Fiction: The Turn of the Screw has inspired a number of adaptations, now the novelist and biographer AN Wilson has bravely tried his hand at a contemporary version, writes John Banville.
Unlike many writers, Henry James was perfectly happy, indeed eager, to discuss his own work, in conversation, in letters, and particularly in the prefaces to the famous New York Edition of his novels that was published late in his life. He made many comments on the tale, long short story, novella - what you will - The Turn of the Screw, about a pair of orphans, a little boy and girl, Miles and Flora, who are, or are presented as being, possessed respectively by the ghosts of their uncle's former valet, Quint, and their former governess and Quint's mistress, Miss Jessel. Most of James's comments on the piece are apologetic. In a letter to HG Wells, he described the story as "a pot-boiler and a jeu d'esprit", to another correspondent it was "a very mechanical matter . . . a shameless pot-boiler", while in the New York Edition preface it was an "irresponsible little fiction".
He also described it, more revealingly, as a "trap for the unwary". Whatever it is, pot-boiler or cleverly baited trap, or both, The Turn of the Screw has continued to fascinate and unsettle readers and critics alike since its first publication as a serial in Collier's Weekly early in 1898, and later that year in a volume called The Two Magics, along with another, long-since-forgotten story.
The germ of the tale came in an anecdote told to James by, of all people, the Archbishop of Canterbury, EW Benson, "the mere vague, undetailed, faint sketch of it", as James wrote in a notebook entry afterwards. Benson in turn had been told the story by an unnamed lady; it was, the notebook entry went on, an account of "young children (indefinite number and age) left to the care of servants in an old country-house, through the death, presumably, of parents. The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children: the children are bad, full of evil, to a sinister degree". The servants die, but return to haunt the children, and to try to get them to "destroy themselves, lose themselves, by responding, by getting into their power". The fragment was, James wrote, "obscure and imperfect", but had "a suggestion of strangely gruesome effect in it".
The tale that James built out of this fragment is narrated by the unnamed successor to Miss Jessel. She comes to Bly, a vast old house in the country, as governess to Miles and Flora at the request of their playboy uncle who inherited the poor mites after the inconvenient and simultaneous deaths of their parents. The main condition of her having the post is that she is never, ever, to communicate with the children's uncle, but must take over Miles and Flora and be wholly responsible for their education and welfare - when James wrote of the "mechanical" aspect of the story he was surely thinking of this contrivance, the one, serious weakness in the piece. At Bly the governess enters into a deadly battle for the souls of the children with the ghosts of Quint and Miss Jessel.
The puzzle, the "trap", at the heart of the tale is whether the ghosts are "real", or merely the fevered imaginings of the young woman who tells the story, a manifestation of her repressed sexual obsessions and her infatuation with the children's uncle. Certainly the atmosphere of the tale is humidly dark. When James's young friend, the novelist Hugh Walpole, asked him how much evil he was to read into the story, James jovially replied: "As much as you can, dear boy, as much as you can!"
The Turn of the Screw has inspired a number of adaptations, notably an operatic masterpiece by Benjamin Britten, and a fine and genuinely frightening film by Jack Clayton, The Innocents. Now the novelist and biographer AN Wilson has bravely tried his hand at a contemporary version. Whether his artistry is on a level with his bravery is open to question. Like its inspiration, A Jealous Ghost is a jeu d'esprit. It is ingenious, entertaining, not at all frightening - but then, the original is not exactly terrifying either - and makes an impish riposte to James's coy portentousness and frequent orotundity of style.
Despite James's poor opinion of it, The Turn of the Screw has all the rich ambiguity of his mature fiction. Its theme is one to which he returned again and again, namely, the wickedness that human beings wreak when they seek possession over others. Wilson's story is a sort of black joke built upon the framework James provided for him. His third-person protagonist is young Sallie Declan, who has come from the American Midwest to London on a scholarship to do a PhD on The Turn of the Screw, or Turn, as she prefers to call it. Isolated and lonely, she follows a friend's suggestion to take a break from her studies and earn some money by working as a child-minder. She answers an advertisement in The Lady and is interviewed by the handsome Charles Masters, a busy lawyer with two motherless children, a little girl and boy, sequestered in a big old house in the country and in need of someone to look after them . . .
Sallie is an impressionable girl; not only is she struck by the echoes from Turn, but she immediately falls in love with Charles Masters, and believes that he is likewise enamoured of her - in fact, she convinces herself he is asking her not only to take care of his children, but to marry him. She readily accepts the post, and while Masters goes off to prosecute a case in Hong Kong, Sallie journeys down to Staverton to take charge of little Michael and Frances, or Miles and Flora, as she frequently miscalls them.
From early on we have been given hints that all is not well with Sallie Declan. There is the matter of little Jakie Kenner and what happened to him in the bath when Sallie was babysitting him back in Muncie, Indiana. There is Kimberly Markevich, whom Sallie struck with an iron one day on campus in Carver, Ohio. Charges had not been brought in either case, and Sallie continues to be indignant that anyone should suggest that Jakie's striking his head on the faucet was anything other than an accident, or that Kimberly did not richly deserve a good whack across her smug face.
Sallie finds life at Staverton difficult. The English and their ways baffle her - Wilson has some restrained fun with her helplessness before colloquialisms, for instance her bafflement as to the identity of "Buggins", whose turn it frequently is - and the children, though seemingly compliant, prove altogether too much for her. When she sees their departed mother loitering in the garden, an apparition which proves all too real, she believes herself to be the victim of yet another turn of the screw. The denouement, unsurprisingly, is bloody, and Sallie ends up in the place she had always dreaded: "Now the room was so white. Sky white, tiles white. No colour, no blood, white as terror. You sat for eternity in this place."
The first question to ask of any book is, did this have to be written? Wilson has told his story skilfully and even with a certain Jamesian cunning, but the reader expecting here an engagement with The Turn of the Screw on the level of Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys's account of the first Mrs Rochester, or Foe, JM Coetzee's response to Robinson Crusoe, will be disappointed. A Jealous Ghost will pass an hour or two entertainingly enough, which is perhaps as much as AN Wilson intended. One hopes his pot will get a merry boiling.
John Banville's new novel, The Sea, will be published later this year by Picador
A Jealous Ghost. By AN Wilson, Hutchinson, 186pp. £12.99