The Ghost Feeler (2 page)

There is little doubt that ‘The Fullness of Life', published at the end of 1893, reflects the state of Wharton's own married life at the time. She had been wed in 1885 to Edward Wharton, a man thirteen years older than her, who had little feeling for literature and art, preferred the company of other male New York socialites, and quickly lost interest in the artistic and physical needs of his young bride. Soon, in fact, the unsatisfactory state of her marriage was to cause Edith to form several intense friendships, and in 1907 she had a deeply passionate affair with a New York journalist named Morton Fullerton which released her sensuality and also had a profound effect upon the tenor of her later writing.

Some years after its publication, Wharton described ‘The Fullness of Life' to her editor at
Scribner's
, Edward Burlingame, as ‘one long shriek – I may not write any better, but at least I hope that I write in a lower key'. And probably because of its intensely personal nature – not to mention the fact that it must have annoyed Teddy Wharton, who could hardly have failed to grasp its implict suggestion – Wharton suppressed the work from her subsequent collections of stories. I know of few other stories of the afterlife more absorbing than this one. Eleanor Dwight believes that the tale may also have been partly inspired by a supernatural experience the author had while visiting Florence. She marvelled at the architectural beauty of the Church of San Michele, ‘when she experienced a wonderful vision and felt herself being “borne onwards along a mighty current”'.

Wharton returned to the subject of death in ‘A Journey', published in June 1899. Here again, Wharton's sensitivity and the idea of death as a physical presence make the story memorable.

As in ‘The Duchess at Prayer', there are elements of sexuality to be found in ‘The Lady's Maid's Bell', written in 1904, and Wharton's first true ghost story. Readers on both sides of the Atlantic were deeply moved by this tale of adultery mingled with supernatural protection, with its superbly evoked atmosphere of dark and mysterious events occurring in an unstable household.

Just how successfully Wharton had confronted the demons of her childhood is evident in ‘Afterwards', a tale written in 1910 and generally considered to be her most successful ghost story. Jack Sullivan, writing in
The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural
(1986), believes that Wharton ‘converted the primal dread from her childhood into the haunted library scene', which is the setting for one of the pivotal moments in the story.

New England in the grip of a blizzard is the backdrop for ‘The Triumph of Night', published in 1914, and featuring the innovation of a
doppelgänger.
The ugly, malevolent spirit is the double of a well-known financier who has virtually imprisoned a young man suffering from advanced tuberculosis, in the hope of benefiting from his death. When the snow drives another traveller into the company of this pair and the man sees the
doppelgänger
for himself, he is faced with a stark choice: to save the stricken boy or flee from the house.

Interestingly, this story had been written several years earlier while Wharton was far away from America, staying in Paris. The French capital was then almost flooded from torrential rain, and this may well have set the tone of a piece that features fiscal misdealings, mysterious death and bloodstained hands.

Wharton returned to the locale of New England for ‘Bewitched', a tale of vampirism, then a subject virtually untouched by women writers. The importance of the story was spotted on publication by the
New York Times's
critic who wrote on 2 May 1926: ‘“Bewitched” has much of the same tragic power which was the commanding feature of
Ethan Frome
.'

It is an atmospheric and disturbing tale about a distracted wife, Mrs Rutledge, who appeals to her local Deacon for help because her husband, Saul, is having an affair. But this is no ordinary affair: he is infatuated with a dead woman who is relentlessly draining away his vitality. Even in the superstitious backwoods of New England, the poor woman does not find it easy to come to terms with what is happening or to get others to take the necessary action to put a stop to the vampire's activities. The influence of this story can be seen in a number of subsequent tales of the undead written by women – not the least of them the sensual and exotic vampire novels of Anne Rice.

The deceptive title of ‘A Bottle of Perrier', which Wharton wrote in 1930, lures the reader almost unsuspectingly into a tale of murder and suspense set in a new locality: the African desert. This story was greatly admired by the late doyen of mystery fiction, Ellery Queen, who republished it in his magazine in 1948 with the following illuminating preface:

It has been said of Edith Wharton's work that ‘her characters are given sharp, clear, consistent shape'. You will find that true of ‘A Bottle of Perrier': young Medford, the velvet-foot Gosling, and especially the strange archaeologist, Henry Almodham, are sharp and clear and consistent against the shimmering background of the desert. It has also been said that Edith Wharton's style is a ‘clear, luminous medium in which things are seen in precise and striking outline'. You will find that also true: the mystery and menace of the infinite sands, the enervating heat, the timelessness, the silence, the inaccessibility – all become luminous; but there is something else, something brooding and haunting, which becomes clear and finally emerges ‘in precise and striking outline' ...

Small wonder that this story should have captivated many other literary figures including L. P. Hartley, who called it ‘an ingenious exercise in sustained suspense' and Graham Greene, who referred to it as ‘that superb horror story'.

Wharton's mentor, Henry James, was a particular admirer of the final story in this collection, ‘The Looking-Glass', which he called a ‘diabolical little cleverness'. The story was contributed to
The Century
in 1935 and, curiously, not included in the collections of Wharton's work published immediately prior to and just after her death. It also appeared under the title ‘The Mirror', and its heroine, Moyra Attlee, recounts the strange and unexpected visions she witnesses in an old looking-glass.

