Curious Warnings - The Great Ghost Stories Of M.R. James (92 page)

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.’”

James also readily admitted that he was often inspired by real locations for the settings for his stories: “If anyone is curious about my local settings, let it be recorded that S. Bertrand de Comminges and Viborg are real places; that in ‘“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You,”’ I had Felixstowe in mind; in ‘A School Story,’ Temple Grove, East Sheen; in ‘The Tractate Middoth,’ Cambridge University Library; in ‘Martin’s Close,’ Sampford Courtenay in Devon; that the cathedrals of Barchester and Southminster were blends of Canterbury, Salisbury and Hereford; that Herefordshire was the imagined scene of ‘A View from a Hill,’ and Seaburgh in ‘A Warning to the Curious’ is Aldeburgh in Suffolk.”

During his research of old texts, he also uncovered and transcribed various tales of hauntings and folklore in the British Museum. These were eventually published in their original Latin as “Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories,” with abundant footnotes by James, in the July 1922 edition of the
English Historical Review
, not receiving their first English-language publication until 1978, when they were presented in
The Man-Wolf and Other Horrors
, edited by Hugh Lamb.

The author’s own belief in the supernatural was, at best, ambivalent. “I answer that I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me,” he wrote. During a debate on the existence of ghosts during his early years at Eton, James admitted that he “could not but believe in anything and everything when in bed,” and some years later he remarked to the Irish baronet [Sir John Randolph] Shane Leslie (recounted in the latter’s 1955
Ghost Book
), “Some of these things are so, but we do not know the
rules
!”

In his 1926 memoir,
Eton and King’s: Recollections, Mostly Trivial 1875–1925
, James also recalled: “Ghosts and ghostly phenomena are rare in colleges and highly suspect when they do occur. Yet, on the staircase next to mine was a ghostly cry in the bedroom. Other professors knew of it, and knew whose voice it was believed to be—a man who died in 1878.”

He also revealed that at least one of his tales—possibly “The Rose Garden,” according to a later reminiscence by Montague Summers—was suggested by a vivid dream.

“Dr. James, for all his light touch, evokes fright and hideousness in their most shocking forms,” observed H.P. Lovecraft, whose own stories were also often inspired by dreams, “and will certainly stand as one of the few really creative masters in his darksome province.”

“The goblins and phantoms devised by James are truly creative and are presented through images often so keen and vivid as to evoke an actual physical shock,” echoed Clark Ashton Smith. “Sight, smell, hearing, taction, all are played upon with well-nigh surgical sureness, by impressions calculated to touch the shuddering quick of horror.”

M.R. James continued his Yuletide readings for many years, as his friend S.G. Lubbock recalled in his memoir: “His reading of them aloud was—like his reading of the Bible—entirely untheatrical and immensely effective. In his later years, when the supply of new stories had ceased, he could generally be persuaded to read one of the old ones on Christmas night at King’s, especially as it was youth, in the shape of some choral scholar, that would thrust a volume of them into his hand. He dined at King’s on the Christmas night of 1934 and read us the Punch and Judy story [‘The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance’]; and that was the last.”

M.R. James’ friends had been urging him for years to publish his ghost stories in book form and, although initially disinclined to the idea, he did eventually agree to have them collected in four hardcover editions, published by Edward Arnold of London.

The first,
Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary
(the title is hyphenated on the book’s title-page but not the cover), contained eight stories and was published in November 1904 to some somewhat lukewarm reviews, although the reviewer for
The Guardian
was full in his
praise: “In this book are no ordinary hauntings or common-place apparitions, but real, inexplicable, horrid Things belonging to another world, such as might have been summoned by medieval wizards to their own lasting undoing. We do not hesitate to say that these are among the best ghost stories we have ever read.”

“In this volume,” James later explained, “‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’ was written in 1894 [actually, more likely 1893] and printed soon after in the
National Review
; ‘Lost Hearts’ appeared in the
Pall Mall Magazine
. Of the next five stories, most of which were read to friends at Christmas-time at King’s College, Cambridge, I only recollect that I wrote ‘Number 13’ in 1899, while ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’ was composed in summer 1904.”

The collection, which also included “The Mezzotint,” “The Ash-tree,” “Count Magnus” and “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,’” was reprinted the following year by Longmans Green in America.

“The stories themselves do not make any very exalted claim,” James wrote in his Preface. “If any of them succeed in causing their
readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, my purpose in writing them will have been attained.”

About one of the stories included in the book, H.P. Lovecraft wrote: “‘Count Magnus’ is assuredly one of the best, forming as it does a veritable Golconda of suspense and suggestion.”

James’ friend, Eustace Talbot, told the author: “You have succeeded in giving me two bad nights and one jumpy walk on a dark foggy evening in the country when every tree became possessed of horrible long arms and every step was dogged by hideous echoes about ten yards behind.”