By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The writer A. M. Burrage once claimed that he wished ‘to give the reader a pleasant shudder, in the hope that he will take a lighted candle to bed with him’. But in fact, his ghost stories – a selection of which was published in a handsome edition by the British Library in 2022 – often succeed in doing far more than this.
Burrage (1889-1956), born in Middlesex, began publishing stories while still at school, and cut his teeth on Chums and other boys’ papers and magazines. But it was after his return from the First World War in 1918 that he became a mature writer of supernatural tales. His best work in the genre is from the 1920s, when the ghost story was enjoying one of its many periodic bursts of popularity.
As Nick Freeman notes in his informative introduction – which, like all good introductions to collections such as this, succeeds in whetting one’s appetite as well as feeding one’s brain – Burrage’s tales range from ‘stories of gentle whimsy and sentimental reincarnations to outright horror’, with some pieces ‘using elements of science fiction such as timeslips and suggestions of alternative realities’.
Freeman, whom I’m honoured to call a colleague of mine, has done a superb job not only in selecting these stories but in introducing us to the little-known Burrage. His introduction furnishes us with some effective ‘ways in’ to Burrage’s work: influenced by the plain-speaking style of his contemporary H. G. Wells, Burrage was much more of the ‘journalist’ school of fiction-writer than the ‘artist’ school whose most famous graduate was probably Henry James.
Nevertheless, Burrage admired James’s The Turn of the Screw as a prime example of the ‘fusion of style and content’, in Freeman’s phrase. His stories are far more than ephemeral hackwork, and Freeman’s comparison – with a couple of necessary provisos – with E. F. Benson (whose Night Terrors is a big, inexpensive volume worth getting hold of), with whom he shares a certain ‘briskness’ of style, is well made.
Burrage is rumoured to have written as many as 100 ghost stories. He was so prolific, writing for so many different publications over the years, that the final total remains unknown. This selection, with its beautiful cover, contains fifteen of his supernatural tales, including some of his best-known works, ‘Smee’, ‘The Sweeper’, and ‘The Waxwork’.
The first of these, ‘Smee’, offers a nice way into the world of Burrage’s ghostly tricks. A party game, ‘Smee’ (from a contraction of ‘it’s me’, which participants have to say when they catch each other while playing hide-and-seek), takes a grim turn when a mysterious girl hides with two of the characters.
‘The Sweeper’, too, deserves special mention. This story focuses on a young woman, Tessa, who goes to work as the live-in lady’s companion to an old woman who lives in a large country house. One day, she encounters a mysterious figure sweeping the leaves in the grounds of the house, and returns indoors to learn that others have seen it, too, and there’s a tragic story behind the figure’s appearance (which I shan’t repeat here for fear of offering spoilers).
Burrage is a supernatural writer who is happy to show us rather than merely suggest, and we are treated to a paragraph describing this strange, ‘transparent’ visitant in considerable detail; but then we come to this:
They faced each other through a fraction of eternity not to be measured by seconds; and then Tessa heard herself scream. It flashed upon her now, the strange, abominable detail of the figure which confronted her – the Something Missing which she had noticed, without actually seeing, from above. The path was flooded with moonlight, but the Visitant had no shadow.
Burrage’s writing may occasionally be rather workmanlike, even prosaic (in keeping with that journalistic approach to his craft; the need to sell stories and meet deadlines must also have played a part), but here he rises above such labels and becomes a gifted stylist, giving us just enough metaphysical vagueness (that ‘fraction of eternity not to be measured by seconds’ is especially effective) and abstraction (‘Something Missing’) to hint at some lifting of the veil while leaving us to ponder its true import.
Although he admired Henry James’s supernatural fiction, Burrage doesn’t appear to have had much time for the ambiguous ghost story, in which the provenance of a supernatural visitation remains open to interpretation. His ghosts are, like those of Henry’s namesake M. R. James, usually explicitly presented as ghosts rather than hallucinations.
But they are not Jamesian (M. R., that is) in their intent, for the most part. ‘The Sweeper’ is also a good example of Burrage’s attitude towards ghosts, which are often benevolent visitors in his characters’ lives, rather than sinister and malevolent forces. But that doesn’t mean his stories lack the ability to chill the blood a little, and fans of ghost stories will doubtless find some entertainment in the 238 handsomely bound pages of this British Library volume.