Collected Ghost Stories (4 page)

As Mike Pincombe has suggested, there are discernible elements of ‘homosexual panic’ in ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’.
³³
The very title of the story is taken from a Burns ballad about the seduction of a maid. This most famous of all James’s ghosts arises from the bed in which Professor Parkins is expecting his colleague Rogers to sleep; its ‘horrible, … intensely horrible, face
of crumpled linen
… was thrust close into his own’ (
p. 92
), as if trying to kiss him. But more strikingly than this, it seems to me that what ‘Oh, Whistle’ really exhibits is a fear of
domesticity
. The locus of horror is, after all, a bedsheet. Jonathan Miller’s celebrated 1968 television adaptation of the story brilliantly realizes this theme by opening with an extended scene of hotel chambermaids making beds. Women, on close observation, do feature frequently in James’s stories, but not necessarily in the ways we might initially expect. They are often the ghosts themselves.

Sometimes these ghosts require no interpretation: they are unambiguously supernatural women. Mrs Mothersole in ‘The Ash-Tree’ wreaks what seems like justified retribution on the heirs of her persecutor Sir Matthew Fell. In ‘Martin’s Close’, the spurned Ann Clark, her throat cut, rises out of the pond in which her body lies, to convict George Martin of her murder. ‘A Neighbour’s Landmark’ features the restless ghost of Theodosia Bryan, Lady Ivie, condemned for eternity to walk the land she had unlawfully obtained during her life. The lamia of ‘An Episode of Cathedral History’ is the female
counterpart of the demon of ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’: physically, they are virtually identical (though his eyes are yellow and hers red), both are imprisoned within cathedrals, and both are linked by a shared passage from Isaiah: ‘The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow, and the screech-owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest.’ One of the ghosts of ‘Wailing Well’ is ‘a terrible figure—something in ragged black—with whitish patches breaking out of it: the head, perched on a long thin neck, half hidden by a shapeless sort of blackened sun-bonnet’ (
p. 388
).

Other ghosts are trickier, more elusive or complex, and of liminal or ambiguous gender. The bedsheet ghost of ‘Oh, Whistle’, for example, is an overdetermined symbol: that is, the site where a number of anxieties converge to create an abundance of meaning. It simultaneously represents homosexual anxieties (the bed in which Mr Rogers is to sleep), and a fear of domesticity and
women
given nightmare form; and for James, these anxieties are related ones. One of the most striking images of the panic caused by the irruption of the supernatural into a secure setting comes in ‘Casting the Runes’ when Mr Dunning, lying in bed at home with the power out and noises coming from his study, gropes for his matches: ‘he put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow: only, it did not get so far. 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’ (
p. 155
). This is a terrifying image—along with ‘Oh, Whistle’’s spectral bedsheet, probably the most unnerving in all of James’s writing. It offers, to begin with, a classic adumbration of the Freudian category of the
uncanny
, in which the seeming security of domesticity is revealed as shot through with anxieties (and for James, as we have seen, the domestic was always a source of anxiety). More than this, though, this image of the hairy, fanged mouth lurking ‘in the well-known nook under the pillow’ is a powerful symbol of sexual terror, a
vagina dentata
—a nightmare image of the monstrous-feminine intruding upon the story’s cloistered, gentlemanly world of libraries and scholarship. Another image of the monstrous-feminine occurs, in grotesquely abject form, at the close of ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’. Exploring a dark cavity inside a well, the antiquarian treasure-hunter Mr Somerton encounters one of James’s most shockingly corporeal horrors:

I believe I am now acquainted with the extremity of terror and repulsion which a man can endure without losing his mind. I can only just manage to tell you the bare outline of the experience. I was conscious of a most horrible smell of mould, and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own, and of several—I don’t know how many—legs or arms or tentacles or something clinging to my body. (
pp. 108
–9)

The symbolic language of this scene—wells, dark cavities, ‘foulness’, an overwhelming sense of physical violation—does not require too much decoding here, and ‘Abbot Thomas’ is ultimately a tale of uncontrollable sexual terror, a quest which leads Mr Somerton to this nightmare vagina, and an encounter which he barely survives.
³⁴

