Influence in Unpleasantness: Ghost Stories for the Depressed

When I talk to people about my book, or listen to them talk to me, there are certain issues that come up again and again.  Sometimes they are more obvious, like Why did you choose such a peculiar title? or Why isn’t there a ghost in the titular story? or What exactly is a ghost story for the depressed?  Those are reasonable questions, but I think it’s more interesting to discuss some of the even more questionable choices I’ve made, especially as it relates to influence – where some of these questionable choices came from.  

 

The story that I’m closest to in this collection is the story that’s been around the longest, “Goodbye, Ghost of Columbus.”  I wrote the very earliest version of this story in the summer and fall of 2007.  I had just spent two years reading ghost stories on-and-off and thought I would write a satire that would send them all up.  It’s a pompous idea and I’m justifiably ashamed of it.  Though I’ve grown up some since then, the narrator of the final version retains a lot of that pomposity insofar as he goes around sort of pinging each ghost story trope or cliché and insisting that this story has none of those elements – and it doesn’t, by design.  The idea was to write the anti-ghost story, a sort of photo-negative of the ghost story, so its influences-in-reverse are the collections I had been reading since I graduated from college in 2005 – stories by M.R. James and J.S. LeFanu being uppermost in my mind, but also Algernon Blackwood, Ambrose Bierce, H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Edith Wharton, and even Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens.  The other influence in this story, both more obvious and more subtle, is Philip Roth’s first book, Goodbye, Columbus, from which I took the title.  The narrator of this story is not just a neurotic mess like Neil Klugman, but also vacillates between views and cannot decide what he thinks about the ghost, and in the end chooses a state of cognitive dissonance rather than accepting what he saw, or rejecting it.  While this isn’t exactly analogous to Neil Klugman, I definitely drew on the reservoir of neurotic anxiety in those early Roth novels. 

 

There are two stories in the book that no one likes to talk about, one of which is “The Man in the Mirror.”  This story has probably my most depressed protagonist, Alice Binderman, and is more or less a braiding together and rewriting of two of my favorite short stories, Sherwood Anderson’s “Adventure,” and A.S. Byatt’s “The Thing in the Forest.”  As a person who battles depression – if you can call lying in bed in the dark for hours battling – I found “Adventure” to be a devastating story.  Thomas Hardy published Jude the Obscure serially, and as he was in the process of writing, reviewers criticized him, saying that he was cruel to his characters.  I agree.  He was.  But no one was ever crueler to a character than Sherwood Anderson was in “Adventure.”  Though the book in which it appeared, Winesburg, Ohio, is most often compared to Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, Anderson’s best-known book was a story cycle that was more or less a rural Ohioan’s retelling of James Joyce’s Dubliners, with this caveat – the first story, “The Book of the Grotesque,” is less a story than a prelude that provides us with a lens through which to analyze and understand the characters we will see later.  The book referenced in the title is about people who have clung so tightly to an idea they think of as “the truth” that it has distorted them and made them grotesque.  Alice Hindman’s idea has twisted her so far out of shape that she has become weird, and she only embarrasses herself when she tries to figure out how to relate to others.  In the end, she realizes that she will live the rest of her life utterly alone.  The echo of Anderson’s final scene is something that I didn’t find in my story after the fact, it is something that I consciously tried to echo and draw attention to, in the hope that my story could channel some of its power.

 

While my protagonist draws on Anderson’s, my plot draws more from Byatt.  “The Thing in the Forest” is one of the finest stories ever written in our language, and I know its first line even better than I know Anderson’s last line.  “There were once two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in the forest.”  Byatt’s tale is a combination fairytale and modernist tale of post-war trauma.  In it two little girls see a thing that I won’t spoil for you by attempting to sum it up.  I will say instead that the thing is an allegory of all they have gone through and all they will go through, and the power of it has always stayed with me.  

 

What I did in my story, then, is to try to depict a modern version of Anderson’s distorted woman, but to encapsulate it in a trauma that came from seeing a physical representation of her depression, rather than a more mundane humiliation.  I butchered the whole thing – Anderson and Byatt’s solutions were so elegant that all I can do is gape at them whenever I read their work.  But it was my intention to both steal from, and pay homage to, these two masterful stories, while also conveying something of my own about the nature of depression and isolation in the twenty-first century.

 

Like the narrator of “Goodbye, Ghost of Columbus,” I am a bit of a walking contradiction at least in that, while M.R. James is my favorite writer of ghost stories, my favorite individual ghost story was written by J.S. Le Fanu.  It is an early draft of a story that would later evolve into “Mr. Justice Harbottle,” that was revived in its earlier form by M.R. James when he edited a collection of Le Fanu’s stories in 1923.  It has the awkward and unfortunate title, “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street,” and it is from this story that I lifted the title of my own story, “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances on Old Baltimore Pike.”  Le Fanu’s story reflects a theory of ghostly activity that was not yet called “the stone tape theory,” because it was thought to be connected to limestone deposits in the ground.  It is also sometimes called a “residual haunting.”  The idea is that the haunting is a kind of recording of prior events that replays itself periodically.  When I started to write my story, all I had in mind was the abandoned house that was near my high school.  But when I finally got my characters into that house under the right circumstances, I realized that I didn’t have a plan for them.  After I had sorted through the possibilities it seemed to me that, given the state of the house, the best thing for it would be a stone tape haunting, and at that time it occurred to me that there were certain similarities between my story and Le Fanu’s.  Those similarities begin and end with debauched students encountering a residual haunting, but it was enough to make me rip off Le Fanu’s title.  I am a peculiar writer, so editing is a years-long process for me, and I spent three years revising this story.  But it was only once I had borrowed from Le Fanu’s title that I started working on it in earnest, and started shaping it into the thing it would become.  In the end, it turned out to be one of my favorite stories in the collection not just because it is nostalgic for me, but also because I built into it a series of references to Le Fanu – easter eggs in the coding sense, almost – that remind me of my favorite ghost story.  All hail Le Fanu.

 

The trend in writing this book has been that I would come up with an idea, and then reference some of my favorite writers and stories.  In one case, though, I was reading a book, stumbled over a passage that seemed extraordinary, and a story idea rose out of it.  My ex-wife beta read this book several times before publication, and whenever this story comes up, she says, “Fuck you for creating that character.”  That character is the main character in “The Smallest Degree of Holiness.”  My ex-wife can never remember that his name is George Corver, she just calls him “that guy who eats hot dogs and eggs.”  She hates him quite a lot, which apparently is a normal reaction.  Another person gave this story a one-line review.  “I loathed George Corver,” was all she had to say.  My ex-wife also asked me what was wrong with me that I would write a story like that.  As much as I appreciate the strong reaction, it’s a little frustrating because I put the inspiration right in the epigraph.  I won’t reproduce it here, but the epigraph is a quote from Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy, a survey of mystical texts from around the world.  It was the book that finally knocked Evelyn Underhill off as Emperor-Guru of western mysticism and put Huxley at the top of that pile.  The passage I quoted essentially says that there are Hindu texts that acknowledge the psychic powers one can acquire through meditation, and they recommend that you ignore them, as they distract you from reality.  Huxley’s commentary is that “others can acquire it without acquiring the smallest degree of holiness.”  This notion of a profane psychic, an unholy person whose intentions and actions were manifestly evil but who God had permitted to acquire second sight is the origin of this story, and even if “The Smallest Degree of Holiness” isn’t my best story, the idea behind it is a better one than any other in this book.

 

I could go on and on about the influences I drew from, the references I made, the similarities I planted and hoped someone would notice, but these are the major points.  At this time, I am more than content with giving away these secrets, and letting the rest remain concealed.  But I hope this look behind the curtain has given you some insight into 

Unpleasantness.