Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories

The young Montague received his education first at Temple Grove preparatory school (1873-76), then Eton College (1876- 82), where he gained a lifelong attachment to his tutor, Henry Elford Luxmoore. Luxmoore may have seen in James—who was already exhibiting an interest in what might be called biblical archaeology (notably the apocryphal books of the Old and New Testament and the apocalyptic literature of the early Middle Ages)—the wide-ranging scholar that he did not have the opportunity to be. At the same time, Eton also saw James’s initial interest in the ghost story. In a letter to his parents he speaks of stumbling upon the work of the medieval writer Walter Map (whose De Nugis Curialium James would later edit and translate), “which contains some extraordinary stories about Ghosts, Vampires, Woodnymphs etc.”² His reading of the great Irish supernaturalist Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, who would remain his favorite writer of horror tales, also dates to his Eton days. There is evidence that he wrote—or, at any rate, told—his first ghost stories as early as 1878; certainly, by 1880, when the Eton Rambler published his essay on “Ghost Stories” (see Appendix), his interest was well established.

But for the time being, scholarship was paramount. It was inevitable that, after graduating from Eton, James would advance to King’s College, Cambridge: for centuries King’s had been a closed corporation reserved exclusively for graduates of Eton, and even after the reforms of 1861 it was still largely an Etonian preserve. James’s years as a collegian at King’s (1882-87) saw the flowering of his interest in Biblical curiosa, medieval manuscripts, and church history. This work only continued when James was successively named Fellow (1887), Dean (1889), and finally Tutor (1900) of King’s. His first scholarly article had been published as early as 1879, but beginning in 1887 he commenced a series of publications—books, monographs, editions, articles, and reviews—that would not cease until his death. In 1893 James also became the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, a post he would hold until 1908.

How exactly James found the time for all this work, let alone the writing of ghost stories, was a puzzle to friends and colleagues alike, especially when one considers James’s other interests—his devotion to Dickens, P. G. Wodehouse, and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories; his interest in card games and crossword puzzles; and, of course, the abundant conviviality he showed to friends, students, and almost any others who came within his horizon. A charming and often-told anecdote gets to the heart of the matter:

When Monty was in his early thirties, Lord Acton came here [to King’s] . . . “You know Montague James?” he asked a King’s man. “Yes, I know him.” “Is it true that he is ready to spend every evening playing games or talking with undergraduates?” “Yes, the evenings and more.” “And do you know that in knowledge of MSS he is already third or fourth in Europe?” “I am interested to hear you say so, Sir.” “Then how does he manage it?” “We have not yet found out.”³

The matter becomes even more baffling when we consider the extensive travel in which James engaged from as early as 1892, when he took his first bicycle tour of the Continent. From 1895 to 1914 he took at least one trip to France a year, chiefly for the purpose of examining medieval cathedrals; he would later maintain that he had personally seen 141 out of the 143 extant cathedrals in France. Trips to Scandinavia followed in 1899 and 1900.

James’s ghost stories were manifestly an amusement of his lighter hours, although they need not be esteemed lightly on that account. We may date the commencement of his supernatural writing to the rather frivolous tale “A Night in King’s College Chapel” (probably written in 1892), but it was not long before he produced weightier work. A celebrated meeting of the Chitchat Society (a literary and social group at Cambridge) on October 28, 1893, saw James read his two earliest ghost stories, “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book” and “Lost Hearts.” Thus began a long tradition, extending well in the 1920s, when James would read drafts of his tales to a succession of friends, collegians, and other groups, usually at Christmas time. Although these first two stories were published in magazines in 1895, James would very likely not have considered book publication of his tales had not a close friend, James McBryde, undertaken the task of illustrating several of them. McBryde’s sudden death in 1904, after completing only four illustrations, appears to have led James to issue Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary (1904) as a tribute to his friend’s memory.

A year after this volume came out, James was made Provost of King’s College. It proved to be a difficult assignment: not only had he been selected only after two others had declined the post, but the tedium of administrative work began to weigh upon his temperament. It was also at this time that a struggle between the “pious” and the “ungodly” began to emerge for control of Cambridge’s intellectual culture; James, manifestly on the side of the “pious,” was notably uncharitable toward such of his “ungodly” Cambridge colleagues as James George Frazer and Bertrand Russell. The war years were particularly stressful: Cambridge seemed emptied of its finest youths, many of whom (such as Rupert Brooke, whose participation in Cambridge theatricals had attracted James’s admiration) left their bodies on the battlefields of France. Although a second volume of tales, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, appeared in 1911, along with an array of impressive scholarly works, this was a markedly unhappy time in James’s life.

The return to Eton in 1918, this time as Provost, could only have been a relief. As Provost of King’s, James had been criticized for failing to be an intellectual pioneer; his scholarship seemed increasingly remote and unrelated to present-day concerns. A close friend, A. C. Benson, who had known James since his Eton days, wrote somewhat uncharitably in his diary: “his mind is the mind of a nice child—he hates and fears all problems, all speculation; all originality or novelty of view. His spirit is both timid and unadventurous.”⁴ Eton was, however, exactly the place for James: his instinctive empathy with the enchantments and travails of schoolboy life, the unaffectedly avuncular or even grandfatherly air he exhibited, and the prodigious learning that he carried so unassumingly were perfectly suited to the education of British youth. Administrative mundanities were safely in the hands of a Head Master; James, although he faced the terror of dining with the King and Queen once every year, could devote himself wholly to nurturing his charges with quiet encouragement.

It was during his Provostship that his two final collections of ghost stories, A Thin Ghost (1919) and A Warning to the Curious (1925), appeared, followed by the gathering of all four volumes, plus a few additional tales, as The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1931). Such important works of scholarship as The Apocryphal New Testament (1924), and such popular works as The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts (1919) and Abbeys (1925), also appeared. James’s learning of the Danish language paid dividends when he translated some of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales into English in 1930. In 1925 he completed the prodigious task—begun informally as early as 1884—of cataloguing all the manuscripts of the Cambridge colleges. Honors were showered upon him in later life: he became a trustee of the British Museum in 1925; he was awarded honorary degrees from Oxford (1927) and Cambridge (1934); and, as a capstone, in 1930 he received the Order of Merit from King George V. James’s later years were plagued with increasing ill health, and he died on June 12, 1936. His headstone bears the words of Ephesians 2:19: “No longer a sojourner, but a fellow citizen with the saints and of the household of God.”

It would be easy to pass off James’s ghost stories as lighthearted amusements; James himself lends some credence to this view in many of his own remarks. Indeed, many scholars on James have unwittingly belittled his work by asserting that “His stories are straightforward tales of terror and the supernatural, utterly devoid of any deeper meaning,”⁵ or that “his fiction . . . was simply the bagatelle for an idle hour, the construction of a delicate edifice of suspense with which to entertain the young people whose company he so much enjoyed.”⁶ To be sure, a more exhaustive study of James’s life and scholarly work will shed additional light on some of the telling autobiographical elements in the stories—his wide-ranging travels as the source of the authentic local color in such stories as “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book” or “Number 13”; his pathological fear of spiders in “The Ash-Tree”; the extraordinary re-creation of medieval Latin in the opening of “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” and of a seventeenth-century trial in “Martin’s Close”—but even this does not get us close to the philosophical thrust of the ghost stories.

Richard William Pfaff maintained, correctly, that “Writers on ghost stories . . . fail not so much in praising MRJ’s stories too little—indeed, it might be argued that if anything the tendency is to overpraise them as a whole—but in paying little or no attention to the really remarkable thing about them, the brilliance of the antiquarian background.”⁷ But Pfaff himself may not have been quite as precise in this formulation as one might wish; for it is not merely the “antiquarian background” (which, in one sense, is merely utilized to create a patina of verisimilitude) that is remarkable, but the purpose to which James puts it. James was sufficiently well-read in the traditions of supernatural fiction to know that terror is most effective when emerging from the depths of history. Where he differed from his predecessors—especially the Gothic novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who actually set their works in the medieval era in order to enhance the reader’s suspension of disbelief in the supernatural manifestations they exhibited—was in suggesting the pervasiveness of the past’s influence upon the present: his tales, generally set only a few decades prior to their date of writing, establish a continuity between past and present in which the present is entirely engulfed and rendered fleeting and ineffectual in the face of the heavy cultural burden of prior centuries. Martin Hughes gets close to this idea when he writes: “the premiss of antiquarian stories is that records and relics are very important: when properly studied they are extremely revealing of all aspects of life in the past; moreover what they reveal is still important now.”⁸

In conveying this conception, James’s protagonists are of central importance. It is a truism to say that James never engages in any detailed psychological analysis of the antiquarians who are the driving force of his tales: they are, in one sense, merely stand-ins for himself—uniformly male, scholarly, somewhat unworldly, and engaged in investigating the past largely to satisfy curiosity. Jack Sullivan has remarked of these figures:

The characters are antiquaries, not merely because the past enthralls them, but because the present is a near vacuum. They surround themselves with rarefied paraphernalia from the past—engravings, rare books, altars, tombs, coins, and even such things as doll’s houses and ancient whistles—seemingly because they cannot connect with anything in the present.⁹

There may not be sufficient textual evidence to support this interpretation, but it is provocative nonetheless. What has, however, gone largely unnoticed is that there is a subtle but unmistakable progression between these seemingly “innocent” characters (all of whom bring doom upon themselves by actively seeking to probe into ancient secrets that they know full well may be dangerous) and the avowedly “evil” figures who people some of James’s most memorable tales. The redoubtable Mr. Abney in “Lost Hearts,” who seeks prolonged life by eating the still-beating hearts of little children, is described as “a man wrapped up in his books,” while Karswell, in “Casting the Runes,” is merely a scholar gone wrong—one who is so embittered at his failure to gain recognition as a man of learning that he turns to occultism as an act of revenge. It is worth noting that the motif of supernatural revenge, very common in James’s stories, may itself have been a product of his own scholarly interests, specifically his interest in apocalyptic literature. Early in his career he had noted that this literature “operates on the principle that the punishment should fit the crime, with much attention to the often gory details by which this principle is worked out.”¹⁰

It is here, I believe, that James’s ghost stories, his antiquarian scholarship, and his religion become inextricably fused. Shane Leslie, a longtime friend of James, made the seemingly startling remark that “his belief in ghosts marched parallel with his religion,” ¹¹ although he does not elucidate the statement. Another friend, Stephen Gaselee, has portrayed James’s religion as follows:

He was a man of simple and deep religious feeling. Learned biblical scholar as he was, he did not think much of the “higher criticism,” at any rate when it was destructive; and I have heard him say that the biblical documents were subjected to criticism not only unfair in itself, but of a kind that no one would ever have dreamed of applying to the secular literary remains of antiquity.¹²

That last phrase is of the highest importance; for although James may not have been a dogmatic or fundamentalist Christian, his hostility to the intellectual ferment of his time in matters of religion—the shock-waves following Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859); the “Higher Criticism” that showed the evolution of biblical texts over centuries and made it increasingly unlikely that they were direct revelations from God; the gradual but inexorable shift of intellectual opinion from unquestioned piety to agnosticism and even atheism—is evident. In his ghost stories, James uses such devices as occultism (the perversion of religion into impious magic and sorcery) and the misuse or misconstrual of biblical passages as a warning on the dangers of straying from orthodoxy. The Bible’s own warnings on the dangers of being tempted by Satan are so frequent that it can easily lead the weak or the vicious—such as James Wilson, the redoubtable landowner of “Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance”—into becoming one of the Devil’s party.

So much attention has been given to the technique of James’s ghost stories that insufficient attention has been paid to their deeper meanings. This is particularly the case with James’s ghosts. H. P. Lovecraft wrote pungently:

In inventing a new type of ghost, he has departed considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition; for where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and hairy—a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and man—and usually touched before it is seen.¹³

All this is very entertaining and, indeed, by no means off the mark; but Lovecraft fails to probe the true symbolism of James’s ghosts. They are “lean, dwarfish, and hairy” because they thus embody the primitivism that stands in stark contrast to the learned, rational, skeptical antiquarians who, for James, represented the pinnacle of human achievement. It is not insignificant that Somerton, in “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,” “screamed out . . . like a beast” when encountering the horror in the well: contact with the primitive reduces even the most civilized to the level of the subhuman.

Related to this whole motif is James’s array of lower-class characters. The fractured and dialectical English in which these characters speak or write is, in one sense, a reflection of James’s well-known penchant for mimicry; but it cannot be denied that there is a certain element of malice in his relentless exhibition of their intellectual failings. The illiteracy of Somerton’s valet in “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”; the malapropisms of the bailiff, Mr. Cooper, in “Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance”; the ignorance of the hapless librarian in “The Tractate Middoth”—all these and other characters are made figures of fun, the butt of jests from a man whose own learning is unassailable. And yet, they occupy pivotal places in the narrative: by representing a kind of middle ground between the scholarly protagonists and the aggressively savage ghosts, they frequently sense the presence of the supernatural more quickly and more instinctively than their excessively learned betters can bring themselves to do.

Another aspect of James’s characterization is his women characters—or, rather, their virtual absence from his tales. Even in his own lifetime James, the lifelong bachelor, suffered from accusations of misogyny: in 1896 he opposed the granting of degrees to women at Cambridge, and in 1916-17 he attacked with unwonted viciousness a paper on comparative religion by Jane Harrison in the Classical Review that he regarded as disrespectful to Scripture. Several women appear to have pursued James for his hand in marriage, but he resisted each time. James’s defenders point to his cordial friendships with any number of women, notably Gwendolen McBryde, the widow of his friend James McBryde; but the world of James’s fiction is as devoid of significant female characters as H. P. Lovecraft’s. This need not be regarded as a flaw: James was not writing mimetic fiction that claimed to present a well-rounded portrayal of society at large. He was writing of what he knew—the world of (male) antiquarian scholarship. And yet, the sardonic view of marriage that we find in such a story as “The Rose Garden,” or the annoying Lady Waldrop in “Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance,” seems to go a bit beyond mere whimsy. What, then, are we to make of the fact that several of the ghosts in James’s tales create fear through a hideous parody of affection? Who can forget the thing in the well in “The Treasure of Abbott Thomas,” which “slipped forward on to my chest, and put its arms around my neck” (James’s emphasis)?

And yet, it may well be said that for James, as Austin Warren has observed, “It is places, not persons, which are haunt-able.” ¹⁴ In this sense, “Number 13,” otherwise as far as possible from the standard “antiquarian ghost story” that James initiated, is prototypical in its display of a haunted hotel room. Although the locus of horror in James is chiefly situated in cathedrals, abbeys, and other sites where centuries of religious tradition have engendered an inevitable backlash of unorthodoxy among a select band of heretics, horror can also manifest itself in any locale where the long reach of history has had free play—a rose garden, a hedge maze, even a library. The mundanity of these settings is vital to James’s methodology of the ghost story, which (as he wrote in the preface to his second collection) is designed to elicit the reader’s awareness that “If I’m not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!”

M. R. James would no doubt have been surprised at the literary legacy he fostered. This legacy is exhibited not so much in the work of those friends and colleagues who tended to produce uninspired pastiches of his style and manner—E. G. Swain (The Stoneground Ghost Tales, 1912), Arthur Gray (Tedious Brief Tales of Granta and Gramarye, 1919), R. H. Malden (Nine Ghosts, 1942), A. N. L. Munby (The Alabaster Hand, 1949)—as in certain other writers who used the antiquarian ghost story as the springboard for imaginative creations of their own. The three Benson brothers—A. C., E. F., and R. H.—all wrote supernatural tales, and E. F. was present at the legendary meeting of the Chitchat Society in 1893 when James read his first tales;¹⁵ but the tales of E. F. Benson, the best of the three, although not written with quite the meticulous precision of James’s, tend to be of broader range and theme. It can by no means be claimed that such writers as Walter de la Mare, L. P. Hartley, Oliver Onions, L. T. C. Rolt, Russell Kirk, or Robert Aickman are in any sense merely imitators of James; indeed, one suspects that the greater emphasis that many of these writers place upon the psychological analysis of ghostly phenomena, especially as they affect the victim of them, is a direct result of James’s apparent lack of interest in this regard. In any event, one would like to think that James—whose views of his predecessors and contemporaries in the realm of supernatural fiction were not always charitable—would have taken some pride in the tradition he instigated, for all his deprecation of his own work as merely an exercise in pleasant shudder-coining. There is much to be said for the scholarly reserve, in-direction, and subtlety of James’s tales, so strikingly in contrast to the loud, brash, and frequently vulgar effusions that clutter the supernatural field today. That his stories have survived a century or more while those of his noisier successors seem destined to lapse into merited oblivion should itself be regarded as “a warning to the curious.”