Ghosts in Daylight (1924), which celebrates its centenary this year, was Oliver Onions’ second volume of ghost stories, following Widdershins (1911). E F Bleiler, in his Guide to Supernatural Fiction, hails the earlier volume as a landmark work in the field, but regards the second book as less successful. Certainly, it has no story to compare with the classic “The Beckoning Fair One” in Widdershins, but then that’s a tall order.
A long story in the book, and one to which Onions evidently attached some importance, is “The Real People”, a phrase he used elsewhere in writing about ghosts. It concerns an author of popular, sentimental romances who creates a dowdy housemaid character for the passing convenience of his plot but finds she is not satisfied with this role and insists on being the heroine and marrying the lord. This is not simply a case of an author finding his story evolving unexpectedly as he writes it, but of the active intervention of the character herself.
It is adroitly done and Onions is clever about not explaining exactly how the character forces her will on the author. Out of control characters have since become more frequently used in fiction and this may blunt the novelty of the tale a bit, but at least Onions was one of the first on the scene, and he makes more of the idea than might seem possible. It is a neat satire, not entirely light-hearted and with some speculative elements, even if it doesn’t have Onions’ trademark brooding quality.
“The Ascending Dream” offers three vignettes from Stone Age, Tudor and contemporary Jazz Age times in which a similar dream or vision, as in the title, forbodes doom. Each is quite brief and so there is no room for much development. “The Woman in the Way” also has a historical setting and is a straightforward, matter-of-fact ghost story: a schoolboy, then a parson who is consulted, encounter the spirit of a local woman in their path not only every day but at several points of the path. Onions is here illustrating the theory he later set out in his ‘Credo’ at the front of the Collected Ghost Stories (1935), that ghosts are all around us all the time and that the real question is what causes them to appear to us when usually they don’t. This makes for an eerie, puzzling story but it is perhaps a bit too plain, and in fact is rather like accounts of ‘real’ ghostly encounters, which are apt to be fairly basic.
The most successful story in terms of its mood and style is to my view “The Honey in the Wall”, which Bleiler regards as not supernatural at all. Yet Onions evidently thought it was, including it not only in this volume and the Collected Ghost Stories but in a further selection, Bells Rung Backwards (1953). The virtue of the story is in its precise, perceptive imagery, rich and strange as fairy tales. It operates on several levels. The scene is a decaying country house on the site of an old abbey: the inhabitants, mother and daughter, are hard up and have to gradually sell their possessions, furniture, pictures and ornaments, to agents and auction houses, but even this is not enough. The house is ‘a crushing burden of maintenance and mortgages and debts.’ Despite this, they are entertaining a house party of ‘Bright Young Things’ as guests, and Gervaise, the daughter, is emotionally entangled with one of the men, though she knows him to be a philanderer.
Alongside these two very human concerns, however, there is another dimension. Gervaise has a fascination for the portrait of an ancestor, Lady Grey, and she feels also the heritage of the house calling to her. When the young guests decide to have a ‘harlequinade’, a fancy dress game of stealthy chasing, she dresses as Lady Grey and startles one of the jejune young women into thinking she is a ghost.
So far, then, we have a metaphorical haunting, by the traditions of the house, and a mock-haunting, and Bleiler is correct that neither is supernatural. But there are several key passages where I think Onions takes us beyond those. So sensitive is Gervaise to the house that she feels she knows its passages not only through long familiarity but “immemorially”: this implies an ancient influence working within her. Further, she feels as if there is some different type of knowledge that is close at hand, though elusive: “when the thing for which she was looking did come, it would be one of those always-known things.” This is a delicate, subtle intimation that there is another dimension in the house, sensed by Gervaise.
Onions doesn’t choose, however, to make this the culmination of his tale, which returns instead to her thwarted longing for a man who even in her house is busy conducting a casual affair. He does not resolve the two aspects of his story, the diurnal and the ethereal. Both, we must suppose, are aspects of Gervaise’s character and we are being told she cannot escape her physical longings through her visionary moments. We may regret there is no more consoling resolution for her, but give Onions credit for not offering the neat romantic ending that his novelist in ‘The Real People’ would have contrived, if his characters had let him.
Ghosts in Daylight is a rare book. The stories are also available in later volumes – the Collected and Bells
Rung Backwards – thought these are not all that much
easier to find. However, they may be found too in the Tartarus Press two volume set The Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions, along with a generous compendium of his other work in the field and an insightful introduction by Rosalie Parker.
(Mark Valentine)
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