Collected Ghost Stories (2 page)

There was a time in my childhood when I thought that some night as I lay in bed I should suddenly be roused by a great sound of a trumpet, and that I should run to the window and look out and see the whole sky split across and lit up with glaring flame: and next moment I and everybody else in the
house would be caught up into the air and made to stand with countless other people before a judge seated on a throne with great books open before him: and he would ask me questions out of what was written in those books—whether I had done this or that: and then I should be told to take my place either on the right hand or the left.
²

(As James’s stories testify again and again, books are dangerous things, to be opened with great care, and often at great cost.) These eschatological interests inform much of his scholarship, culminating in a major study of apocalyptic iconography, also published in 1931.
³
They also account for his recurring fascination with the millenarian sensibilities of the English seventeenth century, a period which plays a prominent part in many of his stories. More generally, themes and images of supernatural retribution and judgement recur throughout James’s stories, clearly a central component of his artistic and scholarly preoccupations, his own aesthetic.

When Monty was 3, the family moved to the living of Great Livermere in rural Suffolk; he spent many of his summers at his grandmother’s house in nearby Aldeburgh. The Suffolk landscape of his childhood, to which he returned throughout his life, was to inform his stories in a profound way. Aldeburgh, in particular, is a wild spot on the Suffolk coast which has long attracted artists of a bleak sensibility, including James himself. George Crabbe was born in Aldeburgh in 1754, and was curate of the flinty parish church of St Peter and St Paul’s for a time from 1781; his long poem
The Borough
was set around Aldeburgh, and has as its most celebrated episode the story of the suicide of Peter Grimes, a fisherman in Slaughden, half a mile north of Aldeburgh. (Slaughden was lost to the sea in the nineteenth century, finally vanishing for good in the 1930s; all that remains of it now is the Martello tower, which was painted by Turner in 1826, and which features dramatically in James’s own ‘A Warning to the Curious’.) Benjamin Britten, a longtime Aldeburgh resident, adapted Crabbe’s tale for his own austere masterpiece,
Peter Grimes
. The uncompromising sculptor Maggi Hambling, another Aldeburghian, has her brilliant, controversial monument to Britten, entitled
Scallop
, on Aldeburgh beach, facing out to the freezing North Sea. Behind it,
the Sizewell nuclear power station looms. It is as remarkable a place now as it was during James’s childhood. Numerous of his stories draw on this landscape, variously fertile and unforgiving, and on the folklore that has grown up around it: ‘The Ash-Tree’, ‘The Tractate Middoth’, ‘Rats’, and ‘A Vignette’ all make important use of East Anglian landscapes; while two of his most important stories, ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ and ‘A Warning to the Curious’, are informed very heavily, and perhaps totally, by this sense of place.

Even more than the East Anglian landscape, it is the presence and influence of educational institutions which dominate James’s work. On ‘a rainy day in September 1873’, young Monty was deposited by his father in Temple Grove school, East Sheen, which ‘had the reputation of being the oldest private school in England’.
⁴
From this moment, his life was an unbroken progress through educational institutions—Eton, King’s, and (when the deaths of so many of his students in the War proved too much for him) back to Eton. Along the way, he garnered just about every academic and professional accolade for which he was eligible, from the King’s Scholarship at Eton through to the Order of Merit (awarded to James in 1930). It was a comfortable life—some of his contemporaries, and some of his modern readers, have thought it rather too comfortable, and perhaps downright complacent. But without this institutional influence, James would probably never have written a word of his stories.

By modern standards, and probably also by the standards of his own time, M. R. James seems to have been a curiously incomplete man. It was for this reason, perhaps, that he was so drawn to the ghost story. His extraordinary intellectual capacities were matched by a commensurate anti-intellectualism which amounted, at times, to a genuine fear of ideas—a fear which his stories, with their consistent themes of the dangers of knowledge, reflect quite clearly. His father, Herbert James, advised exercising ‘wholesome restraint’ against ‘ill-regulated speculation’, and this is the kind of advice which the young Monty seems to have taken to heart.
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While it is true that his students at Cambridge and Eton tended to be uncritical admirers, his academic
friends and colleagues could often be more sceptical. His longtime King’s colleague Nathaniel Wedd recalled James’s admonishing two students who were discussing a philosophical problem: ‘He rapped sharply on the table with his pipe, and called out: “No thinking gentlemen, please.” “Thought” in this sense really did disturb Monty throughout his life.’
⁶
Another King’s colleague, Oscar Browning, is credited with being the origin of the frequently repeated slur that ‘James hates thought’.
⁷
James’s friend A. C. Benson, provost of Magdalene College Cambridge, could be withering in his opinions:

