There is something dismaying in a life with nothing to regret and nothing to hide. In the case of Montague Rhodes James, however, this has to be accepted. ‘No loveless childhood to be thrust out of mind,’ wrote his biographer, Michael Cox, ‘no parental iniquities to be kept secret.’ Monty (as he preferred to be called) did not like talking about himself. How much, in fact, did he have to say?
He was the fourth and youngest child of the rector of Livermere, near Bury St Edmunds. Born in 1862, he spent almost his entire life between Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, the two foundations of Henry VI. After entering Eton (on his second attempt) as a King’s Scholar in autumn 1876, he spent there, as he always acknowledged, the happiest years he could remember. He was twenty years old before he left Eton. Passing on to King’s he took a double first in classics and was appointed junior Dean, Dean, Provost, and, in 1913, Vice-Chancellor of the University. During this time he had made himself one of the leading authorities on the Apocryphal Books of the Bible and on western medieval manuscripts. In 1918, just before the armistice, he was called back to Eton as Provost. In 1930 he received the Order of Merit. He died in his Lodge in June 1936, while in Chapel they were singing the Nunc dimittis.
Monty’s sedate memoirs are called Eton and King’s (1926). ‘It’s odd,’ Lytton Strachey wrote after reading them, ‘that the Provost of Eton should still be aged sixteen. A life without a jolt.’
Monty never married, although he remained on affectionate terms with his brothers and sister, and acquired, in the course of time, a surrogate family. They were the widow and daughter of a pupil who became a friend, James McBryde. McBryde died early, and Monty became guardian to little Jane, taking his responsibilities very seriously. But he was still a bachelor, and a late-Victorian bachelor at that. It has been pointed out that in every photograph of Monty, from his childhood to his seventies, he has the same benevolent but almost expressionless look, latterly behind round, wire-rimmed spectacles. Probably he felt the greatest pressure on him in 1905, when he was appointed Provost of King’s. ‘You will have to get a Provostess, that’s that,’ a distinguished friend told him. And Monty, well used to deflecting this argument, would hint at his admiration for a certain actress who was appearing in Peter Pan, but nothing came of it. Much more important to him, although what he said about it is not on record, was the question of ordination. Like Lewis Carroll, he became a deacon but never a priest.
Monty is remembered today for his ghost stories. They are entirely his own, written in an irresistibly appealing manner, in accordance with rules which he had invented for himself. Writing at the end of the 1920s about contemporary ‘tales of the supernatural,’ he said, ‘They drag in sex…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.’ Certainly sex doesn’t trouble his protagonists. It is their unclouded innocence, combined with their serious scholarship, which is precisely Monty’s strong card. By way of contrast there are deferential inn-keepers, agents and chambermaids, who may know a little more than their employers, may wink or smile, but are a thousand miles from guessing the shocking truth.
It would be a mistake to think of these stories as something separate from his life. His predilection began early. His biographer quotes from a contribution to the Eton Rambler in 1880 (when he was seventeen): ‘Everyone can remember a time when he has carefully searched his curtains—and poked in the dark corners of his room before retiring to rest—with a sort of pleasurable uncertainty as to whether there might not be a saucer-eyed skeleton or a skinny-chested ghost in hiding somewhere. I invariably go through this ceremony myself.’ To the skeleton and the ghost we may add spiders, owls, the sound of voices talking just out of earshot, a creature covered with long hair, a figure cloaked or cowled or with its head in a sack. The Apocrypha, too, which had fascinated him very early and continued to do so all his life, has been described by Richard Holmes as ‘a somewhat twilight field, neither orthodox Biblical studies nor entirely medieval folklore, and it contains many strange presences, such as Solomon and the Demons.’ At the same time, Monty’s recreations remained guileless—long bicycle rides with two or three friends, church music, Animal Grab sometimes in the evenings, then (like Anderson in ‘Number 13’) ‘his supper, his game of patience, and his bed.’
Having written ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book’ some time after April 1892 (when he visited St Bertrand-de-Comminges in the Pyrenees) but before 1893 (when he read it aloud to the Chitchat Club in Cambridge), and ‘Lost Hearts’ at about the same time, Monty produced his ghost stories at regular intervals, and read them to a Christmas audience of friends in his rooms at King’s, blowing out every candle but one. They were published at regular intervals: 1904, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary; 1911, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary; 1919, A Thin Ghost; 1925, A Warning to the Curious; and 1931, The Collected Ghost Stories, for which he wrote five additional pieces, ‘There was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard,’ ‘Rats,’ ‘After Dark in the Playing Fields,’ ‘Wailing Well,’ and ‘Stories I Have Tried to Write.’ He also wrote a preface, in which he cautiously answered the question, did he believe in ghosts: ‘I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me.’ That is to say, he used the same criteria as he did in his life as a scholar, teacher, and administrator.
‘Places have been prolific in suggestion,’ he wrote. The stories are not only set in, but arise from real localities, and Monty himself was a deeply engaged traveller, with his map spread out on his knee—like Mr Davidson, for example, in ‘The Uncommon Prayer-Book,’ who spends the first morning of his holiday taking a train a couple of stations westward and walking back to his hotel along the river valley. Denmark, Sweden, Felixstowe, Belchamp St Paul in Essex—not exotic places, but that is why he selects them—respectable hotel rooms, libraries, cathedral cities, modest country houses, seaside towns out of season, dark passages leading to candlelit bedrooms where there is something wrong with the window. The reader, of course, is always one or more steps ahead of the victim, and would like to tell him not to pick up objects from archaeological sites, or to put his hand on carved figures on a choir-stall, or, if he dreams, that it is only a dream.
But that would not be quite accurate, because in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary Monty introduces dreams that wonderfully suggest the feeling of suffocation and powerlessness that comes with ‘dreaming true.’ There is Stephen Elliot’s dream of a figure of a ‘dusty leaden colour’ lying (and smiling) in an old disused bath, W.R.’s dream of a sickeningly bloodstained Punch and Judy show, Professor Parkins’s dream (or vision) of a man desperately climbing over the groynes on Felixstowe beach, Mr Dillet’s dream (or nightmare) in ‘The Haunted Dolls’ House.’ They are equally likely to be projected from the past (like Frank’s in ‘The Rose Garden’) or from the immediate and unescapable future. In either case, they anticipate the climax of the story, but don’t diminish it. Whether Monty himself was troubled by dreams I don’t know. In January 1907 he told Arthur Benson (who noted it in his diary) that he was only happy in bed or looking at manuscripts. This hardly sounds like a dreamer, but I am not sure that Monty told Arthur Benson the whole truth.
He was, from first to last, a man of books. ‘The library was the obvious place for the after-dinner hours. Candle in hand and pipe in mouth, he moved round the room for some time, taking stock of the titles.’ This is from ‘Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance,’ but might just as well be about its author. With old-fashioned courtesy he welcomes his readers to his world, just as, when Provost of King’s, he welcomed students and friends with tobacco and whisky decanters already laid out in the hall, while the lock had been replaced by a plain handle. A natural mimic in real life, he could imitate the style of any period that interested him—it seemed less a deliberate imitation than a natural process, like protective colouring. There was Medieval Latin, of course, the ‘fragments of ostensible erudition,’ as he called them, which persuade us into accepting as real the manuscripts, the inscriptions, the ‘rather rare and exceedingly difficult book, The Sertum Steinfeldens Norbertinum.’ This last is in the possession of a Mr Somerton, an antiquary, but his story, ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,’ takes place in 1859, and Monty is careful to adjust himself to that date, three years before he himself was born. ‘Martin’s Close’ begins ‘some four years ago’ but consists largely of the verbatim report of the trial in 1684 (it is said to be in seventeenth-century shorthand, so there has been some delay in translating it) of George Martin for the murder of a half-witted girl, Ann Clark. Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys is the judge, and Monty, using, as he says, the State Trials, has reproduced Jeffreys’ style so exactly that it seems ventriloquism. Almost as good, and almost as chilling, is the diary of Archdeacon Haynes from August 1816 onwards in ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral.’ Monty approaches slowly. First he tells us that he read an obituary of Haynes ‘quite by chance’ in an old copy of The Gentleman’s Magazine, then, ‘quite lately,’ he is cataloguing the manuscripts of the college to which he belongs. The first hint of something unusual comes when the librarian says he is ‘pretty sure’ that a certain box is one that the old Master of the college said they should never have accepted. It contains the diary. Now Monty has shut the trap on us. He can rely on the guilt and fascination that all of us feel when we open a private diary. The placing of the entry ‘There is no kitchen cat’ is a masterstroke.
Ghosts, he declared (in his introduction to More Ghost Stories), should be ‘malevolent or odious,’ never amiable or helpful. The haunted should be ‘introduced in a placid way, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings, and in this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head.’ This may be the result, by accident or design, of long-buried secrets, setting retribution to work. Something of the kind seems almost a professional hazard for his visiting scholars and librarians. They have to face, also (in one of Monty’s own phrases), ‘the malice of inanimate objects,’ such objects as the wallpaper in ‘The Diary of Mr Poynter’ (who lives quietly with his aunt) and the sand-filled whistle in ‘“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.”’ He speaks, too, of the rules of folklore, and says he has tried to make his ghosts act in ways ‘not inconsistent with them.’ One of the rules of folk stories is that the bad shall come to bad ends, and to this Monty was faithful. But the good (whose only failing may be that they have lived undisturbed so far) are rewarded rather unequally. Take, for example, what to my mind is the best story he ever wrote, ‘The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance.’ W.R.’s uncle has not been a wrongdoer, has no hideous secret like Mr Abney in ‘Lost Hearts,’ hasn’t disturbed any long-dead or made any rash experiments, or (most unwise of all) bought or borrowed any questionable old books. In W.R.’s dream of Punch and Judy there is ‘a sturdy figure clad in black and, as I thought, wearing bands: his head was covered with a whitish bag.’ This must be a projection of Uncle Henry, but Monty does not explain why he should be there, and seems to have come in this story as close as he ever did to compulsive writing, or being carried away. There is true inspiration in the names of the Punch and Judy men—Foresta & Calpigi, which change to Kidman & Gallop.
How seriously did he take these stories? ‘I am told that they have given pleasure of a certain sort to my readers,’ he wrote. ‘If so, my whole object in writing them has been attained.’ It was his lifelong habit not to make too much of things. However, they were more than a diversion, they were a declaration of his position. From his schooldays onward he not only disliked but detested maths and science. In Eton and King’s he reduces both these subjects and their teachers to a stream of mildly satirical stories. ‘As a warning to scientists I must record how a question of mine, to which I really desired an answer, was met by [Mr Carpenter]. “Sir, what is the difference between a frog and a toad?” “Well, that’s perfectly simple; one’s Rana, and the other’s Bufo.” I am convinced that there must be a better solution than that.’ T. H. Huxley he referred to as ‘a coarse nineteenth-century stinks man.’ Mathematics he equated with suffering. He extended his disapproval, which was more like an intense physical reaction, to philosophy. When he was Dean of King’s he overheard two undergraduates disputing a problematic point, and, according to his colleague Nathaniel Wedd, he rapped on the table sharply with his pipe and called out: ‘No thinking, gentlemen, please!’ ‘Thought,’ Wedd notes in his unpublished memoirs, ‘really did disturb Monty throughout his life.’ What truly distressed him, however, was the division of King’s into the Pious and the Godless (Wedd himself, although an admirer of Monty’s, was an agnostic), while in the Cavendish Laboratory young physicists were at work—with cardboard and string, it was said—constructing new models of a world without God. It was, of course, not scientific accuracy Monty objected to—that was necessary to all scholarship—but a sense that mankind was occupying the wrong territory. In 1928, towards the end of his life, he spoke at Gresham’s School in defence of an education in the humanities as against ‘modern invention or the most intimate knowledge of things that have no soul.’
‘“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”’ is the story which in literal fact is about a ‘sheeted ghost’—it has ‘a horrible, an intensely horrible face of crumpled linen.’ Its victim is Professor Parkins, said to be the Professor of Ontography, which I suppose makes him an expert on things as they are. He is certainly a scientist, ‘young, neat, and precise of speech,’ and emphatically a disbeliever, above all in ghosts. Disarmingly, Monty gives Parkins credit where it is due. He is ‘something of an old woman—rather hen-like, perhaps,’ but ‘dauntless and severe in his convictions, and a man deserving of the greatest respect.’ He is also the man who, after he has summoned his gruesome visitor, would either have fallen out of the window or lost his wits if help had not come. ‘There is nothing more to tell, but, as you may imagine, the Professor’s views on certain points are less clear-cut than they used to be. His nerves, too, have suffered.’ So, faced by the obstinate disbeliever, Monty takes his not-so-mild revenge.
From the Penguin edition, 2000