The Memoirs of a Ghost, by G. W. Stonier (1947)

One of the pleasures of being back in college after almost forty years is having access to a good university library. I first developed my love of neglected books from wandering through the stacks of Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington in Seattle, not looking for anything in particular, pulling down whatever seemed interesting. As I wrote in a piece for The Reader back in 2007, “It was as if I’d been stuck in prison for years and one someone had tapped me on the shoulder and whispered, ‘Look: the gates are open.'”

So I am back now to this long-lost habit. It’s a smaller library now, not quite so rich in its holdings, and clearly struggling as the digital divide saws its way through institutions such as this. But a sprinkling of orphans can still be found among the authorised editions and critical companions. One of the first to catch my eye was the elegant spine and lovely title of The Shadow Across the Page by G. W. Stonier — both title and author new to me. It was the book next to it I took home that day, however: The Memoirs of a Ghost.

“It seems a long while ago,” the book opens. “When the bombs came — a stick of them — there wasn’t much one could do.” This caught my interest immediately because I am now working on a dissertation about the utterly forgotten novelist, G. E. (Gertrude Eileen) Trevelyan, who herself became a victim of the Blitz when her flat in Kensington was hit in late 1940. Like Stonier’s narrator, she became a ghost — but has had no one to tell her story.

Despite its title, The Memoirs of a Ghost is not really a ghost story — though Stonier did write a few of those in his time. In his Guide to Supernatural Fiction, E. F. Bleiler found the book “unclear in intention. It is possible that the author is simply discussing problems of readjustment during and after the war.” I think Mark Valentine got it right in his Wormwoodiana article on the book: “Stonier’s book belongs in the sphere of modernist literature. The restless, allusive, splintered response to the city has qualities in common with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, for example, or Rhapsody on a Windy Night, with its nocturnal exploration of memory “through the spaces of the dark.”

In reality, The Memoirs of a Ghost is far more frightening than any ghost story I’ve ever read. This is scary at a visceral, existential level. This is about the horror of spending an eternity with yourself.

At first, death is unexpected but not quite unwelcome. There’s a certain novelty to the experience: “Death, death no doubt came quickly, crashing, crashing in an instant. Then again, with a flickering consciousness, as of tides that whip and recede, I rose to the outlines of darkness.” After crawling out from under the rubble, standing for a few moments watching the ruins alongside the firemen, then running to hide in the shadows of a nearby church as he realizes they cannot see him, he discovers he’s come into possession of a new talent: he can fly. He floats up above the city, seeing all its aspects of life, observing now with his invisible camera eye.

Soon, novelty is replaced by disorientation. People come and go, scenes come and go, one slipping into the other with no coherent relationship. It’s very much like a dream — but a relentless, unending dream. Writing dreams is not easy. The lack of coherence can leave reader and writer with the same sense of disorientation as Stonier’s narrator experiences: the sense of being adrift in a sea (or soup) of words. It’s a sense Stonier doesn’t always successfully avoid. There are moments when I found myself thinking, “But you could have written a dozen different things here and it wouldn’t have mattered — I’d still feel adrift.”

Whether by design or accident, however, a shape does emerge from these mists. The narrator finds himself going back to the moment of his death, searching for clues:

Again I am carrying the tea-tray across the room, the bomb is coming nearer, but this time with such a leisurely sweep and beauty that I have time to take note of every article on the tray, to observe the Eastern fowl, a sort of pheasant, on the saucer, to notice the little belch of steam which my movement across the room and abrupt halt have jerked out of the spout. The milk bottle has a chip at the base — if I’m not careful it will tip over…. I am not I, the room isn’t quite real, the bomb wailing melodiously in descent will never strike…. I don’t know whether I’m dreaming or not. Perhaps this is reality and all the rest invention. I don’t know…. Misere!

No matter how hard he tries to make sense of what has happened, it’s like working with dry sand. Nothing retains any form. Nothing lasts from one moment to the next:

Even as it was, my elaborate reconstructions of the daytime unravelled, crumbled away at night in terrors that reduced everything to a rubble of crushed identities, chaotic fragments, which in the morning might take hours to reinstate. The struggle between chaos and order — all chaos, any order — was unremitting

“I must try to define my predicament,” he tells himself. But eternity is just too big to fathom: it “staggers the mind so that one can’t take it in.” “Habit,” he concludes at one point, restricts “imagination to the experience of a lifetime.”

Stonier’s hell isn’t other people: it’s ourselves and nobody but ourselves.

What a bloody grim prospect.

Memoirs of a Ghost, by G. W. Stonier
London: Grey Walls Press, Ltd., 1947