The Turn of Several Screws

I see Marcel Proost pulled over on the side of Buckshot Creek Road kneeling down working on his Harley. It rained a bit over the past few days, so the road is pretty muddy.

“Got a problem, Marcel?” I say, although truth to tell, I wouldn’t know what to do to fix a forty year-old chopper.

“Naw, just tightening the cap on the carb. Only takes a couple turns of the screw here. Just call me Peter Quint.”

“You what?”

“Peter Quint, John. Ain’t you never read ‘The Turn of the Screw’ by Henry James?”

“Oh, yeah. I started it several times, but never got very far.”

“Well, you better go home right now and give it a good read, John. It’s a classic. And the chamber opera that Benjamin Britten made of it ain’t bad either, clunky libretto aside.”

“Ah. I remember now. It’s a gothic ghost story. A young woman goes to a remote English estate to care for two small children and finds that they are possessed by the malevolent spirits of an adult couple who had previously lived there.”

“Well, yes. That’s one way of describing it. You see, it’s a very subtle piece of writing. Could be that they are ghosts—this very shady and malignant Peter Quint, for instance. Dude was the valet of the owner of the place and then he died. But not before he had developed a strong and presumably perverse control over that young boy there, name of Miles.”

“How do you know it was perverse? Was this fellow Peter Quint some kind of pedophile, Marcel?”

“Maybe. Maybe not, John. But the boy don’t act natural all the time, that’s for sure. He has, well I guess you’d call it, ‘episodes,’ some kind of unhappy outta-body experiences during which he’s under the control of this here fella Peter Quint.”

“Those Victorians could be pretty hung up,” I say.

“ Yessir. When Miles is around the governess (who narrates the story) he’s just a charming little fellow, sweet and smiling and spouting that upper class twitty Brit language. But then, particularly at night, she finds him acting like he’s possessed—same with his little sister. Miles, now, he’s been thrown out of his public school—which as you know, John, in England means the opposite, in other words a “private” school. He’s said something unacceptably bad, not just naughty but, shall we say, ah…emphatically unacceptable, whatever it is.”

“You can imagine anything?”

“Henry James never tells us what Miles has done or what he’s said that’s so bad. That’s the ingenious—and I might say perverse—appeal of the story. He lets you fill in the blanks, so to speak.”

“And what about the little girl, the boy’s sister?”

“Ah, she’s got her own evil pursuer, the eerie, controlling shade of her former mistress.”

“Bad news, I guess, for both of these poor children.”

“Well, John, that’s only if you’re an Apparitionist.”

“An Abolitionist? “

“No, an Apparitionist, John. You see, people who read ‘The Turn of the Screw’ fall into one of two categories, depending on how they interpret the events. You got yer Apparitionists, those who read it as a true ghost story and imagine these poor children as indeed possessed by the evil ghosts of those kinky dead adults. And then you got yer Non-apparitionists. Those are the readers who interpret the story as nothing more than a long hysterical fantasy of the woman narrator.”

“But little Miles dies in this woman’s arms at the end, doesn’t he? Is that just her fantasy, too?”

“Probably not. But it could be that a Non-apparitionist would tell you that the poor deluded woman had smothered him to death in an attempt to protect him from what she imagines is the ghost’s attempt to grab him and do him serious harm. You of course know Edmund Wilson, don’t you John?”

“Ed, the guy who drives the Amerigas truck?”

“No, the great American literary critic. Doncha know yer stuff, John? ‘Patriotic Gore’ or ‘To the Finland Station?’ Wilson wrote a lot about this story. He thinks that James meant it all as a purely imagined fantasy of a very disturbed woman. An emotional cannibal, as another critic put it.”

“Sounds a little sexist to me, Marcel.”

“Yeah, I can agree. I don’t go with him anyway. Takes the spookiness out of it for me. But you know, Wilson was writing at the height of the psychoanalytical boom in literary theory. Freud’s influence on literary interpretation was everywhere. It’s no surprise Wilson would read it as a twisted sexual fantasy and not as a good old ghost story.”

“So Marcel,” I say, “the last time I was by your place I saw only ‘Biker World” magazine, ‘Culture Warrior’ by Bill O’Reilly and ‘The Mushroom Hunter’s Bible’ on your kitchen table. Now you’re talking about Henry James, Freud and Edmund Wilson. I want to know, Marcel, what’s going on? You havin’ a midlife crisis or what?”

“Just self education, John. I’m home-schooling myself. Getting ready for the Palin presidency when there won’t be any more public education. Furthermore, I’m taking over the literary column for the Independent Coast Observer. Next week I’m writing another review. Just haven’t decided which best seller to do. It’ll either be ‘The Death of Virgil” or ‘Going Rogue.’”

Marcel gives another turn to the carburetor screw and kicks his old Harley a few times. It coughs and jolts to a horrifically loud start. He grins that bad-teeth grin, gives me a wave and heads down the muddy road.