This Day in Literary History (‘Turn of the Screw’ Scares Up Much-Needed Sales for Henry James)

Oct. 13, 1898—As The Turn of the Screw came out in book form following its serialization in Colliers’ earlier in the year, Henry James didn’t bother to hide his disgust with this “abject, down-on-all-fours pot-boiler, pure & simple, that a proud man brought low ever perpetrated.”

Readers, however, differed sharply, making this “ghost story” the novelist’s most successful work of fiction since Daisy Miller over two decades before. In time, James—needing the money from this tale of terror to boost his finances, and its widespread acclaim to soothe his spirit from his recent disastrous foray into the theater—came to feel differently about it, too.

I’m sure he would feel surprised but delighted that even Ivy League English departments today put it on their reading lists for American Lit classes.

What has made the novella so enduringly popular, 125 years after publication? Successive generations have discovered something creepy in this study in ambiguity that has left readers guessing as much as frightened.

In the late Victorian Era when the tale came out, readers would have picked on the fact that the story is being told “on Christmas eve in an old house.” Ghost stories told by the fireside remained an English tradition during the holidays. Already, the atmosphere in the tale is threatening.

Well into the 20^th century, critics offered Freudian interpretations of what transpired. Did the ghosts of past servant Peter Quint and governess Miss Jessel really exist—or did they spring from the imagination of the neurotic new, unnamed governess, the sheltered daughter of a vicar who may have been projecting her own sexual fantasies onto others?

Or was James being prescient but careful in alerting readers to child molestation—a crime that, like many other sexual matters, could not be discussed openly in the repressive late-Victorian age?

Structurally, Turn of the Screw is an “envelope story”—a story within a story, with one narrator hearing the tale from another, who yields it in turn to another. This framing device—influencing, among other cases, Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome and Willa Cather’s My Antonia—seemingly testifies to the credibility of the narrative.

But that very authority is undercut in the prologue by complications of time that are disclosed. Consider:

*It opens in our age (or, for Victorians, theirs);

*The narrator immediately says the events are in the past;

*Douglas’ narration of the tale happens two days after the fireside scene;

*A short time elapses when the narrator transcribes the governess’ manuscript;

*Still further back in time, Douglas reads the governess’ manuscript, which had been willed to him;

*Earlier still, the governess writes the manuscript;

*Yet earlier still, the governess tells Douglas the events;

*Earlier yet, the events took place.

In short, the events happened 50 years before the tale proper begins. The possibility can’t be ruled out that some of what happens has been misremembered, forgotten, suppressed—or made up.

A few words should also be said about the employer of the governess, “a bachelor in the prime of life…handsome and bold and pleasant, off-hand and gay and kind.” Left as guardian of little Flora and Miles through the death of their parents, he has no experience in dealing with children, and neither the time nor the wish to be bothered with them.

So he offers the governess the job, with the provisos that she will have absolute authority over them and he is not to be disturbed by news of them. She accepts, carried away by his looks and manner—and, Douglas relates, “She never saw him again.”

The governess comes to believe not only that Flora and Miles have seen Quint and Miss Jessel, but that they’re somehow in league with the apparitions. But James never reveals what, if anything, happened between the children and the dead house help, leaving the reader to infer the most horrifying possibilities.

As R.W.B. Lewis perceptively notes in his family biography, The Jameses, The Turn of the Screw was written when both Henry and his brother William, the pioneering psychologist- philosopher, had become increasingly concerned with the supernatural.

Though Henry wrote the first of his 10 ghost stories as far back as 1868, they grew in number, length, and psychological complexity in the 1890s, as more family members and friends passed away.

This genre also enabled the novelist to extend, in a realm he never imagined, the dramatic devices and themes he had learned in his brief attempt to conquer the London theater world (culminating in the disastrous play Guy Domville, a fiasco I discussed in this blog post from 15 years ago).

The dramatic possibilities of The Turn of the Screw have been exploited by others in several genres in the 20^th and 21^st centuries:

*As the play The Innocents, written by William Archibald;

*As a 1961 movie by the same name, written by Archibald and Truman Capote and starring Deborah Kerr (shown in the image accompanying this post);

*Several TV adaptations;

*Benjamin Britten’s 1954 opera The Turn of the Screw.

