A Secret Book of Ghost Stories

Gerald Bullett’s Men at High Table (1948) is presented as a novel. But it is really a collection of ghost stories that, so far as I know, has not been recognised as such before. Using a portmanteau format, it presents half a dozen self-contained supernatural tales. Some are fairly slight, but others are accomplished and interesting.

The 'novel' takes place entirely in a fictional Cambridge college, Pentecost. The Master and Fellows are in conversation, first at dinner and then over port in a withdrawing-room afterwards. The period is during the Second World War and the sound of planes and bombs are heard in the background: semi-fictionally, as the author notes, since the East Anglian university city did not in fact receive many air raids and not to the intensity described here.

There is a distinguished guest, a Chinese scholar, whose presence leads to some reflections on the customs of different civilisations.

It is decided to settle in to the recounting of tales. This is of course a Jamesian tradition at Cambridge, but he is not invoked and the stories that follow are not Jamesian. The light framework of the novel proper now becomes a vehicle for a set of interpolated short stories. They are all in different ways supernatural.

The first involves an after-life scene with an open-ended final line, the next an affinity between an old gardener and an ancient medlar tree, a third a vengeful ghost. These first few tales are concise and nicely done, if not particularly original in plot, and they fit well in the context of after-dinner entertainment.

But then the stories become more fully-developed and atmospheric. One of the Fellows, Smith, recounts a childhood memory in which the narrator tells of his holidays at his grandmother’s house, with its walled kitchen garden: here he finds a playmate of about his own age who seems always to be there when he goes through the door in the wall. The boy in the garden, as we soon discern, has a link to an eighteen year old young woman, a cousin of the narrator, whom he much admires. With its wistful evocation of summer days and its meditation on time and dream, this is a story in the style of Forrest Reid and Walter de la Mare. 

The novel format resumes when the hearers of the story, the college Fellows, briefly speculate upon what it may mean. Is it a sincere but unreliable memory of a genuine childhood episode? Could it be the vision of an alternative time-stream? Or the projection of the imagination of the narrator as a boy, or of his cousin, or of both?

The narrator of this story, Smith, shares attributes of Bullett himself. He begins by explaining that though he was born in a London borough and has a Cockney element, his mother’s family were from the rural Midlands and he spent portions of his childhood there, the setting for his story. Bullett himself was born in Forest Hill and grew up in Muswell Hill, where his father was a teacher, later a coal merchant. His mother was from a Leicestershire farming family and it seems likely it is her background that the story evokes.

The next story also invites speculation upon its meaning. The narrator arrives at an island which is elusively familiar to him: he does not at first know who he is, where exactly he is, or what has gone before, yet he recognises landmarks. Some sort of memory slowly resumes, however, and he is able to carry on without betraying too much his bewilderment: any lapses are taken by the people around him  as due to his odd sense of  humour. He is staying at an inn with an older man and his young daughter, and he spends his days mostly working in the fields with the villagers. But then the call of his other life and his duty there begins to pull him back.

This story has a deep sense of yearning for another world. The discussion afterwards ranges from a reductionist view that it was simply a dream or delirium, to the possibility of parallel planes of existence, similar to those envisaged by Machen in his story ‘N’.

The final tale, narrated by the visiting Chinese scholar, is somewhat in the manner of Ernest Bramah’s Kai Lung stories, in which a humble peasant youth rises to power through wit and audacity. Probably it was influenced too by Arthur Waley’s popular translations of Chinese folk tales. Bullet had earlier, in 1946, collaborated with his friend Tsui Chi Lai, in translating 12^th century poetry by Fan Cheng-ta. His story is adroitly told, with pleasing fantastical elements, and has a fatalistic, rather melancholy tone.

That is the last of the tales told after dinner, but the novel has a coda some years after which gently suggests the continuity of the college in changing times.

The novel is paired in a shared volume with another, ‘The House of Strangers’. In this, Mary Flint, a literary editor, has ‘discovered’ the poetry of Sorrel Harley, issued in a posthumous slim volume. The young woman had died aged 22. Convinced of the value of her work, Flint is now staying with the poet’s family (her father and aunt) with a view to writing a study.

The loss of his daughter has caused her father, an architect, to turn to speculative thought, but ‘he was more concerned to ask questions, than to find answers to them’. This is very much the approach of de la Mare in his enigmatic fiction, which is often about ambiguity and the absence of answers too.

Mary Flint soon begins to sense a sort of presence in the house. ‘No ghosts harbour here, that’s certain,’ she writes in her journal, but ‘there is a queer feeling, an expectancy, a mixture of tenses as though time were folding back on itself . . .’ Indeed it is, and I won’t say too much more as I suspect the trend of the book will now be clear, but this slim novel is a rare and subtle work which works well alongside the other title, and adds to the sense that what we have here is really a volume of ghost stories.

There is a perceptive criticism of Gerald Bullett’s books by his friend Storm Jameson, that he just lacked ‘that touch of the grotesque’. He wrote his novels like a poet, she said, compressing emotional experiences into ‘a single precise image’ but his characters are ‘treated with a touch of reserve.’ I think that’s right, from the point-of-view of the enthusiast of supernatural fiction: what’s missing is the fervour that we find in Machen, Blackwood and others, or the succinctly gruesome imagery of James.

Even so, Bullett’s writing here has some qualities in common with them, and in particular, as I have suggested, with Walter de la Mare’s fiction. It is not quite as lyrical and it can be even more reticent than de la Mare about the otherworldly.  Still, he is usually only just a shade away, and his thoughtful work is very much worth attention. I am glad to have found this 'secret' volume of ghost stories by him.

(Mark Valentine)