Curious Warnings - The Great Ghost Stories Of M.R. James (90 page)

If Dickens’s ghost stories are good and of the right complexion, they are not the best that were written in his day. The palm must I think be assigned to J.S. Le Fanu, whose stories of “The Watcher” (or “The Familiar”), “Mr. Justice Harbottle,” “Carmilla,” are unsurpassed, while “Schalken the Painter,” “Squire Toby’s Will,” the haunted house in “The House by the Churchyard,” “Dickon the Devil,” “Madam Crowl’s Ghost,” run them very close. Is it the blend of French and Irish in Le Fanu’s descent and surroundings that gives him the knack of infusing ominousness into his atmosphere? He is anyhow an artist
in words; who else could have hit on the epithets in this sentence: “The aerial image of the old house for a moment stood before her, with its peculiar malign, scared and skulking aspect.” Other famous stories of Le Fanu there are which are not quite ghost stories—“Green Tea” and “The Room in the Dragon Volant”; and yet another, “The Haunted Baronet,” not famous, not even known but to a few, contains some admirable touches, but somehow lacks proportion. Upon mature consideration, I do not think that there are better ghost stories anywhere than the best of Le Fanu’s; and among these I should give the first place to “The Familiar” (alias “The Watcher”).

Other famous novelists of those days tried their hand—Bulwer Lytton for one. Nobody is permitted to write about ghost stories without mentioning “The Haunters and the Haunted.” To my mind it is spoiled by the conclusion; the Cagliostro element (forgive an inaccuracy) is alien. It comes in with far better effect (though in a burlesque guise) in Thackeray’s one attempt in this direction—“The Notch in the Ax,” in the “Roundabout Papers.” This, to be sure, begins by being a skit partly on Dumas, partly on Lytton; but as Thackeray warmed to his work he got interested in the story and, as he says, was quite sorry to part with Pinto in the end. We have to reckon too with Wilkie Collins. “The Haunted Hotel,” a short novel, is by no means ineffective; grisly enough, almost, for the modern American taste.

Rhoda Broughton, Mrs. Riddell, Mrs. Henry Wood, Mrs. Oliphant—all these have some sufficiently absorbing stories to their credit. I own to reading not infrequently “Featherston’s Story” in the fifth series of “Johnny Ludlow,” to delighting in its domestic flavor and finding its ghost very convincing. (Johnny Ludlow, some young persons may not know, is by Mrs. Henry Wood.) The religious ghost story, as it may be called, was never done better than by Mrs. Oliphant in “The Open Door” and “A Beleaguered City”; though there is a competitor, and a strong one, in Le Fanu’s “Mysterious Lodger.”

Here I am conscious of a gap; my readers will have been conscious of many previous gaps. My memory does in fact slip on from Mrs. Oliphant to Marion Crawford and his horrid story of “The Upper Berth,” which (with the “Screaming Skull” some distance behind) is the best in his collection of
Uncanny Tales
, and stands high among ghost stories in general.

That was I believe written in the late eighties. In the early nineties comes
the deluge, the deluge of the illustrated monthly magazines, and it is no longer possible to keep pace with the output either of single stories or of volumes of collected ones. Never was the flow more copious than it is today, and it is only by chance that one comes across any given example. So nothing beyond scattering and general remarks can be offered. Some whole novels there have been which depend for all or part of their interest on ghostly matter. There is
Dracula
, which suffers by excess. (I fancy, by the way, that it must be based on a story in the fourth volume of Chambers’s
Repository
, issued in the fifties.) There is “Alice-for-Short,”
^†
in which I never cease to admire the skill with which the ghost is woven into the web of the tale. But that is a very rare feat.

Among the collections of short stories, E.F. Benson’s three volumes rank high, though to my mind he sins occasionally by stepping over the line of legitimate horridness. He is however blameless in this aspect as compared with some Americans, who compile volumes called
Not At Night
and the like. These are merely nauseating, and it is very easy to be nauseating. I,
moi qui vous parle
, could undertake to make a reader physically sick, if I chose to think and write in terms of the Grand Guignol. The authors of the stories I have in mind tread, as they believe, in the steps of Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce (himself sometimes unpardonable), but they do not possess the force of either.

