Backlisted - The Altar of the Dead and Other Tales by Henry James

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

This Hallowe’en episode of Backlisted focusses on the collection of ‘uncanny’ stories by Henry James, first gathered together under the title The Altar of the Dead and Other Tales to form the seventeenth volume of the New York Edition of his Collected Works in 1917. We are joined, as ever, by our resident spook-master Andrew Male, and by acclaimed novelist and Henry James aficionado Tessa Hadley. We each choose a story to present and read from - these are tackled in chronological order to better trace the evolution of James’s famously dense and challenging late style . Before that Andy confesses his admiration for I Used to Live Here Once, Miranda Seymours’ new biography of Jean Rhys and reads a short Jean Rhys ghost story, while John revisits Giving Up the Ghost, Hilary Mantel’s haunting (and haunted) memoir. Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length) 5:49 - I Used to Live Here Once by Miranda Seymour 12:19 - Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel 19:38 - The Altar of the Dead and Other Tales by Henry James * If you'd like to purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For more information about the show visit www.backlisted.fm * If you'd like to support the show and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Other conditions apply. Skeleton Dance. Played by the Edison Cancer Dance. Hello and welcome to this special Halloween edition of Backlisted, the podcast that connects the living with the dead. Today you find us entering the gloom of an old London church sometime in the early 1890s. The air is heavy with the smell of incense and our eyes are drawn to a riotous blaze of light in one of the side chapels. At its centre stands an altar surrounded by dozens of bright candles. A man, smartly dressed and middle aged, kneels in the front pew. To his left, a younger woman, robed in black, is bent in prayer.

Neither speaks, but after a while she draws herself up and walks past us out into the church, her pale face lost in thought. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and today we are joined by two revenants. Tessa Hadley, back for the second time this year, having previously joined us to discuss Elizabeth Bowen back in May, and of course, Andrew the Spook Male, returning for his and our sixth Halloween. Welcome back, everybody. Hello.

Nice to be here. So nice. Tessa, thanks for coming on one of the Halloween episodes. And also, listeners, we know loads of you really enjoy these episodes, and so do we. Always, always exciting to dip into the uncanny. None more so than today's choice, which we'll come on to in a moment. Das Unheimliche. Unheimliche. Tessa Hadley is the author of eight novels, including The Past, Late in the Day and Free Love, and three collections of short stories.

She publishes stories regularly in The New Yorker and reviews for The Guardian and the London Review of Books. is regularly in the new yorker and reviews for the guardian and the london review of books and as luck would have it she is the author of the 2002 study henry james and the imagination of pleasure described by one critic as having quotes a rare combination of clarity and complexity qualities which might come in handy later i want want to just establish for listeners, however, Tessa, when we asked you to do this Halloween episode about Henry James ghost stories, what was it you said? I think I may have said that I don't really like ghost stories. We said you're booked.

Come straight back because we happen to know somebody with who we can have a heated debate and that person is andrew male andrew welcome back thank you andrew is the senior associate editor at mojo music magazine and presenter of the fortnightly mojo record club podcast he writes regularly on music books film radio tv theater do you do theater never done theater well probably about 20 years ago i did some theater reviews but no it's not for me theater it's not very good is it wow wow the iconoclast andrew mayall he's back the book we're here to discuss is less of a book, more a collection of ten uncanny tales by Henry James, first gathered together under the title

The Altar of the Dead and Other Tales to form the 17th volume of the New York edition of Henry James' collected works in 1917 and first published under that title in the UK by Macmillan in 1922. Now, if you are looking to assemble your own collection of the Altar of the Dead, the good news is it is available as an e-book under that title, and it is generally available, all the stories, clearly because it's Henry James, are available in various collections. So I'm just going to tell you what those stories are. You might want a pen and a piece of paper,

so I'm just going to tell you what those stories are. You might want a pen and a piece of paper or you might want a way of making a note but in The Altar of the Dead, aka volume 17 of the New York edition of James's collected works, you will find the following tales. The Altar of the Dead, 1895. The Beast in the Jungle, 1903.

The Birthplace, 1903 The Private Life, 1893 Owen Wingrave, 1892 The Friends of the Friends, aka The Way It Came, 1896 Sir Edmund Orme, 1891 The Real Right Thing, 1899 The Jolly Corner, 1908, and Julia Bride, 1908. And the two things to say about this selection of stories is some of them are ghost stories,

weird tales, and some of them are not. Though we will probably debate as we go along which ones are and which ones aren't. That's the first thing to say. The second thing is to say that the inclusion of Julia Bride, the final story, was a mistake because it was supposed to be in volume 18 of the collected works, but there wasn't space in the extent, so they bumped it back to volume 17.

So it really doesn't quite fit in this collection at all but nevertheless it gives us an overview of all sorts of themes within Henry James's work so we felt here on Backlisted that when Andrew suggested it it would act as a Halloween episode Andrew's speciality but also an overview of James's short of fiction and writing in general, Tessa Hadley's speciality. So we've been thinking ahead, listeners, for several months to try and get this right. Anyway, before we start wandering around dark and empty rooms lit only by the lambent flickerings of our own consciousness,

Andy, what have you been reading this week? Oh, okay. I've been reading the biography of Jean Rees that was published a few months ago, written by Miranda Seymour, which is called I Used to Live Here Once, The Haunted Life of Jean Rees. This felt like an appropriate show to mention that on. Regular listeners to this show from the beginning will know the second ever episode of Batlisted we did was on about Good Morning Midnight by Jean Rees. We are huge admirers of Rees' writing

and it's exciting that there's a new biography of her and I will say I've read all the biographies of Jean Rees and this is my favourite to date. I also did an event with Miranda Seymour a few weeks ago down in Hastings which was totally fascinating for me to sit and I also did an event with Miranda Seymour a few weeks ago down in Hastings, which was totally fascinating for me to sit and listen to somebody who is deeply invested in Rees's life

and work. And if you are interested in Jean Rees, and of course you are because you're a backlisted listener and you're interested in one of the best writers of the 20th century, I can strongly recommend Miranda's biography, I Used to Live Here Once. I'm going to read the opening paragraph of it, and then I am going to read you a ghost story by Jean Rees herself. This is the very beginning of Miranda Seymour's biography of Jean Rees. very beginning of Miranda Seymour's biography of Jean Rees. Near to the end of her long life, she was almost 90 when she died in May 1979. Jean Rees wrote what her Devonshire neighbour William Trevor praised as one of the finest short ghost stories he'd ever read. She called it, I used to live here once.

