The Ghost Feeler Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE GHOST-FEELER

  ‘Edith Wharton described herself as having an “intense Celtic sense of the supernatural.” The Ghost-Feeler: Stories of Terror and the Supernatural, selected and introduced by Peter Haining, contains nine stories that Wharton wrote between 1893 and 1935. While they display the elegant prose of her novels, these tales revolve around supernatural manifestations (vampires, doppelgangers) made credible by Wharton’s superb storytelling skills.’ – Publishers Weekly

  ‘Wharton is rich in implication ... the selection here is an excellent one.’ – Scotland on Sunday

  THE GHOST-FEELER

  Stories of Terror and the Supernatural

  Diagnosed with typhoid fever at age of nine, Edith Wharton was beginning a long convalescence when she was given a book of ghost tales to read. Not only setting back her recovery, this reading opened up her fevered imagination to ‘a world haunted by formless horrors.’ So chronic was this paranoia that she was unable to sleep in a room with any book containing a ghost story. She was even moved to burn such volumes. These fears persisted until her late twenties.

  She outgrew them but retained a heightened or ‘celtic’ (her term) sense of the supernatural. Wharton considered herself not ‘a ghost-seer’ – the term applied to those people who have claimed to have witnessed apparitions – but rather a ‘ghost-feeler,’ someone who senses what cannot be seen.

  This experience and ability enabled Edith Wharton to write chilling tales that objectify this sense of unease. Far removed from the comfort and urbane elegance associated with the author’s famous novels, the stories in this volume deal with vampirism, isolation, and hallucination, and were praised by Henry James, L. P. Hartley, Graham Greene, and many others.

  EDITH WHARTON

  THE GHOST-FEELER

  Stories of Terror

  and the Supernatural

  Selected and Introduced by

  Peter Haining

  PETER OWEN

  London and Chicago

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Duchess at Prayer (1901)

  The Fullness of Life (1893)

  A Journey (1899)

  The Lady’s Maid’s Bell (1904)

  Afterwards (1910)

  The Triumph of Night (1914)

  Bewitched (1926)

  A Bottle of Perrier (1930)

  The Looking-Glass (1935)

  What gives a ghost story its thrill? First I think its physical sense and, secondly, a moral twist.

  Graham Greene

  The Spectator, 1937

  Introduction

  It is a strange fact that for the first twenty-seven years of her life, a woman who is today regarded by several authorities on ghost fiction as one of the foremost writers of supernatural stories of her time, was quite unable to sleep in any room that contained so much as a single book of such tales. So unnerved was Edith Wharton by supernatural fiction that she later admitted to destroying any that she came across at home. But it was from her childhood traumas and anxieties that Wharton drew the inspiration for her stories of ghosts and terror to produce a steady flow of work that spanned her entire literary career and which today is worthy of the highest praise.

  Born into a wealthy New York family in January 1862, this sensitive, responsive and obedient young lady led a cosseted and strictly disciplined life until a cathartic experience in the summer of 1870. On holiday in Europe in the Black Forest, Wharton suddenly collapsed and was diagnosed with typhoid fever. For several days she was close to death before finally rallying and beginning a long period of convalescence. To pass the time she asked for some books to read, and among those given to her was one from two friends which she could only later describe with a shudder as a ‘robber story’. This book, with its tales of robbers and ghosts, deeply affected her ‘intense Celtic sense of the supernatural’ and not only caused a set-back in her recovery but opened up to her fevered imagination ‘a world haunted by formless horrors’. For years thereafter, she said, a dark undefinable menace dogged her footsteps. ‘I had been a naturally fearless child,’ she explained, ‘now I lived in a state of chronic fear. Fear of what? I cannot say – and even at the time I was never able to formulate my terror.’

  Wharton also had a fear of old houses. One of her aunts, a stern, humourless spinster lady who had also suffered a death-threatening illness as a child, lived in almost reclusive isolation in a twenty-four-roomed Gothic mansion at Rhinecliff, New York. The building was ugly, dark and uncomfortable and the little girl could never visit the place without having nightmares afterwards.

  Both of these influences contributed to Wharton’s overwhelming fear of ghost and horror stories, a fear that persisted through her childhood, into her teens, and even her early twenties. ‘I could not sleep in a room with a book containing a ghost story,’ she confessed later. ‘I frequently had to burn books of this kind, because it frightened me to know that they were downstairs in the library!’ When, however, the urge to write possessed the young woman, she determined to exorcize the ghosts and goblins that haunted her.

  Later in her life when Wharton was firmly established as a famous novelist and double-winner of the Pulitzer Prize, she could write freely of the terrors that had so affected her imagination as well as her convictions about the supernatural world.

  The celebrated reply (I forget whose): ‘No, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them,’ is much more than the cheap paradox it seems to many. To ‘believe’, in that sense, is a conscious act of the intellect, and it is in the warm darkness of the pre-natal 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.

  For this very reason, Edith Wharton considered herself not a ‘ghost-seer’ – to use the term so often applied to those people who claim to have witnessed a spirit – but rather a ‘ghost-feeler’, someone who senses what cannot be seen. It is this fact which determined my choice of a title for this collection.

