Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. M. James R.

the plots to the narrative style, there is something very knowing – almost self-mocking – about the way he presents a tale. This is not to say that his ghost stories are designed to be humorous: far from it. Rather they are designed to suggest authenticity.

      James was a respected academic and a noted antiquary – a student and collector of old manuscripts, artefacts and art. From the very first story in this collection, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’, he establishes a narrative voice that could conceivably be his own, leaving the reader suitably ill at ease as to whether James has invented the story or experienced it himself. The scrapbook, we are told, ‘is in the Wentworth Collection at Cambridge’; the mezzotint in the story of the same name ‘is in the Ashleian Museum’. The book is full of references to ‘the papers I have quoted’ and ‘the papers out of which I have made a connected story’, and peppered with academic footnotes and intellectual asides. ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’ begins with a lengthy paragraph entirely in Latin, which an antiquary is carefully copying from a rare book; ‘Number 13’ begins with a digression into the bloody history of medieval Denmark, which ends abruptly with the knowing self-admonishment ‘But I am not writing a guide-book.’

      This all adds up to a sense that we are in the hands of a rational, learned narrator – possibly James himself – and certainly one who would know nonsense if he saw it. In an apt response to the question of whether he himself believed in ghosts, James once said, ‘I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me.’ And if our reliable author/narrator believes in ghost stories, what cause has the ordinary reader to doubt them?

      Stories for a Small Audience

      Growing up in the later decades of the nineteenth century, James was very familiar with the Gothic horror stories that so fascinated the Victorians. But the stories he wanted to write were quite different from those of his predecessors and even of many of his contemporaries. He wasn’t interested in the grotesque monsters of Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), nor in the hysteria surrounding vampires that culminated in Stoker’s Dracula (1897), nor even in the chain-rattling ghosts of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). James wanted subtlety in his stories: apparitions that murmur on the breeze and watch through windows, half heard and half seen. He wanted realistic psychological terror. ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a book with very good ideas in it,’ he wrote in 1931, ‘but … the butter is spread far too thick. Excess is the fault here.’ It was far more effective, he felt, to push the reader’s imagination in the right direction and leave it to do its worst.

      James’s stories were not written to shock the public; they were written to spook a small audience. He was a pioneer of a tradition we now associate with the Victorians – that of the fireside ghost story on Christmas Eve. Most of the stories in this collection were written to entertain his friends at King’s College, Cambridge; he would gather them in one room and read out loud by the eerie light of a single candle. Combined with his preference for a first-person scholarly narrator, the effect must have been quite hair-raising.

      The Rules of Ghost Stories

      Over the course of his career, James was frequently called upon to divulge the secret of his success. What, he was repeatedly asked, were the rules governing a good ghost story? ‘Two ingredients most valuable,’ he wrote in 1924, ‘are, to me, the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo.’ The tale should begin in a perfectly ordinary way, with ordinary-seeming characters ‘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.’

      James recommended giving ghost stories ‘a slight haze of distance’ – setting them just a decade or two in the past, so that they were recognisably realistic without being distractingly modern. He wanted, above all, to work the reader into a state of quiet anxiety that encouraged him to think ‘If I’m not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me!’ These rules are a template for many of James’s stories.

      M. R. James was a master of his art but a reluctant celebrity. An academic first and foremost who delighted in entertaining his close friends, he remained modest about the literary value of the stories in this collection. ‘If 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,’ he wrote in the preface to the first edition, ‘my purpose in writing them will have been attained.’

      If anyone is curious about my local settings, let it be recorded that St Bertrand de Comminges and Viborg are real places: that in “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You” I had Felixstowe in mind. As for the fragments of ostensible erudition which are scattered about my pages, hardly anything in them is not pure invention; there never was, naturally, any such book as that which I quote in “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”. “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book” was written in 1894 and printed soon after in the National Review, “Lost Hearts” appeared in the Pall Mall Magazine; of the next five stories, most of which were read to friends at Christmas-time at King’s College, Cambridge, I only recollect that I wrote “Number 13” in 1899, while “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” was composed in the summer of 1904.

      M. R. JAMES

       CANON ALBERIC’S SCRAP-BOOK

      St Bertrand de Comminges is a decayed town on the spurs of the Pyrenees, not very far from Toulouse, and still nearer to Bagnères-de-Luchon. It was the site of a bishopric until the Revolution, and has a cathedral which is visited by a certain number of tourists. In the spring of 1883 an Englishman arrived at this old-world place—I can hardly dignify it with the name of city, for there are not a thousand inhabitants. He was a Cambridge man, who had come specially from Toulouse to see St Bertrand’s Church, and had left two friends, who were less keen archaeologists than himself, in their hotel at Toulouse, under promise to join him on the following morning. Half an hour at the church would satisfy them, and all three could then pursue their journey in the direction of Auch. But our Englishman had come early on the day in question, and proposed to himself to fill a note-book and to use several dozens of plates in the process of describing and photographing every corner of the wonderful church that dominates the little hill of Comminges. In order to carry out this design satisfactorily, it was necessary to monopolize the verger of the church for the day. The verger or sacristan (I prefer the latter appellation, inaccurate as it may be) was accordingly sent for by the somewhat brusque lady who keeps the inn of the Chapeau Rouge; and when he came, the Englishman found him an unexpectedly interesting object of study. It was not in the personal appearance of the little, dry, wizened old man that the interest lay, for he was precisely like dozens of other church-guardians in France, but in a curious furtive or rather hunted and oppressed air which he had. He was perpetually half glancing behind him; the muscles of his back and shoulders seemed to be hunched in a continual nervous contraction, as if he were expecting every moment to find himself in the clutch of an enemy. The Englishman hardly knew whether to put him down as a man haunted by a fixed delusion, or as one oppressed by a guilty conscience, or as an unbearably henpecked husband. The probabilities, when reckoned up, certainly pointed to the last idea; but, still, the impression conveyed was that of a more formidable persecutor even than a termagant wife.

      However, the Englishman (let us call him Dennistoun) was soon too deep in his note-book and too busy with his camera to give more than an occasional glance to the sacristan. Whenever he did look at him, he found him at no great distance, either huddling himself back against the wall or crouching in one of the gorgeous stalls. Dennistoun became rather fidgety after a time. Mingled suspicions that he was keeping the old man from his déjeuner, that he was regarded as likely to make away with St Bertrand’s ivory crozier, or with the dusty stuffed crocodile that hangs over the font, began to torment him.

      “Won’t you go home?” he said at last; “I’m quite well able to finish my notes