Lady Cynthia Asquith - 2nd Ghost Book

[dem bones]

Lady Cynthia Asquith (ed.) - The Second Ghost Book (Pan, 1956 originally J. M. Barrie, 1952. This edition is the 9th Pan reprinting, 1964)

Introduction by Elizabeth Bowen

Laurence Whistler - Captain Dalgety Returns
Rosemary Timperley - Christmas Meeting
L. A. G. Strong - Danse Macabre
G. W. Stonier - The Memoirs of a Ghost
Nancy Spain - The Bewilderment of Snake McKoy
V. S. Pritchett - A Story of Don Juan
Walter de la Mare - The Guardian
Rose MacAulay - Whitewash
C. H. B. Kitchin - The Chelsea Cat
L. P. Hartley - W. S.
Mary Fitt - The Amethyst Cross
Evelyn Fabyan - Bombers' Night
Eleanor Farjeon - Spooner
Lord Dunsany - Autumn Cricket
Jonathan Curling - The Restless Rest-house
John Connell - Back to the Beginning
Collin Brooks - Possession On Completion
Elizabeth Bowen - Hand in Glove
Eileen Bigland - The Lass With The Delicate Air
Cynthia Asquith - One Grave Too Few

Robert Aickman dedicated the first Fontana Book Of Great Ghost Stories thus: "In Memory of LADY CYNTHIA ASQUITH Friend and Patron of Ghosts and their Creators" and a number of his selections originally appeared in her own excellent collections. As you'd expect, these stories are LITERATURE as opposed to PULP and many of them are delicate, polite and unfussy. And I'm still enjoying it? E. F. Bleiler describes The Second Ghost Book as "well mannered" and, not unusually, he's spot on. To my mind, it would be too impeccably behaved were it not for the injection of some good old fashioned plain nastiness every so often. Hartley's doppelganger masterpiece certainly isn't lacking in that department ....

Eileen Bigland - The Girl With The Delicate Air: Cawder Village, Scottish Highlands. A bachelor war veteran, convalescing in the mountains, falls in love with a young vision of beauty in a shabby blue dress who appears in the forest every new moon. He realises from the first that she's dead but that can't dissuade him. Why does she look so forlorn? And who is responsible for the melancholy whistling he hears in the night? A deathbed confession reveals the sad story of Elspeth Munro and the fate of the penniless tinker she loved, shot dead by the man who was to be her husband by an arranged marriage. Not usually my thing but I loved this.

V. S. Pritchett - A Story of Don Juan: Quintero, heartily sick of his legendary guest bragging of his conquests, decides to give him the room haunted by his dead wife's ghost to teach him a lesson. He reckons without Don Juan's indifference to whether or not his lovers possess a pulse.

Rosemary Timperley - Christmas Meeting: A schoolma’am is spending her first Christmas alone. A young man, flamboyantly dressed, enters her lodging room thinking it’s his own. He apologises for his mistake, makes mention of the fact that he’s a poet, and she persuades him to take tea with her. When she returns with the cups, he’s gone. She finds one of his books on the shelf with a note from the publisher that he died on Christmas day 1851. The last entry in his diary records an encounter with the ghost of a middle aged woman in his study. Roald Dahl, E. F. Bleiler and Richard Dalby are ardent admirers of this three pager but it doesn’t do much for me.

G. W. Stonier - The Memoirs of a Ghost: The narrator talks us through his death by collision with a bus and subsequent experience as a ghost. He doesn't much enjoy it. Constantly bored but terrified that he'll dissolve to nothing at any moment. He offers his thoughts on traditional ghost stories - at least you can still read in the afterlife it seems - and moans that all who write on the subject have got it all wrong. And that's about the strength of it. *shrug*

Lord Dunsany - Autumn Cricket : Old Modgers, retired groundsman, spends two hours a night at the once-famous Long Barrow cricket field, watching a game only he can see. His friends are so concerned for his health that they try to get him certified. On his ninetieth birthday, W. C. Grace and fellow ghostly players make him an honorary member of the club and invite him to play for them. From what his wife - watching from the window - understands of the game, he hit a century before dropping down dead. Definitely the way he would have wanted it.

