1862-1936
Montague Rhodes James was born in 1862 in Goodnestone parsonage, Kent, where his father was the curate, and died in 1936. He developed a taste for old books from a precocious age and was fonder of reading dusty volumes in the library than playing with the other children. When he was six years old, he became ill with bronchitis, and, while recovering, wished to see a 17th century dutch bible which was owned by a friend of his father's, bishop Ryle. The book was sent to him and he reportedly sat up in his bed, examining it intently. He studied at Eton and then at King's College, Cambridge, where he became assistant in classical archaeology at the Fitzwilliam museum. He was elected a Fellow of King's after writing his dissertation The Apocalypse of St. Peter, and after that, he lectured in divinity, eventually becoming dean of the college in 1889. He was a distinguished medievalist and wrote a large amount of reviews, translations, monographs, articles and works on bibliography, palaeography, antiquarian issues, and often edited volumes for specialized bibliographical and historical societies. He was a brilliant linguist and biblical scholar, and he was exceptionally gifted, which, along with his unusually keen memory and hard work, enabled him to write many pioneering studies. His translation of the Apocryphal New Testament in 1924 was one of these studies. He was made provost of King's College in 1905 and was later the vice-chancellor of the university from 1913 to 1915. His research often took him abroad, and he visited Cyprus, Denmark, Bavaria, Austria and Sweden, where he set his story Count Magnus, which was based on the 17th century count Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie.
Although he was a great scholar in his day, he is now most remembered for his ghost stories. Fascinated by the supernatural, he was an admirer of the Irish mystery-writer John Sheridan LeFanu, whose ghost stories he edited. James's stories were usually first published in magazines such as the Cambridge Review, but some were written for special occasions. Wailing Well is one such story, composed for the gathering of the Eton College boy scouts in 1927. His life was spent in studying the past. Among other things, he catalogued the many manuscript collections in Cambridge, a task that took forty years to complete. He never married and never had any children. The university, Eton and his books were his life.
His supernatural fiction is still read today, and his style and ideas have served as inspiration for many modern authors. He never reveals the ghost completely; the horror is always left up to the reader to imagine. One of the best reviews of his work was written by H.P. Lovecraft in his excellent essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, where he details extensively how and why M.R. James can still be called one of the greatest masters of supernatural fiction. I beg permission to quote Lovecraft's lengthy passage concerning James, for Lovecraft has done a very fine job in analyzing James and his work.
"...gifted with an almost diabolic power of calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of prosaic daily life, is the scholarly Montague Rhode James, Provost of Eton College, antiquary of note, and recognized authority on medieval manuscripts and cathedral history. Dr. James, long fond of telling spectral tales at Christmastide, has become by slow degrees a literary weird fictionist of the very first rank; and has developed a distinctive style and method likely to serve as models for an enduring line of disciples.
"The art of Dr. James is by no means haphazard, and in the preface to one of his collections he has formulated three very sound rules for macabre composition. A ghost story, he believes, should have a familiar setting in the modern period, in order to approach closely the reader's sphere of experience. Its spectral phenomena, moreover, should be malevolent rather than benificient; since fear is the emotion primarily to be excited. And finally, the technical patois of 'occultism' or pseudo-science ought carfeully to be avoided; lest the charm of casual verisimilitude be smothered in unconvincing pedantry.
"Dr. James, practicing what he preaches, approaches his themes in a light and often conversational way. Creating the illusion of every-day events, he introduces his abnormal phenomena cautiously and gradually; relieved at every turn by touches of homely and prosaic detail, and sometimes spiced with a snatch or two of antiquarian scholarship. Conscious of the close relation between present weirdness and accumulated tradition, he generally provides remote historical antecedents for his incidents; thus being able to utilize very aptly his exhaustive knowledge of the past, and his ready and convincing command of archaic diction and colouring. A favourite scene for a James tale is some centuried cathedral, which the author can describe with all the familiar minuteness of a specialist in that field.
"Sly humourous vignettes and bits of lifelike genre portraiture and characterization are often to be found in Dr. James's narratives, and serve in his skilled hands to augment the general effect rather than to spoil it, as the same qualities would tend to do with a lesser craftsman. In inventing a new type of ghost, he has departed considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition; for where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and hairy - a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and man - and usually touched before it is seen. Sometimes the spectre is of still more eccentric composition; a roll of flannel with spidery eyes, or an invisible entity which moulds itself in bedding and shows a face of crumpled linen. Dr. James has, it is clear, an intelligent and scientific knowledge of human nerves and feelings; and knows just how to apportion statement, imagery, and subtle suggestions in order to secure the best results with his readers. He is an artist in incident and arrangement rather than in atmosphere, and reaches the emotions more often through the intellect than directly. This method, of course, with its occasional absences of sharp climax, has its drawbacks as well as its advantages; and many will miss the thorough atmospheric tension which writers like Machen are careful to build up with words and scenes. But only a few of the tales are open to the charge of tameness. Generally the laconic unfolding of abnormal events in adroit order is amply sufficient to produce the desired effect of cumulative horror."
Lovecraft then proceeds to discuss some of James's stories in detail, and it is unnecessary to continue quoting him at this point. The rest of his review of James's work can be found in Supernatural Horror in Literature. He mentions the collections which contain the supernatural fiction of M.R. James as being Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, A Thin Ghost and Others, and A Warning to the Curious, along with a somewhat spectral juvenile phantasy called The Five Jars. Today, many collections of his stories are available, the perhaps best and also cheapest one being Penguin Popular Classics' 1994 Ghost Stories, which contains thirty stories, and a preface and afterword entitled Stories I Have Tried To Write, both by James. Worth noting is that one of our times' most popular and respected authors of horror and supernatural fiction, Ramsey Campbell, is often referred to as writing stories in the Jamesian manner. Certainly, the stories of M.R. James and the shudders they evoke still live on, more than six decades after his death.
castaigne@swipnet.se
Last update
8Enero 2000© Iris García Andaluz
Bibliography:
Bloom, Clive, Creepers: British Horror and Fantasy in the Twentieth Century (Pluto Press, 1993). (One short chapter devoted to "M.R. James and his Fiction")
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~fadey/mrjframes.html