M R James: The Collected Ghoststories

     I've be reading 'The History of Ely Cathedral', ed Peter Meadows and Nigel Ramsey, and there in the first chapter, which deals with the early history of Ely, is an interesting if somewhat vicious, if not plain spiteful, legend from the 'Liber Miraculorum' concerning the 'desecration' of the tomb of the St Etheldreda. The culprits, who were merely curious rather than malicious - and also their families, who were innocent - were all punished swiftly with inexplicable death. It is as much a warning against breaking taboos concerning the dead as it about trespassing upon the sacred.
     This is the world of M R James - academic, antiquary and writer of ghost stories.  I read the whole lot last Christmas, which always seems the right sort of time for ghost stories.  A world of Medieval scholarship (of some obscurity at times) and a world in which the unseen impinges in a malevolent way upon the seen. Is indeed always ready to steal out from the shadows when we least expect it. A world in which the good, and the divine economy itself, is temporarily suspended while a terrible drama is acted out.  An asymmetrical drama at that, where the corporeal is often unable to counteract the spiritual, the occult; where all our Modern confidence, our rationalism, even our agency, evaporates before something that is far older, determined and evil.  A world that embraces the concrete; in which historical detail - James's own scholarship - is used as literary device to authenticate and strengthen the narrative and by contrast heighten the terror, and simultaneously undermine our sense of the normal course of things.  A world that is therefore pregnant with the darkly miraculous, or for want of a better phrase the anti-miracle.  The polar opposite of that divine act of charity that temporarily suspends the normal and the everyday.

     My suspicion is that James used the story from the 'Liber miraculorum' as the basis for 'An Episode of Cathedral History' in which an ancient tomb is disturbed during a mid-nineteenth century restoration and releases a lamia, a female vampire-like spirit from Greek Mythology, into the sedate world of an English Cathedral close.
     Part of that constructed everyday, that makes its eventual dislocation so effective, is James's sense of place.  It haunts his work, and what is more these occult occurrences are not only essentially site specific, an avenging genius loci, but are often object specific, as though the object, the nexus of the haunting, is a vector for a form of spiritual contagion.

     Apart from his time at Eton, first as a pupil and much later in life as Provost, James was an East Anglian.  He was raised in Great Livermere in west Suffolk on the southern edge of the Breckland - the 'Fielding' of John Kirby's 'The Suffolk Traveller', went on to study at King's College, Cambridge; and there in Cambridge he remained, rising to director of the Fitzwilliam Museum and Provost of King's until his return to Eton in 1919. A life then lived completely in academia and lived mainly in male company.  Most of his characters are men; he is likely to have been homosexual (sounds less anachronistic than 'gay' in this context).  There seems to be a fear, in some of the stories, of sexual intimacy. Not, I think, as the editor of the particular edition I read, female sexuality, of the vagina dentata. I can't see that that is necessarily culturally relevant.

     There is another theme that in our age carries a more disturbing, contemporary echo: the corruption of children. In 'Lost Hearts' single children are abducted and killed; in the horrific 'Wailing Well' a boy's blood is drained and consumed by 'ghosts'. This late story seems, like 'A Warning to the Curious', to be in the manner of a Medieval 'exemplum' - a short moral story.

    It must be admitted that the stories do vary in quality; some are less haunting than others.  All however are well written and James has a good ear for dialogue, perhaps because the stories were written to be read out, but also as a literary device for establishing the veracity of the events described. The best however are very good literature indeed.

     All art has an afterlife. James's stories have been particularly busy inspiring a number of adaptations on the big and small screen; famously 'The Night of the Demon' - 'It's in the trees! It's coming!' - based on 'The Casting of the Runes', and the series of 'Ghost Stories at Christmas' produced by the BBC between 1971 & 1978, some 8 episodes in all. I remember, as a rather timid child, being frightened by a trailer for 'Lost Hearts'. In recent years four new adaptations have been produced.  Adaptations have also been made for radio and the stage, and let's nor forget, either, Kate Bush's song 'The Hounds of Love' which begins with Reginald Beckwith's anguished cry from 'The Night of the Demon'.