L. P. Hartley - W. S. : Author William Streeter is the recipient of serial, increasingly hostile postcards from a mystery man who shares his initials. From the postmarks it is evident that the sender is travelling ever closer to where he lives, and Streeter requests police protection. The bobby stationed outside his home is the embittered 'W.S.', a creation of Streeter's own pen who has assumed flesh and blood existence and wants to know why the author always portrayed him as a wretched character, devoid of any redeeming features whatsoever.

Elizabeth Bowen - Hand In Glove: Jasmine Lodge, somewhere in the South of Ireland. Orphans Elsie and Ethel Trevor are taken grudgingly in by their widowed, invalid aunt Elysia, a belle in her own day even as the spoilt, insufferably vain little madams are in theirs. The old girl being bedridden is a bonus as this allows the girls to ransack her trunks for the finest gowns and customise them to their own needs. Annoyingly they still haven't managed to get at the key to unlock the box containing her prize baubles and all-important ballroom gloves and this becomes a matter of some urgency. Lord Fred, on whom Ethel has designs, is allergic to benzine and both young ladies' worn-out gloves reek of the stuff! Ethel decides its time her aunt did the decent thing and took leave of the world and does her bit to hasten Elysia on her way. Then it's off to unlock that treasure trove ....

Great, great stuff. The three women are thoroughly ghastly!

L. A. G. Strong - Danse Macabre: Flanagan, "the most indefatigable sower of wild oats in ten parishes", comes to grief when, true to form, he picks up a pretty girl at the Red Cross dance and offers her a lift home. The girl, Maud Gille, gives him an address in Finstown, but as they drive past the cemetery she insists he let her out of the car. He follows her through the graves but she just seems to vanish. The following day he enquires after her in Finstown. Her mother attacks him as a nasty piece of work. Maud is long dead, killed in a drunken car accident after a night of gallivanting. An ancient plot - it's even been used on such timeless pop classics as The Sweater - but that just doesn't seem to matter. As good in its way as the other recommendations.

David Riley

That book cover brings back some memories for me. This was the very first horror book I ever bought for myself.

What I do remember about the book is that I wasn't particularly taken by the stories in it at the time, though I was pretty young then and more into Edgar Rice Burroughs and Isaac Asimov than L. P. Hartley, etc.

I would buy it for the nostalgia of that cover, though.

David

[franklinmarsh]

I've recently been on holiday. Time to read and time to actually buy some books. I took a couple with me, one being Susan Hill's The Woman In Black but my stepdaughter was grizzling that she had nothing to read so I lost that to her. In a charity shop I found a Pan paperback copy of The Second Ghost Book for 50p - it was the one with the cover featuring a blonde lady looking through a glass door (Dem put it up on the old site). Although I dislike ghost stories I decided to read the whole thing - at least it was an anthology which would give me a variety of authors. Would it change my opinion?

Interestingly, in a kind of opposite to The First Pan Book Of Horror Stories, the tales were printed in reverese alphabetical order of the authors' surnames...

Introduction by Elizabeth Bowen (she was a CBE you know - I love the middle class nature of the whole enterprise - there's even a puff from no less than (pre-Sir) John Betjeman from the Torygraph.

Laurence Whistler - Captain Dalgety Returns - pretty much what I was expecting.
Rosemary Timperley - Christmas Meeting - more of the same, although this is maddenlingly clever and irritating in equal measures.
L. A. G. Strong - Danse Macabre - a good 'un, if obvious.
G. W. Stonier - The Memoirs of a Ghost - awfully dull, if an interesting portrait of its time.
Nancy Spain - The Bewilderment of Snake McKoy - one of John Betjeman's picks - interesting in that it's about a writer - an unexpected ending at least.
V. S. Pritchett - A Story of Don Juan - most amusing.
Walter de la Mare - The Guardian - getting better, but a ghost story? Dodgy ending - not sure if I 'get' it, but damned unsettling if I do.
Rose MacAulay - Whitewash - I enjoyed this - elements of horror (not to mention Jaws) and a plea for the terrible not to be rehabilitated.
C. H. B. Kitchin - The Chelsea Cat - much better but not really a ghost story as such. Well to me anyway. Reminiscent of an Amicus Portmanteau story.
L. P. Hartley - W. S. - Brilliant. *SPOILER* Stephen King nicked this for The Dark Half, but here's how to do it as well but without padding it out.
Mary Fitt - The Amethyst Cross - more brilliance - genuinely scarey.
Evelyn Fabyan - Bombers' Night - Oh dear - back to the ghostly predictability.
Eleanor Farjeon - Spooner - a pleasant enough tale, but...
Lord Dunsany - Autumn Cricket - I quite liked this, and I'm not nuts about cricket.
Jonathan Curling - The Restless Rest-house - nope.
John Connell - Back to the Beginning
Collin Brooks - Possession On Completion - This was quite atmospheric and well told.
Elizabeth Bowen - Hand in Glove - see Dem's comments. The ending didn't quite match the build up but overall a good 'un.
Eileen Bigland - The Lass With The Delicate Air - Blythely romantic, but very well told.
Cynthia Asquith - One Grave Too Few - this was pretty grim - well done your Ladyship!

A taste of things past. Very entertaining.

[dem bones]

This'll be the one, FM, from a 1968 reprint though I think it was used before then.

The first three Ghost books are always trotted out as 'classics', to be worshipped on the same pedestal as the Robert Aickman-edited Fontana Book of Ghost Stories, but neither series are without their share of bland, desperately dull make-weights, though there's probably a law against saying so. Cynthia Asquiths own stories rarely lack a horrific edge, so i could never understand why she included the anaemic likes of Memoirs Of A Ghost. But it's worth suffering the yawn fests for the moments of sheer brilliance.

[Craig Herbertson]

'L. P. Hartley - W. S. - Brilliant. *SPOILER* Stephen King nicked this for The Dark Half, but here's how to do it as well but without padding it out.'
Quote of the week. it's a stunningly good story though.

[cw67q]

It has been a long time since I read them, but I think I remember the second Ghost book as being much lighter in tone and content than both the 1st and 3rd volumes.

A quick look over the contents of vols 1 &3 (as listed here: freepages.pavilion.net/tartarus/a18.htm) shows that volume 1 contains the stupendously good Villa Desiree (May Sinclair), LP Hartley's A Visitor from Down Under (HArtley is always good), Hugh Walpole's "Mrs Lunt" and Walter de la Mare's A Recluse. Blackwood's A Chemical has a really great opening but doesn't sustain itself throughout the tale. Machen and Onions unfortunately are not at their best. I can't call to mind many of the other entries, but I do remember thinking the colelction was very solid when I read it.

Volume 3 has Aickman's Ringing the changes (I think the first publication of an RA ghost story, at least in book form) and Marghanita Laski's wonderful The Tower. Hartley is again present, but I can't remember much about Someone in the Loft.

- Chris

ps the supernatural fiction database maintained by tartarus press (and linked to above) is a nioce resource, worth visiting if you haven't come across it before.

[ripper]

I found this lurking in a pile of books I had bought ages ago and forgotten about. Just picking a few stories at random:

Whitewash: I wasn't too keen on this one. A shark controlled by a dead emperor was a little too way out for my tastes.

The Amethyst Cross: Better, but I thought it took an awfully long time to get to the payoff, and, for me, the final revelation of the fate of the parents added nothing to the story. I would have preferred it to close with the end of Dorothea's letter.

Danse Macabre: Not bad as a basic telling of the familiar urban legend. Probably the story I enjoyed most out of the three I read last night.

[ripper]

A couple more:

Bombers' Night: Okay, but nothing to make it stand out. I was expecting some malevolence from the ghost of the protagonist's first wife, but it was more wistful than anything.

Possession on Completion: A bit better. Is it truly the house that is affecting the newly-weds or is it all in the main character's mind? I couldn't quite decide.

[dem bones]

Jul 21, 2016 6:17:43 GMT ripper said:

I found this lurking in a pile of books I had bought ages ago and forgotten about. Just picking a few stories at random:

Whitewash: I wasn't too keen on this one. A shark controlled by a dead emperor was a little too way out for my tastes.

The Amethyst Cross: Better, but I thought it took an awfully long time to get to the payoff, and, for me, the final revelation of the fate of the parents added nothing to the story. I would have preferred it to close with the end of Dorothea's letter.

Danse Macabre: Not bad as a basic telling of the familiar urban legend. Probably the story I enjoyed most out of the three I read last night.A couple more:

Bombers' Night: Okay, but nothing to make it stand out. I was expecting some malevolence from the ghost of the protagonist's first wife, but it was more wistful than anything.

Possession on Completion: A bit better. Is it truly the house that is affecting the newly-weds or is it all in the main character's mind? I couldn't quite decide.

Stick with it Rip, as there are better tales ahead although you may have to wade through yet more humdrum material to reach them. I'm very fond of Danse Macabre, but the others you've mention have long since slipped from memory. Don't want to put you off, but, on the evidence of stories sampled to date - more than I've commented upon - the post-war content of Louis Welsh's Ghost: 100 Stories To Read With The Light On is a modern, multi-national equivalent of The Ghost Books at both their charming and occasionally unsettling best and pretentious, over-written, thrill-free worst.

[ripper]

Thanks for your thoughts on the Louise Welch book, Dem. As for this volume by Lady Cynthia, up to now it has been middling with nothing really standing out. I think it was Franklin who commented on it being 'middle class' and I think I understand what he meant.

WS: Much better, I thought, particularly good how the author built up expectation and atmosphere.

Lass with the Delicate Air: A bit soppy but I did enjoy it. Not scary in the slightest.

[ripper]

A Story of Don Juan: Not too bad but not one I would read very often.

Hand in Glove: I like this tale a lot. Nicely-drawn characters and a suitable ending.

One Grave too Few: Lady Cynthia's contribution makes me wonder why she included so much fluff in this volume. I hadn't read this one before and it is probably my pick so far.

[helrunar]

I've started wandering around in this one. Unlike the Third Ghost Book, I am just bouncing around here, perhaps in part because some of the stories in the third volume were so disappointing.

Rose Macaulay "Whitewash" was a story I read in high school, as compiled in a book of supernatural horror tales written by women. I tried finding it again several times over the years. It was ironic that I had no idea it was included in this book. I opened the small, worn paperback, and there it was. Magic. What I still love about it is how deftly she explodes the 20th century notion of historical rehabilitation. Though it has to be said that through another irony, I just spent months last year being stunned and sometimes baffled by Dorothy Dunning's brilliant portrait of the historical Macbeth--a formidable act of rehabilitation indeed, one supported by five years of scholarly research. Am also a huge fan of Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time, a rehabilitation of Richard III which was recent when Macaulay wrote her short tale. The aunt in Macaulay's story evident disapproved of Tey's theory. As for this story, "Whitewash" may be too slight for some--I found it effective and tightly composed.

Rosemary Timperley "Christmas Meeting" is also short and perhaps slight... again, I found it effective, and time well spent.

Elizabeth Bowen "Hand in glove" was perhaps more fascinating as an exercise in evoking a vanished world, than as a horror story. I will have to look up benzine, apparently a chemical sprayed on ladies' gloves to keep them fresh-looking back in the early 19th century. It plays an important role which is easy to miss as it is mentioned very much in passing near the beginning. I did notice it because there was no explanation about what it was, but I did not feel inclined to stop and look it up. Perhaps it was still in use in the 1950s.

Collin Brooks  "Possession on completion" was disappointing, given how much I enjoyed this writer's story "Mrs Smiff" in volume 3. Newlywed writer moves into house with wife, has a crack-up. That's pretty much it.

H.

[helrunar]

C. H. B. Kitchin "The Chelsea Cat" This one just pootled along for a few pages, then suddenly developed into a delectably gnarled and twisted thing for the final third or so. But I am doubtful most Vault residents would care for it, perhaps finding it too pedantic or sententious in some of the details. As a former academic, I found the latter spot on the mark and intermittently hilarious.

A wealthy middle-aged bachelor of the sort found in a lot of these tales purchases an 18th century porcelain cat, a mildly famous object to be celebrated in the frontispiece for one of the important London museums' new monograph on The Cat in England. The problem is that kitty, while appearing to be a benign sleepy pet, is the seat of something not at all nice--in fact, actively malignant. A delight.

H.

[helrunar]

Evelyn Fabyan "Bombers' night" provided a vividly etched snapshot of life in London during the Blitz, but was told in prose that had a fairytale ring to it. There were certain moments that felt genuinely fey and uncanny. I wonder whether she published other stories not listed on ISFDB; her writing has an unusual quality to it. I presume she may have been a personal friend of the editor's as I suspect was the case with certain of these contributors (definitely so for L. P. Hartley).

Eleanor Farjeon "Spooner" could be filed in the "Horror of Sports" box except that it's more wistful and nostalgic than horrific. Spooner is the name of a kitty, as well as a cricket player. As in the works of Simon Raven there are passages (thankfully, not terribly lengthy here) that involve fawning bouts of cricket phantasmagoria. For this reader, these  might as well have been written in a foreign language. I've tried looking at glossaries--it doesn't help.  As a child I read a few of Farjeon's books and it was interesting to read something by her written for an adult market. She seems to have been one of those writers for whom sex simply did not exist--they sometimes write with a curious sort of allure.

Mary Fitt "The Amethyst Cross" Once again "dearest Margaret's" formidable Aunt Dorothea Hornwinder (what a moniker) who insists that talk of spirits is "all nonsense" has an encounter with the spectral world. Elements of the plot inevitably reminded one of the Three Bears, and no, I don't mean the gay porno loop somebody made under that title.

Cynthia Asquith "One Grave Too Few"  I found this by and large a fairly effective tale, though the ending was more or less spoilt by how she chose to set it all up at the start. I read for the mood and atmosphere so did not care. The only baffling element to me was the mention of the date 1840 which did not seem to fit with the time frame of the eventual narrative that was revealed--I don't know if I missed something or there was some kind of editorial confusion (which, since she herself was the editor, could well have happened).

H.

[helrunar]

Walter de la Mare "The Guardian"  I am only making a note about this one because I wonder if it was Lady Cynthia's inspiration for the theme of the third ghost book. Like far too many of the stories in that third volume, this one starts out promisingly and is well written but really leads to nothing beyond the tragic end met by one of the characters.

Strong-willed, no-nonsense Caroline takes on much of the upbringing of her widowed sister's child, Philip. All seems fine until the fateful Xmas holidays of the boy's ninth year when he shows up looking strangely haggard. The boy is not sleeping well and this leads to complications. A possible incidence of the spectral and demonic halfway through fails to lead to anything remotely occult or horrific. The finale strikes a note at once pathetic and faintly ridiculous.

Something called Parrish's Food was mentioned in this story and another tale (I forget which one; might have been in volume 3). I found this interesting short note about Parrish's Food:

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1113565/

Quote:

The formula for the food was given in the 1859 edition as protosulphate of iron, phosphate of soda, phosphate of lime, phosphoric acid, carbonate of soda, carbonate of potassa, muriatic acid, water of ammonia, powdered cochineal, water, sugar, and orange-flower water.

Now that's horror.

H.

[helrunar]

G. W. Stonier's "Memoirs of a Ghost" and Nancy Spain's "Bewilderment of Snake McCoy" could both be interpreted as possible send-ups of the whole "Ghost Book" enterprise, certainly the Asquith mark of such. "Memoirs" is wispy and inconsequential and ultimately tells us that existence as a ghost is both terrifying and a deadly, exhausting bore.

Spain's "Bewilderment" I found quite entertaining--in some ways, one of the most entertaining stories I've read in these volumes. It's supposed to be written by a male American "hard-boiled" crime writer but comes across as the fantasy life of a neurotic spinster who spends her nights in her bed-sit reading Dashiell Hammett. The final couple of pages and the "twist" ending fell incredibly flat after such a promising start. However, for a while it galloped along nicely. Then... splat.

H.