Quote of the Day (Roald Dahl, on the Presence of a Ghost)

“The best ghost stories don’t have ghosts in them. At least you don’t see the ghost. Instead you see only the result of his actions. Occasionally you can feel it brushing past you, or you are made aware of its presence by subtle means… If a story does permit a ghost to be seen, then he doesn’t look like one. He looks like an ordinary person.”— British novelist, short-story writer, poet, screenwriter, and wartime fighter pilot Roald Dahl (1916-1990), introduction to Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories (1983)

(The image accompanying this post shows Claire Bloom and Julie Harris in the Robert Wise’s 1963 film The Haunting, an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s chilling novel The Haunting of Hill House. Believe me, the atmosphere of this movie is about as far as you can get from the one Wise would make only two years later, the box-office smash The Sound of Music.)

Quote of the Day (Edith Wharton, on the Evil Rich)

“In spite of the balmy temperature and complicated conveniences of Faxon's bedroom, the injunction [I.e., ‘Make yourself at home‘] was not easy to obey. It was wonderful luck to have found a night's shelter under the opulent roof of Overdale, and he tasted the physical satisfaction to the full. But the place, for all its ingenuities of comfort, was oddly cold and unwelcoming. He couldn't have said why, and could only suppose that Mr. Lavington's intense personality— intensely negative, but intense all the same— must, in some occult way, have penetrated every corner of his dwelling. Perhaps, though, it was merely that Faxon himself was tired and hungry, more deeply chilled than he had known till he came in from the cold, and unutterably sick of all strange houses, and of the prospect of perpetually treading other people's stairs.”—Edith Wharton, “The Triumph of Night” (1916)

Mention “winter” and “Edith Wharton” in the same sentence and the immediate association is with her classic novel, Ethan Frome. This year being the centennial of that marvelous tale of fate and thwarted love in the Berkshires, don’t be surprised if I post something about it before 2011 draws to a close.

But for me, Wharton has become linked with winter not just through this tragedy, but through her ghost stories. Brought together in the compact but choice collection The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, they might not have been as long, various, or tantalizingly ambiguous as those of friend and mentor Henry James, but to me, they surpass “The Master” in their evocation of atmosphere and, for want of a better phrase, the chill factor--and none more so than “The Triumph of Night” (even the title haunts me).

From its beginning, this tale is about imbalance and psychological disorientation. George Faxon has been hired as a secretary for a wealthy New Hampshire woman, but she’s forgotten about his arrival. His surmise has been acquired “through long experience,” suggesting vulnerability at the hands of the rich. His plight is worsened by exposure to weather so brutal that it almost becomes a character in its own right. (“Dark, searching and sword-like, it alternately muffled and harried its victim, like a bull-fighter now whirling his cloak and now planting his darts.”)

He’s seemingly rescued from this situation by Frank Reiner, who brings him to the home of his uncle, captain of industry John Lavington. But, as seen in the passage above, Lavington’s mansion is unsettling. Faxon simply can’t get a handle on it (he “couldn‘t have said why”)--especially the presence of a figure that mysteriously materializes and disappears in Lavington’s study with nobody else even noticing him.

By the time the night is through, Faxon realizes that this other visitor, focusing “eyes of deadly menace” on the guileless Reiner, is Lavington’s doppelganger, or double.

Like a New England Hamlet, Faxon bemoans his fate as the only person who, witnessing an apparition, is given the responsibility to prevent evil (“he, the one weaponless and defenceless spectator, the one whom none of the others would believe or understand if he attempted to reveal what he knew--he alone had been singled out as the victim of this dreadful initiation”). His panicked flight leads to tragedy, a breakdown and the lasting recognition that “he might have broken the spell of iniquity” had he acted immediately.

“The Triumph of Night” belongs to a group of stories written around 1910 that emphasize male characters; this and two others, “Afterward” and “The Eyes,” are ghost stories. A decade later, she would write of this milieu in which she grew up with increasing nostalgia, but at this point she left no doubt that much of the wealth of the Northeast aristocracy was acquired through fraud. “The Triumph of Night,” then, becomes not just a tale of the supernatural but also a moral consideration, an examination of the desperate and evil lengths to which the rich will go to prevent their own ruin.

Tales of the supernatural need not be simply gory fright fests; they can also memorably evoke the sorrows and evils created by our most compelling everyday concerns. That includes the world of work and finance.

It amazes me that, three years after the Wall Street collapse, no film of the supernatural has considered these events. (Even the skullduggery of 1980s Wall Street, far milder in effect than the one with such explosive consequences in 2008, eventually inspired the Oscar-winning script for Ghost.) As for supernatural fiction, it feels more genre-dominated than ever, less likely to be taken up by masters of mainstream literary fiction such as Wharton, who, with subtlety and concision, knew how to suggest evil all the more terrifying for being initially immaterial.