A Warning To The Curious: The Life and Works of M.R. James Early Life: The Man of Eton and King’s M.R. James, the writer of a highly cultivated series of ghost stories, including the once-famous Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), remains a lesser-known name in the pantheon of horror, overlooked by the roughly contemporary success of Stoker’s Dracula (1898). Nevertheless, he remains the true godfather of the English ghost story, consciously reinventing Victorian horrors for a 20 th century audience. While his stories owe a considerable debt to the Gothic tradition passed down by Mary Shelley and Sheridan Le Fanu, M.R. James could never properly be termed a ‘Gothic’ writer. James avoids the Romantic sentiments of nature and the sublime (despite his love for picturesque natural settings), preferring the cold, almost sterile environment of a life- long academic. In a genre known more for its concessions to ‘low’ culture, his stories find inspiration in obscure academic byways, such as forgotten tomes of Hebraic thought
Transcript
A Warning To The Curious: The Life and Works of M.R. James
Early Life: The Man of Eton and King’s
M.R. James, the writer of a highly cultivated series of
ghost stories, including the once-famous Ghost Stories of an
Antiquary (1904), remains a lesser-known name in the pantheon
of horror, overlooked by the roughly contemporary success of
Stoker’s Dracula (1898). Nevertheless, he remains the true
godfather of the English ghost story, consciously
reinventing Victorian horrors for a 20th century audience.
While his stories owe a considerable debt to the Gothic
tradition passed down by Mary Shelley and Sheridan Le Fanu,
M.R. James could never properly be termed a ‘Gothic’ writer.
James avoids the Romantic sentiments of nature and the
sublime (despite his love for picturesque natural settings),
preferring the cold, almost sterile environment of a life-
long academic. In a genre known more for its concessions to
‘low’ culture, his stories find inspiration in obscure
academic byways, such as forgotten tomes of Hebraic thought
or Latin word-puzzles buried in cryptic stained-glass
windows.
While ‘academic’ seems a sad adjective to couple with
horror, in James’ stories the perspective works, and indeed,
makes his stories all the more disturbing. In his detailed
world of antiquarians and bourgeois Englishmen, the sudden
appearance of a spectral hand or a malevolent face effaces
the comforting reality of England. While James never
explicitly talks of imperialism (and was averse to writing
politically), his stories walk a fine line between tradition
and the fin de siecle. Instinctively, James knew that the world
of prehistory, myth, and legend remained disturbingly real,
and modern man defied it at a considerable cost. Yet James
abhorred anything that smacked of spiritualism, and instead
found a veiled way to explore his obsession with the occult
through his narrator-scholar, who (like him) only believed
the truth of his eyes and the call numbers of the Cambridge
University library.
Perhaps the best illustration of James’ aesthetic
occurs—fittingly—after his death in the posthumously
published story, “A Vignette” (1936). The brief story
follows a tried-and-true formula for James: a mundane
object, in this case, an old monument in a country garden,
reveals its uncanny origin to the careful observer. At the
end of the story, the narrator (in a voice suggesting the
wisdom and detachment of James’ own), writes,
Are there here and there sequestered places which some
curious creatures still frequent, whom once on a time
anybody could see and speak to as they went about on
their daily occasions, whereas now only at rate
intervals in a series of years does one cross their
paths and become aware of them; and perhaps that is
just as well for the peace of mind of simple people.
(Oxford UP, 298)
This comes as a valedictory statement to an otherwise tame
(for James) narrative: were the legends and tales of old
documentary evidence of a now- hidden reality? Is the
veneer of modern civilization simply a mask disguising the
true nature of life and death? Predictably, James would
dismiss his writings as simple entertainments written for a
close circle of friends; he certainly avoided the
pretentious stance of many writers of the Modernist period
(whom he famously detested). A ghost story gave one a
chill, a certain pleasure, and ended without further
comment. Whether or not ghosts are the mysterious remnants
of a previous ‘race’ is for the reader to decide, not the
author to reveal.
However, after reading the collected stories of M.R.
James, it seems less a technique than a life-long obsession.
In tale after tale, the fabric of mundane reality rips to
reveal a hidden seam, offering a momentary glimpse into
these “sequestered places” where the old world remains.
Clearly James was compelled to stare a bit longer than his
contemporaries. What he wanted us to see is uncertain,
though the clues are remarkably consistent, pointing to
something just beyond the page. As James himself admits in
“Some Remarks on Ghost Stories,” published in The Bookman in
1929, “when the climax is reached, [we should] be just a
little in the dark as to the working of [the story’s]
machinery. We do not want to see the bones of their theory
about the supernatural” (Oxford UP, 348). Yet his machinery
is no clumsy Baroque deus ex machina, but a true “theory,” one
he dared not admit to in public life. Only in the relative
privacy of a ghost story could he indulge his hidden
thoughts about the supernatural, notably the terrors that
await those whose intellectual curiosity defied the status
quo.
This is a curious occupation for the son born in 1862
to an Evangelical clergyman and his wife in the bucolic
surroundings of Goodnestone, Kent. James’ early life was
spent entirely ensconced by the world of the church: a daily
regimen of prayers, hymns, and Bible study etched Christian
beliefs deep in his psyche, where they would color even his
most fantastic stories. Though his father intended him to
take Holy Orders, James ultimately followed a different—but
not so dissimilar—path. Indeed, far from rebelling against
his father, James’ career took root from his early
indoctrination in the church. The apocalyptic imagery of
the Old Testament, and in particular, the Medieval penchant
for depicting this imagery in the most grotesque and macabre
fashion, became a lifelong obsession. After preparatory
studies at Temple Grove, he earned a scholarship to Eton,
firmly establishing his spiritual center. The rest of his
life would be spent within the confines of university walls,
poring through old manuscripts, giving lectures, or spinning
out newly-invented tales of forgotten worlds for friends and
students.
His early years at Eton brought numerous distinctions
and honors: he won the Newcastle Scholarship (the highest
academic award at Eton), as well as a scholarship to King’s
in 1882. The student quickly became the master, as he took
Firsts in both parts of the Classical Tripos, and was named
Assistant Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1886.
During this time he participated in excavations in Cyprus—
archeology became yet another scholarly pursuit—and was
named Dean of King’s in 1889. After receiving his D.Litt
degree in 1895, he became first a Tutor at King’s, and then,
remarkably, Provost in 1905. Here he remained until 1918,
the period that encompasses the first two volumes of
stories. Far from retiring, he then returned to Eton as
Provost, where he remained until his death in 1936. These
two institutions were the cornerstones of his intellectual
and spiritual existence, as he makes clear in his 1926 book,
Eton and King’s, one of his rare autobiographical
publications.
Though to most readers James is familiar, if at all,
through his ghost stories, academics remember him primarily
for his voracious—and seemingly, limitless—knowledge of the
ancient and medieval world. As a testament to his father’s
influence, he made comprehensive studies of the apocrypha of
the Old and New Testaments, publishing the Apocryphal New
Testament in 1924. As James writes in Eton and Kings,
I had cherished for years, I still cherish, a quite
peculiar interest in any
document that has claimed to be a Book of the Bible,
and is not. Nowadays I suppose it would be proper to
say that I have a complex about it. A dream of my
childhood is still vivid to me, in which I opened a
folio Bible in a shiny black binding, and found in it a
Book of about the length of Obadiah, occupying a single
page, divided into verses and with a heading in
italics, all quite ship-shape. It was called (I think)
the Book of Maher-shalal-hash-baz…And for years after I
hoped I might some day come on the real thing, and
whenever a chance offered I read with avidity anything
that was classed as apocryphal, and wrote down careful
abstracts of it in note-books. (195-196)
Here we see his unique ability to blend fantasy and
academia, as this dream sounds remarkably like one of his
stories: an antiquary stumbling upon a lost book of the
Bible—one with terrible portent to the hapless academic.
