The Weird Tale by S T Joshi

Author:S T Joshi
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2017-05-17T04:00:00+00:00

It is also quite obvious that James’s inspiration began to flag very early on. If we concede that the eight tales in Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary (1904) are nearly perfect examples of the form, we must also add that the rest of James’s work does little but ring increasingly feeble changes upon those tales. James’s first collection is all that anyone need read of his work. It is particularly unfortunate to see James spin such an incredibly tedious tale as “Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance” (avowedly written to “fill up”[121] his second volume); all the later tales are dogged by hints of this sort of prolixity.

As it is, perhaps James is rather more interesting as a critic and theorist of the form. We are now concerned with three documents: the preface to More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), the introduction to Ghosts and Marvels (1924), and the lengthy essay “Some Remarks on Ghost Stories” (1929). The first two are principally theoretical, and impeccable as far as they go; they prove that James had clear principles for ghost-story writing (Sullivan makes much too much of James’s apparent coyness and indefiniteness in this regard) and that he followed them closely enough, with the exceptions noted above. The final essay is a fascinating history of the ghost story—fascinating precisely because it is so bizarre. Admittedly, James seems to be narrowly restricting himself to the avowed “ghost story,” so that perhaps it is understandable that such figures as Machen or Dunsany have no place in his account. But James’s highly ambiguous stance toward Poe is of interest. The editor of Ghosts and Marvels had selected Poe’s “Ligeia” for inclusion, and James was forced to comment upon it. His cautious remark, “Evidently in many people’s judgments it ranks as a classic” scarcely conceals his distaste. “Some Remarks on Ghost Stories” is more ambivalent, as he speaks of “some Americans” (i.e., the pulp writers) who fancy that they “tread . . . in the steps of Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce (himself sometimes unpardonable),”[122] but the hint of disapproval is strong. What offended James so much? Clearly it was the concentration on what he felt was the merely physically gruesome, as can be inferred in his slap at Bierce and also in his comment on E. F. Benson: “He sins occasionally by stepping over the line of legitimate horridness.”[123] Certainly he has nothing good to say about the American pulp writers: “The[y] are merely nauseating, and it is very easy to be nauseating.”[124] This is really an unprovoked attack, since the pulp writers never considered themselves “ghost-story writers” and should therefore not even have been mentioned in James’s essay. I think James’s squeamishness prevented him from appreciating the fact that there is a lot more to the work of Poe, Bierce, Machen, and Lovecraft than merely loathsome physical horror; James’s idol Le Fanu can be just as revolting, but evidently his indirection appealed to James.

I have studied James here not because I have much

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