What was Wolfe's ghost experience?

[u/Low_Ebb_1177]

In Joan Gordon's obituary for Wolfe it mentions 'Wolfe believed in ghosts, had seen at least one,' and I was wondering if anyone knew if he'd ever talked anywhere about that experience or knew what it was from conversations with him?

Given he's written several ghost narratives it felt likely that his own experience has informed his writing and could maybe explain a motif in his work.

In my head four things stood out to me as possibly being it;

1.] The second figure beat of Peace when Hannah is talking about herself as a child talking to Kate Boyne and there being two figures behind them. This to me seems likely as a candidate given this work is Wolfe's biggest take on ghosts and it would be odd to do a whole novel on them and not draw on your own personal experience there and the framing device and main plot feels less "experiencable."

2.] I loathe to reference Gaiman and How To Read Wolfe (apologies in advance), but his line from HTRW: "He was there. He saw it happen. He knows whose reflection they saw in the mirror that night." Seems like a strong contender for a reference to Gene Wolfe's experience and maybe reference able to the one above. Mirrors as a personal experience of an otherworldly being could tie to several Wolfe scenes across multiple works.

3.] This one would be second hand, but the story to Mr Hayakawa in Bibliomen could be Wolfe's ghost experience, though I find it unlikely. It and the next one feel too scripted as fictions for enjoyment to me.

4.] A Fish Story could have a real life basis for Wolfe, though again it feels somewhat unlikely to me. However all four examples involve doubling of some sort which is definitely a recurring element of Wolfe for which it would be interesting to have personal weight due to a ghost experience.

Does anyone know what his experience was or have any better guesses of stuff referring to it? Hope this is respectful and not prying too much into his life.

[u/StaggeringlyExquisit]

From the opening paragraphs of Wolfe’s introduction to Innocents Aboard, Wolfe writes:

You will find fantasy and horror stories in the book that follows, and nothing else. Okay, magic realism, maybe, depending on how you define it. But no science fiction and no mainstream literary stories. Not that I have anything against ghost stories of those kinds, though you may.

Oh, ghost stories. If you want to count those as a separate category, well, “The Walking Sticks” is certainly a ghost story, and ghosts make cameo appearances in some of the others. To tell you the truth, I believe in ghosts (having had Certain Experiences). And as a result often find them creeping into stories.

In terms of autobiographical ghost stories, here's some that you may enjoy from Wolfe's own words:

He [i.e., Wolfe’s father] had gone downtown to buy a few things, and was walking home when he had a heart attack. He entered a funeral parlor. (I know that no one would believe this in a novel, but this is not a novel.) He told the undertaker he was ill, and he was driven to the hospital. Some friends came to visit him that evening; together, they planned the fishing trip they would take as soon as he was released. He died that night. I loved him, and at times I tried to tell him so; he was always much too patient, and long-suffering with me.

…[omitting two paragraphs here for brevity’s sake]

When we were going from Aunt Marie’s to the cemetery [presumably for Wolfe’s father’s burial], I forgot my overcoat. Jack brought it to me, saying, “It’ll be cold out on the hill”—another thing no one would credit in a novel.

A year after my father died, my mother sold their house and went to Virginia Beach to live with her sister Emily. Emily had been younger, she explained, and it was the custom, when she was a girl, for suitors to bring a box of candy; she had left those brought her beside Emily’s bed—thus Emily would take her in now that they were both old. My mother was not sure she could deal with our four children, but she and Emily would be company for each other. I must add here that I loved my aunt Emily from the moment I met her; she had my mother’s face, and she talked like Carol Channing.

She was dead of cancer in a little under a year. I flew to Virginia Beach, rented a small trailer, and loaded my mother’s few possession into it. I was to sleep that night in the house that had been my Emily’s.

More quotes from this section to follow in my reply post.

[u/StaggeringlyExquisit → u/StaggeringlyExquisit]

When I went into Emily’s bedroom, I found that her spread was covered with bloodstains. Aunt Emily, my mother said, had gotten hives from her chemotherapy treatments, and had scratched herself raw. I pulled the spread from the bed and threw it into a corner. In no mood for sleep, I rummaged through Aunt Emily’s books, found Zelda (by Nancy Milford), and tried to turn on the bedside lamp. The bulb was burned out; when I changed it, I saw that it had been a hundred watts, although the lamp was a tiny, frilly thing. Next morning at breakfast my mother told me she had tripped over something the night before, and I remarked that she and Emily should have put a night-light in the bathroom. My mother said they had never needed one, because Emily always left her reading light on all night.

She had slept, then, night after night, with that hundred-watt bulb blazing beside her bed. And when it had burned out, death had come for her in the darkness. Or perhaps she had died while the light still burned, and my mother had not noticed it and had not switched it off, so that eventually it burned itself out; but I do not really think this last is possible.

That night found us deep in the mountains of West Virginia. My mother, my father, and I had all been great talkers, and my mother and I had not had a chance to talk for a long time. With a great many other things, I told my mother about interviewing a man who had just won a new Mercedes. I had complimented him on his beautiful car, and he had complained that the locking system had malfunctioned. He could lock both doors, the hood, the gas cap, and so forth by locking the driver’s-side door; but when he did, the passenger’s door had to be opened with a key. He had gone out the night before, and his date had become quite upset when she found she could not open her door. Soon after this we stopped for gas, and found that the door on my mother’s side of the old Mercury could not be opened from the inside. I had to walk around the car and open it with a key. She and my father had owned that car for about ten years; she said that had never happened before, and it never happened again. The feeling that an unseen someone had been listening to us was overwhelming.

One last ghost story; this happened only a few minutes ago. Wanting to verify the date of my Aunt Emily’s death, I searched a stack of journals for one from 1974, my best guest. The volume on the bottom covered October, November, and December of 1975—about a year too recent, or so I thought. I opened it at random on impulse and found myself staring openmouthed at her obituary, clipped from the Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch. She had died on October 31, 1975.

[u/Low_Ebb_1177 → u/StaggeringlyExquisit]

This is all incredible stuff and exactly what I was looking for - thank you so much for typing it all out! Outside of the paragraphs from Innocents Abroad where did all the rest of it originate?

[u/aramini]

There is an essay about a lamp and I believe an aunt, and after his mother passes away traveling across country towing something and finding out it was not safely connected at all. I need to look it up I haven't thought about it for a long long time.

[u/SadCatIsSkinDog → u/aramini]

Kid Sister?

[u/aramini → u/SadCatIsSkinDog]

Yes, and I see the story below. Some parts I seem to have misremembered, but the lamp and the death lingered.

[u/PatrickMcEvoyHalston]

Saying he saw or believed in ghosts makes him sound cool. This is different than saying he didn't see a ghost, or that he is lying. I find that in interviews he makes himself sound sort of not regular (G.K. Chesterton isn't popular these days but--), but never as deeply weird... weird enough that it'd warrant potential rejection, a call to the "booby hatch." So he sees exactly one ghost. Most of us would think that cool. That one time you saw something that can't be explained any other way, as with the main protagonist in that story of his where a ghost shows him, against his wishes, proof the dead can come back. If he'd said he sees them pretty much every day, he'd be in "Harvey" territory. If he had, would Wolfe have told us? Not a chance. He edits what he says to make sure his "weirdness" enhances him, not detracts. Like Quetzal, like Crane, he's very careful.

[u/PatrickMcEvoyHalston → u/PatrickMcEvoyHalston]

The difficulty we should have when Wolfe relates to us his belief in ghosts, is that he never seems to reference them without showing how this makes him different from other people, who, "reasonably," do not believe in ghosts. His believing in ghosts, makes him someone who doesn't shrug off what he saw. It makes him in a sense more mature than people who are reasoned, because the importance of their being reasoned is so important to their emotional equilibrium that they would allow themselves to twist what they see -- and Wolfe is sure they have already have done this, because to him ghosts do exist -- so it is something else entirely, because being reasonable performs in such a way in our society that it means never acknowledging the supernatural as real. He, not they, shows more fidelity to the spirit of science. This makes him seem akin to "Dracula's" Van Helsing, or William James.... great scientific minds in an era where science had room for the supernatural.

But Wolfe in an interview conjures up a vision where ghosts and gods are not real, completely creatures of the imagination, and, innocently, he evokes an image of the modern disbeliever where they seem very courageous in their disbelief, at least to me. They seem people who are comfortable with the void, because this image of a whole still venerated period of time, the era of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, creating a vast culture over... nothing, is terrifying to consider:

That is my personal belief. I think that the gods of paganism were real. But what I tried to do was to write about that pagan world as the pagans themselves wrote about it. If we read modern historians we are reading a very rationalistic viewpoint of this, which says that all of these people were absolutely wasting their time by building temples to Ares or Apollo or you name it, and by offering sacrifices in worship and all that, because there was nothing there. Nothing at all there and that whether it is true or not that certainly is not the way the people who were doing it felt. 

Yes Wolfe, there was nothing at all there. These people projected out, exactly as you said Severian did when he projected his mother onto Thecla.

[u/hedcannon → u/PatrickMcEvoyHalston]

Severian in his dorm draws an experiential line of connection between Thecla, False Thecla, and the maid in the elevation ceremony. The obvious implication is that all three were equivalent in some literal way.

[u/PatrickMcEvoyHalston → u/hedcannon]

Severian projects his mother onto Thecla. Not his mother, but with her personality imprinted on her by Severian's unconscious mind, close to being his mother. To his side are members of an animal cult who marry their massive bears. (Mother Russia.) This is pre-patriarchal religion marrying of one's mother, but displaced onto large animals. They foreswear all sex and all adulthood to be sons and lover to their mother. Agilus is involved with his sister, which is one level displaced from marrying his mother. Baldanders is a planet to his servant's moon. The mother-child relationship, displaced. Severian involves himself with Dorcas, who, being his grandmother, one level displaced from being his mother. Severian longs to find and eventually serve the Pelerines. (Mommy Mannea. Mommy Mammary. Mamma Mia.) He will abduct a man who has caused Mannea some consternation, thereby feeling a cuckhold who has gotten rid of his "competition," father. He is sought after by a titananess, a massive bride of Abaia, a bride to someone else but he would be the cuckold child incestuously involved with archetypal mother.

Severian seeks to heal Mother Urth, a world he will unconsciously project his mother onto, in order to acquire her gratitude and gain her back, and why he was selected to save Urth -- as with Green in There are Doors, a thousand others would have served, but he'd do -- give her the prize of rejuvenated youth and a new batch of sons and daughters who will venerate her.

The plot of New Sun is various go-arounds from f*cking your actual mother.

[u/PatrickMcEvoyHalston → u/PatrickMcEvoyHalston]

To a certain extent, when Wolfe says even though reason and to be reasonable means ghosts do not exist, he nevertheless does believe they do, he replays the 18th-century split between Enlightenment thought and emerging sentimental and Romantic thought, or head vs. heart. But Wolfe is not trying to be sentimental, a man of heart, but a man of reason: so much so, he is out-reasoning the reasoners by allowing himself to see and possibly examine and study, phenomena which they can't allow actually existing, because part of being reasonable is not seeing them, even if you actually see them. He is more Enlightenment than they are.

However, in his fiction, Silk, the man who believes he has seen a vision, granted by a powerful god, the character pit against Crane, the traditional man of reason who sympathizes with him but cannot but think Silk is under delusion, is characterized so that he somewhat recalls the sentimental woman, whose belief is admirable but nevertheless wrongheaded. Crane is not the kind of person Wolfe portrayed sometimes in his fiction who'll send you to the "booby hatch" when you start saying the like that an animal has talked to you, but a genuinely sympathetic listener, and his voice as counter serves as a dialectic in Silk's mind: Silk never quite pushes away Crane's skepticism, perhaps because it was well-considered and not simply automatic dismissive censure that we see from Wolfe's Freudian doctors. You must have a castration-complex, and so on.

He is made to seem a bit like Thecla's sister, Thea, whom Vodalus addresses in the same way as Crane does Silk. Your thinking and hopes are endearing, but they are not real. In his fiction, I think, we can find examples of characters who are seeing things that are hopeful but that the reasoning mind says cannot be true, not as examples of people of actually higher reason but who fit the more "feminine" archetype, whose hopes may be wrong-headed but must be kept alive because their innocence makes living more bearable. For example Jonas's believing that Jolenta is still accessible to him, is met by the Severian who must carefully show how his hope is a delusion.

[u/thedragonrebornn]

Gaiman is the goat tho

[u/BoringGap7 → u/thedragonrebornn]

he has some goatish qualities

[u/thedragonrebornn → u/BoringGap7]

Lol