Self-Conscious Ghosts

A BOOK OF MODERN GHOSTS (236 pp.) --Edited by Cynthia Asquith--Scribner ($3).

The modern English ghost stories in this anthology do not have the shudder value of the old bloody-head and clinking-chain school. Instead of haunting damp Ruddigorean castles, most contemporary ghosts seem to have settled into fashionable flats, where they play hob with the call bells and the central heating. Moreover, the authors in Editor Asquith's collection have adulterated an old-fashioned art form with Freudian complexes and social crisis; they have forgotten that the one thing a ghost story does not need is a rational explanation.

Tradition has not been abandoned entirely. Wan and weary maidens still linger at the scene of their betrayal. Here & there a lonely house still groans with memories of ancient wrongs--though in one story the trouble is that the house is not haunted, which creates an unhappy state of "psychic emptiness."

But English ghosts in general nowadays tend to be literary and neurotic. One is a "novelist of sensibility" with a Virginia Woolf style; another worries, "Am I losing weight?" Among the best of Editor Asquith's pieces:

P:Walter de la Mare's The Guardian, in which a high-strung boy becomes attached to a ghost who represents death.

P:Evelyn Fabyan's Bomber's Night, in which a man remarries after his wife is killed in the London blitz, then finds that his first wife has come back to haunt him.

P:Elizabeth Bowen's Hand in Glove, in which a greedy young woman steals the last of her dying aunt's clothes only to be choked by an unforgiving old glove.

Perhaps best of all is V. S. Pritchett's thoroughly lighthearted, thoroughly post-Freud A Story of Don Juan, which tells how Don Juan once visited Quintero, a man whose wife had died on their wedding night. To punish Juan for his sins, Quintero tucks him into the haunted nuptial bed. Next morning Don Juan goes off jaunty as ever. Poor Quintero wonders how his scheme has misfired, spends the next night in the haunted bed himself. The ghost is still there, and her arms are "of ice no more [but] of fire."

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