell!

During the 1920s, when she was in her sixties, Wharton published a number of her major works in a women’s magazine called Pictorial Review, which had been established in 1899 as a vehicle to promote and distribute dress patterns for the American Fashion Company; by 1930 it boasted more than two million readers. Four of her novels, including The Age of Innocence, were serialized in its pages, and four of her shorter works, including two ghost stories, appeared there as well. “This publishing relationship put Wharton’s work in front of a new audience, drew the attention of the film industry, and increased her readership exponentially,” literary scholar Noreen O’Connor writes in an essay examining how the magazine transformed Wharton’s audience, her fortune, and the public perception of her writing. “The new publishing arrangement also paid handsomely; McCall’s and The Delineator engaged in bidding wars with Pictorial Review for rights to publish Wharton’s work.” Each of her novels during the 1920s earned her from $18,000 to $40,000 for the magazine rights alone, and she earned far more in royalties as nearly every book became a best seller. At least six movie adaptations were made between 1918 and 1934, including a now-lost silent film version of Glimpses of the Moon that used dialogue title cards written by F. Scott Fitzgerald (most of which probably didn’t end up in the final cut). A hit Broadway production of The Age of Innocence in 1928–29 earned Wharton another $23,500.

“Miss Mary Pask” was one of the two ghost stories published in Pictorial Review. The verdict from Wharton’s contemporary critics was mixed: While praising the story for its mood and setting, a reviewer in The New York Times faulted the “trickery” of the story as derivative of Poe’s tales (which, to be fair, it is—deliberately so). Other critics seemed desperate to find fault with her stories from the period. A critic in the North American Review dismissed “Miss Mary Pask” as “silly” and “inconsequential”; what he found particularly galling was that the thoughts of the emotionally frail narrator were ungrammatical. Equally contemptuous of half a dozen other selections that had appeared in women’s magazines, the reviewer ended by suggesting that if “Mrs. Wharton is determined to continue the inviting path of short story writing,” then she should consult the “familiar, yet incomparable, O. Henry and read, read and read him again.”

Yet, as so often seems the case, her “inconsequential” story has been resurrected by scholars and critics in the last half century. Among its earliest fans was the novelist Louis Auchincloss, who singled it out in his 1961 biography of Wharton as one of her better, “more ominous” ghost tales. More recent readers have focused on the subversive element that none of Wharton’s contemporary male reviewers could bring themselves to mention: the not-so-subtle sexual desires and pent-up loneliness of the spectral woman encountered by the story’s narrator. Wharton herself says that, as a ghost, Mary Pask can “express at last what the living woman had always had to keep dumb and hidden.” Or, as the late British scholar Nickianne Moody rephrased it, “women have to be dead before they can say what they feel or think,” particularly if they are speaking to a man. Once the story’s final secret is revealed, readers who revisit the earlier dialogue between the narrator and Mary Pask will find that it takes on an entirely different cast. “In this little story that seemed at first to be a charming trifle in Wharton's ghostly oeuvre,” writes cultural historian John C. Tibbetts, “there is a terrible social insight that is devastating.”

Note: Baie des Trépassés (Bay of the Dead), is on the west coast of Finistère, in Brittany, France.

*   *   *

It was not till the following spring that I plucked up courage to tell Mrs. Bridgeworth what had happened to me that night at Morgat. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

The Black Dog

Stephen Crane (1871–1900)
From Stephen Crane: Prose & Poetry

Interesting Links
“Stephen Crane and a Sussex Ghost” (Jot101)

“On Cora Crane and the Literary Women Who Prop Up Literary Men” (Jaime Fuller, LitHub)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Four Men in a Cave,” Stephen Crane
• “A Dog’s Tale,” Mark Twain
• “Pelt,” Carol Emshwiller

Buy the book
Stephen Crane: Prose & Poetry
Includes The Red Badge of Courage, Maggie, George’s Mother, The Third Violet, “The Monster,” other stories, journalism, poetry, and more
1,379 pages
List price: $50.00
Web store price: $35.00

Moonlight, c. 1885–95. Oil on wood panel by American artist Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847–1919). Courtesy The Philips Collection.

---

When he was eight years old, Stephen Crane wrote the earliest poem that has survived among his papers, a four-stanza work that begins:

I’d Rather Have—
Last Christmas they gave me a sweater,
      And a nice warm suit of wool
But I’d rather be cold and have a dog,
      To watch when I come from school. . . .

One of Crane’s earliest stories—and the first he submitted to a national magazine—was also about a dog. Although it has survived only in fragments, it appears to have been about a boy who is attacked by a bear and rescued by his dog. The story, “Jack,” was submitted to the children’s magazine, St. Nicholas, while Crane was a student at Syracuse University. The editor rejected it, because he had a surplus of dog stories already in hand, but he praised the story highly enough that Crane bragged about the rejection letter to at least one fellow student, Frank Moxon, who also recalled Crane’s belief that “the instinctive attitude of a dog toward a new human acquaintance was an infallible test of character and that no man who felt repugnance or even indifference toward canines” could be trusted to be kind to humans.

Stephen and Cora Crane were famous (bordering on notorious) for their love of dogs; during their four years together they had as many as five at one time. When the couple rented a manor house in Brede Place, England, the dogs were known to terrorize the sheep in the village and Stephen ended up in court once for neglecting to get licenses. Stephen befriended the novelist Joseph Conrad and told him that his son “must have a dog, a boy ought to have a dog.” The only thing Jessie Conrad remembered about Crane’s first of many visits with her husband was that he “discoursed gravely on the merits of his three dogs, Sponge, Flannel, and Ruby.”

The story of one of the Cranes’ dogs in particular captured the hearts of Stephen and Cora and their friends. The Cranes went to the Continent in the spring of 1897 to cover the Greco-Turkish War for the New York Journal. Cora initially began reporting on the refugee situation in Athens but eventually joined her husband at the front, and both were on the scene for the Battle of Velestino. John Bass, who was the chief of the Journal’s news bureau in Europe, sent home a dispatch, “How Novelist Crane Acts on the Battlefield,” knowing that Journal readers would be interested in how the now-famous author of The Red Badge of Courage would behave while witnessing his first real battle. Bass reported that he saw Crane sitting atop a box of ammunition and lighting a cigarette, a casual act also witnessed by a fellow journalist from a Chicago paper who described him as aspiring “to the championship of inspired idiocy.” Bass’s piece also recorded that “amid the singing bullets and smashing shells the novelist stopped, picked up a fat, waddling puppy and immediately christened it Velestino, the Journal Dog.”

It seems unlikely that Bass witnessed the incident himself, and Cora later claimed that she was the one who scooped up the dog. Regardless, the Cranes found themselves with a new puppy and resolved to take Velestino back to England. In Athens Crane sent to his employers “The Dogs of War,” an article describing the rescue and its aftermath. At one point the Cranes nearly lost Velestino when Stephen was separated from it while he and his party were under attack from shellfire, but after a series of convoluted adventures the puppy was rescued a second time. “Before he reached Athens,” Crane boasted, “he was easily the most famous dog in Greece.” The Cranes eventually reached Paris and stayed in a relatively well-appointed hotel, where Velestino set about destroying the carpet and drapes in their room, resulting in damages that cost the couple almost a hundred pounds—an expense they could hardly afford. Barely two months later, alas, the dog fell sick with distemper. Stephen wrote to a journalist who had stayed with them in Athens on the return trip and had purchased a collar and leash to keep the puppy from getting lost again:

Velestino has just died—not two hours ago. He died in Cora’s bedroom with all the pillows under him which our poverty could supply. For eleven days we fought death for him, thinking of nothing of anything but his life. He made a fine manly fight, with only little grateful laps of his tongue on Cora’s hands, for he knew that she was trying to help him. . . . We are burying him tomorrow in the rhododendron bed in the garden. He will wear your collar in his grave.

Dogs are scattered throughout Crane’s oeuvre, including such stories as “Yellow Under-Sized Dog,” about a dog who “works” at a construction site, and “A Dark Brown Dog,” a devastating tale that many critics read as a political allegory. In his novel The Third Violet, the dog Stanley (modeled after his brother’s setter) steals nearly every scene. The reviewer for the London Spectator praised Stanley as “one of the most delightful animals we have encountered in recent fiction,” while even a negative review in The New York Times noted that the dog’s “geniality and constancy almost reconciles one to Mr. Crane’s manner of telling a story.”

Last week’s Story of the Week selection was Edith Wharton’s “Kerfol,” a ghost story featuring spectral dogs; here we present Crane’s canine ghost story written more than twenty years earlier. Like Wharton, the young Stephen Crane was fond of dogs and of ghost stories—at Brede Place he and Cora would inflict both on their guests—but the difference in this case is that “The Black Dog” is a parody of ghost stories, and more specifically (in the view of some readers) a spoof of Ambrose Bierce’s tales of horror. It is one of Crane’s first five short stories, all of them comic tales set in the Catskill Mountains of New York’s Sullivan County. Each story features four unnamed campers, identified simply as pudgy, little, tall, and quiet, who traipse aimlessly through the countryside, encountering various adventures in which the men are frightened by people or incidents that are much less than they seem. (The first of these tales, “Four Men in a Cave,” is a previous Story of the Week selection, and its introduction contains more information about the Sullivan Country sketches.)

*   *   *

There was a ceaseless rumble in the air as the heavy raindrops battered upon the laurel-thickets and the matted moss and haggard rocks beneath. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Kerfol

Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
From Edith Wharton: Collected Stories 1911–1937

Interesting Links

“Why Edith Wharton Gives Us the Whim-Whams” (Anne Ray, Tor.com)

Remarks on Edith Wharton’s Collected Stories by editor Maureen Howard (Library of America)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Eyes,” Edith Wharton
• “The Hossack Murder,” Susan Glaspell
• “The Shadowy Third,” Ellen Glasgow

Buy the book
Edith Wharton: Collected Stories 1911–1937
Xingu | Roman Fever | A Bottle of Perrier | All Souls | 25 other stories | 848 pages
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $31.50

View of the Château de Tonquédec at dusk in Brittany, 1879, oil on canvas by French artist Félix Jean Clément Choisnard (1846–1924).

---

“‘I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them,’ is much more than the cheap paradox it seems to many,” Edith Wharton wrote in the preface to the 1937 collection Ghosts. “‘To believe,’ in that sense, is a conscious act of the intellect, and it is in the warm darkness of the prenatal fluid far below our conscious reason that the faculty dwells with which we apprehend the ghosts we may not be endowed with the gift of seeing.”

Wharton died during the preparation of Ghosts, which gathered ten previously published tales of the supernatural with her final story, “All Souls’.” As her last book, it is perhaps a surprising endnote to her five-decade career. “When I first began to read, then to write, ghost stories,” she explained, “I was conscious of a common medium between myself and my readers, of their meeting me halfway among the primeval shadows, and filling in the gaps in my narrative with sensations and divinations akin to my own.” To Wharton, whether ghosts actually “existed” was beside the point: “It is luckier for a ghost to be vividly imagined than dully ‘experienced.’” One might even say “there are no ghosts, but only tellers of ghost stories.” A successful ghost story was one that produced “a thermometrical quality; if it sends a cold shiver down one’s spine, it has done its job and done it well.” Yet she feared most of all that modern life was bankrupting readers’ imaginations and their ability to understand and enjoy not only ghost stories but any kind of literature. She rarely received mail after her stories appeared in magazines, but in 1931, when “Pomegranate Seeds” was published in Ladies’ Home Journal, she was “bombarded by a host of inquirers,” many of whom demanded “to be told how a ghost could write a letter, or put it in a letterbox.” In those italics, one can almost hear the echo of Wharton’s exasperated sigh over how her readers have missed the point.

“Kerfol” is unique among her ghost stories because the specters are not humans, but dogs. She recorded her feelings about her own beloved pets in a diary entry in 1924:

I am secretly afraid of animals—of all animals except dogs, and even of some dogs. I think it is because of the Usness in their eyes, with the underlying Not-Usness which belies it, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them; left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us.

Throughout her life Wharton had several dogs at a time; she was a charter member of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and she participated in a campaign to place water bowls for dogs on the sidewalks of New York City. To this day, a cemetery for half a dozen of her dogs is preserved at the Mount, her famous home in Lenox, Massachusetts. When her last dog, eleven-year-old Linky, died, she told a friend, “Now, for the first time, literally, I am faced with real loneliness. . . . Oh, what a train of ghosts will follow her burial today.” Wharton died four months later.

A “train” of canine ghosts haunt “Kerfol,” written during the early months of World War I, when Wharton was living in France. It is the “strangest piece of fiction to come out of her war years,” writes Hermione Lee in her biography of Wharton. Indeed, literary scholar R.W.B. Lewis notes that, rather than vehicles for scary apparitions, some of her ghost stories are “fictional strategies” that allowed her to deal “with intensities of sexual behavior by distancing them into the spectral and legendary.” The real horror in “Kerfol” is spousal abuse. A wealthy bachelor, urged by friends to purchase a home in Brittany, finds the estate of Kerfol devoid of human presence and populated instead by a pack of eerily silent dogs. Directed to a regional chronicle by a local resident, the narrator reads the 200-year-old account of a woman tyrannized by her jealous husband and of his gruesome murder—a mix that Lewis calls “one of Edith Wharton’s finest exercises in the imagination of violence, terror, and the erotic.”

When we first presented this story as a Story of the Week selection more than a decade ago, numerous readers were perplexed by the abrupt, enigmatic final sentence, particularly by the offhanded mention to the famous seventeenth-century mathematician and logician Blaise Pascal. Suffice to say that this name-drop might be read as Wharton’s sly wink at the struggle between the readers’ willingness to believe the story and a rationalism that would try to explain it away. Pascal, like the fictional character Hervé de Lanrivain, became a Jansenist, and he later had a mystical experience. His most famous work, Pensées, is a posthumously published, unfinished manuscript of fragments attempting to reconcile reason and logic with belief in God (see, for example, “Pascal’s wager”), and it was one of Wharton’s favorite books ever since she first encountered Pascal's writings as a young girl. One might imagine Lanrivain, then, recounting his lover’s experiences to Pascal, and the two men attempting to square her story with the “realities” of the world.

Notes: A chemin de ronde is the walkway behind a castle battlement, where defenders would patrol the ramparts. A “Sleeve-dog” can refer to any small dog that can be carried on one arm but often refers to a Pekingese. At the time of the story-within-the-story, Pekingese were owned exclusively by the royal family of China; any dogs outside the court would have been stolen and smuggled—a serious crime. The breed became popular in the West during Wharton’s lifetime and she had several of them. The pardon of Locronan is a penitential ceremony and festival held in July, one of several such pilgrimages unique to the Catholics of Brittany. Robert Arnauld d'Andilly became the head of the Arnauld family after the death of his father; he and his nineteen siblings (ten of whom outlived their father) were all prominent Jansenists connected with the Benedictine abbey of Port Royal. A powerful figure in the French court, d'Andilly used his political influence to defend fellow Jansenists from the attacks of the Jesuits and the condemnations of the popes.

