Robert Aickman's Introduction to The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1964) [Reading notes]
INTRODUCTION
[....] The ghost story…. seems to derive its power from what is most deep and most permanent. It is allied to poetry.
[....]Dr. Freud established that only a small part, perhaps one tenth, of the human mental and emotional organisation is conscious.
[....] The ghost story, like Dr. Freud, makes contact with the submerged nine-tenths.
[....] Art reflects disintegration on the one hand, and commercialised fashion on the other. Religion concerns itself more and more exclusively with ethics and politics. Love is rationalised and domesticate.
[....] The ghost itself reminds us that death is the one thing certain and the thing most uncertain; the bourn from which no traveller returns, except this one….
[A] better title [than ghost story] for the genre might be found, but the absence of the ghost seldom dispels the alarm.
[....] what the ghost story hints to us is that there is a world elsewhere…. that as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; that luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure; that achievement and comfort are (like the poor ghosts themselves) immaterial.
[....] for man standing naked on the disregarding uplands, morals are, of course, a cloak, however ragged and patched; and perhaps the main reason why "The Travelling Grave" is one of the greatest stories in its field, is that it burns up the cloak in a single brimstone flash, and travels, if not above good and evil, then certainly far beyond them. The reader has a garish vision of all life’s elements seen for the first time, as in an El Greco. Perhaps it is Satanic. Perhaps it is merely the truth. Humour is prominently there, which is outside the scheme of most practitioners, except, sometimes, as contrast….
[....] humour is…. near the very heart of that synthesising attitude known as the occult.
[....] The ghost is neutral, and when he thwacks us or gnaws us to death, the doing (not necessarily the fault) is ours. In his true manifestation, the ghost is an intimation of that wider world than custom, which we disregard at our extreme peril, and in which we should at least try to move without clumsiness and neck-breaking, for it and not the fish-bowl of history, is our real world.
[....] American critic, Mr. Philip van Doren Stern, has put it well:
—“‘ The ghost story is an exceedingly difficult and delicate form to master, requiring a distinguished style, deftness in handling atmospheric effects, a wide background in psychology and anthropology, a mature attitude towards life, and, above all, a narrative ability that few authors possess. And it is a dangerous form to tackle— an inept word or phrase, a shade of emphasis wrongly applied, or the clumsy handling of its gossamerlike structure will quickly turn a tale of terror into a gross parody that arouses only smiles of derision. To make a reader accept things which his sense of reason bids him reject is not easy; only a really skilful writer can sustain illusion and maintain the spell to the end.”
[The good literary ghost story is] fragile but with a grip of iron. And a vital ingredient is beauty. In all beauty, said Hesiod, is an element of strangeness.
[....] They are things within us which we have, as psychologists say, projected outside us. There are little children beating on the glass. They are free; at least from us. They are real. We are glad to meet them when we are glad to meet ourselves, but that is to be one man (or woman) marked out of ten thousand.
There is evidence [for actual ghosts as reported by parapsychologists]; but co-existing with the evidence has always been the art, and the worth of the art is not dependent upon the weight of the evidence, because art is its own evidence, assimilated intuitively and emotionally, or excluded as valueless, at least to the particular person. The good ghost story could probably not exist did poltergeists not exist, but it is much as Shelley’s Ode could not exist without real skylarks.
[....] If we see fewer ghosts to-day, it should not for a moment be supposed that we are the wiser for it: rather is it that organisation, uniformity, and sheer noise have encroached that much further upon the imagination and the soul.
[....] There is no neat area, officially indulged as the ghostly. So it is, too, with writing the ghost story: like a poem, it cannot be summoned, or: even expected. The poet can set himself to ‘“‘ exercises ” (Mr. Masefield does them daily still), but the muse of the supernatural seems actually to prefer a moment when one is thinking of, concentrated upon, something quite different….1
1https://archive.org/details/aickman-ed-fontana-book-of-great-ghost-stories-1