M. R. James

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Montague Rhodes James (August 1, 1862, Goodnestone Parsonage, Kent, England–June 12, 1936), who published under the byline M. R. James, was a noted medieval scholar and provost of King's College, Cambridge (1905–1918) and of Eton College (1918–1936), best remembered today for his ghost stories in the classic Victorian Yuletide vein.

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[edit] Early influences

Although James was born in Goodnestone, Kent, his parents were closely connected with Aldeburgh, Suffolk, and from the age of three (1865) until 1909 his home, if not always his residence, was at the Rectory in Great Livermere, Suffolk. This had also been the childhood home of another eminent Suffolk antiquary, "Honest" Tom Martin "of Palgrave." Several of the ghost stories are set in Suffolk, including "'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'" (Felixstowe), "A Warning to the Curious" (Aldeburgh), and "A Vignette" (Great Livermere).

[edit] Scholarly works

James is most widely known for his ghost stories, but as a medieval scholar his output was phenomenal and remains highly respected in scholarly circles. Indeed the success of his antiquarian ghost-stories is rooted in his life as an antiquary. His discovery of a manuscript fragment led to excavations in the ruins of the abbey at Bury St Edmunds, West Suffolk, in 1902, in which the graves of several twelfth-century abbots described by Jocelyn de Brakelond (a contemporary chronicler) were rediscovered, having been lost since the Dissolution. His 1917 edition of the Latin Lives of Saint Aethelberht, king and martyr (English Historical Review 32), remains authoritative.

He catalogued many of the manuscript libraries of the Cambridge and Oxford colleges. Among his other scholarly works, he wrote The Apocalypse in Art, which placed illuminated Apocalypse manuscripts into families. He also translated the New Testament Apocrypha. The fact that he was not a "dry" scholar is shown in his Suffolk and Norfolk (Dent, 1930), in which a great deal of knowledge is presented in a popular and accessible form, and in Abbeys (Great Western Railway, 1925).

[edit] Ghost stories

James's ghost stories were published in a series of collections: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), and A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925). The first hardback collected edition appeared in 1931. Following an English tradition, many of the thirty or so tales were penned as Christmas Eve entertainments and read aloud to gatherings of friends. This idea was used by the BBC in the mid-1990s when they filmed Christopher Lee reading four stories in a candle-lit room in King's College, just as James did so dramatically ninety years before.

The stories perfected several key elements of the classical ghost story. These include plot elements: a bucolic setting in a small village, rural community, or venerable university; a nondescript and rather naive gentleman scholar as protagonist; and the discovery of an old book or other antiquarian object that somehow calls down the wrath, or at least the unwelcome attention, of a supernatural menace, usually from beyond the grave. James also perfected the literary technique of the genre: narrating supernatural events principally through implication and suggestion, letting his reader fill in the blanks, and focusing on the mundane details of his settings and characters in order to throw the horrific and bizarre elements into greater relief. MRJ (as he called himself) summed-up his approach in his foreword to a ghost story anthology Ghosts:& Marvels, pub. Oxford, 1924: "Two ingredients most valuable in the concocting of a ghost story are, to me, the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo....Let us, then, be introduced to the actors in a placid way: let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings; and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage...."

Despite his suggestion (in the essay "Stories I Have Tried to Write") that writers employ reticence in their work, many of James's tales depict scenes and images of savage and often disturbing violence. For example, in "Lost Hearts," pubescent children are drugged by a sinister dabbler in the occult who then removes their hearts from their paralysed bodies.

Although not overtly sexual, plots of this nature have been perceived as unintentional metaphors of the Freudian variety. James's biographer Michael Cox wrote in M. R. James: An Informal Portrait (1983), "One need not be a professional psychoanalyst to see the ghost stories as some release from feelings held in check." Reviewing this biography (Daily Telegraph, 1983), the novelist and diarist Anthony Powell, who attended Eton under James's tutelage, claimed that James's romantic affairs with young boys "were fascinating to watch."

Other critics have seen complex psychological undercurrents in James's work. His authorial revulsion from tactile contact with other people has been noted by Julia Briggs in Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (1977). As Nigel Kneale said in the introduction to the Folio Society edition of Ghost Stories of M. R. James, "In an age where every man is his own psychologist, M. R. James looks like rich and promising material.... There must have been times when it was hard to be Monty James."

In addition to writing his own stories, James championed the works of Sheridan Le Fanu, whom he viewed as "absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories", editing and supplying introductions to Madame Crowl's Ghost (1923) and Uncle Silas (1926).

[edit] Media adaptations

There have been numerous radio and television adaptations of James's stories, mostly in Britain. Two of the best-known of these TV dramas, Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968) and A Warning to the Curious (1972), are available on DVD from the British Film Institute. The BBC, in a long-standing tradition, used to broadcast a reading of an M. R. James story each Christmas. This tradition was resurrected in December 2005, when BBC4 broadcast a new dramatised version of James's story "A View from a Hill", with "Number 13" following in December 2006.

