Henry disagreed. He believed that a story should be able to suggest anything at all, including the most outlandish matter, but he was, nonetheless, interested in Gosse’s argument, although it was too vehement and too eager to impose rules on subjects which, in Henry’s opinion, required great latitude. Privately, Henry was appalled by ‘The Way It Came’ and regretted collecting it in a volume, knowing that it might have been better to let it sink. He quite resented Gosse for noticing it.
During one of those evenings with Gosse, he told him in passing how he had acquired Lamb House, mentioning the iron-monger Mr Milson as a ferryman waiting to take him across the water to ideal seclusion, managed happiness. He then told Gosse of Howells’s visit, and how his financial circumstances due to new possibilities for American publication had been transformed, as though he were being handed a coin by an old friend to put under his tongue and assist him on his journey to Hades.
‘ Rye,’ Gosse laughed, ‘is indeed a death, especially on weekdays in the winter, but I daresay at weekends as well.’
‘If I were Poe,’ Henry said, ‘I could write about one of those characters who is travelling to an unknown house whose door is a door into the grave.’
‘You will long for London, and that will settle it, and you will escape with the mere fright which rural life offers the unwary,’ Gosse said.
HENRY HAD promised Collier’s a new story as part of Howells’s interceding on his behalf, and, having consulted his notebooks and spoken more to Gosse about the problem of credibility in the modern ghost story but without telling him what his plans were, he set to work. This time he would frame the story, use the first-person voice as a narrative left behind by the protagonist and now retrieved to be read to a weekend party at a country house. He longed, as he dictated, to frighten the Scot, and watched him carefully as he began his tale so that he could note thereafter any shift in his countenance, any paling of his skin.
His narrator’s voice would be prim and factual; seeping gently from her tone would be a sort of goodness, a readiness to appreciate each new person and each new experience as a reward sent to her in exchange for her quick intelligence and sensitivity. He sought a tone of voice full of calm acceptance, resigned competence, mingling authority with a devotion to duty, an orderly attachment to making the best of things; someone who would not complain and for whom shrillness would be among the cardinal vices. He wanted a voice that every reader would automatically believe and trust, but also a literary style redolent of fifty years earlier – our heroine was an avid reader – broken intermittently by simple vivid sentences.
It was the story which had lain in his notebooks for more than two years, and had come to him over that time in flashes and moments, but nothing close to a form or a way to begin had inspired him until now, when he knew that he would need such a story, firm and frightening and dramatic, for his new editor at Collier’s, something that would grip the readers and make them want more. This was the vague tale told to him by the Archbishop of Canterbury of two children in a large house left by their guardian in the care of a governess detailed not to contact the guardian under any circumstances.
It was easy to put flesh on these bare bones, have a hearty, trusty housekeeper, make the little girl gentle and beautiful, make the boy both charming and mysterious, and make the house itself, the strange old house, into a great adventure for our heroine, the governess. He wanted her to have no skills at reflection or self-examination, he wanted the reader to know her by what she noticed, and what sights, indeed, she used her narrative to gloss over. Thus the reader would see the world through her eyes, but somehow see her too, despite her efforts at self-concealment and self-suppression, in ways she could not see herself.
The house was all emptiness and echoing sounds. The governess’s two charges made nothing of their abandonment, they paraded themselves to the governess and the kind housekeeper as brimming vessels in need of nothing more than what was provided for them. All sound, both within and without, was ominous sound matched by ominous echo. He set down as soon as he could the moment when, on retiring for the night, the governess heard the faint distant cry of a child and then in front of her door the sound of a light footstep. These, he determined as he moved up and down the room dictating the words, should seem like nothing at the time and would only become significant in the light, or in the gloom, of what was to come.
He had begun the story as a potboiler, a way of fulfilling a contract, a tale likely to appeal to a wide audience, and he worked accordingly to have it completed by the end of the year. He did not know why it disturbed his waking life in the months in which he prepared his move to Lamb House. He did not know why the voice he had so thoughtfully created, and so carefully controlled and manipulated, seemed to have worked on him so that he allowed his governess a power and a freedom which he had never intended for her. He allowed her to fool herself, something he had never allowed anyone before; he gave her permission to wallow in the danger, to want it to come towards her, to motion it close, signal to it. He relished frightening her. He made her loneliness and her isolation into a longing to meet someone, for a face at the window, a figure in the distance.
This longing, he knew, would in time come to him too as the garden door creaked, or the branches of the trees beat against the window as he read by lamplight, or lay awake in that old house, and in one of those seconds before worthier thoughts could surface, the first thought would be to welcome what was coming now to break the sad, helpless monotony of the self, to feel a moment of desperate hope that it was come at last, whatever it was. Even in its darkest shape, it would offer the same moment of pure, sharp release as a flash of lightning offers to the brittle air in a dried-up landscape.
He worked. He moved everything slowly and deliberately towards excitement. He began the sentences simply, declaratively, so that the fright of what she saw seemed to harden the governess’s diction, forced her into bald, true statement. The person looking in through the window was the person who had appeared to her. He was the same. His face was close to the glass and his stare into her face was deep and menacing until she realized something that she would never cease to believe: the added shock of certitude went through her fiercely that it was not for her he had come. He had come for the children.
As he laboured on the story, he did not think in any detail about the children. He gave them names and allowed their governess superlatives with which to describe them. Slowly, however, it became apparent to him that he had imagined for them strange private selves, which, while giving nothing away, maintained a strong resistance to the governess. She did not recognize it, and yet, whatever he had done with her words, he had handed young Miles and little Flora minds of their own.
Each time he came to describe the appearance of the ghost, or the ethereal and menacing presence of Peter Quint, none of this mattered. The scene itself, the emptiness of the house, its newness for the governess, and then the invasive figure, utterly real to her, and seemingly real also to the children and the housekeeper Mrs Grose, made him shiver as he began to conjure it up. He watched McAlpine for signs of interest, but none came. He knew that asking McAlpine if he found these scenes in any way disturbing would be a breach of decorum. Most of the time, however, he did not think about McAlpine, and even the sound of the Remington made no difference. Most of the time he concentrated on the voice itself, the governess’s vivid version of each thing witnessed. His main task was to prevent the reader from asking why the governess did not contact the children’s guardian; he sought to offer enough detail and swift movement and further development to preserve the fiction that she was alone and must act alone. He set out to cajole the reader into becoming her eyes and ears and thus entering into her spirit, inhabiting unquestioningly her consciousness.