Curious Warnings - The Great Ghost Stories Of M.R. James (95 page)

However, although “Rats” had originally been written for
At Random
(“Edited by present Etonians”) in 1929, James was obviously so proud that the story had also appeared the same year in Lady Cynthia Asquith’s anthology
Shudders: A Collection of New Nightmare Tales
that he couldn’t help boasting about it to his readers.

He additionally revealed in the same piece that “a Norse version of four from my first volume, by Ragnhild Undset, was issued in 1919 under the title
Aander og Trolddom
.” He was perhaps unaware that a companion volume,
Abbedens skat
, published the same year by Cammermeyers Forlag, contained Undset’s translations of the remaining four stories from
Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary
.

While reviewing the
Collected Ghost Stories
in 1934, Clark Ashton Smith summed up the author’s oeuvre: “The personnel of James’
Pandemonium
is far from monotonous; one finds a satyr dwelling in a cathedral tomb; a carven cat-like monster that comes to life when touched by a murderer’s hand; a moldy smelling sack-like object in an unlit well, which suddenly puts its
arms around the neck of a treasure-seeker; a cloaked and hooded shape with a tentacle in lieu of arms; a lean, hideously taloned terror, with a jaw ‘shallow as that of a beast’; dolls that repeat crime and tragedy; creatures that are dog-like but are not dogs; a saw fly tall as a man, met in a dim room full of rustling insects; and even a weak, ancient thing, which being wholly bodiless and insubstantial, makes for itself a body out of crumpled bed-linen.”

In a review of the book in the April 1931
Spectator
, Peter Fleming described James as “an acknowledged master of his craft: unrivaled at his best, for consistent merit never approached.”

James himself contributed an insightful Introduction to the 1924 anthology
Ghosts and Marvels: A Selection of Uncanny Tales from Daniel Defoe to Algernon Blackwood
, edited by V.H. (Vere Henry Gratz) Collins for the Oxford University Press/Humphrey Milford.

“Often have I been asked to formulate my views about ghost stories and tales of the marvelous, the mysterious, the supernatural,” he wrote. “Never have I been able to find out whether I had any views that could be formulated. The truth is, I suspect, that the genre is too small and special to bear the imposition of far reaching principles. Widen the question, and ask what governs the construction of short stories in general, and a great deal might be said, and has been said. There are, of course, instances of whole novels in which the supernatural governs the plot; but among them are few successes. The ghost story is, at its best, only a particular sort of short story, and is subject to the same broad rules as the whole mass of them. Those rules, I imagine,
no writer ever consciously follows. In fact, it is absurd to talk of them as rules; they are qualities which have been observed to accompany success.”

The author then went on to once again expound upon his ideas that the basis of a good ghost story relied on “the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo,” as well as the reader being “introduced to the actors in a placid way.” He also reiterated his belief that, “For the ghost story a slight haze of distance is desirable.”

However, he did qualify this latter comment: “If a really remote date be chosen, there is more than one way of bringing the reader in contact with it. The finding of documents about it can be made plausible; or you may begin with your apparition and go back over the years to tell the cause of it; or (as in ‘Schalken the Painter’) you may set the scene directly in the desired epoch, which I think is hardest to do with success. On the whole (though not a few instances might be quoted against me) I think that a setting so modern that the ordinary reader can judge of its naturalness for himself is preferable to anything antique. For some degree of actuality is the charm of the best ghost stories; not a very insistent actuality, but one strong enough to allow the reader to identify himself with the patient; while it is almost inevitable that the reader of an antique story should fall into the position of the mere spectator.”

James also championed the work of Irish writer J. (Joseph) Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73), author of the above-mentioned story “Schalken the Painter” and the classic vampire novella “Carmilla,” whom he described as standing “absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories.”

He edited and provided the Introduction to Le Fanu’s collection
Madame Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery
(1923): “Nobody sets the scene better than he,” enthused James, “nobody
touches in the effective detail more deftly.” Three years later he contributed an Introduction to a new edition of Le Fanu’s novel
Uncle Silas
, in which he somewhat unconvincingly claimed to have exposed “Conan Doyle’s cribbing of the plot.”

