Читать книгу The Tiled House - J.S. Le Fanu - Страница 5

‘Sheridan Le Fanu,’ wrote S.M. Ellis in 1916, ‘retains his own special place and fame as the Master of Horror and the Mysterious.’[1] Today, Le Fanu’s reputation is as high as ever amongst connoisseurs of supernatural fiction – a reflection not only of his historical importance in a literary genre that is gradually becoming critically respectable, but also of the enthusiastic endorsements bestowed on him by some of the most accomplished ghost fiction writers of the twentieth century. Amongst these, it was M.R. James who was largely responsible for Le Fanu’s rehabilitation after a long period of neglect and who first appreciated and described the peculiar blend of qualities that placed Le Fanu, in his opinion, ‘absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories … nobody sets the scene better than he, nobody touches in the effective detail more deftly’.[2]

James’s own tales – among them some of the best ghost stories ever written in English – are similarly characterized by close attention to scene setting and circumstantial detail, to the evocation of a richly particularized actuality into which the supernatural insidiously intrudes itself. But James’s admiration for Le Fanu – which began as a boy and continued with no loss of pleasure to the end of his life – did not translate itself into mere imitation. Far from it. Le Fanu’s influence on James – and on those who, in turn, were influenced by James – was confined to generalities, not to specifics; to strategies and approaches, rather than to congruity of style. Nor did James ever claim too much for his predecessor, noting that Le Fanu had attained supremacy in one particular line: ‘he succeeds in inspiring a mysterious terror better than any other writer’ – better, for example, than Edgar Allen Poe, whose tales to James’s mind had ‘such an essential flavour of 1830–40 as takes the whole edge off them’.[3]

The earliest tale in this present selection dates from just this period: ‘Schalken the Painter’, first published in the Dublin University Magazine (henceforth DUM) in May 1839; and it well illustrates James’s point. This, we feel, is good writing, not just good period writing. A good tale well told is undoubtedly one of the reasons why Le Fanu has held on to his readers. He was a born storyteller, acutely sensitive to the pace and dynamics of fictional narrative; above all, he had a genius for invoking exactly the right atmosphere for the kind of fiction in which he excelled. Take, as a random example, the opening of ‘Squire Toby’s Will’ (Temple Bar, 1868):

Many persons accustomed to travel the old York and London road, in the days of stage-coaches, will remember passing, in the afternoon, say, of an autumn day, in their journey to the capital, about three miles south of the town of Applebury, and a mile and a half before you reach the Old Angel Inn, a large black-and-white house, as those old-fashioned cage-work habitations are termed, dilapidated and weather-stained, with broad lattice windows glimmering all over in the evening sun with little diamond panes, and thrown into relief by a dense background of ancient elms. A wide avenue, now overgrown like a churchyard with grass and weeds, and flanked by double rows of the same dark trees, old and gigantic, with here and there a gap in their solemn files, and sometimes a fallen tree lying across the avenue, leads up to the hall door.

Yet Le Fanu was not, and did not regard himself as, a conscious artist – any more, interestingly, than M.R. James did. And though there is a distinct – if perplexing – metaphysical context to his stories, nor was Le Fanu self-consciously a philosopher or moralizer. In the best of his short tales – and supremely in his best known novel, Uncle Silas (1864) – he succeeded, as his most recent biographer observes, ‘through the synchronization of his own temperament with the inner logic of the material he chose’.[4]

This is another way of saying that elements of Le Fanu’s personal life are reflected in his fiction, though transformed by imagination and introspection. But whereas in the case of M.R. James it is external reality that is drawn on to sustain the imaginative fabric, for Le Fanu it was a deeply troubled internal world that provided the impetus and sustaining energy of his fiction. The complexities of Le Fanu’s inner life have yet to be fully unravelled, but on the available evidence he appears as a man in whom stirred deep currents of anxiety creating a potent nexus of fears and fantasies that found imaginative and symbolic expression in his novels and stories.

