Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

  Maturin’s publisher – now Constable of Edinburgh – reacted more frostily. Why did the chaotic instalments of manuscript have no pagination? Where were the logical links between the tales? What was the title to be? How could a reader ever reach the end without chapter summaries? And anyway, why was it so late?

  In retrospect, it is clear that the asymmetrical, labyrinthine structure of the tales is one of the main sources of their weird power. The further the reader enters in, the more he is overcome by a nightmare sense of suffocation and apprehension. Yet all the time the narrative moves at relentless pace. It is like a prisoner rushing to escape through a Piranesi-style series of bifurcating, subterranean vaults, which only appear to lead him deeper and deeper underground. At each twist or intersection, sooner or later, we glimpse the figure of Melmoth, lurching from the shadows, grimly proposing his bargain. The final effort may even strike the modern reader with an uncanny sense of premonition – here already is something like the dark, closed universe of Kafka’s Castle or Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.

  In the most avowedly Romantic of the tales, the story of the innocent Indian maiden Immalee on her beautiful desert island, Melmoth himself is her demon lover. He tries deviously to corrupt her mind with distorted accounts of mainland civilization, which he shows her – in a scene surely predestined for the stage – through a powerful telescope. Immalee is the figure who comes closest to redeeming Melmoth by falling in love with him. She is a potential Ariadne. He is the first human being she has ever seen (‘the daughter of a palm tree’), and she unravels his sophistries with innocent guile. Through her we realize the limitations of Melmoth’s satanically purchased powers, and the paradoxical truth that it is he who is more deeply imprisoned than all his intended victims. Many of their dialogues, full of Rousseauesque naïvetés, have a quaint poetic charm.

  ‘The tempter was departing gloomily, when he saw tears start from the bright eyes of Immalee, and caught a wild and dark omen from their innocent grief. “And you weep, Immalee?” – “Yes”, said the beautiful being, “I always weep when I see the sun set in clouds; and will you, the sun of my heart, set in darkness too? and will you not rise again? will you not?” and with the graceful confidence of pure innocence, she pressed her red delicious lips to his hand as she spoke. “Will you not?” ‘

  In the end Melmoth simply cannot bring himself to seduce her, and he bitterly abandons her to the lonely island of peacocks and blossom, as a shadow passes over the moon. But the idyll is brief, and the labyrinth here doubles back with particular cruelty. Under the name of Isadora, Immalee turns up again in Madrid, rescued, educated and refined. She is swiftly carried off, seduced and married against her parents’ will, and ends her days in yet another dungeon, with a dead child in her arms. There is no escape for anyone.

  Yet Melmoth is never successful in his temptations. Not one of his victims finally gives way, and by the end of the novel it is Melmoth himself, returned after 150 years to the remote ancestral house on the coast of Wicklow, who is at last called to account. A touch of the Irish charm does not quite desert him, though. ‘His hairs were as white as snow, his mouth had fallen in, the muscles of his face were relaxed and withered – he was the very image of hoary decrepit debility. He started himself at the impression which his appearance visibly made on the intruders. “You see what I feel,” he exclaimed, “the hour then is come. I am summoned, and I must obey the summons – my master has other work for me! When a meteor blazes in your atmosphere – when a comet pursues its burning path towards the sun – look up, and perhaps you may think of the spirit condemned to guide the blazing and erratic orb.” ‘

  Maturin leaves open one unsettling possibility. Melmoth might continue to rove the world, ‘seeking for whom he might devour’, in centuries to come – ‘should the fearful terms of his existence be renewed’.

  Maturin eventually received £500 from Constable for his overdue manuscript, but the terms of his own contract were never renewed. A mere four years after the publication of his masterpiece, he died in gloom and genteel poverty, aged forty-four. Fame never reached him properly again. When Walter Scott, the most faithful of his literary supporters, journeyed to Dublin in order to collect materials for a biography, he found that most of Maturin’s private papers had been destroyed by his family.

  Maturin had written that he was ‘one who has hitherto known little of life but labour, distress and difficulty, and who has borrowed the gloomy colouring of his own pages from the shade of obscurity and misfortune under which his existence has been wasted’. In Melmoth he added: ‘Let those who smile at me, ask themselves whether they have been indebted most to imagination or reality for all they have enjoyed – if indeed they have enjoyed anything.’

  Despite its Gothicism, much of the deepest inspiration of Melmoth the Wanderer is profoundly and timelessly Irish. It draws on images of age-old subjection and persecution, but lights them with a fantastic charm and exuberance. It touches upon the spiritual nature of captivity – social, religious, political – in a way that has often been more accessible to the European than the English mind. Perhaps this will always be so. But surely this was one of the reasons why Wilde, with a kind of posthumous gallantry, adopted his grand-uncle’s strange creation when he went into sad exile in France.

  How oddly delighted the Reverend Maturin would have been, if he had lived even to a legitimate ripe old age, to learn that Charles Baudelaire – that other spoilt priest – had proposed to translate Melmoth unabridged into French; and how moved he might have been to read the following passage from his ‘Poème du Haschisch’ (1858):

  Let us remember Melmoth, that admirable emblem. His horrific suffering lies in the disproportion between his marvellous faculties, acquired instantly by a satanic pact, and the everyday world in which, as a creature of God, he is condemned to live. And none of those whom he wishes to seduce consent to purchase, on those same conditions, his terrible privilege. In effect, any man who does not accept the conditions of life, sells his own soul.

  Yet one stranger speculation remains. If Melmoth’s contract was renewed – where is he now?

  M. R. JAMES AND OTHERS

  AT THIS SEASON, the darkness slides out of the fens and begins to gather in Cambridge towards five o’clock. It is the late afternoon, entre chien et loup. From the tall windows of the panelled library of King’s College, one looks north in the half-light over the neat, shaved lawns towards Wilkins’ Building, and the four mace-like spires of King’s Chapel, where the choristers will soon be vesting for Evensong. Outside, in the sharp wind, muffled figures hurry round the flagged terraces and disappear over the hump of the bridge into the rustling gloom of the Backs. As for the thin shapes that occasionally glide at angles across the forbidden centres of the grass, they are vaguely identified, by ancient notices, as Senior Members of the College, which their fluttering draperies would seem to confirm.

  To the south, the library windows gaze down upon the shadowy brickwork of Webb’s Court, and the Provost’s gateway, above which the initials M. R. J. may be seen carved in relief above the casements, with sinuous trefoils and elaborate tentacles of stonework binding the letters of his name to the cold fabric in a tight, labyrinthine, and presumably benevolent embrace.

  All this is as it was, and, almost, as it should be. The career of Montague Rhodes James was inextricably bound up with the life of King’s College. Here he came as a scholar from Eton in 1882; here he took a Double First in Classics, and was appointed in faultless progression Dean, Provost and Vice-Chancellor of the university; and it was from here that he retired back to King’s sister college Eton in 1918, to a second benign and much-loved Provostship, now the ageing friend of schoolboys, choristers and cats.

  Montague James was a tall, solidly built man, with large impassive features, rather severely cut, round black spectacles, and great physical strength, which seemed to find little outlet except in bicycling and demon patience. He never married. His life was essentially scholast
ic and collegiate in the old academic pattern, that rare blend of monastic loneliness and mischievous, faintly boyish, good fellowship. He presided at the end of the golden age of assured continuity between Eton and King’s. In the field of medieval manuscripts he gained an international reputation as a palaeographer and antiquarian. His great work, a definitive edition of the Apocryphal New Testament, was published in 1924. He received the Order of Merit in 1930. He died, listening to Christmas carols, in 1936. He left a humorous, oddly impersonal autobiography called Eton and King’s – subtitled ‘Recollections, mostly trivial’. It was in its way a model life, smooth, well-trimmed, distinguished and without interruptions: indeed, much like the lawns of the college. Only, what were those shapes that glided across it, occasionally, in the dusk?

  For there is the little matter of the ghost-stories.

  Dons, of course, had strange quirks of humour in those days. They liked weird jokes lurking in footnotes; conundrums in Latin vulgate; etymological anecdotes about diseases; imaginary friendships with domestic animals; or domestic friendships with imaginary ones. (No doubt it has all changed now.) Montague James’s ghost-stories fitted into all these categories of cloister recreation. Yet this does not entirely account for them.