The diary excerpt quoted above is from Hermione Lee’s biography of Edith Wharton (2007).

*   *   *

“You ought to buy it,” said my host; “it’s just the place for a solitary-minded devil like you. And it would be rather worth while to own the most romantic house in Brittany. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Luella Miller

Mary Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930)
From American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

Interesting Links

“Sucking the Life Right Out of the Room: Mary Wilkins Freeman’s ‘Luella Miller’” (Ruthanna Emrys and Anne M. Pillsworth, Tor.com)

Exhibit: “Letters of 19th and 20th Century Women Writers: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman” (Loyola University Chicago Special Collections)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Town Poor,” Sarah Orne Jewett
• “The Little Room,” Madeline Yale Wynne
• “An Itinerant House,” Emma Frances Dawson
• “How I Went Out to Service,” Louisa May Alcott

“All but Luella shone white in the moonlight.” Illustration by American artist Peter Newell (1862–1924) for “Luella Miller” when it appeared in the December 1902 issue of Everybody’s Magazine. Click on the image to see the full drawing.

---

Mary Eleanor Wilkins had been living on her close friend Mary Wales’s farm south of Boston for twenty years when, on New Year’s Day 1902, she married Charles Manning Freeman at his home in Metuchen, New Jersey. The newlyweds first met a full decade earlier, when she was nearing forty and he was thirty-two. By the time they were introduced, Mary Wilkins had made a name for herself as a writer of short stories of New England “local color,” and she had just finished Pembroke, which is still her best-known novel. Charles Freeman had briefly been an assistant professor of chemistry at Rutgers before entering medical school; after he graduated, he never practiced medicine but instead assumed control of his family’s lucrative business in coal and lumber—a career that utterly bored him. Wilkins’s friends described Freeman to her as someone who acted far younger than his years and who loved his drink, but she grew fond of his nonconformity. Her friends’ judgments proved prescient; Freeman’s alcoholism and drug use would eventually land him in a series of asylums and hospitals, leading to the couple’s separation in the late 1910s and his death in 1923.

In the happier months immediately following their marriage, however, Mary Wilkins Freeman acclimated herself to the mansions and servants of her new neighborhood. Mocking her home’s “seventy-eight doors and five sets of stairs,” she described her new life in letters to a friend:

I have two maids and one of them is almost as good as a housekeeper. The other is not yet wholly materialized as “help” but I don’t worry. I have made up my mind if my house is clean enough so there is no immediate danger of typhoid, and we have enough to eat, it is the principal thing.

She admitted to another correspondent that she was “keeping house horribly, and not managing well my servants,” and she was often tempted to help with some of the chores. “What's all this?” her husband barked at her one day, as the finances dwindled because they were having an even bigger house built down the street. “Making a cake when the same time would produce a story worth five hundred!”

During the first three years of marriage, while the new home was under construction, Mary finished two novels and numerous stories, including a half dozen ghost stories that she collected in 1903 as The Wind in the Rose-Bush and Other Tales of the Supernatural. In the decades after her death in 1930, scholars largely ignored these explorations of genre fiction, with one biographer dismissing their supernatural elements as “ludicrous devices.” Readers and critics in recent years, however, have resurrected several of these tales and recognize both their satirical intent and the obviously ambiguous nature of those “devices.” The most well-known and most anthologized is “Luella Miller”—but is it really a ghost story?

“I never made coffee in my life,” cries Luella Miller, during one of the rare periods when there is nobody around to help her. Luella is utterly dependent on a series of helpmates who become gradually powerless under the rule of her wheedling demands. Lynda L. Hinkle argues in a recent essay that the character of Luella is Freeman’s “stinging critique of a declining but still prevalent social class structure that churned out a large, useless upper class of women whose job it was to be beautiful and consume,” and Alfred Bendixen, introducing the selection in the anthology Haunted Tales, concurs that Freeman “confronts and rejects the Victorian ideal of the passive and dependent woman.”

The depiction of the story’s “servants” was almost certainly informed by the author’s own past. After the Civil War, her father’s carpentry business suffered repeated failures. The Wilkinses had to move from their home, first to Brattleboro, Vermont, and then, when his latest venture failed, back to Randolph, Massachusetts, to live in the household of a wealthy family, where Mary’s mother toiled as the housekeeper for seven years until her death in 1880. The plight of her mother’s final years influenced much of her writing; as biographer Perry Westbrook notes, “Many of Freeman’s fictional characters regarded such subserviency as the ultimate disgrace that could befall them.” Since her teens, Freeman had detested domestic chores and regarded the responsibilities of housekeeping as an intrusion on her writing, and her attitude toward service was reflected in the easygoing supervision of her maids. “Luella Miller,” then, combines her distaste for the pampered rich women in her new social milieu with her aversion for the drudgery and acquiescence demanded of “the help.”

