Veering is about where ghosts live. It entails the experience of the where as a kind of atopos, a spectralization of place that literature enables us to apprehend perhaps better than any other kind of discourse. In the following pages I want to explore the question of this where (still echoing from the end of The Turn of the Screw, in the boyish voice of Miles, relayed through the governess and through the anonymous narrator who relays the relaying of the governess, all thrown in the cryptic side-vocals of Henry James) through an engagement with the writings of Elizabeth Bowen, Raymond Williams and a few others.

Everything gathers inside or spreads out in order to start, right down to my bare feet, as I sit here in my study on an upper floor of this old house, ‘a sea house’ as Walter de la Mare might call it, in Seaford, East Sussex. Why barefoot? Because it is late summer and warm enough, but it also seems right in a way I do not understand. Perhaps it has to do with death, a certain spookiness, like the cold and ‘horny feet’ that protrude in Wallace Stevens's ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’. But there is also a feeling of affirmation, as in that poem, also by Stevens, about a ‘large red man reading’ and the ‘ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases, / As he sat there reading’.