I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops . . . .

‘I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong. ‘

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, January 27-April 16, 1898.

And so begins the internal voice of the governess of Henry James’s seductive and eerie tale of fear and flight. Remembering is a rich pleasure, and James’s famous tale indulges in the ‘flights and drops’ of memory as it throbs its way across a flight of passage towards the things that most excite it. Memory is a hungry gull flying through the air looking to land on whatsoever tasty morsel it can spy. But James’s narrator produces the image, not of a bird, that is my imagination at work — I was first taught this gothic tale at a Scottish university filled with glowering gothic buildings with gulls wheeling around parapets and towers - but of a seesaw moving up and down to the ‘right throbs and the wrong.’ Memory is as exciting as sex when the sex is good.

I remember my old and fusty tutor trying to explain something like this to us in a lecture - not about memory - but about the sexual elements of the governess’ narrative. Whatever he said it was a Freudian mess and he didn’t believe a word of it. He was having us on. Still, I love this sentence because it reminds me of the pure ripping-yarn pleasure of telling tales, which are most exciting - or should be - just at the beginning. A good story must have the right succession of flights and drops. We want to to feel giddy, certainly when we read gothic literature we do, that most adolescent of genres. I still read it late at night in bed and I’ve just written a gothic fable which is a study of giddiness and giddy-effects. Why not? We all want blood to rush to our head as we read.