Edith Wharton died on 11 August 1937 at her French home in St Brice-sous-Fôret, just north of Paris, and she was buried at Versailles. Three months later, in a tribute to her work in the supernatural genre, the English critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor neatly encapsulated the secret of why her stories of ghosts and terror deserved to be read then and still do today, over half a century later:

She is a story-teller whose speech is naturally quiet and unhurried. Her stories have a half-eerie, half-cosy charm of their own. You begin to feel the silence around your chair; she is a past mistress of that curious art which makes you put the book down for an instant, poke the fire, and settle back with the thought: ‘Well, here I am, reading a ghost story – what could be more agreeable?'

There is nothing more for me to add beyond suggesting that the reader immediately take Mr Shawe-Taylor's advice.

PETER HAINING
Boxford, Suffolk

The Duchess at Prayer

I

Have you ever questioned the long shuttered front of an old Italian house, that motionless mask, smooth, mute, equivocal as the face of a priest behind which buzz the secrets of the confessional? Other houses declare the activities they shelter; they are the clear expressive cuticle of a life flowing close to the surface; but the old palace in its narrow street, the villa on its cypress-hooded hill, are as impenetrable as death. The tall windows are like blind eyes, the great door is a shut mouth. Inside there may be sunshine, the scent of myrtles, and a pulse of life through all the arteries of the huge frame; or a mortal solitude, where bats lodge in the disjointed stones and the keys rust in unused doors ...

II

From the loggia, with its vanishing frescoes, I looked down an avenue barred by a ladder of cypress shadows to the ducal escutcheon and mutilated vases of the gate. Flat noon lay on the gardens, on fountains, porticoes, and grottoes. Below the terrace, where a chrome-coloured lichen had sheeted the balustrade as with fine
lamince
of gold, vineyards stooped to the rich valley clasped in hills. The lower slopes were strewn with white villages like stars spangling a summer dusk; and beyond these, fold on fold of blue mountain, clear as gauze against the sky. The August air was lifeless, but it seemed light and vivifying after the atmosphere of the shrouded rooms through which I had been led. Their chill was on me and I hugged the sunshine.

‘The Duchess's apartments are beyond,' said the old man.

He was the oldest man I had ever seen; so sucked back into the past that he seemed more like a memory than a living being. The one trait linking him with the actual was the fixity with which his small saurian eye held the pocket that, as I entered, had yielded a
lira
to the gatekeeper's child. He went on, without removing his eye:

‘For two hundred years nothing has been changed in the apartments of the Duchess.'

‘And no one lives her now?'

‘No one, sir. The Duke goes to Como for the summer season.'

I had moved to the other end of the loggia. Below me, through hanging groves, white roofs and domes flashed like a smile.

‘And that's Vicenza?'

‘Proprio!
' The old man extended fingers as lean as the hands fading from the walls behind us. ‘You see the palace roof over there, just to the left of the Basilica? The one with the row of statues like birds taking flight? That's the Duke's town palace, built by Palladio.'

‘And does the Duke come there?'

‘Never. In winter he goes to Rome.'

‘And the palace and the villa are always closed?'

‘As you see – always.'

‘How long has this been?'

‘Since I can remember.'

I looked into his eyes; they were like tarnished metal mirrors reflecting nothing. ‘That must be a long time,' I said involuntarily.

‘A long time,' he assented.

I looked down on the gardens. An opulence of dahlias overran the box-borders, between cypresses that cut the sunshine like basalt shafts. Bees hung above the lavender; lizards sunned themselves on the benches and slipped through the cracks of the dry basins. Everywhere were vanishing traces of that fantastic horticulture of which our dull age has lost the art. Down the alleys maimed statues stretched their arms like rows of whining beggars; fauneared terms grinned in the thickets, and above the laurustinus walls rose the mock ruin of a temple, falling into real ruin in the bright disintegrating air. The glare was blinding.

‘Let us go in,' I said.

The old man pushed open a heavy door, behind which the cold lurked like a knife.

‘The Duchess's apartments,' he said.

Overhead and around us the same evanescent frescoes, under foot the same scagliola volutes, unrolled themselves interminably. Ebony cabinets, with inlay of precious marbles in cunning perspective, alternated down the room with the tarnished efflorescence of gilt consoles supporting Chinese monsters; and from the chimney-panel a gentleman in the Spanish habit haughtily ignored us.

‘Duke Ercole II,' the old man explained, ‘by the Genoese Priest.'

It was a narrow-browed face, sallow as a wax effigy, highnosed and cautious-lidded, as though modelled by priestly hands; the lips weak and vain rather than cruel; a quibbling mouth that would have snapped at verbal errors like a lizard catching flies, but had never learned the shape of a round yes or no. One of the Duke's hands rested on the head of a dwarf, a simian creature with pearl ear-rings and fantastic dress; the other turned the pages of a folio propped on a skull.

‘Beyond is the Duchess's bedroom,' the old man reminded me.

Here the shutters admitted but two narrow shafts of light, gold bars deepening the subaqueous gloom. On a daïs the bedstead, grim, nuptial, official, lifted its baldachin; a yellow Christ agonized between the curtains, and across the room a lady smiled at us from the chimney-breast.

The old man unbarred a shutter and the light touched her face. Such a face it was, with a flicker of laughter over it like the wind on a June meadow, and a singular tender pliancy of mien, as though one of Tiepolo's lenient goddesses had been busked into the stiff sheath of a seventeenth-century dress!