She called it, I used to live here once. The dreaming narrator, evidently Reese herself, follows the trail of stepping stones that guide her across a shallow familiar river and onto a rough forest path that leads to her own childhood home. She feels extraordinarily happy. But when she walks across the parched grass to where a boy and girl seem to await her, But when she walks across the parched grass to where a boy and girl seem to await her, they register her presence and timid greeting only as a sudden chill in the afternoon air. The children turn away and the story ends abruptly.

And I thought, given that this is our Halloween episode, and this is a very short, short story, and it is a tiny masterpiece that I will now read you. Jean Rees's I Used to Live Here Once, which is one of the last stories that Rees ever wrote. In fact, almost her penultimate story. So very near the end of her long life, she wrote this, this tale. I used to live here once. She was standing by the river, looking at the stepping stones and remembering each one.

There was the round unsteady stone, the pointed one, the flat one in the middle, the safe stone where you could stand and look around. The next wasn't so safe, for when the river was full, the water flowed over it, and even when it showed dry, it was slippery. But after that, it was easy, and soon she was standing on the other side. The road was much wider than it used to be, but the work had been done carelessly. The felled trees had not been cleared away and the bushes looked trampled. Yet it was the same road, and she walked along feeling extraordinarily happy. It was a fine day, a blue day. The only thing was that the sky had a glassy look that she didn't remember. That was the only word she could think of, glassy. She turned the corner, saw what had

been the old pavé had been taken up, and there too the road was much wider, but it had the same unfinished look. She came to the worn stone steps that led up to the house and her heart began to beat. The screw pine was gone, so was the mock summer house, but the clove tree was still there and at the top of the steps the rough lawn stretched away just as she remembered it. She stopped and looked towards the house that had been added to and painted white. It was strange to see a car standing in front of it. There were two children under the big mango tree, a boy and a little girl, and she waved to them and called hello, but they didn't answer her or turn their heads. Very fair children, as Europeans born in the West Indies so often are,

as if the white blood is asserting itself against all odds. The grass was yellow in the hot sunlight as she walked towards them. When she was quite close, she called again shyly, hello. Then, I used to live here once, she said. Still they didn't answer. When she said for the third time, hello, she was quite near them. Her arms went out instinctively with the longing to touch them. It was the boy who turned. His grey eyes looked straight into hers. His expression didn't change. He said, hasn't it gone cold all of a sudden? Do you notice? Let's go in. Yes, let's, said the girl. Her arms fell to her sides as she watched them running across the grass to the house.

That was the first time she knew. Good day, isn't it? Well, there you go. Beat that, Henry James. That story is available in Rhys' late collection, Sleep It Off Lady,

or in the collected short stories of Jean Rhys. And Miranda Seymour's biography, which shares the same title, I Used to Live There Once, published by William Collins, £25, and is in bookshops now. John Mitchinson, what have you been reading this week? I've been reading a memoir by Hilary Mantel called Giving Up the Ghost, which was published some years ago. But we did the episode on Beyond Black maybe three years ago.

Which would make a very good Halloween choice as well, Beyond Black. And I was struck. I remember reading bits of the memoir and being incredibly impressed by I mean as you always are by the the sheer brilliance of Hilary Mantel's prose and the oddness of the narrative and it is a strange narrative it's a narrative that is haunted full of ghosts and I'm going to read a little bit in a moment which I think fits so nicely with kind of themes of what we're doing today with Henry James. It starts with her selling a house when she's in her,

I think she's just turned 50, in Norfolk, which is a house that her parents had lived in, and she sees the ghost of her stepfather. So you're immediately in this strange kind of slightly kind of liminal world between what's real and what's what's imagined or not imagined um she's she never really will come sure this is me this will be a discussion we'll have with henry james you never quite know where you stand so it talks about her early childhood um it talks about her catholic schooling where she you know classic kind of tale of of uh difficulties

with with with nuns and teachers uh Growing up in working-class childhood in 50s Derbyshire, it talks about her battles through her 20s with her strange medical condition, which was finally diagnosed as endometriosis. But it meant that she was very thin and then became very fat, and she had to deal with a lot of people calling her a malingerer, including doctors. The thing about the memoir that really strikes you is just the sheer bravery and the refusal to be remotely sentimental.

She says, and I'll read a slightly longer passage, she says, So now I come to write a memoir. I argue with myself over every word. Is my writing clear or is it deceptively clear? I tell myself, just say how you came to sell a house with a ghost in it. But this story can only be told once and I need to get it right. Why does the act of writing generate so much anxiety? Margaret Atwood says, the written word is so much like evidence, like something that can be used against you.

I used to think that autobiography was a form of weakness, and perhaps I still do. But I also think that if you're weak, it's childish to pretend to be strong. It's just full of really really really sharp and wonderful insights into she's examining her own life as though it's not her own life and that's the best way I can describe it so there's something there's a passage like a little ghost story here that I just want to read this this is the the central moment of her childhood where everything changes and I'll let

her tell the story because it's so beautifully done. Sometimes you come to a thing you can't write. You've written everything you can think of to stop the story getting there. You know that technically your prose isn't up to it. You say then, very well, at least I know my limitations. So choose simple words, go slowly. But then you are aware that the readers, any kind readers who stayed with you, are bracing themselves for some revelation of sexual abuse. That's the usual horror. Mine is more diffuse. It wrapped a strangling hand around my life and I don't know how or what it was. I am seven. I am in the yard at Broscroft. I am playing near the house near the back

door. Something makes me look up, some shift of the light. My eyes are drawn to a spot beyond the yard, beyond its gate, in the long garden. It is, let us say, some fifty yards away among coarse grass, weeds and bracken. I can't see anything, not exactly see, except the faintest movement, a ripple, a disturbance of the air. I can sense a spiral, a lazy buzzing swirl, like flies, but it is not flies. There is nothing to see, it is not flies. There is nothing to see. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to hear. But its motion, its insolent shift makes my stomach heave. I can sense at the periphery the limit of all my senses, the dimensions of the creature. It is high as a child of two. Its depth is a foot, 15 inches. The air stirs around it invisibly. I am cold and rinsed by nausea. I cannot move. I am shaking as if pinned to the moment.

I cannot wrench my gaze away. I am looking at a space occupied by nothing. It has no edges, occupied by nothing. It has no edges, no mass, no dimension, no shape except the formless. It moves. I beg it, stay, stay away. Within the space of a thought as is inside me and has set up a sick resonance within my bones and in all the cavities of my body. I pluck my eyes away, just like plucking them out of my head. Grace runs from me, runs out of my body. I pluck my eyes away, just like plucking them out of my head. Grace runs from me, runs out of my body like a liquid from a corpse. I move from the spot. My body weighs heavy. My feet have to be hauled up from the ground as if they were sticking in gore. I walk out of the sunlight, through the gas place, into the enclosed dimness of the cold kitchen. I say, glass place into the enclosed dimness of the cold kitchen I say mum I want to come in now can I do some drawing I see myself through her eyes sweat running from me my cheeks fallen in my chest

heaving to control the thick taste of blood and sick that's in my mouth I pray let her not look at me yes she says sweetly her back turned of you can. It is the best yes I have ever heard. It is the best yes I have ever heard in the course of my life. If I'd been sent out again into the secret garden, I think I would have died. I think my heart would have stopped. When I grow up, I laugh at this. I say I'm like Aunt Ada Doom. I saw something nasty in the woodshed. I say that like Aunt Ada, I was never nasty in the woodshed I say that like Aunt Ada I was never the same afterwards I was always Doomy after that

and what was it anyway? I don't know something intangible had come for me to try its luck some formless borderless evil that came to try to make me despair when I'm on my own and I think about it privately then I scarcely laugh at all.

Well Hilary Mantel was a very great writer. She really was. Yeah I felt very sad I'm sure many people did when when they learned of her her death so thanks, John, for reading that. That was very, that's an incredible piece of writing. And very, I think, very opposite to things we're going to discuss later. Oh, you have set the mood like nobody's business, John. Well, let's keep this party going. John, what are we here to talk about? So Henry James, as we have already said, loved Ghostly Tales. His most famous, the novella The Turn of the Screw, is one of his most popular and regularly adapted works.

But it's other uncanny stories that we're focusing on today. As you will see, although there are elements of the Gothic in some, what really interested James was the meeting of the real and the imaginary and the complex psychology of apparently supernatural experience. the imaginary and the complex psychology of apparently supernatural experience. As he wrote in one of his prefaces, a good ghost story must be connected at a hundred points with the common objects of life. He also liked the short story form as his ghostly medium, because unlike the complex webs he spins in his novels, the uncanny tale focuses the reader's attention. Its effect is heightened by being read or told in one sitting. They are, he writes, short and sharp and single, charged more or less with the compactness of anecdote. Anyway, so taking this as our lead, we've each chosen one tale to discuss in detail,

but we're going to start, I think, aren't we, in the usual place, Andy? Yeah, So I think, Tessa, I'd like to ask you first, when you first read or became aware of the work of Henry James? It was at a point where I decided that I should read grown-up serious books. Someone had given me a book token, and I remember going into George's Bookshop, which used to be at the top of Park Street in Bristol, where I grew up. And I bought such a funny miscellany of Penguin modern classics that nobody advised me. And I just chose them for myself. And I can remember it was Richard Hughes, High Wind in Jamaica, Aldous Huxley, Chrome Yellow, which I have to say I haven't revisited. And What Maisie Knew.

And that was a bit of a shock because I couldn't really, I took it home and it had that beautiful Degas painting on the cover of the girl having her red hair brushed. And I remember rather clinging to the cover because, understandably, when I opened the book up, I found it immensely difficult. I really read it from cover to cover without knowing what was happening. Bowen perhaps even as a bit younger I just feel that reading books that you don't understand what's happening at all is a brilliant initiation because they seem to have a message for you that it really is as magnificently complicated and intricate and beautiful and and hard. I'd like just to pick up this thing Tessa because I think this is important for listeners who might find James challenging which a lot of readers do.

I'm so pleased we're talking about the author of the dead and the short fiction because it seems to me like a really excellent introduction to the glories and challenges of reading Henry James. Have you found as you've continued to spend time with James that it's becomes easier to read him or do you have to always moderate your reading speed to to no I think Johnny I think it's a legitimate question because I think James requires you as a reader to operate differently yeah yeah there's no question of this marvellous thing that can happen to you as a reader. As with any author who offers anything worth having, really,

the books teach you how to read the books. It's extraordinarily true with poetry. I had to learn that quite late. You have to read the poet to understand the poetry. I had to learn that quite late. You have to read the poet to understand the poetry. So I now find James relatively easy to read. I feel I've got the confidence to guess, you know, that's often what it's like. It's like skimming along on the sentences, though slowly, if you can skim slowly, and trusting yourself that you have the right hunch in the most obscure sentences of the late style,

trusting yourself that you're getting it. And, you know, I have a confession to make, which is that I belong to a Henry James reading group in London, which was wonderful. And there were the top academic interpreters of Jane's. And often we would get to a sentence. And if you stopped and said, what is that sentence saying? They were all puzzled. There aren't people out there who just think, oh, yes, easy. It's obvious. So you're all making that guess and and just gaining confidence as a reader of him.

And then it turns out suddenly you do know what he's talking about. And he could only be using that language he's using to say these things. There's no other way of getting hold of him except in that opaque, extraordinary, convoluted writing. I agree. I mean, I often feel when I'm reading James, I'm intuiting where I am in the text. I think it's becoming acclimatised to that sense as a reader.

It's very unusual. I mean, I discovered Henry James really through reading Portrait of a Lady and then went straight on to read the three famous later works, Wings of the Dove, Golden Bowl and the Europeans. And going back to what Tess was saying, reading him is kind of like you're holding on to a very fine thread. But if you hold it too tightly, it breaks. You can't focus in and go and as T Tessa said take every sentence and go what does this mean because you actually lose your way and the thing that I noticed about the later books is that even though you might call the wings of the dove um a haunted book they the late books all

feel haunted and ghostly they have this kind of enigmatic, elusive and elusive quality, opaque. They're subtle, they're shrouded. Nothing is ever knowable or certain in them. Nothing ever quite comes into focus. Did I experience that and did I only imagine it? So even when Henry James isn't writing ghost stories. His texts feel haunted. You know, they have the quality of the ghostly. And also, so you read them and you enter into almost this altered state, which is almost psychedelic. It's quite dreamlike almost. And once you stop to pass the specific meaning of something, you're lost, which feels very, you know, very supernatural at times.

And so that was what led me to read, reading a book that I wasn't even aware, edited by Leon Adel called the ghostly tales of Henry James. And so, you know, I kind of read these late books and said, these, you know, these have the quality of hauntings that the text is the ghost almost. And so that was what led me to to seek out the the actual specific ghostly stories john what did you how did you find your reading of these short stories compared with the novels that you've read on the very superficial level quite similar i read maizey and i read golden bolt there's quite a a lot of James I haven't read but this reminds me one why I haven't read it because it does take time and concentration but also how much I how

much I look forward to doing it reading Henry James seems to me like as as close as a metaphor as I can think of for how our brains actually conscious brains actually work we're always throwing stuff out and the stuff that that comes back, that our predictions are kind of met, that's the version of reality we all agree on. Every now and then something comes back that isn't predictable and that's what we really notice. And I think he's the master of doing that. As you say, the meaning is just always out of reach, but you kind of feel you can run with it. just always out of reach, but you kind of feel you can run with it. I found that the stories, obviously, if you read them,

I've read The Altar of the Dead three times now, and I definitely am getting more out of it each time I go back to it. I notice more. I just think James is just remarkable. to what extent is it important that james is writing in the era in which he's writing this is a question to andrew and tessa there's a kind of freudian precognition isn't there yeah so to what extent do we read him with the hindsight of the 20th and 21st century because he seems to me to be articulating things that have yet to be articulated this is henry james himself i think kind of referred to compared freud to spiritualism almost didn't he i think in one piece of writing and so which is interesting because obviously

they're both popular around about the same time that sense of kind of communing with the unseen or the unconscious and it's interesting that his kind of his best ghostly tales are the ones that and i wonder if maybe tessa could answer this they're the ones that come after jekyll and Hyde and the picture of Dorian Gray. And they seem to refer to both of those. I mean, both the Jolly Corner and the Beast in the Jungle, you could kind of compare to Dorian Gray in certain ways. You know, this idea of a man who lives one version of a life and then is shown, you know, the other version of a life. But also you constantly get that sense of doubling through James,

you know, that you kind of have people meeting their doubles and their opposites, which you kind of obviously have in Jekyll and Hyde, you know. There's that incredible scene in Colm Toybin's novel about James the Master, which is an imagined conversation between Henry James and Edmund Gosse about Wilde, Tessa, where they're going, what is this man doing? Why is he being so open in this thing that we would prefer

not to have discussed openly? And you feel that putting one of these James stories alongside Dorian Gray, that actually Dorian Gray is comparatively crude in its thesis. Yeah, yeah. And too crude for the subject matter. You know, it feels a little bit, I'm being mean here, but it feels a bit like a cheap trick.

It feels a little bit, I'm being mean here, but it feels a bit like a cheap trick. Whereas in The Jolly Corner, say, the haunting of the man by the man he might have been, you know, it is such an exploration of the ego and the self and time and contingency. So, Tessa, we've each chosen a story from The Altar of the dead to talk about a little bit of me thinks we should do them in chronological order is that being i just feel as

if the early stories are so different and that there's a kind of growth or a change is that is that okay yeah which means we would go owen wingra. Yeah. And then, yeah. The Altar of the Dead. Yeah. The Beast in the Jungle. Yeah. And then, Tessa, you bring us to a rousing finale with the Jolly Corners. I feel like it. It is.

I think that's a great sequence. I think that's great. In which case, Andrew, you're up. Well, that's a really good way to do it because in a way we're talking about, if we're talking about Owen Wingrave, we're talking about a story that, in a way, compared to the other three that we've chosen, might be considered something of a failure. I mean, Virginia Woolf dismissed it as a story that misses its mark. And I think she's right.

It is, on the other hand, the most, of the four stories we're going to discuss, the most easily comprehended, isn't it? So you could see this in an anthology of ghost stories by other writers and it wouldn't feel out of place. But at the same time, I could see why when Tessa says, I don't like ghost stories, you can see with Owen Wingrave that when you compare it to the others, it feels like there's so much less there. I mean, it's basically, it's a story of a young intellectual, sensitive man,

as James's sort of heroes often are, who objects to the military profession, which is the tradition of his awful family, the tradition of the British Army. He despises the notion of military glory and decides, a bit like Melville's Bartleby, to opt out and have nothing to do with it. And the further the story goes on, I mean, it kind of begins like a comedy of manners. It begins almost like one of, you know, a Jamesian play. It's very much based in dialogue.

And, you know, it's very kind of, it's quite witty and it's quite playful. But the further that it goes on, the kind of darker it gets. You realize that there's a point where it turns out that Owen Wingraves, one of his relatives may have murdered his own son, beaten his son to death. And this house that he kind of has to return to, almost as penance, is filled with kind of these memories of sort of brutishness and a kind of jingoist desensitization to violence and a kind of morbid obsession with it as well

and he's effectively kind of banished this haunted room in which he is the the next i mean i say kind of this is pre kind of Dorian Gray, but kind of the, you know, the next morning he is, he is found dead. Spoilers. Well, how can you talk about this story without that, you know, I know, I know. Yeah. And, but also there's, there's a weird implication in the story and James's story that it's some kind

of victory over the family but you know he is kind of he's he's kind of preserved as an innocent in death you know he's kind of okay so so this is for me you've totally persuaded me this is a great story tell me why isn't a great story i think because it lacks that there's no other way to read it other than the version i've told you i don't think it's kind of there's no there's no other way to read it other than the version I've told you I don't think it's kind of there's no there's no sense that I said earlier the text having this kind of occluded kind of multi-layered quality there was a it's not ambiguous no there's a brilliant quote that I sent Andy later and I thought it'd be quite good to read it. But by all people, Owen Wister, the author of The Virginian.

So in a way, the father of the cowboy novel. And he said, Henry James writes like a painter. He produces a number of superimposed, simultaneous impressions. He would like to put several sentences on top of each other so that you could read them all at once and get all at once the various shadings and complexities instead of consecutively as the mechanical nature of his medium compels. And I think the problem with Owen Wingrave, and perhaps as Andy points out, it's only a problem when we compare it to the stories that come later,

is that it has that mechanical quality. It has that forward mechanical movement. quality. It has that forward mechanical movement. He has a point to make about militarism and about families and about the sort of, you know, the inheritance of kind of violence and guilt. And he makes it. And I would argue that there are maybe other ways to read it, but I'd say there's little more to it than that. I just wanted to ask Tessa, could we just remind listeners why Henry James is writing these stories in this era? Is it he feels artistically driven to do so? For cash.

Certainly for cash. I mean, certainly he made lots of money from publishing them, but he wouldn't have done that if he hadn't also felt their potential for expressiveness for him. There is a quote about Owen Wingrave, though. I can't remember who he says it to. He wrote it for a paper called The Graphic. And he said, I mustn't make it too psychological. They understand that no more than a donkey understands a violin.

Bernard Shaw thought he copped out by killing Wingrave well Shaw thought he was basically it was an essay on he was basically preaching cowardice yeah it was an anti-military I think George Bernard Shaw said why do you preach cowardice

you know and kind of hated it for that reason Owen Wingrave was adapted of course Andrew by Benjamin Britten late in his career and hated it for that reason. Owen Wingrave was adapted, of course, Andrew. By Benjamin Britten. By Benjamin Britten, late in his career. Yeah. He'd obviously done Turn of the Screw. And there's a sequel to it.

And he thought, yeah, I need a follower. Turn of the Screw, right? But how, and we talked about this a bit, but the Turn of the Screw, which is not in um the altar of the dead but everyone who listens to this i feel certain if if they haven't read it the turn of the screw they have a copy of the turn of the screw or they've seen the innocence or they know the beats of the turn of the screw what is it about the turn of the screw that works where owen wingrave doesn't i reread it and at first i was thinking oh you know he

gives you he shows you what he's doing he says oh you're moving between these two worlds you're moving between ghost story and psychological character study you know you'll be you're kind of reading it and you're saying you know are they real ghosts is it a document of a woman losing her mind you know and you think you're sort of slightly removed from the story and kind of you're above everything. But gradually, through the language that James uses and the language that the governess speaks, that movement kind of becomes more inhibited.

The story becomes more claustrophobic. And you suddenly realize that rather than being the removed reader, you are inside the haunted text. You know, it's no longer taking place in Bly Manor, but it's, you know, you realize it's taking place inside, you know, the tangled interiors of the governess's mind. But it's also that you are part of that haunting, you know, you're kind of inside it and you're trapped, you know, it's a really,

it doesn't begin as it begins as quite a, you know, because obviously it begins in the tradition of the 19th century ghost story, you know, gentlemen sitting around telling other ghost stories. One says, Oh, I have this, you know, I have this story this story to tell i have this document and so you have that sense of distance from it that a lot of ghost stories have the one sense of being once removed and then once you're inside the story you're not once removed at all you're it's almost like you're kind of trapped tessa you have we said you're not a fan of the ghost stories? And The Turn of the Screw, talk to me about The Turn of the Screw. So when you read that,

do you think this works despite being a ghost story or it isn't a ghost story at all? I think it's so successful because it's longer. It's really a novella. It's long. And I haven't completely owned it yet that not only do I not like ghost stories, but I don't think James is such a great short story writer as he is novelist. And I think he works better at length. And then there are the Jolly Corn and the Beast in the Jungle. They're pretty amazing. And I and of course, i'm absorbed in their extraordinary terrain but mostly i feel as if his short stories are top heavy they they always begin i actually loved the beginning of owen wingrave which i couldn't remember at all i thought it was a marvelous

opening and then that it was all over in a silly, slightly mechanical way. It feels very like a piece of theatre, doesn't it? It kind of feels like the curtains opening, the door opening. Oh, he's dead! Yeah, whereas Turn of the Screw, which is magnificent, but I have to tell you, I do give it a very rational reading and I do think it's all inside the governess's head and that it's a brilliant piece about Victorian womanhood and the Jane Eyre fantasy and the fantasy that somebody lovely and great is watching you

and understanding you and so on. And that there's a sort of sexual pathology playing out, which the two children, in my very perhaps boring, rational reading, the two children are completely like they don't, they are completely straight. And they are just the victims of the pathology of the grownups who are going quietly and noisily mad all around them. That was magnificent piece of shadow boxing round Owen Wingrave to get to the turn of the screen, so it was good. Also, I would say the thing about Owen Wingrave,

in the light of the stories we are going to go on to discuss, Owen Wingrave does not have the sense of what we will come on to, certainly in The Beast in the Jungle and The Jolly Corner, will come on to, certainly in The Beast in the Jungle and The Jolly Corner, of the individual haunted by themselves. Yeah. Which clearly becomes the major James theme later on. Absolutely, that's the thing.

So, John, which story have you... I'm in The Altar of the Dead, and I think we can... I think this has actually worked out very well this is classic transition it isn't really a ghost story but it is um it is definitely more complex and interesting than owen wingrave i don't think it quite reaches the psychological uh complexity of the the two stories are going on to do. A man who has lost his bride to be is in his middle age, he's been faithful to her memory through his life. Chance meeting on the street, he meets a friend whose wife he hadn't realised had died and he realises

that the wife was the person after Mary Antrim his his his one true love was the woman he loved the best and she's dead and he's now married a slightly vulgar American woman and he's suddenly forced to think about death and that he's dead he finds himself wandering past a Catholic church goes in there and has the idea that he's going to build an altar, a blazing mountain of light to recognise all the people he has loved and who have died. Cutting a very long story quite short, a woman comes and kneels at the same altar with him and they become friends and in that Jamesian way they kind of become lovers but not lovers in the way that we would know.

They become intimate. I'm not going to tell you that you have to read the story to find out what happens. It's beautifully worked. It's psychologically extremely complex, the relationship between him and the woman. She stops coming because of a revelation. It turns out that he is adding candles for all the friends of his are dying. He's at that stage in life where a lot of his friends are dying. But there's one person he can't light a candle for, somebody who's wronged him. And of course, there is a connection because it's a short story, a connection to the woman. And she stops coming until the very end when there is an amazing and beautiful,

one of the really satisfying endings to a story. But I have Tessa's words ringing in my ears about James. It isn't quite what we read Henry James for, the neat, tidy. Well, OK, let me ask you then, John. So this is written three years after Owen Wingrave, which we've said is too close. Right. Owen Wingrave is too we've said is too close, right? Owen Wingrave is too uptight, we feel, perhaps, as a story. What is it about The Altar of the Dead

