Curious Warnings: The Great Ghost Stories of M.R. James

by M. R. James

  All this while I have confined myself almost entirely to the English ghost story. The fact is that either there are not many good stories by foreign writers, or (more probably) my ignorance has veiled them from me. But I should feel myself ungrateful if I did not pay a tribute to the supernatural tales of Erckmann-Chatrian. The blend of French with German in them, comparable to the French-Irish blend in Le Fanu, has produced some quite first-class romance of this kind. Among longer stories, La Maison forestière (and, if you will, Hugues le loup); among shorter ones Le Blanc et le noir, Le Rêve du cousin Elof and L’Œil invisible have for years delighted and alarmed me. It is high time that they were made more accessible than they are.

  There need not be any peroration to a series of rather disjointed reflections. I will only ask the reader to believe that, though I have not hitherto mentioned it, I have read The Turn of the Screw.

  Afterword

  “THE STONY GRIN OF UNEARTHLY MALICE”

  Stephen Jones

  MONTAGUE RHODES JAMES was born in Goodnestone Parsonage in the village of Goodnestone, near Canterbury, Kent, on August 1, 1862, the fourth and youngest child of Mary Emily James (née Horton) and the Reverend Herbert James, a Church of England Perpetual Curate of an Evangelical persuasion.

  At the age of three he moved with his family to the rectory in Great Livermere, Suffolk, a village just outside Bury St. Edmunds (which would later serve as the inspiration for his final short story, “A Vignette.” James’ childhood interest in both the Suffolk countryside and ecclesiastical architecture would significantly shape the direction of his writings in his adult life.

  He was educated at home until the age of eleven, after which, in September 1873, he was sent to Temple Grove Preparatory School in East Sheen (the setting for “A School Story”). This is where he first met Arthur Christopher (A.C.) Benson; the two men were to remain lifelong friends as they followed almost identical academic paths.

  In 1875, after having won a number of prizes for his Latin prose and verse, James was awarded a scholarship to Eton College, where he became one of the foremost scholars of his generation, distinguishing himself in Divinity, the Classics and French. After moving to King’s College, Cambridge, he decided not to follow the family tradition of joining either the clergy or military but to stay in academia, and his career progressed rapidly. “Monty,” as he was affectionately known to his many friends and admirers, served as Fellow, Dean and Tutor before, in May 1905, he became Provost of King’s.

  In September 1918 he accepted the Provostship of Eton, where he remained until his death.

  “It is truly a pleasure,” he told a friend, “the prospect of being knit up so closely with Eton, which of all places holds perhaps the first place in my affections.”

  James was friendly and good-humored by nature, with a “genius for friendship” (according to the Cambridge Review), and in between his numerous commitments, he worked to remain in touch with old friends and former students alike. He also reportedly enjoyed such diversions as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show (which toured Great Britain and Europe in the early 1890s), Christmas pantomimes, detective novels and the works of P.G. Wodehouse.

  His “old and beloved” friend, the author and poet A.C. Benson, observed: “He is one of the few people to whom I can say, and do say, exactly what I think and as I think it. He never misunderstands, is always amused, always appreciative.”

  James’ interest in the supernatural was evident while he was still a teenager. At the age of sixteen he was already entertaining fellow pupils with ghost stories (“in which capacity I am rather popular now,” he recorded in a letter), and a couple of years later he wrote in an 1880 issue of The Eton Rambler, edited by his friend Arthur Benson: “Everyone can remember a time when he has carefully searched his curtains—and poked in the dark corners of his room before retiring to rest—with a sort of pleasurable uncertainty as to whether there might not be a saucer-eyed skeleton or a skinny-sheeted ghost in hiding somewhere. I invariably go through this ceremony myself.”

  (“I think it is rot,” is how James described this early article in a letter to his father, and he later dismissed his own work in the “ephemeral” when he admitted: “My own contributions to it I cannot now look at with patience.”)

  M.R. James did not start writing fiction until he was in his early thirties, when he originally conceived the idea of his now-celebrated “antiquarian ghost stories” as Christmas entertainments, to be read aloud at gatherings of friends and fellow members of Cambridge’s select Chit-Chat Club—whose number included future ghost-story authors Edward Frederic (E.F.) Benson and Robert Hugh (R.H.) Benson (Arthur’s equally famous brothers), and Edmund Gill (E.G.) Swain.

  “I have always thought that one very desirable quality in a ghost story is leisureliness,” wrote James. “The ghost story is essentially a somewhat old-fashioned thing; that is one of the reasons why Christmas time, which appeals to old association in so many ways, is considered the proper season for ghost stories. And in so far as the ghost story is old-fashioned, it ought to move at a pace suitable to its age.”

  After having been invited to write a story to read to the gathered assembly, James in fact concocted two tales—“Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book” (originally titled “A Curious Book”) and “Lost Hearts”—which he first presented to an appreciative audience at the weekly meeting on October 28, 1893. He was asked to repeat his performance each year, ideally on Christmas Eve.

  In his A Memoir of Montague Rhodes James, with a List of His Writings (1939), one of the author’s closest friends, S.G. (Samuel Gurney “Jimbo”) Lubbock, gave a vivid description of these reading sessions:

  “So the Ghost Stories began; and they were continued at the urgent request of a small party that was used to gather at King’s just before Christmas. Some pressure was needed; and on the appointed evening the party met and waited till at last, about 11 p.m. as a rule, Monty appeared with the ink still wet on the last page. All lights except one were turned out and the story was read. Afterward, when he was Provost, the same ritual was preserved; but by then the small party had grown …”

  Oliffe Richmond, another listener at these gatherings, recalled: “Monty emerged from the bedroom, manuscript in hand, at last, and blew out all the candles but one, by which he seated himself. He then began to read, with more confidence than anyone else could have mustered, his well-nigh illegible script in the dim light.”

  As horror writer Ramsey Campbell noted in the Introduction to his Jamesian-inspired anthology Meddling with Ghosts (2001), “In this James clearly meant to align himself with the tradition of the festive ghost story and indeed of oral storytelling … All this may suggest a certain coziness, which would be confirmed by the standard view that the most important Jamesian attribute is his antiquarianism. Of course that is crucial to the verisimilitude of many of the stories, and many of them deal with scholars whose comfortable world is invaded by the malign supernatural.”

  In his seminal essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” originally published in the first and only edition of W. Paul Cook’s amateur publication The Recluse (1927), H.P. Lovecraft noted: “The art of Dr. James is by no means haphazard, and in the preface to one of his collections he has formulated three very sound rules for macabre composition. A ghost story, he believes, should have a familiar setting in the modern period, in order to approach closely the reader’s sphere of experience. Its spectral phenomena, moreover, should be malevolent rather than beneficent; since fear is the emotion primarily to be excited. And finally, the technical patois of ‘occultism’ or pseudo-science ought carefully to be avoided; lest the charm of casual verisimilitude be smothered in unconvincing pedantry.

  “Dr. James, practicing what he preaches, approaches his themes in a light and often conversational way. Creating the illusion of every-day events, he introduces his abnormal phenomena cautiously and gradually; relieved at every turn by touches of homely and prosaic detail, and sometimes spiced with a snatch
or two of antiquarian scholarship. Conscious of the close relation between present weirdness and accumulated tradition, he generally provides remote historical antecedents for his incidents; thus being able to utilize very aptly his exhaustive knowledge of the past, and his ready and convincing command of archaic diction and coloring. A favorite scene for a James tale is some centuried cathedral, which the author can describe with all the familiar minuteness of a specialist in that field.”

  Following their reading to the Chit-Chat Club two years earlier, “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book” was first published under the title “The Scrap-book of Canon Alberic” in the March 1895 edition of the National Review. M.R. James’ second story, “Lost Hearts,” appeared in the December issue of Pall Mall Magazine that same year.

  In some ways like their author, many of James’ protagonists are steeped in antiquarianism—scholarly men or studious clerics of limited worldly experience, absorbed in books and objects from the past.

  “I attribute great importance to the setting of such a story,” wrote the author. “I like, as I do in a detective novel, to make some sort of acquaintance with the actors. And, I would add, the more ordinary and normal both setting and actors are, the more effective will be the entangling of them in a dreadful situation, and the more ready will he who follows their adventures be to shake the head and murmur those words which I have long since registered as the proper ones for the reader of ghost stories, to wit, ‘If I’m not very careful, something like this may happen to me.’”

  “His main characters are almost always scholars, and almost always bachelors,” observed Geoff Ryman in Horror: 100 Best Books (1988). “The world is seen through their eyes … The narrators of James’ stories usually take no part in the action. They piece their stories together as historians would, through old documents or the evidence of friends.”

  However, despite his somewhat pedantic approach to constructing a narrative, M.R. James is also justly credited as redefining the modern ghost story, throwing off the genre’s Gothic trappings and bringing its specters into the twentieth century.

  While many of James’ apparitions are revealed as merely a glimpse from the corner of the eye, they are still presented in a grisly and gruesome fashion that would have been unthinkable only a few years earlier.

  “In inventing a new type of ghost, he has departed considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition,” continued Lovecraft, “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. Sometimes the specter is of still more eccentric composition; a roll of flannel with spidery eyes, or an invisible entity which molds itself in bedding and shews a face of crumpled linen.”

  “I say you must have horror and also malevolence,” James himself stated in a 1931 article for The Evening News, written to coincide with the publication of The Collected Ghost Stories. “Not less necessary, however, is reticence.”

  “M.R. James is thought of as a master of subtle suggestion,” explained Geoff Ryman. “He almost never describes physical injury. But his terrors are described in great and very physical detail, and are the focus of the tales. The writing grows more specific when they appear—and there would be no story without them.”

  As former British Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman observed: “M.R. James thought that his ghosts should be evil and only glimpsed. He was a master of the unexpected”—although James himself criticized his friend and contemporary E.F. Benson for sometimes “stepping over the line of legitimate horridness” in his fiction.

  In his Preface to More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, the author expanded upon his thoughts about what a ghost should be: “To be sure, I have my ideas as to how a ghost story ought to be laid out if it is to be effective. I think that, as a rule, the setting should be fairly 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!’

  “Again, I feel that the technical terms of ‘occultism,’ if they are not very carefully handled, tend to put the mere ghost story (which is all that I am attempting) upon a quasi-scientific plane, and to call into play faculties quite other than the imaginative. I am well aware that mine is a nineteenth-(and not a twentieth-) century conception of this class of tale; but were not the prototypes of all the best ghost stories written in the sixties and seventies?

  “However, I cannot claim to have been guided by any very strict rules. My stories have been produced (with one exception) at successive Christmas seasons. If they serve to amuse some readers at the Christmas-time that is coming—or at any time whatever—they will justify my action in publishing them.”

  James’ ghosts can also be insubstantial revenants, evoked through atmosphere, suggestion and imagination, leaving his reader to conjure up their own interpretation.

  “Two ingredients most valuable in the concocting of a ghost story are, to me, the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo,” he explained in his Introduction to the 1924 anthology Ghosts and Marvels. “Let us, then, be introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings; and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage.”

  It also holds that most of the supernatural creatures that appear in his stories are inimical to those who come across them. “Another requisite, in my opinion, is that the ghost should be malevolent or odious,” he continued. “Amiable and helpful apparitions are all very well in fairy tales or in local legends, but I have no use for them in a fictitious ghost story.”

  But although his ghosts were threatening apparitions, James urged others to follow his lead and employ restraint in their depiction of the supernatural. “Reticence may be an elderly doctrine to preach,” he admitted in a 1929 article in The Bookman Christmas Issue, “yet from the artistic point of view, I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it, and there is much blatancy in a lot of recent stories … At the same time don’t let us be mild and drab. Malevolence and terror, the glare of evil faces, ‘the stony grin of unearthly malice,’ pursuing forms in darkness, and ‘long-drawn, distant screams,’ are all in place, and so is a modicum of blood, shed with deliberation and carefully husbanded; the weltering and wallowing that I too often encounter merely recall the methods of M.G. Lewis.”

  This advice is still as relevant to today’s horror writers as it was more than eighty years ago, when James first made his pronouncement.

  In the same article, James also complained: “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.”

  It is certainly a fact that women rarely feature in any meaningful way in M.R. James’ stories and, as Nigel Kneale remarked in his Introduction to the Folio Society’s edition of Ghost Stories of M.R. James (1973): “In an age where every man is his own psychologist, M.R. James looks like rich and promising material.”

  The American pulp writer and poet Clark Ashton Smith succinctly summed up the author’s approach to the supernatural in his article, “The Weird Works of M.R. James” in the February 1934 issue of The Fantasy Fan: “Usually there is a more or less homely setting, often with a background of folklore and long-past happenings whose dim archaism provides a depth of shadow from which, as from a recessed cavern, the central horror emerges into the noontide of the present. Things and occurrences, sometimes with obvious off-hand relationship, are grouped cunningly, forcing the reader unaware to some frightful deduction
; or there is an artful linkage of events seemingly harmless in themselves, that leave him confronted at a sudden turn with some ghoulish specter or night-demon.

  “The minutiae of modern life, humor, character-drawing, scenic and archaeological description, are used as a foil to heighten the abnormal, but are never allowed to usurp a disproportionate interest. Always there is an element of supernatural menace, whose value is never impaired by scientific or spiritualistic explanation. Sometimes it is brought forth at the climax into full light; and sometimes, even then, it is merely half-revealed, is left undefined but perhaps all the more alarming. In any case, the presence of some unnatural but objective reality is assumed and established.”

  James is also regarded as almost creating the “cursed reliquary” story, in which an antiquarian or ecclesiastical object exerts a malevolent influence over the individual who discovers it.

  “Many common objects may be made the vehicles of retribution,” he wrote, “and where retribution is not called for, of malice. Be careful how you handle the packet you pick up in the carriage-drive, particularly if it contains nail-parings and hair. Do not, in any case, bring it into the house. It may not be alone …

  “I am not conscious of other obligations to literature or local legend, written or oral, except in so far as I have tried to make my ghosts act in ways not inconsistent with the rules of folklore. As for the fragments of ostensible erudition which are scattered about my pages, hardly anything in them is not pure invention; there never was, naturally, any such book as that which I quote in ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas.’”

  As Clark Ashton Smith noted: “Reading and re-reading these tales, one notes a predilection for certain milieus and motifs. Backgrounds of scholastic or ecclesiastic life are frequent and some of the best tales are laid in cathedral towns. In many of the supernatural entities, there recurs insistently the character of extreme and repulsive hairiness. Often the apparition is connected with, or evoked by, some material object, such as the bronze whistle from the ruins of a Templars’ preceptory in ‘“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll come to You, My Lad”’; the old drawing of King Solomon and the night-demon in ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’; the silver Anglo-Saxon crown from an immemorial barrow in ‘A Warning to the Curious’; and the strange curtain-pattern in ‘The Diary of Mr. Poynter’ which had ‘a subtlety in its drawing.’”