When discussing the otherworldly aspects of the story, many critics and readers remark on how Freeman pointedly depicts Lydia Anderson—who narrates the core of the story in an extended monologue—as unreliable. Luella Miller, after all, married the man Lydia herself might have married. “Only Lydia mentions Luella’s duplicity,” literary scholar Susan Oaks reminds us. “Only Lydia’s version of the story exists.” Lydia is also the only source for the story’s supernatural elements, and the righteousness that pervades her narration leaves the reader wondering: what really was her role in these long-ago events? In the end, it is Lydia Anderson who commands the story because she controls its telling, and her homespun tone lends both authority and authenticity. As Martin Scofield writes in The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story, “What gives this story its edge is the style of the narrator: as often in Freeman, and in the American short story in general, the quality of voice (often involving regional dialect) is essential to its effect.”

*   *   *

Close to the village street stood the one-story house in which Luella Miller, who had an evil name in the village, had dwelt. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

The Spectre Bridegroom

Washington Irving (1783–1859)
From Washington Irving: History, Tales and Sketches

Interesting Links
“America’s First Literary Star” (Editor Eric)

“Washington Irving, The Quintessential New York Writer” (Leonora Stein, Literary Traveler)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Bold Dragoon,” Washington Irving
• “The Moonstone Mass,” Harriet Prescott Spofford
• “Somnambulism,” Charles Brockden Brown

Buy the book
Washington Irving: History, Tales & Sketches
Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. • Salmagundi • A History of New York • The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • 1,144 pages

Detail from La Ballade de Lénore ou les Morts vont vite [The Ballad of Lenore, or The Dead Travel Fast], 1839, oil on canvas by French artist Horace Vernet (1789-1863). Courtesy of The Athenaeum. Click on the image to see the entire painting.

---

First published in seven paperback numbers in New York (and simultaneously in Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore) in 1819 and 1820, Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. contains more than thirty selections: short stories, travel pieces, historical accounts, sketches of British town and country life, literary essays, and portraits of vanishing traditions, including five chapters describing an old-fashioned Christmas celebration at an English estate. Narrated by Irving’s fictitious alter ego, Geoffrey Crayon, the collection became the first American literary work to enjoy success in Europe, instantly making the 37-year-old author a celebrity abroad.

The Sketch Book includes Irving’s two most famous works, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” both set in America but inspired by German folk tales. If we were asked to name the collection’s third most popular entry, we would probably point to “The Spectre Bridegroom.” In fact, during the last two centuries various book publishers have extracted this particular trio of stories and reprinted them either individually or together, often with illustrations.

Like his two more famous stories, “The Spectre Bridegroom” was inspired by German legends, but this time Irving retained the location and period of the original material. The most obvious source is Gottfried August Bürger’s Lenore (1774), which Irving mentions in passing within the story itself. Bürger’s ballad depicts a young woman whisked away from her home on horseback by an apparition that resembles her lost fiancé, who had gone missing in action on the battlefield. The poem was first introduced to English readers in 1796, when the still-unknown Walter Scott published a loose translation with the title “William and Helen.” Irving, almost certainly familiar with the original German ballad, turns the tale on its head and presents a ghost story that is more burlesque than Gothic.

Preceding “The Spectre Bridegroom” in The Sketch Book is “The Inn Kitchen,” one of the short framing interludes chronicling Geoffrey Crayon’s travels. While staying in a small Flemish village inn, Crayon hears laughter emanating from the kitchen, where he finds a group of travelers and local “hangers on” sharing stories, “some very extravagant, and most very dull.” The only tale Crayon remembers is the one presented here as our Story of the Week selection, but before sharing it with his readers he describes the man who told it:

He was a corpulent old Swiss, who had the look of a veteran traveller. . . . He was interrupted more than once by the arrival of guests, or the remarks of his auditors; and paused now and then to replenish his pipe; at which times he had generally a roguish leer, and a sly joke for the buxom kitchen-maid.

I wish my readers could imagine the old fellow lolling in a huge arm chair, one arm akimbo, the other holding a curiously twisted tobacco pipe, formed of genuine écume de mer [meerschaum], decorated with silver chain and silken tassel—his head cocked on one side, and a whimsical cut of the eye occasionally, as he related the following story.

Notes: Irving’s epigraph is from the Middle English romance The History of Sir Eger, Sir Grahame, and Sir Gray-Steele. The earliest extant copy is a Glasgow edition from 1669. The Heldenbuch (“Book of Heroes”) is a collection of fourteenth-century German epic poetry. Minne-lieders are love songs sung by medieval German troubadours. The great Heidelberg tun is an enormous cask for wine in the castle of Heidelberg. The first one was built in 1591. Saus und Braus are revelry and riotous living.

