Oates votes
Mark Valentine
Muriel Spark's "The Portobello Road" and Elizabeth Bowen's "The Demon
Lover" are the "most accomplished British ghost stories of the
twentieth century".
Anybody read the Spark story ?
Anybody like to disagree ?
Mark V
paghat
mark.va...@btinternet.com (Mark Valentine) wrote:
> Joyce Carol Oates in the Times Literary Supplement of October 5 thinks
> Muriel Spark's "The Portobello Road" and Elizabeth Bowen's "The Demon
> Lover" are the "most accomplished British ghost stories of the
> twentieth century".
>
> Anybody read the Spark story ?
Spark wrote several ghost stories & this one is SO much better than the
rest. It's been in several ghost story anthologies, even one by Herbert
van Thal, & of course in her COLLECTED STORIES with enough ghosties in the
mix to be worth getting just for those.
> Anybody like to disagree ?
Obvioiusly such an expansive proclamation is apt to boil down to
hyperbole. "Demon Lover" is unquestionably a brilliant story; I wouldn't
put it on my list of the best ten of the century. "Portobello" however
transcends even that which is occasionally great in ghost literature --
subtle, tasteful, emotional chilling. Obviously much that has elements of
tasteless excesse can itself be transcendent, but I would gather from
Oates two examples that she dismisses all that wouldn't fit a narrow
definition of serious & literary or even that which is written by an
amateur genius like MRJ whose method is hard to mistake for literary
("literary" at its best meaning that which is written with an almost
invisible style that imparts psychological depth to the characters with
just a few perfect words here & there, & at its worst is tepidity &
affectation of merit. In this context even Poe would not be literary
because too obvious a style, & Dickens would not be literary because he
does not actually develop characters but caricatures who are more symbolic
than real; & certainly no one who labors under those old influences quite
fits the "modern", nor do such as derive from pulp fiction escapism &
excess, amateur-gentleman predictability like James & Wakefield -- most of
us wouldn't exclude such choices but I can only imagine Oates must in
order to come to the conclusion you say she made).
Oates makes this broad assessment of the two tales with two provisos --
best that is British thus not competing with the best ghost stories by
those Americans imposed the supernatural on the type of universal realism
perfected by Dreiser & Anderson, or magic realists like Rodereda or Garcia
Marquez who just can't be outdone. And second, the best of 20th Century
hence not competing with ideal Victorian examples. She needed one more
proviso for it to almost work, though: best of the LAST TWO THIRDS of the
20th Century, as by far the greatest number of the best 20th C. ghost
stories are bunched up early in the century, not mid or later.
If one included American ghost stories of the first quarter of the 20th
century, "Portobello" would pale but slightly. It is just a tad shy of the
perfect genius of Theodore Dreiser's "The Lost Phoebe," Dana Burnett's
"The Mist" "Rain" & "Beyond the Cross," Mary Heaton Vorse's "The Half-way
House," Vincent O'Sullivan's "They" and "Master of Fallen Years,"
Katherine Fullerton Gerould's "Loquier's Third Act," Vance Thompson's "The
Tenement of Dreams," Ellen Glasgow's "Dare's Gift"...many of which by
reason of their "literary" rather than genre origins are not well known to
ghost story collectors. Even Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's best stories are of
the 20th Century, if only barely, "The Lost Ghost" & "Luella Miller" from
1903 issues of Everybody's Magazine -- though if by "20th Century" Oates
means to imply authors of modern method, in that case, the only two that
go off my hasty list would be Freeman & O'Sullivan as products of
victorian regionalism & decadance respectively, not the arch modernism
that begins with Dreiser & Anderson in America -- onto which modern
realism many brilliant writers could not resist restoring the one
Romanticist element -- the ghost -- for the sake of deepening the
psychological portraits of the characters.
And I wonder if Oates is asking us not to count the ideal specimens of
American ghost stories because she actually did know these are frequently
in advance of the British, which labored under Le Fanu & Dickens for too
long, whereas Americans were somehow able to break free of Poe & Hawthorne
& discover a more universal realism slightly ahead of the Brits (a
universal realism which, by the by, was already old in Russia, for Gogol
is the father of all modernism in the short story). Still, even the
British transcendent equivalents are pretty numerous, & often better known
than the American poortion. Hard to imagine what criteria in "British &
20th Century" would make "Portobello" better than "The Willows" & "The
Beckoning Fair One" -- thus Oates exaggerates even if with good cause. But
add the third proviso, that the competitors be post-1920s, one encounters
fewer transcendant moments for ghost literature as the century progresses.
There is still plenty that is just awfully good, but transcendently
brilliant in the "literary" rather than genre sense, the list definitely
grows smaller, & "Portobello Road" is on that smaller list.
-paghat the ratgirl
> Mark V
--
"Here dwell souls that did neither evil nor good."
-Inferno
Mark Valentine
> In article <e4c912b1.01111...@posting.google.com>,
> mark.va...@btinternet.com (Mark Valentine) wrote:
>
> > Joyce Carol Oates in the Times Literary Supplement of October 5 thinks
> > Muriel Spark's "The Portobello Road" and Elizabeth Bowen's "The Demon
> > Lover" are the "most accomplished British ghost stories of the
> > twentieth century".
> >
> > Anybody read the Spark story ?
>
> Spark wrote several ghost stories & this one is SO much better than the
> rest. It's been in several ghost story anthologies, even one by Herbert
> van Thal, & of course in her COLLECTED STORIES with enough ghosties in the
> mix to be worth getting just for those.
>
> > Anybody like to disagree ?
>
Hmm, thanks, a thought-provoking response. Makes me even more
remorseful that I haven't read it. Nor, indeed, most of those you list
(except the O'Sullivans). I think you are right that Oates appears to
be applying a fairly severe "literary" test in order to arrive at the
two ghost stories she selects: but this would still make it strange
that she omits, say, Hartley and de la Mare, both of whom would by any
standards be accounted "literary". I would say it is difficult to get
beyond de la Mare at his best, as to ghost stories of the last
century,principally because his stories allow so much room for
interpretation and - to use that old critical standby - "resist
closure". They are also, the more closely you examine them, the more
impressive in their crafting, with very careful placing of oblique
symbolism and a subtle way of presenting the everyday that is just
slightly askew.
I wonder if there are any other examples, like Spark, of "mainstream"
authors who have written just one or two highly accomplished
supernatural stories ?
>
>
> > Mark V
Jim Rockhill
Hartley and de la Mare were precisely the names that came to me when
reading Oates' statement. I admire the Sparks and Bowen stories, but
cannot imagine either one towering over every other ghost story
written in Britain during the 20th century, even using what we can
imagine to be Oates' criteria.
Jim
Randy Money
Especially the Bowen. Much as I like that story, there are a couple of
others that I'd place above it from her own works. I need to go back and
reread the Spark. It's been a few years.
(Mark, if you have Alan Ryan's _Haunting Women_ [_Haunted Women_?]
around you have the Spark story.)
Randy M.
Steve Duffy
> Joyce Carol Oates in the Times Literary Supplement of October 5 thinks
> Muriel Spark's "The Portobello Road" and Elizabeth Bowen's "The Demon
> Lover" are the "most accomplished British ghost stories of the
> twentieth century".
> Anybody like to disagree ?
Hi, Mark! Er, where's the queue? Why have so few people taken issue
with the otherwise admirable Ms Oates over what is really quite an
unwarrantedly sweeping statement? I like "The Demon Lover" - it's a
really good tale, with an unforgettable denouement - and "The
Portobello Road" is fine too... but the most accomplished British
ghost stories of the C20th? No. Neither makes my Top Twenty (tho'
"The Demon Lover" would certainly get into my Top 50). Mind you, both
tales would be in my Top Ten of C20th ghost stories by women... but I
don't know whether that distinction was being made by Ms Oates when
she made her selection. And should that be a consideration?
Bestest
Steve
Mark Valentine
-------Hello to you Steve, good to find you here. To be fair to Joyce
Carol Oates, she was making a deliberately breezy, provocative aside
in a long review of Muriel Spark's Collected Stories. But, no, she
wasn't distinguishing her comments by reference to women only. I
thought her view was of interest, though, given that she practices the
Gothic art herself. (MV)