The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 2: Decaying Vegetable Matter

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When you do an internet search for the name "Oliver Onions", you are more likely to gather information on the Italian folk music duo than on the English writer who actually had that name, and wrote dozens of books, and was best known for writing ghost stories. Why this should be, I don't know, although the Italian guys wrote a lot of soundtracks for Bud Spencer/Terence Hill movies, while most of the English guy's books have turned to dust. Of those books, the biggest exception, the great survivor, is a collection of short stories from 1911 called Widdershins (a word which means, according to Onions in his brief author's note, "contrary to the course of the Sun"). The story, or rather novella, that serves as Widdershins' launching point is called "The Beckoning Fair One", and if, as seems likely, Widdershins is the sole reason Onions is remembered today, "The Beckoning Fair One" is quite possibly the sole reason Widdershins is still in print.

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I say "quite possibly" because, first off, who among us can know such things, but also, and more to the point, because "The Beckoning Fair One" is thus far the only Oliver Onions story I've read (and that's pronounced "oh-nee-ons", by the way, not "un-yuns", which might be another reason his star has faded -- that's like having a last name spelled "Mouse" and insisting it be pronounced "moe-yoos". I'd refuse to reprint your books, too, Mr. Oh-nee-ons!!) But throughout my life as a reader of horror fiction, "The Beckoning Fair One" is one of those ubiquitous titles, along with "The Great God Pan" and "The Rats in the Walls" and The Turn of the Screw. If you hadn't read one of those stories, it was made abundantly clear that some day you damn well better, if you expected to have any authority in this field. "The Beckoning Fair One" is one of the tentpoles of horror literature, whereas the remaining stories found in Widdershins -- "Benlian", "The Accident", "Hic Jacet", for instance -- aren't, exactly. Which is no comment on their quality, because I'm in no position to make any such comment. But Arthur Machen, H. P. Lovecraft and Henry James all had more than one story to live on. Onions doesn't, apparently, and I can't help but wonder if there's a reason for that.

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Because I didn't much care for "The Beckoning Fair One". I mean, it's fine. But it's also a bit exhausting. At 70-ish pages, the plot of "The Beckoning Fair One" requires almost no summarization, consisting, as it does of the travails of a novelist moving into a new flat, after which point he stops writing the novel he'd been working on, and slowly goes mad, or maybe he's being possessed by a ghost. Both of these things are equally likely! Who knows the real answer, and so on.

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The very idea of summarizing a story like "The Beckoning Fair One" defeats me, even though there are interesting elements here and there. I do like that our protagonist, Paul Oleron, is what we would now call a mid-list writer, who writes fiction very much as a profession, with one eye on artistic ambitions and the other on a living wage, and there was a time, after Oleron announces to his friend Elsie Bengough (whose love for Oleron is not only unreciprocated, but also unnoticed) that he plans on ditching the fifteen chapters of his novel, Romilly Bishop, he's already written so he can start from scratch, that I thought perhaps Onions was aiming to marry the themes plumbed so deeply in New Grub Street, George Gissing's 1891 novel of tragedy, ambition and pandering in England's literary world, with a classical ghost story, and I became quite interested (quite!). But Onions isn't doing that -- Oleron is a writer, I suspect, because so is Oliver Onions, and it just seemed like the thing to do. Plus, it simplifies things narratively, cutting out any co-workers that and otherwise employed Oleron -- who will become a recluse over the course of the story -- might have to deal with, and limiting his necessary social interaction to Elsie, and a nosy neighbor or two.

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Instead, the only thing that might count as interesting here is the -- sigh -- ambiguity regarding whether or not the ghost, who manifests itself as a female through action -- the house seems jealous of Elsie, Oleron hears the sound of a woman brushing her hair -- rather than appearance, is real. Because it might not be! When Oleron starts to go crazy, it may not be because a ghost is making that happen. He might actually be going crazy. And I'm just flat tired of this sort of thing. It can be handled brilliantly (see Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla"), but by and large it's something of a trick, even a cheat. The writer refuses to commit, so the reader, who may be biased, is able to choose the interpretation that best suits his or her taste. What's so wrong with that? you might ask. Well, it sticks in my craw more than a little when I hear that Edmund Wilson was fully on board with James's The Turn of the Screw, right up until somebody told him that James always intended the story to be taken as a straight-up ghost story, whereupon he grabbed his copy off the shelf and shit-canned it at once (I'm speaking figuratively here, at least as far as I know). It betrays a certain embarrassment about the very genre you're writing in, an embarrassment it is assumed the reader shares, and therefore a window is opened that will allow us all to scamper out the back, unnoticed by the Edmund Wilson's of the world.

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The other thing -- and I've mentioned this before -- is that stories like "The Beckoning Fair One" get praised, independent of their literary qualities, for the simple reason that they employ that most sought after creative device that we call "ambiguity". Ambiguity, I've come to learn, is an absolute good. Or so we're supposed to think. The sort of people who think that the absence of irony (which means there's an abundance of sincerity) is always a bad thing are the same people who think a fantastical premise presented with conviction and without ambiguity is a sign of artistic weakness. By this rationale, if you read a really good epistolary novel, no non-epistolary novel can possibly match up.

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Ambiguity's just a device, is what I'm saying, and when it's applied to a ghost story like "The Beckoning Fair One", it has the tendency, in my view, to render the whole thing meaningless. By the end of Onions's story, some rather unfortunate things have occurred, and these things are irreversible. Given that we don't know the answer and never will, what in the world does it matter whether there really was a ghost or not? More to the point, what good can "deciding for ourselves" do? And since this is a fiction anyway, which renders this next question the only one that matters, what does leaving the question hang add to the reader's enjoyment or appreciation or understanding of what's just been read? No new or extra or brighter light will be shone on the story's climax, whichever side of the ghost fence we find ourselves on. So what, finally, is the function of Onion's ambiguity? I submit that, whether writers like Onions and a host of others actually felt this particular motivation, the function is to allow those who would rather not think they've just read a horror story to convince themselves that they haven't.