Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
CANON ALBERIC’S SCRAP-BOOK
LOST HEARTS
THE MEZZOTINT
THE ASH-TREE
NUMBER 13
COUNT MAGNUS
“OH, WHISTLE, AND I’LL COME TO YOU, MY LAD”
THE TREASURE OF ABBOTT THOMAS
A SCHOOL STORY
THE ROSE GARDEN
THE TRACTATE MIDDOTH
CASTING THE RUNES
THE STALLS OF BARCHESTER CATHEDRAL
MARTIN’S CLOSE
MR. HUMPHREYS AND HIS INHERITANCE
APPENDIX
PREFACE TO GHOST-STORIES OF AN ANTIQUARY
PREFACE TO MORE GHOST STORIES OF AN ANTIQUARY
Explanatory Notes
COUNT MAGNUS AND OTHER GHOST STORIES
MONTAGUE RHODES JAMES was born in 1862 at Goodnestone, in Kent, but spent most of his early years at Livermere Hall in Suffolk. He attended Temple Grove preparatory school and Eton before beginning a long association with King’s College, Cambridge, first as a student (1882), then as a Fellow (1887), Dean (1889), Tutor (1900), and Provost (1905). He was also director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (1893-1908). His first volume of ghost stories, Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary, appeared in 1904, followed by three other volumes: More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost (1919), and A Warning to the Curious (1925). His Collected Ghost Stories appeared in 1931. In 1918 he became Provost of Eton, remaining in that office for the rest of his life. Throughout his career James published many distinguished works of scholarship, especially on medieval manuscripts, Biblical apocrypha, and church history; among his important publications were The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts (1919) and The Apocryphal New Testament (1924). His autobiography, Eton and King’s, was issued in 1926. Among his many honors was the Order of Merit, bestowed upon him by King George V in 1930. James, who never married, died in 1936.
S. T. JOSHI is a widely published writer and editor. He has edited three Penguin Classics editions of H. P. Lovecraft’s horror tales as well as Algernon Blackwood’s Ancient Sorceries and Other Strange Stories (2002) and Lord Dunsany’s In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales (2004). Among his critical and biographical works are The Weird Tale (1990), H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996), and The Modern Weird Tale (2001). He has edited works by Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken, and other writers. He lives with his wife in upstate New York.
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First published in Penguin Books 2005
Introduction copyright © S. T. Joshi, 2005
All rights reserved
“A Night in King’s College Chapel” is . R. James.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
James, M. R. (Montague Rhodes), 1862-1936
Count Magnus and other ghost stories : the complete ghost stories of
M. R. James /M. R. James ; edited with an introduction and notes by S. T. Joshi
p. cm.—(Penguin classics)
eISBN : 978-0-143-03939-6
1. Ghost stories, English. I. Joshi, S. T., 1958- II. Title. III. Series.
PR6019.A565A6 2005
823’.912—dc22 2005043371
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Introduction
In one sense, it is exceptionally odd that M. R. James (1862- 1936) would become the leading twentieth-century author of ghost stories; in another sense—especially when we consider the sort of ghost stories James came to write—it seems eminently natural and inevitable. James led a double, perhaps a triple, life—first as one of the most distinguished scholars of medieval manuscripts and early Christianity of his time, second as a noted professor and administrator at Cambridge University and then at Eton College, and finally as a writer of ghost stories. It is no surprise that only that last body of work continues to attract the attention and fascination of readers worldwide: James’s scholarship, although fundamentally sound, has now been largely superseded, and in any event its audience is necessarily limited to a small cadre of the learned, whereas the ghost stories are of universal appeal and have never been surpassed by those many authors who have chosen to pay them tribute by imitation.
Montague Rhodes James was born on August 1, 1862, at the vicarage of Goodnestone, in Kent, the fourth child and third son of Herbert and Mary Emily James. Three years later Herbert was transferred to Livermere Hall, near Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, a home that remained in the James family until Herbert’s death in 1909, and remained close to M. R. James’s heart long after that.1 Herbert had fallen under the influence of the evangelical movement of the time, but there is little evidence that his children became doctrinaire or fundamentalist in their religion; indeed, it was a lasting disappointment for Herbert when Montague eventually decided not to pursue holy orders.
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 mediev
al 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