[James’s] mind is the mind of a nice child—he hates and fears all problems, all speculation, all originality or novelty of view. His spirit is both timid and unadventurous. He is
much
abler than I am, much better, much more effective—yet I feel that he is a kind of child.
⁸

Browning’s comment, in particular, can in part be put down to a common kind of academic rivalry and backbiting, the jealousy felt by a modestly successful academic towards a colleague whose institutional advancement appears seamless. Benson’s consistent criticisms, in turn, may be informed by his lifelong clinical depression, which often made him see the world through the black lens of despair. Nevertheless, such remarks consistently accompanied James’s academic life, and can certainly be borne out by the practice of that life.

‘“Remember if you please,” said my friend, looking at me over his spectacles, “that I am a Victorian by birth and education, and that the Victorian tree may not unreasonably be expected to bear Victorian fruit”’ (
p. 315
) This remark, near the beginning of ‘A Neighbour’s Landmark’, is highly significant. M. R. James understood himself to be a Victorian, sometimes at sea in, and often at odds with, the modern world. This, in great part, is why he so happily spent his entire life in educational institutions of a decidedly traditional bent: they provided for him a shelter from the pressures of modernity. The King’s College to which James was admitted in 1882 had until relatively recently (1861) been a closed corporation, solely for the university education of Etonians.
⁹
While recent reforms had brought it somewhat more in tune with the modern world, it remained perhaps
the most conservative college in a notably conservative university. Little wonder that that most anti-Victorian of Modernist intellectuals, Lytton Strachey, should have read James’s memoir
Eton and Kings
(1925) with what seems like real disdain, believing it to be ‘a dim affair’, full of ‘vapid anecdotes and nothing more. Only remarkable as showing the extraordinary impress an institution can make on an adolescent mind. It’s odd that the Provost of Eton should still be aged sixteen. A life without a jolt.’
¹⁰

Across a long career as an increasingly influential academic and university administrator, James seems to have opposed, and attempted to block where he could, every piece of progressive legislation and every really modern thinker that crossed his path, increasingly seeing (and using) Eton and King’s as bulwarks against secular modernity. As a student at King’s, he objected to the proposed appointment of the great evolutionary biologist T. H. Huxley as provost of Eton: ‘a secularist, and a coarse nineteenth-century stinks man like Huxley don’t do’.
¹¹
As a young Fellow of King’s, he opposed the candidature for provost of the distinguished political philosopher and psychical researcher Henry Sidgwick. In 1871, Sidgwick had been one of the founders of Newnham, a Cambridge college for women, which awarded certificates rather than degrees. When the issue of awarding degrees to women, and so allowing them full university membership, arose in 1897, James found himself part of a syndicate of fourteen academics charged with producing a report—which he attempted to obstruct at every stage, and refused to sign in any of its forms. In 1905, shortly after his election to the provostship of King’s, James’s colleague Oliffe Richmond described him as ‘orthodox and woman-hater’.
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Women were not to be awarded Cambridge degrees until 1948.
¹³
James was also a consistent opponent of the abolition of
compulsory Greek from the Cambridge curriculum, and of any form of modern or systematized thinking, from communism to German Higher Criticism (which strove for a formalized analysis of biblical textual sources) to the comparative mythography of his Trinity College Cambridge contemporary J. G. Frazer’s
The Golden Bough
. Karswell, the rogue scholar and occultist of ‘Casting the Runes’, is himself a comparative mythographer, who ‘seemed to put the
Golden Legend
and the
Golden Bough
exactly on a par, and to believe both: [his work was] a pitiable exhibition, in short’ (
p. 159
). In 1917, James wrote a withering review of the Newnham classicist Jane Harrison’s comparativist essay on ‘The Head of John the Baptist’. By his own admission, after reading the article, James ‘instantly took a pen and dipped it in gall and flayed her’.
¹⁴
James was normally a mild man, and so it is worth dwelling on the disproportionate venom of his response to Harrison’s essay:

Her article cannot, I feel sure, be the result of very careful thought, and I regret to see that a researcher of her experience can allow herself to make public crude and inconsequent speculations of this kind, which go far to justify those who deny to Comparative Mythology the name and dignity of a science.
¹⁵

Underlying what is unquestionably a genuine scholarly dispute (comparativists by their nature tend to work at a high level of generalization; James was obsessed by particulars and exceptions) are a series of interrelated anxieties. Harrison was a woman, a graduate and Fellow of Newnham, and a systematizing intellectual. M. R. James was in flight from all of these things throughout his life.

Indeed, James seems to have objected to
all
the modern thinkers and writers he encountered: Aldous Huxley, James Joyce (both ‘a charlatan’ and ‘that prostitutor of life and language’
¹⁶
), Lytton Strachey, Bertrand Russell (a pacifist), Radclyffe Hall (‘I believe Miss Hall’s book [
The Well of Loneliness
] is about birth control or some kindred subject, isn’t it. I find it difficult to believe either that it is a good novel or that its suppression causes any loss to literature’
¹⁷
),
J. B. S. Haldane (James voted to dismiss him from his university readership in biochemistry following his involvement in a case of adultery and divorce in 1926, though Haldane’s appeal against dismissal was upheld; Haldane was also an outspoken socialist). Perhaps worst of all for James was John Maynard Keynes, who appears to have become something of a nemesis, and who may have been one contributing factor to his decision to leave King’s in 1918. Keynes was both James’s double and his antithesis: an Old Etonian, Fellow and bursar of King’s, an outward-looking modernizer, and amongst the very greatest British intellectuals of the twentieth century. ‘I’ve had a good look at this place,’ Keynes remarked shortly after his arrival at King’s, ‘and come to the conclusion that it’s pretty inefficient.’
¹⁸
When James became provost of King’s in 1905, Benson recorded his concerns: ‘He will simply be a Head on the old lines, reactionary, against novelty and progress. He will initiate nothing, move nothing. Monty has
no
intellectual, philosophical or religious interests really.’
¹⁹

The potential that ideas have for opening up new worlds of possibility caused James lifelong anxiety. Thus, his research, phenomenal as it was, tended habitually towards apocrypha, ephemera, marginalia—towards forgotten and perhaps deliberately irrelevant subjects. James was happy to acknowledge this himself. As a schoolboy, his autobiography records, he became fascinated by ‘blobs of misplaced erudition…. Nothing could be more inspiriting than to discover that St Livinus had his tongue cut out and was beheaded, or that David’s mother was called Nitzeneth.’
²⁰
In 1883, the first paper James delivered to the Chitchat Society in Cambridge (to whom he first read a number of his important early stories) was entitled ‘Useless Knowledge’.
²¹
Amongst the very greatest of his scholarly achievements is his 1924 Oxford edition of
The Apocryphal New Testament
, a collection of marginal or excluded scriptural texts whose intrinsic worth, James admitted, was highly dubious.
²²
The irresistible pull of
the irrelevant for James was frequently remarked upon by his colleagues and contemporaries. His revered tutor at Eton, H. E. Luxmoore, noted the way in which James ‘dredges up literature for refuse’; Edmund Gosse, the great Edwardian man of letters, and lecturer in English at Trinity College Cambridge, remarked on ‘those poor old doggrell-mongers of the third century on whom you expend (notice! I don’t say
waste
) what was meant for mankind’; A. C. Benson believed that ‘no one alive knows so much or so little worth knowing’.
²³

But it is the very limitations of James’s personal, social, and intellectual horizons that account for the brilliance of his ghost stories. The great effect and power of James’s stories lies in their acts of exclusion, the ways in which they use scholarship, knowledge, institutions, the past, as a rearguard action to keep at bay progress, modernity, the Shock of the New. They are straitened, narrow, austere, limited. And it is precisely this lack of expansiveness that makes him a great short story writer, and the very greatest ghost story writer, as these limitations become narrative preoccupations, simultaneously obsessions and games. The ghost story tends to be a highly conventional, formalized, conservative form, governed by strict generic codes, which often themselves, as with James, reflect and articulate an ingrained social conservatism, an attempt to repulse the contemporary world, or to show the dire consequences of a lack of understanding of, and due reverence for, the past, its knowledge and traditions. These traditions, when violated or subjected to the materialist gaze of modernity, can wreak terrifying retribution.