Notes to Time, change, and the King

* Why Christine? It was recommended by a King-fan coworker. I told her that I'd read these--
Salem's Lot
Night Shift
The Stand
Danse Macabre
It
The Tommyknockers
Eyes of the Dragon
Needful Things
Four Past Midnight
Different Seasons
On Writing
The Colorado Kid
Lisey's Story
Under the Dome-and asked what she thought I should pick up next. (The obvious answer is The Shining, but that's just too scary. I read twenty pages once, just like I saw ten minutes of the movie once, and I couldn't deal.) I was skeptical about Christine, because the premise is just so ridiculous, but she was right that it wouldn't take many pages before I gave up my disbelief.

Notes to And so we bid the ghosts adieu, or, See you in the stacks!

"The Ghost of Doctor Harris," by Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in The Living Age on February 1o, 1900

In the year 1856 Nathaniel Hawthorne was American Consul at Liverpool. There he made many friends and acquaintances. He was an honored and weicome guest at the house of the late Mr. John Pemberton Heywood, well known in Liverpool as one of its most prosperous and respected citizens. Here it was that Hawthorne met Henry Bright (a nephew of Mrs. Heywood), who became one of his most intimate friends, and to whom he wrote many letters, some of which were published in his life.

It once happened that, when dining with the Heywoods, Hawthorne related his own personal experience of a ghost. The story was thought so remarkable by Mrs. Heywood that she begged him to write it down for her. With this request he complied. The manuscript is now in the possession of Mrs. Heywood's sister, the Honorable Mrs. Richard Denman, who kindly allows its publication.
--A. M. Wilberforce

I am afraid this ghost story will bear a very faded aspect when transferred to paper. Whatever effect it had on you, or whatever charm it retains in your memory, is, perhaps, to be attributed to the favorable circumstances under which it was originally told.

We were sitting, I remember, late in the evening in your drawing-room, where the lights of the chandelier were so muffled as to produce a delicious obscurity, through which the fire diffused a dim, red glow. In this rich twilight the feelings of the party had been properly attuned by some tales of English superstition, and the lady of Smithhills Hall had just been describing that Bloody Footstep which marks the threshold of her old mansion, when your Yankee guest (zealous for the honor of his country, and desirous of proving that his dead compatriots have the same ghostly privileges as other dead people, if they think it worth while to use them) began a story of something wonderful that long ago happened to himself. Possibly in the verbal narrative he may have assumed a little more license than would be allowable in a written record. For the sake of the artistic effect, he may then have thrown in, here and there, a few slight circumstances which he will not think it proper to retain in what he now puts forth as the sober statement of a veritable fact.

A good many years ago (it must be as many as fifteen, perhaps more, and while I was still a bachelor) I resided at Boston, in the United States. In that city there is a large and well-established library, styled the Athenaeum, connected with which is a reading-room, well supplied with foreign and American periodicals and newspapers. A splendid edifice has since been erected by the proprietors of the institution; but, at the period I speak of, it was contained within a large, old mansion, formerly the town residence of an eminent citizen of Boston. The reading-room (a spacious hall, with the group of the Laocoon at one end and the Belvidere Apollo at the other) was frequented by not a few elderly merchants, retired from business, by clergymen and lawyers, and by such literary men as we had amongst us. These good people were mostly old, leisurely, and somnolent, and used to nod and doze for hours together, with the newspapers before them—ever and anon recovering themselves so far as to read a word or two of the politics of the day—sitting as it were on the boundary of the Land of Dreams, and having little to do with this world, except through the newspapers which they so tenaciously grasped.

One of these worthies whom I occasionally saw there was the Reverend Doctor Harris, a Unitarian clergyman of considerable repute and eminence. He was very far advanced in life, not less than eighty years old, and probably more; and he resided, I think, at Dorchester—a suburban village in the immediate vicinity of Boston. I had never been personally acquainted with this good old clergyman, but had heard of him all my life as a noteworthy man; so that, when he was first pointed out to me, I looked at him with a certain specialty of attention, and always subsequently eyed him with a degree of interest whenever I happened to see him at the Athenaeum or elsewhere. He was a small, withered, infirm, but brisk old gentleman, with snow-white hair, a somewhat stooping figure, but yet a remarkable alacrity of movement. I remember it was in the street that I first noticed him. The Doctor was plodding along with a staff, but turned smartly about on being addressed by the gentleman who was with me, and responded with a good deal of vivacity.

"Who is he?" I inquired, as soon as he had passed.

"The Reverend Doctor Harris, of Dorchester," replied my companion; and from that time I often saw him, and never forgot his aspect. His especial haunt was the Athenaeum. There I used to see him daily, and almost always with a newspaper—the Boston Post, which was the leading journal of the Democratic party in the northern states. As old Doctor Harris had been a noted Democrat during his more active life, it was a very natural thing that he should still like to read the Boston Post. There his reverend figure was accustomed to sit day after day, in the self-same chair by the fireside; and, by degrees, seeing him there so constantly, I began to look towards him as I entered the reading room, and felt that a kind of acquaintance, at least on my part, was established. Not that I had any reason (as long as this venerable person remained in the body) to suppose that he ever noticed me; but by some subtle connection this small, white-haired, infirm, yet vivacious figure of an old clergyman became associated with my idea and recollection of the place. One day especially (about noon, as was generally his hour) I am perfectly certain that I had seen this figure of old Doctor Harris, and taken my customary note of him, although I remember nothing in his appearance at all different from what I had seen on many previous occasions.

But that very evening a friend said to me:

"Did you hear that old Doctor Harris is dead?"

"No," said I, very quietly, "and it cannot be true; for I saw him at the Athenaeum to-day."

"You must be mistaken," rejoined my friend. "He is certainly dead!" and confirmed the fact with such special circumstances that I could no longer doubt it.

My friend has often since assured me that I seemed much startled at the intelligence; but, as well as I can recollect, I believe that I was very little disturbed, if at all, but set down the apparition as a mistake of my own, or, perhaps, the interposition of a familiar idea into the place and amid the circumstances with which I had been accustomed to associate it.

The next day as I ascended the steps of the Athenaeum, I remember thinking within myself, "Well, I shall never see old Doctor Harris again!" With this thought in my mind, as I opened the door of the reading-room, I glanced towards the spot and chair where Doctor Harris usually sat, and there, to my astonishment, sat the gray, infirm figure of the deceased Doctor, reading the newspaper as was his wont! His own death must have been recorded, that very morning, in that very newspaper! I have no recollection of being greatly discomposed at the moment, nor indeed that I felt any extraordinary emotion whatever. Probably, if ghosts were in the habit of coming among us, they would coincide with the ordinary train of affairs, and melt into them so familiarly that we should not be shocked at their presence. At all events, so it was in this instance. I looked through the newspapers as usual, and turned over the periodicals, taking about as much interest in their contents as at other times. Once or twice, no doubt, I may have lifted my eyes from the page to look again at the venerable Doctor, who ought then to have been lying in his coffin dressed out for the grave, but who felt such interest in the Boston Post as to come back from the other world to read it the morning after his death. One might have supposed that he would have cared more about the novelties of the sphere to which he had just been introduced than about the politics he had left behind him!

The apparition took no notice of me, nor behaved otherwise in any respect than on any previous day. Nobody but myself seemed to notice him; and yet the old gentlemen round about the fire beside his chair were his lifelong acquaintances, who were, perhaps, thinking of his death, and who, in a day or two, would deem it a proper courtesy to attend his funeral.

I have forgotten how the ghost of Doctor Harris took its departure from the Athenaeum on this occasion, or, in fact, whether the ghost or I went first. This equanimity, and almost indifference, on my part—the careless way in which I glanced at so singular a mystery and left it aside—is what now surprises me as much as anything else in the affair.

From that time for a long while thereafter—for weeks, at least, and I know not but for months—I used to see the figure of Doctor Harris quite as frequently as before his death. It grew to be so common that at length I regarded the venerable defunct no more than any other of the old fogies who basked before the fire, and dozed over the newspapers.

It was but a ghost—nothing but thin air—not tangible nor appreciable, nor demanding any attention from a man of flesh and blood! I cannot recollect any cold shudderings, any awe, any repugnance, any emotion whatever, such as would be suitable and decorous on beholding a visitant from the spiritual world. It is very strange, but such is the truth. It appears excessively odd to me now that I did not adopt such means as I readily might to ascertain whether the appearance had solid substance, or was merely gaseous and vapory. I might have brushed against him, have jostled his chair, or have trodden accidentally on his poor old toes. I might have snatched the Boston Post—unless that were an apparition, too—out of his shadowy hands. I might have tested him in a hundred ways; but I did nothing of the kind.

Perhaps I was loth to destroy the illusion, and to rob myself of so good a ghost story, which might probably have been explained in some very commonplace way. Perhaps, after all, I had a secret dread of the old phenomenon, and therefore kept within my limits, with an instinctive caution which I mistook for indifference. Be that as it may, here is the fact. I saw the figure, day after day, for a considerable space of time, and took no pains to ascertain whether it was a ghost or no. I never, to my knowledge, saw him come into the reading-room or depart from it. There satDoctor Harris in his customary chair, and I can say little else about him.

After a certain period—I really know not how long—I began to notice, or to fancy, a peculiar regard in the old gentleman's aspect towards myself. I sometimes found him gazing at me, and, unless I deceived myself, there was a sort of expectancy in his face. His spectacles, I think, were shoved up, so thait his bleared eyes might meet my own. Had he been a living man I should have flattered myself that good Doctor Harris was, for some reason or other, interested in me and desirous of a personal acquaintance. Being a ghost, and amenable to ghostly laws, it was natural to conclude that he was waiting to be spoken to before delivering whatever message he had to impart. But, if so, the ghost had shown the bad judgment common among the spiritual brotherhood, both as regarded the place of interview and the person whom he had selected as the recipient of his communications. In the reading-room of the Athenaeum conversation is strictly forbidden, and I could not have addressed the apparition without drawing the instant notice and indignant frowns of the slumbrous old gentlemen around me. I myself, too, at that time, was as shy as any ghost, and followed the ghosts' rule never to speak first. And what an absurd figure should I have made, solemnly and awfully addressing what must have appeared in the eyes of all the rest of the company an empty chair! Besides, I had never been introduced to Doctor Harris, dead or alive, and I am not aware that social regulations are to be abrogated by the accidental fact of one of the parties having crossed the imperceptible line which separates the other party from the spiritual world. If ghosts throw off all conventionalism among themselves, it does not, therefore, follow that it can safely be dispensed with by those who are still hampered with flesh and blood.

For such reasons as these—and reflecting, moreover, that the deceased Doctor might burden me with some disagreeable task, with which I had no business or wish to be concerned—I stubbornly resolved to have nothing to say to him. To this determination I adhered; and not a syllable ever passed between the ghost of Doctor Harris and myself.

To the best of my recollection I never observed the old gentleman either enter the reading-room or depart from it, or move from his chair, or lay down the newspaper, or exchange a look with any person in the company, unless it were myself. He was not by any means invariably in his place. In the evening, for instance, though often at the reading-room myself, I never saw him. It was at the brightest noontide that I used to behold him, sitting within the most comfortable focus of the glowing fire, as real and lifelike an object (except that he was so very old.
and of an ashen complexion) as any other in the room. After a long while of this strange intercourse, if such it can be called, I remember—once, at least, and I know not but oftener—a sad, wistful, disappointed gaze, which the ghost fixed upon me from beneath his spectacles; a melancholy look of helplessness, which, if my heart had not been as hard as a paving-stone, I could hardly have withstood. But I did withstand it; and I think I saw him no more after this last appealing look, which still dwells in my memory as perfectly as while my own eyes were encountering the dim and bleared eyes of the ghost. And whenever I recall this strange passage of my life, I see the small, old, withered figure of Doctor Harris, sitting in his accustomed chair, the Boston Post in his hand, his spectacles shoved upwards—and gazing at me, as I close the door of the reading-room, with that wistful, appealing, hopeless, helpless look. It is too late now; his grave has been grass-grown this many and many a year; and I hope he has found rest in it without any aid from me.

I have only to add that it was not until long after I had ceased to encounter the ghost that I became aware how very odd and strange the whole affair had been; and even now I am made sensible of its strangeness chiefly by the wonder and incredulity of those to whom I tell the story.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Liverpool, August 17, 1856

Notes to Virginia Woolf on Henry James's ghost stories, or, "Surely there are facts enough in the world to go round."

* Bible-steeped unbeliever that I am, I can't help but hear in that phrase echoes--so distant as surely to be unintentional--of Jesus's promise to his disciples in Matthew 18:20, "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." Where'er the significant o'erflows our powers of understanding, there . . . something is. In the best of horror, or even more gentle supernatural writing, the one thing we know about that something is that it sure isn't holy.

Notes to Shelving and Sorting

1 The Way It Wasn't, by James Laughton, page 147

2 Fantastic Mr. Fox, by Roald Dahl, page 30

3 Seven Types of Ambiguity, by William Empson, page 194

4 The Pritchett Century, by V. S. Pritchett, page 168

5 The Journal, 1837–1861, by Henry David Thoreau, page 300

6 Maps and Legends, by Michael Chabon, page 140

Notes to Reality Hunger and What's Next

* Okay, here goes:

"The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley."

Or,

"For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord cometh like a thief in the night."

Or,

"In the midst of life, we are in death."

Or, edging into inspirational poster territory:

"Live each day like it could be your last."

If you've read the novel, you'll see how ridiculous these seem, and what a joke they make of the whole enterprise of boiling the novel down to a pithy statement.

Notes to "What strange intoxication was it that he drew from books?"

* Mr Garnett is David Garnett, son of translator Constance Garnett. At the time of the publication of The Common Reader, David was running a bookshop near the British Museum and had received a lot of acclaim for Lady into Fox, a novel in which a man's young wife turns into a fox. It's one of those odd books that keeps popping up on the periphery of my reading, which means I really ought to give it a try. I see that the edition I've linked to is in the Collins Library series from McSweeney's, which is a very good sign.

** Mr Masefield, whom you most likely were more quick to identify, is John Masefield, author of, among other books, the children's classic The Box of Delights.

Notes to "The Glamorous World of Publishing, Revealed!"

* Ruk was played by Ted Cassidy, who at this point is better known from his earlier role as Lurch on The Adams Family. Cassidy would go on to appear in two other episodes of Star Trek, and in one of them he played yet another of the original series' many memorable villains, Gorn.

Or, more properly, Gorn!!!!!



Oh, it's also worth noting that the episode featuring Ruk, "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", was written by Robert Bloch.

Notes to "Lawrence thinks critics influential and should realize their responsibility," or, D. H. goes to parties

*Jeannette Winterson, in Art Objects, writes, of her Pentacostal upbringing,

I found it necessary to smuggle books in and out of the house and I cannot claim too much for the provision of an outside toilet when there is no room of one's own. It was on the toilet that I first read Freud and D. H. Lawrence, and perhaps that was the best place, after all.

Not what one thinks of as bathroom books, at least in publishing industry terms, but it's hard to argue with her thinking here.

Notes to "All that is required in studying them is patience," or, On youthful enthusiasm

* Which, speaking of enthusiasm, landed Richardson a wife! According to Richardson's Wikipedia entry,

He married Annie Dillard, after she wrote him a fan letter about Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind.

Now that's enthusiasm!

Notes to Thumbnails

* Though I do feel it's my duty to note that Sumner, for all his sanctimony, was serious--even fierce--in his abolitionist beliefs, for which he deserves credit, and that his recovery and his determination to return to public life after his caning by Preston Brooks on the Senate floor does him honor. Was he likeable? By most account, no. Would I have been glad to have been on his side most of the time? Hell, yes.

Notes to Tolstoy's zoo

* A coworker, on learning that I wasn't all that into Bauhaus design, exclaimed, "But you have a shaved head and black-framed glasses and are the most disciplined person I know!"

Notes to The show must go on!

*Amusingly, the Wikipedia entry for Nelly Ternan features an italicized subhead near its top that informs readers that

Ellen Ternan is sometimes confused with her near contemporary, the Shakespearean actress Ellen Terry, whose career was more distinguished, but who did not have an affair with Dickens.

Notes to Metternich's alarm clock

* Though there's far less grounds for it, I find that the terseness of the message brings to mind one of the most famous writings of Ulysses Grant, who was known for the clarity and economy of his written orders: at the Battle of Fort Donelson, in response to an inquiry from the Confederate commander, Grant wrote in response that he demanded unconditional surrender, and that "I propose to move immediately upon your works."