Tag: E F Benson

The Haunting of Lamb House by Joan Aiken

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The Haunting of Lamb House by Joan Aiken is a novel published in 1991. Lamb House, a Georgian building in Rye, Sussex, has been home to several writers over the years. Henry James lived and wrote there, as did E F Benson and later on, Rumer Godden. James wrote The Turn of the Screw there; Benson wrote his Mapp and Lucia novels, in which the house itself features, as well as many ghost stories there. It is now a National Trust property. Joan Aiken was born in Rye and lived not far away all her life.

This is an atmospheric and fascinating novel, an intriguing mixture of fact and fiction. It is composed of three linked stories. In the first, Toby Lamb, son of the builder of the house, tells the tale of tragic events in his childhood and youth. This is a very credible recreation of life in early eighteenth-century Sussex. We find out towards the end that what we have been reading is his own manuscript, written later in life, which he conceals behind a wall in the house.

Many years later, Henry James becomes the occupant of the house. This story is written in the third person in a style rather like James’ own. He feels as if the house has chosen him, rather than the other way round. A mysterious fire leads to some reconstruction work and the discovery of the manuscript. There are troubling similarities between Toby’s story and James’ own life. James considers publishing the manuscript as it is, but his brother William dissuades him. James considers that Toby’s use of the first-person style is a weakness and he re-writes it. He shows his new version to his friend and fellow-writer Edith Wharton. She considers that the work is not up to his usual standard.

After James’ death the house passes to E F Benson. He too has the feeling that the house is calling to him in some way. This story is the shortest of the three, written in the first person in the style of one of Benson’s ghost stories. Behind a garden wall he discovers another secret garden in which he erects a writing hut. It is while writing there that he sees the apparition of a man in black, a figure who featured in the first story, when Toby saw him in the garden. I shall not spoil things by saying who he is. A meeting across time resolves things in a satisfying way but also with a suggestion that the cycle will carry on when Benson says: “Perhaps you and I, Hugh, will be the next pair of ghosts to take over the lease. Perhaps we shall be occupying the secret garden here in the year 2030!”

This is as much a meditation on ideas of literary quality and posterity as a conventional ghost story. James is disconcerted by the fact that Edith Wharton’s novels sell so much better than his own, which he considers to be of higher quality. Benson is aware that although his own novels are successful, they do not really go deep enough.

Joan Aiken’s reader’s note is slightly misleading, perhaps deliberately so. She says that Toby’s story is completely fictional, yet elements of it, such as the visit of King George, are part of the history of Rye. She acknowledges that she has drawn on writings by and about James and Benson for their stories. She says that the ghosts are entirely fictional. What she does not say is that the description of the man in black is taken almost word-for-word from E F Benson’s 1940 autobiography, in which he describes an encounter with what he took to be a ghost.

How much you like this novel will probably depend on how much you like the writing of Henry James and E F Benson and whether or not you have been to Rye. For an admirer of E F Benson’s ghost stories like me, it’s a real treat. I have the feeling that there’s been something of a competition over the years as to whether Lamb House should be a literary shrine to James or to Benson. I know James is generally considered the superior writer, but Benson wrote not only in the house but about the house, so for me that secures his claim to it. After all, he lived there much longer than James, from 1918 until his death in 1940.

I have also written about E F Benson’s stories The Temple and Pirates.

The Temple by E F Benson

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The Temple by E F Benson was published in a magazine in 1924, and later collected in the volume Spook Stories in 1928. It begins, as so often with Benson, with two youngish, well-off bachelors deciding to take an extended holiday in a pleasant part of the country. It is Cornwall this time, and the two men are soon installed in a large seaside hotel, with its own golf links between the beach and the hotel grounds.

The narrator is a writer and his companion is an archaeologist who plans to investigate some of the antiquities of the county. The local people are superstitious about a nearby stone circle, believing it to be a pagan temple. The archaeologist says it can’t be, because the arrangement of the stones is wrong, but more importantly, it lacks a sacrificial stone in the centre. He is sure there must be a temple site somewhere in the neighbourhood and he is determined to find it.

