by M. R. James
It is here, I believe, that James’s ghost stories, his antiquarian scholarship, and his religion become inextricably fused. Shane Leslie, a longtime friend of James, made the seemingly startling remark that “his belief in ghosts marched parallel with his religion,” 11 although he does not elucidate the statement. Another friend, Stephen Gaselee, has portrayed James’s religion as follows:He was a man of simple and deep religious feeling. Learned biblical scholar as he was, he did not think much of the “higher criticism,” at any rate when it was destructive; and I have heard him say that the biblical documents were subjected to criticism not only unfair in itself, but of a kind that no one would ever have dreamed of applying to the secular literary remains of antiquity.12
That last phrase is of the highest importance; for although James may not have been a dogmatic or fundamentalist Christian, his hostility to the intellectual ferment of his time in matters of religion—the shock-waves following Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859); the “Higher Criticism” that showed the evolution of biblical texts over centuries and made it increasingly unlikely that they were direct revelations from God; the gradual but inexorable shift of intellectual opinion from unquestioned piety to agnosticism and even atheism—is evident. In his ghost stories, James uses such devices as occultism (the perversion of religion into impious magic and sorcery) and the misuse or misconstrual of biblical passages as a warning on the dangers of straying from orthodoxy. The Bible’s own warnings on the dangers of being tempted by Satan are so frequent that it can easily lead the weak or the vicious—such as James Wilson, the redoubtable landowner of “Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance”—into becoming one of the Devil’s party.
So much attention has been given to the technique of James’s ghost stories that insufficient attention has been paid to their deeper meanings. This is particularly the case with James’s ghosts. H. P. Lovecraft wrote pungently:
In inventing a new type of ghost, he has departed considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition; for where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and hairy—a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and man—and usually touched before it is seen.13
All this is very entertaining and, indeed, by no means off the mark; but Lovecraft fails to probe the true symbolism of James’s ghosts. They are “lean, dwarfish, and hairy” because they thus embody the primitivism that stands in stark contrast to the learned, rational, skeptical antiquarians who, for James, represented the pinnacle of human achievement. It is not insignificant that Somerton, in “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,” “screamed out . . . like a beast” when encountering the horror in the well: contact with the primitive reduces even the most civilized to the level of the subhuman.
Related to this whole motif is James’s array of lower-class characters. The fractured and dialectical English in which these characters speak or write is, in one sense, a reflection of James’s well-known penchant for mimicry; but it cannot be denied that there is a certain element of malice in his relentless exhibition of their intellectual failings. The illiteracy of Somerton’s valet in “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”; the malapropisms of the bailiff, Mr. Cooper, in “Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance”; the ignorance of the hapless librarian in “The Tractate Middoth”—all these and other characters are made figures of fun, the butt of jests from a man whose own learning is unassailable. And yet, they occupy pivotal places in the narrative: by representing a kind of middle ground between the scholarly protagonists and the aggressively savage ghosts, they frequently sense the presence of the supernatural more quickly and more instinctively than their excessively learned betters can bring themselves to do.
Another aspect of James’s characterization is his women characters—or, rather, their virtual absence from his tales. Even in his own lifetime James, the lifelong bachelor, suffered from accusations of misogyny: in 1896 he opposed the granting of degrees to women at Cambridge, and in 1916-17 he attacked with unwonted viciousness a paper on comparative religion by Jane Harrison in the Classical Review that he regarded as disrespectful to Scripture. Several women appear to have pursued James for his hand in marriage, but he resisted each time. James’s defenders point to his cordial friendships with any number of women, notably Gwendolen McBryde, the widow of his friend James McBryde; but the world of James’s fiction is as devoid of significant female characters as H. P. Lovecraft’s. This need not be regarded as a flaw: James was not writing mimetic fiction that claimed to present a well-rounded portrayal of society at large. He was writing of what he knew—the world of (male) antiquarian scholarship. And yet, the sardonic view of marriage that we find in such a story as “The Rose Garden,” or the annoying Lady Waldrop in “Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance,” seems to go a bit beyond mere whimsy. What, then, are we to make of the fact that several of the ghosts in James’s tales create fear through a hideous parody of affection? Who can forget the thing in the well in “The Treasure of Abbott Thomas,” which “slipped forward on to my chest, and put its arms around my neck” (James’s emphasis)?
And yet, it may well be said that for James, as Austin Warren has observed, “It is places, not persons, which are haunt-able.” 14 In this sense, “Number 13,” otherwise as far as possible from the standard “antiquarian ghost story” that James initiated, is prototypical in its display of a haunted hotel room. Although the locus of horror in James is chiefly situated in cathedrals, abbeys, and other sites where centuries of religious tradition have engendered an inevitable backlash of unorthodoxy among a select band of heretics, horror can also manifest itself in any locale where the long reach of history has had free play—a rose garden, a hedge maze, even a library. The mundanity of these settings is vital to James’s methodology of the ghost story, which (as he wrote in the preface to his second collection) is designed to elicit the reader’s awareness that “If I’m not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!”
M. R. James would no doubt have been surprised at the literary legacy he fostered. This legacy is exhibited not so much in the work of those friends and colleagues who tended to produce uninspired pastiches of his style and manner—E. G. Swain (The Stoneground Ghost Tales, 1912), Arthur Gray (Tedious Brief Tales of Granta and Gramarye, 1919), R. H. Malden (Nine Ghosts, 1942), A. N. L. Munby (The Alabaster Hand, 1949)—as in certain other writers who used the antiquarian ghost story as the springboard for imaginative creations of their own. The three Benson brothers—A. C., E. F., and R. H.—all wrote supernatural tales, and E. F. was present at the legendary meeting of the Chitchat Society in 1893 when James read his first tales;15 but the tales of E. F. Benson, the best of the three, although not written with quite the meticulous precision of James’s, tend to be of broader range and theme. It can by no means be claimed that such writers as Walter de la Mare, L. P. Hartley, Oliver Onions, L. T. C. Rolt, Russell Kirk, or Robert Aickman are in any sense merely imitators of James; indeed, one suspects that the greater emphasis that many of these writers place upon the psychological analysis of ghostly phenomena, especially as they affect the victim of them, is a direct result of James’s apparent lack of interest in this regard. In any event, one would like to think that James—whose views of his predecessors and contemporaries in the realm of supernatural fiction were not always charitable—would have taken some pride in the tradition he instigated, for all his deprecation of his own work as merely an exercise in pleasant shudder-coining. There is much to be said for the scholarly reserve, in-direction, and subtlety of James’s tales, so strikingly in contrast to the loud, brash, and frequently vulgar effusions that clutter the supernatural field today. That his stories have survived a century or more while those of his noisier successors seem destined to lapse into merited oblivion should itself be regarded as “a warning to the curious.”
Suggestions for Further Reading
A. PRIMARY
James’s ghost stories were issued in four slim
volumes published in the United Kingdom by Edward Arnold: Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary (1904); More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911); A Thin Ghost and Others (1919); and A Warning to the Curious (1925). Only the third volume appeared in the United States during James’s lifetime (Longmans, Green, 1919). The complete contents of these volumes (aside from their prefaces) were included in The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James (Edward Arnold, 1931), a volume that has been frequently reprinted under various titles (e.g., The Penguin Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James [Penguin, 1984]). This omnibus also includes five additional stories along with a new preface and the essay “Stories I Have Tried to Write.” The Five Jars (Edward Arnold, 1922) is a children’s fantasy; it was not published in the United States in James’s lifetime. James also prepared a notable edition of the stories of Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery (George Bell & Sons, 1923). His autobiography, Eton and King’s, was published by Williams & Norgate in 1926.
There are numerous selections of James’s ghost stories, the most notable being Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, edited by Michael Cox (Oxford University Press/World’s Classics, 1987), with substantial introduction and notes. Curiously, the 2002 reprint removes Cox’s introduction and notes and substitutes an introduction by Michael Chabon. Cox has written another weighty introduction to another collection, The Ghost Stories of M. R. James (Oxford University Press, 1986). Peter Haining’s M. R. James: The Book of the Supernatural (Foul-sham, 1979; published in the United States as M. R. James: The Book of Ghost Stories [Stein & Day, 1982]) contains a wealth of obscure writings by James and other ancillary material. Rosemary Pardoe’s compilation, The Fenstanton Witch and Others (Haunted Library, 1999), is a valuable assemblage of James’s ghost-story fragments and other writings.
In a class by itself is A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings of M. R. James, edited by Barbara and Christopher Roden (Ash-Tree Press, 2001). It not only contains the complete contents of all four collections of ghost stories, but also all the uncollected tales (including some fragments), The Five Jars, his various writings on the ghost story, and several interesting works of criticism. The works by James are annotated (Michael Cox’s annotations from Casting the Runes are included for the stories in that volume), although the notes (not excluding Cox’s) are not written with quite the scholarly rigor that one might expect; there are also a few errors and omissions. But on the whole, it is an admirable compilation, and it is unfortunate that it was limited to one thousand copies and is now out of print.
It is surprising that little has been done with the abundance of James’s surviving letters. Gwendolen McBryde issued a charming if expurgated volume of James’s letters to her as Letters to a Friend (Edward Arnold, 1956), but little of his other correspondence has seen print.
James’s scholarly work divides broadly into several discrete categories. One group in his descriptive catalogues of manuscripts. He catalogued the manuscripts of all the colleges of Cambridge University, including Jesus (1895), Sidney Sussex (1895), Peterhouse (1899), Trinity (1900-04; 4 vols.), Emmanuel (1904), Christ’s (1905), Clare (1905), Pembroke (1905), Queen’s (1905), Gonville and Caius (1907-08; 2 vols.), Trinity Hall (1907), Corpus Christi (1909-13; 7 parts), Magdalene (1909), St. John’s (1913), and St. Catherine’s (1925). Other catalogues include: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Eton College (1895); A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Fitzwilliam Museum (1895); A Descriptive Catalogue of Fifty Manuscripts from the Collection of Henry Yates Thompson (1898); The Manuscripts in the Library at Lambeth Palace (1900; rev. ed. [with Claude Jenkins] 1930-32, 5 parts); The Manuscripts of Westminster Abbey (with J. A. Robinson) (1908); A Descriptive Catalogue of the Latin Manuscripts in the John Rylands Library at Man-chester (1921; 2 vols.); Bibliotheca Pepysiana (1923); A Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts in the University Library, Aberdeen (1932); The Bohun Manuscripts (with E. G. Millar) (1936).
Another group in his editions of and treatises on Biblical apocrypha and apocalyptic works: The Gospel According to Peter, and the Revelation of Peter: Two Lectures (with J. A. Robinson) (1892); Apocrypha Anecdota (two series, 1893, 1897); The Trinity College Apocalypse (1909); The Second Epistle General of Peter and the General Epistle of Jude (1912); Old Testament Legends (1913); The Lost Apocrypha of the Old Testament (1920); The Apocalypse in Latin and French (1922); The Apocryphal New Testament (1924); Latin Infancy Gospels (1927); The Apocalypse in Art (1931); The Dublin Apocalypse (1932); The New Testament (with Delia Lyttelton) (1934-36; 4 vols.).
James also prepared editions and translations of works of medieval Latin and other languages: The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich by Thomas of Monmouth (with Augustus Jessopp) (1896); Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium (edition, 1914; translation, 1923); The Biblical Antiquities of Philo (1917); Hans Christian Andersen, Forty Stories, translated from the Danish (1930).
More general discussions of libraries, manuscripts, and associated matters include The Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover (1903); The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts (1919); Abbeys (1925); Suffolk and Norfolk (1930).
James prolifically contributed scholarly articles and reviews to many journals, most notably to the Classical Review, the Eton College Chronicle, the English Historical Review, the Journal of Theological Studies, and the Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society.
The most comprehensive bibliography of James’s work can now be found in “A Bibliography of the Published Works of Montague Rhodes James” by Nicholas Rogers, in The Legacy of M. R. James, ed. Lynda Dennison (Shaun Tyas, 2001), pp. 239-67. It supersedes the bibliographies by A. F. Scholfield in S. G. Lubbock’s memoir (1939) and in Richard William Pfaff’s biography (1980), for which see below.
B. SECONDARY
Of the two biographies of James, Richard William Pfaff’s Montague Rhodes James (Scolar Press, 1980) exhaustively and meticulously treats James’s scholarly writings. Michael Cox’s M. R. James: An Informal Portrait (Oxford University Press, 1983) is a good complement, providing details on James’s personal life (with liberal quotations of unpublished letters) and valuable information on the ghost stories. S. G. Lubbock’s A Memoir of Montague Rhodes James (Cambridge University Press, 1939) is an affecting tribute. The Legacy of M. R. James, ed. Lynda Dennison (Shaun Tyas, 2001), presents papers from the 1995 Cambridge Symposium on James and is exclusively devoted to James’s scholarly work.
Critical analysis of James’s ghost stories has not been produced in great abundance. H. P. Lovecraft’s warmly appreciative pages on James in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (Recluse, 1927) were read by James himself and received with mixed impressions. Chapters on James in general studies of supernatural fiction, such as Peter Penzoldt’s The Supernatural in Fiction (Peter Nevill, 1952), Julia Briggs’s Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (Faber & Faber, 1977), Jack Sullivan’s Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (Ohio University Press, 1978), and Edward Wagenknecht’s Seven Masters of Supernatural Fiction (Greenwood Press, 1991) are variously informative. My own chapter on James in The Weird Tale (University of Texas Press, 1990) now strikes me as a bit uncharitable. Austin Warren’s “The Marvels of M. R. James, Antiquary” in Connections (University of Michigan Press, 1970) is more descriptive than analytical, but makes some good points regarding James’s techniques of ghost-story writing.
The occasional journal Ghosts & Scholars, edited by Rosemary Pardoe (thirty-three issues published between 1979 and 2001), although largely devoted to “stories in the tradition of M. R. James,” includes a substantial number of interesting articles and notes on James, including some annotations of stories not included in Cox’s Casting the Runes (these annotations are now included in A Pleasing Terror). It has now been succeeded by the Ghosts & Scholars M. R. James Newsletter (2002f.), also edited by Rosemary Pardoe. See also Formidable Visitants, edited by Roger Johnson (1999), a tribute to
Ghosts & Scholars on its twentieth anniversary.
General articles on James include:
Mary Butts, “The Art of Montagu [sic] James,” London Mercury 29 (February 1934): 306-17 (a rather effusive essay that discusses James’s economy of means and his “low” characters).
Brian Cowlishaw, “‘A Warning to the Curious’: Victorian Science and the Awful Unconscious in M. R. James’s Ghost Stories,” Victorian Newsletter No. 94 (Fall 1998): 36-42 (a provocative study of James’s use of nineteenth-century science in his depiction of ghosts).
Penny Fielding, “Reading Rooms: M. R. James and the Library of Modernity,” Modern Fiction Studies 46 (Fall 2000): 749-71 (an unhelpfully pedantic study of the sociological significance of the library in James’s work).