by M. R. James
Her article cannot, I feel sure, be the result of very careful thought, and I regret to see that a researcher of her experience can allow herself to make public crude and inconsequent speculations of this kind, which go far to justify those who deny to Comparative Mythology the name and dignity of a science.15
Underlying what is unquestionably a genuine scholarly dispute (comparativists by their nature tend to work at a high level of generalization; James was obsessed by particulars and exceptions) are a series of interrelated anxieties. Harrison was a woman, a graduate and Fellow of Newnham, and a systematizing intellectual. M. R. James was in flight from all of these things throughout his life.
Indeed, James seems to have objected to all the modern thinkers and writers he encountered: Aldous Huxley, James Joyce (both ‘a charlatan’ and ‘that prostitutor of life and language’16), Lytton Strachey, Bertrand Russell (a pacifist), Radclyffe Hall (‘I believe Miss Hall’s book [The Well of Loneliness] is about birth control or some kindred subject, isn’t it. I find it difficult to believe either that it is a good novel or that its suppression causes any loss to literature’17), J. B. S. Haldane (James voted to dismiss him from his university readership in biochemistry following his involvement in a case of adultery and divorce in 1926, though Haldane’s appeal against dismissal was upheld; Haldane was also an outspoken socialist). Perhaps worst of all for James was John Maynard Keynes, who appears to have become something of a nemesis, and who may have been one contributing factor to his decision to leave King’s in 1918. Keynes was both James’s double and his antithesis: an Old Etonian, Fellow and bursar of King’s, an outward-looking modernizer, and amongst the very greatest British intellectuals of the twentieth century. ‘I’ve had a good look at this place,’ Keynes remarked shortly after his arrival at King’s, ‘and come to the conclusion that it’s pretty inefficient.’18 When James became provost of King’s in 1905, Benson recorded his concerns: ‘He will simply be a Head on the old lines, reactionary, against novelty and progress. He will initiate nothing, move nothing. Monty has no intellectual, philosophical or religious interests really.’19
The potential that ideas have for opening up new worlds of possibility caused James lifelong anxiety. Thus, his research, phenomenal as it was, tended habitually towards apocrypha, ephemera, marginalia—towards forgotten and perhaps deliberately irrelevant subjects. James was happy to acknowledge this himself. As a schoolboy, his autobiography records, he became fascinated by ‘blobs of misplaced erudition…. Nothing could be more inspiriting than to discover that St Livinus had his tongue cut out and was beheaded, or that David’s mother was called Nitzeneth.’20 In 1883, the first paper James delivered to the Chitchat Society in Cambridge (to whom he first read a number of his important early stories) was entitled ‘Useless Knowledge’.21 Amongst the very greatest of his scholarly achievements is his 1924 Oxford edition of The Apocryphal New Testament, a collection of marginal or excluded scriptural texts whose intrinsic worth, James admitted, was highly dubious.22 The irresistible pull of the irrelevant for James was frequently remarked upon by his colleagues and contemporaries. His revered tutor at Eton, H. E. Luxmoore, noted the way in which James ‘dredges up literature for refuse’; Edmund Gosse, the great Edwardian man of letters, and lecturer in English at Trinity College Cambridge, remarked on ‘those poor old doggrell-mongers of the third century on whom you expend (notice! I don’t say waste) what was meant for mankind’; A. C. Benson believed that ‘no one alive knows so much or so little worth knowing’.23
But it is the very limitations of James’s personal, social, and intellectual horizons that account for the brilliance of his ghost stories. The great effect and power of James’s stories lies in their acts of exclusion, the ways in which they use scholarship, knowledge, institutions, the past, as a rearguard action to keep at bay progress, modernity, the Shock of the New. They are straitened, narrow, austere, limited. And it is precisely this lack of expansiveness that makes him a great short story writer, and the very greatest ghost story writer, as these limitations become narrative preoccupations, simultaneously obsessions and games. The ghost story tends to be a highly conventional, formalized, conservative form, governed by strict generic codes, which often themselves, as with James, reflect and articulate an ingrained social conservatism, an attempt to repulse the contemporary world, or to show the dire consequences of a lack of understanding of, and due reverence for, the past, its knowledge and traditions. These traditions, when violated or subjected to the materialist gaze of modernity, can wreak terrifying retribution.
