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ОглавлениеAbout the Author
For a writer considered the leading light of a literary genre Montague Rhodes James lived a private, uncontroversial life. Born into a respectable Christian family in Kent in 1862 and then raised in Suffolk, he was educated at Eton College, studied diligently, and was later accepted into Cambridge University, where he was awarded numerous prizes and a double first in Classics. Remaining in Cambridge after graduation, James went on to become the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, a fellow of King’s College, and ultimately vice-chancellor of the university. His final post was back at Eton, as provost, from 1918 until his death there in 1936. He never married and rarely expressed an interest in politics.
It was a quiet life, and one filled with simple pleasures: travels around Britain and Europe; fine art and interesting books; lively debate with students about Classics and literature; ghost stories with friends around the fire at Christmas time. It is perhaps surprising that, in his extracurricular fictional works, James should be content to write about unremarkable scholars with quiet lives – but he knew what he was doing. The genius of M. R. James lies largely in the fact that so many of his characters are just like him.
James the Antiquary
James’s first collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, published in 1904, laid the groundwork for what would become a keystone of his literary output: from the title to the plots to the narrative style, there is something very knowing – almost self-mocking – about the way he presents a tale. This is not to say that his ghost stories are designed to be humorous: far from it. Rather they are designed to suggest authenticity.
James was a respected academic and a noted antiquary – a student and collector of old manuscripts, artefacts and art. From the very first story in this collection, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’, he establishes a narrative voice that could conceivably be his own, leaving the reader suitably ill at ease as to whether James has invented the story or experienced it himself. The scrapbook, we are told, ‘is in the Wentworth Collection at Cambridge’; the mezzotint in the story of the same name ‘is in the Ashleian Museum’. The book is full of references to ‘the papers I have quoted’ and ‘the papers out of which I have made a connected story’, and peppered with academic footnotes and intellectual asides. ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’ begins with a lengthy paragraph entirely in Latin, which an antiquary is carefully copying from a rare book; ‘Number 13’ begins with a digression into the bloody history of medieval Denmark, which ends abruptly with the knowing self-admonishment ‘But I am not writing a guide-book.’
This all adds up to a sense that we are in the hands of a rational, learned narrator – possibly James himself – and certainly one who would know nonsense if he saw it. In an apt response to the question of whether he himself believed in ghosts, James once said, ‘I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me.’ And if our reliable author/narrator believes in ghost stories, what cause has the ordinary reader to doubt them?
Stories for a Small Audience
Growing up in the later decades of the nineteenth century, James was very familiar with the Gothic horror stories that so fascinated the Victorians. But the stories he wanted to write were quite different from those of his predecessors and even of many of his contemporaries. He wasn’t interested in the grotesque monsters of Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), nor in the hysteria surrounding vampires that culminated in Stoker’s Dracula (1897), nor even in the chain-rattling ghosts of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). James wanted subtlety in his stories: apparitions that murmur on the breeze and watch through windows, half heard and half seen. He wanted realistic psychological terror. ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a book with very good ideas in it,’ he wrote in 1931, ‘but … the butter is spread far too thick. Excess is the fault here.’ It was far more effective, he felt, to push the reader’s imagination in the right direction and leave it to do its worst.
James’s stories were not written to shock the public; they were written to spook a small audience. He was a pioneer of a tradition we now associate with the Victorians – that of the fireside ghost story on Christmas Eve. Most of the stories in this collection were written to entertain his friends at King’s College, Cambridge; he would gather them in one room and read out loud by the eerie light of a single candle. Combined with his preference for a first-person scholarly narrator, the effect must have been quite hair-raising.
The Rules of Ghost Stories
Over the course of his career, James was frequently called upon to divulge the secret of his success. What, he was repeatedly asked, were the rules governing a good ghost story? ‘Two ingredients most valuable,’ he wrote in 1924, ‘are, to me, the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo.’ The tale should begin in a perfectly ordinary way, with ordinary-seeming characters ‘going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings; and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage.’
James recommended giving ghost stories ‘a slight haze of distance’ – setting them just a decade or two in the past, so that they were recognisably realistic without being distractingly modern. He wanted, above all, to work the reader into a state of quiet anxiety that encouraged him to think ‘If I’m not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me!’ These rules are a template for many of James’s stories.
M. R. James was a master of his art but a reluctant celebrity. An academic first and foremost who delighted in entertaining his close friends, he remained modest about the literary value of the stories in this collection. ‘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,’ he wrote in the preface to the first edition, ‘my purpose in writing them will have been attained.’