Later, the two men are aware of an ominous atmosphere while walking in a wood: “. . . I was conscious of some gathering oppression of the spirit. It was an uncomfortable place, it seemed thick with unseen presences.” They think nothing of it, emerging back into the sunshine to come across a pretty cottage that appears to be uninhabited. The hotel is beginning to fill up for the season. Would it be possible to stay in the cottage instead? Enquiries are made and the cottage is indeed available at a knock-down price because the previous occupant committed suicide.

The wood on the hill overlooks the cottage. What are the lights that can be seen moving about in it at night? And just what is the large stone that forms part of the kitchen floor of the cottage?

It turns out that the cottage has been built in the centre of the pagan temple, with disastrous consequences. This is not entirely a surprise to the reader, and as I’ve said before, it’s not really suspense that is the appeal of a Benson story, but the sense of inexorable progress towards a malign fate that cannot be avoided.

He also has a wonderful gift for conveying the sense of place in his elegant, precise prose. His stories are often set in a remote part of the English countryside, with a local large town, such as Hastings, often given its real name but the village or hamlet where the action takes place given a fictional name, allowing Benson some room for invention.

The Temple fits neatly into the genre that is today known as Folk Horror. The central idea is also not as far-fetched as it might appear. After all, something similar happened at Avebury in Wiltshire, where the stones of the circle were knocked down in the eighteenth century and used to build houses in the village that grew up inside it. I suspect Benson might have been inspired by the restoration at Avebury that was beginning at around the time he wrote his story.

I’ve also written about Pirates, another tale by Benson.

Ten of the best ghost stories

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M R James called them “Ghost Stories”; E F Benson preferred the term “Spook Stories”; H P Lovecraft’s stories were published in the magazine Weird Tales; Robert Aickman called his productions “Strange Stories”. Dave Allen’s 1970s anthology was called A Little Night Reading. Whatever we call them, we know what we are talking about.

The Dave Allen book was in our local library when I was young. I’ve often wished I was in the position to choose the stories for such an anthology myself. Here, then, in no particular order and in time for Halloween, is my selection of ten pretty good ones.

The Monkey’s Paw by W W Jacobs (1902). Three wishes that lead to tragedy. It’s impossible to read the last few words of this tale without that feeling of a shiver up the spine, no matter how many times you have read it before. Be careful what you wish for, in case you get it, indeed.

The Signalman by Charles Dickens (1866). No other form of transport has featured in as many ghost stories as the railway. This is a story of premonition and disaster that Dickens wrote after being involved in a major train crash himself. I’ve looked at it in more detail here.

A Warning to the Curious by M R James (1925). I could have picked any one of half a dozen stories by James, but this one wins out, I think, for the East Anglian coastal setting and the feeling that it is something to do with the recent war. The framing narration makes Seaburgh remote in time as well as place, then the second narrator introduces a note of melancholy, as he casually mentions his dead friend. Nowhere else is the characteristic James atmosphere so strong, that feeling of the light fading on a deserted beach on a late November afternoon.

The Music of Eric Zann by H P Lovecraft (1922). I am not altogether a fan of Lovecraft. I tend to think of him as a writer I enjoyed in my teenage years, then left behind. All those slug or wormlike monsters! Too easy to dismiss as things that do not exist. This one, though, is quite different. Paris by night and strange violin music coming from the garret at the top of the stairs. . . .what can one see from the window?

A Small Place off the Edgware Road by Graham Greene (1947). The place in question is a cinema. This is very creepy and all it is, really, is a chat between neighbours in cinema seats. It’s an all too believable tale of the incursion of the uncanny into the everyday world that I think may show the influence of Walter de la Mare.

Naboth’s Vineyard by E F Benson (1928). Just as with M R James, I could have picked any one of half a dozen by Benson. In fact, his range was a bit wider than James. Some are very English ghost stories, with clearly recognisable coastal settings, whereas others lean closer to the Lovecraft style. As I have written about Pirates elsewhere, for this selection I’ll go for another favourite. Here is a very satisfying tale of property appropriated and revenge from beyond the grave. It couldn’t happen to a nicer fellow. . . .

Bad Company by Walter de la Mare (1955). De la Mare’s ghost stories are not so well known today. He is a master of doubt and ambiguity, close to the psychological style of Henry James. Again, one is spoilt for choice, but this short tale has stuck in my mind. London by night this time, and a reminder of why it doesn’t pay to look too closely at your fellow passengers on the tube. A strange encounter in the underground, followed by a lonely walk through a cold and deserted city to an empty house.

Man Size in Marble by E Nesbit (1893). Like De la Mare, Edith Nesbit is best-known today as a writer for children. I found this in the same anthology of ghost stories for children as the De la Mare one above. All I can say is, it must have been for children with strong nerves. The idyllic early days of a marriage between two artists, a cottage deep in the countryside. What could go wrong? There is a local legend that once a year, the stone effigies in the nearby church are able to walk. . . on Halloween, of course.

Ringing the Changes by Robert Aickman (1964). We are in East Anglia again, that zone of the uncanny, and this is a sort of zombie story, with elements of what is now known as folk horror. What makes it so fascinating, I think, is the relation of the main story about zombies to the second layer of meaning bubbling away under the surface, about the marriage of an older man to a much younger woman.

‘They’ by Rudyard Kipling (1904). This may be a surprise to those whose image of Kipling comes from The Jungle Book and poems of the army and empire. Many of his stories have a supernatural element, and none more so than this one. When the narrator discovers an ancient house, hidden in the Sussex countryside, he catches fleeting glimpses of children at the windows and in the garden. A blind woman holds the key to the mystery. It is made all the more poignant when you realise it was written after the death of Kipling’s own small daughter, and that the house resembles Bateman’s, Kipling’s Sussex home.

I’m aware that I’ve skipped over the surface a bit here, but my intention is to whet your appetite. All these stories have hidden depths that will repay repeated readings. Perhaps the secret of a really good story of this type is that it can be given more than one interpretation.  There are many others. Which ones would you choose?

Haunted by the past: E F Benson

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When is a ghost story not a ghost story? We talk about being “haunted” by the past and so on. It would be a shame to give away too much of the plot of this story to those who have not read it. Let’s just say that a man, the last survivor of his siblings, has the idea of buying his childhood home and recreating it as it was during his happiest years.

It seems an impossible project, but then circumstances combine to make it possible. The enigmatic title refers to a game the children used to play in the garden. In the story we are presented with a lush, idyllic dream of Cornwall. The overall effect is rather reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling’s story They.

Benson was well-connected in the world of early 20th century supernatural writing. He was one of the audience when M R James read his first ghost stories to a group of undergraduates at Cambridge, and he maintained a friendship with James. He knew Henry James too, staying with him at Lamb House in Rye. Benson took over the lease and made Lamb House famous as “Mallards” in the Mapp and Lucia novels. He saw a ghost there, an incident fictionalised in Joan Aiken’s 1991 novel The Haunting of Lamb House.

He wrote more than fifty “spook stories” as he called them, among the most famous The Bus Conductor, a story of premonition coming true. His best stories are quite the equal of anything in the genre. His descriptive talents and sense of place mean that you can recognise a real-life location even if he does not name it.

However, it has to be said that the creation of suspense is not his strongest point. What he does have is the ability to be supremely effective in stories that involve predestination, the sense of proceeding to an inevitable conclusion. Pirates has this, and also another element that makes Benson distinctive in the genre; the ghosts, if ghosts they are, are benign rather than malevolent. It stands apart from his other stories, being richly nostalgic and consoling, somehow, rather than frightening.

The story becomes all the more interesting if one is aware that it is fairly autobiographical, and the Cornish setting is indeed where Benson spent his childhood years with his large brood of brothers and sisters when his father was Bishop there. Pirates was published in More Spook Stories in 1934, towards the end of Benson’s life.

By writing the story, Benson was doing what his character did within it, re-visiting the scenes of childhood. He is not the only writer to have done this at the end of a long career. One thinks of Agatha Christie’s Postern of Fate, where the house is again, a re-creation of her childhood home. There is also Graham Greene’s The Human Factor, set around Greene’s childhood landscape of Berkhampstead.

The ending of Pirates leaves scope for a follow-up, but I can’t say too much about that without spoiling this marvellous story for those who have not had the pleasure of reading it yet.