The first encounter with the short ghost stories of Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) is very similar to the usual pattern of the tales he tells. Usually located in reassuringly secure environments – libraries, college quads, gardens, comfortable old buildings thoroughly inhabited and domesticated – these are slowly but surely undermined by a looming, but very loose, sense of threat, culminating in a shocking epiphany – a figure turning to one who ends up having no face, or a pile of leaves swirling up moved by a squall of wind that start to take embodied form. The stories leave an aftertaste. They can be very addictive.
It helps that they are read in the right place. My own encounter with them was traveling in France in the winter of 1989, going to meet up with my parents at a large estate house deep in the countryside which was then run as a hotel. At night the place had a suitably forlorn and isolated air, only exacerbated by the sound of deer and stags in the parks around noisily rutting! Reading a few of James’s stories was enough to force me to leave the bedroom light on most of the night. And yet, they had seemed so gentle and civilly told to start with!
M R James was born in the parsonage at Goodnestone, close to Wingham, just outside of Canterbury. The building, from the 18th century, has acquired, perhaps because of its association with the writer, a reputation as a place of hauntings to this day – the actress Joanna Lumley who owned it in the 2000s complained about a series of unsettling events over the three years she lived there, from seeing figures in the cellar teller her to leave to ghostly voices in the upper rooms. James’s father, Herbert, and his wife Mary, left here when their third son was only three to move to Great Livermore in Suffolk. East Anglia was to provide the setting for many of James’s later works.
James’s was a formidable scholar, attending Eton, attaining a First at King’s College, Cambridge, becoming a Fellow, and, in 1895, Provost. In 1918 he moved on to become Provost of Eton, dying there, having been awarded the Order of Merit in 1930, in 1936. He remained unmarried, and lived the life of someone almost scrupulously of the establishment.
His life was almost uneventful to a fault. No signs of major traumas beyond the usual bereavements and life events; no major foreign travel; no evidence of any passionate attachments – in fact, no evidence of any attachments at all. James’s life was deeply worthy – directorship of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge right at the end of the 19th century in which its collections were strengthened, work as an archaeologist in Bury St Edmunds uncovering the huge abbey there which remains exposed in parts to this day; decent, wholesome views on literature, a dislike of Communism, but nothing expressed with anything but balance and decorum. Except, however, for the remarkable predilection he had for writing these short, powerful, and all too realistic ghost stories.
Which makes the moments of shocking exposure, when they come in his stories, all the more powerful. One of the most representative is `The Rose Garden’, from 1911. The simple story of Mr and Mrs Anstruther and their plans to build a rose garden in Westfield House, their home, despite the strong protestations of their gardener as to their choice of a location – due to the lack of light there. Mrs Wilkins, a former owner of the building visiting, gives even more solid reasons for avoiding this spot. She tells of how it had always had something a little unsettling about it. `Neither of us would ever be here alone when we were children,’ Wilkins says. `It is one of those things that can hardly be put into words – by me at least – and that sound rather foolish if they are not properly expressed. I can tell you after a fashion what it was that gave us – well, almost a horror of the place when we were alone’ (M.R. James, `Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories’, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987, 108-9) It transpires that while at the place they both feared, her brother had been overcome by tiredness, and then sat and had a series of unsettling dreams, from which he took a number of days to recover.
Unperturbed, Mrs Anstruther persists with her plans. A little later, sketching one afternoon near the site, as the weather changes and darkens, she walked through the garden and is distracted by what she initially thinks to be a Fifth of November mask.
`It was not a mask. It was a face – large, smooth, and pink. She remembers the minute drops of perspiration which were starting from its forehead: she remembers how the jaws were clean-shaven and the eyes shut. She remembers also, and with an accuracy, which makes the thought intolerable to her, how the mouth was open and a single tooth appeared below the upper lip. As she looked the face receded into the darkness of the bush’ (115).
The poor witness to this manages to get to the house before collapsing. The face, it turns out, may have been the ghostly image of a former owner, disgraced during the era of King Charles the Second, and retiring to the house to die. In any case, it would be hard to think of a better story in which such a simple event could convey such ominous feeling and meaning. James’s work is rich in these associations between memory traces that have been left on the landscape and the ways they are then manifested in unsettling events. It is fitting that it seems his own imprint is still felt in the house in which he was born in this tiny village in Kent.