Yet this “complex,” as he calls it, led him on the
gargantuan task to catalogue the entire Cambridge manuscript
collection—some twenty thousand manuscripts, some of which
he brought to light for the first time in centuries.
According to E.F. Bleiler, in his Introduction to
James’ Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, “The bibliography of his
learned publications, published in the necrology for the
British Association for the Advancement of Science, covers
some thirty pages, and his necrologist, Sir Stephen Gaselee,
refers to James as the greatest scholar, in volume of
knowledge, that he had ever known” (Dover, 4). These
accomplishments place James, the ghost story writer, in
striking relief. Far from being an isolated hobby, the
stories are a natural extension of his scholarship, sharing
the same subject, themes, and ideas. Indeed, we can see him
working out the lacunae of medieval texts through the
conventions of literary horror, since the manuscripts are
“sequestered places which some curious creatures still
frequent.” Who better than an antiquary (to use his own
term) to remind us that the ‘demons’ of the past continue to
haunt us, despite civilization’s attempts to relegate them
to the dustbin of superstition?
In this regard James bears a striking similarity to his
contemporary and fellow academic, J.R.R. Tolkein.
Interestingly, both writers were drawn to the forgotten
byways of the medieval world, fashioning stories from
fragmentary scraps of knowledge. What Tolkein found in
Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and other poems parallels
the ‘horrors’ James discerned in the apocrypha and other
moldering missals. As Tolkein remarks in his famous essay,
“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (1936), “A Christian
was (and is) still like his forefathers, a mortal hemmed in
a hostile world. The monsters remained the enemies of
mankind, the infantry of the old war, and became inevitably
the enemies of the one God…” (Fry, 27). Though Edwardian
England seemed a relatively civilized place devoid of
“monsters,” James possessed an almost Freudian ability to
discern traces of the old gods. As Freud would explain in
his essay, The Uncanny (1919), much of what we experience as
“uncanny” (disturbing, monstrous, or bizarrely coincidental)
are fragments of our ancestral past, pagan beliefs and
rituals which are anathema to our civilized mores. As the
Medieval church erected cathedrals over pagan shrines, so,
too, have we ‘cast out’ our old religions and fashioned them
into ghosts, vampires, and devils. Tolkein caught something
of this in the Christian vs. Pagan tension in Beowulf (as
well as in his own Middle Earth), and James does the same in
a modern context. When his academics uncover an ancient
manuscript, dreaming of future publications, they find
instead hints of a forgotten narrative: of pacts made with
the Devil, of strange creatures brought back from a “Black
Pilgrimage” to the Crusades, or simply proof of the “malice
of inanimate objects” (to quote the title of one of his
unpublished stories). James, the scholar, realized how
easily stories passed out of tradition, particularly when
they were consciously suppressed. His stories thus seem a
response to a question posed long ago, in a language as
obscure as the Exeter Riddles, which speak to the
unconscious fears and longings of the modern world.
Naturally, there was another side to James besides the
antiquary. To his friends and students he was known
affectionately as “Monty,” a jovial man who loved cats,
played the piano, and devoured detective novels and ghost
stories, particularly those of Sheridan Le Fanu. Indeed,
his scholarship often mingled with these interests,
prompting him to edit editions of Le Fanu’s novels Uncle Silas
and Madame Crowl’s Ghost, as well as translate the complete
fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. In short, James was
no intellectual snob; he found amusement and edification
almost anywhere, and no field escaped his scrutiny once it
crossed his path. The ghost stories, themselves, initially
emerged from the “Monty” side of his personality. At King’s
James presided over the Chitchat Club, where he would
entertain members with seemingly impromptu yarns of ghosts,
curses, and ancient riddles. The first official “story”
that became part of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary was read on
October 28, 1893, which is the first story in the volume,
“Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book.” The success of this story
established it as a yearly tradition, though the readings
shifted to Christmas Eve, where he dutifully produced story
after story, year after year. Present at these early
meetings was a young man named James McBryde, who would
become not only his dearest friend, but one of the chief
catalysts of his creative life.
James McBryde arrived at King’s in 1893, and despite
(or perhaps, because of) differences in background got on
well with James and his inner-circle. James recalls him as
a man of “conciliated goodwill,” who had a “wonderfully
picturesque vocabulary…[and an] angelic temper” (Eton and
Kings, 218-219). The two took long trips on the continent,
traveling notably throughout Scandinavia on what they termed
“troll hunts,” which became the setting for two of his most
famous stories, “Number 13” and “Count Magnus.”
Interestingly, his only description of this voyage in Eton
and Kings concerns McBryde’s slaying of a spider: “the
courage which enabled [McBryde] to seize by its sinewy leg
the largest spider I have ever seen in a derelict bath at
Verdun commanded the deepest respect” (219). This is
another detail that sounds curiously in keeping with his
ghost stories, as all the ‘monsters’ encountered bear an
unmistakable resemblance to spiders (explicitly so, in
“Canon Alberic”). Clearly, his relationship with McBryde
allowed him to see the stories as more than occasional
pieces and to consider publication. While “Canon Alberic”
and “Lost Hearts” had already been published in National
Review, publishing an entire volume of such stories was
another matter entirely. Indeed, James might have feared
slightly for his reputation: an established scholar and
Tutor at King’s publishing ghost stories in the manner of Le
Fanu? The tide turned in 1904, when McBryde fell ill with
appendicitis and faced a lengthy recovery. To amuse
himself, he asked James if he might illustrate a few of the
stories with an eye toward publication. James agreed,
perhaps inspired by the idea of collaboration, and offered
him six possibilities: “Canon Alberic,” “The Mezzotint,”
“The Ash-Tree,” “Number 13,” “Count Magnus,” and “Oh,
Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.”
McBryde set to work producing a number of drawings in
an accomplished, macabre style. The most famous of these
images accompanies the story, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to
You, My Lad,” depicting the climax of the tale. In this
illustration, the professor’s bed sheets lurch into the form
of a monster, its face a crumpled-up, indistinct menace.
The professor has collapsed in terror against a dresser,
warding off the spirit with a face that looks distressingly
skeletal. Following James’ lead, McBryde avoids the most
obvious pitfall—the ‘walking sheet’ ghost. Instead, the
phantasm that emerges is human, but only just. The
illustration reflects James’ favorite description of the
supernatural: “There was intelligence of a kind in [it],
intelligence beyond that of a beast, below that of a man”
(Oxford UP, 11). Tragically, these images of death and
horror were McBryde’s last creations; following his
operation, he unexpectedly passed away, leaving only 4
illustrations complete with many more unfinished or roughly
planned out. James’ shock must have been extraordinary, yet
it convinced him to push ahead with the planned volume.
Adding two additional stories, the previously published
“Lost Hearts,” and a new creation, “The Treasure of Abbot
Thomas,” he offered the book as a memorial to late friend
and collaborator. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary was published by
Edward Arnold in November of 1904, only a few months after
McBryde’s death.