*   *   *

On the summit of one of the heights of the Odenwald, a wild and romantic tract of Upper Germany, that lies not far from the confluence of the Main and the Rhine, there stood, many, many years since, the castle of the Baron Von Landshort. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

For the Blood Is the Life

F. Marion Crawford (1854–1909)
From American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

Interesting Links

“F. Marion Crawford's Six Best Horror Stories” (M. Grant Kellermeyer, The Classic Horror Blog)

Biographical sketch of F. Marion Crawford (Terence E. Hanley, Tellers of Weird Tales)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Luella Miller,” Mary Wilkins Freeman
• “The Dead Valley,” Ralph Adams Cram
• “Kerfol,” Edith Wharton

Buy the book
American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps
44 classic stories of fantasy, horror, and the supernatural | 748 pages

Two drawings by American illustrator Walter Appleton Clark (1876–1906) for the original magazine publication of “For the Blood Is the Life” (Collier’s, December 16, 1905).

---

In 1904 P. F. Collier & Son finished issuing the massive Complete Works of F. Marion Crawford. Featuring matching gilt-blocked cloth bindings, the edition gathered in thirty-two volumes the thirty-five novels Crawford had published to date, beginning with his extraordinarily successful debut, Mr. Isaacs: A Tale of Modern India (1882). The author was accorded the honor of a collected edition even though he was only forty-eight years old, and the set was a notable commercial hit. He would publish nine more novels before his death five years later.

The novelist Henry James was a friend of Crawford’s parents and, eventually, of the young author himself—although it might be more accurate to call them rivals, at least in James’s view. Crawford’s unbroken string of best sellers (and the financial security that came with them) was the source of considerable envy. In 1884 William Dean Howells informed James that Crawford’s third book, To Leeward, had sold nearly 10,000 copies, and James let loose with “ferocities” he acknowledged might be mistaken for “green-eyed jealousy”:

What you tell me of the success of Crawford’s last novel sickens & almost paralyses me. It seems to me (the book) so contemptibly bad & ignoble that the idea of people reading it in such numbers makes one return upon one’s self & ask what is the use of trying to write anything decent or serious for a public so absolutely idiotic. It must be totally wasted. I would rather have produced the basest experiment in the “naturalism” that is being practised here than such a piece of sixpenny humbug. Work so shamelessly bad seems to me to dishonour the novelist’s art to a degree that is absolutely not to be forgiven; just as its success dishonours the people for whom one supposes one’s self to write.

Twenty years later, although the two authors had remained friends and visited each other in Italy and England, James was still harping on in private about Crawford’s fame. In a letter offering advice to a young author who admired James’s writing, he sarcastically warned against emulating his style too closely if she wanted to be popular: “I would have written, if I could, like Anthony Hope and Marion Crawford."

The approach to literature of the two rival authors could not have been more different. When the final volumes of Crawford’s Complete Works appeared, a British critic pointedly remarked on the dissimilarity: “He has no inclination, like Mr. Henry James, to analyse and dissect the complex motives of men and women in the ordinary affairs of life; his characters must be of a more or less heroic or diabolic mould, and they must live under striking and exceptional conditions.” In the book-length essay The Novel: What It Is, Crawford wrote, “There are, I believe, two recognised ways of looking at art: art for the public or ‘art for art.’” He not only argued in favor of the former but, more bluntly, he regarded the novel as a “marketable commodity, of the class collectively termed luxuries.” In Crawford’s view, the successful formula for reaching a wide readership in the late-nineteenth-century literary bazaar was a mixture of historical novels and cosmopolitan romances set in New York and Europe (especially Italy, where he was born and where he lived as an American expatriate for most of his adult life).

Yet markets are notoriously fickle. Every one of Marion Crawford’s forty-four novels has been long forgotten, while Henry James’s novels and stories are still read and admired today (and, unexpectedly, continue to be adapted for film and TV). What Crawford is remembered for would have surprised his fans and detractors alike—as well as the author himself. Two years after his death his publisher collected his various supernatural tales as Wandering Ghosts, and Crawford’s legacy rests almost entirely on those seven influential and still frequently anthologized short stories, one of which we present below as our Story of the Week selection.

Notes: The title of the story is from Deuteronomy 12:23: “Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life; and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh.”

“For the Blood Is the Life” originally appeared in the Christmas 1905 issue of Collier’s magazine. For an explanation of how ghost stories came to be associated with Christmas during the nineteenth century, see the introduction to “Thurlow’s Christmas Story,” a previous Story of the Week selection.

