In college I was taught that Henry James was a man of gravitas, a writer whose work resonates with discretion and discernment. And if I had any doubts, I simply needed to look at John Singer Sargent’s portrait of the "Master" — a capital M is advised nowaday s when using James’s sobriquet—with its sober mein, Napoleonic hand positioning, and gold watch chain. Sargent could very well have entitled this work Gravitas , and we would have all nodded our heads in approval.
Henry James’s characters are much the same. They too are masters of discretion and restraint. Read his late novels, and see how carefully his protagonists couch their views in ambiguous words, and indirect statements. What are they really thinking? Trying to figure that out is half the fun—I use that word advisedly: one person’s fun is another’s hard labor without parole—in reading these books.
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No, not everyone is prepared to find enjoyment in dense novels such as The Ambassadors or The Golden Bowl . Christopher Beha recalls the sympathetic reactions of his friends when he told them of his plan to read James’s entire oeuvre, who treated his project as a kind of self-flagellation, or "an exercise in self-discipline." "Better you than me," was a typical response. But I like the multilayered quality of these works, the huge gap between cause and effect, rich with implication, in their pages. And I admire the misdirection and nuances of the author who constructs these rich, gradually unfolding dramas, where conflicts develop in hints and allusions. If I had to describe the essence of James the writer, I would summon up that arch praise of Shakespeare, in Sonnet 94, of those "who, moving others, are themselves as stone, unmoved, cold and to temptation slow."
But the scholars who have surrounded James are a different matter entirely. They are prickly and contentious, ready to argue about everything. Even James’s sex life, which should be a slam dunk to describe—this author with a "low amatory coefficient" (according to his doctor) hardly had one; next question please—gets worked over and turned into a big academic equivalent of a TV wrestling free-for-all. (Check out the eight-part article here , if you doubt it.)
But the most contentious work in James's whole body of work is one of the shortest, namely the classic ghost story The Turn of the Screw . And the controversy centers on the embarrassing fact that this author of gravitas would even condescend to write a ghost story. And this work was hardly the only one. James wrote plenty of ghost stories, including significant works such as "The Jolly Corner," "The Third Person," "Owen Wingrave," "The Real Right Thing," and "Sir Edmund Orme."
Yes, believe it or not, Henry James was a horror writer!
But that’s hard for his academic entourage to stomach. And they have tried, in various ways, to put another spin on this work. Yet their various reinterpretations tell us more about the passing fads and fashions in lit crit than they do about Henry James.
When the book first appeared, the New York Times greeted The Turn of the Screw as a commentary on moral turpitude—the reviewer lauding James tale as "the strongest and most affecting argument against sin we have lately encountered in literature." But by the 1920s, Harold C. Goddard was viewing the story as the account of a hallucination, and in 1924 Edna Kenton categorically stated that the ghosts in James’s tale did not exist. A decade later, Edmund Wilson concocted a Freudian interpretation of The Turn of the Screw , arguing that it actually dealt with a "neurotic case of sex repression." (I warned you—there’s a lot of sex in Jamesian criticism….or maybe just the critics themselves.)
By the time we arrive at the inquiries of Leon Edel, James ' s most committed biographer, ghosts play no part in the consensus view of The Turn of the Screw . Edel was simply reflecting the prevalent view of the scholarly community in announcing that the book is "a tale of a governess frightened by her own imaginings….the demon she seeks to exorcise is the demon within herself." What we are witnessing is a case of hysteria, plain and simple.
But with the rise of postmodernism, a new view of James's story comes to the forefront. Our esteemed author wasn’t a crude Freudian with politically incorrect views of female hysteria. No, not all. He was actually a master—okay a Master—of multivalent narrative ambiguity, inviting alternative readings of his text. In other words, James wanted to present simultaneously two different views of the story: the ghosts might exist, and then again they might not. Only a fool uninitiated in the wonders of deconstruction would actually opt for just one of these outcomes. When I was in grad school, this was the dominant view of The Turn of the Screw —and it was helped by similar manifestations of ambiguity in several of James’s other so-called 'ghost' stories.
But once we accept the possibility of hallucinations and unreliable testimony of characters, all of these stories start to fall apart. Does Spencer Brydon actually see his ghostly alter ego late at night in his abandoned childhood home? Or maybe he is just having a bad hair day. Are the two spinsters in James’s "The Third Person" really fighting over a charismatic male ghost—I note that they never both encounter him at the same time—or are they simply trying to inspire each other’s jealousy? We never really get a glimpse of the ghost in "Owen Wingrave" and when two characters both see an apparition at the same time in "Sir Edmund Orme," who is to say that we are merely dealing with a case of mass hysteria?
If we are destined to update our view of James's horror writings on the basis of passing fads, we should finally have arrived back at the starting point—namely to view these ghost stories as actual ghost stories. After all, what is hotter now than genre fiction? Even serious highbrow authors are now writing science fiction, fantasy and horror novels. Cormac McCarthy won a Pulitzer Prize for The Road , an unabashed horror novel, and Jennifer Egan got one too for her sci-fi infused A Visit from the Goon Squad . Patrick Modiano, recent Nobel laureate, has built his oeuvre on works that draw on mysteries , horror fiction and crime thrillers.
So why not Henry James? Why can’t we treat him as a horror writer?
If you cut through all the posturing and theorizing of later critics, and return to what James himself said about his work, we find that he had no problem labeling these works as "ghost stories." Even more noteworthy: if you read James’s prefaces, which represent his most important contribution to literary criticism, you can even find material for a very sophisticated defense of genre fiction. Here he waxes poetic on the leap of imagination that presents "the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy."
I never run into any notice of such passages in discussions of genre stories. Indeed, Henry James is usually viewed as the champion of strict realism, and embraced as the superior highbrow writer in comparison with the lowbrow purveyors of genre tales. Yet James himself admits that, if his personal preferences had been different, he might be writing detective stories or adventure tales featuring pirates. His preference for the ghost story stems from his interest in the psychological impact of horror on the person haunted, and this allowed him to embrace this genre as a kind of turbo - charged fairy tale.
Yet the question remains. If James was so enamored with horror, why do the ghosts stay out of view in most of his tales? Why is ther e so little actual haunting in his haunted houses?
In answering this we need to consider what people of James’s time and place actually believed about ghosts. This is a vital starting point, because the Western world—especially Victorian England—was obsessed with supernatural phenomenon during the period in which James wrote these stories. Seances were regular affairs in high society, and James’s own brother, the esteemed William James established the American Society for Psychical Research—an organization that is still investigating ghosts today—back in 1885. Many prominent authors of that period, for example Arthur Conan Doyle, were convinced of the reality of spirits.
In that era, ghosts were expected to appear at séances or in haunted houses, but you rarely got more than a brief glimpse of them. Those seeking irrefutable evidence of their existence were inevitably disappointed. This wasn't a field in which objective documentation was possible.
So should we be surprised that Henry James allowed his fictional ghosts to practice the same reticence that 'real-life' specters demonstrated in his day? What else would we expect from an author who based so much of his work on close observation of the world around him? His presentation of ghosts, much like his depiction of affluent Americans and decadent Europeans, aspired to a scrupulous accuracy, and in the case of the supernatural, James's best sources were the various first-person accounts of 'sightings' that he must have heard over the years. The inquisitive reader who probes deeply between the lines could even surmise that James himself may have had a glimpse of a ghostly presence.
An even better reason for James’s shy ghosts comes in a statement from the author himself—but one found in the least likely place. In a medical study on angina pectoris , Sir James Mackenzie shares a conversation he had with a patient who had written a famous ghost story. From the context, we can tell that the writer in question in Henry James, and the story The Turn of the Screw . Here in a forgotten book on heart disease, we encounter the Master in a casual setting explaining his ghost story to an inquisitive reader.
Why didn't readers get more details on the apparitions? Dr. Mackenzie insisted that his patient explain himself. "So long as the events are veiled," James responded, "the imagination will run riot and depict all sorts of horrors, but as soon as the veil is lifted, all mystery disappears and with it the sense of terror."
Here we see that Henry James is not much different from Alfred Hitchcock or those other purveyors of horror who grasp that the ultimate source of fright is what might happen, rather than what actually occurred. Put simply, James was trying to make his story as scary as possible, and his much-studied ambiguity was merely a device to accentuate the terror.
So forget about your Freudian interpretations of James’s ghost stories. And put away those clever theories about multivalent readings, postmodern paradox, and hysterical hallucinations. James embraced the essence of horror as a genre, and did his best to terrify, drawing on his deepest insights into human nature to accentuate his effects. Based on the success, and lasting fame, of his results, we should feel no hesitation in mentioning his name alongside those of Poe , Lovecraft , Matheson and King as Masters—yes, I will insist on capitalization here—of Horror.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His most recent book, Love Songs: The Hidden History , is published by Oxford University Press.
Forget about your Freudian interpretations of James’s ghost stories. And put away those clever theories about multivalent readings, postmodern paradox, and hysterical hallucinations. James embraced the essence of horror as a genre, and did his best to terrify .