The First Book: The Antiquary Speaks
The volume proved a modest success, though its limited
run made even his friends scramble to find it. Reprinted
in 1905, it eventually went through nine editions until it
was collected with his subsequent stories in 1931. Though
many critics ignored the works (or dismissed them, perhaps,
as trifles), they soon caught on as a distinct voice in the
genre. In a 1917 review of the book, The Supernatural in Modern
English Fiction, Montague Summers takes the author (Dorothy
Scarborough) to task for omitting James in her survey. As
he writes,
…she does not refer to the series of ghost stories from
the erudite pen of the Provost of King’s, two volumes
of which have pages so vivid in their description of
malignant entities and sinister intelligences, that,
when the first tale, Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book, appeared
some years ago in The National Review, people were asking
if it were not really true, and it was with something
like relief we learned that Dr. James had invented his
midnight demon of the pit. Dr. James is of great
importance in a study of the supernatural in fiction,
and this not only because his stories are consummate
masterpieces, but because in his preface to More Ghost
Stories of an Antiquary, he gives us his ideas ‘how a ghost
story ought to be laid out if it is to be effective,’
and very striking and suggestive these ideas are.
(Modern Language Review, 347)
Summer’s emphasis on the vivid nature of James’ writing is,
to modern readers, its most striking quality. Despite
critical indifference, three volumes followed in quick
succession: More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in 1911, A Thin Ghost
and Others in 1919, and A Warning to the Curious in 1925. Along
with Montague Summers (a renowned scholar of 17th century
English drama and witchcraft), James’ literary admirers
included Thomas Hardy, Arthur Machen, and A.E. Housman,
among others. Clearly, James had found the ideal medium for
his message, and his stories, far from being forgettable
fire-side amusements, clearly struck a chord with pre-WWI
English society (an attraction that lasted long after the
war, while many more innocent tastes were forgotten).
Summer’s 1917 defense of M.R. James is just as needed
today, as few of his stories are anthologized outside of
ghost story collections. Indeed, few ghost stories of any
note survive the centuries, since readers are typically
scared only by what seems believable (and thus,
contemporary). This casts many works of previous decades
and centuries into an untimely grave. Walpole’s The Castle of
Otranto (1764), despite its humor and novelty, would hardly
frighten even the most timid reader, while even works such
as Frankenstein (1818) and Le Fanu’s Green Tea (1872) are
remarkable more for their literary insights than their
ability to scare. James’ stories, surprisingly enough,
might pass the test. Despite their language, which to some
might seem rather quaint, the stories have a timeless
quality that could be set in 2015 just as easily as 1915.
Steeped in ancient and medieval lore as James was, he had an
almost mythic perspective on the supernatural; not simply
what terrified Englishmen and women, but the very essence of
what civilization deems ‘supernatural.’ James’ stories can
be reduced to a very simple formula with slight variations:
a gentleman (typically a scholar) stumbles upon an ancient
manuscript or object; probing into this mystery of this
possession invokes a presence that quickly shadows his
footsteps. As the story reaches its climax, the gentleman
is forced to come face-to-face with the presence, which
either destroys him or from which he escapes at the last
moment. The reality of the encounter is never conclusively
explained and rests entirely on the word of the narrator.
Yet James takes such pains to establish the narrative voice
and an almost documentary sense of place that few readers
can question his reliability. Unlike Poe’s narrator-madmen,
we can never accuse James’ antiquarians of embellishment or
monomania; they seem far too self-aware and rational for
that. What we are left with—as Summers suggests—is a
disturbingly “true” story where even the most fantastic
elements seem to echo with uncanny familiarity.
The first story in the collection, “Canon Alberic’s
Scrap Book,” illustrates his essential technique, a
framework he would continue to develop in subsequent
stories. It opens with an almost Baedeker-like description
of a small French town near the Pyrenees, S. Bertrand de
Comminges, which makes an unfavorable impression upon the
narrator. Thus setting the scene, the narrator introduces
our ‘hero,’ a “Cambridge man” who has come here expressly to
see the local church and “fill a notebook and to use several
dozen plates in the process of describing and photographing
every corner of [it]” (Oxford UP, 1). This seems an
unpromising beginning for a ghost story, and James takes no
pains to dispel this illusion for several pages. Only the
strange behavior of the sacristan, who seems unusually
entranced by a shadowy painting, makes us suspicious. Yet
the Englishman quashes this with his condescending attitude
toward the man and the church, remarking, “Why should a daub
of this kind affect anyone so strongly?...the man must be a
monomaniac; but what was his monomania?” (Oxford UP, 3). In
short, he seems to warn us not to read anything into such
rustic displays; he slaps a diagnosis on the man and moves
on. In the Gothic tales of Shelley, Poe, Stoker, and
others, the main characters are themselves Romantically
inclined, susceptible to the charms—or terrors—of the
supernatural. In James’ stories, they have no such
inclinations. They are too ‘intelligent’ or civilized to be
superstitious, and they are always men of business. They
have a job to do and intend to do it with as little nonsense
as possible.
Ironically, it is his characters’ very focus on
business (in this case, scholarship) that flings them
headlong into the supernatural. Most of them are obsessed
by “the find,” that one priceless manuscript which has
somehow survived the ages and waits, silently, in a
forgotten Gothic church or a dusty university library. In
“Canon Alberic’s Scrap Book,” the scrap-book in question
proves irresistible to Dennistoun (the Englishman). Upon
finding it, the narrator writes,
Such a collection Dennistoun had hardly dreamed of in
his wildest moments. Here were ten leaves from a copy
of Genesis illustrated with pictures, which could not
be later than AD 700…Could it possibly be a fragment of
the copy of Papias One the Words of our Lord which was
known to have existed in as late as the twelfth century
at Nimes? In any case, his mind was made up: that book
must return to Cambridge with him, even if he had to
draw the whole of his balance from the bank and stay at
S. Bertrand till the money came. (Oxford UP, 6)
In a way, this is the imperial project in miniature: the
collection of ‘colonial’ knowledge from distant lands to be
catalogued and displayed in England (and more to the point,
Cambridge). There is probably a bit of sly self-parody
here, as James also spent his time looking for “the find”
that could change history, or at least make his heart skip a
beat. Yet he must have understood the invasive, and even
destructive nature of scholarship (having toyed with being
an archaeologist) which packs off Elgin Marbles and breaks
into centuries-old tombs for contemporary analysis. Surely
all knowledge comes with a price, yet few of James’
characters are aware of this, seeing everything through the
narrow perspective of scholarship. Knowledge, through
collection, becomes a series of numbers and values;
forgotten is the human impulse of power and desire that
created it.
As Dennistoun reads through the scrap-book, he comes
across a strange drawing from the 17th century of King
Solomon and four soldiers confronting a hideous creature
(which has just killed a fifth soldier). As the narrator
explains, I entirely despair of conveying by any words
the impression which this
figure makes upon any one who looks at it. I recollect
once showing the
photograph of the drawing to a Lecturer in Morphology—a
person of, I was
going to say, abnormally sane and unimaginative habits
of mind. He
absolutely refused to be alone for the rest of that
evening and he told me
afterwards that for many nights he had not dared to put
out his light
before going to sleep. (Oxford UP, 8)
James always places us at this slight remove from the
artifact itself: the narrator has only seen a “photograph”
of the original, which at once makes the object more
mysterious and more definitive (since there are now two
eyewitnesses to Dennistoun’s tale). Even this, however, is
sufficient to break down a man of civilization, a “Lecturer
in Morphology,” who should know better than to feel a
moment’s hesitation before a grotesque illustration (another
one of Dennistoun’s “daubs”). Yet Dennistoun, for all his
business, is similarly spooked. As the narrator continues,
“Imagine one of the awful bird-catching spiders of South
America translated into human form and endowed with
intelligence just less than human, and you will have some
faint conception of the terror inspired by those to whom I
have shown the picture: ‘It was drawn from the life’ ”
(Oxford UP, 8). The description is a curious echo of the
spider felled at the hands of McBride, which may well have
seemed ‘intelligent’ due to its size and monstrosity.
Interestingly, James’ terrors fall along the same lines
as his contemporary, J.R.R Tolkein, whose trilogy The Lord of
the Rings (1954) conjures up the ancient and quiet sentient
spider, Shelob. There is something uncanny in their
obsession with spiders, and in James’ case, a very specific
one—the “awful bird-catching spiders of South America.”
James seems to invoke the empire’s fear and fascination with
the dark corners of the colonial world, much as Conrad would
exploit them in his roughly contemporary novel, Heart of
Darkness (1899). Though the outside world could be known and
classified, it rarely accorded with English (or perhaps,
even Western) notions of civilization. It remained somewhat
monstrous, the setting for feverish nightmares and Gothic
romances. It is no coincidence, then, that his narrator—who
seems thoroughly English in his tone and values—reaches for
this description as the epitome of horror. After all, a
17th century artist would hardly know anything about South
American spiders; this is a narrative anachronism which
makes the terror more palpable to his audience. Of course,
there is another sense to the passage that goes beyond
colonial fears of darkness. The creature is in “human
form,” possessing “intelligence just less than human.” What
this means, then, is a beast that is no longer inferior to
man; it possesses “almost” human understanding with
supernatural abilities, as its appellation as a “bird-
catcher” attests. The horror, then, is not something simply
monstrous, but a “man-animal” that holds forbidden powers—
powers the modern world insists are exclusively the domain
of man.
Prehistoric man was much less exclusive in dividing
itself from the natural world, as we can glimpse in the
mysterious cave paintings of Lascaux, among others. What
happened to this symbiotic relationship, where shamans
became fabled beasts and spoke in their language, learning
the secrets of life and death? As Freud writes in his
essay, “The Uncanny,”
The analysis of cases of the uncanny has led us back to
the old animistic view of the universe, a view
characterized by the idea that the world was peopled
with human spirits, by the narcissistic overrating of
one’s own mental processes, by the omnipotence of
thoughts and the technique of magic that relied on it,
by the attribution of carefully graded magical powers
(mana) to alien persons and things, and by all the
inventions with which the unbounded narcissism of that
period of development sought to defend itself against
the unmistakable sanctions of reality. (Penguin, 147)
Though James had little sympathy with Freud’s essential
theories (he famously ridiculed Frazer’s Golden Bough, as
discussed below), the two writers are describing the same
world, albeit from different sides of the mirror. The age
in which nature spoke to man, possessing ‘human’ qualities
and abilities, may have been sublimated by religion and
science, but it still remains, buried under layers and
layers of civilization. That it could easily return, just
as a single image or scent brings back memories of long ago,
is more than possible, it is inevitable. In this story,
James suggests that our “animistic” selves long to return,
just as other bodily desires make themselves known despite a
host of religious and social taboos. The strange creature
haunting Canon Alberic’s scrap-book is that ‘dark’ knowledge
lurking in the shadows of human thought.
In the story, James signals the break with the
“English” world when Dennistoun offers to buy the scrap-
book. The sacristan merely asks for two hundred and fifty
francs, which the collector sees as an absurd sum, even
pressing him to accept a bit more. When the sacristan
refuses, he snaps at the bargain, since “[t]here was really
no possibility of refusing such a chance. The money was
paid, the receipt signed, a glass of win (Vin de Limoux, not
to be recommended) drunk over the transaction, and then the
sacristan seemed to become a new man” (Oxford UP, 8-9). The
Englishman’s arrogance is deftly painted: his conscience
appeased, he gleefully makes the bargain and even sneers
condescendingly over the humble man’s wine. He never
considers why the sacristan might want to rid himself of
such a ‘prize.’ Indeed, even when the sacristan’s daughter
begs him to accept a silver crucifix and chain (without
payment), he can only marvel, “It really seemed as if he had
rendered the father and daughter some service which they
hardly knew how to repay” (Oxford UP, 9). In the world of
the scrap-book, money no longer has any value, and the
greatest gifts are those which are bought with respect and
humility, such as the daughter’s crucifix. Dennistoun,
without immediately realizing it, has stepped into Freud’s
“animistic” past, where mankind spoke with the angels and
demons civilization taught him to suppress.
The climax of the story is repeated almost point-by-
point in most of James’ stories. While alone in his
bedroom, the apparition appears, possessing the tell-tale
signs of James’ monsters: “coarse black hairs…nails rising
from the ends of the fingers…grey, horny, and wrinkled…the
lower jaw was thin…shallow, like a beast’s; teeth showed
behind the black lips…the eyes of fiery yellow against which
the pupils showed black and intense” (Oxford UP, 11). One
wonders whether all of his ‘ghosts’ are the same one, a sort
of perverse imp or trickster figure offering a “warning to
the curious” (to quote his final volume of stories). They
always appear small, hairy, spider-like, and full of hatred.
Yet they are never quite monsters, as James’ narrator
emphasizes: “There was intelligence of a kind in them,
intelligence beyond that of a beast, below that of a man”
(Oxford UP, 11). Are these creatures earlier versions of
ourselves? A haunting reminder of our evolutionary past,
which we have suppressed and hidden under the name of devil,
monster, and spirit?
In a way, the creature’s appearance reminds us of Lucy
Westerna, the former society belle in Stoker’s Dracula
(1898), who becomes Dracula’s first victim. The vampire
Lucy is by equal measures recognizable and horrid, both the
woman they loved and not a woman at all. As Dr. Seward, her
former suitor, writes in his diary: “She seemed like a
nightmare of Lucy as she lay there; the pointed teeth, the
bloodstained, voluptuous mouth—which it made one shudder to
see—the whole carnal and unspiritual appearance, seeming
like a devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet purity” (Bedford,
221). The chief quibble for Seward is the “voluptuousness,”
which makes her appear “carnal and unspiritual,” since the
‘real’ Lucy lacked appetite or cruelty. The vampire hunters
cannot reconcile the Lucy with appetites with the Lucy she
was; she has become a creature with “intelligence beyond
that of a beast, below that of a man,” which can thus be
staked and beheaded, even by her fiancé. Yet both the
vampire and the creature of Canon Alberic’s scrap-book are
related to man: James never explains the genealogy of his
creation, but to see it as conveniently “other” belies the
power it holds over his characters. They recognize it
instinctively and fear to pay the terrible price it demands
for its knowledge.
Dennistoun beats a hasty escape from the creature,
ultimately living to communicate his story to the unnamed
narrator (along with the only surviving photo of the scrap-
book’s monster). Yet his response to the encounter is
completely out of character; or rather, it is in keeping
with a different character. As Dennistoun explained to the
narrator, “He has never been quite certain what words he
said, but he knows that he spoke, that he grasped blindly at
the silver crucifix, that he was conscious of a movement
toward him on the part of the demon, and that he screamed
with the voice of an animal in hideous pain” (Oxford UP,
11). James’ word choice is particularly apt here, as
Dennistoun, by denying the creature’s humanity, himself
suffers a de-evolution. The ‘Cambridge man’ cries out as
“an animal in hideous pain,” which denies him even sub-human
intelligence. Interestingly, he flails blindly for an
iconic symbol that, moments before, had little meaning to
him. This provides another uncanny echo of Dracula, for
Johnathan Harker also accepts a crucifix from a
Transylvanian woman, remarking, “I did not know what to do,
for, as an English Churchman, I have been taught to regard
such things, as in some measure idolatrous” (Bedford, 31).
Despite their teachings, both men cling to these holy
weapons when confronted by the ‘unholy,’ and both become
believers by the end of their story.
Before leaving S. Bertrand, Dennistoun pays for a
“trental of masses” for the recently departed sacristan,
adding, “I had no notion they came so dear” (Oxford UP, 13).
This is an amusing touch, since it suggests not only
Dennistoun’s ignorance of Catholic ritual but of the true
cost of faith itself. It has indeed come “dear” to him,
since his callous appropriation of the scrap-book nearly
cost him his life. Fittingly, the collector of antiquities
deposits the scrap-book at Cambridge and burns his only copy
of the illustration. He believes, but wishes to file it
away under a call number and forget (not unlike the iconic
boxing-up of the Ark scene in Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost
Ark). There it will remain, until another hapless antiquary
stumbles upon it and awakens mankind to the nightmare of
history.
Many of the stories in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary reinforce
this general theme, notably “Number 13,” “Count Magnus,”
“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” and “The
Treasure of Abbot Thomas.” In several of these, we find a
Faustian bargain with the devil that threatens to visit
itself upon the would-be discoverer. In “Count Magnus,”
which moves away from England to the ‘troll haunts’ of
Denmark, an ancient count returns centuries ago from the
“Black Crusade” with forbidden, Eastern knowledge. This
knowledge appears first in another illustration (found by
the antiquary of the story), echoing the uncertainty of the
monster in the scrap-book:
…it would be hard to say whether the artist had
intended it for a man, and
was unable to give the requisite similitude, or whether
it was intentionally made as monstrous as it looked…The
figure was unduly short, and was for the most part
muffled in a hooded garment which swept the ground.
The only part of the form which projected from that
shelter was not shaped like any hand or arm. Mr.
Wraxall compares it to the tentacle of a devil-fish.
(Oxford UP, 52)
Again, we get a familiar shape (the hooded garment, later
referred to as a priest’s cassock) which hides a horrific
shape in its darkness. Most of James’ phantoms emerge from
something familiar: bed sheets in “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll
Come to You, My Lad,” and even a mundane hotel door in
“Number 13.” In the latter story, one of his most
disturbing, a “room 13” appears mysteriously in a Danish
hotel between rooms 12 and 14. In the darkness, shadows
from the room appear on a wall across the way, revealing a
“tall, thin man” moving against a flickering red light.
Only once does Anderson (the antiquary) get a brief glimpse
of its inhabitant, as he stands before the door of room 13:
“an arm came out and clawed at his shoulder. It was clad in
ragged yellowish linen and the bare skin where it could be
seen had long grey hair upon it” (Oxford UP, 39). Both
images blur the lines between man and beast, suggesting that
the distinction is less clear-cut as his narrators (or
readers) would believe.
As with “Count Magnus,” the story hints at a Faustian
bargain, but Anderson is content to wash his hands with it,
much as Dennistoun did with the scrap-book. However, this
brief—and perhaps, quite unsatisfying—explanation is merely
tacked on and belies the story’s purpose. For James,
explanations are not the point; true terror comes in being
“just a little in the dark as to the working of [the
story’s] machinery,” as he famously explained to The
Bookman. The mundane realism of a provincial hotel adds to
this effect, particularly as the appearing/disappearing Room
13 seems so out of place. Anderson begins to question his
sanity, though he knows—as we all know—that not everything
conforms to ‘sense.’ As he remarks, “He almost blushed to
himself at confessing it, but he could not deny that it was
the fact that he was becoming quite nervous about the
question of the existence of Number 13; so much so, that he
approached his room by way of Number 11, in order that he
might not be obliged to pass the door, or the place where
the door ought to be” (Oxford UP, 35). Such behavior is
unbecoming to a man of discipline and science, who finds
himself—blushingly—moved to the quick by ancient
superstitions regarding a forbidden number. Yet these
numbers and their dark associations have always remained
with us, as the hotel’s manager admits: “Quantities of
stories they have among them of men who have slept in a
Number 13 and never been the same again, or lost their best
customers, or—one thing and another” (Oxford UP, 34).
James also uses the language of dreams in subtle ways
throughout the stories, less as a plot device than as a way
to underscore the reality of his character’s experiences.
For them, dreams become yet another antiquarian volume to be
discovered and translated, revealing a world that exists,
quite comfortably, within the familiar corners of ‘home.’
In “Lost Hearts,” the young boy taken in by his strange,
reclusive uncle begins dreaming of a locked door in a
forgotten corner of the house. As he gazes through the door
he finds “a figure which lay in the bath…inexpressibly thin
and pathetic, of a dusty leaden colour, enveloped in a
shroud-like garment, the thin lips crooked into a faint and
dreadful smile, the hands pressed tightly over the region of
the heart” (Dover, 29). While this seems another of James’
“man-beasts,” in this case the apparition is even more
familiar: the boy recognizes her as the little girl who
disappeared from the house before he arrived. Unusually, we
also learn why she has become so horrific, as her uncle has
removed her still-beating heart to gain immortality. Though
the boy is no antiquary (one of the very few who isn’t), the
dream becomes his book, whose mysterious language spells out
the horror of human greed. His uncle, a seemingly
philanthropic, if eccentric gentleman, is revealed to be the
true monster of the work, turning children into creatures
(like vampires) who return as spirits hungry for life and
revenge.
A similar episode occurs in “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come
to You, My Lad,” when the narrator uses his own dreams to
corroborate the professor’s experience. Just before the
professor is attacked by the ‘bed-sheet’ apparition, the
narrator suggests that we have all, at some point, known his
fear of being watched by inanimate objects:
There had been a movement, he was sure, in the empty
bed on the opposite side of the room…There was a
rustling and shaking: surely more than any rat could
cause. I can figure to myself something of the
Professor’s bewilderment and horror, for I have in a
dream thirty years back seen the same thing happen; but
the reader will hardly, perhaps, imagine how dreadful
it was to him to see a figure suddenly sit up in what
he had known was an empty bed. (Oxford UP, 75)
Though a small narrative moment, James judges it carefully.
It provides another layer of corroboration, not merely of
the narrator, but of the readers themselves. For surely, we
have all suspected sheets of moving, walls of speaking, and
other ‘mundane’ terrors that find fullest expression in our
dreams. Perhaps this is the true repository of all the
‘lost knowledge’ of the ages, stored away against time and
thought in our dreams—a collective, if forgotten,
Alexandria. This leaves no doubt that James’ stories are
‘real’ and not delusions or opium fantasies of the narrator.