James not only contributed an Introduction to Faber & Faber’s
Hans Andersen: Forty Stories
in 1930, but he also supplied a new translation of the Danish writer’s work because he was not happy with the previous attempts. The new edition featured twenty-four color plates by Christine Jackson, and the
New Statesman
reviewer approved of the whole package, saying, “We get possibly for the first time, a glimpse of the originals as they really are.”

Five years later, James’ translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s
The Little Mermaid
was issued in a separate edition by New York publisher Holiday House with illustrations by Pamela Bianco.

Not every story James set out to write reached completion, as the author explained in his essay “Stories I Have Tried to Write,” which was originally published in the November 30, 1929, edition of the small Eton magazine
The Touchstone
.

“It has amused me sometimes to think of the stories which have crossed my mind from time to time and never materialized properly,” he wrote. “They are not good enough. Yet some of them had ideas in them which refused to blossom in the surroundings I had devised for them, but perhaps came up in other forms in stories that did get as far as print.”

The piece was subsequently reprinted in
The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James
and it has inspired numerous writers down the decades—including Sir Andrew Caldecott, Sheila Hodgson, David G. Rowlands, A.F. Kidd, C.E. Ward, Stephen Gresham, Rhys Hughes and Reggie Oliver, to name but a few—to try their own hand at completing these unfinished plot ideas.

Many more authors have been inspired to create their own ghost stories in the “Jamesian tradition.” This has led to Ramsey Campbell—whose own 1989 story “The Guide” was a tribute to the Jamesian method—to state that “M.R. James is the most influential British writer of supernatural fiction,” while author and editor Michael Cox speculated that “it is probable that M.R. James has generated more imitators than any other English ghost story writer.”

James’ own ghost stories were often rooted in his background as a scholar, and his lifelong work was cataloging the medieval manuscript libraries of the colleges in Cambridge. The first catalog was published in 1895 and the last—more than 1,100 manuscripts later—in 1925.

He was also the author of such scholarly works as
The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts
(1919) and
The Apocalypse in Art
(1931), and the guidebooks
Abbeys
(1925) and
Suffolk and Norfolk: A Perambulation of the Two Counties with Notices of Their History and Their Ancient Buildings
(1930). He translated New Testament Apocrypha and also contributed to the
Encyclopædia Biblica: A Critical Dictionary of the Literary, Political and Religion History, the Archaeology, Geography and Natural History of the Bible
(1899–1903), edited by Thomas Kelly Cheyne and J. Sutherland Black.

James also took on the post of Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge between 1893–1908, and was responsible for acquiring many important antique manuscripts and works of art, including some notable portraits by the 16th-century Italian painter Titian (Tiziano Vecelli). In 1902 the abbey ruins at Bury St. Edmunds in West Suffolk were excavated after he found a fragment of ancient manuscript, which in turn led to the rediscovery of the graves of several 12th-century abbots.

Montague Rhodes James was awarded the British Commonwealth’s prestigious Order of Merit in June 1930. He was a confirmed bachelor and never married, preferring his life of academia, and he died peacefully in his lodge on Friday, June 12th, 1936, at the age of 73. He was buried in Eton town cemetery three days later.

That same year, his final story appeared posthumously in the November issue of
The London Mercury and Bookman
, which had previously published “A View from a Hill” (May, 1925) and “A Warning to the Curious” (August,
1925). Although the author had indicated in his Preface to
The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James
that, when asked if he was going to write any more ghost stories, “I fear I must answer, Probably not,” editor R.A. ScottJames explained to his readers how it had come about:

“A Vignette” is undoubtedly the last ghost story written by the late Dr. M.R. James, Provost of Eton, and probably his last piece of continuous writing intended for the press. It came into being in this way. Mr. Owen Hugh Smith was good enough to ask Dr. James to try to recapture the mood in which he wrote
Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary
, and to let me have something in similar vein for the Christmas number of
The London Mercury
(1935). The answer was that he would do his best. On December 12th of that year he sent off to me the MS, written in pencil, from The Lodge, Eton College, with the following letter: