And the childhood fascination with the tortures suffered by Christian martyrs, each date and gruesome detail of beheadings, immolations, and dismemberments lovingly memorized the way some boys memorize batting averages? And the spectral face at the garden gate, pale and wild-eyed and reeking of evil that one evening peered back at the young James across the lawn as he looked out through the windows of the rectory? And the intimate eleven-year friendship with a man named McBryde, illustrator of some of James’s best stories, traveling companion and inseparable confidant, whose rather late marriage, in 1903, was followed, scarcely a year later, by his untimely death? And the boys, the tens upon hundreds upon thousands of boys of Eton and King’s, on whom James had lavished his great teacherly gifts, cut down in the battlefields of Belgium and France? And the empty lawns, deserted commons and dining halls, the utter desolation of Cambridge in 1918?
Over all of this speculation as to the origins of James’s ghosts and horrors, over any hint of torment, shame, passion, remorse, or sorrow, the shutters have been drawn. The only evidence we have for the existence of such emotions in M. R. James is the disturbing tales he chose, over and over, to tell. Could they possibly be the work of a man whose life presented him with a nearly unbroken series of comfortable, satisfying, and gratifying days, from cradle to grave? Let us say that they could; let us stipulate that the stories are the work of a man whom life denied none of the fundamentals of mortal happiness. Violence, horror, grim retribution, the sudden revulsion of the soul—these things, then, are independent of happiness or suffering; a man who looks closely and carefully at life, whether pitiable as Poe or enviable as the Provost of Eton, cannot fail to see them.
Along with A. E. Housman, Thomas Hardy, and even, we are told, Theodore Roosevelt, one of James’s early admirers was the American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). The two men shared a taste for old books and arcane manuscripts, for dusty museums and the libraries of obscure historical societies, and for ancient buildings, in particular those equipped with attics and crypts; shared that requisite of any great writer of ghost stories: a hyperacute sense of the past. We all have this sixth human sense, to one degree or another, but in the case of Lovecraft and James the sense of the past is as evolved as the sense of smell in a professional nez. When it comes to their writing, however, Lovecraft and James could not differ more—in style, in scale, in temperament. Lovecraft’s style is the despair of the lover of Lovecraft, at once shrill and vague, clotted, pedantic, hysterical, and sometimes out-and-out bad. James, on the other hand, writes the elegant English sentences, agile and reticent, that an excellent British education of his era both demanded and assured. The contrast is particularly stark when it comes to their portrayal of the un-portrayable. Lovecraft approaches Horror armed with adverbs, abstractions, and perhaps a too-heavy reliance on pseudopods and tentacles. James rarely does more than hint at the nature of his ghosts and apparitions, employing a few simple, select, revolting adjectives, summoning his ghosts into hideous, enduring life in the reader’s mind in a bare sentence or two.
Evil, in Lovecraft, is universal, pervasive, and at least partially explicable in terms of notions such as Elder Races and blind idiot gods slobbering at the heart of creation. In James, Evil tends to have more of a local feel, somehow, assembling itself at times out of the most homely materials; and yet to remain, in the end, beyond any human explanation whatsoever. Evil is strangely rationalized in Lovecraft, irresistible but systematic; it can be sought, and found. In James it irrupts, is chanced upon, brushes against our lives, irrevocably, often when we are looking in the other direction. But the chief difference between Lovecraft and James was one of temperament. Lovecraft, apart from a few spasmodic periods, including one in which he briefly married a Brooklyn Jew named Sonia Greene and formed a part of her salon—liked his own company best. He could be gloomy and testy, and was perhaps most appreciated by his friends at a distance, through his lively correspondence with them. M. R. James, on the other hand, was legendary for his conviviality, and loved nothing more than whiling away an afternoon in sherry and tobacco with his erudite friends. Indeed, friends—colleagues, companions—play an important role in James’s stories, coming along to shore up the protagonist’s courage at just the right moment, providing him with moral support, crucial information, or simply another soul with whom to share an unspeakable secret. In Lovecraft the protagonist has often cut himself off from his friends and companions, and must face the final moment of slithering truth alone.
Lovecraft wrote, in part, for money, often as little as one and a half cents a word; James was an avowed hobbyist of literature, and wrote many of his finest stories as Christmas entertainments of the sort already described, reading them aloud to his assembled friends by the light of a single candle. These lucky men were every bit as entertained by them as you will be. The stories are, nevertheless, unmistakably works of art, the products of a peculiar imagination, a moral sense at once keen and undogmatic, and an artist’s scientific eye for shape and structure.
This brings us back to “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” whose unlucky protagonist, Parkes, we first encounter in conversation with his fellow professors over dinner “in the hospitable hall of St. James’s college.” (James’s stories never originate in cheap atmospherics, fogs or plagues or blasted landscapes, or with the creaky, dubious avowals of narratorial sanity so beloved of Lovecraft and Poe.) In the very first sentence James displays the remarkable command that qualifies him as a great unrecognized master of point of view, which is the ultimate subject of any ghost story and, of course, of twentieth-century literature itself. For the narrator, or the author, or some indeterminate, playful amalgam of the two, reveals himself before we are twenty words into the story, and will continue to remind us of his presence throughout, right up to the final paragraph when at last he takes leave, with a strange kind of cheerful pity, of the shattered Professor Parkes.
I don’t think any writer has handled a narrator in quite the same way as James in “Oh, Whistle.” For the narrator here is not merely a disembodied authorial voice in the classic nineteenth-century manner. He is involved in the lives of the characters he describes, he knows them, he sees them on a regular basis—he is, albeit invisibly, a character in the story, cut from the same cloth, as it were, as Parkes and Rogers and the rest of the St. James’s faculty. There are portions of the story, he suggests, that could be told, that actually happened—most of them having to do with the game of golf—but which he gratefully lacks the expertise to set down. This accords with a fundamental operation of the supernatural story, from “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” to “The Blair Witch Project,” which is to make the explicit point—generally implicit or finessed in “literary” fiction—that what is being given is a factual account. All ghost stories are “true” stories. We love them, if we love them, from the depth and antiquity of our willingness to believe them.
M. R. James, more than any other writer, explores the wobble, the shimmer of uncertainty that results when quotation marks are placed around the word “true.” Because at the same time that the narrator of “Oh, Whistle” is implicating himself in his story—scrupulously telling us what he has seen for himself and what parts of the story he has only heard second- or thirdhand—his supremely “authoritative” voice and evident easy control over the materials establish him as unmistakably the writer of the story, its inventor, hurrying us past characters we need not overly attend to, rendering the events with an impossible familiarity. This, in turn, calls into question the fictional status of the narrator, and hence that of the author himself.
All of this, I know, sounds dreadfully postmodern. And indeed James, not merely in his approach, at once careful and cavalier, to point of view, but also in fitting out his stories with the full apparatus of scholarly research—footnotes, learned quotations from Latin, references to obscure medieval tracts—often anticipates Borges and the postmodernists, and with every iota of their self-conscio
us playfulness. But the playfulness is worn so lightly, and the experiments in point of view are undertaken with such a practical purpose—scaring you—in mind, that even a critical reader may scarcely be aware of them the first time through. James is like some casual, gentleman tinkerer yoking a homemade anti-gravity drive to the derailleurs of his bicycle because he is tired of being late to church every Sunday.
“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” is, in many ways, the prototypical M. R. James story. It presents a man who stumbles, through generally benevolent motives (Parkes, in searching the Templar ruin that conceals the fatal flute, is mostly trying to help his archaeologist colleague, and to give the outraged Colonel a chance to cool down), upon a historical puzzle that cannot fail to interest him and, poking innocently around in it, inadvertently summons—more literally here than in other stories—an unexpected revenant of a bygone time, with frightful results.
The story is typical of James, as well, in that when at last we encounter the Horror, there is something about its manifestation, its physical attributes, its habits, that puts the reader in mind, however reluctantly, of sex. I say reluctantly in part because the cool, fleshy, pink, protruberant, furred, toothed or mouthed apparations one finds in M. R. James are so loathsome; and in part because James keeps his stories studiously free—swept clean—not merely of references to sexual behavior but of all the hot-and-heavy metaphor and overt Freudian paraphernalia with which supernatural fiction is so often encumbered. James is a hospitable writer, and one wishes not to offend one’s host. But the fact remains that “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” is a story about a man pursued into the darkness of a strange bedroom, and all of the terror is ultimately generated by a vision of a horribly disordered bed. The bodily horror, the uncanny, even repulsive nature of sex—a favorite theme of the genre from Stoker to Cronenberg—is a recurring element in the stories of M. R. James, rendered all the more potent because it feels so genuinely unconscious. Sex was undoubtedly the last thing on the mind of M. R. James as he sat down to compose his Christmas creepers, but it is often the first Thing to emerge when the stays of reality are loosened.
At times, as in traditional ghost stories (e.g., “A Christmas Carol”), James’s characters engender and deserve their ghastly fates, bringing them about through excess of ambition, pride, or greed. Professor Parkes, one senses, does not entirely meet with the author’s approval—he is priggish, skeptical; he plays golf—but in other stories the protagonists are men whose profession, temperament, and tastes barely distinguish them from their creator. Most of the time they are innocents, ignorant trippers and travelers who brush up against the omnipresent meaningless malevolence of the world, and the sins for which they are punished tend, likely as not, to be virtues—curiosity, honesty, a sympathy for bygone eras, a desire to do honor to one’s ancestors. And, often, their punishment is far grimmer than the scare that Professor Parkes receives.
The secret power of James’s work lies in his steadfast refusal fully to explain, in the end, the mechanisms that have brought about the local irruption of Evil he describes, and yet to leave us, time and again, utterly convinced that such an explanation is possible, if only we were in possession of all facts. He makes us feel the logic of haunting, the residue of some inscrutable chain of ghostly causation, though we can’t—though, he insists, we never will be able to—explain or understand that logic. In “Oh, Whistle,” the elements—the Templars’ church, the brass flute with its fragmentary inscriptions, the blind pursuing figure in white, the whistled-up wind—all hang together seamlessly in the reader’s imagination: they fit. And yet, in the end, we have no idea why. For the central story of M. R. James, reiterated with inexhaustible inventiveness, is ultimately the breathtaking fragility of life, of “reality,” of all the structures that we have erected to defend ourselves from our constant nagging suspicion that underlying everything is chaos, brutal and unreasoning. It is hard to conceive of a more serious theme, or a more contemporary plot, than this.
It may be, in fact, that the ghost story, like the dinosaur, is still very much with us, transformed past the point of ready recognition into the feathered thing that we call “the modern short story.” All short stories, in other words, are ghost stories, accounts of visitations and reckonings with the traces of the past. They describe moments when a dark door, long closed, is opened, when a forgotten error is unwittingly repeated, when the fabric of a life is revealed to have been woven, from frail and dubious fiber, over top of something unknowable and possibly very bad. Were there ever characters in fiction more haunted than Chekhov’s or Joyce’s by ghosts? (2002)
Brown Sugar Kitchen, Tanya Holland
OAKLAND—LIKE A SWINGING PARTY, LIKE AN EMERGENCY—is happening. Oakland is always happening. From the moment of its founding, in the 1850s, by a nefarious confederation of squatters, opportunists, filibusterers, graft artists, boosters, visionary thieves, and confidence men, Bump City has been happening. And yet, in all that time, Oakland has never quite happened. Or rather, Oakland never has happened. Oakland has never had its day. It has never gone soft, grown fat, rested on its laurels. It has never entirely gotten its act together, remembered to set its alarm clock, made it through to payday, waited for its cake to cool completely. There is a there there (Oakland coolly says “Bite me” to Gertrude Stein), but Oakland’s not there yet.
Getting there, though. Oakland is—always, forever—getting there.
Oakland is like America in that way. Oakland’s like America in a lot of ways—violent and peace-loving, burdened by a calamitous racial history, factious and muddled, friendly and casual, rich in local genius and in natural beauty, poorly governed, sweet-natured, cold-eyed, out to lunch, out for blood, out for a good time. And, above all, promising. Every day, Oakland makes and breaks the American promise, a promise so central to the idea of America that we carry it around everywhere we go, in our wallets, jingling in our pockets. I mean, of course, e pluribus unum: out of all the scattered sparks, one shining light. It’s a utopian promise, and like all utopian promises, liable to breakage. But even if that promise can never truly be redeemed, it can be—it must be—endlessly renewed. And it’s the work that we put in, day after day, toward renewing the promise, and not the promise’s fulfillment, that really matters.
Tanya Holland knows that. Every day, starting at 5:30 a.m., she renews Oakland’s promise at Brown Sugar Kitchen, a little hip-pocket utopia in the city’s wild west end. Of all the many good restaurants, greasy-spoon to top-drawer, that make up a substantial share of the cultural wealth of Oakland, Tanya’s Brown Sugar Kitchen most clearly, most faithfully, and most thrillingly embodies, one plate of chicken and waffles at a time, the ongoing, ever-renewed promise of the city she has come to love and, in a very real sense, to embody.
Drop by Brown Sugar Kitchen any day, for breakfast or lunch, and you will find people of all ages and stations, professing various brands of faith or doubt, tracing their ancestries to Africa and Europe, Asia and South America, to the Cherokee, Shawnee, or Creek. You might very well find all those inheritances gathered around a single table, perhaps even in the genetic code of a single member of the waitstaff.
Diversity in the kitchen and dining room is hardly unusual in an Oakland restaurant, of course—that’s one of the things to love about Oakland. Even in cities segregated far more determinedly than Oakland, I’ve noticed that a popular soul-food restaurant will often feature the most integrated tables in town—that’s one of the things to love about soul food. Beans, rice, and collards are a powerful force for transformation. But the crowd’s different at Brown Sugar Kitchen. More jumbled, the lines of race and class drawn more faintly than in Oakland’s other restaurants, soul food or otherwise. A more purposive clientele, I want to say, self-jumbled, everybody showing up with his or her own eraser to rub away those lines a little more. One of the most beautiful things about human beings, in the midst of so much that is ugly, is the desire that takes hold of us, if only
we can manage to leave our homes, our villages, and our little worlds behind, for the companionship of people from Elsewhere. Make no mistake; people come to Brown Sugar Kitchen for the food. I believe that I could be hauled back from the gates of the Underworld by the prospect of a bowl of Tanya’s shrimp and grits. But it was Oakland, and not some other town, remember, that cradled the visions of the most high prophet Sly Stone, and to a greater extent than I’ve found in other American cities, the Everyday People of Oakland are hip to the possibility that the point of the journey is neither the destination nor the journey itself but rather the coming to a crossroads, to a watering hole, to what my character Archy Stallings, in Telegraph Avenue, likes to call a “caravansary.” The point of the journey, to the everyday wanderer, is the feeling one gets on crossing the threshold of one of those magical places along the way, built on the borderline between here and there, where the stories and the homelands and the crooked routes of history come together in a slice of sweet potato pie.
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