Complete Ghost Stories, page 51
Endnotes
1 We now know that these leaves did contain a considerable fragment of that work, if not of that actual copy of it.
2 He died that summer; his daughter married, and settled at St Papoul. She never understood the circumstances of her father’s ‘obsession’.
3 i.e. The dispute of Solomon with a demon of the night. Drawn by Alberic de Mauléon. Versicle. O Lord, make haste to help me. Psalm. Whoso dwelleth [91]. St Bertrand, who puttest devils to flight, pray for me most unhappy. I saw it first on the night of 12 December 1694: soon I shall see it for the last time. I have sinned and suffered, and have more to suffer yet. Dec. 29, 1701.
The ‘Gallia Christiana’ gives the date of the canon’s death as 31 December 1701, ‘in bed, of a sudden seizure’. Details of this kind are not common in the great work of the Sammarthani.
4 Mr Rogers was wrong, see Dombey and Son, Chapter 12.
5 An account of the Premonstratensian Abbey of Steinfeld, in the Eiffel, with lives of the abbots, published at Cologne in 1712 by Christian Albert Erhard, a resident in the district. The epithet Norbertinum is due to the fact that St Norbert was founder of the Premonstratensian Order.
6 There is a place for gold where it is hidden.
7 They have on their raiment a writing which no man knoweth.
8 Upon one stone are seven eyes.
9 Apparently the ichneumon fly (Ophion obscurum), and not the true sawfly, is meant.
AFTERWORD
The Private Pact
Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The art of telling a ghost story is a refined one and Montague Rhodes James is a master of it. With gentle cunning, he draws his readers into a narrative that at first seems innocuous but which by gentle turns becomes darker and darker until he transfixes us with his prose, creating the most unforgettable, alarming and frightening pictures. What begins as a gentle dream becomes a nightmare. Unlike modern horror writers, James makes no recourse to the use of gratuitous gore to achieve his effect. He does it by implication and suggestion. It is as though we see his horrors through a distorting mirror, never quite catching the full view of the gruesome vision held there. In this way, James forms a partnership with the readers who, prompted and stimulated by his writing, help to create their own chilling images.
James’s technique of implication and the use of fragmented visions can be illustrated effectively by the appearance of the demon in the first ghost story that he wrote, Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook:
In another infinitesimal flash he had taken it in. Pale, dusky skin, covering nothing but bones and tendons of appalling strength; coarse black hairs, longer than ever grew on a human hand; nails rising from the ends of the fingers and curving sharply down and forward, grey, horny and wrinkled.
He flew out of his chair with deadly, inconceivable terror clutching at his heart. The shape, whose left hand rested on the table, was rising to a standing posture behind his seat, its right hand crooked above his scalp. There was black and tattered drapery about it; the coarse hair covered it as in the drawing. The lower jaw was thin – what can I call it? – shallow, like a beast’s; teeth showed behind the black lips; there was no nose; the eyes, of a fiery yellow, against which the pupils showed black and intense, and the exulting hate and thirst to destroy life which shone there, were the most horrifying features in the whole vision. There was intelligence of a kind in them – intelligence beyond that of a beast, below that of a man.
This extract distils the essence of James’s genius. Despite all the description that he uses to conjure up this demon for the reader, he only gives us selected details. It is our job to embellish them and slot them together to create our own picture of this foul beast. James knew that there was nothing more frightening than our own imagination. He gave us the prompts to set it in motion; he gave us those ‘infinitesimal’ flashes to stimulate us. That is why it seems to me that it is a mistake to attempt to illustrate the stories. We should never be presented with the whole image of the ghost-creature. This undermines James’s intention to suggest the horror and leave the rest to the imagination.
Novelist Muriel Gray, talking about James on a radio programme, observed that he was ‘gifted with an almost diabolical power of calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of prosaic daily life’. By contrast, James’s own life was fairly uneventful. He was a bookish academic who indulged in writing ghost stories as a divertissement from his more serious pursuits and as entertainments for his colleagues. And yet his love of academia, ancient tracts and the cloistered life not only informed his fiction but enriched it. These passions became the focus of and inspiration for his stories.
M. R. James was born in 1862 at Goodnestone Parsonage, Kent, where his father was a curate, but the family moved soon afterwards to Great Livermere in Suffolk. He was a serious boy, and although his childhood was a happy one, he suffered from nightmares and may have been led to exorcise some of these nightly terrors in later life. He was an avid reader and as a youth he loved to collect stories about the martyrdom of saints, ‘the more atrocious the better’.
He first began reading ghost stories at prep school where he encountered the work of Sheridan Le Fanu, whom James regarded as ‘ absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories’. Although James’s fiction is less fanciful, more prosaic in tone than Le Fanu’s, both writers have an intuitive grasp of irrational terror and are both successful in creating nightmare sequences where the fantastic has a chilling reality to it.
M. R. James studied at Eton College, which he adored and where he became known as ‘the learned boy’. His academic path led him next to King’s College, Cambridge, where he decided, after much soul-searching, not to follow his father and brother into the Church. It was clear even at this early stage of his life that he would never leave the confines of the academic world and seek occupation elsewhere. He loved the womblike environment of the library and the cloister. After graduating, he became an Assistant in Classical Archaeology at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and later lectured in divinity. James’s dissertation on The Apocalypse of St Peter earned him the election to a fellowship at King’s College in 1887. By the time he became Dean of the College in 1889, he was widely recognised as an authority on medievalism. He rose further up the academic ladder to become Provost (high administrative officer) of King’s College in 1905 and went on to serve as Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University between 1913 and 1915. After the First World War he returned to his beloved alma mater and became Provost of Eton, remaining there as a bachelor until his death in 1936.
His love of the bizarre and his passion for and expertise in medieval and antiquarian studies were combined in the unlikely fiction to which he turned his hand. As we have seen, James’s interest in the supernatural, like his scholarly passions, developed in his youth. While still at Eton he encountered and was thrilled by Walter Map’s medieval miscellany De Nugis Curialium, in which he found ‘extraordinary stories about ghosts, vampires wood-nymphs, etc.’. He gained a reputation for entertaining his fellow students by engaging in what he referred to as ‘a dark séance’ – the telling of ghost stories. In June 1880, at the age of eighteen, he contributed an article on ghost stories to the Eton Rambler, the college magazine. It is clear that the ideas and thoughts concerning this specialised form of fiction which he expressed in this piece, so well considered at an early age, lay behind the subsequent creation of his own supernatural stories:
Everyone can remember a time when he has carefully searched his curtains – and poked in the dark corners of his rooms 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. Of course we all know there are no such things – but someone might be going to play us, you know; and anyhow, it’s best to be quite sure. People do tell us such odd stories.
In his ghost stories M. R. James certainly played on that innate uncertainty we all feel about ‘the dark corners’, encouraging the belief that ‘it’s best to be quite sure’. However, the phrase in the extract which really illuminates James’s approach to the art of the ghost story is ‘pleasurable uncertainty’. This was always his aim: to disturb us, frighten us, but always in an entertaining way, aware that paradoxically readers actually enjoyed being frightened!
It was at Cambridge that James began a tradition of writing ghost stories to be read aloud. In October 1893 James presented the first of his ghost stories, Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook (originally called A Curious Book), to the Chitchat Society, a regular gathering of friends with a literary bent, mostly from King’s and Trinity. The story was a great success and this became the first of many similar occasions. It is not clear when the ritual of James’s reading one of his ghost stories to a select gathering of friends at Christmastime began, but the practice was well underway by 1903 when he delighted and chilled his audience with one of his most frightening tales, Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.
On these festive occasions, the party would adjourn to James’s private quarters after dinner to hear the new story, which the author admitted was often written at ‘fever heat’. Oliffe Richmond, a member of the early Christmas audiences, described such an occasion in his unpublished memoirs:
Monty disappeared into his bedroom. We sat and waited in the candlelight . . . Monty emerged from his bedroom, manuscript in hand, at last, 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.
The original aspect of these narratives was not the format or indeed the language that James used but the way that he was able to manipulate the established formula of the ghost story to provide something new and shocking. He considered that there were only a limited number of themes available to the ghost-story writer if his stories were to conform, as his did, to the traditional patterns and expectations. The spirit who returns to avenge his death on the individual responsible for it; black magicians who have made a pact with the Devil; the use of terrifying but nevertheless plausible dreams which impinge on reality; and the reckless curiosity that leads the character who possesses it to a fate worse than death – all were familiar themes and motifs used and reused by James in his tales. However, the freshness of his work came from new settings and new twists which he introduced into familiar structures. The use of academics as central characters has much to do with the effectiveness of the stories. The blend of intellectual rationality and calm scepticism combined with real ancient places infuses James’s stories with a staid realism that becomes increasingly effective as the supernatural world intrudes.
The aforementioned Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad exhibits all that is best, original and yet paradoxically typical of a James tale. Often, the apparition in his stories is connected with, or evoked by, some material object, usually one of antiquity which is mundane in itself, like the old drawing in Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook, the silver Anglo-Saxon crown in A Warning to the Curious and the strange curtain pattern in The Diary of Mr Poynter, which ‘had a subtlety in its drawing’. In Whistle it is the old bronze whistle which is taken from the ruins of a Templars’ preceptory. The actual blowing of the whistle is followed by a dream in which a terrified individual is pursued by ‘a figure in pale, fluttering draperies, ill-defined. There was something about its motion that made Parkins very unwilling to see it at close quarters.’ The reluctance of the author to reveal in greater detail the awfulness of this figure stimulates the reader’s imagination to sketch in his own details and whets the appetite for further revelatory descriptions which come when the ghost manifests itself in the sheets of an empty bed:
Parkins, who very much dislikes being questioned about it, did once describe something of it in my hearing, and I gathered what he chiefly remembers about it is a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen.
So we have in this tale the ancient object, the unsettling dream and most important of all the shock element of the final wonderfully frightening description of the face of ‘crumpled linen’ (notice James’s use of italics for effect). As with all the scenes in James’s stories where the ghost finally makes an appearance, we are only given a glimpse of the fiend, details which are sufficient enough to chill us to the marrow. Similar moments can be found in many of these narratives, such as the clutching demon in The Treasure of Abbot Thomas – ‘several – I don’t know how many – legs, arms or tentacles or something, clinging to my body’; in a ghastly face in The Rose Garden – ‘She remembers also, and with an accuracy that makes the thought intolerable to her, how the mouth was open and a single tooth appeared below the upper lip’; the strange figure in The Tractate Middoth – ‘a little dark form appeared to rise out of the shadow behind the tree-trunk and from it two arms enclosing a mass of blackness came before Eldred’s face and covered his head and neck’; and the supernatural creature in Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance – ‘It took shape as a face – a human face – a burnt human face: and with the odious writhings of a wasp creeping out of a rotten apple there clambered forth an appearance of a form, waving black arms prepared to clasp the head that was bending over them.’
There is no hysteria or great drama in James’s stories. They are told calmly and simply in such a way that when the weird realm of the undead breaks through the calm rational surface of this mundane world the shock is all the greater and the reader is not only terrified but filled with that ‘pleasurable uncertainty’.
By the time of his death, Montague Rhodes James had published four collections of his uneasy fictions, 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 and Other Ghost Stories (1925). In this body of work, thirty-three supernatural tales in all, which were published in one volume as Collected Ghost Stories in 1931, we have the distillation of fear and terror and the high benchmark in ghost-story writing. As an exciting bonus to the present volume we have added three later ghost stories not before collected in book form, The Experiment, The Malice of Inanimate Objects and A Vignette, thus bringing you the complete M. R. James ghost-story oeuvre between two covers. James’s style and effect has been emulated by many, but his success has been rarely matched and never surpassed.
Inevitably, both film and television have manhandled these stories with varying effects. The Hollywood movie Night of the Demon (Curse of the Demon, USA) in 1957, based on The Casting of the Runes, was effective in producing its fair share of thrills and chills, but inevitably the story was modernised, opened out, changed and somewhat vulgarised to suit a cinema presentation and so the spirit of James was diminished. Over the years BBC Television has produced some reverential versions of the stories and in general these programmes have been effective in capturing the mood and essence of the tales. In particular, their version of Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad, produced in 1968, came very close to creating the effect that the author achieved in the original. But the producers of these dramas are missing the point. The ghost stories of M. R. James are not meant to be dramatised and presented in a visual way. As I have tried to show in this essay, they were conceived with the sole purpose of being read, preferably in a dimly lighted room at night, so that the reader could collude with the author in a private pact and create his own personal terrors.
The power of M. R. James’s imagination continues to exert its power over ours as this volume bears testimony and will do so as long as man seeks that frisson of ‘pleasurable uncertainty’ a good ghost story can engender.
Further Reading
Cavaliero, Glen, The Supernatural and English Fiction, Oxford University Press, 1995
Cox, Michael, M. R. James: An Informal Portrait, Oxford University Press, 1983
Cox, Michael (ed.), The Ghost Stories of M. R. James, Tiger Books International, 1996
Haining, Peter, M. R. James: Book of the Supernatural, Foulsham, 1979
Johnson, Roger (ed.), Formidable Visitants, Pyewackit Press, 1999
Kneale, Nigel (ed.), The Ghost Stories of M. R. James, Folio Society, 1973
Lubbock, S. G., A Memoir of Montague Rhodes James, Cambridge Press, 1939
Penzoldt, Peter, The Supernatural in Fiction, Peter Nevill, 1952
Sullivan, Jack, Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood, Ohio University Press, 1978
Wilson, Neil, Shadows in the Attic: A Guide to British Supernatural Fiction 1820–1950, British Library, 2000
Biography
Montague Rhodes James was born in 1862 at Goodnestone Parsonage, Kent, where his father was a curate, but the family moved soon afterwards to Great Livermere in Suffolk. James attended Eton College and later King’s College, Cambridge, where he won many awards and scholarships. From 1894 to 1908 he was Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and from 1905 to 1918 was Provost of King’s College. In 1913, he became Vice-Chancellor of the University for two years. In 1918 he was installed as Provost of Eton. A distinguished medievalist and scholar of international status, James published many works on biblical, historical and antiquarian subjects. He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1930. His ghost-story writing began almost as a divertissement from his academic work and as a form of entertainment for his colleagues. He never married and died in 1936.