In the 1980s, a series of four double audio cassettes was released by Argo Records, featuring nineteen unabridged M. R. James stories narrated by Michael Hordern. The tapes were titled Ghost Stories (1982), More Ghost Stories (1984), A Warning to the Curious (1985), and No. 13 and Other Ghost Stories (1988). ISIS Audio Books also released two collections of unabridged M. R. James stories, this time narrated by Nigel Lambert. These tapes were titled A Warning to the Curious and Other Tales (four audio cassettes, six stories, March 1992) and Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (three audio cassettes, eight stories, December 1992).

In 1997–1998 BBC Radio 4 broadcast The Late Book: Ghost Stories, a series of 15-minute readings of M. R. James stories, abridged and produced by Paul Kent and narrated by Benjamin Whitrow (repeated on BBC 7, Dec. 2003–Jan. 2004, Sept.–Oct. 2004, Feb. 2007). The stories were "Canon Alberic's Scrapbook", "Lost Hearts", "A School Story", "The Haunted Dolls' House" and "Rats".

In 2003, Radio 4 broadcast The House at World's End by Stephen Sheridan. A brilliant pastiche of James's work, it contained numerous echoes of his stories while offering a fictional account of how he became interested in the supernatural. James was played by John Rowe, with Jonathan Keeble playing his younger self.

The only notable film version to date has been a British adaptation by Jacques Tourneur of "Casting the Runes," under the rather more attention-catching title of Night of the Demon (1957; U.S. title: Curse of the Demon). While somewhat more literal than the original story, which was loosely based on the foul reputation of Aleister Crowley, the film is generally considered one of the high points of the horror film. Opinion is, however, divided on the merits of the rather un-Jamesian decision (allegedly against Tourneur's wishes) to explicitly show a special-effects demon with a bulb-fingered design inspired by medieval woodcuts.

The first stage version of "Casting the Runes" was performed at the Carriageworks Theatre in Leeds, England on 9 June–10 June 2006 by the Pandemonium Theatre Company.*[1]

In 2006–2007, Nunkie Theatre Company have presented atmospheric readings of two of M. R. James's tales, "Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book" and "The Mezzotint," at various venues in Britian.

In Spring 2007 UK-based Craftsman Audio Books intend to release the first complete set of audio recordings of M. R. James's stories on CD, spread across two volumes. These have already been recorded with the actor David Collings (who appeared as Silver in the cult TV series Sapphire & Steel) as reader. The ghost story author Reggie Oliver acted as consultant on the project.

[edit] Influence

H. P. Lovecraft was an admirer of James's work, extolling the stories as the peak of the ghost story form in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature." Another renowned fan of James in the horror and fantasy genre was Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote an essay on him. The author John Bellairs paid homage to James by incorporating plot elements borrowed from James's ghost stories into several of his own juvenile mysteries. Other writers in the Jamesian tradition include A. N. L. Munby, E. G. Swain, and R. H. Malden, although their stories are generally considered to be inferior to those of James himself.[1] The stories of M. R. James continue to influence many of today's great supernatural writers, including Stephen King (The Shining, etc.) and Ramsey Campbell, who edited Meddling with Ghosts: Stories in the Tradition of M. R. James and wrote the short story "The Guide" in tribute.[2]

[edit] Family

James was the uncle of Robert Rhodes James, a 20th century British historian and Conservative member of Parliament.

[edit] Works

  • Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904)
  • More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911)
  • A Thin Ghost and Others (1919)
  • The Five Jars (1922) a children's story
  • A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925)
  • Wailing Well (1928)
  • The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1931)
  • Best Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1944)
  • Two Ghost Stories: A Centenary (1993)
  • The Fenstanton Witch and Others: M.R. James in Ghosts and Scholars (1999)
  • A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings (2001)

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Introduction to Joshi, S. T. (editor). Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories. Penguin Classics, 2005. ISBN 0-14-303939-3
  2. ^ Preface to Campbell, Ramsey (editor). Meddling with Ghosts: Stories in the Tradition of M. R. James. The British Library, 2002. ISBN 0-71-231125-4

[edit] References

  • Bleiler, E. F. The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Shasta Publishers, 1948.
  • Cox, Michael. M. R. James: An Informal Portrait. Oxford University Press, 1983. ISBN 0-19-211765-3.
  • James, M. R. A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings, ed. Christopher Roden and Barbara Roden. Ash-Tree Press, 2001. ISBN 1-55310-024-7.
  • Joshi, S.T. Introductions to Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories. Penguin Classics, 2005. ISBN 0-14-303939-3 and The Haunted Dolls' House and Other Ghost Stories. Penguin Classics, 2006. ISBN 0-14-303992-X.
  • Pfaff, Richard William. Montague Rhodes James. Scolar Press, 1980.
  • Sullivan, Jack. Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood. Ohio University Press, 1980. ISBN 0-8214-0374-5.
  • Tolhurst, Peter. East Anglia—a Literary Pilgrimage. Black Dog Books, Bungay, 1996. ISBN 0-9528839-0-2. (pp. 99–101).
  • Wagenknecht, Edward. Seven Masters of Supernatural Fiction. Greenwood Press, 1991. ISBN 0-313-27960-8.

[edit] External links

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