The Le Fanus were of Huguenot descent: one of them – Charlés de Cresserons, a name Le Fanu was to use as a literary pseudonym – had fought for William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne. By the eighteenth century they had become established as solid, respectable members of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. But there was also a more volatile, literary and histrionic strain in the family, for Le Fanu’s grandmother on his father’s side was a sister of the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan: these opposite qualities are apparent in Le Fanu, in whom predictability and enigma, conservatism and erratic brilliance, mingled.

In July 1811 Thomas Le Fanu, a curate of Dr William Dobbin, rector of Finglas on the outskirts of Dublin, married Dr Dobbin’s daughter Emma. Thomas Le Fanu and his bride began their married life at 45 Lower Dominick Street in Dublin, where their first child, Catherine, was born in 1813. The following year, in August 1814, Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was born in the same house, though his earliest memories were of the Hibernian Military School in the Phoenix Park, to where the family had moved in 1815 when Thomas Le Fanu was appointed Chaplain. Phoenix Park was then a place of pastoral seclusion dotted with picturesque villages such as Chapelizod: both the Park and, especially, Chapelizod took early hold of Le Fanu’s imagination and both reappear in his novels and stories.

In 1826 the family moved to Abington in Co. Limerick, Thomas Le Fanu having been appointed rector there, in addition to holding the deanship of Emly. In the rector’s library, besides conventional fare, there were books with a natural appeal to the future author of ghost stories and mysteries, such as Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho and The Mummy: a Tale of the Twenty-second Century. Beyond the civilized confines of the glebe house and its library discontent and violence among the native Catholic population also fed into the imagination of the young Le Fanu, producing a lasting image of the Great House under siege and isolated, threatened by violent intrusions from an anarchic outer world. In W.J. McCormack’s words: ‘The essence of society as Le Fanu grew to know it in his Abington years was the isolation of his people from “the people”.’ In spite of the antagonism of the Irish to the political and religious allegiances of his class, Le Fanu nurtured strong nationalistic sympathies, as well as a deep admiration for the Irish people. He also derived imaginative sustenance from Irish folklore and legends, imbued as the majority were with a deep supernaturalism. How potent was the effect of these Limerick years, in particular the landscape of his boyhood and adolescence, can be seen for instance in this passage from the late story ‘The Child that went with the Fairies’ (1870) describing the haunted hill of Lisnavoura in the Slievefelim mountains:

A deserted country. A wide, black bog, level as a lake, skirted with copse, spreads at the left, as you journey northward, and the long irregular line of mountain rises at the right, clothed in heath, broken with lines of grey rock that resemble the bold and irregular outlines of fortifications, and riven with many a gully … It was at the fall of the leaf, and an autumnal sunset threw the lengthening shadow of haunted Lisnavoura close in front of the solitary little cabin over the undulating slopes and sides of Slievefelim.

In 1832 Le Fanu went up to Trinity College, Dublin, to read classics and train for the law. His first story appeared in the Dublin University Magazine in January 1838: ‘The Ghost and the Bonesetter’, the first tale in the collection posthumously entitled The Purcell Papers, named after the eponymous narrator, Father Francis Purcell. It was not long before writing began to assume a greater importance in Le Fanu’s life than his legal studies. ‘Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter’ (reprinted here) was published in the DUM in May 1839 (the year Le Fanu was called to the Irish Bar) and is the first of Le Fanu’s stories to hint at a synchronicity of the external themes of his fiction and personal disorientation. ‘Schalken’, a story of supernatural rape, is a variation on the demon lover theme, and though a certain ambiguity is conveyed by linking the climax of the story with Schalken’s dream, the whole thrust of the narrative is towards accepting the reality of supernatural intrusions. The death of his much-loved sister Catherine in March 1841 brought Le Fanu himself face to face with death for the first time, and from this date he began to show signs of morbidity and melancholy, coupled with the kind of religious and sexual anxiety reflected in ‘Spalatro’ (DUM, March 1843).

In December of that year Le Fanu married Susanna Bennett,[5] daughter of George Bennett, QC, a leading barrister on the Munster circuit, who lived at 18 Merrion Square South in Dublin. Le Fanu took his bride back to Abington for Christmas, writing to his sister-in-law Elizabeth: ‘I think I never saw my father and mother take such a fancy to my dear little wife … She is as merry as a lark, & for my part I am ten thousand times more in love with her than ever.’[6] Their first child, Eleanor, was born in February 1845, followed by another daughter, Emma, a year later and a son, christened Thomas Philip, in September 1847.

Le Fanu’s first novel was The Cock and Anchor, a costume romance of eighteenth-century Dublin and written in the popular style of W.H. Ainsworth and G.W.M. Reynolds. Another historical novel, The Fortunes of Colonel Torlogh O’Brien (illustrated by ‘Phiz’), followed in 1847, though historical romance was soon abandoned by Le Fanu for journalism and short tales.

In the New Year of 1851 Le Fanu published his first collection of stories, the now rare volume Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery, containing ‘The Watcher’ (later reprinted as ‘The Familiar’ in In a Glass Darkly), ‘The Murdered Cousin’ (an early form of what was to become Uncle Silas), ‘Schalken the Painter’, and ‘The Evil Guest’ (an early short form of A Lost Name). At the same time, in January 1851, the DUM carried three ‘Ghost Stories of Chapelizod’: ‘The Village Bully’, ‘The Sexton’s Adventure’, and ‘The Spectre Lovers’ – all anticipations of The House by the Churchyard.

The Le Fanus’ fourth child, George Brinsley Le Fanu, was born in August 1854. By this time the family had moved into the Bennetts’ house in Merrion Square, George Bennett, his wife and unmarried daughters having taken up residence in Sodylt Hall, Shropshire, in July 1850. ‘An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’, published in the DUM in December 1853, was Le Fanu’s last piece of fiction for nine years – a reflection of increasing domestic tension generated by debts, Susanna’s ill health, family deaths, and, in 1855, his brother William’s religious conversion, which threw into relief his own and Susanna’s spiritual doubts. The death of her father in May 1856 had a devastating effect on Susanna, who was already tormented by religious uncertainty and whose mental stability was threatened by a near hysterical reaction to death. As Le Fanu recorded: ‘If she took leave of anyone who was dear to her she was always overpowered with an agonizing frustration that she would never see them again. If anyone she loved was ill, though not dangerously, she despaired of their recovery.’[7]

On 26 April 1858 Susanna herself was taken seriously ill. She died two days later. Le Fanu wrote immediately to his mother:

The greatest misfortune of my life has overtaken me. My darling wife is gone … Pray to God to help me. My light is gone … She was wiser than I & better & would have been to the children what no father could be … She was the light of my life & light in every day.[8]

Nelson Browne called the Le Fanus’ marriage ‘an exceptionally happy one’. It was not quite that. If Le Fanu was – as his brother William said – ‘devotedly attached’ to Susanna, there was also much anxiety, torment even, and negativity in the relationship. Of the extent of Susanna’s neurosis Le Fanu himself left a record:

She one night thought she saw the curtains of her bed at the side next the door drawn, & the darling old man [her father], dressed in his usual morning suit, holding it aside, stood close to her looking ten or (I think) twelve years younger than when he died, & with his delightful smile of fondness & affection beaming upon her … [he said] ‘There is room in the vault for you, my little Sue.’

After his wife’s death Le Fanu became progressively more withdrawn and painful introspection became habitual. But in spite of these apparent disabilities he continued to write and in 1861 purchased the Dublin University Magazine, in which The House by the Churchyard was serialized in 1861–2. The novel – long and rambling, with several romantic sub-plots interspersed with supernatural incidents – drew on his childhood memories of Chapelizod, the Phoenix Park, and the Royal Hibernian Military School. It was one of M.R. James’s favourite books (he once said that he’d lost count of how many times he had read it), and James left an interesting account of a visit he made to Chapelizod in 1927:

The only excursion I made was to Chapelizod to see the House by the Churchyard, which is quite unmistakable. The big factory of which Le Fanu speaks, on the site of the old Barracks, is just across the road. There are some other sizeable houses & gardens, but none that I could really identify with the Tyled [sic] House or the King’s House, etc.

The church etc. are on the right of the road as you come from Dublin, and the Phoenix Park slopes up from the wall of the churchyard, which is not very big. The river of course on the left of the road.[9]

The references here are to the nostalgic passages in Le Fanu’s opening chapter:

As for the barracks of the Royal Irish Artillery, the great gate leading into the parade ground, by the river side, and all that, I believe the earth, or rather that grim giant factory, which is now the grand feature and centre of Chapelizod, throbbing all over with steam, and whizzing with wheels, and vomiting pitchy smoke, has swallowed them all up.

The House by the Churchyard contains what S.M. Ellis considered to be ‘the most terrifying ghost story in the language’. Ellis’s verdict may be open to argument, but chapter ix, entitled ‘An Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand’, certainly illustrates Le Fanu’s ability to convey terror through a controlled and economic style that heightens the loathsomeness of the supernatural intruder:

He drew the curtain at the side of the bed, and saw Mrs Prosser lying, as for a few seconds he mortally feared, dead, her face being motionless, white, and covered with a cold dew; and on the pillow, close beside her head, and just within the curtains, was the same white, fattish hand, the wrist resting on the pillow, and the fingers extended towards her temple with a slow wavy motion.

In the context of Le Fanu’s life, this incident – which is completely irrelevant to the plot, such as it is, of The House by the Churchyard – brings to mind Susanna Le Fanu’s disturbing dream of her dead father; and later, in Uncle Silas, Maud Ruthyn is troubled by a vision of her dead father’s face – ‘sometimes white and sharp as ivory, sometimes strangely transparent like glass, sometimes hanging in cadaverous folds, always with the same unnatural expression of diabolical fury’. These correlations with actual personal trauma should remind us that Le Fanu was not a mere ‘sensationalist’ writing only for effect. His fascination – or even obsession – with the supernatural and the macabre coincided with embedded psychological characteristics, with dimensions of his nature that were linked to emotional disturbance and guilt.

After its serialization The House by the Churchyard was published in three volumes by Le Fanu himself: five hundred copies were sold to the London publisher William Tinsley, who issued the work in a new binding in 1863. Le Fanu then contracted with Richard Bentley for what became Wylder’s Hand, written to Bentley’s specifications and squarely in a recognizably ‘sensationalist’ style. What is generally regarded as Le Fanu’s masterpiece, Uncle Silas, appeared in 1864. His nephew, T.P. Le Fanu, suggested that the character of Austin Ruthyn was a sketch of the author himself: ‘It was a peculiar figure, strongly made, thick-set, with a face large, and very stern; he wore a loose, black velvet coat and waistcoat … he married, and his beautiful young wife died … he had left the Church of England for some odd sect … and ultimately became a Swedenborgian.’

Though Susanna’s death had encouraged Le Fanu’s naturally reclusive habits, and though he became known in Dublin as the ‘Invisible Prince’, he continued to keep in touch to a degree with the literary and political life of the city. Nor did the loss of his wife affect his writing output. After the purchase of the DUM in July 1861 he produced a succession of serialized novels for the magazine: The House by the Churchyard (1861–2), Wylder’s Hand (1863–4), Uncle Silas (1864), Guy Deverell (1865), All in the Dark (1866), The Tenants of Malory (1867), Haunted Lives (1868), and The Wyvern Mystery (1869). But the influence of the DUM on the reading public was not sufficient to place Le Fanu’s career as a novelist on a higher and more secure footing and his attempts to have his novels serialized in other magazines were unsuccessful. So in 1869 he sold the DUM to a London printer, Charles Adams, for £1,500.