*   *   *

We had dined at sunset on the broad roof of the old tower, because it was cooler there during the great heat of summer. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

The Dead Valley

Ralph Adams Cram (1863–1942)
From American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

Interesting Links
“An Architect for All Purposes,” (Daniel McCarthy, The University Bookman)

“Ralph Adams Cram and the Gothic Quest” (Joan C. Pratt, The Exeter Bulletin)

Previous Story of the Week selection
“Golden Baby,” Alice Brown (Cram’s childhood friend in Hampton Falls, NH, and neighbor in Boston)

Buy the book
American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps
746 pages
List price: $35.00
Web store price: $31.50

Buy both volumes of American Fantastic Tales in a boxed set
Bret Harte • Ambrose Bierce • Edith Wharton • Ellen Glasgow • Robert E. Howard • H. P. Lovecraft • Robert Bloch • Shirley Jackson • Ray Bradbury • Harlan Ellison • John Crowley • Joyce Carol Oates • Stephen King • Michael Chabon • 86 stories in all • 1,400 pages
List price: $70.00
Web store price: $55.00

Ralph Adams Cram on the cover
of the December 13, 1926, issue of
Time magazine.

There are a handful of authors with writings published in Library of America volumes who have been honored with feast days in the liturgical calendar of the U.S. Episcopal Church—including such eminent figures as William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, and John Muir. Another such writer is Ralph Adams Cram. This year’s feast day, on December 16, also marks the 150th anniversary of his birth.

Although he had anonymously and privately published a short novel (The Decadent) in 1893, Cram’s literary fame is based entirely on six tales that appeared two years later in Black Spirits and White: A Book of Ghost Stories. The collection includes his most famous (and most often reprinted) story, “The Dead Valley,” which H. P. Lovecraft later singled out for achieving “a memorably potent degree of vague regional horror through subtleties of atmosphere and description.” The other stories, too, have appeared frequently in anthologies compiled throughout the last century. Although Cram lived for another five decades, he never again published works of fiction.

You might be thinking that a mere half dozen ghost stories, no matter how well known or well written, seem too slight to justify honoring an author with his own feast day—and you would be right. Because Cram, who converted to Anglo-Catholicism in 1887 during a stay in Rome, became one of the leading architects of his day, known especially for his Gothic Revival buildings that dot city centers and college campuses throughout the United States. Among the five hundred projects in his portfolio are the Cadet Chapel at the United States Military Academy (West Point), the Church of the Covenant (Cleveland, Ohio), Fourth Presbyterian Church (Chicago), the notoriously unfinished St. John the Divine (New York City), Doheny Library at the University of Southern California, and more than two dozen buildings on the Princeton University campus. Cram’s “skyward” wonders had become so ubiquitous that Time magazine featured him on the cover of its December 13, 1926, issue. The architectural firm founded in 1889 by Cram and Charles Francis Wentworth still exists (known as Cram and Ferguson since 1913).

Daniel McCarthy, in a review of Douglass Shand-Tucci’s recent two-volume biography, lists other accomplishments:

Cram’s achievements extended far beyond architecture, however: He was a fine, and controversial, essayist; a novelist (Gothic, of course); a co-founder of Commonweal magazine, though Cram, a High Church Anglican, never became a Roman Catholic; also a co-founder in 1925 of the Medieval Academy of America and its journal, Speculum; and he was responsible for the first wide publication of Henry Adams’s Mont St. Michel and Chartres, which Adams had been reluctant to put into print. “If the world owes me anything for what I have done,” Cram wrote in his 1936 autobiography, “. . . it certainly does so for my having been able to act as agent in making available to the public this great and singularly distinguished work.”

Shand-Tucci’s biography explains how the links between Cram’s fiction and architecture extend well beyond the basic “Gothic” connection: “[His] literary Gothic, for all its foreign settings, seems equally very American in feeling, just as, for all his admiration of the late nineteenth-century British Gothicists, his architectural Gothic shares the same ‘regional’ feeling.” In “The Dead Valley” we see these transatlantic influences meld: although the tale recounts an experience from an immigrant’s boyhood in Sweden, “there is something profoundly New England about Cram’s stories, something of Hawthorne and Poe.”

*   *   *

I have a friend, Olof Ehrensvärd, a Swede by birth, who yet, by reason of a strange and melancholy mischance of his early boyhood, has thrown his lot with that of the New World. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

The Shell of Sense

Olivia Howard Dunbar (1873–1953)
From American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

Interesting Links
Five Poems by Ridgely Torrence (Poetry Magazine, November 1939)

Previous Story of the Week selections:
• “The Little Room” (1895), Madeline Yale Wynne
• “Luella Miller” (1902), Mary Wilkins Freeman
• “Golden Baby” (1910), Alice Brown
• “The Eyes” (1910), Edith Wharton
• “The Shadowy Third” (1916), Ellen Glasgow

Buy the book
American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps
Charlotte Perkins Gilman • Stephen Crane • Edith Wharton • Ellen Glasgow • Stephen Vincent Benét • Robert E. Howard • H. P. Lovecraft • Robert Bloch • 36 others • 746 pages
List price: $35.00
Web store price: $31.50

In the June 1, 1905, issue of The Dial, the lead essay pondered “The Decay of the Ghost in Fiction.” Its author, Olivia Howard Dunbar, argued that “ever since literature began . . . what we call ‘the supernatural’ has been the staple material of the tellers of tales.” She discussed how ghosts were ubiquitous in English folklore and ballads and how, during the mid-1800s, ghost stories were commonplace in American magazines and especially in Christmas annuals. “But suddenly, and it must surely have seemed mysteriously, the magazine ghost vanished; nor were its eerie footprints traced.” She did note as an exception to this decline the stories of Henry James, particularly “The Turn of the Screw,” but “his work is probably too esoteric to stand as typical.” In sum, she hoped for “the renaissance of the literary ghost.”

