Collected Ghost Stories

"James, I think, is the most frightening writer I have ever encountered. It is all in the set-up. It is all in his ability to create an extraordinary, unsettling atmosphere. James was a Cambridge don, and a manuscript scholar of enormous distinction. You have to understand his ghost stories as a by-product of his formal scholarly research. “M R James is the most frightening writer I have ever encountered” The bachelor dons you find in his stories were very much like James himself. They lead repressed, straightened, silent, sexless lives. In the stories, they often happen, in the course of their research in libraries or cathedrals, to unleash disturbing forces. These forces are imperfectly or improbably realised. James has a great power of withholding the horror for as long as possible and then giving us a flash, a glimpse out of the corner of the eye. We are not sure whether we see it or not. His ghosts or monsters are often intensely physically realised. They are often hairy or spidery. The feeling they tend to produce is disgust. The classic example is the famous scene in ‘Casting the Runes’, in which Edward Dunning the antiquarian is alone in bed. This domestic setting is meant to signify warmth and security. He reaches under his pillow where he keeps his matches in order to light a candle. But he finds a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and not the mouth of a human being. James is brilliant at such intensely realised, physical moments of horror. No, it isn’t. It is easy to offer Freudian readings of James the repressed bachelor don, who was probably gay, but in an unspoken and unarticulated way. It is certainly the case that many of the monsters and images that invoke disgust in his stories are female, or have distinctively female characteristics. For example, in ‘The Ash-Tree’, Mrs Mothersole, who was executed as a witch, returns to wreak arachnid vengeance upon the descendants of her tormentors. Again, the vagina dentata images that recur throughout his stories suggest an intense sexual anxiety. “It is easy to offer Freudian readings of James the repressed bachelor don, who was probably gay” However, I wouldn’t want to overstate such readings. It is worth bearing in mind that James, like a number of ghost story writers, has a very loyal readership who tend not to take kindly to these kind of suggestions. First and foremost, they display a narrative reticence. They are very spare, and highly formalised. The narrative frames that he employs are often deliberately narrow: much is left unsaid. They are also politically reticent. James himself was a Tory, and the product of a certain kind of education out of which he never strayed. He went seamlessly from prep school to Eton, to King’s College Cambridge, and then back to Eton. He remained in educational establishments his entire life. “James was described as having a brilliant but intense and narrow intellect” A C Benson, who was James’s close friend and counterpart, described James as having a brilliant but intense and narrow intellect. This narrowness is reflected in his ghost stories, which display little interest in class. Nor is there a sense of Britain as an imperial power."

"M R James is arguably the greatest master of the English ghost story. His stories are considerably grimmer and grislier than ghost stories had been up until then. I’m by no means denigrating or dismissing the Victorian ghost stories—some of which are very fine—but they tended to be ethereal and to convey the afterlife in some way, whereas James’s spectres are considerably less human—if they were human in the first place. It’s interesting that he describes his work as ghost stories, as much of it doesn’t deal with ghosts in the conventional sense at all. There are demons, there are familiars, there is whatever horrid thing is glimpsed at the end of Oh , Whistle , and I ’ ll Come to You , My Lad . Oh, Whistle is a good story to start with when talking about James, in fact. What I think he does there—or this is my perception—is take the Victorian ghost story, where the ghost was often wrapped in a winding sheet, and in his story make the sheet the ghost, effectively. It is something that takes on a life of it’s own, having been possessed. Yes, indeed. It’s often overlooked that although the background to his stories was often antiquarian or academic—he was an English medieval scholar at Cambridge and the provost of Eton—he actually writes about the everyday. In a story like Casting the Runes —which was very well filmed, if not very faithfully, as Night of the Demon in 1957—a character sees an omen in the form of an advertisement on the side of an omnibus. So he’s taken it out of the Gothic castle and put it into the everyday experience of the reader. In James there’s a surreal quality where the utterly mundane is invaded by the utterly alien. There’s a scene in Casting the Runes that haunted me for many years, since I read the story in my pre-teens. Having heard a noise that suggests that someone is in the house, one of the characters, lying in bed, puts their hand under the pillow to take out a box of matches, and instead puts his hand into a mouth. Some of James’s imitators feel that it’s the academic background, the use of old books and the scholarly protagonist, that’s the essence of him. But I think that the real essence of James is his genius for the glancing phrase that suggests more in terms of horror than most of us can do in a paragraph. And it’s precisely because it’s terse that it’s so effective. To be more succinct, he says just enough to suggest far worse. Yes, he wrote these stories initially to be read to friends at Christmas. They were only published later—he wrote them down for the telling. That style of candlelit scary storytelling is called Jamesian after him. And the other thing worth saying about James is that his ambition was to be as frightening as possible. He certainly succeeds."

"Well, actually, I can barely read these stories myself. It’s the only literature that gives me nightmares. This collection was read to me by a teacher at school when I was eight years old, on dark autumnal Friday afternoons. I re-read them as an undergraduate, and was absolutely terrified once again. While the Gothic novel gained momentum through the nineteenth century with a fascination with vampires and werewolves, M R James is rather different. He was steeped in the apocryphal lore of the Bible . He also collected and translated medieval ghost stories from the monk of Byland Abbey—the first English ghost stories that we have on record. He was an extraordinarily erudite scholar. He combines that with a theme that is also central to Frankenstein : forbidden knowledge. The nineteenth century saw a pursuit of knowledge in all its forms: there was an obsession with collecting and categorizing, and with taxonomies. There was a proliferation of new sciences, and a huge enthusiasm for theories that purported to explain the working of history in the world. Karl Marx and Charles Darwin both offered grand explanatory narratives, and Sigmund Freud was getting going with psychoanalysis. James makes the subtlest of challenges to these grand theories, with his short stories. In them, there’s the sense that however much you try to make sense of the world and order it, there are still things that can’t be explained. It’s like a flickering, and then a crack appears, and then the whole edifice threatens to fall down. James often deals with researchers, or people who pry just a bit too deeply into things that they shouldn’t. Anybody who has been drawn to a ruined church or building—knowing that they shouldn’t, but feeling at the same time an irresistible pull—will be able to relate to this. There’s an almost vertiginous sense with James that we are getting closer and closer to a precipice. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Another thing that strikes me about James, is that Gothic for him is very much tied up with English national identity. As a late Victorian and Edwardian writer, he was reflecting on a traditional sense of Englishness. And yet, he reminds us that even a nostalgic relation to the past is something that is haunted. We might be tempted to build a stable identity on the past, but James traumatises what we thought was safe."