The nearest James ever came to a statement of theoretical principle about his chosen form—albeit one couched in a characteristic reluctance towards abstraction—was in the introduction he wrote to V. H. Collins’s anthology Ghosts and Marvels, published in 1924:
Often have I been asked to formulate my views about ghost stories and tales of the marvellous, the mysterious, the supernatural. Never have I been able to find out whether I had any views that could be formulated. The truth is, I suspect, that the genre is too small to bear the imposition of far-reaching principles. Widen the question, and ask what governs the construction of short stories in general, and a great deal might be said, and has been said…. The ghost story is, at its best, only a particular sort of short story, and is subject to the same broad rules as the whole mass of them. These rules, I imagine, no writer ever consciously follows. In fact, it is absurd to talk of them as rules; they are qualities which have been observed to accompany success…. Well then: two ingredients most valuable in the concocting of a ghost story are, to me, the atmosphere and the nicely-managed crescendo. (Appendix, p. 407)
It is a very revealing essay, not least because of its typically self-denying nature: can the ghost story be theorized, or not? The short story has ‘broad rules’, but ‘no writer ever consciously follows’ them. The ghost story also properly belongs in the past—not necessarily the distant past; but it is important that its setting and concerns be at least a generation out of date, in a world which pre-dates technological modernity:
The detective story cannot be too much up-to-date: the motor, the telephone, the aeroplane, the newest slang, are all in place there. For the ghost story a slight haze of distance is desirable. ‘Thirty years ago,’ ‘Not long before the war,’ are very proper openings. (pp. 407–8)
Writing in 1924, James clearly conceives of his chosen form—as he conceived of himself—as fundamentally Victorian (‘Thirty years ago’), or at best Edwardian (‘Not long before the war’).
Like James himself, in fact, the ghost story is a characteristic product of nineteenth-century forces. It is a reaction to the secular, materialist, industrial modernity that animated the dominant, progressivist Victorian utilitarian ideology. As such it has clear relations with spiritualism and occultism (and their scientific offshoot, psychical research), the belief that the worlds of matter and of spirit interpenetrated, or were separated only by a thin veil, which could readily be pulled aside (by clairvoyants, for example) to allow communication with the Other World. As the social historian Janet Oppenheim has argued, spiritualism, extraordinarily widespread and permeating all sections of society, was the main Victorian response to secular modernity.24 Debates about spiritualism and the occult were at the very centre of Victorian public and intellectual life: ‘No major Victorian thinker or writer,’ Jarlath Killeen writes in his history of nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, ‘from the Brontës to the Brownings, from Dickens to Darwin, was unconcerned about the occult.’ ‘The ghost’, Killeen concludes, ‘represents a breach in historical progression: in a stark reproach to the Victorian investment in notions of linearity and progress, the ghost is a manifestation of the “past-in-the-present”’.25
James’s own position on the reality of the supernatural was typically ambivalent, or contradictory—or perhaps, as Julia Briggs suggests, he was simply undisturbed by (or even unaware of) the implications of what he wrote.26 Towards the end of his life, writing the Preface t
o the Collected Ghost Stories (1931), he asked: ‘Do I believe in ghosts? To which I answer that I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me’ (Appendix, p. 419). It is difficult to know which is more striking about this remark, its brevity or its evasiveness. James had little interest in psychical research, that attempt by some of the foremost intellectuals of his own generation to establish a basis for discovering the veracity of the supernatural, and to test it according to tough-minded empirical standards. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR), in fact, had its home in Trinity College Cambridge, right next door to King’s. As we have seen, James was no admirer of Henry Sidgwick, the intellectual powerhouse behind the SPR; and the SPR itself makes a disguised appearance in ‘The Mezzotint’ as the ‘Phasmatological Society’, a collection of busybodies from whom news of the story’s supernatural illustration must be kept at all costs. James, in fact, policed the boundaries between his own stories and the possible reality of an Other World quite rigorously: ‘I have not sought to embody in [my stories] any well-considered scheme of “psychical” theory’ (Preface to More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, Appendix, p. 406). While he believed that it was appropriate for a ghost story to express an uncanny sense of epistemological indeterminacy—‘a loophole for a natural explanation; but, I would say, let the loophole be so narrow as not to be quite practicable’ (Introduction to Ghosts and Marvels, Appendix, p. 407)—this is quite clearly an aesthetic judgement on the ghost story rather than a statement about the existence of the supernatural. In one of his late essays on the ghost story, ‘Ghosts—Treat Them Gently!’, he makes the distinction very plain: ‘I am speaking of the literary ghost story here. The story that claims to be “veridical” (in the language of the Society of Psychical Research) is a very different affair’ (Appendix, p. 416).
It is worth reiterating the fact that the stories for which James is now best known, and rightly revered, were for him gentlemanly entertainments and occasional pieces, the amusing by-products of his magisterial scholarship in catalogues, manuscript studies, and editorial work. They were certainly not to be taken with any great seriousness. In the Preface to More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, he acknowledges that ‘I have not been possessed by that austere sense of the responsibility of authorship which is demanded of a writer of fiction in this generation’ (p. 406). When in 1934, the ghost-story writer Mary Butts wrote a critical article entitled ‘The Art of Montagu [sic] James’, his response was ‘I knew not that I had any’.27 This is a perhaps characteristically disingenuous remark, as James’s stories are at their best extremely artfully constructed works. Yet they are also generic works, variations on a successful template: this is what James’s Christmas audiences expected to hear.
In the typical James story, a bachelor don or antiquarian scholar discovers a lost manuscript or artefact which unleashes supernatural forces, often causing him to rethink his comfortable assumptions about the nature of reality. While on occasion this happens within what were to James the familiar confines of a university college (‘The Mezzotint’) or library (‘The Tractate Middoth’), or one of James’s own schools (‘A School Story’, set in a disguised version of James’s prep school, Temple Grove; ‘After Dark in the Playing Fields’, set in Eton), more usually the stories take the scholar away from institutional security, and it is here that danger really lurks. It is for this reason that the hotel or inn features so heavily as the locus for horror in James—in ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’, ‘Number 13’, ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, ‘A Warning to the Curious’, ‘Rats’, and others. To step outside of institutions is to court danger.
The lifelong appeal of institutions for James was that they provided the security of all-male environments. One of the reasons that the hotel provides such a consistent locus of anxiety is that it requires enforced encounters with women—landladies, chambermaids, and other kinds of domestics—whom James tended, where possible, to avoid throughout his life. The issue of his sexuality is one about which many of James’s biographers and commentators choose to maintain a decorous silence, or at best allude to discreetly.28 Michael Cox, indeed, closes the matter authoritatively by asserting that ‘Women figure rarely in James’s stories, for this is a world where sex is not’.29 And yet, to many modern readers James’s sexuality, simultaneously unknowable and all-pervasive, may be the key issue to understanding his stories. We are all now, inevitably, post-Freudian readers—and Freudianism, lest we forget, was itself the product of (and interpretation of, and response to) the same Victorian world that produced M. R. James. Sigmund Freud himself, just six years older than James, was the last, and the greatest, of all writers of Victorian Gothic.
Much has been written about the erotics of male relations in the Victorian public school system of which James was a distinguished product. Readers of this volume may well conclude, as his biographers and commentators tend to imply, that James had no sexual feelings of any kind, at least not in any way that a modern sensibility would understand the concept. Whatever sexuality he did have was very probably unrecognized and certainly never articulated. And yet James’s sexuality, and the attitudes to men and to women which it tended to produce, can be read in displaced form throughout his life and his stories.
His friend James McBryde, a student at King’s in the 1890s, when James was already dean, seems to have been the love of M. R. James’s life; the pair went, with friends, on holidays to France and to Denmark in the 1890s, and McBryde, a talented illustrator, worked on a series of illustrations to accompany the publication of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. These were sadly never completed, as McBryde died in 1904 of complications arising from an appendix operation. The story of James at McBryde’s funeral in Lancashire is an extremely touching one, and a moment in which one can detect, albeit in a highly symbolic form, a sense of genuine, heartbroken passion in this otherwise very repressed Victorian. On hearing of McBryde’s death, James picked flowers—roses, lilac, and honeysuckle—from the Fellows’ Garden at King’s, which he took with him on the train from Cambridge to Lancashire. After all the other mourners had left, James threw the flowers into McBryde’s grave. In 1904, James arranged for the publication, by Cambridge University Press (normally an austere publisher of academic monographs), of The Story of a Troll Hunt, a children’s book written and illustrated by McBryde, and inspired by the holiday they had taken to Denmark in 1899. James contributed an introduction to the book, which may be the nearest he ever came to articulating his feelings: ‘The intercourse of eleven years,—of late, minutely recalled,—has left no single act or word of his which I could choose to forget.’30 A. C. Benson, who certainly understood the nature of repressed homosexual desire, wrote in his diary of receiving
A sad and moving letter from MRJ telling me of McBryde’s death…. Monty’s letter touched me very much; for he called me his oldest friend. But there seemed a curious effort in the letter not to let himself go, not to dive deep; to take the thing as lightly as was consistent with feeling it very much—not to let it be a sad remembrance. He spoke strongly of McB as being a friend who didn’t want sentimentality. But here I believe Monty a little deceives himself. He likes beautiful graceful people and what is that but a refined sentimentality. He is not demonstrative and thinks that is unsentimental.31
After McBryde’s death, James carried on the relationship in displaced form, with a lifelong and devoted attachment to his widow Gwendolen, easily the most important friendship he had with a woman.
Relations between men could also encompass more directly physical exchanges. James was particularly fond throughout his life of ‘ragging’ and other forms of horseplay, as evinced by this account of an incident with his student friend St Clair Donaldson:
I then called on St Clair … He eventually came to my rooms and I speedily originated a rag by hanging his hat on the coal scuttle. Marshall and Thomas thought my book cases were falling and came to see if they could render any assistance. We were at that moment somewhat mixed
on the hearthrug.
Cyril Alington, later headmaster of Eton, recalled Donaldson’s account of rolling around on the floor ‘with Monty James’s long fingers grasping at his vitals’, a story which Alington omitted from his description of the Cambridge TAF (Twice a Fortnight) Club, of which James was a member, ‘for reasons of piety’. Even the occasions for reading James’s stories could degenerate into ragging, as H. E. Luxmoore recalled: ‘Last night Monty James read us a new story of the most blood curdling character, after which those played animal grab who did not mind having their clothes torn to pieces and their hands nailscored.’32
