Ghosts and Scholars: Ghost Stories in the Tradition of M. R. James

FOREWORD

In July 1918, after thirty-six years as undergraduate, don, and finally Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, M. R. James—‘Monty’ to his many friends and admirers—formally accepted the Crown appointment of the Provostship of Eton. It was, as James himself admitted, ‘a great wrench’ to leave King’s; but against this was the emotional pull of Eton, where he had been a Colleger from L876 to 1882. ‘It is truly a pleasure,’ he told his friend Henry Jackson, ‘the prospect of being knit up so closely with Eton, which of all places holds perhaps the first place in my affections.’

For James, the Provostship of Eton represented a homecoming; for many of those he left behind in Cambridge it was a loss to the university that could not easily be filled, if at all. Edmund Gill Swain, a former Chaplain of King’s, spoke for many when he wrote: ‘it is the end, but for a few survivals, of King’s as we knew it, you being a real link with the past. Your intellectual and other antecedents belonged to the King’s of history, to enter into which has been the main pleasure and privilege of my Life.’

Six years earlier Swain had dedicated his Stoneground Ghost Tales, the fictitious recollections of the genial Revd Roland Batchell, to Monty James, ‘For twenty pleasant years Mr Batchell’s friend, and the indulgent parent of such tastes as these pages indicate’. It was at King’s, back in the mid-1890s, that M. R. James, then Dean of the college, had begun to inculcate that taste by writing the first of the ghost stories with which his name is now generally associated. The two earliest—‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’ and ‘Lost Hearts’—were read to the Chitchat Society, a convivial weekly gathering of men mostly from King’s and Trinity at which papers were given on a variety of topics (James’s offerings ranged from ‘Useless Knowledge’ and ‘Church Portals’ to ‘Sheridan Le Fanu’) and a ritual repast—consisting of coffee, snuff, and ‘whales’, i.e. anchovy toast—partaken.

The stories were read at the 601st meeting of the Chitchat, on 28 October 1893, and both were subsequently published—‘Canon Alberic’ in the National Review (March 1895) and ‘Lost Hearts’ in the Pall Mall Magazine (December 1895). In due course a ghost story from Monty became a feature of Christmas gatherings at King’s. The party varied from year to year, but amongst the regulars waiting in the candlelight in James’s rooms for the author to emerge from his bedroom with the new story (composed, he claimed, ‘at fever heat’) were James’s former Eton tutor Henry Elford Luxmoore, S. G. Lubbock and his brother Percy, Walter Morley Fletcher, Arthur Benson, and Swain. At last, as one listener recalled, ‘Monty emerged from the bedroom, manuscript in hand . . . and blew out all the candles but one, by which he seated himself. He then began to read, with more confidence than anyone else could have mustered, his well-nigh illegible script in the dim light.’

The first collection of James’s tales, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, was published in 1904, principally as a tribute to his friend James McBryde, who, until his early death in June 1904, had been working on illustrations for the six stories that James thought suitable for publication. The volume, appropriately, was dedicated ‘To all those who at various times have listened to them’, for the ghost stories of M. R. James are intimately linked to his milieu, to the social pleasures he enjoyed so much at Cambridge, and to those particular friendships which—as he put it in his recollections, Eton and King’s (1926)—‘give light to life’.

Inevitably, several of his friends tried their hands at writing ghost stories. Both Arthur (A. C.) and Edward Frederic (E. F.) Benson had been present at Monty’s Christmas readings, and both published collections of supernatural tales. (James thought EFB’s stories ranked high, though he criticized him for ‘stepping over the line of legitimate horridness’.) More directly inspired by James’s style were Swain’s Stoneground Ghost Tales (1912) and the stories of R. H. Malden, a Kingsman who later became Dean of Wells and another member of Monty James’s somewhat exclusive inner circle. Malden’s collection Nine Ghosts was not published until 1943, though the earliest story in it had been written in 1909. ‘Anyone familiar with Ghost Stories of an Antiquary’, he wrote in his introduction, ‘will have no difficulty in recognizing their provenance. It was my good fortune to know Dr James for more than thirty years . . . Sufficient time has now elapsed since Dr James’s death to make some attempt to continue the tradition admissible or even welcome to his friends and readers.’

Malden’s use of the word ‘tradition’ here is significant, for by the 1940s a distinct Jamesian genre had been established within English supernatural fiction. In Cambridge itself, of course, James’s influence was particularly strong. It is frankly acknowledged, for instance, in A. N. L. Munby’s The Alabaster Hand (1949), with its Latin dedication to James, and supplied a context for Tedious Brief Tales of Granta and Gramarye (1919) by Arthur Gray, Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, in which the deadpan antiquarian style of James’s Stories was taken to its limit.

But these are only the tip of the iceberg, and James’s presence soon began to be felt in the stories of those who had never known him personally. This present anthology demonstrates—for the first time—just how pervasive James’s influence has been on the tradition of ghost fiction in English, following his example, the writers represented here conjure up an ordered, placid world into which the supernatural—usually with malevolent intent—slowly hut surely intrudes itself: a world of country houses, forlorn churches, quiet college quadrangles and damp cathedral crypts, of gentlemen scholars, professional antiquaries and studious clerics; a world in which ancient objects, books, manuscripts, and inscriptions provide potent links between the present and a vengeful past.

For James, the background details of his fiction reflected his career as one of the greatest scholars of his generation. Amongst those who imitated his style, none could lay claim to his depth of knowledge or had his wonderful ability to blend fact and fantasy. Nevertheless, these stories written in the tradition of M. R. James have an appeal and a nostalgic charm all their own, and this collection will be warmly welcomed by all enthusiasts of the old-fashioned ghost story. If—to borrow James’s apologia for his own tales—any of them succeed ‘in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours’ their purpose, like that of the man who inspired them, will have been fully attained.

MICHAEL COX

‘M. R. James and Friends’ by Alan Hunter