that is allowing in more Jamesian dark light? I think that there is a relationship at the heart of it and James is never better than when he's judging the kind of the valency of a relationship, particularly between a man and a woman sort of moving forwards, not second guessing what she's thinking, trying to. It's it's so there's I don't think there is that in the same way. It's much more cartoonish, you know, in Wingragrave there's nothing cartoonish about altar of the dead yeah and also i would say tessa like what altar of the dead is setting up the thing john's just talked about is setting up that same dynamic occurs in the beast in the jungle and the jolly corner and the jolly corner although in both of those what we feel, I think, is that the man, while given a great deal of the story's sympathy and imagination,

is an ego in a way that is problematic and that the woman is to some extent overlooked. Yes. Whereas in this story, he hasn't quite got that element isn't developed yet though the setup with the sort of experiencing complex tortured man and and the the ministering sweetness of the woman is recognizable but it hasn't taken on that last kind of shove so what i find very interesting about this is you could almost see these four stories as the same story told over and over again at three or four year intervals yeah because they

do feature very similar elements um in the male female discourse that's going on and the power relationships going on but they're shifting all the time in fact you know wingrave the woman is the baddie if you like it's yes julian who forces owen to to make his show of courage staying in the room overnight where he dies yeah yeah yeah yeah and one thing that's probably worth mentioning is altar of the dead was written a year after the suicide of a woman called constance Fenimore Wilson, who was an unrequited love of James. And there is, I think, a certain amount of guilt bound up in the altar of the dead, but also a certain amount of woe is me kind of narcissism as well, I think. And, I mean, you could argue that George Transom is the first goth as well, couldn't you?

But why would you? But why would you, Andrew? I know what you mean. I find Altar of the Dead slightly overwrought and morbid. And that's another bit of the Jamesian short stories that I... Tessa, it is Halloween. I know! It is Halloween.

I told you I didn't like ghost stories. But do you not feel that Stranston doesn't come out of it well? He does come out as, you know, an overly romantic, gothic narcissist, you know, bathed in the glow of all those candles, you know, and telling himself that it's for other people. I don't know. I'm not quite sure. I really have an open mind as to quite how ironic James is in this story at the expense of the builder of the altar. Let me pick that up. James as an ironist. I don't read James as an ironist.

Not really. You know, you're giving him an out there. I don't think the Ultra of the Dead is ironic. I think he absolutely means it. And it's a strand in James that perhaps I find the most Edwardian and the most alien. And it isn't there. The earnestness of him.

That sort of exaltedness rather than earnestness. It's got a touch of something almost hysterical about it. And it is very much of its period. Something neurasthenic about it. Neurasthenic, yep. And it's just not there in the great big late novels, Something neurasthenic about it. what I'm uneasy with, more in the altar of the dead than any of them, I think, because the other two strange, weird late ones seem to be on such terrain of fascinating psychological depth that they're kind of irresistible.

Neurasthenia. Neurasthenia is, of course, the term that was used, very popular in the Victorian era, for nerves that were overstrung uh um often attributed i think to female victims of anxiety or psychological trauma or a catch-all term i suppose um but nonetheless you know one of the things that's so interesting about james's protagonists certainly the male protagonists they seem able to access neurasthenia neurasthenia as it was understood in that era whether or not they were able to acknowledge it to themselves when i read them i think well that guy needs to relax but obviously the governess

in the turn of the screw is you know neurasthenic as well yeah yeah yeah well look i i would like to talk a bit about the beast in the jungle which for me this is my favorite story by henry james i was absolutely delighted when um andrew said we were going to do the altar of the dead this episode knowing that the beast in the jungle is uh contained within this john is laughing because he he said to me earlier i don't know if we caught this or not he said to me earlier god when i read the beast in general i was thinking oh my goodness this is andy's this is like this is the sort of story andy miller would like right it's totally so the beast in the jungle is the story about a man who in a nutshell dreads has a presentiment that something awful is going to happen to him

he's unable to clarify what it might be even with the help of the now, what we've already identified as the Jamesian female character named here as Mae Bartram. And so John March, the protagonist of his, spends his life waiting for the worst to happen. And again, spoilers, at the end of his life, realises that the worst that happened was that he spent his life waiting for the worst to happen. And that seems to me to be so exquisitely perfect.

And subject to a queer reading, of course, queer in all senses, weird but also repressed homosexual reading, but also seems to me applicable to so much to do with what we fear in our lives what we fear what anxiety this is a story about anxiety it seems to be a very 21st century thing and um i'm going to read a little bit now um because we haven't had read from i'm going to do my best here listeners to try and... You know, nobody said when we started this seven

years ago that we would have to read Henry James aloud in such a way to make it relatable. But I'm going to give it a go. So this is just one paragraph from relatively early in the story. But for me, this... I get goosebumps towards the end of this

paragraph. I've practiced it the end of this paragraph. I've practiced it a couple of times. It seems a brilliant example of how Jamesian prose works, that you appear to be ambling through a relatively relaxed terrain. And then suddenly you realise he's trapped you in a ravine. So I'll read this to you now. And our protagonists are called John Marcher and May Bartram. And this is the he referred to here is John Marcher.

He had thought himself, so long as nobody knew, the most disinterested person in the world, carrying his concentrated burden, his perpetual suspense ever so quietly, holding his tongue about it, giving others no glimpse of it nor of its effect upon his life, asking of them no allowance and only making on his side all those that were asked. He had disturbed nobody with the queerness of having to know a haunted man, though he had had moments of rather special temptation on hearing people say that they were unsettled. If they were as unsettled as he was, he who'd never been settled for an hour in his life, they would know what it meant. Yet it wasn't all the same for him to make them, and he listened to them civilly enough. This was why he had such good, though possibly such rather colourless,

manners. This was why, above all, he could regard himself in a greedy world as decently as in fact perhaps even little sublimely unselfish. Our point is accordingly that he valued this character quite sufficiently to measure his present danger of letting it lapse, against which he promised himself to be much on his guard, he was quite ready nonetheless to be selfish just a little, since surely no more charming occasion for it had come to him. Just a little, in a word, was just as much as Miss Bartram, taking one day with another, would let him. He never would be in the least coercive, and he would keep well before him the lines on which consideration for her, the very highest, ought to proceed.

He would thoroughly establish the heads under which her affairs, her requirements, her peculiarities, he went so far as to give them the latitude of that name, would come into their intercourse. All this naturally was a sign of how much he took the intercourse itself for granted. There was nothing more to be done about that. It simply existed, had sprung into being with her first penetrating question to him in the autumn light there at weather end. The real form of it should have taken on the basis that stood out large was the form of their

marrying. But the devil in this was that the very basis itself put marrying out of the question. His conviction, his apprehension, his obsession, in short, was not a condition he could invite a woman to share. And that consequence of it was precisely what was the matter with him. Something or other lay in wait for him amid the twists and turns of the months and the years, like a crouching beast in the jungle. It signified little whether the crouching beast were destined to slay him or to be slain. The definite point was the inevitable spring of the creature, and the definite lesson from that was that a man of feeling didn't cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger hunt. Such was the image under which he had ended by figuring his life.

Have we ever read better prose than that on this podcast, Sean, in the last seven years? And you have to remember he's dictating that when he's writing at this point in his life. Tessa please explain to the listeners what what you've just said because this is incredible. At a certain point in the 1890s he stops writing by hand I think he's having arthritic problems. Gout he's got gout. Gout is it gout and he employs a secretary first of of all, a young Scottish man. But I think by the time of The Beast in the Jungle, it's Miss Bozenquet or Miss Bozenquet. And she has a Remington typewriter, I think. And she takes his dictation down. and that extraordinary flow and that clauses and sub clauses is coming out verbally. First of all, one's just astonished that anyone could hold that in their mind and say it. But secondly, I actually think if you can imagine teaching yourself that discipline, I think it helps explain the flow. discipline, I think it helps explain the flow. I think, I mean, listening to it read out loud, I often think it's clearer than reading it on the page.

Yes. How interesting. I agree. I agree completely. I agree. I even felt while I was reading that, I was, I had one of those moments thinking, oh, wait, I understand this. As I read it out loud, I understand it. But also the rhetorical shift that happens in that paragraph, I would say, that is a verbal thing. It's a kind of closing in on that image of the beast there. We're sort of, this is why I say we're ambling along. We're sort of, it seems quite laconic and quite circuitous. And then suddenly we're being taken to a point of now stop,

now think, now, you know, that idea when the beast in the jungle, is he going to eat or be eaten? To pick up a metaphor which seems quite rich. Which creates suspense in the story. You know, it kind of telegraphs that that that division early on so you yeah it's a brilliant story andrew and aside about the queer readings of uh james i was talking to um recently talking to dr dick and edwards former bat listed guest who wrote his phd on camp modernism in fiction and had a whole chapter on Henry James

in his PhD that he jettisoned in the end but he tells me that during the James revival in the 50s and 60s the 1950s and 60s particularly the reading of him as a queer author English students referred to Henry James as Hattie Jakes. Did they? Oh that's too too perfect, isn't it? Isn't that fantastic? Isn't that fantastic? I know, Patty James. But do we need to read, I want to ask you, do we need to read The Beast in the Jungle like that?

You know, what is the metaphysical nature of that story? For me, you know, I find that sense of dread, the dread within the Beast in the Jungle is not merely the dread, perhaps, but the blithe attempt of John March, the protagonist, to lighten whatever this thing is that he feels he's carrying around with him and as you said Tessa earlier

we have the Jamesian heroine here acting as what? Acting as beard or or enlightener of you know or martyr is the female character.

She's almost a martyr to the protagonist, right? I mean, she's the one who gets it. She's got it. She knows better than him. And she, from such an early point in the story as well, you know, she knows. Yeah. In a way, can't bear to tell him.

Yeah. I mean, maybe that would have been a hard thing to tell somebody. Exactly. And impossible, especially when he think there's a part of him that thinks that he's waiting for something rare and strange. He thinks he's heroic because he's got this magnificent, dreadful psychic secret. And it's pathetic, deliberately pathetic that it's actually just that nothing will ever happen. And although it's given that Jamesian rhetorical kind of height, there's definitely some pathetic irony with how it really turns out. And Tessa, how does James use pace in these later stories? Because we're now, so we've talked about the beast

and so the beast in jungle is 1903 there's a clear shift between this story and the earlier stories we've been you know you you as a great writer of short stories what is he how does he do this here is he kind of the dramatic beats seem to me to come too late, and yet they work so magnificently because you're, are you with the protagonist? Are you ahead of him? through the difficult period of his writing in the 1890s, he's broken into an extraordinary place where he feels it doesn't even matter if many people follow him. So one feels that the master writer taking his time and the length is good for the stories. But it's funny, you said something earlier about how good it is when your piece that you read out arrives at the beast in the jungle and I was thinking as I read these last

these too late long stories how the music of even a paragraph or two works with such difficult abstraction that we're really having to focus all our head and consciousness on understanding what he's saying and then he delivers an actual animal and an actual jungle or an actual orchestra and an actual conductor or an actual the bits i've got from the jolly coin you know a staircase and a black and white hall floor and he just paces the abstraction with the realist precision the brilliant realization of stuff in his paragraphs with with this grace that redeems it if it was all like the first 10 sentences you read out we would just die of its ungroundedness yeah but also the the appearance of the duanio russo the tiger right the the kind of the yeah the beast in the jungle right there

forces you to go back and reread those first 10 sentences and think we are being paced, we are being led, we are being prepared for the manifestation of this thing that eventually, arguably, John Marcher realises. But even I think the revelation in The Beast in the Jungle is the reader has arrived there beforehand. I think that, I think James wants the reader to there. So you're, so what you're witnessing is

what marches defeat, obtuseness, you know, it's not, it's not as simple as going, the Rome is a revelation. It's not a moment of revelation, is it? It's a moment of defeat, as you say, defeat. defeat yeah the reader is more like me yeah yeah when he says the escape the escape would have been to love her then he would have lived but your realization as a reader is

but he didn't love her yeah if he'd have loved her he'd have loved her yeah yeah you know and that leaves it even more empty you know and there's something pathetic about him grabbing onto that even, you know, because if love had been there, love would have been there. That isn't an intellectual exercise. I find John March's been neither likeable nor relatable. And that's to Henry James' great credit. Last story.

Tessa, so The Beast in the Jungle is 1903, and we should say that James is... He writes up until the end of his life, doesn't he? He writes up until 1916, so he's still active. Actually, he's very... It's a ridiculous thing to say. He's very thrown by the war. And he has two weird late novels on the go,

both of which he abandons, feeling the war makes them irrelevant, ridiculous. So he doesn't write to the very end. But he does, yes. But he's still developing the late style. I mean, we've referred repeatedly to the late style. We should say for listeners, the late style is this incredibly difficult.

I'm not even going to mince my words. It's difficult. It requires you to, like, so the final story in this collection, Julia Bride, which was written in 1908, the same year as The Jolly Corner, I found almost impenetrable. I tried my hardest, Andrew, Tessa, John and Nicky, and I came away thinking I didn't understand that and I'm 54. I really tried.

The Jolly Connor I did not feel that with, which is the story you're going to talk about. So this is the latest of the stories from this collection. What works in this story so fantastically well? I think it's partly because the scene of the story, though it's a long story, is very limited. It's an American man who grew up in a big, lovely old house in New York but left it as a very young man, hasn't been back for 30-odd years

and has presumably done a Jamesian thing and been in Europe and been artistic and subtle and had sensibility and yet actually drawn rent from this property he comes back to an America as James did just the year before he wrote this I think James went back to America it wasn't 33 years but it was a long time and found a a place a world a new economy a new population that was unfathomable to to james and to the character in this story to francer bryden in this story. And he then, he has his house. His house is empty of furniture. It has, I think, I think it's four stories.

I'm not quite sure. And he becomes addicted to going there at the end of every evening. He's just staying in a hotel and walking around in this house. And he begins to think he's pursuing the self that would have been if he stayed and he would have been cruder coarser richer he'd be a billionaire practical wounded

he's got these that we do eventually encounter this is a spoiler but you know otherwise the story doesn't make any sense he encounters this other self in an extraordinary closing couple of pages. And the man has these two fingers shot away. So he's been the victim of violence and violent. And, yeah, it's a brilliant story that no doubt has some sexual story in there, but that just can't limit the implications. It's about contingency. It's about the fact that if you grow up in one place,

you might have your fingers shot off and make a lot of money. And if you grow up in another place, you'll just be reading Henry Jones novels and looking at Tintoretto. And that makes all the difference. I love it. What's that brilliant thing that Clifford Geertz says? What's incredible is the difference difference makes. Yeah.

And I love that. And I think that's part of what this story is about. Tessa, is this a ghost story? And I love that. And I think that's part of what this story is about. Tessa, is this a ghost story? Not. I don't know if it's a ghost story. I'll have to revise my original sense that I don't like ghost stories because I do love this. I think all it I mean, it is quite hyperventilating and perhaps even overwrought. I mean, it is quite hyperventilating and perhaps even overwrought, but it's all earned by this fantastic conceit about self and experience.

And very interestingly, when he does encounter this, his other possible self, he refuses to recognise him. He thinks that could be me and we need the intelligent woman to say, no, no, I liked him too. It could have been you. I quite fancied him too, yeah. Yes, I quite fancied him too, yes. Is that a Jamesian sentence, John? I don't know.

I'm not sure it is, to be honest with you. It certainly is not, Andy. But do you know what I think I really love best and what does it for me? And it's maybe just because I'm a houses in fiction person. It's the house. And it's him wandering around this house with the shutters closed and then the shutters open. And it's the staircases unfolding and the vistas through the room.

And there's this terrifying moment where I have to say, all right, it's a ghost story and it's amazing where there is a door that was left he knows he left open and then suddenly it's closed so how tiny is that yes absolutely how terrifying yeah yeah yeah and he doesn't dare go back to see whether it's open again that's it is it's a marvelous thing actually virginia wolf is really good on um james and i think she understands and loves all the things that tessa loves but also embraces the idea that these are ghost stories and she says of james's characters his characters with their extreme fineness of perception are already half out of the body. And I think that is fantastic, you know, because that in a way brings those two things together.

And it was kind of maybe what I was kind of reaching forward at the start about how there is a way in which these are almost in terms of the, the way the sentences and the way in which James's characters perceive things are almost out of body experiences and yet I so agree with you but look how at the end of every paragraph we have a thing oh yes stuff absolutely and equally at the end the anchor the anchor and at the end of the story we have the physicality of that other self that was or wasn't yeah and and his ravaged sort of gnarled body and his and his hands in front of his face so so in the end oh suddenly

it's come into my head that lovely john dunn line you know we must turn to bodies else a great prince in prison lies. So James knows that bodies are going to be where the story finds its kind of resting place. And with that, we must leave the intricate, uncanny world of James's tales behind. Huge thanks to Andrew for suggesting them, to Tessa for returning from the other side so soon, to Nicky Birch for extracting our ectoplasm of content from the ether, and to Unbound for all the dust and incense. You can download all 172 previous episodes plus follow

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your generosity and to all our patrons huge thanks for enabling us to continue to do what we love and enjoy. I would like to ask Andrew Mayle, is there anything on the weird tales of Henry James that we haven't covered that you would like to say? A final parting comment? I don't think so. I think that was magnificent. Absolutely fantastic. And thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you.

Thank you, Tessa. Thank you, everyone. And Tessa, is there anything you would like to add that we haven't covered? No, I seem to have given up my position as a hater of ghost stories. Oh, well, there we go. All right. My work is done. Oh, my God.

We've conclusively reached the end of Henry James. That's quite an achievement, everybody. We've actually closed it off. John, is there anything? We found the anchor at the end of the sentence. Oh, my goodness. OK. John, anything else to say?

I was just going to say it's Halloween. Sleep tight. And as Henry James definitely wouldn't say, but the night is long and full of terrors. Thanks, everyone. And Tessa and Andrew, thank you so much. Thank you so much. We hope you enjoy reading these, everybody.

This has been one of my favourite Halloween episodes we've ever done. So thanks, Andrew. Thanks, Tessa. Brilliant. Skeleton Dance, played by the Edison Cancer Dance. Andrew, normally we'd ask you to, there'd be a Gene Kelly film, we'd ask you to compare The Altar of the Dead to, but it seems right, given you mentioned Hattie Jakes earlier, that we ask you, Andrew Mayle,

if The Altar of the Dead were a carry-on film, which carry-on film would it be? Oh, OK. I think it has to be Carry On Screaming. In which... In which... In which the middle-aged Dr Orlando Watt, Kenneth Williams, resides in a place resembling a mausoleum with an attractive woman

he is unable to love, Fenella Fielding, and the collection of bodies suspended in a state between the living and the dead. Dr. Watt, unable to find peace, is ultimately reconnected with the rapture of life when he falls into a vat of petrifying liquid with his one true love, the Egyptian mummy, Rubatiti. The story ends with Dr. Watt's face showing the whiteness of death. His final words, frying tonight, are ultimately ambiguous in the classic manner of Lake James.

No further questions, Your Honour. Thanks, everyone. See you next time. Bye.