While it may not always predominate, there is also a discernible element of sexual terror in James’s two most characteristic symbols of horror, spiders and hair—and, worst of all, hairy spiders, as the two are interconnected symbols for him. It is in these terms that the stories’ ghosts and demons are most frequently imagined. The prevalence of spidery monsters in his stories is in part a product of James’s lifelong and well-attested arachnophobia. On one of their French bicycling holidays, James records McBryde’s encounter with a particular monster: ‘the courage which enabled him to seize by its sinewy leg the largest spider I have ever seen in a derelict bath at Verdun commanded the deepest respect’.
³⁵
The demon of ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’ is a kind of tarantula: ‘a mass of coarse, matted black hair … hideously taloned … Imagine one of the awful bird-catching spiders of South America translated into human form’ (
p. 9
). The ghost of Dr Rant in ‘The Tractate Middoth’ has ‘a very nasty bald head … and the streaks of hair across it were much less like hair than cobwebs … and the eyes were very deep-sunk, and over them, from the eyebrows to the cheek-bone, there were
cobwebs
—thick’ (
p. 133
). At the close of the story, John Eldred is attacked and killed by what may be a mass of spiders, or another of James’s spiders in human form, while frantically trying to destroy an unfavourable will. The event is seen unclearly, from a distance:

Then he took hold of a leaf, and was carefully tearing it out, when two things happened. First, something black seemed to drop upon the white leaf and run down it, and then as Eldred started and was turning to look behind him, a little dark form appeared to rise out of the shadow behind the tree-trunk and from it two arms enclosing a mass of blackness came before Eldred’s face and covered his head and neck. (
p. 142
)

Investigating the scene of Eldred’s death the next day, Garrett sees ‘a thick black mass of cobwebs; and, as he stirred it gingerly with his stick, several large spiders ran out of it into the grass’ (
p. 144
). ‘The Ash-Tree’ is entirely and most explicitly a tale of supernatural arachnid vengeance, and also unambiguously of a vengeful woman, as the story’s deadly giant spiders are the instruments of Mrs Mothersole’s will, living inside the tree which seems to grow out of her corpse. When the ash tree burns, her skeleton is discovered in its roots, ‘with the skin dried upon the bones, having some remains of black hair’, the human form of the ‘enormous spider[s], veinous and seared’ with which she shares her grave (
pp. 46
,
37
).

As well as arachnids, insects, too, provoke terror in James’s stories: the sawflies, crane-flies, and ichneumon wasps of ‘The Residence at Whitminster’; the flies and their master Beelzebub, Lord of Flies, in ‘An Evening’s Entertainment’; the truly unsettling image of the charred ghost crawling out of the plans of the maze in ‘Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance’, ‘a
burnt
human face: and with the odious writhings of a wasp climbing out of a rotten apple there clambered forth an appearance of a form, waving black arms prepared to clasp the head that was bending over them’ (
p. 219
).

And so, finally, to hair, which of all things seems most terrifying to James and his protagonists, most emblematic of an insecure, destabilized world. James’s own hair, as a young man, was often on the verge of being too long, and the subject of frequent comment and rebuke from his Eton masters, notably Walter Durnford, who was to succeed James as provost of King’s (‘I can still hear him proclaiming that James, K.S., must get his hair cut before five o’clock school’
³⁶
). James’s ghosts have hair, too much hair, hair where there should be none. Mrs Mothersole’s skeleton, we have seen, has ‘some remains of black hair’, and the skeletal, child-abducting spectre of ‘The Mezzotint’ has ‘a white dome-like forehead and a few straggling
hairs’ (
p. 32
). Both the demon of ‘Canon Alberic’ and the lamia of ‘An Episode of Cathedral History’ are entirely covered in hair. The entity occupying the non-existent room in ‘Number 13’ is glimpsed only as ‘an arm … clad in ragged, yellowish linen, and the bare skin, where it could be seen, had long grey hair upon it’ (
p. 59
). The very feel of hair is unsettling: as we have seen, Mr Dunning in ‘Casting the Runes’ feels ‘a mouth, with teeth, and hair about it’ under his pillow; while Dr Haynes in ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’, putting his hand on a carved wooden choir-stall, ‘was startled by what seemed a softness, a feeling as of rather rough and coarse fur’ (
p. 172
).

One story, in particular, seems to concentrate the anxieties discussed here into one image of terrifying domesticity, homosexual panic, and hairiness. ‘The Diary of Mr Poynter’ is a tale of haunted curtains (analogous to ‘Oh, Whistle’’s haunted bedsheet), based on a design which so captivates Miss Denton, the aunt of the story’s antiquarian protagonist, that she quite forgets her earlier demand for chintz curtains: ‘It is a most charming pattern … and remarkable too. Look, James, how delightfully the lines ripple. It reminds one of hair, very much, doesn’t it?’ (
p. 246
). The design is, it transpires, based on the hair of Sir Everard Charlett: ‘He was a very beautiful person, and constantly wore his own Hair, which was very abundant, from which, and his loose way of living, the cant name for him was Absalom’ (
p. 251
). This is an encoded statement of Sir Everard’s homosexuality. Absalom, son of King David, was a beautiful rebel, as recorded in 2 Samuel:

But in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him.

And when he polled his head [i.e., cut his hair], (for it was at every year’s end that he polled it, because the hair was heavy on him, therefore he polled it:) he weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels after the king’s weight. (15: 25–6)

The pattern in the wallpaper assumes corporeal form in James Denton’s room, in what is for James an unusually long and descriptive account of supernatural terror:

happening to move his hand which hung down over the arm of the chair within a few inches of the floor, he felt on the back of it just the slightest touch of a surface of hair, and stretching it out in that direction he stroked
and patted a rounded something. But the feel of it, and still more the fact that instead of a responsive movement, absolute stillness greeted his touch, made him look over the arm. What he had been touching rose to meet him. It was in the attitude of one that had crept along the floor on its belly, and it was, so far as could be recollected, a human figure. But of the face which was now rising to within a few inches of his own no feature was discernable, only hair. Shapeless as it was, there was about it so horrible an air of menace that as he bounded from his chair and rushed from the room he heard himself moaning with fear: and doubtless he did right to fly. As he dashed into the baize door that cut the passage in two, and—forgetting that it opened towards him—beat against it with all the force in him, he felt a soft ineffectual tearing at his back which, all the same, seemed to be growing in power, as if the hand, or whatever worse than a hand was there, were becoming more material as the pursuer’s rage was more concentrated. (
pp. 249
–50)

As M. R. James knew, the ghost story form is itself essentially Victorian. This certainly was the authorial tradition to which he understood himself, in a small way, to be a contributor, as he returned throughout his life to the works of his two great Victorian precursors, Charles Dickens and Sheridan Le Fanu. Writing in 1977, in what is probably the most influential of the very few full-length studies of the ghost story,
Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story
, Julia Briggs lamented that ‘the ghost story now seems to look back over its own shoulder. It has become a vehicle for nostalgia, a formulaic exercise content merely to recreate a Dickensian or a Monty Jamesian atmosphere. It no longer has any capacity for growth or adaptation.’
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Perhaps, yes—but Briggs also seems a little harsh on the ghost story here, and on M. R. James himself. What James’s stories do, it seems, is to give articulation to a particularly English longing for the past. This might be the classic attitude of a late imperial writer, which James certainly was; but such a backward-looking tendency is not always damagingly reactionary. Modernity
is
terrifying, monstrous, demonic. James lived long enough to see the effects of the Age of Total War (to use Eric Hobsbawm’s term), which obliterated a generation of his best students at Cambridge, and left others scarred and incapacitated, hollow men. The temptation in his old age to retreat into an idealized Etonian youth must have been overwhelming.

M. R. James died peacefully on 12 June 1936. Five years later, in 1941, with German bombs dropping around him, George Orwell, a very different kind of Old Etonian from James, wrote his famous manifesto of Englishness, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’. In this great essay, written in the teeth of Total War, Orwell attempted to encapsulate what was most precious about the English, most worth fighting for—and also what was most stultifying and retrograde, least helpful. His conclusion was that these two qualities, the admirable and the infuriating, were indissociable in the national character: ‘the English’, Orwell believed, ‘are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic “world view”.’
³⁸
It was precisely this anti-intellectualism, Orwell believed, that was to save the nation, as the English, being impervious to ideas, were the only major European nation also impervious to fascism, a systematic ideology which they did not understand. Instead, Orwell suggested, the English were a nation of individualists, eccentrics, cranks, hobbyists, cultivators of the deliberately irrelevant. This was their gift to the world. It may have come as a surprise to Monty James to discover that, in the end, he was a most Orwellian Englishman.