In the last twelve years of his life Le Fanu wrote eleven full-length novels, in addition to publishing two collections of tales (Chronicles of Golden Friars, 3 vols., 1871, and In a Glass Darkly, 3 vols., 1872) and a mass of journalism. At the same time the biographical record is virtually silent. The late novels contain much bad writing, whereas amongst the short stories of the 1860s are some of Le Fanu’s best – including ‘Wicked Captain Walshawe, of Wauling’ (1864) and ‘Squire Toby’s Will’ (1868).

With the sale of the DUM to Adams, Le Fanu’s links with the cultural and social world of Dublin were effectively severed: his world in fact was now bounded by the walls of the memory-filled house in Merrion Square. Brinsley Le Fanu gave S.M. Ellis the following celebrated account of his father’s solitary working habits in these last years:

He wrote mostly in bed at night, using copy-books for his manuscript. He always had two candles by his side on a small table; one of these dimly glimming tapers would be left burning while he took a brief sleep. Then, when he awoke about 2 a.m. amid the darkling shadows of the heavy furnishings and hangings of his old-fashioned room, he would brew himself some strong tea – which he drank copiously and frequently throughout the day – and write for a couple of hours in that eerie period of the night when human vitality is at its lowest ebb.[10]

At the end of January 1873 Le Fanu suffered an attack of bronchitis, though by the 31st he appeared to be recovering. He died on 7 February and was buried four days later in the Mount Jerome cemetery, in the Bennett tomb that contained his beloved Susan. His daughter Emma, in a letter to Lord Dufferin, remarked: ‘He lived only for us, and his life was a most troubled one.’

With J.S. Le Fanu a new type of ghost appeared in English supernatural fiction. From ‘Schalken the Painter’ onwards Le Fanu created new ways of describing violations of the mundane by the supernatural that utilized suggestion, obliquity, and what Jack Sullivan called ‘anti-Gothic restraint’.[11] Gone are the sheeted spooks rattling rusty chains and the peripatetic headless ladies that infest late eighteenth-century Gothic fiction. In their place Le Fanu conjured up ‘real ghosts who stubbornly refused to confine themselves to the shabby psyches of aristocratic neurotics, yet somehow managed to emerge from within as well as invade from without’.[12] Le Fanu was the first writer to explore the psychological dimensions of the ghost story; at the same time he was adept at invoking the physical presence of supernatural malevolence. The range of his supernatural fiction is described by E.F. Bleiler;

He wrote stories of folkloristic themes, in which the fairy lore of his Ireland was transformed into stories of quaint menace and sometimes rough humour; he also wrote sombre fate-stories, tales of supernatural vengeance for past injuries … there are also strangely involuted tales in which the universe is a vast living machine that parallels the human mind … Best of all are his highly personal stories of tortuous psychologies, of remarkable guilts and their hypostarization, of strange states of consciousness and unconsciousness, where the boundaries of the fanciful and the real swirl away in a mist of pain and terror.[13]

Above all, Le Fanu established what we can now judge to be the correct and most effective narrational mode for ghost fiction, a descriptive method in which precision and ambivalence are held in balance by the voice of a detached narrator. This potent blend of objective reportage and careful manipulation of the reader’s responses is characteristic of Le Fanu’s style at its best. Take this passage from ‘Schalken the Painter’ describing the horrendous Vanderhausen, a passage that juxtaposes half-glimpses and indirection with images of terrible clarity:

A quantity of grizzled hair descended in long tresses from his head, and rested upon the plaits of a stiff ruff, which effectually concealed his neck. So far all was well; but the face! – all the flesh was coloured with the bluish leaden hue, which is sometimes produced by metallic medicines, administered in excessive quantities; the eyes showed an undue proportion of muddy white, and had a certain indefinable character of insanity; the hue of the lips bearing the usual relation to that of the face, was sensual, malignant, and even satanic … There was something indescribably odd, even horrible, about all his motions, something undefinable, that was unnatural, unhuman; it was as if the limbs were guided and directed by a spirit unused to the management of bodily machinery.

