Story of the month/ week/ whatever :D
Sep. 12th, 2004 12:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joysilence posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
darkling_talesWell now I think it's time to have a chat about our group read, Oh, Whistle And I'll Come To You, My Lad by Montague Rhodes James.
"O Whistle…" has been one of my favourite ghost stories ever since I read it when I was nine. I have outgrown many of the authors I used to enjoy back then, or at least come to view their writing with a more critical eye, but I still find James’ best work as flawless and spellbinding as when I went to primary school. Here is a short synopsis of the story in case some of you have already read it but would like to have your memories jogged:
Parkins, a clucking Oxford bachelor and professor of Ontology (an entirely fictional subject, but one which would, I assume, require the scholar to be dry, overly logical and pedantic) is holidaying in the little town of Burnstow on the east coast of England. He is staying at the Globe Inn, where circumstances have forced him to take a room with two beds. Curiosity drives him to poke about among the “ruins of a Templars' preceptory” one evening, and he finds a bronze whistle engraved with a strange message. He takes the whistle back to his room and blows on it, unwittingly summoning something very unpleasant. That night the foolhardy scholar is plagued by visions of a lolloping creature chasing a man over a beach and finally swooping down on him. He eventually falls asleep but the next day a chambermaid notes that both the beds appear to have been slept in.The next day, while Parkins is out on the links improving his golf in the company of a bluff old Colonel, a small local boy gets a bad scare when he sees a flapping, “wiving” white sheet in a window of the hotel, which turns out to be Parkins’ window. Undeterred by all this, Parkins settles down to spend another night in the room. After a little sleep he wakes to find that there is a figure rising up from the room’s second, empty bed. The creature, which has a “face of crumpled linen”, appears to be blind, but sniffs around looking for Parkins in the dark; Parkins gives his position away by screaming, and the creature attacks him. Luckily for his sanity the Colonel bursts into the room on hearing the shriek and saves Parkins – the “creature” falls to the ground and, robbed of its spirit, becomes just another sheet, which the men hastily burn in the back-yard of the inn…Parkins is forced to revise some of his more skeptical opinions on the supernatural.
Oh, Whistle… has all the virtues of a good Jamesian ghost story – it is fairly short, and concise, but James manages in a few paragraphs to totally absorb the reader in the world of his characters. We are encouraged to laugh slightly at his academic hero Parkins, who like many of James’ heroes is a slightly prissy, querulous bachelor. Time has given a charming patina to the descriptions of bickering Edwardian scholars, retired military men, seaside guest-houses, and endless rounds of golf. But whereas many of James’ imitators' writing has fallen foul of the passing years and now merely seems quaint, in O Whistle… it is not very long before the pleasant glow of nostalgia falls away and pure timeless terror rears its ugly head.
Here is a passage that I found to be a particularly good example of the taut, restrained, but evocative and merciless style that endears James to so many readers. Parkins is trying to get to sleep after having sounded the whistle, but every time he closes his eyelids, that scene plays out in his mind’s eye. A man is running across across a beach.
…So far no cause whatever for the fear of the runner had been shown; but now there began to be seen, far up the shore, a little flicker of something light-coloured moving to and fro with great swiftness and irregularity. Rapidly growing larger, it, too, declared itself as a figure in pale, fluttering draperies, ill-defined. There was something about its motion which made Parkins very unwilling to see it at close quarters.
And that’s only the beginning of Parkins’ ordeal! I also enjoyed the way James summarizes a whole lifetime’s worth of trauma in one short sentence at the very end of the story:
There is really nothing more to tell, but, as you may imagine, the Professor's views on certain points are less clear cut than they used to be. His nerves, too, have suffered: he cannot even now see a surplice hanging on a door quite unmoved, and the spectacle of a scarecrow in a field late on a winter afternoon has cost him more than one sleepless night.
I have occasionally seen James come under criticism for his patronizing portrayals of members of the working class, but I think that in this story at least we owe one of the most frightening moments to the hero's encounter with a small local boy who comes flying round a corner of the hotel and bumps into Parkins and the Colonel as they are returning from the links at sunset. The vague, almost hysterical way the petrified boy describes the source of his fear still sets my hairs on end:
”The boy had been playing about on the grass in front of the Globe with some others; then they had gone home to their teas, and he was just going, when he happened to look up at the front winder and see it a-wiving at him. It seemed to be a figure of some sort, in white as far as he knew - couldn't see its face; but it wived at him, and it warn't a right thing - not to say not a right person.”
(Incidentally I find the way James gradually shifts the perspective from the narrator to the small boy quite fascinating and unusual too.)
But of course, James wrote many great stories. What causes Oh, Whistle… to stand out for me are the beautiful descriptions of the lonely winter beach, a lovely but eerie expanse of sand lined with black groins, lapped by the endless sea and buffeted by the soughing wind, that becomes the stage of a terrible and utterly inexplicable drama by night. (As in many James stories, there is no proper explanation for any of the horrors that unfold; instead the events unfurl with a sort of crazed logic that seems right even though it is deeply, deeply wrong.) James, in spite of his dry tone, can really depict nature well when he feels like it. A Warning To The Curious has a similar setting on the East Coast, and my love of the sea ensure that both these tales rank in my top five James stories.
What did you all think?
Finally, here are a couple more links I dug up recently:
An appraisal of James' work by a fellow horror author, Clark Ashton Smith, in 1934.
Last but not least, an excellent piece by Michael Chabon which featured as an introduction to one of James' many reprints. This is well worth a read and mainly deals with Oh, Whistle....
"O Whistle…" has been one of my favourite ghost stories ever since I read it when I was nine. I have outgrown many of the authors I used to enjoy back then, or at least come to view their writing with a more critical eye, but I still find James’ best work as flawless and spellbinding as when I went to primary school. Here is a short synopsis of the story in case some of you have already read it but would like to have your memories jogged:
Parkins, a clucking Oxford bachelor and professor of Ontology (an entirely fictional subject, but one which would, I assume, require the scholar to be dry, overly logical and pedantic) is holidaying in the little town of Burnstow on the east coast of England. He is staying at the Globe Inn, where circumstances have forced him to take a room with two beds. Curiosity drives him to poke about among the “ruins of a Templars' preceptory” one evening, and he finds a bronze whistle engraved with a strange message. He takes the whistle back to his room and blows on it, unwittingly summoning something very unpleasant. That night the foolhardy scholar is plagued by visions of a lolloping creature chasing a man over a beach and finally swooping down on him. He eventually falls asleep but the next day a chambermaid notes that both the beds appear to have been slept in.The next day, while Parkins is out on the links improving his golf in the company of a bluff old Colonel, a small local boy gets a bad scare when he sees a flapping, “wiving” white sheet in a window of the hotel, which turns out to be Parkins’ window. Undeterred by all this, Parkins settles down to spend another night in the room. After a little sleep he wakes to find that there is a figure rising up from the room’s second, empty bed. The creature, which has a “face of crumpled linen”, appears to be blind, but sniffs around looking for Parkins in the dark; Parkins gives his position away by screaming, and the creature attacks him. Luckily for his sanity the Colonel bursts into the room on hearing the shriek and saves Parkins – the “creature” falls to the ground and, robbed of its spirit, becomes just another sheet, which the men hastily burn in the back-yard of the inn…Parkins is forced to revise some of his more skeptical opinions on the supernatural.
Oh, Whistle… has all the virtues of a good Jamesian ghost story – it is fairly short, and concise, but James manages in a few paragraphs to totally absorb the reader in the world of his characters. We are encouraged to laugh slightly at his academic hero Parkins, who like many of James’ heroes is a slightly prissy, querulous bachelor. Time has given a charming patina to the descriptions of bickering Edwardian scholars, retired military men, seaside guest-houses, and endless rounds of golf. But whereas many of James’ imitators' writing has fallen foul of the passing years and now merely seems quaint, in O Whistle… it is not very long before the pleasant glow of nostalgia falls away and pure timeless terror rears its ugly head.
Here is a passage that I found to be a particularly good example of the taut, restrained, but evocative and merciless style that endears James to so many readers. Parkins is trying to get to sleep after having sounded the whistle, but every time he closes his eyelids, that scene plays out in his mind’s eye. A man is running across across a beach.
…So far no cause whatever for the fear of the runner had been shown; but now there began to be seen, far up the shore, a little flicker of something light-coloured moving to and fro with great swiftness and irregularity. Rapidly growing larger, it, too, declared itself as a figure in pale, fluttering draperies, ill-defined. There was something about its motion which made Parkins very unwilling to see it at close quarters.
And that’s only the beginning of Parkins’ ordeal! I also enjoyed the way James summarizes a whole lifetime’s worth of trauma in one short sentence at the very end of the story:
There is really nothing more to tell, but, as you may imagine, the Professor's views on certain points are less clear cut than they used to be. His nerves, too, have suffered: he cannot even now see a surplice hanging on a door quite unmoved, and the spectacle of a scarecrow in a field late on a winter afternoon has cost him more than one sleepless night.
I have occasionally seen James come under criticism for his patronizing portrayals of members of the working class, but I think that in this story at least we owe one of the most frightening moments to the hero's encounter with a small local boy who comes flying round a corner of the hotel and bumps into Parkins and the Colonel as they are returning from the links at sunset. The vague, almost hysterical way the petrified boy describes the source of his fear still sets my hairs on end:
”The boy had been playing about on the grass in front of the Globe with some others; then they had gone home to their teas, and he was just going, when he happened to look up at the front winder and see it a-wiving at him. It seemed to be a figure of some sort, in white as far as he knew - couldn't see its face; but it wived at him, and it warn't a right thing - not to say not a right person.”
(Incidentally I find the way James gradually shifts the perspective from the narrator to the small boy quite fascinating and unusual too.)
But of course, James wrote many great stories. What causes Oh, Whistle… to stand out for me are the beautiful descriptions of the lonely winter beach, a lovely but eerie expanse of sand lined with black groins, lapped by the endless sea and buffeted by the soughing wind, that becomes the stage of a terrible and utterly inexplicable drama by night. (As in many James stories, there is no proper explanation for any of the horrors that unfold; instead the events unfurl with a sort of crazed logic that seems right even though it is deeply, deeply wrong.) James, in spite of his dry tone, can really depict nature well when he feels like it. A Warning To The Curious has a similar setting on the East Coast, and my love of the sea ensure that both these tales rank in my top five James stories.
What did you all think?
Finally, here are a couple more links I dug up recently:
An appraisal of James' work by a fellow horror author, Clark Ashton Smith, in 1934.
Last but not least, an excellent piece by Michael Chabon which featured as an introduction to one of James' many reprints. This is well worth a read and mainly deals with Oh, Whistle....
