Collected Ghost Stories Read online

  COLLECTED GHOST STORIES

  M. R. JAMES

  COLLECTED GHOST STORIES

  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

  DARRYL JONES

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6DP

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  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  THIS edition could not have appeared without a lot of help. I am grateful first to Judith Luna at OUP for inviting me to undertake this project, and for her help, patience, and wisdom. The librarians of many great libraries have been invaluable, and I would particularly like to thank the archivists at the two institutions with which M. R. James was closely associated, King’s College Cambridge, and Eton College. My thanks also to Charles Benson, Keeper of Early Printed Books at Trinity College Dublin. I am not the first editor James has had, and I have benefited greatly from the work done by all of my predecessors, but particularly Michael Cox, whom I never got to meet, but whose work as an editor and biographer was exemplary.

  Part of the research for this volume was enabled by an Arts and Social Sciences Benefactions Fund Award from the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Trinity College Dublin, for which I am very grateful.

  For advice, information, and support along the way, I would like to thank Chris Baldick, Ailise Bulfin, Steve Cadman, John Connolly, Helen Conrad-O’Briain, Nick Daly, Dara Downey, John Exshaw, Christopher Frayling, Kate Hebblethwaite, Paul Jackson, Maureen Jurkowski, Hilde Losnegård, Elizabeth McCarthy, Philip McEvansoneya, Ebony Morey, Bernice Murphy, John Nash, Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Helen O’Connell, Eve Patten, John Scattergood, and Brenda Silver, and my students at Trinity College Dublin.

  Particular thanks must go to my friend and colleague Jarlath Killeen for very many conversations on Victorian and Edwardian literature and culture, and on the supernatural, over very many years.

  My deepest debt is to my wife, Margaret, and my daughter, Morgan, to whom this volume is dedicated.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of M. R. James

  THE GHOST STORIES

  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 Abbot 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

  The Residence at Whitminster

  The Diary of Mr. Poynter

  An Episode of Cathedral History

  The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance

  Two Doctors

  The Haunted Dolls’ House

  The Uncommon Prayer-Book

  A Neighbour’s Landmark

  A View from a Hill

  A Warning to the Curious

  An Evening’s Entertainment

  There was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard

  Rats

  After Dark in the Playing Fields

  Wailing Well

  The Experiment

  The Malice of Inanimate Objects

  A Vignette

  Appendix: M. R. James on Ghost Stories

  Explanatory Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  Readers who are unfamiliar with the stories may prefer to treat the Introduction as an Afterword.

  IT is Christmas Eve in King’s College Cambridge, in the first decade of the twentieth century. In the Chapel—the finest, most beautiful, and most complete work of late Gothic perpendicular architecture in England—the famous choir, made up of choral scholars from the College and schoolboy choristers from nearby King’s College School, have sung the carol service, opening with a beautiful rendition of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ (though the celebrated Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols for which the choir is today best known is not a tradition that will begin until 1918, when the College starts to heal itself after the devastation of the First World War, in which so many young Kingsmen lost their lives). The Fellows and Scholars then process to Hall, for dinner and tankards of hot spiced beer to ward off the cold and the dark.

  To close the evening, a select few, a very few—friends, colleagues, former students—retire to the Provost’s rooms, participants in an altogether more sinister Christmas ritual, but one intimately connected to the carols and the Chapel. This is a dark, Victorian Anglicanism, practised out there on the fens in the flat east of England, where the sky and the land seem part of one another, and where there is no horizon; far away from the concerns of the world. The Provost thinks of his own childhood, not too far from here, a world of isolated country houses in the Italian style, of Martello towers, shingle beaches, Anglo-Saxon burial mounds, witches …

  Candles are lit, the Provost disappears into his bedroom; the friends talk, and drink their brandies or port, a little nervously. Perhaps someone plays a few bars on the piano, but always hesitantly, and never for long. At last, the Provost returns, clutching a manuscript covered in a spidery, illegible handwriting that might almost be a private cipher, the ink still wet upon the final pages, and blows out all the candles but one. It is gone eleven, nearer midnight, when the Provost begins to read, his clear, confident voice cutting through the dim, flickering light of candle and fire: ‘By what means the papers out of which I have made a connected story came into my hands is the last point which the reader will learn from these pages …’1

  By the time his ghost story readings became a Christmas ritual, Montague Rhodes James—Old Etonian and Kingsman, dean and provost of King’s College Cambridge, future vice-chancellor of Cambridge University and, in semi-retirement, provost of Eton—was amongst the most distinguished scholars in the world. His prodigious body of work, on manuscript catalogues, on biblical apocrypha and the writings of the Church Fathers, on ecclesiastical architecture, and on whatever else happened to capture his imagination, would continue unabated until his death, aged 73, in 1936. Very occasionally, to entertain himself and his friends, he also wrote ghost stories. Even more occasionally, these were collected together and published in slim volumes. While his catalogues, in particular, remain indispensable to any serious scholar of medieval manuscripts, and are very unlikely to be superseded, it may have come as a surprise to Monty James that it was to be for his ghost stories that he would be best remembered and most revered. The Collected Ghost Stories, published under his supervision in 1931, has never been out of print—although it is not complete, as there were more stories to come in the last years of his life.

  M. R. James was born in Goodnestone, Kent, on 1 August 1862, the youngest child of Herbert James, an Anglican clergyman of Evangelical leanings, and his wife, Mary Emily. Young Monty grew up surrounded by an atmosphere of religion and the supernatural, subjects which captivated him throughout his life. He was particularly drawn as a child to dread visions, be they of the gruesome martyrdoms of saints, or of the end of the world itself. Preaching a sermon in Eton in 1933, he recalled:

  There was a time in my childhood when I thought that some night as I lay in bed I should suddenly be roused by a great sound of a trumpet, and that I should run to the window and look out and see the whole sky split across and lit up with glaring flame: and next moment I and everybody else in the house would be caught up into the air and made to stand with countless other people before a judge seated on a throne with great books open before him: and he would ask me questions out of what was written in those books—whe
ther I had done this or that: and then I should be told to take my place either on the right hand or the left.2

  (As James’s stories testify again and again, books are dangerous things, to be opened with great care, and often at great cost.) These eschatological interests inform much of his scholarship, culminating in a major study of apocalyptic iconography, also published in 1931.3 They also account for his recurring fascination with the millenarian sensibilities of the English seventeenth century, a period which plays a prominent part in many of his stories. More generally, themes and images of supernatural retribution and judgement recur throughout James’s stories, clearly a central component of his artistic and scholarly preoccupations, his own aesthetic.

  When Monty was 3, the family moved to the living of Great Livermere in rural Suffolk; he spent many of his summers at his grandmother’s house in nearby Aldeburgh. The Suffolk landscape of his childhood, to which he returned throughout his life, was to inform his stories in a profound way. Aldeburgh, in particular, is a wild spot on the Suffolk coast which has long attracted artists of a bleak sensibility, including James himself. George Crabbe was born in Aldeburgh in 1754, and was curate of the flinty parish church of St Peter and St Paul’s for a time from 1781; his long poem The Borough was set around Aldeburgh, and has as its most celebrated episode the story of the suicide of Peter Grimes, a fisherman in Slaughden, half a mile north of Aldeburgh. (Slaughden was lost to the sea in the nineteenth century, finally vanishing for good in the 1930s; all that remains of it now is the Martello tower, which was painted by Turner in 1826, and which features dramatically in James’s own ‘A Warning to the Curious’.) Benjamin Britten, a longtime Aldeburgh resident, adapted Crabbe’s tale for his own austere masterpiece, Peter Grimes. The uncompromising sculptor Maggi Hambling, another Aldeburghian, has her brilliant, controversial monument to Britten, entitled Scallop, on Aldeburgh beach, facing out to the freezing North Sea. Behind it, the Sizewell nuclear power station looms. It is as remarkable a place now as it was during James’s childhood. Numerous of his stories draw on this landscape, variously fertile and unforgiving, and on the folklore that has grown up around it: ‘The Ash-Tree’, ‘The Tractate Middoth’, ‘Rats’, and ‘A Vignette’ all make important use of East Anglian landscapes; while two of his most important stories, ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ and ‘A Warning to the Curious’, are informed very heavily, and perhaps totally, by this sense of place.

  Even more than the East Anglian landscape, it is the presence and influence of educational institutions which dominate James’s work. On ‘a rainy day in September 1873’, young Monty was deposited by his father in Temple Grove school, East Sheen, which ‘had the reputation of being the oldest private school in England’.4 From this moment, his life was an unbroken progress through educational institutions—Eton, King’s, and (when the deaths of so many of his students in the War proved too much for him) back to Eton. Along the way, he garnered just about every academic and professional accolade for which he was eligible, from the King’s Scholarship at Eton through to the Order of Merit (awarded to James in 1930). It was a comfortable life—some of his contemporaries, and some of his modern readers, have thought it rather too comfortable, and perhaps downright complacent. But without this institutional influence, James would probably never have written a word of his stories.

  By modern standards, and probably also by the standards of his own time, M. R. James seems to have been a curiously incomplete man. It was for this reason, perhaps, that he was so drawn to the ghost story. His extraordinary intellectual capacities were matched by a commensurate anti-intellectualism which amounted, at times, to a genuine fear of ideas—a fear which his stories, with their consistent themes of the dangers of knowledge, reflect quite clearly. His father, Herbert James, advised exercising ‘wholesome restraint’ against ‘ill-regulated speculation’, and this is the kind of advice which the young Monty seems to have taken to heart.5 While it is true that his students at Cambridge and Eton tended to be uncritical admirers, his academic friends and colleagues could often be more sceptical. His longtime King’s colleague Nathaniel Wedd recalled James’s admonishing two students who were discussing a philosophical problem: ‘He rapped sharply on the table with his pipe, and called out: “No thinking gentlemen, please.” “Thought” in this sense really did disturb Monty throughout his life.’6 Another King’s colleague, Oscar Browning, is credited with being the origin of the frequently repeated slur that ‘James hates thought’.7 James’s friend A. C. Benson, provost of Magdalene College Cambridge, could be withering in his opinions:

  [James’s] 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. He is much abler than I am, much better, much more effective—yet I feel that he is a kind of child.8

  Browning’s comment, in particular, can in part be put down to a common kind of academic rivalry and backbiting, the jealousy felt by a modestly successful academic towards a colleague whose institutional advancement appears seamless. Benson’s consistent criticisms, in turn, may be informed by his lifelong clinical depression, which often made him see the world through the black lens of despair. Nevertheless, such remarks consistently accompanied James’s academic life, and can certainly be borne out by the practice of that life.

  ‘“Remember if you please,” said my friend, looking at me over his spectacles, “that I am a Victorian by birth and education, and that the Victorian tree may not unreasonably be expected to bear Victorian fruit”’ (p. 315) This remark, near the beginning of ‘A Neighbour’s Landmark’, is highly significant. M. R. James understood himself to be a Victorian, sometimes at sea in, and often at odds with, the modern world. This, in great part, is why he so happily spent his entire life in educational institutions of a decidedly traditional bent: they provided for him a shelter from the pressures of modernity. The King’s College to which James was admitted in 1882 had until relatively recently (1861) been a closed corporation, solely for the university education of Etonians.9 While recent reforms had brought it somewhat more in tune with the modern world, it remained perhaps the most conservative college in a notably conservative university. Little wonder that that most anti-Victorian of Modernist intellectuals, Lytton Strachey, should have read James’s memoir Eton and Kings (1925) with what seems like real disdain, believing it to be ‘a dim affair’, full of ‘vapid anecdotes and nothing more. Only remarkable as showing the extraordinary impress an institution can make on an adolescent mind. It’s odd that the Provost of Eton should still be aged sixteen. A life without a jolt.’10

  Across a long career as an increasingly influential academic and university administrator, James seems to have opposed, and attempted to block where he could, every piece of progressive legislation and every really modern thinker that crossed his path, increasingly seeing (and using) Eton and King’s as bulwarks against secular modernity. As a student at King’s, he objected to the proposed appointment of the great evolutionary biologist T. H. Huxley as provost of Eton: ‘a secularist, and a coarse nineteenth-century stinks man like Huxley don’t do’.11 As a young Fellow of King’s, he opposed the candidature for provost of the distinguished political philosopher and psychical researcher Henry Sidgwick. In 1871, Sidgwick had been one of the founders of Newnham, a Cambridge college for women, which awarded certificates rather than degrees. When the issue of awarding degrees to women, and so allowing them full university membership, arose in 1897, James found himself part of a syndicate of fourteen academics charged with producing a report—which he attempted to obstruct at every stage, and refused to sign in any of its forms. In 1905, shortly after his election to the provostship of King’s, James’s colleague Oliffe Richmond described him as ‘orthodox and woman-hater’.12 Women were not to be awarded Cambridge degrees until 1948.13 James was also a consistent opponent of the abolition of compulsory Greek from the Cambridge curriculum, and of any form of modern or systematized thinking, from communism to German Higher Criticism (which strove for a formalized analysis of biblical textual sources) to the comparative mythography of his Trinity College Cambridge contemporary J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Karswell, the rogue scholar and occultist of ‘Casting the Runes’, is himself a comparative mythographer, who ‘seemed to put the Golden Legend and the Golden Bough exactly on a par, and to believe both: [his work was] a pitiable exhibition, in short’ (p. 159). In 1917, James wrote a withering review of the Newnham classicist Jane Harrison’s comparativist essay on ‘The Head of John the Baptist’. By his own admission, after reading the article, James ‘instantly took a pen and dipped it in gall and flayed her’.14 James was normally a mild man, and so it is worth dwelling on the disproportionate venom of his response to Harrison’s essay: