Ellery Queen’s Anthology. Volume 1, 1960

Now that you have finished Louis Golding’s “Pale Blue Nightgown,” we hope you agree with us that it is one of the most remarkable short stories you have ever read...

The story first appeared in book form in a limited edition of only 64 copies — 60 for public sale and 4 probably retained by the publisher, Lord Carlow, whose Corvinus Press of London issued the slim volume in October 1936. In this edition (one of the truly rare first editions among modern English books) the story is followed by a Postscript, specially written by the author. Mr. Golding’s postscript is so fascinating, and throws such a brilliant light on the conception of “Pale Blue Nightgown,” that we cannot refrain from quoting it in full.

“Several of my friends,” wrote Mr. Golding, “including Lord Carlow who printed this tale, have suggested that it might add to its interest if I concluded with, as a postscript, a brief note regarding its origin.

“I dreamed this tale, as I have dreamed tales before. I mean that I have dreamed events, in which I personally may, or may not, have been involved, and at a certain stage in the dreaming I have said to myself, ‘I will make a tale out of this dream. It ought to make a good tale.’

“Sometimes I have made the resolution after the dream was over, at the moment of awakening. But that is perhaps not unusual. The interest lies in the concurrence of the tale-making impulse with the dreaming of the events dreamed, while the dream mind was still unconscious of their denouement.

“I say that I have dreamed tales before and decided to write them. But I have never actually done so till now. For the fact was that they proved to be nonsense, as most dreams are, with no coherence in episode and character and with no finale, in any acceptable literary value.

“ ‘Pale Blue Nightgown’ was unlike them. The characters are as real to me now as they were when I dreamed them. The central situation still terrifies me as it terrified me the night it evolved between a bed-sheet and a pillow-case drenched with sweat. The denouement has as much ‘surprise’, in the formal O. Henry sense, as any tale I have composed in my waking moments.

“I remember two things in that night-dreaming, the appalling vividness of the events themselves, and my insistence throughout: ‘What a good story this will make.’ I think I was trying to comfort myself for my profound wretchedness. I was equally sorry for the poor small boy and the poor headmaster. My heart was wracked with pity for them.

“At the same time I was consumed with curiosity. ‘How,’ I asked myself, ‘is it going to end?’ The ending was as startling and terrifying to myself as it has been to my friends since, if I am to believe them.

“To sum up. On one level I was dreaming a dream, on another level my conscious literary mind was preoccupying itself with the dream as literary material. On still another level, one of the characters I was dreaming himself had dreamed a dream which gave the whole dream episode its motive power and its denouement.

“It is that superimposition of levels of consciousness which has seemed odd enough to absolve these words of postscript from the charge of impertinence. So I hope, at least.”