Three years earlier, in 1902, Dunbar had quit her job as editor at The New York World; she would spend the rest of her life as a professional writer of stories and articles for leading American magazines. When she wasn’t writing fiction and essays, she was active in the woman suffrage movement, and in 1914 she married Ridgely Torrence, the future poetry editor of The New Republic. He would also become, in 1917, the first American playwright to feature an all-black cast in a non-minstrel production on Broadway: the seminal Three Plays for a Negro Theater. An ebullient James Weldon Johnson hailed Torrence’s staging of these plays at the Garden Theater at Madison Square Garden as “the beginning of a new era.” (Unfortunately, the production ended after only ten performances when America declared war on Germany.)

Olivia Dunbar’s hope for a revitalization of supernatural fiction was realized during the decades after her article appeared, as a number of writers—many of them women—published stories featuring phantoms of various kinds. She herself contributed to that renaissance, writing several psychological ghost stories that also display her interest in marriage roles and women’s lives. Appearing three years after her essay, “The Shell of Sense” is unique in that the narrative is from the point of view of the ghost, a dead woman who observes her surviving husband with both jealousy and concern. Jeffrey Weinstock, an expert on gothic fiction, notes in his study of supernatural tales that Dunbar’s story resembles “A Dead Vashti,” an 1877 tale by Louise Stockton; in both stories, the dead woman initially “feels stunned and betrayed by the course of events she observes.” But in Dunbar’s story the ghost’s realization that her marriage was not what it seemed results in greater acceptance and understanding of both her own life and her husband’s.

*   *   *

It was intolerably unchanged, the dim, dark-toned room. In an agony of recognition my glance ran from one to another of the comfortable, familiar things that my earthly life had been passed among. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

The Eyes

Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
From Edith Wharton: Collected Stories 1891–1910

Interesting Links
Is Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence the greatest novel about New York? (Reader's Almanac)

A controversial Pulitzer Prize brings Edith Wharton and Sinclair Lewis together (Reader's Almanac)

Previous Story of the Week selections by Edith Wharton
• “A Journey”
• “Kerfol”
• “Xingu”

Buy the book
Edith Wharton: Collected Stories 1891–1910
Two novellas (The Touchstone and Sanctuary) • 36 stories • 928 pages
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $31.50

Edith Wharton loved ghost stories and included a good number of them among the more than eighty pieces of short fiction she published during her career. (We previously offered one of her creepiest tales, “Kerfol,” as a Story of the Week selection.) In 1910 she published the collection Tales of Men and Ghosts; one of its most acclaimed stories, “The Eyes,” opens when a group of men have finished sharing personal tales of “supernatural impressions.” After most members of the party leave, the host relates to his remaining two companions, including a young acolyte, an account of his own “ghost.” The story within the story, however, is a tale of psychological dread rather than an account of rattling chains and eerie moaning. To be sure, the host seems to be haunted by a spectral manifestation belonging “to a man who had done a lot of harm in his life,” but the tale reveals even more about the teller.

The lead character is a “confirmed bachelor,” to use the antiquated euphemism—although there is hardly anything coy about Wharton’s portrait. Motivated by selfishness and cowardice, he has convinced himself that he acts out of kindness and consideration to his acquaintances and his young “recruits.” But Wharton’s story offers a twist on the old maxim, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” The late Louis Auchincloss noted, “The egotism of Mrs. Wharton’s constantly recurring bachelors is brought out more effectively in ‘The Eyes’ than in any of her other short stories or novels.” The story is often described as Jamesian in style—The Turn of the Screw obviously comes to mind—and, in a recent biography of Wharton, Hermione Lee adds, “Wilde’s Dorian Gray and Edgar Allan Poe haunt this story, too, and Wharton had other examples of self-pleasing, uncommitted bachelors to draw on [from her own life].”

Notes: In the context of this story, Positivist (p. 810) describes an adherent of rigorous and testable scientific methods. Nathaniel Parker Willis (p. 814) was an early-nineteenth-century author and editor who published many works by Edgar Allan Poe, among others. Vertige de l’abîme (p. 818) is “dizziness of the abyss,” or vertigo, and bêtise (p. 820) is stupidity. Antinous (p. 820), a young man favored by the second-century Roman Emperor Hadrian, was famous for his beauty and died when he was eighteen years old, while Cherubino (p. 826) is the amorous pageboy in Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro. Gautier’s axiom (p. 826) is “Nothing is truly beautiful unless it is useless.”

*   *   *

W e had been put in the mood for ghosts, that evening, after an excellent dinner at our old friend Culwin’s, by a tale of Fred Murchard’s—the narrative of a strange personal visitation. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.