Tell Me a Ghost Story

Whatever we do with the dead, they will not go away. Whether we entomb them or isolate them or scatter their ashes, they remain as ghosts in our memories and faced with their continuing presence we have to no option but to learn to live with them.

—Michael Cox

It is bad to be between books. I sit in bed with dental floss and a glass of wine, fretting over the spines of novels I fear will disappoint.

Sometimes I get fooled. Midway through Bel Canto, I realized both the game and the snare: The reader cares, even while knowing that to read further won’t change the predictable outcome.

Sometimes I get cheated. If a good book fails to end properly, it means the time I’ve spent is wasted. But it’s even worse with a less-than-good book. Tim O’Brien’s July, July should have been better than it was and ended not with a bang—despite the character’s best efforts in that direction—but with a whimper.

In graduate school I developed a shield against this disappointment: I’d read a book with rapt attention, but only halfway through. So my half-read biographies of Edith Wharton and Colette keep them forever young. And since I never got past the Enlightenment in Paul Johnson’s History of Europe, I’m convinced we’re still living in the best of all possible worlds.

OK, I exaggerate.

But when I really like a book, I don’t want it to end.

Anna Karenina was good for that for a while. But when the author kills off the character for whom the book is named, that’s pretty much the end of things.

Still, it’s such a great scene where Anna throws herself beneath the train’s iron wheels. In bookstores I read that passage in every translation I can find. It’s a morbid habit, but of all morbid habits, a lesser one.

When I’m between books, the leaning tower of the unread bedside pile threatens to topple me. If the choice is between disappointment at a good book that ends too soon and disappointment at a mediocre book that takes too long to fail, what’s left to do?

Since it’s not good for the complexion to go to bed frowning, I return to what’s reliable: ghosts.

Because we’re near to Halloween, you might think I’m turning this into a topical column. But I’m up for a good ghost story anytime. Even a bad one will do nicely.

Ghosts have the power not only to make you suspend disbelief, but to suspend critical judgment as well.

The first time I saw Robert Wise’s The Haunting, I tried to sit alone through a second showing after my friend had gone off to study. Couldn’t do it. A few years later at a film seminar in Denver, I figured it would be a cakewalk to watch The Haunting, since Wise was in the room and was going to talk about it afterward. Didn’t matter; the movie was still scary as hell. I loved it.

And maybe I loved it because ghosts—or even intimations of ghosts, which is all you really get in the original version of The Haunting—don’t have to behave in any of the ways fictional characters are supposed to. A fictional character is supposed to be believable.

The whole point of a ghost is that it’s not. When ghosts scare you or misbehave or appear at unwanted hours and at their own will, they’re only doing what ghosts are supposed to do. When characters in novels do that, we hold the creator responsible, as if the author should put the errant characters in the Time Out chair till they learn to follow the script.

On the other hand, ghosts, to the extent that they can, have minds of their own.

That means there is no threat in settling into bed with a glass of hot milk and a ghost. They’re allowed to break all the rules. And if they break them in all the right ways, you’ll be doing a heebie-jeebies hurting dance.

Which is why I come back, like a loyal puppy, to M. R. James.

You’ve probably never heard of him. From everything I can tell, he was a stuffy Brit, as opposed to a jolly Brit. The book jacket bio says he was a linguist, medievalist, biblical scholar and paleographer. I don’t even know what a paleographer does, though it sounds improbably related to cosmetology.

James might not flick most people’s switches. All I know is he gets it right for me.

And it’s a mystery why.

His main characters are invariably male, priggish and overeducated in some obscure field of study. They probably need to do a million stomach crunches to ward off the academic’s predictable paunch. And the stories are long, the print is small, the writing as dense as fruitcake. James would certainly put a lot of readers to sleep. (I’ve been known to drift off, companionably, mid-sentence.)

But everything about James’ stories has nothing whatsoever to do with my life. So I’m freed to be at once both scared witless and utterly unconcerned that anything like that could happen to me.

I’ve never had to translate from Greek or Hebrew or Ugaritic some passage on a sundial in the middle of an overgrown topiary maze that would predict my forthcoming demise.

No part of my life involves scholars of arcana poking around in gloomy abbeys, tombs or crypts. And I’m not at risk for crossing the ocean in a haunted first-class berth.

Nor can I remember the last time I stayed in a hotel room that had a window that no one, not even the innkeeper, knew existed—a window that gave view to a murder on the heather-covered moors.

Of course, it’s true that there is not enough Xanax in the world to make me stay a second night in a hotel with a preternatural view to a kill. And I would never hack my way into a haunted maze—my mother raised me to believe a good girl didn’t do such things.

But it sure provides a sheet-clutching counterpoint to the nasty threats of normal life.

And you don’t need me to say a thing about normal life. Let’s face it—we might not do what Anna Karenina did, but her angst, whatever its cause, is something we can recognize.

There will always be the well or poorly written fictions of common human sorrows. But who can resist the transparently thrilling presence of the ghost we never have to fear we’ll meet?

—Jo Page

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