One Thing and Another

Three years on from his television film of the short story “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad”, Miller was invited to reflect on M. R. James’s skills as a writer of horror.²⁵⁶

EVANS: This is an enormously effective piece of writing because it conjures up in one’s mind, immediately, something…the ‘something’ that James has caught there, which isn’t merely the lack of description. He introduces something about the motion of the thing which is alien and unpleasant. This seems to me to be the essence of James.

MILLER: Well, it’s very significant in fact that what is described is really a paraphrase of what psychologists would give of the appearance of objects as they present themselves on the edge of the field of vision, in that part of the retina which is not equipped to provide detailed information but can only provide very vague outlines: differences between light and shade, and differences of movement. We know for example that the human eye is divided into two sectors – the central field of vision, which is equipped to deal with detailed pattern, and the peripheral field of vision, which is designed just to tell the difference between light and shade and states of movement. Objects which are on the periphery of the field of vision can never be seen in detail. They produce a state of alarm because they are alerting you to the existence of something which might or might not be threatening. And as long as it’s on the field of vision, it’s always potentially threatening. Brought into the central field of vision, where its details can now be seen, it can be diagnosed, accurately classified and appropriate action undertaken. But so long as it remains out there on that edge of the field of vision, where you can’t quite tell what its shape is, or what its colour is, or what its form is, it is still in that unclassifiable area and therefore is potentially a risky object. I think what James has intuited here is a very, very refined description of his subject’s capacity to analyse the fact that what he was seeing was something which did not have the characteristic form of an ordinary, organic object, but was unclassifiable and peculiar in its motion.

EVANS: This business about not being too detailed in your description of the ghost – do you think that this…if it’s going to be successful, do you think this partly accounts for the relative lack of success of ghost figures in the theatre and in movies?

MILLER: I think it’s one of the reasons. I think it’s extremely hard to create a visual counterpart to a ghost because it’s hard to put on a screen something which is going to occupy the periphery of the vision of the audience. To put it on the screen is instantly to place it on the centre of the retina of the audience, and therefore it’s there in all its detail and can instantly be classified and seen for what it is. I think the way to do it is simply to produce events and incidents which are themselves quite natural, but they’re in a context where they shouldn’t actually happen. In other words you don’t need to present anything which visually is in itself abnormal, but you simply need to present two normal incidents which shouldn’t be there at all.

EVANS: Now does the interpretation that the audience puts upon these juxtaposed events have to be a supernatural one?

MILLER: Well it depends how you arrange it. For example, in the James “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” [1904], one of the most successful moments in the written story is the finding of the upper bed by the maid, the discovery that the bedclothes have been mysteriously ruffled in the night – that it’s been slept in.258 Now, you don’t need to see the creature that’s done it; you merely need to know that only one person has been in that room and that therefore the bed should have remained unruffled. So what is upsetting here is no particular ‘appearance’ which is supernatural, but the juxtaposition of two incidents which together add up to a supernatural occurrence. A ruffled bed after all is a ruffled bed, but a ruffled bed in a room in which only one person has been sleeping is an extremely unsettling idea.

EVANS: So the problem with the ghost in the theatre and in the movies is that both are so visually…both are visual arts in the sense that they present things, they demand that you look at the thing in the full frontal vision, and it simply doesn’t work because no one is prepared to accept anything in the peripheral.

MILLER: Well there are two visual tricks which you can use, I think, to present the thing visually. One of them is to present an extremely fleeting vision; in other words, the very rapid cut so that the mind hardly has time to fasten on the object, and that’s the equivalent of placing it in the periphery of vision. You can place it in the centre of vision but it’s there so fast that the mind hasn’t got time to scan it, and that I think is always the trick which is used. Or else you pan very rapidly over the object of horror, or you present the object in a very anomalous form so that you can’t quite tell what it is. For example, I had a number of technical difficulties, when doing Whistle and I’ll Come to You, with the object on the beach in the extract that you’ve just read. We spent two whole days handling elaborate, concrete, physical machinery to try and create this fluttering drapery moving across the beach. We had meteorological balloons with long strings suspending a strange polythene object, and I’m afraid that on the screen it simply looked like a large polythene object suspended from meteorological balloons. It wasn’t until we actually used something far simpler, and none of the technical devices of the BBC Visual Effects Department, that we really succeeded. What we did in the end was to hang a piece of dirty dishcloth from a string about 20 feet from the camera, from two beanpoles which were placed just on the edge of the frame, so that you couldn’t see the beanpoles and nor could you see the strings. All that you could see was this dirty dishcloth. We then started to move the beanpoles very slowly towards the camera so that the wind caught in the cloth and began to wave it. It had no particular shape, no particular outline. It just fluttered in a rather unsettling way. We then stretched the film, and that’s to say we printed every frame twice, thereby slowing down the movement of the thing, and also giving it a curious, anomalous, jerky progress. The actual effect of this was to reproduce a movement which was quite unlike any movement which could possibly occur with an animal or with a mechanical object. It had a strange, jerky, syncopated, glutinous movement which was extremely disgusting when it was on the screen. You couldn’t quite tell what it was at all. It was too far away to tell it was a dishcloth. All that you saw was a sort of filthy turmoil in the middle distance.

EVANS: And no doubt M. R. James would have been proud of it.

MILLER: I think he would have been quite pleased!

EVANS: Of course James can also do detail beautifully if he wants to. The case that I think of is in “Lost Hearts”, there are one or two images in that: the creature seen in an old bathroom, lying in the bath, through some frosted glass. A tremendously powerful image. And also two children seen in the moonlight outside a window, and here his very sharp writing and quite a bit of detail is equally effective.259

MILLER: It’s also significantly detailed in “The Mezzotint” [1904], where the minutely detailed account of the movement of the figure on the lawn is reproduced almost with the same grain as the engraving itself.²⁶⁰ But here of course he’s producing a sense of the uncanny by a different technique altogether. It’s to do not so much with the appearance as with a disorder of classification once again. After all, pictures are known to us as things which do not move, which are embalmings of states of affairs. The whole essence of a photograph or of a snapshot or of a picture is that time is stilled and fixed at that moment. And what James does is to reverse the classification and present us with, in fact, what now is very familiar to us: a moving picture on a framed screen.

EVANS: It’s interesting, isn’t it, that James really scorns the invisible creature, which was quite a fashionable type of ghost, although a limited one. I’m thinking of “The Horla” [1887] for example by de Maupassant, where a man is plagued by a totally invisible being. Now, that is a horrific notion. None of us would like this to happen to ourselves, and yet it’s got limited potential because you can only have so many stories about totally invisible creatures. What do you think are the reasons for James’s enormous success? Because he does zig-zag back and to between a piece of intuitive writing, such as in “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad” where something is seen in the periphery of vision, to something with a lot of sharp detail.

MILLER: I think there are two or three things which contribute to James’s success. One I think is that he is a first-class naturalistic writer. There is an authorative sense of realism, a tremendous sense of physical authenticity about the time and place which he conjures up. He reproduces a world of late-nineteenth-century English academics and clerics –

EVANS: Which he was one.

MILLER: Which he was one himself – who live in a clearly recognizable world of studies and manuscripts and palimpsests, and it’s by reproducing the dreary physical detail of this life and then slightly altering by four or five degrees the events which occur within it, which bring these into some startling relief. It’s very important when writing a ghost story not to magnify the incident and not to make the incident too extravagant, because once you do that you stretch belief beyond the point where the subject becomes interested in the story.

EVANS: For example, a long chase, featuring a ghost chasing you endlessly through…no matter how horrible the house, the chase gets less and less exciting the longer it goes on.

MILLER: In a sense it’s very like pornography, in this way. Pornography is really more successful when it sets itself in a very clear, dull, recognizable circumstance. In rather extravagant circumstances, one’s interest begins to flag because it reproduces a world with which one can’t identify. Therefore it only needs an extremely small shift of reality to produce a very large shock, either of erotic or supernatural sensation.

EVANS: One thing that James does is to set up, to make his background authentic, doubly authentic. He not only gives a lot of attention to local detail but he also introduces the apparently solid themes of archaeology, antiquarianism, and also the church very strongly featured in his stories: the vicar who has the church service and yet, nevertheless, he still finds himself briefly face-to-face with something that is beyond him. In “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” [1904]261 there’s a whole lot of initial story which merely deals with the antiquarian’s attempt to find this particular box. He lowers himself down the well and even now it’s nothing more than almost an archaeological adventure story until he finds the box, opens it, and something reaches out and puts its hands around his neck…that is the total story in effect. He then runs away from the well and there’s practically nothing much more to it.

MILLER: Well it’s a very good lure, you see, and the reader is drawn in by his fascination with a very esoteric expertise. One of the reasons for the success, for example, of that architectural programme Animal, Mineral, Vegetable?, was to hear experts talking in detail about the physical arrangements and matter of the various exhibits, and this is exactly what James does. He plays a game of Animal, Mineral, Vegetable with us and then, quite suddenly, presents a fourth category which is neither animal, mineral, nor vegetable.