Reticence may be an elderly doctrine to preach, 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. 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.

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.

Clearly it is out of the question for me to begin upon a series of “short notices” of recent collections; but an illustrative instance or two will be to the point. A.M. Burrage, in
Some Ghost Stories
, keeps on the right side of the line, and if about half of his ghosts are amiable, the rest have their terrors, and no mean ones. H.R. Wakefield, in
They Return at Evening
(a good title), gives us a mixed bag, from which I should remove one or two that leave a nasty taste. Among the residue are some admirable pieces, very inventive.

Going back a few years I light on Mrs. Everett’s
The Death Mask
, of a rather quieter tone on the whole, but with some excellently conceived stories. Hugh Benson’s
Light Invisible
and
Mirror of Shalott
are too ecclesiastical. K. and Hesketh Prichard’s
Flaxman Low
is most ingenious and successful, but rather over-technically “occult.” It seems impertinent to apply the same criticism to Algernon Blackwood, but
John Silence
is surely open to it. Mr. Elliott O’Donnell’s multitudinous volumes I do not know whether to class as narratives of fact or exercises in fiction. I hope they may be of the latter sort, for life in a world managed by his gods and infested by his demons seems a risky business.

So I might go on through a long list of authors; but the remarks one can make in an article of this compass can hardly be illuminating. 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.

All this while I have confined myself almost entirely to the English ghost story. The fact is that either there are not many good stories by foreign writers, or (more probably) my ignorance has veiled them from me. But I should feel myself ungrateful if I did not pay a tribute to the supernatural tales of Erckmann-Chatrian. The blend of French with German in them, comparable to the French-Irish blend in Le Fanu, has produced some quite first-class romance of this kind. Among longer stories,
La Maison forestière
(and, if you will,
Hugues le loup
); among shorter ones
Le Blanc et le noir, Le Rêve du cousin Elof
and
L’Œil invisible
have for years delighted and alarmed me. It is high time that they were made more accessible than they are.

There need not be any peroration to a series of rather disjointed reflections. I will only ask the reader to believe that, though I have not hitherto mentioned it, I have read
The Turn of the Screw
.

MONTAGUE
R
HODES
J
AMES
was born in Goodnestone Parsonage in the village of Goodnestone, near Canterbury, Kent, on August 1, 1862, the fourth and youngest child of Mary Emily James (née Horton) and the Reverend Herbert James, a Church of England Perpetual Curate of an Evangelical persuasion.

At the age of three he moved with his family to the rectory in Great Livermere, Suffolk, a village just outside Bury St. Edmunds (which would later serve as the inspiration for his final short story, “A Vignette.” James’ childhood interest in both the Suffolk countryside and ecclesiastical architecture would significantly shape the direction of his writings in his adult life.

He was educated at home until the age of eleven, after which, in September 1873, he was sent to Temple Grove Preparatory School in East Sheen (the setting for “A School Story”). This is where he first met Arthur Christopher (A.C.) Benson; the two men were to remain lifelong friends as they followed almost identical academic paths.

In 1875, after having won a number of prizes for his Latin prose and verse, James was awarded a scholarship to Eton College, where he became one of the foremost scholars of his generation, distinguishing himself in Divinity, the Classics and French. After moving to King’s College, Cambridge, he
decided not to follow the family tradition of joining either the clergy or military but to stay in academia, and his career progressed rapidly. “Monty,” as he was affectionately known to his many friends and admirers, served as Fellow, Dean and Tutor before, in May 1905, he became Provost of King’s.

In September 1918 he accepted the Provostship of Eton, where he remained until his death.

“It is truly a pleasure,” he told a friend, “the prospect of being knit up so closely with Eton, which of all places holds perhaps the first place in my affections.”

James was friendly and good-humored by nature, with a “genius for friendship” (according to the
Cambridge Review
), and in between his numerous commitments, he worked to remain in touch with old friends and former students alike. He also reportedly enjoyed such diversions as
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
show (which toured Great Britain and Europe in the early 1890s), Christmas pantomimes, detective novels and the works of P.G. Wodehouse.