A Preference for “Green Tea”

by Jeffrey Greene

part 1

As Robert Aickman, the English writer of “strange stories” (his own description) was fond of reminding us, only forty or so truly great ghost and supernatural stories have been produced in the entire Western canon. Aickman, who died in 1981, wrote some of the finest and most idiosyncratic examples of the genre in the 20th century and had strong opinions about the form. He likens the best ghost stories to poetry and attributes the rarity of masterpieces written in the last two centuries to the difficulty — hardly less than that of writing a great poem — of achieving an uncanny or otherworldly atmosphere through suggestion, style and a supremely delicate touch.

An admirer of Freud, Aickman believed that the diurnal self composes the merest fraction of the human mind and that the night side — or unconscious mind — exerts far more influence on our destinies than we ever realize because we are largely unaware of it throughout our lives; what little we learn of it comes mostly through the maddeningly ephemeral impressions of dreams.

This interior approach to the so-called supernatural — a term I don’t love— partially explains Aickman’s preference for the term “strange” instead of “ghost” in describing his fiction, which only occasionally features what a Victorian reader would have recognized as an apparition. He generally follows his own advice to eschew overt violence in the composition of a ghost or supernatural tale, insisting that grisly and bizarre forms of homicide belong to what he considers the vastly inferior genre of horror which, with some notable exceptions, relies on crude shock for its effects.

One of the best example of a literary horror tale that successfully combines visceral and supernatural elements is Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” but this is a rare pinnacle in a genre saturated with gore. The creation of genuine eeriness, that unaccountable chill stealing over us, preferably late at night, as we read a good ghost story, accomplished solely through an arrangement of words on paper and our own collaborative imagination, is an act of magic. The retributive or random ax descending in a murderous arc in a darkened room, whether presented on the page or the movie screen, offers little more than a vulgar jolt of surprise.

There isn’t a reader alive who doesn’t know that the end of all our stories is death, whether peaceful, violent, or miserably protracted and, in that sense, most horror stories, Aickman felt, end in the same way a thriller, a romance, or a mystery does, by delivering whatever harmless form of escape its fans require; the difference being that horror sates, at least in some readers, a more sadistic expectation. The true writer of ghost stories, in stark contrast, lives by the assumption that the night, however leached of its purity by the ever-spreading lights of civilization, contains more mystery than all the generations of human bewilderment can hope to fathom, and the deepest and most enduring of these mysteries is death.

As to what may or may not lie beyond the cessation of vital signs, the best ghost stories often bestride the fence on this never-to-be-settled subject, neither insisting on the existence of an afterlife nor denying the possibility. Ambiguity, by which I mean a calibrated allowance for doubt as to what exactly has happened in the events described in a story that ventures beyond the quotidian, is one of the ways by which we judge supernatural fiction rereadable.

Many of Aickman’s “Forty Best” are familiar to those of us who frequent anthologies of ghost stories:

Oliver Onions, “The Beckoning Fair One,” (a novella that some consider the best ghost story ever written)
Robert Hichens, “How Love Came to Professor Guildea”
W. W Jacobs, “The Monkey’s Paw”
several of Edgar Allan Poe’s best tales
Algernon Blackwood, “The Wendigo” and “The Willows”
Arthur Machen, “The Great God Pan,”
Henry James, “The Turn of the Screw”
Rudyard Kipling, “They”
Edith Wharton, “Afterward”
Walter De La Mare, “Seaton’s Aunt”
M. R. James, “Casting the Runes”
J. S. LeFanu, “Carmilla” and “Green Tea”

All of the stories on this very partial list are masterpieces of the form and, because fiction isn’t or shouldn’t be a competition, I will say only that while I admire all of the above and love most of them, the one that has most deeply affected me over the many years I’ve read and reread it is “Green Tea.” As much to myself as to the reader, I’ll try to explain why.

Joseph Thomas Sheridan LeFanu (1814-73) was born in Dublin of an old Huguenot family that included Richard Brinsley Sheridan, author of The School for Scandal. He studied law but abandoned it for journalism and at different times owned a Dublin newspaper and published and edited a literary magazine.

LeFanu’s wife, Susanna, died of uncertain causes following a “hysterical attack” (one of those maladies, like brain fever, apparently endemic to the 19th century) in 1858, and he never remarried. According to Peter Penzoldt, author of The Supernatural in Fiction, LeFanu “retired from the world” after Susanna’s death, living as a recluse for most of his last fifteen years, “finally closing the door even to his most intimate friends.”

Penzoldt describes a lonely, fearful man who went out only after dark to visit bookshops in quest of the books on ghostly lore and demonology that, toward the end, were LeFanu’s only reading. The picture is compelling, if a bit suspiciously gothic. It seems plausible, however, that LeFanu’s slow-growing isolation and advancing eccentricities well prepared him for the creation of his greatest stories.

Another authority quoted by Penzoldt, S.M. Ellis, author of Wilkie Collins, LeFanu, and Others, offers the image of a writer whose habits mirror those of the unfortunate Reverend Mr. Jennings in “Green Tea”:

He wrote mostly in bed at night, using copybooks for his manuscript. He always had two candles by his side on a small table; one of these dimly glimmering 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 through a couple of hours in that eerie period of the night when human vitality is at its lowest ebb, and the Powers of Darkness rampant and terrifying. What wonder then, that, with his brain ever peopled by day and night with mysterious and terrible beings, he became afflicted by horrible dreams, which, as I have suggested, were the basis of his stories of the supernatural.

Though a prolific and popular writer in his day, only one of LeFanu’s fourteen novels, Uncle Silas, has survived oblivion. His ghost and supernatural stories, on the other hand, remain some of the most admirable ever written. His novella, “Carmilla,” predates Dracula by twenty years and is a far subtler story of a female vampire.

Most, if by no means all, of his ghost fiction, while always original in style and setting, follows the traditional moral calculus of the vast majority of ghost stories: evil acts are punished in life by haunting the perpetrator’s guilty conscience and, in death, by a kind of eternal purgatory. Several of LeFanu’s doomed protagonists have done grievous harm to others in their misspent lives, while others, usually noblemen who have run their estates into the ground, make ill-considered pacts with Satan, over which, as the time nears when the Devil’s bargain comes due, they torture themselves with fear and regret.

“Mr. Justice Harbottle,” an example of the former type, is a brutal hanging judge in 18th-century England, perhaps the best portrait of such a man in all of literature. For his numerous sins, Harbottle falls asleep in a carriage and finds himself taken before an infernal tribunal presided over by “Chief Justice Two-Fold,” who is a grotesque magnification of Harbottle himself, where a jury of lost souls condemn him to death by hanging, the execution to be carried out on the 10th of the month.

Dismissing this dreadful vision as a nightmare, the gouty judge nevertheless dies, an apparent suicide by hanging, on the appointed day. LeFanu gives us a choice of believing whether Harbottle’s fate descends on him through some semi-divine mechanism of cosmic justice or by a combination of late-arriving guilt welling up from his own depths and his advanced moral and physical dissipation.

“The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh” and “Sir Dominick’s Bargain” are two examples of LeFanu’s ruined noblemen who unwisely turn to the Great Tempter in order to recoup their fortunes, and both stories were more or less dry runs for his fine novella, “The Haunted Baronet.” For a British nobleman of that era, being damned for eternity was apparently preferable to learning a trade.

Aside from LeFanu’s “Schalken the Painter,” which falls outside the two categories described above and is distinctive for very different reasons, “Green Tea” is the lone exception in his oeuvre to the moral determinism of the classic ghost story. The Reverend Mr. Jennings is a middle-aged clergyman, unmarried, independently wealthy and charitable, a shy, kind, courteous, intelligent and highly educated man who hasn’t an enemy in the world.

Jennings has a secret, however, that he reveals to only one person, the narrator of the tale, Dr. Martin Hesselius, a practitioner of “metaphysical medicine,” about whom more will be said later. Into his sympathetic and curious ear, Mr. Jennings reveals how he met his “companion,” “three years, eleven weeks ago and two days” before. He relates that four years earlier, he had begun the writing of a work which had cost him much thought and reading on the religious metaphysics of the ancients.

He wrote a great deal, often at night and was constantly thinking on the subject. To fuel these nocturnal labors, he drank great quantities of tea: black tea at first, then switching to green tea, the effect of which he found pleasanter and more salubrious in clearing and intensifying his thoughts. He emphasizes to Hesselius that his ideas were “more or less of the beautiful, the subject itself delightfully interesting and I, then, without a care.” Though he goes to bed between two and three every morning, he continues to socialize with friends and finds his existence altogether pleasant.

While returning home at night from a visit to a man in London who had agreed to let him peruse some odd old German editions of books in medieval Latin, Mr. Jennings is alone in a horse-drawn omnibus, when he sees a pair of small, dull red lights at the far end of the carriage, spaced about two inches apart, the source of which he can’t account for. They move about as a pair, and he soon makes the startling discovery that the red orbs are the eyes of a small monkey, “perfectly black” and barely visible in the dark carriage, and the monkey is mimicking his curious, startled grimace. He assumes that some passenger has forgotten “this ugly pet,” and “fearing that it might be meditating a spring,” he tries poking it with his umbrella, but is horrified when the point of his umbrella goes right through the monkey.

Proceed to part 2...