Oh, Click and I'll Come to You, My Lad
December 5, 2015 9:05 AM   Subscribe

Montague Rhodes James was an antiquarian, cataloger, scholar (especially of apocryphal books of the Bible), as well as Vice Chancellor of King’s College Cambridge and Provost of Eton College (where he died in 1936). But he is best known for his ghost stories, excellent examples of the Victorian Christmas ghost story tradition.

His ghost stories were mostly collected in 4 volumes during his life

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
A Thin Ghost and Others
A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (I couldn’t find a link to the whole collection, but the bulk of the stories can be found here)

A lot of people feel that A Pleasing Terror, published by Ash-Tree Press in 2001, is the best and most complete collection of James' weird fiction. It is hellishly expensive as an out-of-print hardcover, but there is a fairly nice Kindle version , whose somewhat screwed up indexing, while it rankles a librarian's soul, gives thorough readers the bibliographic pleasure of discovering “hidden tracks” by paging through it.

If you aren't in the mood for ghost stories, and have read this far, you might enjoy his off-kilter children's novel The Five Jars or a collection of apocryphal Biblical stories Old Testament Legends, which was aimed at a general, not scholarly, audience.

If reading isn't your thing, you might like some nice LibriVox recordings of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (both volumes) and The Five Jars, both read quite well by Peter Yearsley. Most podcast apps can search for LibriVox recordings, if you like that route.

If you prefer audiovisual entertainment, M.R. James has been much-adapted.

Shorts (these three are by Stephen Grey, but there are many others if you hunt around)

"Rats"
"The Wailing Well"
"The Haunted Doll’s House"

Longer Versions

The BBC has adapted a lot of the stories for the TV series A Ghost Story for Christmas. The 70s run were mostly directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, and the series was revived in 2005 with a variety of directors, including Mark Gatiss of Dr, Who and Sherlock fame. There iappears to be a nice DVD set of them, but it’s only available in the UK, but YouTube comes to the rescue. Here are a couple examples:

"Number 13"
"The Tractate Middoth"

Earlier, there was "Oh Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" from 1968.

And there was the theatrical release from 1957 of Night of the Demon (also Curse of the Demon), a version of "Casting the Runes. " Trailer, the whole film is widley available.

Not enough James? Try the podcast A Podcast to the Curious which does for James what the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast does for Lovecraft -- a loving and critical story-by-story "excerpt and commentary "format with two slightly goofy hosts and the occasional guest.

Still not enough James? Try the exhaustive and erudite Ghosts and Scholars journal/website, with much Jamisian information, articles, and links to other resources.

M.R. James and A Ghost Story for Christmas previously

Christmas ghost stories previously

M.R. James, much previously
posted by GenjiandProust (24 comments total) 55 users marked this as a favorite
 
I was JUST having a conversation over Twitter about this guy

Person: ME: *to every main character in an M.R. James story* but what about GIRLS, young man, GIIIRLLLSS

Me: M.R. James characters are people who prefer finely made woodworking to girls
posted by The Whelk at 9:26 AM on December 5, 2015 [7 favorites]


Such a fine writer. I used to love teaching "Ash-tree" and "Mezzotint".
posted by doctornemo at 9:40 AM on December 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


Flagged as fantastic for form AND content. Christmas ghosts are the best ghosts.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 9:54 AM on December 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


James is great. I always try to get "Oh, Whistle..." into my classes whenever possible, as it manages to be both scary and incredibly funny all at once; students who have been paying attention to the ghost story conventions have a blast picking up all the ways in which Parkins is just destined to get into trouble. You're a professional man in a ghost story, you've got to be careful! Noooo, don't sneer at the supernatural! Arrrrgh, don't go on vacation! Wait, you're poking around in ancient ruins! And you took something away with you?! Did you actually blow on that thing without properly translating the Latin??!
posted by thomas j wise at 9:59 AM on December 5, 2015 [7 favorites]


None. None more English ghost storyteller.