  There is, for example, the sudden and unexpected occasion of their advent, at an October meeting of the Chitchat Society, in 1893, a rather prosaic institution dedicated to ‘the promotion of rational conversation’ and habituated to nothing wilder than dissertations on church portals or Breton ballads. The minute still exists: the 601st meeting, eleven members present, and ‘Mr James read Two Ghost Stories’. There were serious scholars in attendance: Walter Headlam, and Dr Waldstein of the Fitzwilliam Museum (where James was to follow as director); yet no explanation of this aberration is forthcoming.

  We know only that the first story was ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’, one of the most horribly violent and deliberately autobiographical of them all: in it, a travelling antiquarian, clearly identified with James, is set upon one lonely night in his auberge bedroom by a fiend whose picture he has just discovered in a priceless folio of medieval manuscripts.

  His attention was caught by an object lying on the red cloth just by his left elbow. Two or three ideas of what it might be flitted through his brain with their own incalculable quickness. ‘A pen-wiper? No, no such thing in the house. A rat? No, too black. A large spider? I trust to goodness not – no, Good God! A hand like the hand in that picture!’ In another infinitesimal flash he had taken it in. Pale, dusky skin, covering nothing but bones and tendons of appalling strength; coarse black hairs, longer than ever grew on a human hand; nails rising from the ends of the fingers and curving sharply down and forward … The shape, whose left hand rested on the table, was rising to a standing posture behind his seat, its right hand crooked above his scalp … he screamed with the voice of an animal in hideous pain.

  Montague James was appointed Dean at King’s in the year of this story.

  Then there is the question of the regularity of the ghost-stories, which if not obsessive was certainly ritual. James was thirty-one, and he produced approximately one story every year for the next quarter of a century. The dates of the collections speak for themselves: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, 1904; More Ghost Stories, 1911; A Thin Ghost and Others, 1919; and A Warning to the Curious, 1925. The Collected Ghost Stories appeared in 1931, and were reissued this autumn. Nor did James resort to any other form of fiction, except one, The Five Jars. But this was to be a deliberate piece of ‘white magic’, dedicated to a particular little girl with a very special place in James’s existence.

  Next there are James’s oddly insistent denials, for he rarely insisted on anything, which belong to the end of his life. ‘First, whether the stories are based on my own experience? To this the answer is No: except in one case, specified in the text, where a dream furnished a suggestion. Or again, whether they are versions of other people’s experiences? No. Or suggested by books? This is more difficult to answer concisely …’

  Against these has to be set the fact that we now know that virtually all of them have direct links with places that James visited, or with work he was engaged upon. The old Cambridge University Library, the Fitzwilliam and Ashmolean museums, the favourite seaside resorts of Felixstowe and Aldeburgh, country houses in Devon and Lincolnshire, his prep school at East Sheen, the cathedral manuscript library at Canterbury, vacational visits to Scandinavia, Austria and France, his lifelong study of witch trials – all may be found under the thinnest of disguises in the stories. A professor from Poitiers University has recently written to praise James on the accuracy of his architectural description of the little church of St Bertrand de Comminges, in the Pyrenees, which the fiend frequented in ‘Canon Alberic’: particularly the detail of the stuffed crocodile in the nave.

  In general the ghost-stories reflect the everyday minutiae of James’s own Edwardian scholar’s world: the late-night studies, the panelled libraries, the rural taverns, the cathedral precincts, the out-of-season seaside hotels, the blustery golf-links, the closed cabs, the winking servants, the lawyers’ deed boxes, the mouldering chapels, the lonely lanes and the stretching beaches of long, introspective expeditions with a thin walking stick in the late afternoon. Indeed, James always insisted that it was just these precise, slightly old-fashioned but absolutely faithful scenarios that were the major factor in the power of his stories to ‘summon’.

  A moment’s consideration, however, serves to delay the looming conclusion that the occurrences in the stories were actually autobiographical. ‘Deux fois je l’ai vu; mille fois je l’ai senti’ is the way the sacristan puts it in ‘Canon Alberic’. A man who saw all James’s demons would do presumably anything rather than write Christmas tales about them, although the diaries of Arthur Benson, the Master at Magdalene, suggests that he might resort to other forms of written record; and there is the case of Algernon Blackwood. But such literal transcriptions would be merely frightful, pathological fragments, not the beautifully balanced and thoroughly gentlemanly accounts of James’s fiction.

  Instead, one is led to ask, what after all is the nature of the ghost-story, beyond that of pure entertainment? If it is not literally true, what kind of truth might it embody? Or what kind of response does it summon? Or what kind of catharsis does it provide?

  Is there not, perhaps, an element of something like automatic writing within the purely mechanical arrangement of the suspense? While the outward narrative is deliberate, and in James’s case finely worked to a really masterly pitch of understatement and implied unpleasantness, the inner encounter is perhaps symbolic and not so deliberate. Indeed it may even be quite uncontrolled.

  To this extent, the ghost-story may have some of the properties of the dream. As James practised it, it might be one of the few genuinely successful forms of English surrealism. It has a power to summon and embody – the words have a particular force of meaning in James’s horribly muscular, crouching, taloned apparitions – certain unformulated threats and contradictions both inside the narrator’s own mind, and, even more, outside it, in the conditions of his life and social circumstance. The ghosts are, perhaps, the true historical witnesses, far more honest and solid than the poor, fleeing men of flesh whom they hound and harrow.

  Here, too, it may be recalled that the basic action of almost all James’s ghost-stories is that of the investigation or research, which disturbs malign forces far more powerful than the investigator ever bargained for.

  The sheltered, outmoded and somewhat peculiar tenor of James’s life at King’s, already contained, openly and on its surface, many of those qualities of the grotesque which were to be expressed at far greater intensity in the stories. This grotesquerie was of a special, English kind: farcically funny, the macabre and the cruel – strongly reminiscent, in fact, of those dribbling gargoyles which everywhere ornament the stolid church architecture of the East Anglian fens. The autobiography Eton and King’s is packed with such tales of the ec
centricities of fellow dons – of the ageing adolescent, Oscar Browning; or of the crippled J. E. Nixon, who lacked one hand and one eye, and was said to have been composed of two dons compacted in a railway accident near Euston Station. Typically, James recorded with a sort of professional interest the baiting of another old retainer by King’s undergraduates:

  They sat at their window looking out into the court and saw Mozley coming out of his staircase, intent on a brisk walk. They then gave a low but penetrating whistle. Mozley started, looked round and stopped dead, and if the whistle was repeated ran back into his staircase like a rabbit. In a minute or two he would peep out again, looking cautiously about. Again they whistled, of course, keeping themselves concealed: again he ran back.

  This entertainment might, apparently, go on for an entire afternoon. How close it already lies to the theme of the story ‘O Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ is evident. But James’s only comment is: ‘Are dons so odd nowadays as they were then? It can hardly be. Most of them are married and lead normal family lives.’

  By comparison, Nathaniel Wedd, a classical tutor at King’s, has recalled in an unpublished memoir one of James’s own peculiarly donnish superstitions which is equally suspended between the sense of prank and of real fear. ‘I lived in the rooms beneath him in Fellow’s Building. At about 2am I used to knock the ashes of my pipe out, tapping on the mantelpiece. Monty told me how often and often when in bed he heard the tap, tap, tap, he used to lie shivering with horror. He couldn’t believe it wasn’t a ghost in his outer room, though he knew all the time exactly how the sounds were produced. At heart he believed in ghosts and in their malevolence.’

  James revelled in the company of undergraduates, especially in the evenings, when as Provost he had the Lodge lock replaced by a simple handle. Card games, mimicry, jigsaw puzzles, whisky and soda, and such hybrid university sports as tossing up coins freighted with licked postage stamps (the object being to frank the ceiling), went on far into the early hours. The cast of humour among the inner circle was exemplified by one of James’s reviews written for private performance at the ADC, a burlesque on the Marlowe Society’s Faust. The Jamesian Faust is an undergraduate tempted by his Mephistophelean tutor to specialize in Occult Studies for Part II of the Tripos. Significantly enough, it is the lady domestic, his bedmaker, who pleads with him: