He turned over the pages till his eye was caught by a marginal note: ‘A Parable of this Unhappy Condition’, and he thought he would see what aptitudes the author might have for imaginative composition.
From Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance by M.R. James
Montague Rhodes James, Litt.D., Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge
H.R. Wakefield directly references the ghost stories of M.R. James in The Nurse’s Tale, where the nurse accuses her ward Gilbert of reading too many ghost books, adding that those of James gives her the creeps, and in The Triumph of Death, where the wicked Miss Pendleham insists her paid companion read her some stories by James. But why are the ghost tales of Montague Rhodes James – ‘Monty’ to his friends – so admired and respected by fellow ghost story writers? There are many ways of answering that question, but for me it’s that James’ stories have the strange power to linger and stay with you, haunting, as it were, your mind long after you’ve finished reading them. Yet exactly how he achieves this feat is annoyingly elusive.
So who was Monty? M.R. James, Litt.D., Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, like many of his protagonists, was a crusty bachelor who lived in the enclosed world of academic life. He was a traditionalist, a devout Anglican, conservative by nature and resistant to change, and known for his dislike of radicalism and ideas. There’s the oft reported incident, originally told by his colleague Nathaniel Wedd, of James catching two students discussing some philosophical point and saying, “No thinking gentlemen, please.” What dominated his scholastic life was instead a fascination with ancient manuscripts and artefacts. Yet therein lies a paradox, for so often in his stories it’s such objects from the past impinging upon the present that leads to the misfortune or even death for the over curious antiquary.
Montague Rhodes James was born in 1862, went to Eton College in 1876, and then to King’s College, Cambridge in 1882, where he graduated with Firsts. James’ working life was spent exclusively in academia, whether working at the Fitzwilliam museum, or as Dean of King’s or as Provost of Eton. James was known to be a very convivial companion, was friends with the Benson brothers, and was a member of the Chit-Chat Club founded in 1893, which was known for its witty and erudite conversation. It was at the Chit-Chat Club that James would read his ghost stories aloud by the light of a single candle. When James died the Nunc Dimittus, the night prayer, was sung in chapel.
As a child, Monty read and admired the tales of Sheridan Le Fanu and in later life edited an edition of his work. At Eton he read Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium, which featured stories of vampires and ghosts. James was known to enjoy bicycle rides and horseplay and ragging, plus church architecture and the lives of martyred saints. He was as well a good actor and mimic.
It is said that James had a fear of spiders, clammy touch and hair, yet all feature prominently in his tales. People have read into his stories a fear of the female sex, especially regarding the vagina dentata monster in Casting the Runes – ‘He put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow: only, it did not get so far. What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being.’ Critics have found symbolic manifestations of homosexual anxiety in ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, where the sheet in the next bed comes alive and moves towards the bachelor, who, in the opening scene of the tale ‘quivered’ at the idea of sharing a room with a male colleague. Much then has been speculated about James’ sexuality, particularly his close friendship with his illustrator James McBryde, who died in 1904, aged thirty. Letters to McBryde used terms such as ‘My dear boy’ and ‘Ever yours affectionately’.
But what about the ghost stories themselves? James knew well the Suffolk landscape (his family moved to Great Livermere soon after he was born) and several tales are set in the bleak landscape of the Suffolk coast. James knew its people, and would have been aware of their superstitious nature and esoteric interest in the supernatural. His servants, doorkeepers and innkeepers, such as Mr Collins, Mr Brown and John Hill, are particularly characterful, and their ways of speech, together with their malapropisms, are written phonetically into their dialogue. James always had a keen sense of place and atmosphere and was especially fond of Queen Ann houses and old churches.
M.R. James’ prose is simple, direct, and often understated (‘The night he passed is not one on which he looks back with any satisfaction’), yet there is as well a subtle dry humour (‘Had not the landlord at this moment knocked at the door, it is probable that quite a long poem might have been laid before the reader’). His narrators, often first person but distanced in some way from the actual events of the tale, are selective in what they say (‘It is not, however, relevant to my purpose to record his conversation’) and sometimes inexact (‘After taking some exercise – I forget exactly how or where – Anderson went back to the Golden Lion’). His story tellers are usually reticent and unwilling to say too much, and therefore there are often gaps left unexplained that the reader must fill in. It’s rare, but occasionally his narrators drop into the use of the present tense.
Many narratives make use of various sources, for example Count Magnus and The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, and James must have put in a lot of planning for them to work as well as they do. James tends to bring in an element of strangeness early in the tale, for example Mr Abney in Lost Hearts repeatedly asking Stephen how old he is on their first meeting or the early reference to keeping ‘ghosts off’ in ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’. The introduction of strangeness, be it casual or otherwise, is an essential technique of the ghost tale in that it sets up and to some degree narratively justifies the supernatural manifestation that comes later in the tale. And James is particularly brilliant at pacing, building of menace and creating psychological unease that climaxes in that ‘infinitesimal flash’ which structurally he referred to as the stab’.
Recurring motifs include a believable setting; a solitary, sexless protagonist with scholastic expertise; nostalgia for a world long gone; obsessive curiosity; unsettling dreams; enclosed or claustrophobic spaces; the disturbance of something from the past impinging upon the present; supernatural guardians; the ignoring of warnings; a reckoning or punishment; the manifestation of a powerful force of demonic evil; a monster with claws and hair that grasps or grips, plus black magic, paganism and folklore.
Here are a few of Monty’s own words of advice taken from various introductions and prefaces from editions of his ghost tales:
“The truth is, I suspect, that the genre is too small and special to bear the imposition of far-reaching principles… In fact, it is absurd to talk of them as rules; they are qualities which have been observed to accompany success.”
“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… Another requisite, in my opinion, is that the ghost should be malevolent or odious: 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.”
“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.”
“Two ingredients most valuable in the concocting of a ghost story are, to me, the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo.”
“Here [referring to a ghost tale in Wild Wales by Norfolk novelist George Borrow (1803-81)] you have a story written with the sole object of inspiring a pleasing terror in the reader; and as I think, that is the true aim of a ghost story.”
“The reading of many ghost stories has shown me that the greatest successes have been scored by the authors who can make us envisage a definite time and place, and give us plenty of clear-cut and matter-of-fact detail, but who, when the climax is reached, allow us to be just a little in the dark as to the working of their machinery. We do not want to see the bones of their theory about the supernatural.”
When asked if he believed in ghosts, James said, “I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me.”
In the preparation of this summary I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to Darryl Jones’ book M.R. James: Collected Ghost Stories, Oxford University Press. His introduction and explanatory notes have proved indispensable and I would commend his book to anyone interested in the life and works of M.R. James.
