Christmas, ghosts and MR James

Quis est iste, qui venit? 

Who is this, that is coming?

An unsettling question from ‘Oh Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad’, by MR James. It is one of the inscriptions on the side of an old whistle found by a certain Mr Parkins, in a ruined Knights Templar chapel on the remote east coast. The story does not really provide us with an answer. Parkins is pursued and menaced by a silent and malevolent presence, but we are never told what precisely he has encountered. James rarely felt the need to over-explain his apparitions.

Parkins is a typical James protagonist; a bachelor academic, sceptical and firmly materialist, visiting an out-of-the-way spot who, through a combination of ignorance and foolhardiness, summons a terrifying and unholy visitor from – well, from Elsewhere. He escapes from the spirit relatively unharmed; this is the norm for well-meaning people in the Jamesian canon, though there are exceptions, like the unwise Mr Wraxall from Count Magnus or the doomed Paxton from A Warning To The Curious. Grisly ends tend to be reserved for genuinely villainous characters. One thinks of the magnificently sinister Karswell from Casting The Runes, or John Eldred, the antagonist of The Tractate Middoth.

Tales of the supernatural have long been a part of Christmas, and as the feast approaches my thoughts often turn to ghost stories. No doubt this is in large part due to its falling at the darkest time of year, with the shortest day (or, if you prefer, the longest night) very nearly coinciding with Christmas Day itself. Perhaps there is some deep folk memory of gathering round the fire in the cruel winters of northern Europe, while a wandering poet retells the ancient legends. Dickens is part of it, too. A Christmas Carol is probably the best known ghost story of them all, with its unforgettable evocation of early Victorian London. One very striking spectral moment is Scrooge’s vision of the skies over the City filled with the unquiet and unhappy dead, bound by “the chains they forged in life” and haunted by the knowledge that they had not helped their fellow men when they could, and were now unable to do so. 

“The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.” 

What a terrifying warning to all us complacently comfortable people.

Dickens produced other ghost stories, several of them very fine, notably The Signal-Man, a downbeat psychological tale seemingly inspired by his experience of surviving the Staplehurst rail crash. He was one of the progenitors of what you might call the Golden Age of the English-language ghost story, which arguably lasted from around the mid-nineteenth century until the 1930s.      

Many writers turned their hand to the genre during this time, including the Irishman Sheridan Le Fanu (who died in 1873), and later in the period Algernon Blackwood (born 1869). Arthur Conan Doyle (born 1859) was not a notable ghost story writer, but crafted some excellent “tales of the macabre”, featuring both supernatural and human terrors. One of the best of these is The New Catacomb, a genuinely creepy tale of deranged vengeance with a distinct echo of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask Of Amontillado. JM Falkner (born 1858), most famous for the historical yarn Moonfleet, wrote a clever and frightening Gothic-inflected ghost novel called The Lost Stradivarius, which capitalised on the strange power of music to move, captivate and corrupt.

Nevertheless, MR James, who served as Provost of both King’s College Cambridge and Eton at various times, will always be my favourite. He perfected, even if he did not quite originate, the so-called “antiquarian” ghost story, characterised by academic protagonists, who must often reconstruct strange historical occurrences from fragmentary documents, moving in a world of college rooms and provincial cathedrals and quiet country towns.

James was born in 1862. Englishmen of that vintage might, if they reached a ripe old age, live to see the atom bomb and the jet fighter, the diesel train and the television (Churchill, born only a decade later than James, was still alive to see the invention of sexual intercourse in 1963). And yet their grandfathers, perhaps in a few cases their fathers, had been at Waterloo and Trafalgar. The execution of Louis XVI during the French Revolution was within living memory. The lives of James’ generation were a kind of bridge between the truly pre-modern and the truly modern age.

Maybe this is why the traditional ghost story achieved an apotheosis in the late Victorian and Edwardian period (James published his four volumes between 1904 and 1925). The generation whose three score years and ten saw the  development of electric lighting, the battleship, the telephone, the internal combustion engine and powered flight would surely have understood very clearly the dramatic possibilities of the uneasy co-existence between the new world and the old. In the first quarter of the twentieth century we were on the cusp of modernity, close to the final triumph of rationalism and scepticism, but there remained great swathes of the country where an older writ still ran – the England of candlelight and parchment and the horse and cart, of the cathedral close and the ancient manor house. In that England there was still a place for mystery and the uncanny, for over-confident young materialists to make eerie discoveries that upset their neat categories and easy assumptions.

James made clever use of fictional but plausible historical detail, to give his tales a feeling of authenticity. The catalyst for the events of A Warning To The Curious is the unearthing of one of the long-buried three crowns of East Anglia, which are supposed to protect the coast against invasion, and the real-life East Anglian coat of arms does in fact bear three crowns. Similarly, one can easily imagine a small and long-empty plot of land in an English village having a gruesome legend attached to it, or a folk song being considered unlucky for obscure macabre reasons, as in Martin’s Close. The story Count Magnus alludes, without further elaboration, to a purportedly real medieval event called the Black Pilgrimage, while The Uncommon Prayer-book hinges on the fanciful but not inconceivable notion that a secret anti-Cromwellian limited edition of the Book of Common Prayer, bearing curses against Old Noll, was printed in 1653.

It works very well as a means of intensifying the pleasurable chills, especially if - like me - you are somewhat open-minded on the question of ghosts. 

A large part of James’ appeal arises from the restraint of the style. The prose is never purple; sometimes rereading is required before the full implications of the tale become clear. The shocking gore so beloved of contemporary horror film-makers is largely absent. Instead, James presents us with the unknown figure half-seen in the twilight, or the slowly dawning realisation that we are not alone in a deserted room. Frequently his spectres appear only briefly, and are described only partially, or are reported at second-hand. He understood that what we don’t know and what we don’t see can be just as unnerving as what we do. I never fail to be affected by a particular line from The Stalls Of Barchester Cathedral. Archdeacon Haynes, a bachelor cleric spending a lonely winter in a large old house, tormented by a guilty conscience – and by something else – writes in his diary:

“The cat was on the stairs tonight. I think it sits there always. There is no kitchen cat.” 

It works well enough on the page, but even better read aloud, which is how the stories were originally told; at Christmas James would gather a small group of friends and students in his rooms – first the provost’s lodgings at King’s, and later at Eton. The great actor Michael Hordern, possessor of a beautiful old-fashioned English voice, who played Parkin in a very fine 1968 TV adaptation of ‘Oh Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad’, recorded audiobooks of many of the stories for the BBC, and he gets them exactly right. 

So, as the evenings draw in and the days get gloomier - at this point in the year, on some days it barely gets light at all - I highly recommend that you find a comfy chair and a stiff drink, dim the lamp, and enter the unnerving world where figures in pictures won't keep still, and extremely odd things happen to bedsheets in quiet seaside hotels.  

NB for further reading, Aris Roussinos recently wrote a fun piece at Unherd on a somewhat similar theme to this post, "Why The British Love Ghost Stories".