A good ghost-story . . . must be connected at a hundred points with the common objects of life

The mass production of culture may very well be justified by the fact that it permits you to pick up books like this for only a dollar:

Ahem. Which leads me to the best $1.00 you could possibly spend this month: the cost of a used copy of the out-of-print Wordsworth Classics edition of Ghost Stories of Henry James, which, as Martin Scofield explains in his introduction,

contains all the stories by James which can strictly be described as ghost stories, in that they all contain an apparition, or at least, in the case of “The Private Life” and “The Jolly Corner,” a ghostly “double.”

The pleasures found in those ten stories should surprise no lover of James, for no author has had a more firm grasp on the ineluctably individual nature of consciousness than him. Our ghosts are our selves, as often as not, as Scofield writes,

Henry James’s ghosts are liable to arise as much from within as from without: whatever their vivid perceptibility, they are often as much emanations from the psyche as visitants from “another world.” Indeed, it is precisely the equivocation between the two that gives them their imaginative power.

Which, to press a point, could be said of all of James’s writing: it is from the equivocation between internal and external, and the mutual deceptions thereof, that it derives its power.

That’s Ghost Stories of Henry James, and you can read the rest of Levi Stahl’s thoughts on it here.

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