  Between youth and old age, Wharton had plucked up the courage to read the works by the great masters of the genre and listed among her favourites three British authors, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Walter de la Mare, and two fellow Americans, Francis Marion Crawford and Fitz James O’Brien. At the very pinnacle, though, she placed Henry James and his novel, The Turn of the Screw; she considered no other writer had come near to equalling its imaginative handling of the supernatural. She might be considered biased, however, since James had, in fact, become her friend and the guiding light of her literary career.

  Wharton has, in turn, earned her own coterie of admirers. The American critic George D. Meadows, for example, says that, ‘Mrs. Wharton works with the sure touch of an Emily Brontë, although with more restraint’; while the English novelist Anita Brookner believes she had ‘an abiding fascination for the comfortably established world of haunted houses and revenants, wives or husbands betrayed, or dead too soon’.

  As I belong to this circle of admirers, assembling this collection has for me been a special pleasure. It has provided some surprises, too. For example, I spent one day wading through dusty copies of the early issues of Harper’s Monthly Magazine, to which Wharton contributed a number of her short stories, in the hope that I might come across some undiscovered gems. And there, in the index to volume II (1851), I found an essay entitled ‘The Ghost That Appeared to Mrs. Wharton’. Of course, it had been published ten years before Wharton was born, but in succeeding volumes I came across a number of other supernatural stories by anonymous writers. I could not help wondering whether this magazine, popular with her parents and always to be found in the family library, had been another – until now – unacknowledged source of her in
spiration?

  In the stories that follow, Edith Wharton demonstrates her feeling for the supernatural and her knowledge of terror, both garnered from personal experience.

  * * *

  ‘The Duchess at Prayer’ is a story of terror and punishment that could just as easily have been written by Edgar Allan Poe, whose work clearly influenced Wharton. Both writers shared a love for the town of Newport, where both of them spent periods of their lives. It was here, during the summer of 1900, that ‘The Duchess at Prayer’ was written, and according to an anonymous reviewer in the American magazine, Independent (June 1901), the tale might have been based on an incident ‘which Balzac once developed somewhat differently’. In the same year, Harper’s Monthly Magazine called it a tale about ‘the brute facts of sin’ and added that ‘it could only have been written by one who has truly known horror’. In her recent study, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life (1994), Eleanor Dwight suggests that the story reflects a plight familiar to Wharton and many young wives of the period, that of ‘The woman abandoned by her husband for long periods of time and then expected to be sexually available to him when he returns’.

  There is little doubt that ‘The Fullness of Life’, published at the end of 1893, reflects the state of Wharton’s own married life at the time. She had been wed in 1885 to Edward Wharton, a man thirteen years older than her, who had little feeling for literature and art, preferred the company of other male New York socialites, and quickly lost interest in the artistic and physical needs of his young bride. Soon, in fact, the unsatisfactory state of her marriage was to cause Edith to form several intense friendships, and in 1907 she had a deeply passionate affair with a New York journalist named Morton Fullerton which released her sensuality and also had a profound effect upon the tenor of her later writing.

  Some years after its publication, Wharton described ‘The Fullness of Life’ to her editor at Scribner’s, Edward Burlingame, as ‘one long shriek – I may not write any better, but at least I hope that I write in a lower key’. And probably because of its intensely personal nature – not to mention the fact that it must have annoyed Teddy Wharton, who could hardly have failed to grasp its implict suggestion – Wharton suppressed the work from her subsequent collections of stories. I know of few other stories of the afterlife more absorbing than this one. Eleanor Dwight believes that the tale may also have been partly inspired by a supernatural experience the author had while visiting Florence. She marvelled at the architectural beauty of the Church of San Michele, ‘when she experienced a wonderful vision and felt herself being “borne onwards along a mighty current”’.

  Wharton returned to the subject of death in ‘A Journey’, published in June 1899. Here again, Wharton’s sensitivity and the idea of death as a physical presence make the story memorable.

  As in ‘The Duchess at Prayer’, there are elements of sexuality to be found in ‘The Lady’s Maid’s Bell’, written in 1904, and Wharton’s first true ghost story. Readers on both sides of the Atlantic were deeply moved by this tale of adultery mingled with supernatural protection, with its superbly evoked atmosphere of dark and mysterious events occurring in an unstable household.

  Just how successfully Wharton had confronted the demons of her childhood is evident in ‘Afterwards’, a tale written in 1910 and generally considered to be her most successful ghost story. Jack Sullivan, writing in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (1986), believes that Wharton ‘converted the primal dread from her childhood into the haunted library scene’, which is the setting for one of the pivotal moments in the story.

  New England in the grip of a blizzard is the backdrop for ‘The Triumph of Night’, published in 1914, and featuring the innovation of a doppelgänger. The ugly, malevolent spirit is the double of a well-known financier who has virtually imprisoned a young man suffering from advanced tuberculosis, in the hope of benefiting from his death. When the snow drives another traveller into the company of this pair and the man sees the doppelgänger for himself, he is faced with a stark choice: to save the stricken boy or flee from the house.

