Between the months of March and December, New England is struck by heat-waves at regular intervals. Temperatures will suddenly spike into the eighties, nineties, even the low hundreds. These heat-waves last about a week, and occur roughly twice every fortnight. Which isn’t ideal.
So it was that last Thursday, October the 14th, at about three in the afternoon, our thermostat read 76 degrees. This was halfway through the month, with more than half the leaves fallen from the trees. Today, the 21st, it’s down to 74.
Well, it’s supposed to be a bit cooler next week, with temperatures as low as 54 degrees. (If it gets any chillier than that, I might have to put on some pants.) With Hallowe’en rapidly approaching and autumn—blessedly; hopefully—in full swing, it’s time to talk about ghost stories.
If you’re new to gothic fiction, I bid you welcome. (If you don’t get that reference, you will.) If you’re looking for a good variety of stories, here are the collections I’d recommend, in order:
Ghosts edited by Marvin Kaye
American Gothic edited by Joyce Carol Oates
The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories edited by Michael Newton
Classic Ghost Stories published by Vintage
Once you’ve done a survey, dive into the genre’s masters. Read collections by Elizabeth Gaskell, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, E. F. Benson, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, Edith Wharton, M. R. James, and Shirley Jackson. Cozy up by the fire with a copy of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dracula by Bram Stoker, the Ghost Book of Shane Leslie, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Old House of Fear by Russell Kirk, or Ray Bradbury’s The October Country.
That should keep you through fall. Then when you can look at an even more exquisite genre: the Christmas ghost story.
Of course, the ghost story is the most reactionary genre of literature. It’s the only genre of literature that’s supernatural by definition, while the reactionary is simply one who refuses to accept the crude, joyless materialism that has spread across the West since the Enlightenment.
I’ll shamelessly remind you, gentle reader, that Rod Dreher called my book The Reactionary Mind “a witty and cheerful invitation to a living a more enchanted life.” I loved that. It got right to the heart of what I was trying to do. Because the world really is full of enchantment, if only we have eyes to see it—though, of course, the enchantment isn’t always benevolent.
That’s the basic message of The Reactionary Mind. It’s also the message of any ghost story worth its salt.
Actually, back in 2015, Benjamin Welton wrote a fascinating article on this very topic. It’s called “The Ghost Story, Conservative Style” and it appeared in the Washington Examiner. In it, Mr. Welton gives the four elements of a conservative ghost story:
1. The conservative ghost story is first and foremost about the past—the troubled past, the evil past, the lost past.
2. Conservative ghost stories predominately take place in time-worn surroundings, from ruined castles to New England homes from the 17th or 18th century.
3. Conservative ghost stories are rarely about politics. Rather, they are about diseased traditions and the role of individual in correcting that malignancy.
4. Conservative ghost stories usually show their disfavor with the modern world by hardly presenting it all.
Number three may throw some folks for a loop, but it’s a brilliant observation. When it comes to ghost stories, even (or especially) those written by conservatives, the past is never the protagonist.
To understand why, we should look to the exemplars of the genre given by Mr. Walton. Among them is Russell Amos Kirk.
I’m sure you’re familiar with Kirk’s magnum opus The Conservative Mind, to which my book The Reactionary Mind is an homage. (It’s published by the same publisher, too, which is fun.) Some of you know that he also wrote ghostly fiction. Yet even few die-hard Kirkians know that, in his own lifetime, Old House of Fear outsold all his nonfiction works put together.
Most scholars credit Kirk with reviving both the conservative movement and the gothic novel in America. If we say that he was both the Tucker Carlson and the Stephen King of his day, we almost get a sense of his vast genius.
Well, a few years ago I had breakfast with a certain newspaper columnist. You would know his name if I said it. He began his career as a traditionalist but slowly morphed into a libertarian. I asked him why he ended up rejecting Kirk. He got this sour look on his face and said, “Because his conservatism didn’t have room for an atheist like me.”
Well, that’s true. For Kirk, materialism isn’t just wrong: it’s unreasonable. It’s dangerous. It not only fails to elucidate but creates obscurity.
Any rational worldview must begin and end by accepting the reality of the supernatural. You can’t understand the universe without acknowledging God and the Devil. They’re not symbols or myths or rhetorical devices. They’re real, realer than you and me. And they have power beyond anything we can imagine.
These are ancient powers. Our lives are only a minor skirmish in a war that’s been raging since before time began. It’s up to us, as moral agents with free will, to resist the evil and align with the good.
That’s why Kirk liked to quote G. K. Chesterton as saying that original sin is “the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” That dogma is denied by modern theologians, despite the fact that “they can see in the street.”
It led to Kirk’s definition of the principle of imperfectability, one of his Ten Conservative Principles. In fact, his description of this principle almost reads like a ghost story itself:
Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination and would break out once more in violent discontent—or else expire of boredom. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk.
To deny original sin is wrong in an abstract, philosophical way. But it’s more than that. It’s deceptive. It leads us to underestimate the Devil and to overestimate man. It makes us forget about God. That’s why Kirk had no room in his system for atheists. They’re willfully blind to realities that are beyond their control.
Kirk also understood better than anyone what Chesterton meant when he called tradition “the democracy of the dead.” Like Chesterton, too, he embraced the macabre beauty of the expression. We can’t cover the past with new wallpaper and pretend it didn’t happen. Those who came before us will have their say, whether we like it or not. That’s why Kirk feared and despised the revolutionary impulse in man. It’s also why, for Kirk, every old house was a haunted house.
So we have his most powerful (and most chilling) description of the conservative:
Mine was not an Enlightened mind, I now was aware: it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful.
As it happens, the undisputed master of the modern ghost story, M. R. James, was also a man of the Right.
“If one were to build the archetype of a reactionary,” writes Benjamin Welton, “it would probably look a lot like Montague ‘Monty’ Rhodes James.”
As Matthew Walther pointed out last October in his magazine The Lamp, James’s legacy (like Kirk’s) is twofold. First, of course, are the ghost stories. The second is his Medieval scholarship, which was “built upon an unfashionable conservatism in biblical scholarship and an unrivaled fussiness in the cataloguing of medieval Latin manuscripts.”
The son of an Anglican priest, James spent most of his career as provost of Kings College and Eton. Whenever he wrote a new story, he would gather some of his students together by the fireplace in his study. Then he would light his pipe and read it to them. Of course, they adored him.
Like all good Britons, James was an empiricist. Yet he didn’t suffer from the same affliction as David Hume or Richard Dawkins, of which Chesterton wrote:
There is a curious idea… that skepticism has some connection with such theories as materialism and atheism and secularism. This is of course a mistake; the true sceptic has nothing to do with these theories simply because they are theories. The true sceptic is as much a spiritualist as he is a materialist.
Thus, when James was asked, “Do I believe in ghosts?” he would answer, “I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me.”
Again, this is a perfectly reasonable answer to any true empiricist. For James, as for Kirk, realism meant accepting the obvious reality of the supernatural—even, or especially, when it would be nicer not to. “In the lives of all of us, short or long,” wrote James, “there have been days, dreadful days, on which we have had to acknowledge with gloomy resignation that our world has turned against us.”
This sort of empiricism or realism or skepticism is the foil of ideology, utopianism, and all manner of “theories.” Hence, as Mr. Walther writes,
[James’s] gravest misgivings were reserved for the coterie surrounding G.E. Moore and later the young Maynard Keynes, who contemptuously dismissed James’s administration as provost of King’s as “inefficient.” He cordially disliked their combination of intellectual pursuits—especially metaphysical speculation—which he regarded as worthless with a hedonism he considered at best frivolous and at worst grossly immoral, and he hated the reflexive atheism that undergirded both. A colleague once recalled James silencing two undergraduates engaged in a philosophical discussion while at table: “No thinking, gentlemen, please.”
If the reactionary had a party, that would be its motto: No Thinking.
As I put the finishing touches on this newsletter, my friend Declan Leary published an article at The American Conservative with this chestnut about Arthur Machen:
Machen, of course—though fascinated by the occult—was a devout Anglo-Catholic, son of an Anglican priest, a hard-right reactionary who could hardly have fit in with the heathens and forward-thinkers who overtook the genre as his early stardom faded. My favorite line he ever wrote, a single-sentence response to The Left Review in 1937: “Mr. Arthur Machen presents his compliments and begs to inform that he is, and always has been, entirely for General Franco.”
Indeed. Machen also declared that “literature is the expression, through the aesthetic medium of words, of the dogmas of the Catholic Church, and that which is in any way out of harmony with these dogmas is not literature.” Which is quite a claim.
It’s surprising, too, given that Machen is best remembered for his novella “The Great God Pan,” which predated Lady Chatterley’s Lover by thirty-four years. It created an even bigger stir than Chatterley, and for similar reasons—i.e., sex stuff.
But there’s a key difference. D. H. Lawrence’s novel was derided for its coarse materialism; Machen’s was condemned for its strange mysticism. Machen himself was obsessed with the idea of ecstasy, of transcendence. Perhaps it made him careless. In his darker moods, it’s difficult to tell at times whether he’s coming down on the side of Jehovah or Pan. As Blake said of Milton, he was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”
Of course, the same could happen to any one of us. Only a fool thinks he can dabble in the supernatural on his own terms. That’s why a true atheists, a materialist, can’t write a decent ghost story—no more than he can be a true conservative. (Don’t mention Wells’s “The Red Room.” It’s a disgrace.)
That may sound sectarian. In any event, it’s quite true. To write a decent ghost story, you have to believe in ghosts, if only the Holy Ghost. You need to spend time on the borderland between the natural and the supernatural. Don’t try to explain it, or even to understand it. Just report back on what you see. It won’t be what you expect.
Again, the goal of the reactionary and the writer of ghost stories is the same. We both exist to make men aware of these great mystery unfolding all around him. It may be wonderful; it may be terrible. Usually it’s both at once.
That’s all right. We take great comfort from that line in Hamlet:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Who wants to live in a world so tiny it can fit into a nutshell? Who really wants to be king of infinite space? That doesn’t sound like much fun at all.
Happy Hallowe’en, my friends. Fidelium animae, per misericordiam Dei, requiescant in pace. Amen.