Creator Of Ghosts

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30396, 21 March 1964, Page 4

Creator Of Ghosts

Wylder's Hand. By J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Gollancz. Rare Works of Imaginative Fiction. 387 pp.

Tales of terror and of the supernatural have a long and respectable ancestry and Mrs Veal has her descendants even in an age addicted like our own to explanation. It was perhaps a pity that the early rough but vigorous growth of the Gothic novel was not more widely refined during the Romantic era and that the eighteenth century mind of Jane Austen so firmly reminded our fiction of its obligations to the social realism laid down by Richardson and Fielding. Ghosts shrivelled under Miss Austen’s eye. Peacock’s better half was always ready to welcome them but the master of the house drove them out Medievalism offered them a rather draughty refuge in Scott and Ainsworth, but for the greater part the Victorians saw through them, indulging them with parlour games. It remains a matter for dispute, however, whether George Eliot or Emily Bronte is the greater writer. And it is hardly even a matter for dispute that the Gothic element in Dickens irradiates and energises his creations. The only thorough-going practitioner in the supernatural whose name can be mentioned in such company is Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Yet a brief study of him made in 1930 carried the title “A Forgotten Creator of Ghosts.”

Le Fanu was born in Dublin in 1814. He was connected, on his mother’s side, with the Sheridan family to which the great playwright belonged. By the middle of the century he had already cultivated a private little section in the literature of crime and the supernatural. He was busy also recovering in the form of ballad and tale much of the legend, the superstition and the colour, whether glowing or eerie, of his native Ireland. A great deal of his early publication was periodical and anonymous, his nature being both secretive and careless. So it is not widely known to-1 . day that he is the creator of ■ the famous Shamus O’Brien I who figures in a ballad car- | ried by oral transmission far I from the original which Le I Fanu scribbled down. B His particular flair for the is revealed in Mthe delicacy and suggestive-

ness of his treatment. There is nothing crudely clanking and groaning about his ghosts. His style at its best is simple and keen. He draws a sure thumb-nail across the nerves and makes the mind shudder. His ghosts are often the visible and pertinacious projection of some inward disorder, guilt or fear on the part of the “hauntee”; a fact which lifts them from the multitude of Victorian objective spectres (who clank in their own right) and places them horridly in the cupboards of the modern psychological decor. The injection of terror into the cerebellum is an operation in finesse and Le Fanu is undoubtedly at his best in the short story. The collection under the title “In a Glass Darkly” which was repuolished some years ago shows Le Fanu at his most adroit Yet such fame as he enjoys rests rather upon his novel “Uncle Silas,” a work in which horror is more prevalent than terror. Now Gollancz have re-issued “Wylder’s Hand” In their series called “Rare Works of Imaginative Fiction.” It has a fascination as a pure late instance of the Gothic cult though the narrative and dialogue are richly Victorian. The working out of the dreadful secret is compulsive, the atmosphere is evoked by a master of the sombre idiom, and the sort of Tom Lehrer terror that attaches to the title is rewardingly conjured. Some devotees rate this novel above “Uncle Silas.”

During the first half of 1963 17 books by United States authors were published in the Soviet Union in Russian translation, according to the Novosti Press Agency of Moscow. These came to a total of 782,000 copies. Among them were new editions of works by Mark Twain and Theodore Dreiser—long popular in the U.S.S.R—and also a translation of Harper Lee’s ’To Kill a Mockingbird.’’ Since English has become the most widely studied foreign language in the U.S.S.R. more and more books by British and American authors are being brought out in their original language. A collection of “Modern American Short Stories”—in English and by such people as Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and John O’Hara—went through two editions, a total of 43,000 copies. i