The world in which Le Fanu’s characters – many of them victims – move is a hostile one, threatened both from without and within. Whereas many later ghost-story writers – M.R. James amongst them – wrote from an ostensible desire to entertain (the American writer Edith Wharton once spoke of ‘the fun of the shudder’), Le Fanu’s motives are altogether more enigmatic and complex. No reader of Le Fanu’s ghost stories can escape the conclusion that private anguish, in some degree, informs these public fictions. The stories are surrounded by an infinity of outer darkness, whilst at their heart is a similarly inpenetrable and menacing inner mystery. The closest Le Fanu came to articulating an explanatory metaphysic was through the character of Captain Barton in ‘The Familiar’, who confesses to Dr Macklin:

I am deeply and horribly convinced, that there does exist beyond this a spiritual world – a system whose workings are generally in mercy hidden from us – a system which may be, and which is sometimes, partially and terribly revealed. I am sure – I know … that there is a God – a dreadful God – and that retribution follows guilt, in ways the most mysterious and stupendous – by agencies the most inexplicable and terrific; – there is a spiritual system – great God, how I have been convinced! – a system malignant, and implacable, and omnipotent …

Just as the ghost story and the tale of detection are related literary forms, so Le Fanu’s work encompassed mystery as well as supernatural fiction: indeed elements of the mystery story frequently invade his ghost stories, and vice versa, whilst a pure ghost story like ‘Madam Crowl’s Ghost’ is found within the mystery novel A Strange Adventure in the Life of Miss Laura Mildmay (1871).

Though Le Fanu’s reputation is principally as a ghost-story writer, the bulk of his fiction actually falls within the Victorian mystery genre. One particular situation that fascinated him – and of which he was an early, probably the first, exponent – was the sealed-room/isolated-room mystery, the possibilities of which were explored in ‘Some Account of the Latter Days of the Hon. Richard Marston of Dunoran’ (DUM, 1848), later modified as ‘The Evil Guest’ (Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery, 1851) and expanded into the novel A Lost Name (1868). The motif is also used in ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’, a tale of the Wilkie Collins type that E.F. Bleiler rightly called ‘easily one of the best mystery-adventure stories of the nineteenth century’.

Le Fanu’s stories – be they ghost stories or tales of mystery – are of the good old-fashioned type, best enjoyed in the sort of setting he himself described: ‘the old-fashioned parlour fire-side and its listening circle of excited faces, and, outside, the wintry blast and the moan of leafless boughs, with an occasional rattle of the clumsy old window-frame behind the shutter and curtain, as the blast [sweeps] by …’. The possibilities for the literary critic of Le Fanu’s stories are one thing; their success as stories to be enjoyed, savoured, and shivered at is another, and for most modern readers it is Le Fanu’s power as a storyteller and descriptive writer that will be appreciated most. This was principally what M.R. James admired about him:

As to his peculiar power: I think the origin of it is not far to seek. Le Fanu had both French and Irish blood in his veins, and in his works I seem to see both strains coming out, though the Irish predominates. The indefinable melancholy which the air of Ireland and its colouring inspire – a melancholy which inspires many Irish writers – is caught by Le Fanu and fixed in words with an almost complete success. He dwells very fondly and very frequently on sunset scenes over a horizon of dark hanging woods, on moonlight shining on a winding river with wooded banks, on a heavily-timbered park, a black tarn in a lonely glen, an old air heard in the distance at night, a ruined chapel or manor-house, a torchlight funeral in a gloomy church. Pictures like these strike his fancy and he makes them stand out for his readers.[14]

And so, draw the curtains; pull your chair towards the fire: Schalken, Madam Crowl, Squire. Toby, Captain Walshawe, Mr Justice Harbottle and the rest await you. And when at last you put the book down and return to the ‘real’ world you may perhaps be inclined to reflect on the words of Sir Victor Pritchett: ‘The evil of the justified ghost is not sportive, wilful, involuntary or extravagant. In Le Fanu the fright is that effect follows cause.’[15]

Be warned.

Michael Cox

Denford, Northamptonshire

April 1988