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

by M. R. James

  Another story, the grimly humorous “Wailing Well,” which James described as “a story of a terrible nature,” was written especially for the Eton College troop of Boy Scouts, and the author read it aloud around a campfire at Worbarrow Bay in Dorset, on July 27, 1927. It apparently led to several of the boys having “a somewhat disturbed night.”

  The story was privately published the following year by Robert Gathorne-Hardy and Kyrle Leng under the Mill House Press, Stanford Dingley imprint in a hardcover edition limited to just 157 copies, of which seven were signed by James that had the title page printed in blue and black.

  The first omnibus edition of the author’s short stories, The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James, appeared in both Britain and America 1931. As the author explained in his Preface: “In accordance with a fashion which has recently become common, I am issuing my four volumes of ghost stories under one cover, and appending to them some matter of the same kind.

  “I am told they have given pleasure of a certain sort to my readers: if so, my whole object in writing them has been attained.”

  The volume contained all the stories in James’ first four collections (written, he later claimed, “at fever heat” in his notoriously illegible hand-writing), and also added a number of other pieces: “Not all of them strictly stories,” as the author helpfully pointed out. This additional material included “There Was a Man Dwelled by a Churchyard,” “Rats,” “After Dark in the Playing Fields,” “Wailing Well” and the essay “Stories I Have Tried to Write.” Except for “Wailing Well” all of these had previously been first published in Eton “ephemerals.”

  However, although “Rats” had originally been written for At Random (“Edited by present Etonians”) in 1929, James was obviously so proud that the story had also appeared the same year in Lady Cynthia Asquith’s anthology Shudders: A Collection of New Nightmare Tales that he couldn’t help boasting about it to his readers.

  He additionally revealed in the same piece that “a Norse version of four from my first volume, by Ragnhild Undset, was issued in 1919 under the title Aander og Trolddom.” He was perhaps unaware that a companion volume, Abbedens skat, published the same year by Cammermeyers Forlag, contained Undset’s translations of the remaining four stories from Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary.

  While reviewing the Collected Ghost Stories in 1934, Clark Ashton Smith summed up the author’s oeuvre: “The personnel of James’ Pandemonium is far from monotonous; one finds a satyr dwelling in a cathedral tomb; a carven cat-like monster that comes to life when touched by a murderer’s hand; a moldy smelling sack-like object in an unlit well, which suddenly puts its arms around the neck of a treasure-seeker; a cloaked and hooded shape with a tentacle in lieu of arms; a lean, hideously taloned terror, with a jaw ‘shallow as that of a beast’; dolls that repeat crime and tragedy; creatures that are dog-like but are not dogs; a saw fly tall as a man, met in a dim room full of rustling insects; and even a weak, ancient thing, which being wholly bodiless and insubstantial, makes for itself a body out of crumpled bed-linen.”

  In a review of the book in the April 1931 Spectator, Peter Fleming described James as “an acknowledged master of his craft: unrivaled at his best, for consistent merit never approached.”

  James himself contributed an insightful Introduction to the 1924 anthology Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection of Uncanny Tales from Daniel Defoe to Algernon Blackwood, edited by V.H. (Vere Henry Gratz) Collins for the Oxford University Press/Humphrey Milford.

  “Often have I been asked to formulate my views about ghost stories and tales of the marvelous, the mysterious, the supernatural,” he wrote. “Never have I been able to find out whether I had any views that could be formulated. The truth is, I suspect, that the genre is too small and special to bear the imposition of far reaching principles. Widen the question, and ask what governs the construction of short stories in general, and a great deal might be said, and has been said. There are, of course, instances of whole novels in which the supernatural governs the plot; but among them are few successes. The ghost story is, at its best, only a particular sort of short story, and is subject to the same broad rules as the whole mass of them. Those rules, I imagine, no writer ever consciously follows. In fact, it is absurd to talk of them as rules; they are qualities which have been observed to accompany success.”

  The author then went on to once again expound upon his ideas that the basis of a good ghost story relied on “the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo,” as well as the reader being “introduced to the actors in a placid way.” He also reiterated his belief that, “For the ghost story a slight haze of distance is desirable.”

  However, he did qualify this latter comment: “If a really remote date be chosen, there is more than one way of bringing the reader in contact with it. The finding of documents about it can be made plausible; or you may begin with your apparition and go back over the years to tell the cause of it; or (as in ‘Schalken the Painter’) you may set the scene directly in the desired epoch, which I think is hardest to do with success. On the whole (though not a few instances might be quoted against me) I think that a setting so modern that the ordinary reader can judge of its naturalness for himself is preferable to anything antique. For some degree of actuality is the charm of the best ghost stories; not a very insistent actuality, but one strong enough to allow the reader to identify himself with the patient; while it is almost inevitable that the reader of an antique story should fall into the position of the mere spectator.”

  James also championed the work of Irish writer J. (Joseph) Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73), author of the above-mentioned story “Schalken the Painter” and the classic vampire novella “Carmilla,” whom he described as standing “absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories.”

  He edited and provided the Introduction to Le Fanu’s collection Madame Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery (1923): “Nobody sets the scene better than he,” enthused James, “nobody touches in the effective detail more deftly.” Three years later he contributed an Introduction to a new edition of Le Fanu’s novel Uncle Silas, in which he somewhat unconvincingly claimed to have exposed “Conan Doyle’s cribbing of the plot.”

  James not only contributed an Introduction to Faber & Faber’s Hans Andersen: Forty Stories in 1930, but he also supplied a new translation of the Danish writer’s work because he was not happy with the previous attempts. The new edition featured twenty-four color plates by Christine Jackson, and the New Statesman reviewer approved of the whole package, saying, “We get possibly for the first time, a glimpse of the originals as they really are.”

  Five years later, James’ translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid was issued in a separate edition by New York publisher Holiday House with illustrations by Pamela Bianco.

  Not every story James set out to write reached completion, as the author explained in his essay “Stories I Have Tried to Write,” which was originally published in the November 30, 1929, edition of the small Eton magazine The Touchstone.

  “It has amused me sometimes to think of the stories which have crossed my mind from time to time and never materialized properly,” he wrote. “They are not good enough. Yet some of them had ideas in them which refused to blossom in the surroundings I had devised for them, but perhaps came up in other forms in stories that did get as far as print.”

  The piece was subsequently reprinted in The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James and it has inspired numerous writers down the decades—including Sir Andrew Caldecott, Sheila Hodgson, David G. Rowlands, A.F. Kidd, C.E. Ward, Stephen Gresham, Rhys Hughes and Reggie Oliver, to name but a few—to try their own hand at completing these unfinished plot ideas.

  Many more authors have been inspired to create their own ghost stories in the “Jamesian tradition.” This has led to Ramsey Campbell—whose own 1989 story “The Guide” was a tribute to the Jamesian method—to state that “M.R. James is the most influential British writer of supernatural fictio
n,” while author and editor Michael Cox speculated that “it is probable that M.R. James has generated more imitators than any other English ghost story writer.”

  James’ own ghost stories were often rooted in his background as a scholar, and his lifelong work was cataloging the medieval manuscript libraries of the colleges in Cambridge. The first catalog was published in 1895 and the last—more than 1,100 manuscripts later—in 1925.

  He was also the author of such scholarly works as The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts (1919) and The Apocalypse in Art (1931), and the guidebooks Abbeys (1925) and Suffolk and Norfolk: A Perambulation of the Two Counties with Notices of Their History and Their Ancient Buildings (1930). He translated New Testament Apocrypha and also contributed to the Encyclopædia Biblica: A Critical Dictionary of the Literary, Political and Religion History, the Archaeology, Geography and Natural History of the Bible (1899–1903), edited by Thomas Kelly Cheyne and J. Sutherland Black.

  James also took on the post of Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge between 1893–1908, and was responsible for acquiring many important antique manuscripts and works of art, including some notable portraits by the 16th-century Italian painter Titian (Tiziano Vecelli). In 1902 the abbey ruins at Bury St. Edmunds in West Suffolk were excavated after he found a fragment of ancient manuscript, which in turn led to the rediscovery of the graves of several 12th-century abbots.

  Montague Rhodes James was awarded the British Commonwealth’s prestigious Order of Merit in June 1930. He was a confirmed bachelor and never married, preferring his life of academia, and he died peacefully in his lodge on Friday, June 12th, 1936, at the age of 73. He was buried in Eton town cemetery three days later.

  That same year, his final story appeared posthumously in the November issue of The London Mercury and Bookman, which had previously published “A View from a Hill” (May, 1925) and “A Warning to the Curious” (August, 1925). Although the author had indicated in his Preface to The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James that, when asked if he was going to write any more ghost stories, “I fear I must answer, Probably not,” editor R.A. ScottJames explained to his readers how it had come about:

  “A Vignette” is undoubtedly the last ghost story written by the late Dr. M.R. James, Provost of Eton, and probably his last piece of continuous writing intended for the press. It came into being in this way. Mr. Owen Hugh Smith was good enough to ask Dr. James to try to recapture the mood in which he wrote Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary, and to let me have something in similar vein for the Christmas number of The London Mercury (1935). The answer was that he would do his best. On December 12th of that year he sent off to me the MS, written in pencil, from The Lodge, Eton College, with the following letter:

  I am ill satisfied with what I enclose. It comes late and is short and ill written. There have been a good many events conspiring to keep it back, besides a growing inability. So pray don’t use it unless it has some quality I do not see in it.

  I send it because I was enjoined to do something by Mr. Owen Smith.

  It was then too late for our Christmas number, or, indeed, for the January number; so it was agreed that it should be held over till one of the closing months of this year.

  At the moment of going to press, I see it announced that the original manuscripts of his ghost stories are to appear at Sotheby’s sale on November 9th (written on foolscap paper). The original of “A Vignette,” of course, is not among them. Like the others, it is written on lined foolscap.

  Five months after M.R. James’ death, his library was sold through Sotheby’s, the famous auction house in London. The sale included the original holographic manuscripts of fourteen of the author’s stories, including “The Ash-tree,” “Count Magnus,” “A Warning to the Curious” and “Casting the Runes.”

  According to a report in the Daily Telegraph the following morning, the sale of the manuscripts raised £140, with prices ranging from £5 10s for “The Mezzotint” to £15 10s for “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.’” The total sale of the entire library—which included several rare volumes dating back to the 13th century—amounted to £794. The current whereabouts of several of James’ original ghost story manuscripts, including some of those sold at auction in November 1936, is now a mystery.

  A collection of the author’s papers and surviving manuscripts are held at King’s College Library in Cambridge. Much of this material was selected in November 1947 by the distinguished librarian A.N.L. Munby (author of the 1949 ghost story collection The Alabaster Hand, which was dedicated—in Latin—to M.R. James). Other material was added from the Sotheby’s auction and as a gift from Jane McBryde, presented by Sir Shane Leslie.

  Although he left behind a relatively small body of work, M.R. James’ ghost stories have never been out of print, and many of his best-known tales have been adapted for television, the movies and radio.

  The first televised version of James’ work was Laurence Schwab’s “The Lost Will of Dr. Rant” (1951), an adaptation of “The Tractate Middoth” by Doris Halman, which was part of the American NBC series Lights Out.

  Leslie Nielsen played a Boston librarian who was asked to get an “old and strangely curious book” by the querulous John Eldred (Russell Collins). Helped to recuperate by the owner (Pat Englund) of a failing boarding house after a terrifying encounter with a peculiarly dusty old man (Fred Ardath) amongst the stacks, he eventually discovered the secret of a long-lost inheritance written in Hebrew.

  Now thought lost, the BBC’s Two Ghost Stories by M.R. James (1954) featured “The Mezzotint” and “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book,” both adapted and directed by Tony Richardson, and performed by Robert Farquharson and George Rose, respectively.

  Broadcast in August 1961, Lewis Freedman directed “Room 13,” a version of James’ “Number 13” for the NBC series Great Ghost Tales. It starred William Redfield and Diana Van der Vlis.

  Between 1966 and 1968, the Associated British Corporation series Mystery and Imagination aired four episodes based on the author’s work. The first of these was “The Tractate Middoth” (1966), directed by Kim Mills. Freddie Jones and Megs Jenkins appeared in Robert Tronson’s memorable version of “Lost Hearts” (1966), while another “Room 13” (1966), directed by Patrick Dromgoole, featured Joss Ackland, David Battley, George Woodbridge and Tessa Wyatt. Finally, Robert Eddison portrayed Karswell in Alan Cooke’s version of “Casting the Runes” (1968), which also featured John Fraser and Gordon Jackson.

  Although all these episodes are now considered lost, a short extract from the trailer for “Casting the Runes” was recently rediscovered and issued as a DVD extra.

  Perhaps the most famous television adaptation of James’ work is Whistle and I’ll Come to You, Jonathan Miller’s somewhat idiosyncratic reinterpretation of “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,’” first broadcast in June 1968 as part of the BBC’s Omnibus series. Michael Hordern starred as a neurotic Professor Parkins, pursued down a wind-swept beach by a billowing white sheet.

  Although not credited as such, “The Cemetery”—the first segment of the Rod Serling-scripted pilot movie Night Gallery (1969)—was very obviously a direct steal of James’ “The Mezzotint.” Directed by Boris Sagal for NBC, a victim of Roddy McDowall’s murderous black sheep of the family reached out from the grave to take his supernatural revenge through a painting that changed from moment to moment.

  For fans of the author’s work, however, the most definitive dramatizations of M.R. James’ fiction continue to be the BBC’s series of annual adaptations produced in the early 1970s under the umbrella title A Ghost Story for Christmas. Adapted and directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, these hour-long dramas comprised “Stalls of Barchester” (1971), “A Warning to the Curious” (1972), “Lost Hearts” (1973), “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” (1974) and “The Ash-tree” (1975).

  Each of these finely crafted shows featured a cast of solid character actors that included Robert Hardy, Clive Swift, Peter Vaughn, Michael B
ryant, Edward Petherbridge and Barbara Ewing.

  In 1976 Yorkshire Television broadcast a seventeen-minute adaptation of “Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance” for an episode of the schools’ program Music Scene, about the use of mood music in film. Scripted, produced and directed by Tony Scull, it was filmed on location in the maze at Roundhay Park, Leeds, which was demolished later that same year.

  Even this short film for children was better than the updated adaptation of “Casting the Runes” for a 1979 episode of ITV Playhouse, directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark and featuring Jan Francis, Edward Petherbridge and Iain Cuthbertson as Julian Karswell.

  Actor Michael Bryant (who had starred in the 1974 television production of “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”) read “The Mezzotint,” “A School Story” and “The Diary of Mr. Poynter” for the BBC children’s series Spine Chillers in 1980.

  Also presented as mostly readings, this time for adults, actor Robert Powell narrated partially dramatized versions of “The Mezzotint,” “The Ash-tree,” “Wailing Well,” “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’” and “The Rose Garden” for the BBC 2 series Classic Ghost Stories, broadcast in December 1986.

  El Grabado (2000) was another version of “The Mezzotint,” made in 2000 by director Jorge Repolles for Spanish television. It featured Martín García and Alex Hernández.

  Iconic horror actor Christopher Lee portrayed James himself in half-hour re-creations of the original Christmas readings of “The Stalls of Barchester,” “The Ash-tree,” “Number 13” and “A Warning to the Curious” for the BBC Scotland series M.R. James’ Ghost Stories for Christmas (2000).

  “Unfortunately they were not his best stories, such as ‘Count Magnus,’” explained the actor, “because the best are too long for TV. Nevertheless, the shorter ones are well worth listening to.”