“How Love Came to Professor Guildea” (1897)

David G. Hartwell, editor of The Dark Descent, calls this long story by Robert Hichens a masterpiece, comparing it with “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James, “Carmilla” by Sheridan Le Fanu, and “The Beckoning Fair One” by Oliver Onions. Hichens is working with a ghost or apparition that shades toward demonic possession (Le Fanu’s “The Familiar” might have been the better comparison, or Algernon Blackwood’s “The Listener,” or the movie Paranormal Activity). It’s not a bad conceit but the story is also at pains in a 19th-century kind of way to oppose a spiritual orientation and a rational. Thus the two main characters are a priest, Father Murchison, and a scientist, Professor Guildea. They have an interesting if somewhat mechanically devised friendship. Both are middle-aged and celibate, connected by intellectual interests but even more by mutual temperaments. The connection is cerebral but also meeting the emotional needs of both as they chew things over. Father Murchison self-consciously emphasizes the importance of love, which Professor Guildea rejects. He doesn’t deny its utility for others but it’s not for him. In this story, however, such decisions are not always up to us. A ghost falls in love with him, in fact, and wants to be with him forever. I’m not sure “falls in love” is the way to put it. This presence, which he first sees, or senses, on a park bench across the street from his place, is suddenly with him always and he can’t escape it by traveling either. He doesn’t like it. The thing does not care. It likes him, or something. There’s some nice ambiguity between a sense that he’s overreacting, on the one hand, that it’s all in his head, he’s too isolated in his work, he should relax and open up to others more. Father Murchison seems to think so. On the other hand, there’s the horror of when no doesn’t mean no. It remains open whether this is indeed Father Murchison’s love or something more remorseless—I’m inclined to the latter, of course, like Hartwell. I’m not entirely sold on everything this story is pitching but at the very least it’s a great contribution to the “familiar” style of haunting, the predatory force that randomly attaches and won’t let go. In the end, the priest sees it himself: “Upon the bench something was sitting, huddled together very strangely.”

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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