The Tiled House. J.S. Le Fanu
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interspersed with supernatural incidents – drew on his childhood memories of Chapelizod, the Phoenix Park, and the Royal Hibernian Military School. It was one of M.R. James’s favourite books (he once said that he’d lost count of how many times he had read it), and James left an interesting account of a visit he made to Chapelizod in 1927:
The only excursion I made was to Chapelizod to see the House by the Churchyard, which is quite unmistakable. The big factory of which Le Fanu speaks, on the site of the old Barracks, is just across the road. There are some other sizeable houses & gardens, but none that I could really identify with the Tyled [sic] House or the King’s House, etc.
The church etc. are on the right of the road as you come from Dublin, and the Phoenix Park slopes up from the wall of the churchyard, which is not very big. The river of course on the left of the road.[9]
The references here are to the nostalgic passages in Le Fanu’s opening chapter:
As for the barracks of the Royal Irish Artillery, the great gate leading into the parade ground, by the river side, and all that, I believe the earth, or rather that grim giant factory, which is now the grand feature and centre of Chapelizod, throbbing all over with steam, and whizzing with wheels, and vomiting pitchy smoke, has swallowed them all up.
The House by the Churchyard contains what S.M. Ellis considered to be ‘the most terrifying ghost story in the language’. Ellis’s verdict may be open to argument, but chapter ix, entitled ‘An Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand’, certainly illustrates Le Fanu’s ability to convey terror through a controlled and economic style that heightens the loathsomeness of the supernatural intruder:
He drew the curtain at the side of the bed, and saw Mrs Prosser lying, as for a few seconds he mortally feared, dead, her face being motionless, white, and covered with a cold dew; and on the pillow, close beside her head, and just within the curtains, was the same white, fattish hand, the wrist resting on the pillow, and the fingers extended towards her temple with a slow wavy motion.
In the context of Le Fanu’s life, this incident – which is completely irrelevant to the plot, such as it is, of The House by the Churchyard – brings to mind Susanna Le Fanu’s disturbing dream of her dead father; and later, in Uncle Silas, Maud Ruthyn is troubled by a vision of her dead father’s face – ‘sometimes white and sharp as ivory, sometimes strangely transparent like glass, sometimes hanging in cadaverous folds, always with the same unnatural expression of diabolical fury’. These correlations with actual personal trauma should remind us that Le Fanu was not a mere ‘sensationalist’ writing only for effect. His fascination – or even obsession – with the supernatural and the macabre coincided with embedded psychological characteristics, with dimensions of his nature that were linked to emotional disturbance and guilt.
After its serialization The House by the Churchyard was published in three volumes by Le Fanu himself: five hundred copies were sold to the London publisher William Tinsley, who issued the work in a new binding in 1863. Le Fanu then contracted with Richard Bentley for what became Wylder’s Hand, written to Bentley’s specifications and squarely in a recognizably ‘sensationalist’ style. What is generally regarded as Le Fanu’s masterpiece, Uncle Silas, appeared in 1864. His nephew, T.P. Le Fanu, suggested that the character of Austin Ruthyn was a sketch of the author himself: ‘It was a peculiar figure, strongly made, thick-set, with a face large, and very stern; he wore a loose, black velvet coat and waistcoat … he married, and his beautiful young wife died … he had left the Church of England for some odd sect … and ultimately became a Swedenborgian.’
Though Susanna’s death had encouraged Le Fanu’s naturally reclusive habits, and though he became known in Dublin as the ‘Invisible Prince’, he continued to keep in touch to a degree with the literary and political life of the city. Nor did the loss of his wife affect his writing output. After the purchase of the DUM in July 1861 he produced a succession of serialized novels for the magazine: The House by the Churchyard (1861–2), Wylder’s Hand (1863–4), Uncle Silas (1864), Guy Deverell (1865), All in the Dark (1866), The Tenants of Malory (1867), Haunted Lives (1868), and The Wyvern Mystery (1869). But the influence of the DUM on the reading public was not sufficient to place Le Fanu’s career as a novelist on a higher and more secure footing and his attempts to have his novels serialized in other magazines were unsuccessful. So in 1869 he sold the DUM to a London printer, Charles Adams, for £1,500.
In the last twelve years of his life Le Fanu wrote eleven full-length novels, in addition to publishing two collections of tales (Chronicles of Golden Friars, 3 vols., 1871, and In a Glass Darkly, 3 vols., 1872) and a mass of journalism. At the same time the biographical record is virtually silent. The late novels contain much bad writing, whereas amongst the short stories of the 1860s are some of Le Fanu’s best – including ‘Wicked Captain Walshawe, of Wauling’ (1864) and ‘Squire Toby’s Will’ (1868).
With the sale of the DUM to Adams, Le Fanu’s links with the cultural and social world of Dublin were effectively severed: his world in fact was now bounded by the walls of the memory-filled house in Merrion Square. Brinsley Le Fanu gave S.M. Ellis the following celebrated account of his father’s solitary working habits in these last years:
He wrote mostly in bed at night, using copy-books for his manuscript. He always had two candles by his side on a small table; one of these dimly glimming tapers would be left burning while he took a brief sleep. Then, when he awoke about 2 a.m. amid the darkling shadows of the heavy furnishings and hangings of his old-fashioned room, he would brew himself some strong tea – which he drank copiously and frequently throughout the day – and write for a couple of hours in that eerie period of the night when human vitality is at its lowest ebb.[10]
At the end of January 1873 Le Fanu suffered an attack of bronchitis, though by the 31st he appeared to be recovering. He died on 7 February and was buried four days later in the Mount Jerome cemetery, in the Bennett tomb that contained his beloved Susan. His daughter Emma, in a letter to Lord Dufferin, remarked: ‘He lived only for us, and his life was a most troubled one.’
With J.S. Le Fanu a new type of ghost appeared in English supernatural fiction. From ‘Schalken the Painter’ onwards Le Fanu created new ways of describing violations of the mundane by the supernatural that utilized suggestion, obliquity, and what Jack Sullivan called ‘anti-Gothic restraint’.[11] Gone are the sheeted spooks rattling rusty chains and the peripatetic headless ladies that infest late eighteenth-century Gothic fiction. In their place Le Fanu conjured up ‘real ghosts who stubbornly refused to confine themselves to the shabby psyches of aristocratic neurotics, yet somehow managed to emerge from within as well as invade from without’.[12] Le Fanu was the first writer to explore the psychological dimensions of the ghost story; at the same time he was adept at invoking the physical presence of supernatural malevolence. The range of his supernatural fiction is described by E.F. Bleiler;
He wrote stories of folkloristic themes, in which the fairy lore of his Ireland was transformed into stories of quaint menace and sometimes rough humour; he also wrote sombre fate-stories, tales of supernatural vengeance for past injuries … there are also strangely involuted tales in which the universe is a vast living machine that parallels the human mind … Best of all are his highly personal stories of tortuous psychologies, of remarkable guilts and their hypostarization, of strange states of consciousness and unconsciousness, where the boundaries of the fanciful and the real swirl away in a mist of pain and terror.[13]
Above all, Le Fanu established what we can now judge to be the correct and most effective narrational mode for ghost fiction, a descriptive method in which precision and ambivalence are held in balance by the voice of a detached narrator. This potent blend of objective reportage and careful manipulation of the reader’s responses is characteristic of Le Fanu’s style at its best. Take this passage from ‘Schalken the Painter’ describing the horrendous Vanderhausen, a passage that juxtaposes half-glimpses and indirection with images of terrible clarity:
A quantity of grizzled hair descended in long tresses from his head, and rested upon the plaits of a stiff ruff, which effectually concealed his neck. So far all was well; but the face! – all