“The Turn of the Screw” and “The Innocents”

The explicit is rarely frightening. Disgusting, perhaps, nauseating even, but not really frightening, as such. The best horror stories imply more than they tell. And this made Henry James – who had perfected the art of saying nothing and yet implying everything – ideal for the genre. While it is his contemporary and namesake M. R. James who is more closely associated with the form of the ghost story, Henry James, more closely associated with what are generally reckoned to be more worthy literary forms, also excelled. Indeed, with The Turn of the Screw, he wrote what is perhaps the finest single instance of the genre.

I remember one night reading the whole thing in one sitting. It took a few hours – it’s some 120 pages or so of often quite tortuous prose – but I don’t think any other work of fiction I have encountered has evoked so powerful a sense of supernatural terror. There is a sense of evil lurking about the work.

And yet, nothing is explicitly said. James knew exactly how to drop the subtlest of hints at just the right time, give it just the right weight, and allow the reader’s mind to do all the work. Famously, we aren’t even sure whether the ghosts actually exist.

As with many ghost stories, the story itself is told within another story, and is a first person narration, purporting to be true. Obviously, we may judge that it isn’t: good ghost stories often allow us a get-out clause of some nature. The story may not be true – or, at least, may not be quite what we are told – either because the narrator, an inexperienced young governess, is deliberately lying, or, more probably, because she herself is mentally unbalanced. But of course, the possibility exists that she is neither, and what she tells us is true, and the ghosts really do exist. There is little point in arguing over this point: the very uncertainty concerning how much of this, if any, can be taken at face value contributes to the horror of the thing. For this is horror, there is an immense evil lurking in these pages: the uncertainty lies not in the existence of the evil, but where that evil is coming from.

The story seems to be almost a sort of parody of Jane Eyre. A young, inexperienced governess is sent to a mysterious and rather creepy house. In Jane Eyre, Jane soon meets the master of the house, the domineering male presence of Mr Rochester; falls in love with him, but stands up for her own sense of dignity and worth; and, by the end, once barriers are eventually swept away and they can meet on an equal footing, reader, she marries him. In The Turn of the Screw, the governess also falls in love with the master of the house (although she does not acknowledge this even to herself), but the master makes it abundantly clear that he is going to be absent, and that he wants nothing further to do with the two children in his charge; nor, indeed, with the governess, who is to assume sole and total responsibility. But once there, she finds another male presence – a very dominating male presence, and possibly a substitute for the master who isn’t there: this presence is Peter Quint, the former valet. And Peter Quint is dead.

Although written a few years before Freud’s ground-breaking publications, it is surely no accident that the governess first sees Peter Quint on top of a tower. And another ghost appears – the former governess, Miss Jessel, who is first seen on the far side of a lake. And the governess begins to see, or, perhaps, to imagine, that Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, the former governess and Quint’s lover, are haunting the two children, and are, somehow, feeding their lust for each other beyond death through this diabolic possession. Perhaps.

It is important to add the word “perhaps”, for we can never quite tell what is happening. Everything that terrifies us so is merely suggested, hinted at: nothing is told. What exactly had been the relationship between Quint and Miss Jessel? We are made to believe that he had been a brutal and violent man. And, possibly, that he and Miss Jessel had some sort of sado-masochistic relationship together. And that, somwhow, they had involved the children. The children, these innocents, may already be corrupted. They may, indeed, be not unwilling victims of the possession. And – who knows? – they may even have been involved, perhaps even physically, in the vile and disgusting practices of the former governess and the former valet. Who knows? Nothing is stated clearly.

But either the evil spirits are practising on the innocence of the children, or the governess is. The governess is determined to save the children: she is not entirely sure from what, but she is determined, whether there is anything to be saved from or not. It is for the children, she tells herself, for the children. And maybe it is she who is projecting on to the children her own frustrations, her own sexual neuroses. Once again, nothing is clear. But whatever the truth of the matter, the children are haunted.

Henry James was fascinated by human motivations and by the power struggles humans have with each other, and often presented in his fiction the motif of two people fighting for the possession of a third: we may see this clearly in, say The Bostonians, where Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransome fight for possession of Verena Tarrant, both citing as their motives the welfare of Miss Tarrant, but both harbouring other motives that are far from altruistic. This motif recurs frequently in many of James’ work, until, in his final enigmatic novel The Golden Bowl, we are presented with four figures any two of whom appear to be fighting for possession of a third. In The Aspern Papers, the novella published alongside The Turn of the Screw, we find a twist in the motif: the narrator, a literary scholar, is trying to obtain the letters of the deceased poet Jeffrey Aspern from the poet’s mistress, now an old lady, who is unwilling to part with the documents personal to her: the narrator and the lady, effectively, fight for possession of a dead person. And in The Turn of the Screw, the narrator, the governess, fights for possession of the children against the dead. The motif is recognisably Jamesian, but its expression takes us into areas not often broached by writers of serious literature: the area is that of supernatural terror. And no other story terrifies quite like this. Underneath the apparent gentility of James’ writing there often lurks the deeply sordid, and it is hard to imagine anything more deeply sordid , or, indeed, a greater evil, than what is clearly hinted at here – child abuse. But if the abuse is but imagined, it is she who imagines it who is the source of the sordidness, the source of the evil. That we can never be sure of anything but adds to the horror.

One would think that a work whose effects are so literary would be virtually impossible to translate into another medium, but astonishingly, it has been the source of an opera and of a film, both of the very highest quality. The opera, of course, is Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, a musical and dramatic masterpiece from one of the greatest of twentieth century opera composers. The film version, made in Britain and dating from 1961, is The Innocents: it is directed by Jack Clayton, and deserves, I think, to be better known. If Britten’s version is an operatic masterpiece, then The Innocents is, it seems to me, a cinematic masterpiece of comparable stature.

Jack Clayton had long been fascinated by James’ story, and it had been his ambition to film it. He bought the rights to a play by William Archibald, The Innocents, based on James’ novella, but he wasn’t entirely happy with Archibald’s script: it was too conventional a ghost story, and Clayton wanted something that would more accurately reflect the qualities of James’ original: he wanted the script re-written. Among the early contenders for this job was a young dramatist who had recently made a name for himself – Harold Pinter: Pinter was interested in the project, but was otherwise engaged, so he merely sent Clayton a piece of advice: do not, he said, include flashbacks. The past – whether it’s the past relationship between Quint and Miss Jessel, or their relationship with the children, or the governess’ own past – must be kept mysterious and enigmatic. Then, Clayton found another young and up and coming dramatist, John Mortimer: Mortimer had only two weeks or so to work on the script, but he added some of its finest touches, and was reportedly proud of his contribution to it. (The line spoken by the housekeeper about Quint and Jessel using the rooms of the house as if they were the “wild woods”, and hinting that the children had been present while they had carried on their affair, was, apparently, Mortimer’s work.) Then, Clayton hit the jackpot: he managed to obtain the services of Truman Capote, no less. Capote introduced elements of what is usually called “Southern Gothic”, and the result was a script which, if sensitively directed, photographed and acted, could result in something very special.

For cinematographer, Jack Clayton obtained the services of Freddie Francis, and his black and white photography is astounding. I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about the technical aspects of the art of cinematography to give an account of what it was that Freddie Francis did, but whatever it was he did, it was absolute perfection: those visual images haunt the mind, just as they should, and they keep on haunting the mind long after one has finished watching the film. It is hard to imagine a visual style more suited to the content than this. (Freddie Francis won an Oscar for best cinematography for his work on the film version of Sons and Lovers, made one year after The Innocents. His cinematography on that film was, as ever, of a very high standard, but the Oscar he got for it was, I suppose, Hollywood’s way of saying “Sorry for not giving this to you when you really deserved it.”)

A scene (not necessarily the “scariest”, despite the title in YouTube) from “The Innocents”, copyright 1961 Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment Inc, DVD released by British Film Institute

And then, there was the casting. The uncle of the children, who appears only in the first scene, has to be charismatic: this is the man the governess falls in love with, after all. For a while, Cary Grant seemed interested, but that didn’t work out. However, one cannot complain: this small but vital part was taken by Michael Redgrave, who had all the charm and charisma required for the role, and who played his few minutes on screen to absolute perfection. For the housekeeper, Clayton cast Megs Jenkins, who seemed to have cornered the market for the kindly and warm-hearted housekeeper (she played a similar role in Carol Reed’s Oliver! a few years later). And for the children, Jack Clayton found a remarkable pair – Pamela Franklin as Flora, and, best of all, a young lad called Martin Stephens as Miles, who was, alternately, innocent and vulnerable, and sinister and menacing: it is one of the most remarkable performances I have seen from a child actor. And then, of course, there was the casting of the governess: Deborah Kerr got the part, and it was the part of a lifetime. (Ms Kerr herself considered this her best performance.) Ms Kerr implies, but doesn’t overplay, the governess’ attraction for her employer, her delight in the children, her sense of terror and also her sense of determination, and, as the film progresses, a mounting hysteria. As with everything else in this film, it is hard to imagine this performance improved upon.

There remained the direction. Jack Clayton has always been a dependable director: perhaps, except for this film, he never quite rose to the heights, but he was a master craftsman, and rarely disappointed. Here, when everything was at hand to make the film he had always wanted to make, he gave us more than mere craftsmanship: with extraordinary skill, he translated what had been purely literary effects in James’ novella into cinematic effects. The deep ambiguity, this sense of everything hinted at but nothing ever stated directly or made explicit, and, above all, the sheer sense of supernatural terror – they all find here perfect expression. The pacing is masterly: not a single scene, not a single shot is wasted: the tension, once it starts building, never falters: the screw keeps turning without pause, and the pitch of intensity reached by the end has to be experienced to be believed.

In films such as this where there is a long and deliberate tightening of tension, of steady turns of the screw, there is always the danger that the climactic sequence won’t live up to the build-up, but there is no danger of bathos here. The final sequence, prefaced by those horrendous nerve-jangling screams of the girl Flora, is every bit as horrific as it should be. The governess here finally confronts Miles with what she claims to be the truth, while the ghost of Quint lurks behind. For those who have neither read the book nor seen the film, it would be unfair to give more away, but, while a dramatically satisfying denouement is reached, the mystery at the heart of the story remains unresolved: the horror is not laid to rest.

This is the only horror film I have seen that I find disquieting even after I have finished watching it. When people list the great film-makers, Clayton is unlikely to be mentioned alongside the likes of Chaplin or Welles or Renoir or Bergman, but this single film is, within my personal canon at any rate, as remarkable a cinematic achievement as any, and is easily in my personal Top 5, irrespective of genre.

Recently, the BBC presented us with a dramatisation of The Turn of the Screw as Christmas special: it was embarrassingly inept. Amongst other things, it made you realise how shrewd Harold Pinter’s advice had been not to show any flashbacks: the more you explain, the more you take away from the mysteries at the heart of the story – the mysteries that make this story work. Jack Clayton understood the story well and knew how it worked: the result is, I think, the finest supernatural film based on the finest supernatural story, and one which continues to disturb and to terrify even on repeated viewings.