Aliens Are Not the Only Aliens
Jeanette Winterson's ghost-story collection both terrifies and excites
Back in the late 1980s, early '90s, my writerly friends and I could not, we said, get enough of Jeanette Winterson’s work. She’d written a trio of novels which just knocked us on our backsides: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Passion, and Sexing the Cherry — titles which only hinted (provocative though they were) at the provocations within. I mean really: they killed us.
…and then, somehow, she drifted off our collective radar screens.
I have no idea why. Certainly, she didn’t suddenly disappear from print; Wikipedia’s bibliography lists 25 full-length works of hers in the 30-some years since. (The gods only know how many shorter works have appeared in that time.) If I were to meet her in person and grasp her hands, I would stammer, be at once all fervor and shame: How did I lose touch with you? I’d be asking myself, while still trying to communicate to her how much she’d meant to us. (Means to us, I’d want to say, not meant. I’d avoid looking at her eyes, for fear of revealing the ghastly truth: We got distracted.) After visiting her about-the-author page recently, I’m even more embarrassed: I don’t actually know this person. She doesn’t know me. How can these be statements of fact? Jeanette Winterson is — apparently has always been — the literary soul mate I never deserved.)
Such inevitable tensions between the lives of the past (as we imagined) and the lives of the present (as we like to see them) are everywhere in Winterson’s new anthology, Night Side of the River…
And so you might guess from the subtitle: Ghost Stories.
The fictions in question — thirteen of them — are apportioned among four sections: Devices, People, Places, and Visitations. Supplementing the stories are a generous introduction and four apparently true — perhaps true-with-a-question-mark? — firsthand accounts, designated JW1 through JW4; in these, Winterson maps out some of her own thoroughly reasonable, first-hand fascinations and experiences with the subject.
Note the difference between reasonable and rational. The latter presumes something like unambiguous “proof”; the former, only explanations. The explanations can even be murky, as Winterson admits — thin, gray, diaphanous, like their subjects: wavering in midair, disappearing entirely in the daylight, and back again, and undeniable, at dusk. Describing a friend’s face-to-face encounter with a woman in a gray dress in the parlor of a house — a former rooming house — which Winterson herself had indeed always felt to be haunted, she remarks: “That was more than I had seen, but I have never ‘seen’ a ghost, only felt their emphatic presence.” She adds, “Ghosts are intangible, but they are not vague” — and, a few paragraphs later, “I don’t understand it, I am not sure that I believe it, but I go on experiencing it.” Like I said: thoroughly reasonable.
A basic premise of the stories is that ghosts have at their disposal all the usual ways in which “real” persons assert their presence, and maybe a few others. A character being haunted hears voices, they see things inexplicable; their phones ring, and when answered there might or might not be a voice at the other end; in an empty room, they feel something moving against the small of their back; smiles and tears spring to their faces at moments and in ways which only a months-dead loved one could ever trigger. If we are (arguably) lucky, we may even converse with them, and vice-versa. Here, the protagonist Jonny encounters a man, Edwin, who identifies himself as a former gamekeeper:
‘Watch your step in this wood, won’t you? There are vipers here, always have been. You should be wearing boots.’
‘I don’t have any boots,’ said Jonny.
‘Meet me here tomorrow at dusk — I’ll find you a pair.’
Edwin got up, walking deeper into the wood. He seemed to evaporate. Jonny waited, then followed him softly. There was no sign of him.
Edwin, like some of the other ghosts herein, turns out to be dangerous. But he, like them, is not a Hollywood special-effects creature; none of these ghosts sport dripping fangs or brandish hooks or bloody stumps with which to cause physical injury. They don’t shriek in fury. No. With a great deal of effort, they may manifest themselves: they can appear to our eyes, touch our faces. (One of them seems capable of leaving bite marks on a human shoulder.)
One of my favorite stories concerns the ghost of a dead actress, Pamela, haunting a castle now used as the setting for a pricey, 1960s-themed “ghostly weekend” experience in which all the special effects are supposed to be artificial; she convinces Paul, story’s narrator and the creator of this “show,” to let her take the place of the flesh-and-blood leading lady. The dead Pamela incites Paul to a flurry of fisticuffs with the castle’s owner (against whom, it happens, Pamela carries a significant grudge):
He stepped forward and hit me. Smack! Just like that. I stumbled. He came again with a left hook. Bam! I thought he had broken my jaw.
‘Paul!’ said Pamela. ‘Pull yourself together! Step with me! Follow my feet!’
Two luminous bare feet appeared. Melvin was swinging towards me, uttering oaths. He swung, he missed, he swung again, he missed. Lurching, he caught my shoulder.
‘Paul! Pay attention! Quicker! Left! Left! Left! Left!’ I followed the feet. Had Pamela been a boxing coach in a previous life?
In a couple of sections, Winterson offers what she calls “hinged” stories: story pairs, whose plots are recounted from two different points of view. Easily my favorite of these, and (I think) the most heartbreaking narrative in the collection, is the hinged story of a long-partnered couple named Simon and William. Simon is alive; William is not. Over the course of months, Simon grieves, and he grieves. He continues grieving. And then, suddenly, for no reason, a radio lights up. There’s no voice, only static…
William is there, of course. He’s been watching Simon’s emotional torment, unable to comfort or communicate with him in any way, missing him… and at the same time disintegrating, further and further, into final and true oblivion. He by now cannot speak, or even recognize spoken words. But before he evaporates entirely, he observes Simon one more time:
Simon is talking to me. I can’t understand what he is saying because I have lost language. I can see him gesturing — he’s replying to himself, he’s excited, he’s making food. The kitchen is steamy. He’s going to open some wine. I can see how thin he is, how hungry he is. He goes on talking to the radio — the back of the radio – the valves glowing and buzzing. It’s the first night he’s been himself.
Later, when it’s time for bed, Simon goes upstairs wearing me like a safety net. I am fastened around him. I won’t let him fall. When he lies down, his eyes are open, staring at the street lamp outside. I close his eyes gently, as gently as he closed mine. I cover him with the last of me, and I love him, and he sleeps.
Maybe it’s just because I myself am in my 70s, with a partner of decades. But this passage both broke and thrilled my heart to read — neither of them responses associated with stereotypical ghost stories. And that, as it happens, is the Jeanette Winterson I remember from all those years ago: fashioning, from the clay of stereotype, narratives we have never seen, could never see, from anyone else.
JW is amazing. I guess I now must add this book to my wishlist. Damn you! 🤣
This is a lovely, loving, and compelling review. Thank you.