  Interestingly, this story had been written several years earlier while Wharton was far away from America, staying in Paris. The French capital was then almost flooded from torrential rain, and this may well have set the tone of a piece that features fiscal misdealings, mysterious death and bloodstained hands.

  Wharton returned to the locale of New England for ‘Bewitched’, a tale of vampirism, then a subject virtually untouched by women writers. The importance of the story was spotted on publication by the New York Times’s critic who wrote on 2 May 1926: ‘“Bewitched” has much of the same tragic power which was the commanding feature of Ethan Frome.’

  It is an atmospheric and disturbing tale about a distracted wife, Mrs Rutledge, who appeals to her local Deacon for help because her husband, Saul, is having an affair. But this is no ordinary affair: he is infatuated with a dead woman who is relentlessly draining away his vitality. Even in the superstitious backwoods of New England, the poor woman does not find it easy to come to terms with what is happening or to get others to take the necessary action to put a stop to the vampire’s activities. The influence of this story can be seen in a number of subsequent tales of the undead written by women – not the least of them the sensual and exotic vampire novels of Anne Rice.

  The deceptive title of ‘A Bottle of Perrier’, which Wharton wrote in 1930, lures the reader almost unsuspectingly into a tale of murder and suspense set in a new locality: the African desert. This story was greatly admired by the late doyen of mystery fiction, Ellery Queen, who republished it in his magazine in 1948 with the following illuminating preface:

  It has been said of Edith Wharton’s work that ‘her characters are given sharp, clear, consistent shape’. You will find that true of ‘A Bottle of Perrier’: young Medford, the velvet-foot Gosling, and especially the strange archaeologist, Henry Almodham, are sharp and clear and consistent against the shimmering background of the desert. It has also been said that Edith Wharton’s style is a ‘clear, luminous medium in which things are seen in precise and striking outline’. You will find that also true: the mystery and menace of the infinite sands, the enervating heat, the timelessness, the silence, the inaccessibility – all become luminous; but there is something else, something brooding and haunting, which becomes clear and finally emerges ‘in precise and striking outline’ ...

  Small wonder that this story should have captivated many other literary figures including L. P. Hartley, who called it ‘an ingenious exercise in sustained suspense’ and Graham Greene, who referred to it as ‘that superb horror story’.

  Wharton’s mentor, Henry James, was a particular admirer of the final story in this collection, ‘The Looking-Glass’, which he called a ‘diabolical little cleverness’. The story was contributed to The Century in 1935 and, curiously, not included in the collections of Wharton’s work published immediately prior to and just after her death. It also appeared under the title ‘The Mirror’, and its heroine, Moyra Attlee, recounts the strange and unexpected visions she witnesses in an old looking-glass.

  Edith Wharton died on 11 August 1937 at her French home in St Brice-sous-Fôret, just north of Paris, and she was buried at Versailles. Three months later, in a tribute to her work in the supernatural genre, the English critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor neatly encapsulated the secret of why her stories of ghosts and terror deserved to be read then and still do today, over half a century later:

  She is a story-teller whose speech is naturally quiet and unhurried. Her stories have a half-eerie, half-cosy charm of their own. You begin to feel the silence around your chair; she is a past mistress of that curious art which makes you put the book down for an instant, poke the fire, and settle back with the thought: ‘Well, here I am, reading a ghost story – what could be more agreeable?’

  There is nothing more for me to add beyond suggesting that the reader immediately take Mr Shawe-Taylor’s advice.

  PETER
HAINING

  Boxford, Suffolk

  The Duchess at Prayer

  I

  Have you ever questioned the long shuttered front of an old Italian house, that motionless mask, smooth, mute, equivocal as the face of a priest behind which buzz the secrets of the confessional? Other houses declare the activities they shelter; they are the clear expressive cuticle of a life flowing close to the surface; but the old palace in its narrow street, the villa on its cypress-hooded hill, are as impenetrable as death. The tall windows are like blind eyes, the great door is a shut mouth. Inside there may be sunshine, the scent of myrtles, and a pulse of life through all the arteries of the huge frame; or a mortal solitude, where bats lodge in the disjointed stones and the keys rust in unused doors ...

  II

  From the loggia, with its vanishing frescoes, I looked down an avenue barred by a ladder of cypress shadows to the ducal escutcheon and mutilated vases of the gate. Flat noon lay on the gardens, on fountains, porticoes, and grottoes. Below the terrace, where a chrome-coloured lichen had sheeted the balustrade as with fine lamince of gold, vineyards stooped to the rich valley clasped in hills. The lower slopes were strewn with white villages like stars spangling a summer dusk; and beyond these, fold on fold of blue mountain, clear as gauze against the sky. The August air was lifeless, but it seemed light and vivifying after the atmosphere of the shrouded rooms through which I had been led. Their chill was on me and I hugged the sunshine.

  ‘The Duchess’s apartments are beyond,’ said the old man.

  He was the oldest man I had ever seen; so sucked back into the past that he seemed more like a memory than a living being. The one trait linking him with the actual was the fixity with which his small saurian eye held the pocket that, as I entered, had yielded a lira to the gatekeeper’s child. He went on, without removing his eye: