Books: Sermons from the Pit

THE GHOSTLY TALES OF HENRY JAMES (765 pp.)—Edited by Leon Edel—Rutgers ($5).

The James family had a rare talent for striking up acquaintances with ghosts. In 1844, when Novelist-to-be Henry James was a year old, his genial papa, Henry Sr., was scared into “a perfectly insane and abject terror” by a shape squatting invisibly before him. For two years the elder James searched for relief from his fearful visitation, tried everything from water cures to cheerful company, eventually found peace only in the esoteric mysticism of Swedish Philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg.

About 25 years later, Henry’s philosopher brother, William, saw an image of “a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic [like a] sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes . . .” William turned into “a mass of quivering fear” at the thought that “That shape am I. . . potentially,” and wondered how people could live “so unconscious of the pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life.”

Chase It. Henry James was always conscious of the pit. He set some of his novels directly in its depths, populated many of his short stories with jittery, conscience-prodding ghosts. The 18 stories now brought together into one volume are a notable contribution to the quake-and-quiver school of writing; they are also subtle portraits of people disturbed by their own failures and weaknesses.

At the age of 70, with almost neurotic zest, James recalled “the most appalling yet most admirable nightmare of my life,” in which he had first been driven to “unutterable fear” by a “presence” and had then turned about and chased it down a long hallway. Throughout his life James was fascinated by the supernatural. He read Poe’s horror tales, thought several of Hawthorne’s fantasies “little masterpieces,” and relished the late 19th Century pseudo-scientific stories about mesmerism or “animal magnetism.” In his European travels, he spent many weekends at castles where family ghosts were indispensable furnishings.

Yet, except for a few sickly sketches in the Hawthorne manner but without the Hawthorne skill, James, wrote few ghost stories until he was 48. Then he burst out with a spate of them. Editor Leon Edel speculates that this middle-aged absorption in the supernatural helped James compensate for the critical and popular rejection of his later novels and dismally unsuccessful plays ; in the ghostly stories, James could work off his resentments, regrets and anxieties.

Live It. James’s ghosts represent not so much creatures intended to frighten readers on a lonely evening as obsessive reminders of the experiences his characters have evaded and the responsibilities they have shirked. A girl is haunted by the ghost of her mother’s neglected lover; a playwright dreams of a creature who, unlike the actress in the role, knows how to play his heroine; a scruple-torn pacifist meets the stern spirit of his strong-willed military ancestor; a young man abandons his girl friend to consort with the ghost of a woman he has never met; two old maids gain a sense of vicarious lawlessness from the ghost of an ancestor who was a smuggler; a woman abandons her fiance to the ghost of a woman he has never known. The best of them, The Beast in the Jungle, is a harrowing portrait of a man who waits all his life for a great experience and then, realizing that his fate is to be one man to whom absolutely nothing happens, throws himself on the tomb of the woman whose love he did not return.

In one of his later novels, James wrote: “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had? . . .” The idea of experiences missed or untaken was the ghost that haunted Henry James.