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David Eccles, From the first, faint voice among the bed -curtains . . .’ - Tim Mackintosh-Smith on M. R. James, Casting the Runes - Slightly Foxed Issue 4

Now We’re Shut in for the Night

On a warm, still evening in June, a motor car drew up before S___by House in the north of Lincolnshire. Out of it stepped a man in early middle age whose considerable luggage, neglected beard and weathered countenance betokened – but what it betokened you will have to deduce for yourself, for it is of no importance to our preamble. Let us instead follow the visitor’s gaze to an entrance front of red brick, that of a substantial farmhouse of a kind that may be seen in any of the eastern shires, here aspiring to the classical by way of the addition to its doorway of a pediment and pilasters. A date somewhere in the prosperous middle of the reign of the third George suggests itself for these genteel improvements.

The modest scale of S___by does not earn it an entry in any of those topographical works – Ponsonby’s Perambulations is but one that comes to mind – in which the earlier nineteenth century was so prolific. More recently, however, Harris has thought fit to afford it a bemused mention in his architectural gazetteer of Lincolnshire, on account of a curious feature; for, at a distance of some two hundred yards from the house, and out of the mid-summer fecundity of its shrubberies, there rises a building of singular design – a prospect tower, also of red brick, set upon a cubic base (a rough essay in the Tuscan order) and culminating in a glazed octagonal lantern. It was to the top of this erection that, having deposited his bags upon the steps of the house, the visitor made his way.

The prospect in view may be summed up thus: a slightly undulating vista of pasture-land, shuddering perceptibly in the expiring heat, intersected by dykes, punctuated here and there by a steeple or windmill and curtailed, not far to the east, by a ragged line of high dunes; beyond which, were we to trouble to climb to the roof, we might descry a melancholy expanse of salt-marsh and a distant suggestion of sea. A dark clump of Scotch firs should be added to the picture, on the landward side of the dunes. Within it stands the New Inn, well known to the excisemen in the days when its name was more appropriate, and to this a tunnel is said to lead from beneath the base of our lofty vantage-point . . .

You may well construe those dots, now so fashionable a substitute for words, as signifying incredulity on the part of the writer. In this you would be correct. Other fancies, attaching to the house itself, were however of greater substance, not l

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On a warm, still evening in June, a motor car drew up before S___by House in the north of Lincolnshire. Out of it stepped a man in early middle age whose considerable luggage, neglected beard and weathered countenance betokened – but what it betokened you will have to deduce for yourself, for it is of no importance to our preamble. Let us instead follow the visitor’s gaze to an entrance front of red brick, that of a substantial farmhouse of a kind that may be seen in any of the eastern shires, here aspiring to the classical by way of the addition to its doorway of a pediment and pilasters. A date somewhere in the prosperous middle of the reign of the third George suggests itself for these genteel improvements.

The modest scale of S___by does not earn it an entry in any of those topographical works – Ponsonby’s Perambulations is but one that comes to mind – in which the earlier nineteenth century was so prolific. More recently, however, Harris has thought fit to afford it a bemused mention in his architectural gazetteer of Lincolnshire, on account of a curious feature; for, at a distance of some two hundred yards from the house, and out of the mid-summer fecundity of its shrubberies, there rises a building of singular design – a prospect tower, also of red brick, set upon a cubic base (a rough essay in the Tuscan order) and culminating in a glazed octagonal lantern. It was to the top of this erection that, having deposited his bags upon the steps of the house, the visitor made his way. The prospect in view may be summed up thus: a slightly undulating vista of pasture-land, shuddering perceptibly in the expiring heat, intersected by dykes, punctuated here and there by a steeple or windmill and curtailed, not far to the east, by a ragged line of high dunes; beyond which, were we to trouble to climb to the roof, we might descry a melancholy expanse of salt-marsh and a distant suggestion of sea. A dark clump of Scotch firs should be added to the picture, on the landward side of the dunes. Within it stands the New Inn, well known to the excisemen in the days when its name was more appropriate, and to this a tunnel is said to lead from beneath the base of our lofty vantage-point . . . You may well construe those dots, now so fashionable a substitute for words, as signifying incredulity on the part of the writer. In this you would be correct. Other fancies, attaching to the house itself, were however of greater substance, not least those concerning what might be termed its nocturnal residents. Of these nothing had been seen with any clarity; but on occasion there had been a shadow where none should have been, and more than one guest had remarked on a ‘presence’ in the south-west bedroom. None of this had ever troubled our visitor, who habitually occupied that very chamber. It was not that he disbelieved in spirits; on the contrary, he regarded those who did so as little better than Sadducees – indeed, had once been heard to echo Browne and call them ‘a sort, not of Infidels, but Atheists’. But to him the obscurer occupants of the house had always behaved with impeccable indifference. He had never felt the slightest unease in that room; until, that is, later on in the evening of which we speak. ‘Pah!’ he exclaimed, snapping shut a novel lately praised by the critics. ‘What tedious rot.’ Nor did the other offerings on his bedside table seem at first to promise any more in the way of entertainment. He stifled a yawn, and was about to put out the light, when his eye fell on a small octavo. ‘Now there’s entertainment for you,’ he said to himself, reaching for it – then hesitating for, although it was many years since he had last opened the book, he knew its contents all too well (or so he thought). His indecision did not last. From within the faded blue binding beckoned a rich and half-remembered world; his better judgement – a faculty which, in any case, he seldom exercised – did not prevail. ‘I’ll just glance at one story,’ he told himself. ‘“A School Story”, I think. I must know it by heart.’ And thus, he reasoned, it could not frighten him. Frighten him it did – from the first, faint voice among the bed-curtains that whispers ‘Now we’re shut in for the night,’ to the final, awful revelation in the shrubbery; and so did the others that he read after it, their pages turned by fingers that trembled as much with addiction as with fear. They always would frighten, for they gave substance to shadows and form to the most incorporeal of presences – terrible, visible form. He slept only when the sky began to pale, and his haggard features were to be remarked upon at the breakfast table. At this point I must slip into something more comfortable – the first person – and apologize to M. R. James for a poor attempt at his inimitable style. The Jamesian setting of my preamble, however, is not a forgery. I must have been about 12 when I first opened James’s Collected Ghost Stories and turned to ‘A School Story’. As a boy who enjoyed gruesome yarns and, more surprisingly, Latin grammar, I was delighted to discover that the two could go together. Briefly, thus: a boy, asked for a sentence using memento + genitive, comes up, apparently out of the blue, with memento putei inter quatuor taxos – ‘I remember the well among the four yews’ – at which his Latin master has a funny turn. In a later lesson on Conditionals a paper is found on the master’s desk, this time in an unknown hand, saying, Si tu non veneris ad me, ego veniam ad te: ‘If you don’t come to me, I’ll come to you’. That night a figure, beastly thin and wet all over, is seen crouching on the master’s windowsill; next morning, the master has disappeared; his decayed corpse is found thirty years later down a disused well between four yews in a shrubbery, and in the tight – but not, we assume, loving – embrace of another corpse. That thin and dripping figure remained in my memory, together with a number of other beastly apparitions and the bones of plots. What I hadn’t realized when I returned to James’s tales was just how many of them featured elements of my English home of more recent years – the red brick house, the shrubbery, the view, from an eminence, of steeples, meadows, marsh and sea. They appear time and again: to enter Jamesland is to embark on a recurring nightmare. By the time the reader brave enough to stay the course has made it from Aswarby Hall, the setting for ‘Lost Hearts’ and the locus classicus of the tales (‘a tall, square red-brick-house built in the reign of Anne’), to the Suffolk inn that is the location of ‘Rats’ (‘a tall, red-brick house, narrow for its height . . .’), a mere glimpse of Jamesland is enough to induce what its creator called ‘a pleasing terror’. I was surrounded by such a landscape. Our New Inn is the spit of that Suffolk one. Aswarby is a real place in Lincolnshire; I pass its park on my way to the marshes – the park where ‘an endless procession of unseen people were sweeping past’, and probably do so still. (Sadly, the house has gone; had gone, I think, many years before James wrote his story in the 1890s. Or perhaps not sadly, given what Mr Abney got up to there.) Just as there is a Jamesian landscape, there is a Jamesian victim. Unlike the Latin master with the murky past, most of the victims are innocent of all but curiosity; Johnson of ‘Rats’ – ‘coming from the University of Cambridge and desirous of solitude in tolerable quarters’ – is such a one. He pokes his nose where he shouldn’t – ‘very gingerly, he approached it and bending down listened, holding his breath . . .’ – and, like the dozen equally dim varsity men before him, ends up a gibbering wreck. James deemed most of these fools unworthy of any characterization at all; and quite rightly, for they are not the real stars of the stories. There is a hard core of serious James fanatics who write articles like ‘Montague Rhodes James – cyberpunk?’ (Ghosts and Scholars, 23). Before they accuse me of making a travesty of the Master, I should point out that there is much more to his scenery than old brick houses and shrubberies. Cathedrals loom large, for example, confections of Hereford and Salisbury with a dash of Canterbury. One story takes place in a miniature Gothick mansion and made James a sort of Ghost-Storyteller Laureate, as it was written for the library of Queen Mary’s dolls’ house. And there is more to his human cast of characters than dimwit dons, who are regularly upstaged by the less well-educated but more picturesque lower orders: ‘Master Had add a Nasty Shock and keeps His Bedd,’ writes the valet of one victim, languishing on the Continent. ‘If I might be so Bold Sir it will be a Pleasure to see an Honnest Brish Face among all These Forig ones.’ If James had fun with orthographically challenged manservants and metaphor-mixing innkeepers, he also enjoyed taking gentle swipes at less obvious targets – Oxford pedants, nineteenth-century gothicizers, Thomas Hardy, Lytton Strachey (I assume it was he James had in mind as the author of at least some of the ‘immense quantity of clever and thoughtful Rubbish [which] is now being written about the Victorian age’) and, especially, golf. But perhaps his greatest delight – and a legacy to storytelling inherited by writers like Peter Ackroyd and Ian Pears – was in forging antique English. He is as adept at reproducing late seventeenth-century narrative (‘It was constantly affirmed of all that saw her that she presented the living Aspect of a mad Divel’) as he is in aping feminine epistolary tics of the 1820s (‘The town, small as it was, affords us some reflection, pale indeed, but veritable, of the sweets of polite intercourse’). His post-medieval Latin, too, is authentically debased. It is here, in this linguistic virtuosity, and in what he calls his ‘ostensible erudition’ – the snippets of architectural, bibliographical and other learning with which he furnishes his settings – that Jamesland intersects with its creator’s other habitat, academia. James was at home in the bookish world from an early age. Born in 1862 and brought up in a Suffolk rectory (a tall house, I suspect, of red brick; the DNB, from which I crib these details, doesn’t say), he taught himself enough Ge’ez to read the Ethiopian Apocrypha while still a boy at Eton. By the time he returned to the school as Provost, having occupied that position at King’s College, Cambridge, he also had Danish, Swedish, Coptic, Hebrew and Syriac under his belt. The Apocrypha in various tongues remained his subject of study, and he also became a renowned scholar of Western medieval manuscripts. Finally: ‘in a lighter vein, [he] composed ghost-stories and little plays for schoolboys’. That is all, in two double-column pages. But then James was similarly self-deprecating: ‘I am told they have given pleasure’, he wrote of his tales in the preface to my pocket edition, ‘of a certain sort.’ Whether the ghosts themselves could be said to give pleasure of any sort is another thing. Non-fictional ghosts, in my experience, leave one neither pleased nor terrified, but doubtful. Was that really a cloaked man evaporating before my eyes in an Oxford alleyway? Did that Dulverton door-handle really move in the small hours, and the door begin to open on an empty passage – or was I merely in a heightened state of suggestibility brought on by my discovery, the previous afternoon, of a human skull in the strawberry-patch? If the ghost does reveal itself indubitably, it is always to someone else: ‘Sorry your room’s in such a state,’ said one hostess of mine, ‘but Mrs Bunch met the Faceless Lady on the stairs and had to take the day off.’ M. R. James’s ghosts are never doubtful. They are happy to reveal themselves to anyone. And while most of us leave only one behind, if that, he has left dozens. You meet not only the faceless, face-to-non-face, but also the full of face (‘It was not a mask. It was a face – large, smooth, and pink . . .’) and the corpse-faced, the cobwebbed, the leggy and the leathery, the slimy and the squelchy and, worst of all, the hairy. The idea of stroking – as Denton does in ‘The Diary of Mr Poynter’ – what you think is your spaniel and suddenly finding that it is an enormous blob of hair called Sir Everard that proceeds to chase you down the corridor sounds, in short, remarkably silly. Mark my words, it is terrifying; and no, the terror isn’t pleasing. Exactly what the long-dead and excessively hirsute cavalier would have done, had Denton not made it through the baize door, is never spelled out. Perhaps, like another of the nastiest ghosts, ‘its one power was that of terrifying’. That is the power of M. R. James, and it is quite enough. If you find him on your bedside table, think twice . . .

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 4 © Tim Mackintosh-Smith 2004


About the contributor

Between visits to Lincolnshire, Tim Mackintosh-Smith lives in Yemen in a tall, red-brick house, narrow for its height and 3,000 miles from the nearest shrubbery.

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