James wanted his readers to truly see this world and chart
its familiar boundaries, which do not exist in ancient times
or in ruined castles, but in forgettable streets and hotel
rooms. As James admitted, “the setting [of a ghost story]
should be familiar and the majority of the characters and
their talk such as you may meet or hear any day. A ghost
story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or
thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or
poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of
saying to himself, ‘If I’m not very careful, something of
this kind may happen to me!’” (Oxford UP, 337). Our dreams
know that the horrors exist here, and not in the past, and
invite us to explore the library—and open the books.
More Ghost Stories: Perfecting His Art
The book that immediately followed Ghost Stories of an
Antiquary departed little from his general format, yet
expanded its scope and narrative voice. If the first
stories were based in New Year’s Eve amusements, the later
stories seem more consciously ‘literary,’ particularly since
his audience had grown. No longer writing solely for the
Chitchat Club, James could experiment with the conventions
of the ghost story as well as pay more conscious homage to
his literary idol, Sheridan Le Fanu. Though his famous
stories appear in the first volume, two of his greatest
masterpieces appear in the second: “The Tracdate Middoth”
and “Casting the Runes.” Each story, though as horrifying
as anything found in Ghost Stories from an Antiquary, add a unique
touch of humor to counterbalance the supernatural. Indeed,
in many of the later stories, there is a slight tongue-in-
cheek element which becomes James’ unmistakable thumbprint.
James clearly enjoyed writing these stories, as they allowed
him to be occasionally arch and satiric—not qualities
typically associated with a diplomatic Provost of King and
Eton’s. Autobiographical elements creep up more and more
frequently in the later stories, as well as James’
invectives against modern society and its faddish tastes.
Perhaps the most revealing of his later stories is
“Casting the Runes,” published in More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
(1911). The story is notable not only for the unique
thumbprints of James’ profession, but the sly manner in
which he frames the story. Here there is no antiquary, per
se, but a scholar (Dunning) who rejects a paper submitted to
the “Council of the _____ Association” entitled “The Truth
of Alchemy.” The story opens, quite cleverly, with three
responses from the Academy: the first a curt rejection to
the author, followed by two additional letters refusing to
reveal the identity of the reviewer. James adds subtle
touches of humor as the writer, trying to maintain a
professional tone throughout, grows increasingly weary of
the author’s haughty demands. An academic on either side of
the submission table can relate to such remarks as, “Please
allow me to assure you that the fullest consideration was
given to the draft…No personal question (it can hardly be
necessary for me to add) can have had the slightest
influence on the decision of the Council…it is impossible
for him to communicate the name of any person or persons to
whom the draft of Mr. Karswell’s paper may have been
submitted (Oxford UP, 135).
James adds to the sheer fun of the piece by cutting to
a conversation between the Secretary of the society and his
wife as they discuss this impossible author. The Secretary
condescendingly dismisses him as “a person of wealth, his
address is Lufford Abbey, Warwickshire, and he’s an
alchemist, apparently, and wants to tell us all about it…
except that I don’t want to meet him for the next week or
two” (Oxford UP, 136). His wife calls the reviewer “poor
Mr. Dunning,” as she fears what would happen if the author
learned his identity; the Secretary agrees “yes…I dare say
he would be poor Mr. Dunning then” (Oxford UP, 136). So
far, this story resembles P.G. Wodehouse more than M.R.
James, which is exactly the point. James takes immense
pleasure in paying homage to a fellow writer (whom he deeply
admired) while finding the raw materials for a ghost story
in the minutiae of his antiquarian profession.
The story continues in a polyphonic vein, as if the
narrator was merely arranging a series of newspaper
clippings together to reconstruct the tale (much as Mina
Harker does in Dracula). This narrator departs from his
earlier technique, as he is neither a participant in the
story nor someone who heard the tale afterward; indeed, “he”
has no tangible existence whatsoever. Yet he casts a
knowing wink at his audience, particularly when glancing
over exposition with the aside, “It is not necessary to tell
in further detail the steps by which Henry Harrington and
Dunning were brought together” (Oxford UP, 148). It is a
clever Gothic touch, of the narrative self-consciously
telling a tale, amused by the twists and turns of the genre—
yet anxious to subvert them. The narrator proves a
necessary foil to the skeptical nature of Karswell’s
critics, notably Dunning himself. Indeed, Dunning seems to
bear more than a passing resemblance to James himself, as
both were experts on ancient and occult lore, and James must
have written his share of rejections to would-be scholars.
In a telling passage, Dunning and his friend Harrington are
discussing Karswell’s book (on alchemy and the occult),
leading to Dunning’s exclamation that,
It was written in no style at all—split infinitives,
and every sort of thing that makes an Oxford gorge
rise. Then there was nothing that the man didn’t
swallow: mixing up classical myths, and stories out of
the Golden Legend with reports of savage customs of
today—all very proper, no doubt, if you know how to use
them, but he didn’t: he seemed to put the Golden Legend
and the Golden Bough exactly on a par and to believe
both: a pitiable exhibition, in short. (Oxford UP, 150)
The two works referred to here touched James’ scholarship
personally. The Golden Legend was a medieval manuscript which
collected lives of the saints, legends, and other religious-
supernatural accounts. To James, this was a legitimate
historic and scholarly document, quite at odds with Frazer’s
The Golden Bough (1890-1915), a monumental study of mythology,
religion, and folklore which more or less laid the
foundations for comparative mythology and cultural
anthropology, as well as influencing both Freud and Jung’s
scholarship.
Dunning’s scorn for The Golden Bough is echoed in 1917
when James ‘rejected’ a paper by Jane Harrison (pioneering
feminist and scholar of Greek mythology) which attempted a
similar symbiosis of myth and culture. As he writes,
I regret to see that a researcher of her experience can
allow herself to make public crude and inconsequential
speculations…which go far to justify those who deny to
Comparative Mythology the name and dignity of a
science…one of the worst services that anyone
responsible for the direction of young students can do
them is to encourage them to make the subject of
dissertations, or to propound any theory concerning it.
(Simpson, 9)
In a sense, this captures James’ essential theory about
scholarship and the supernatural. He could believe privately
in the possibility of ghosts and medieval legends, but felt
it gauche to use accepted scholarship to legitimize such
musings as a scholarly field. He instinctively shrank from
allying himself with amateur ‘scholars’ such as
Spiritualists, Atavists, etc. In this James reflected the
establishment views of his day, though he may have equally
been preserving the reputation of King’s (or later, Eton)
from his popular tales. Either way, we sense James’
distaste for the fin de sicle atmosphere of his times, as well
as the emerging Modernist experiments after the First World
War.
However, James never wrote out-and-out autobiography,
which he felt was anathema to the demands of art. If he
truly had a bone to pick with the Aleister Crowleys of the
world, he would have exposed Karswell as a fraud in a wicked
satire. No such satire occurs in “Casting the Runes,” where
Karswell, does, indeed, command tremendous powers. What
follows is James’ most dramatic story, echoing and at times
surpassing the break-neck speed of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes
tales. The final pages stop the heart not from hideous
spider-men but from sheer suspense: Dunning manages to
replace the curse (a paper Karswell slipped to him days ago)
in Karswell’s neglected ticket-case before the latter can
miss it. When he returned to the train, the three sit in
stone silence waiting for the inevitable denouement:
Even in that few moments that remained—moments of tense
anxiety, for they knew not to what a premature finding
of the paper might lead—both men noticed that the
carriage seemed to darken about them and to grow
warmer; that Karswell was fidgety and oppressed; that
he draw the heap of loose coats near to him and cast it
back as if it repelled him; and that he then sat
upright and glanced anxiously at both. (Oxford UP, 155)
Lest the reader suspect that it was all a psychological
ruse, we learn later that Karswell was killed on the spot by
a fallen stone from a church in Abbeville. The witty,
tongue-in-cheek tale ends in absolute proof of the
supernatural. Consistently, there is no misunderstanding,
no unreliable narration in James. He has documented the
story too carefully for us to laugh at Karswell. Indeed,
the narrator’s previous humor now seems cold and out-of-
place, like a joke at the expense of corpses in the grave.
This aspect of carefully documented—indeed, scholarly—
narration stands out as James’ finest achievement. While we
might not be taken-in today, readers of the first volumes
spent long nights debating the plausibility of his spider-
men and alchemists. In a letter James received in 1905, a
fan wrote him with a request to dispel the mystery once and
for all:
Please pardon me for writing to ask you a question. We
have been reading your book Ghost Stories from an Antiquary.
I live in Linconshire—not so very far from Aswarby Hall
[where the second story, “Lost Hearts,” takes place]—
but my question has nothing to do with that at all. It
is—are these stories real? gathered from antiquarian
research, or are they your own manufacture and
imagination on antiquarian lines? Please, assure me,
if it is possible to you [sic] to do so. I have a real
reason for asking. (Cox, 142)
This letter reveals two important aspects: first, the writer
felt that the invocation of Aswarby Hall was uncomfortably
close to reality. Surely James wouldn’t invoke such a well-
known place without some authoritative evidence (he was a
scholar, after all!). Second, that the story touched on
fears or suspicions that most people kept buried deep, in
all likelihood denied until they opened his book. The
writer’s plea that “I have a real reason for asking” is
either touching or alarming. Did he want assurance that it
was all made-up? So the world, which for a moment now
seemed entirely out of whack, could go on purring and
humming in the usual order? Or more desperately, had he
seen—or dreamed—of similar events himself? If James
responded, he undoubtedly let the gentleman off the hook
with his usual remarks about the ‘effectiveness of ghost
stories.’ Even so, one wonders if he could accept this
explanation, particularly when he re-read a work like
“Casting the Runes.”
Exorcising the Ghost: The Final Years
The war briefly interrupted his literary efforts,
though James continued pretty much where he left off with
the publication of A Thin Ghost and Others in 1919. However, to
say that the walls of King’s shielded him from the terrors
of WWI—as some of his contemporaries did—would be to mistake
the man for the antiquaries of his stories. Like many
artists, James cared little for political reality,
preferring the eternal truths found in history and
literature. Yet he realized the terrible cost of the war,
all the more so as many of his students never returned from
the trenches. Rupert Brooke was the most notable loss,
though many other students, friends, and colleagues perished
or were declared missing. Indeed, his dearest friend of the
war years, Gordon Carey, fought with the 8th Battalion Rifle
Brigade, and was one of only 280 men (out of 760) to survive
(Cox, 190). Writing to Carey in 1918, James admitted,
“when I don’t plunge myself into some subject quite
unconnected with the present I am for ever thinking of what
is going on with you, and that dries my pen and
incapacitates” (Cox, 194). The retreat into ghost stories
and scholarship warded off more desperate feelings, much as
Tolkein diverted himself with creating the languages of
Middle Earth while on the front.
The years after World War I saw the publication of
several more volumes: following A Thin Ghost, he released the
children’s book, The Five Jars (1922, channeling Kipling and
George MacDonald), A Warning to the Curious (1925), and finally in
1935, The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James. His later stories
lacked something of the inspiration and immediacy of the
first two volumes, possibly because of how drastically the
world had changed. James had no sympathy with modernism and
may have felt his audience had moved on. He spent his final
years editing volumes of his favorite authors, notably Hans
Christian Andersen and Sheridan Le Fanu, as well as
reflecting on his academic upbringing in Eton and Kings (1926).
This interesting volume is less an autobiography than a
string of colorful—if faded—anecdotes, perhaps appreciated
best by a schoolmate of James’ generation. Many
contemporaries had little sympathy with this brand of
nostalgia, notably Lytton Stratchey (Emiment Victorians), who
dismissed it as “vapid little anecdotes and nothing more.
Only remarkable as showing the extraordinary impress an
institution can make on an adolescent mind. It’s odd that
the Provost of Eton should still be aged sixteen. A life
without a jolt” (Cox, 220). However unfair this assessment,
it does contain a grain of truth: James held firm to the
principles of his youth, and lived his entire life as a
“child” of Eton and King’s. That he never left testifies
less to a “life without a jolt,” but a life dedicated to the
very ideals of academia; not isolation, but introspection
and intellectual discovery. James died in 1936 after a
lingering illness, yet in his mind, remained the same
antiquary of his youth. His final story, A Vignette (1935,
published posthumously in 1936), is a graceful summing up of
his eternal theme: that the past remains buried in the
forgotten byways of modern life, merely awaiting re-
discovery by curious eyes. A single bed sheet or faded
manuscript can obliterate time itself and remind us of our
collective past: spellbound by the mysteries of the
universe, and still frightened of the dark.
Critical Fortunes
Critical indifference to James’ work remained firmly in
place during his life, despite an occasional voice of
dissent in the last decade of his life. Indeed, the most
authoritative discussion of his work comes from James
himself, who wrote short articles discussing his process—and
the genre itself—for The Bookman, The Touchstone, and the
Spectator. This is a rich source for any discussion of the
ghost stories, as the articles not only reveal James’
technique, but also serve up its limitations. In these
articles, James firmly set down the unshakable criteria for
the successful ghost story: a realistic setting, characters
drawn from every-day life, and a “slight haze of distance…
‘Thirty years ago,’ ‘Not long before the war,’ are very
proper openings” (Oxford UP, 339). He writes somewhat
dismissively of Walpole and Radcliffe’s Gothic works of
yesteryear, which always inhabited ruined castles and
Italian settings. For James, true horror resided in one’s
own backyard, conjuring up a past not far removed from
‘modern’ existence. His horror was a vague, sinister
presence that could not be tied to anything tangible such as
ghosts, vampires, or devils. It simply remained uncanny,
glimpsed solely in a hairy spider-leg darting out of the
shadows.
Surprising, then, was James’ prohibition against sex
(or love, for that matter) in a ghost story. As he writes,
“Reticence may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from
the artistic point of view I am sure it is a sound one…there
is much blatancy in a lot of recent stories. They drag in
sex, too, which is a fatal mistake; sex is tiresome enough
in the novels; in a ghost story, or as the backbone of a
ghost story, I have no patience with it” (Oxford UP, 347).
As James’ biographer, Michael Cox notes in his Introduction
to his collected stories, “Women figure rarely in James’s
stories, for this is a world where sex is not” (Oxford UP,
xxiv). Growing up between Eton and Kings, James’ world was
understandably masculine, full of male pursuits and
companionship. The few women we find in his stories have
relatively minor roles, and are never sexual creatures.
Only in “The Tracdate Middoth” do we find a love interest,
though this is scarcely hinted at before the marriage is
consummated in the final lines. Sex remained James’
greatest fear, one he could only hint at in his stories, and
then only unconsciously. How else can we understand why
James’ characters are often assaulted in their beds, finding
hairy mouths or arms under their pillows—or bed sheets that
attack them outright? His inability to discuss sex in an
explicit manner led him to reject most Gothic works of this
time; even Dracula was summarily dismissed as “a book with
very good ideas in it, but—to be vulgar—the butter is spread
far too thick. Excess is the fault here” (Oxford UP, 349).
A critical analysis of James’ sexuality, particularly as it
manifests itself throughout the tales, is only beginning to
be explored by contemporary critics.
The first article devoted solely to his stories
appeared just two years before his death (1934), when Mary
Butts (the noted Modernist writer) published “The Art of
M.R. James” in London Mercury. Given James’ notorious
disinterest in modernism and its adherents (even worse, she
was a follower of Crowley), he snubbed the review. Yet
Butts appreciates the essential qualities of his fiction, in
particular noting its ability to evoke the lost worlds of
pagan belief. As she writes, somewhat rhapsodically,
I read, rapt with terror and felicity; and found in the
tale more than the story to excite me. For it had made
me aware of nature and my own environment.... There was
something else too - though this, I suspect, was on a
later reading - it filled my mind with new things. What
were 'the religious beliefs of the late pagans'? What
were the Mysteries? The Neo-Platonists? The Orphics? If
I know some of the answers now, it was here that I
first asked the questions. I was utterly fascinated.
(Duffy, M.R. James Newsletter 4)
Like many readers before her and since, Butts found the
stories too authentic, too disturbing to be the creation of
any one author (much less the conservative Provost of
King’s). Following this surmise, she speculates whether or
not James had early contact with an “elemental,” allowing
him insight into arcane knowledge. James’ reaction must
have been amusing, though his only public response was to
question the title of her article: as he had never intended
to create ‘art,’ he questioned her ability to discern it.
Fantastic she may have been, yet Butts’ sympathies were
shared by other writers of the occult, notably H.P.
Lovecraft, who praised James in his article, “Supernatural
Horror in Fiction” published initially in 1927 in the short-
lived magazine, The Recluse. Not surprisingly, James found
the essay distasteful, perhaps shrinking from truths he
dared not express in public—and which fellow-authors should
conceal in fiction. Nevertheless, Lovecraft also proves
remarkably insightful on James’ work, noting that his
horrors are always “touched before [they are] seen” (H.P.
Lovecraft Archive). James must have shuddered at this
observation, since many of his horrors are indeed ‘touched’
in the bed sheets, in descriptions that buzz with sexual
innuendo. Lovecraft goes on to praise his “intelligent and
scientific knowledge of human nerves and feelings,” which
taken together with the “laconic unfolding of abnormal
events in adroit order is amply sufficient to produce the
desired effect of cumulative horror” (H.P. Lovecraft Archive).
Not surprisingly, Lovecraft singles out “Count Magnus” for
special praise, as it is perhaps the most Lovecraftian of
all the stories: the terrible presence carried back from the
East, lying in wait for the unsuspecting antiquary, seems
lifted straight from the Cthulu mythos. In closing,
Lovecraft makes the definitive statement that “Dr. James,
for all his light touch, evokes fright and hideousness in
their most shocking forms; and will certainly stand as one
of the few really creative masters in his darksome province”
(H.P. Lovecraft Archive). Whether or not James aspired to be one
of the leading lights in a “darksome province” is debatable,
yet the article remains clear-headed in its prophetic claims
for his ‘art.’
Sadly, Lovecraft’s essay found little distribution
(though he revised it in the 30’s), and was not taken up by
any critics or writers for several decades. Only in the
80’s did James’ works see a revival, with two biographies,
numerous articles, and new editions of the stories following
one upon the other. Two men are chiefly responsible for
this critical revival: Michael Cox, who not only edited the
complete stories for Oxford World’s Classics, but penned a
fine biography of the author, M.R. James: An Informal Portrait
(1983), and S.T. Joshi, who has written extensively of James
and edited the works in the rival Penguin Classics series.
Joshi is also the editor of the first critical collection of
James articles, Warnings to the Curious: A Sheaf of Criticism on M.R. James
, which contains not only Butts and Lovecraft’s
contributions, but the most up-to-date criticism of his
stories. Luckily, this resurgence has restored M.R. James
to a respected place in the Gothic canon alongside Le Fanu,
Stoker, Lovecraft, Jackson, and Stephen King. Gradually, it
can only be hoped, his name will appear as a substantial
minor figure in British literature itself, perhaps occupying
a few pages in an anthology sandwiched between Woolf and
Joyce? A joke at his expense, perhaps, but a fitting
testament to M.R. James, who for all his antiquarian
pursuits, was a profoundly modern author.
Works Cited
Bleiler, E.F. “Introduction to the Dover Edition of Ghost
Stories of an
Antiquary.” Mineola: Dover Publications, 1971.
Cox, Michael. M.R. James: An Informal Portrait. Oxford: Oxford
Paperbacks,
1986.
Duffy, Steve. Review of “The Journals of Mary Butts” edited
by Nathalie
Blondel.” The Ghost & Scholars: M.R. James Newsletter. Issue 4
(August
2003).
James, M.R. Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories. ed. Michael
Cox.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
James, M.R. “Preface to More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.” .
Casting the
Runes and Other Ghost Stories. ed. Michael Cox. Oxford:
Oxford UP,
1987.
James, M.R. “Some Remarks on Ghost Stories.” Casting the
Runes and Other
Ghost Stories. ed. Michael Cox. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
James, M.R. Eton and King’s: Reflections, Mostly Trivial: 1875-1925.
London:
Williams & Norgate, Ltd., 1926.
Lovecraft, H.P. “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” The
H.P. Lovecraft Archive.
<hplovecraft.com.> Accessed 2 Aug 2012.
Simpson, Jacqueline. “ “The Rules of Folklore” in the Ghost
Stories of M.R.
James.” Folklore , Vol. 108, (1997), pp. 9-18
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Ed. John Paul Riquelme. Boston:
Bedford St. Martin’s.
2002.
Summers, Montague. Review of “The Supernatural in Modern
English Fiction”
by Dorothy Scarborough. The Modern Language Review , Vol.
13, No. 3
(July 1918), pp. 346-351
Tolkein, J.R.R. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.”
The Beowulf Poet: A
Collection of Critical Essays. ed. Donald K. Fry. New Jersey:
Prentice
Hall, 1968.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Story Collections
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. London: Edward Arnold, 1904.
More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. London: Edward Arnold, 1911.
A Thin Ghost and Others. London: Edward Arnold, 1919.
A Warning to the Curious. London: Edward Arnold, 1925.
The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James. London: Edward Arnold,
1931.
Other Works
The Five Jars. London: Edward Arnold, 1922.
Eton and King’s: Reflections, Mostly Trivial: 1875-1925. London:
Williams & Norgate, Ltd., 1926.
“Some Remarks on Ghost Stories.” The Bookman (Dec, 1929).
“Stories I Have Tried to Write.” The Touchstone 2 (Nov, 1929).
Hans Christian Anderson: Forty Stories. London: Faber & Faber, 1930.
“Ghosts—Treat Them Gently!” Evening News (April 1931).
“The Malice of Inanimate Objects.” The Masquerade, I (June
1933)
“A Vignette.” London Mercury, 35 (Nov.1936).
Modern Editions
Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories. ed. Michael Cox. Oxford:
