THE DEAD OF NIGHT
The Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions
with an introduction by
David Stuart Davies
The Dead of Night first published by
Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2010
Published as an ePublication 2011
ISBN 978 1 84870 403 9
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For my husband
ANTHONY JOHN RANSON
with love from your wife, the publisher
Eternally grateful for your unconditional love,
not just for me but for our children,
Simon, Andrew and Nichola Trayler
INTRODUCTION
Oliver Onions’s ghost stories are as unusual as his name. Indeed he is unique in the realms of writers of the supernatural in that his tales are so far-ranging in their background and substance that they are not easily categorised. Remarkably for a writer born in the mid-nineteenth century his style is very modern and his approach is as psychological as it is supernatural. One of the well-regarded commentators of the ghost story genre, Mike Ashley, observed: ‘Onions’s best stories are powerfully charged explorations of physical violence, their effects heightened by detailed character study and a preparedness to challenge the accepted.’
Onions’s fiction is also graced with a powerful poetic elegance often missing in even the best of ghost stories. While other writers may create moods and images designed to chill, Onions is able to add a richness to the prose giving it a depth and beauty which enhances the development of the plot and cultivates living, breathing characters who are more than just pieces to be moved about the chessboard of a plot. In simple terms Oliver Onions goes for the cerebral rather than the jugular. However, make no mistake, his ghost stories achieve the desired effect. They not only unnerve the reader, but disturb him also and stay with him long after the book has been closed.
One of the pleasures of these stories is that Onions lets his ideas breathe and develop slowly. Most of these tales are quite long and, indeed, some are regarded as novellas. There is no headlong gallop to the dénouement with his work. We are led gently but inexorably to the climax. Nevertheless, it may well be that Onions’s subtle technique and style is responsible for his ghost stories having been overlooked in the past. We hope that this bumper volume will help to redress that balance.
George Oliver Onions (pronounced like the vegetable) was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, in November 1873. He had the bluff, no-nonsense characteristics of the native Yorkshireman and, although proud of his unusual name, he was taunted at school because of it. In 1918 he changed it to George Oliver, partly to please his wife, who found it distasteful, and probably also to prevent his two young sons suffering the same humiliation that he had experienced. However, by this time he had established himself as a successful author and so he continued to publish his work under the name of Oliver Onions.
From an early age, Onions demonstrated an artistic and imaginative talent. As a young man he studied at the National Arts Training School in London. He continued his studies in Paris where he indulged himself in the artistic, bohemian life of the Left Bank. It was here that he got his first taste for writing by editing a student journal, Le Quartier Latin. One of the contributors to this publication was a certain Berta Ruck, who had been born in India in 1878. He was to marry her in 1908. Ruck later became a popular romantic novelist, penning over eighty books. She outlived her husband to reach the age of one hundred.
On Onions’s return to England, he made his living as a book and poster designer and magazine illustrator. It was the American humourist and illustrator Gelett Burgess who encouraged Onions to try his hand at writing fiction. He was hesitant to begin with but after the success of his first novel, a light-hearted comedy of manners, The Compleat Bachelor (which was dedicated to Burgess) the die was cast. There then followed a whole series of novels and short stories which, because of the range of tone and theme, prevented the author from being categorised. The scope of his fiction not only included ghost stories and human interest dramas, but also a murder mystery, In Accordance with the Evidence (1912); a science fiction novel, The New Moon (1918), set in a utopian Britain of the future; and an historical romance set in Yorkshire, The Story of Ragged Robyn (1945). In 1946 Onions won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the Best Novel of the Year with Poor Man’s Tapestry. He was writing until his death in 1961 and indeed this collection contains a story, ‘Tragic Casements’, which was found in his papers and not published until some years after his demise by a small press.
However, it is with Onions’s forays into the dark realms of supernatural fiction that we are concerned here. His best-known and probably his most effective collection was Widdershins, which appeared in 1911. It is this fascinating bubbling cauldron of spookiness that first gave the world ‘The Beckoning Fair One’, Onions’s most famous and most anthologised of stories. While E. F. Bleiler, an eminent scholar and critic of ghostly fiction, regarded Widdershins as a ‘landmark book’ in the genre, such notable and respected practitioners of the art of penning strange fiction, Algernon Blackwood and H. P. Lovecraft regarded ‘The Beckoning Fair One’ as one of the most effective and subtle ghost stories in all literature.
Indeed this story illustrates most effectively the skill and brilliance of Onions’s writing. It is in one sense a haunted house tale, but to regard it simply as that is to be blind to its depth and nuances. It is the first story in this collection and chosen to be so for a definite purpose. It is the ideal introduction to the dark, subtle and challenging psychological nature of Onions’s writing. When the story’s protagonist Paul Oleron goes to live in the old house in the ‘little triangular “Square” ’, he is at a pivotal point in his life: both his writing career and his relationship with his lady friend Elsie have reached a crucial stage. As the spirit of the house and the central character in his unfinished novel begin to take hold of him, Oleron’s mental outlook begins to change rapidly. As the air of strangeness grows, Onions seems to be challenging the reader to decide whether this unsettling and bizarre state of affairs is a result of supernatural forces beyond Oleron’s control, or if the character is suffering the onset of madness brought about by his inability to complete his novel. This multi-layered work can also be regarded as a tale of psychic vampirism as Oleron’s fictional heroine feeds on him and drains his strength and sanity.
Onions imbues the text of this fascinating story with his first-hand knowledge of the pleasures and pains of the creative writing process and the terrors of writer’s block which now hold Oleron in its thrall.
As in time past he had known, in his writing, moments when his thoughts had seemed to rise of themselves in words not to be altered afterwards, so now the questions he put to himself seemed to be answered even in the moment of asking. There was exhilarat
ion in the swift, easy processes. He had known no such joy in his own power since the days when his writing had been a daily freshness and delight to him. It was almost as if the course he must pursue was being dictated to him.
Whatever causes Oleron’s world to implode upon him, we, through the persuasiveness of Onions’s prose, sympathise with him and therefore experience the same shivers of uncertainty and dread. We follow and understand his moods. In other words, we see the world through his haunted eyes. The story is a master-class in involving the reader in the emotions of the author’s central character.
The connection between creativity and insanity is explored in other tales in this collection. For instance there is ‘Rooum’, whose central character is a clever engineer who is haunted by a ghost who can penetrate matter; and ‘Benlian’, a story which is narrated by a painter of miniatures who now resides in a madhouse, and which concerns a sculptor who, rather like Oleron in ‘The Beckoning Fair One’, becomes increasingly obsessed with his creation.
Onions seemed intrigued with the power of the imagination which allows the mind to bring into reality artificial constructs, whether they are fictional characters or works of art. This idea is explored with a tinge of dark humour in ‘The Real People’ in which the fragile barrier between reality and fantasy is explored when characters created by a romantic novelist take on a wonderfully disruptive life of their own. Similarly in ‘Hic Jacet’, Onions presents us with the strange scenario of a mystery writer who writes the biography of a friend as detective story.
The stories I have mentioned so far are from Widdershins, Onion’s first foray into what he termed ‘the ghostly spectrum’. His other two collections were Ghosts in Daylight (1924) and The Painted Face (1929). It was in these volumes particularly that Onions explored his fascination with the idea that the events of the past have a great influence on the life and destiny of an individual. In ‘The Rosewood Door’ from The Painted Face we are presented with what might be termed ‘a living ghost’, a character who, influenced in some mystical fashion by the antique door of the title, reveals varied past lives which impinge tragically on the present. A ghost story, yes, but also a tale of a doomed romance and again one involving a possible mental breakdown. As with so much of Onions’s fiction, the characters are wonderfully drawn and the plot is multi-layered. The idea of a dark reincarnation, the power of past personalities to inhabit and influence the living, is also found in one of Onions’s masterpieces, the title story from The Painted Face collection. It is the tale of a Sicilian girl on holiday in Tunis who falls in love with a young Englishman. The passion aroused in her by this affair causes the girl to experience dramatic personality changes. It turns out that this heroine is a temptress who through the ages is reincarnated to fool and entrap men. On this occasion, however, she has really fallen in love. The resolution of the plot is both ingenious and imbued with a touching sadness. In some ways it has the feel of a Greek tragedy about it.
This theme of past influences and reincarnation can be found in other stories including ‘The Ascending Dream’ in which the same portentous dream is experienced by three separate individuals through history. There are a number of what one might refer to as traditional ghost stories in this collection also: for example ‘The Woman in the Way’, which concerns the spirit of a young woman from the seventeenth century who haunts a meadow; and ‘The Cigarette Case’, which involves an attractive silver cigarette case that is the souvenir of a ghostly visitation.
I have no intention of touching on all the stories in this collection in my Introduction. I just wanted to give you a flavour, an appetiser if you like, of what to expect in this rich and varied mélange awaiting you. As intimated earlier, Oliver Onions is unique in the world of ghost stories; neither he nor his work can be easily compared with other practitioners of the art. One can often say, with other writers, something like ‘there is a touch of M. R. James to this story’ or ‘one can detect the influence of E. F. Benson with that particular plot’, and so on, but not so with Onions. He really does stand alone.
In this volume we have tried to present the reader with all of Onions’s ghost stories, but it may well be that one of two elusive tales have escaped the net. However, there are four stories included here that have not found their way into any collection of Onions’s work in recent times. Two are what he referred to as trifles: ‘The Ether Hog’ and ‘The Mortal’, and they merit special comment because of the whimsical and humorous nature of their narrative, so at odds with the bulk of this volume. ‘The Ether Hog’ is a kind of cheery Christmas ghost story involving a cantankerous but well-meaning ghost who is sent on an errand by the ‘Special Committee on Ethereal Traffic and Right of Way’ and disobeys their instructions in order to save lives. It is an amusing, fanciful and heart-warming tale which clearly demonstrates the author’s versatility. ‘The Mortal’ is even more of a trifle and is rather like a comic sketch or an amusing fairy tale with a medieval setting where the main character risks his ghostly existence to carry out a haunting.
The third ‘extra’ tale is ‘The Master of the House’, a rare foray for Onions into werewolf territory; and the fourth is the aforementioned posthumously published ‘Tragic Casements’ which, rather like ‘The Rosewood Door’, involves the ghostly past intruding upon the present by means of an antique object – in this instance ancient window glass. Written towards the end of Onions’s ghost-writing career, this story does not touch on any new territory, and if the ideas are by now somewhat familiar, nevertheless the story reveals that Onions’s ability to turn a chilling phrase and inject touches of dry humour into his prose remained undiminished.
These rare examples of Onions’s work are the icing on this rather majestic cake. It was over twenty years ago that Gary William Crawford, one of the great commentators on and publishers of Gothic literature, stated that Onions’s ghost stories were overdue for a revival. Well, it has been a long time coming but at last you hold in your hand a treasure-trove of some of the best supernatural writing ever penned. I hope you find the contents as exciting, engrossing and indeed as pleasantly uncomfortable as I did.
DAVID STUART DAVIES
THE DEAD OF NIGHT
Credo
Ghosts, it is advanced, either do not exist at all, or else, like the stars at noonday, they are there all the time and it is we who cannot see them. The stories in the following pages were written on the second of these assumptions.
At first sight it would therefore appear that the writer of ghost-stories in this sense has unlimited material to his hand; but actually this is not so. All-the-time manifestations, pervading the whole of nature with a ghostly element, are for all practical purposes no manifestations at all. What the writer has in practice to investigate is the varying ‘densities’ of the ghostliness that is revealed when this surface of life, accepted for everyday purposes as stable, is jarred, and for the time of an experience does not recover its equilibrium.
Nevertheless his realm is no narrow one. True its Central Province is of strictly limited extent, but, as this provides only the class of story so plainly labelled “ghost” that it cannot be mistaken for anything else, the spectre is apt to be swamped by the traditional apparatus that makes the stock illustration for the Christmas Number, and there is little to be said about this region except that here the ghostly texture is found at its coarsest.
But this place of shrouds and moans and bony fingers is surrounded by territory no less haunted than itself, and with far subtler terrors. This is the ghost-belt that never asserts its spectre, but leaves you in no doubt about his presence. Above all, only rarely is he seen, and I myself have never been able to understand why the unvarying question should be, “Have you ever seen a ghost?” when, if a ghost cannot exist apart from visibility, his being rests solely on the testimony of one sense, and that in some respects the most fallible one of all. May not his proximity be felt and his nature apprehended in other ways? I hav
e it on excellent authority that such a visitor can in fact be heard breathing in the room, most powerfully smelt, and known for a spirit in travail longing for consolation, all at one and the same time, and yet not be seen by the eye. And even short of signs so explicit as these, who at some time or other has not walked into a room, known and familiar and presently to be known and familiar again, but that for a space has become a different room, informed with other influences and charged with other meanings? Something has temporarily upset the equilibrium, which will be restored by and bye. Much less dense, I take it, is the texture of the spirits that make this secondary zone their habitat, but ah, how much more shiveringly it gets to the marrow than do the groans and clankings of the grosser spook!
But nobody who has thought much of the poise of contending forces that keeps matter in its place, or of that other mystery by which spiritual entities deviate on the whole so little from type – nobody who has given his mind to these things has not sometimes also surmised the existence of a class of beings of a composition so unstable, yet of so plausible an exterior, that they are hardly known to have been ghosts till they have passed. To some of us these are the most disturbing simulacra of all, not because they contradict nature, but because they actually join hands with it. Surely that voice was a real voice, that touch a real touch? That that passed us in the twilight just now, surely that was substance and not shadow? For all is twilight here, and before we come out into the world of men and women again we have to traverse a territory peopled, not by graveyard figures seen by their own spectral light, not by daunting presences that creep in at our pores, but by such as look like men and women, at first arouse no fear, but yet hover so on the confines of ghostliness that it is but a step and lo, from the very verge of happy unhaunted earth they lapse back into the dread company. Should not these auto-haunts, that we have rubbed shoulders with without realising their nature, have information about both realms? Alas poor susceptibles, so near immunity, but blighted with one fatal particle, one vulnerable cell, which do but touch and they are haled back and claimed, as Xena in one of these stories was haled back to the darkness of the making of the world, to be branded on the breast with the trident of her lord Poseidon! But for some other compulsion such a ghost perhaps should I be, such a ghost you. Precariously we move among perils we do not know, saved only by a sanity stronger than our own. And when, either in ourselves or in another, such an osmosis takes place before our very eyes, does not a ghost write his own story? Who are The Real People?
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