The July Ghost

by A.S. Byatt

A story from "Sugar and Other Stories"

Genres: Short Stories, Fantasy

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

A.S. Byatt (Antonia Susan Byatt) is internationally known for her novels and short stories. Her novels include the Booker Prize winner Possession, The Biographer’s Tale and the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, and her highly acclaimed collections of short stories include Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Elementals and her most recent book Little Black Book of Stories. A distinguished critic as well as a writer of fiction, A S Byatt was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.

BYATT, Dame Antonia (Susan), (Dame Antonia Duffy), DBE 1999 (CBE 1990); FRSL 1983; Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), 2003 , writer; born 24 Aug. 1936;

Daughter of His Honour John Frederick Drabble, QC and late Kathleen Marie Bloor

Byatt has famously been engaged in a long-running feud with her novelist sister, Margaret Drabble, over the alleged appropriation of a family tea-set in one of her novels. The pair seldom see each other and each does not read the books of the other.

Married
1st, 1959, Ian Charles Rayner Byatt (Sir I. C. R. Byatt) marriage dissolved. 1969; one daughter (one son deceased)
2nd, 1969, Peter John Duffy; two daughters.

Education
Sheffield High School; The Mount School, York; Newnham College, Cambridge (BA Hons; Hon. Fellow 1999); Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, USA; Somerville College, Oxford.

Academic Honours:
Hon. Fellow, London Inst., 2000; Fellow UCL, 2004
Hon. DLitt: Bradford, 1987; DUniv York, 1991; Durham, 1991; Nottingham, 1992; Liverpool, 1993; Portsmouth, 1994; London, 1995; Sheffield, 2000; Kent 2004; Hon. LittD Cambridge, 1999

Prizes
The PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Of Fiction prize, 1986 for STILL LIFE
The Booker Prize, 1990, for POSSESSION
Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize, 1990 for POSSESSION
The Eurasian section of Best Book in Commonwealth Prize, 1991 for POSSESSION
Premio Malaparte, Capri, 1995;
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, California, 1998 for THE DJINN IN THE NIGHTINGALE''S EYE
Shakespeare Prize, Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, 2002;

Publications:
The Shadow of the Sun, 1964;
Degrees of Freedom, 1965 (reprinted as Degrees of Freedom: the early novels of Iris Murdoch, 1994);
The Game, 1967;
Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1970 (reprinted as Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1989);
Iris Murdoch 1976
The Virgin in the Garden, 1978;
GEORGE ELIOT Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings , 1979 (editor);
Still Life, 1985
Sugar and Other Stories, 1987;
George Eliot: selected essays, 1989 (editor)
Possession: a romance, 1990
Robert Browning''s Dramatic Monologues, 1990 (editor);
Passions of the Mind, (essays), 1991;
Angels and Insects (novellas),1992
The Matisse Stories (short stories),1993;
The Djinn in the Nightingale''s Eye: five fairy stories, 1994
Imagining Characters, 1995 (joint editor);
New Writing 4, 1995 (joint editor);
Babel Tower, 1996;
New Writing 6, 1997 (joint editor);
The Oxford Book of English Short Stories, 1998 (editor);
Elementals: Stories of fire and ice (short stories), 1998;
The Biographer''s Tale, 2000;
On Histories and Stories (essays), 2000;
Portraits in Fiction, 2001;
The Bird Hand Book, 2001 (Photographs by Victor Schrager Text By AS Byatt);
A Whistling Woman, 2002
Little

Reviews

[Cecily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve read a bit of Byatt and think she’s often better in short form. Here, she captivated me from the start. The initial ‘mystery’ is awkward, rather than supernatural, and for a while I wondered who/what the ghost was, if there was one. Even by the end, it’s open to interpretation.

“No illusions are pleasant.”
A framing story is a common literary technique, but in this case, it is all at one remove. An unknown omniscient narrator is recounting what a man is telling an American woman (as well as some bits he leaves out) about why, after his girlfriend left him, he moved to new lodgings.

The man and his landlady are bereaved in different ways, both haunted by memories linked to a home. However, this is Byatt, in an anthology of “fantastic” fiction.

She is “too rational to see ghosts”, but he becomes haunted by her memories, seeing the ghost she longs to see, before he knows who the person is, or even that they are a ghost. As he comes to understand, he attempts a solution. Shocking in itself, and made worse by his post-hoc justification . Very clever. Very well-written.


Image: Smiling blond boy, sitting in a tree. (Source)

See also
• Tragically, there are autobiographical elements to this story. See HERE.
• There’s subtlety and ambiguity. I kept thinking of a particular film, The Sixth Sense .

Short story club

I read this in Black Water 2: More Tales of the Fantastic, by Alberto Manguel, from which I’m reading one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 24 March 2025.

You can read this story HERE.

You can join the group here.

[Olga · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Short Story Club

'The July Ghost' is not a scary or dark ghost story. It is rather a touching and a bit sad one which leaves you with a warm feeling. In spite of the fact that the story explores the sense of loss and grieving, it gives a glimmer of hope to cling to.
It is the first work by A.S. Byatt read by me and I loved her writing style.

[Bionic Jean · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a strange little story.

I have read books by A.S. Byatt on and off over the years, and also those of her sister Margaret Drabble. I felt I had to really, both coming from the same Northern city as I do, and both highly regarded English novelists as I was growing up. I realised in my twenties that they were sisters, but not the rest, until my brother said:

“Did you realise they used to live quite close to us … in one of the those big houses up … ” and he named a road less than 5 minutes walk from our childhood home. “No!” I replied, but he hadn’t finished … “And they haven’t talked to each other for years! They don’t even read each other’s books!”

This seemed incredible, although who knew what the posh people in those big houses were really like? The feud, lasting many decades was famous—even notorious—with one of them even leaving a literary event if the other was there. Who knows the reason? Perhaps only themselves, although one sister once said that they were encouraged to be competitive as children, which seems odd since they were raised as Quakers.

All this preamble is to make the point that they write very different novels, as I have found most siblings do. A.S. Byatt’s are perhaps more literary, with many literary allusions, and concerned with events. One critics has said she has been: “considered a welterweight [with] novels crammed with complicated ideas, frequent references to Milton and Wordsworth and mind-stretching words like quiddity and horripilant” (Booker prize-winning stuff). Margaret Drabble’s novels on the other hand, are more concerned with people, relationships and dysfunctional families (potential Orange prize-winning stuff).

The July Ghost is an exception. It is concerned very much with people and their relationships, and atypical for A.S. Byatt. The reason for this is its real life stimulus. The July Ghost was first published in “Firebird I” in 1982, however ten years earlier, A.S. Byatt—Antonia Byatt—’s own son Charles had died in a car accident at the age of 11. Once the reader knows that, it is clear why she felt impelled to write it, although it does feel an odd, detached tale with her typical prolix sentences sometimes.

The story is framed within another, which seems to serve no purpose except to make the events feel more remote. Perhaps this was necessary, given how raw it must have felt. It is written in the third person. An unnamed man has just met an unnamed American woman at a party in London, during a very hot and uncomfortable summer. He begins to tell the woman about his landlady and the “problem” he has with her. For some reason the American woman draws him out, and he ends up telling her all about his situation. He had met his landlady a year ago, also at a party, and struck up a conversation with her, also beginning “I think I must move out of where I’m living” which is the very same line he has just said to the American woman. He sounds a bit of an odd fish, but for some reason the woman keeps listening. At that time, he tells her, his girlfriend Anne had left him for another man, and he was reeling from the shock of it.

The woman had been happy for him to rent the attic rooms in her house. There was a husband in the picture—Noel—but things are prickly between them and he isn’t around much. In fact the young man witnesses the strange relationship, and also the weirdness of the woman herself, but he doesn’t run a mile like you or I might. He seems to have fallen in love with the paradise of the attached garden:

“It was a lovely place: a huge, hidden, walled South London garden, with old fruit trees at the end, a wildly waving disorderly buddleia, curving beds full of old roses, and a lawn of overgrown rye-grass.”

For the young man, an academic trying to write a paper on Thomas Hardy’s poems, on what he considers “their curiously archaic vocabulary”, sitting in the cool of the garden each day relaxes him, and his mind begins to be soothed. So he begins to read, and to work. Children are playing in the next garden but he doesn’t mind that. Every so often one of them will come over to retrieve a ball which has come over in to his garden.

It isn’t long before he notices that he has a companion: a silent boy of about ten with brilliant blue eyes and an extraordinarily trusting smile, swinging from the apple tree. There’s something about the boy that really strikes him; perhaps it is his smile. The boy continues to appear intermittently, out in the garden, or lying in the grass in the corner, but always smiling at him. One day, the young man sees the little boy coming out of the house—right through the kitchen door, as though he lived there. He decides to ask the woman about the little boy, describing him, right down to his Chelsea football shirt:

“He was used to her being silent. But this silence went on and on and on. She was just staring into the garden. After a time, she said, in her precise conversational tone, ”The only thing I want, the only thing I want at all in this world, is to see that boy.“”

So we begin to surmise what might be happening here. But the events which follow are most peculiar, even for a story of this type.

The boy must be the ghost of her dead son, who had been killed two summers previously on the common behind her house, knocked down by a car on a busy road. The description of the boy’s clothes, his appearance and demeanour, are enough to convince the woman.

However, neither the landlady nor the man truly believes in ghosts, and so they both try to rationalise what he is seeing, even though it is such a precise picture and he can describe different outfits on several occasions. He wonders to himself if he might have seen another boy, maybe even a boy who had been given the T-shirts and jeans afterwards. The landlady herself wonders if “what he had seen was what she desired to see, a kind of mix-up of radio waves”. He compares the woman’s loss with his own; incredibly believing that in some ways his loss is worse, because since Anne had chosen to leave him, it is “an absence that could not be loved because love was at an end.”

The woman decides she must be too “sensible” to be able to see her young son’s ghost, and can know of the ghost secondhand, through her lodger. The boy tries to present himself to her, but when it doesn’t work he has a plan. He makes the lodger understand that he wants the man to have sex with his mum. It is not really made clear why, but the man theorises that the ghost hopes he will be inhabit the new child’s spirit through this, thus bringing his mum the comfort she craves.

See what I mean? At this point the story becomes increasingly nonsensical. The lodger attempts to have sex with the woman. It is explicit, embarrassing, and unsuccessful. “Sex and death don’t go,”, the lodger says, apologising to his landlady (you’re telling me!) He leaves her bedroom only to find the boy waiting expectantly on the landing. The man apologises to him too, but feels he and his landlady both have to make fresh starts, and find a way of coping. He packs a suitcase, only to find the boy sitting on it.

““Please let me go … I can’t get through. Do you want me to stay?”
Upon which, as he stood helplessly there, the boy turned on him again, the brilliant, open, confiding, beautiful desired smile.”

It’s a chilling ending for sure, but what a bizarre way to arrive at it.

This story did nothing for me. Overlong and wordy in the beginning, it takes far too long to get going. It has a false frame structure, and descends into the ridiculous near the end. I appreciate that the author may have needed to write the story but I wish I hadn’t read it. I’ll end with a positive picture:

“Blond, almost ten at a guess, he was not very good at children’s ages, very blue eyes, slightly built, with a rainbow-striped tee shirt and blue jeans, mostly though not always – oh, and those football practice shoes, black and green. And the other tee shirt, with the ships and wavy lines. And an extraordinarily nice smile. A really warm smile. A nice-looking boy.”

[Connie G · Rating 3 out of 5]

A man at a London party tells an American woman that he needs to move out of his apartment because it has so many sad memories. The woman offers to rent the attic rooms in her house. The home has beautiful gardens where the lodger writes a paper on Hardy's poetry. A silent boy with a beautiful smile comes to visit him in the garden or climb a nearby tree.

The lodger can see the boy, but he's invisible to the landlady. The probable identity of the boy and his backstory fill the rest of the tale. The meetings between the boy and the lodger in the garden were lovely, although sad. The lodger has an intuition that he knows what the silent boy is thinking. But the lodger lacked sensitivity in his actions with the landlady. He did not have a good understanding of the woman's emotional needs as she coped with a tragic situation.

The author's son was killed by a drunken driver, and that heartbreaking incident inspired this short story. I read this story with the Short Story Club from the anthology Black Water 2: More Tales of the Fantastic.

[Paula Mota · Rating 4 out of 5]

# short stories in the shortest month #11

The July Ghost, de A.S. Byatt

‘No illusions are pleasant’, she said, decisively.

Este conto começa com o protagonista a tentar mudar de casa porque o ambiente naquela onde tem vivido se tornou demasiado pesado. Convidado pela senhoria a aproveitar o jardim nos dias quentes do verão londrino, faz amizade com um rapazinho que aparece por lá pendurado numa árvore ou num muro. Quando o descreve à senhoria, ela desmaia.

‘I’m too rational to see ghosts, I’m not someone who would see anything there was to see, I don’t believe in an after-life, I don’t see how anyone can. (…) I thought that ghosts were – were what people wanted to see, or were afraid to see… and after he died, the best hope I had, it sound silly, was that I would go mad enough so that I might have the illusion of seeing or hearing him come in.’

“The July Ghost” é, como o título indica, uma história de fantasmas, mas onde a doçura e a saudade substituem o medo e o sobressalto.

[Hester · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes a short story takes my head off . This one did . Knowing nothing of Byatt's biography I enjoyed both the way she captured a particular slice of London Chattering Classes with its unquestioned assumptions , easy encounters and relaxed accomodation of people in need of a place to live and the dark throb of death and grief that refuses to be rationalised even as the characters glide about in their enlightened confidence .

For me the real ghost here is not the child but the mother who is frozen in unspeakable grief , buried deep behind a wall of rational logic . The lodger is unthinkingly predatory , refusing to wonder whether his own shallow relationships reflect his own inability to grieve, his focus on dead poets , his sexist presumption that he has the answer which will release the mother ( spoiler alert : a good shagging ) is another more dangerous ghost, already moving into his next victim . He looks like a hawk and lives in attics . Frightening .

[Klowey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short ghost story that, after some thought, reminds me of Henry James. I wasn't a big fan of the writing style and I'm not sure I interpreted the story adequately. There's probably more here than meets my eye.

Read as part of the collection Black Water 2: More Tales of the Fantastic for The Short Story Club.

[Benjamin Stahl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another odd, somewhat creepy, melancholic story.

[Larrry G · Rating 3 out of 5]

Plenty more questions than answers abound for the AILarrry to elucidate:
Why is the title "The July Ghost”? My paranormal AI insinuates this is due to the writer probably almost but not quite bumping into any number of ghosts of the months as he parlays his way through the various vulnerable ladies’ more material assets.
Why not call it the pragmatic grammar ghost? Good question. Certainly, a speculative spectral spectacle is succinctly posited. Legions of philosophers and semanticists will bloodbath over whether "is dead" - a continual present tense - implies a continued tense presence.
Is this a particularly scary ghost story? Very much so. There is gratuitous impromptu screaming that is so frightfully delayed from any ghostly encounters due to the shock of being quite unable to presciently express emotions in the actual present presence. Not to mention the multiple overlapping rebound affairs, together with children atop baggage as well.
Can ghosts really pass through walls or objects? Not the civilized ones. Note the landlady presumedly has freshly locked the back gate to protect the living dead from further splatterment, thus necessitating the aspirational apparitional tree climbing and the like.
Why is the writer (character) such a bad reader of tea leaves? He gets his tea and leaves the scene, or perhaps should. Clearly, it is very indicative that should an eerily smiling kiddo-ghosty attempt to bogart your luggage, it is high time to flee the scene, pragmatically leaving any baggage behind in the lurch. Yet we are left with the feeling that he will continue to mess this up significantly enough such as to warrant a sequel.

[Debi Cates · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a ghost story that isn't scary. What is, is sad and humane.

Of the stories we've been reading in the Black Water 2: More Tales of the Fantastic anthology, this story was the most contemporary feeling and the least "fantastical." The story is about grief.

It's a story I'll remember long after some of the other stories' details have faded.

Join The Short Story Club group here https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...

[George Ilsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

A different sort of ghost story, offering a kind of slightly surreal haunting; and oddly believable.

There's a few layers operating here, because the "man" (the protagonist) is telling the story to a woman at a party, a story of another woman at another party who became his landlord. The story he tells is slightly "bowdlerized" (a word rarely encountered these days) in order to make an impression on the new woman, who might become his new landlord — if everything works out.

One has to wonder what might happen next, that is, how much is this man the vehicle for events, if he is a medium of some sort — or perhaps a charming liar.

I rather enjoyed this peculiar ghost story.

[Petergiaquinta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe the first thing I've ever read by Byatt? Interesting spin on the ghost story...I made a bunch of notes planning to say something about possible Hamlet influences, and then I never followed through.

++++++++++++++++++
Read with GR short story group