“Curtains, bedsheets and other household objects are usually worth a second glance, just to be sure that they aren’t something more.” (Fred Morley/Getty)
Montague Rhodes James was the greatest writer of ghost stories in the English language. I think that greatness lies in his consistency. This might seem a small compliment, but it isn’t really. To write one truly creepy ghost story is unusual; to write one after another across decades is uncanny. Ghost stories are a tremendous technical challenge. You must have absolute control of pace, rhythm and language. Most of all, you have to know what not to write. The surest way to exorcize a malign spirit is to describe it in detail. No, the trick is to create and sustain angst in the reader, so that unease curls up from the page like fine dust.
Roald Dahl found the genre fiendishly difficult: “I am a short story writer myself, and although I have been doing it for 45 years and have always longed to write just one decent ghost story, I have never succeeded in bringing it off.” Yet James produced a whole clutch of haunting yarns. Not all are strictly stories about ghosts. There are witches, sorcerers, revenant counts and devils aplenty. Many are true classics. In Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book, a traveler buys an ancient volume and finds that his purchase comes with an unwelcome freebie; Casting the Runes sees a cursed man try to outwit a practitioner of black magic; The Mezzotint allows an academic to watch a grisly crime unfold before his eyes.
How did he do it? An excellent new biography by Darryl Jones, For the Dead Remember: A Life of M. R. James, sensibly avoids tackling that question directly. There isn’t much about James that you can tackle directly, apart from the bare bones of his career. Born in 1862; prep school; Eton; King’s College, Cambridge (student, don, provost, vice chancellor); Eton again (provost); died in 1936.
He was a phenomenally hard worker, often publishing several books a year. James spent most of his life consumed by Biblical apocrypha and the cataloging of manuscripts. On the side, he became a noted authority on medieval stained glass and the occult. He enjoyed Charles Dickens and bicycling holidays in France. Politically, he was conservative, and deeply suspicious of change. Friendship was his chief pleasure. Colleagues at King’s wondered how he was able to sustain such a pitch of scholarly industry while hosting convivial gatherings in his rooms almost every evening. There was no romance. James was attracted to men, or at least loved them, but that’s as far as it went. As Jones writes, “If he had an inner life at all (and I have sometimes wondered), it stayed resolutely inner.”
Inner lives are all very well, though they are rarely of interest to a stranger. It is the work that matters, and James’s stories still tick today. The world, always weird, is getting weirder. Familiar shapes dissolve, lights flicker, your cup isn’t quite where you set it down. Millionaires are pumping themselves full of their own children’s blood, vulnerable adults are falling in love with computer programs and drinkers are queueing in pubs. The life James knew is definitively gone, remote as Elmet, but that doesn’t matter to the stories. James’s strength lay in his ability to articulate weirdness and, occasionally, give a sense of how it might be weathered.
You don’t have to be conservative to write good ghost stories, but it probably helps. Most supernatural tales are about what happens when a debt goes unpaid, or a life is taken, or an ancient boundary marker moved. So much supernatural fiction hinges on an awareness of how fragile our little world of custom and convention really is. James was certainly a man of conservative instincts. As his choice of academic specialism suggests, he disliked abstraction, preferring the solid realities of manuscripts to grand theorizing. He was part of the 1897 campaign that prevented women from taking degrees at Cambridge, though it is only fair to note that his stance on that issue was not an unusual one for the time. Even his approach to stained glass was marked by a suspicion of change: he hated the thought of restoration; once a thing was gone, it was gone forever, and there was no point pretending otherwise. Jones observes that “the ghost story is a characteristic product of nineteenth-century forces. It is a reaction to the secular, materialist, industrial modernity that animated the dominant, progressivist Victorian utilitarian ideology.” It was the natural genre for a man like James.
Some biographers have a tendency to patronize their subjects, to strain a writer’s work through the DSM 5 and see what sticks. Jones is too good to fall for this guff, simply observing that James’s tales return to similar themes again and again. A horror of hair — luxuriant, invasive — is one such motif. Bedrooms are dangerous places, as are antiquarian booksellers and libraries. Curtains, bedsheets and other household objects are usually worth a second glance, just to be sure that they aren’t something more. But James’ great theme is that of curiosity punished.
“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad” is perhaps his most famous story, in part due to the extraordinary 1968 television adaptation, which ranks among the best dramas the BBC has ever made. It goes like this. A Cambridge don travels to East Anglia for a golfing holiday. Naturally, he can’t stick to golf. Some amateur excavation in a ruined preceptory uncovers an ancient whistle engraved with Latin text. He takes it back to his hotel. Late that night, with supper over and the bedroom quiet about him, he picks the whistle up and blows.
That’s enough plot. Anyone unfamiliar with the story should discover the rest for themselves. Suffice to say that “Oh, Whistle…” deals with many of James’s deepest preoccupations. The don, disdainful of anything that smacks of the supernatural, is saved by another hotel guest, a retired colonel whose muscular Anglicanism and intellectual humility prove much more valuable than any amount of book-learnt skepticism. England’s countryside — Jones notes that James has been unfairly overlooked as a landscape writer — is alive and old. At one moment, the world is reduced to bands of black and grey, a cell of groynes and shingle and graphite sea. Above all, there is the warning to the curious. Do not interfere with things that you cannot understand. They are more than capable of interfering with you in turn.
It isn’t all doom and groyne. James blended the truly unnerving with moments of coziness and comedy. This is because most of his stories were not written for magazines. They were performance pieces, delivered at Christmastime to an audience in his rooms at King’s. Wry asides about donnish peccadillos were designed to elicit chuckles of recognition. James had a reputation as a mimic, and so most of his tales include a Worthy Cockney or Knowing Rustic, their over-long contributions a vehicle for the author’s talents. While James is worth reading and rereading, I sometimes wonder if it isn’t better to listen to his work instead. After all, these stories were meant to be heard, not read. How strange that a writer so mistrustful of innovation should prove such a natural fit for the audiobook.
James doesn’t seem to have taken his ghost stories particularly seriously. They were an amusement, both to write and to perform. His main work was scholarly. Later, he found himself vice chancellor of Cambridge during the Great War, and was consumed by the construction of temporary hospitals and the settling of Belgian refugees. Perhaps this is part of his tales’ enduring appeal. They were not labored over. While Dahl struggled his whole life to write just one decent ghost story, James would appear before his audience with ink still wet on the page. When a story didn’t come off, he simply abandoned it and moved on to the next.
In 1931, James was asked to write a preface for his Collected Ghost Stories. The task clearly irritated him: “In accordance with a fashion which has recently become common, I am issuing my four volumes of ghost stories under one cover…” Today’s fashion is to state why an author is worth reading now. It is no longer sufficient to say, “because they are a very good writer.” For reasons that do not seem clear to anyone in the publishing industry, an argument must be made for tongue-blistering relevance. This is how we end up with front covers claiming that a particular subspecies of mollusc “Made the Modern World”.
Thankfully, Jones has been allowed to write a very good book about a very interesting man. M. R. James, you will be relieved to hear, did not Make the Modern World. In fact, he did everything he could within his small sphere to keep it at bay. His relevance is linked purely to a chain of excellent supernatural yarns that have entertained and chilled readers for over a century. He influenced many other writers of the uncanny too, from H.P. Lovecraft to Stephen King, Jeanette Winterson to Susan Hill. Yet I happen to think that his tales still are worth reading now. Because they are very good, yes, but also because they are weird stories for weird times. They ask sensible questions. Does that mound need to be dug up? That whistle blown? There’s some excellent advice for daily life in there, too: “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…”