Caldecott, Andrew. Not Exactly Ghosts: Collected Weird Stories.
Introduction by Stefan Dziemianowicz. Ashcroft, BC: Ash-Tree Press, 2002.
269 p.
In all honesty, Andrew Caldecott's Not Exactly Ghosts is more interesting
for its mere existence than for its actual contents. We are here presented
with the collected horror tales (the complete contents of two short story
collections) by a highly unusual man—Andrew Caldecott (1884-1951), a high-ranking
member of the British colonial service. The great majority of Caldecott’s
career was spent in the Malay peninsula, where he remained from 1907 to
1935; thereafter he served in Hong Kong (1935-37) and Ceylon (1937-44).
Along the way he received several knighthoods, and, as Stefan Dziemianowicz
remarks in his richly detailed introduction, he is perhaps the only author
of weird tales to receive a full page in the prestigious Dictionary of
National Biography and a lengthy obituary in the New York Times.
Those weird tales were a product of Caldecott’s retirement; in quick succession
he published Not Exactly Ghosts (1947) and Fires Burn Blue (1948),
although it is an open question whether the twenty-five tales in these two
volumes were actually written just prior to publication or years earlier.
Purely internal evidence—such as the setting of some stories in the 1920s
and 1930s—might point to earlier composition, but this is mere conjecture.
So what does one make of Andrew Caldecott as a weird writer? Competence,
ingenuity, and wholesome geniality are the descriptives that spring to mind.
I find no single story in this volume that stands out over the others; all
are ably written, cleverly conceived, and satisfyingly executed. If Caldecott
lacks the hypertrophied prose of Poe or Lovecraft, the esoteric mysticism
of Blackwood, or the shivering sense of the unholy that typifies Machen, he
at least reveals a vigorous pleasure in writing that makes him representative
of the best kind of amateur storyteller.
It would be misleading to consider Caldecott merely another in the long
line of M. R. James disciples, even though James is mentioned by name (along
with John Metcalfe) in some of the stories. The great majority of his tales
are indeed “ghost stories” in the narrow sense of the term, and many of these
embody a relatively conventional supernatural-revenge motif that is one of
the sad limitations of the ghost story as an art form. But on occasion Caldecott
abandons the ghost for more bizarre horrors. In particular, he is able to
use his colonial experience in the remoter provinces of Asia to good effect
both for convincing background and for some actual legendry. Only a civil
servant could have depicted the daily peregrinations of a “Government House
calling-book”:
Punctually every morning at nine o’clock it was deposited
there, and as punctually every evening at half-past six removed, by two scarlet-hatted,
scarlet-sashed peons. This function they performed with such evident satisfaction
to their personal vanity as to make of it almost a ceremony. Indeed the aide-de-camp
referred to it in his Routine Orders as “the Procession of the Book.”
Let it not be assumed, however, that Caldecott exhibits even the remotest
tinge of the racism and classism so typical of the British colonial service
of the great days of the Empire: he was, in fact, a notably progressive
figure, and no doubt earned his honours precisely because of the respect
he accorded to the natives in his charge.
Many of Caldecott’s stories are filled with verse—not merely a couplet or
a quatrain, but several lengthy poems. The curious thing is that most of these
poems are presented precisely in order to be made fun of; it appears that
Caldecott enjoyed the task of writing bad poetry. As Stefan Dziemianowicz
notes, “At least one story, ‘Autoepitaphy,’ seems to have been conceived for
no other purpose than to showcase his skill in composing amusing doggerel.”
We are certainly at the farthest remove from Ann Radcliffe, who was apparently
under the impression that the poetry she liberally scattered through her Gothic
novels was actually good.
There does not seem to be any advantage in analysing any single story of
Caldecott’s, or even the whole of them as a lot. They are set either in England
or in the colonies with which Caldecott was familiar; ghosts abound, but sometimes
there exist other kinds of supernatural entities, such as the huge spiders
in “Grey Brothers,” which is a kind of poor man’s “Heart of Darkness” in
its study of an Englishman who has retreated to the depths of the jungle to
cultivate the large arachnids that dwell there. Music is featured in a number
of tales, in such a way as to reveal Caldecott as sensitive and knowledgeable
in the art, and a few stories (especially in Fires Burn Blue) seem
to peter out into confusion and inconsequence, as if Caldecott had no idea
where he was going with the narrative and merely brought it to a close out
of weariness. But these are rare instances, and on the whole Not Exactly
Ghosts can afford any devotee of the weird a certain mild satisfaction
in well-crafted and well-conceived tales written in pure if unadventurous
English. At the very least, they will allow all but diehard collectors to
forego spending hard-earned cash searching out the original editions of
what must be two fabulously rare volumes.
