Books: Jamesian Ghosts

THE LADY WHO CAME TO STAY—R. E. Spencer—Knopf ($2.50).

The late great expatriate Author Henry James (1843-1916), pontifical in his generation, was fast diffused by death, has become in these days largely a sainted memory. But echoes of James’s hesitant subtlety have been rare in the novels of his successors. R. E. Spencer shows in his first book, The Lady Who Came to Stay, that he is a James-admiring writer. With an obvious debt to James’s psychological thriller, The Turn of the Screw, obvious salutes to the Master in the turnings of every tortured sentence, The Lady Who Came to Stay is a distinguished novel in its own right.

Four middle-aged spinsters lived in a gloomy house; one locked room was haunted. To this unlikely refuge came Katherine, an unwanted sister-in-law, with her baby daughter Mary, because she had nowhere else to go. Phoebe, taciturn bully of the household, hated Katherine because she could not bully her. Milly, the prying gossip and Lucia and Emma, the ineffectual twins kept a frightened neutrality. Katherine soon died, but with her last breath warned the sisters to be kind to Mary, or else—. Sinister old Phoebe transferred her hatred of the mother to the child. The other old maids, in powerless horror, thought they were about to see a tragedy; in time’s nick Phoebe was checkmated.

One by one the sisters did not so much die as join the ghosts that inhabited their house. Mary grew up and fell in love. Still Phoebe, dead but restless, threatened her, and still her mother’s influence thwarted an almost materialized evil. In time Mary’s son was sent to the house for a visit; the old warfare continued. With the outwardly insane but inwardly heroic death of Lucia, the last old lady. Author Spencer rings down the curtain on a ghost story that is also a subtly convincing psychological drama, a novel that might have been ghosted by Henry James himself.

Some (but only a few) of Author Spencer’s sentences are as fearful & wonderful as any Author James ever spun: “She yet, however, hungrily clung to it, used it, developed it: it came nearer to anything else to yielding what she so deeply needed ; and if it fell to an inordinate memory thus at the beginning sometimes to wound her with abnormal revisionings, it was to become the office of an equally inordinate imagination in the end to turn them, in restitution, to another account — to select, to reshape, to interpret every adaptable passage in the history of her house, first to foster an extraordinary wish, and at last to sustain a strange unearthly hope. . . .”

The Author. Robin Edgerton Spencer, 34, discovered Henry James at 27, still thinks The Ambassadors “the loveliest novel” he knows. Born in Ogden, Utah, son of a train despatcher, he left school at 10 to work in a department store, clerked in various offices for 18 years. Then he started school again, on winter evenings at Washington’s George Washington University. He spent his summer nights for four years writing The Lady Who Came to Stay. When he sent the unsolicited MS to Publisher Knopf he enclosed a self-addressed return wrapper. The wrapper was not used. Author Spencer now lives in Indianapolis. Ind.