James is hands down of my favourites. I love a world where the most terrible things happen to historians, professors, researchers, and generally quite fussy people.
posted by Kitteh at 10:05 AM on December 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


I recently watched a new version of "Whistle" on Amazon video, starring John Hurt. It's a good, unsettling adaptation and I recommend it.
posted by orrnyereg at 10:05 AM on December 5, 2015 [5 favorites]


Oh, The Whelk, you are so unfair! Why, "The Tractate Midodoth" has a young lady in it! (Almost entirely off-page, but, still.) "An Episode of Cathedral History" has that sassy sketching womanbantering with her husband and narrowly avoiding losing a foot, and "The Residence at Whitminster" almost has a young woman as a protagonist (well, she's the most sensible person in the story). And then there are the older ladies... OK, well, James' women are outnumbered two to one by descriptions of library shelving. You win.

More seriously, I really do like Lady Wardrop from Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance," because she's a) crazy about mazes and b) the only person to say pragmatically "yup, that's evil; bulldoze it." She should have been the main character in the story, and I would like to see a prestige BBC series about her motoring around the country and fighting the occult.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:10 AM on December 5, 2015 [12 favorites]


Also the evil mother in "The Haunted Dolls' House."
posted by thomas j wise at 10:12 AM on December 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


I thought I was about to discover that he wrote this story that scared me when I was little (it was in a collection of ghost stories we bought at K-mart) but I was wrong.
posted by lagomorphius at 10:13 AM on December 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


Also the evil mother in "The Haunted Dolls' House."

I'm pretty sure everyone in that story is evil. Well, maybe not the children (and that one, brief sentence that describes their fate is my vote for the most economical chill in all of horror writing).

I've been on a James binge lately (as you might have guessed), and something that really struck me (and it's one of the things that I love about Lovecraft, although James is a magnitude more reticent)) is James' willingness to tell us just enough to make us feel the horror, but to hold most of the information back -- there are huge lacunae in almost all his stories, and often the "motivations" of the supernatural forces can only be guessed at. What is that thing at the end of "The Uncommon Prayer-Book?" A giant worm? An animated carpet? The cloth covering the books? What was it doing? Was it a protector? An expression of rage? And the description based on a brief glimpse, related at three removes, is part and parcel with the feeling, in almost all of the stories, that something horrible has occurred that we can barely grasp, much less explain. It's masterful.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:29 AM on December 5, 2015 [5 favorites]


MR James: Ghost Writer documentary by Mark Gatiss
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 11:25 AM on December 5, 2015 [4 favorites]


There's a James story, can't remember the name of it, but there's hardly any plot... it's just this guy who goes for a walk in the country and sees this really disturbing shadow under a hedge... well you don't really want to be remembering it if you go for a country walk, especially this time of year when night comes early, because every single shadow will look disturbing as all hell.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 11:28 AM on December 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


I love M.R. James so much. At some point, I was trying to explain him to my wife and settled on "ghost stories that are 1/3 ghost and 2/3 descriptions of old houses" and I love both parts.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 12:46 PM on December 5, 2015 [4 favorites]


James' willingness to tell us just enough to make us feel the horror, but to hold most of the information back--

"Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance" comes to mind. We glimpse evocative clues to a horrific mystery, but the protagonist, distracted by a single aspect of that mystery ("Why can't I map this dang maze?"), never begins to solve it. Just what the hell is James Wilson's secret?
posted by Iridic at 1:10 PM on December 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Thanks so much for this post, GenjiandProust. M.R. James is my favorite ghost storyteller too. I always think his works must be such fun to illustrate, all proper corners and ominous implications, basically the same world as Edward Gorey's The West Wing.
posted by thetortoise at 1:39 PM on December 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


fearfulsymmetry, thanks for that documentary link. I'd heard that Gatiss had done one, but I didn't even think to look for it on YouTube. Well wroth a watch.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:36 PM on December 5, 2015


I'm not particularly susceptible to ghost stories, but listening to Ruth Rendell read Canon Alberic's Scrapbook while falling asleep alone in a big house on a dark winter's evening was not a prescription for a comfortable drift into slumber.
posted by Kattullus at 3:10 PM on December 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


The Uncommon Prayer Book is most likely guarded by a spirit in a winding sheet, like in the portrait of John Donne.
posted by Ideefixe at 6:53 AM on December 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


Rhodes, with an s. The best author of ghost stories.

As for his women, this is interesting:
In the build-up, by contrast, scarcely a woman appears, except as a comic rustic or tiresome servant in the inn. But the ghosts themselves are so often women, spurned or murdered or guilt-ridden: Mrs Mothersole in ‘The Ash Tree’, Ann Clark in ‘Martin’s Close’, Theodosia Bryan in ‘A Neighbour’s Landmark’ and the terrible figure in ‘a shapeless sort of blackened sun-bonnet’ in ‘Wailing Well’. We don’t need to have read any of the Freud which James would have run several miles from to interpret what Mr Dunning in ‘Casting the Runes’ finds when he puts his hand into the well-known nook under his pillow: ‘What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being.’

Jones detects a vagina dentata, and it is hard to dodge the sexual vibrations here or in the other slimy, clutching, intensely hairy phantasms which finger and stroke the beleaguered single man.
posted by pracowity at 7:27 AM on December 6, 2015 [3 favorites]


Rhodes, with an s.

Oh, for the love of Mike. I checked and checked my post text, and that got past me?

I can only blame it on ghosts. And living in Rhode Island. I've asked the mods to fix it, and I see that they have bestowed their friendly gaze, erasing my error. Now, my books will stop glaring at me reprovingly with their spider-like faces.

As for that review; I dunno. James was extremely conservative and that extended to his views on relations with women, but he did have a number of long friendships with women (mostly carried out through letters), and women in his stories, while not exactly common, aren't always portrayed as trivial (as I say above, Mr. Humphries comes off distinctly poorly compared to the sharp and learned Lady Wardrop, and Mary Oldys, from "The Residence at Whitminster," is certainly more sensible than her uncle or even Mr. Spearman, who is a very inert "hero"). This is considerably better than Lovecraft managed (although this may be damning with faint praise). So I am unconvinced that James was conceiving of some vagina dentata in that horrible mouth under the pillow in "Casting the Runes," as opposed to putting together a couple of things that disgusted him (James really didn't like hairy beings given their appearance in his stories, for example) into an arresting image.

I have my doubts about James' sexuality as well -- it seems popular to cast him as repressing his desire for men (the Gatiss documentary above takes this approach), but it makes as much sense to think of him as asexual (with maybe romantic feelings toward men) than repressed. Heterosexual-homosexual is not the only continuum of desire, and James' use of embrace as a sign of menace suggests some antipathy to physical contact. Of course, I doubt very much that James would have the vocabulary/framework to make this distinction, even if we were to find his "secret romantic diaries."

I also found the article a little weird on the subject of ambiguity. It's true that James, as a conservative, seemed to crave order and clear distinctions, and he definitely seemed to conceive of scholarship as a "mastery of facts" rather than a "facility with theory," but his stories are often deeply ambiguous -- the reader rarely gets any kind of real explanation, and the explanations that do exist are often from deeply unreliable/unknowledgeable sources. It seems to me that this ambiguity is at the heart of Jamesian horror -- you can't protect yourself from supernatural calamity if the rules are unspoken and arbitrary. Surely James' personal search for order and an undisturbed life might feed his use of uncertainty and ambiguity as drivers for horror?
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:29 AM on December 6, 2015 [5 favorites]


I first read MR James as a young teenager, and was particularly impressed by Canon Alberic's Scrapbook. So when I went on a camping trip in the Pyrenees, I made sure that St Bertrand de Comminges was one of the towns we visited. It's a really lovely place, and, remembering James' "...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..", I was amused to see that there was still a little stuffed crocodile hanging on the wall in the cathedral.
posted by Azara at 10:22 AM on December 6, 2015 [3 favorites]


So sorry, GenjiandProust , but I am going to have to be "that bloke" and point out that it's Montague, rather than Montigue, Rhodes James.

Great post; thank you.
posted by On the Corner at 2:12 AM on December 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


Mod note: Fixed spelling.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 11:38 AM on December 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


I can only blame the ghosts, or maybe the spirits. The valiant mods came to the rescue again. (Three mod fixes in one post; that's a new low for me, and what I get for doing a many-link post). Sigh. Maybe I should have called this "A Spellchecker for the Curious."
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:39 AM on December 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


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