‘Pleasantly uncomfortable’

MR James was the master of the macabre. Now the first edition of his private letters tries to summon up his ghost – but he remains as elusive as ever

In 1879, Montague Rhodes James – a precocious teenager, still a student at Eton – kicked off an illustrious publishing career with an article on “A Latin Fragment of Plutarch’s Sertorius”. A brilliant young scholar, he followed this up some years later with a number of contributions to the Journal of Hellenic Studies, a learned article on “The Sculptures in the Lady Chapel at Ely” in the Archaelogical Journal (1892), and then with multiple descriptive catalogues of the manuscripts in the library at Eton, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Jesus College, Peterhouse, Pembroke, Gonville and Caius, and Trinity Hall, as well as various short works on stained glass, wall paintings, sepulchral brass, bestiaries, rare medieval tiles, carved bosses, and later a number of books about the Apocalypse, abbeys, and Suffolk and Norfolk: A Perambulation of the Two Counties with Notice of Their Histories and Ancient Buildings (1930). A reluctant but highly competent administrator, James also – almost incidentally – became provost of King’s College and vice-chancellor of Cambridge, before eventually returning whence he came and becoming provost of Eton.

He is, of course, remembered for absolutely none of that: precocious, prodigious, competent? Whatever. He is today known only as MR James, author of ghost stories, many of which were originally written to be performed as mere Christmas Eve entertainments for friends, but which remain much beloved by connoisseurs of the macabre, including Mark Gatiss and Reece Shearsmith, famous for the cult comedy horror sitcom The League of Gentlemen. Such are lives and careers: we are lucky to be remembered, if at all, for some chance remark, some random act, some terrible error or mistake, or like

James, as some faint cry in the night, a voice from the past, a glimpse of a perpetual guttering candle.

James was undoubtedly a great storyteller, but not perhaps a great writer – a kind of late-Victorian Stephen King, with whom he shares a number of characteristics. King occasionally offers more than a nod and a wink in his fiction towards James’s inspiring example, but it was that other master of the weird and the not-so-wonderful, HP Lovecraft, who truly understood James’s secrets: “MR James joins the brisk, the light, & the commonplace to the weird about as well as anyone could do it […] The most valuable element in him – as a model – is his way of weaving a horror into the every-day fabric of life & history – having it grow naturally out of the myriad conditions of an ordinary environment.” Correct, H P.

There is also a rather thin, tightlipped humour in James’s stories, which makes them all the more attractive and disturbing, something like the wit of a cruel and affectionate schoolmaster or a quietly smirking don, which contrasts starkly with the hints of truly appalling violence that lie at the heart of some of his tales. “The stories themselves do not make any very exalted claim,” wrote James in his preface to his first collection of tales, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904). “If any of them succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, my purpose in writing them will have been attained.”

Casting the Runes, a collection of James’s letters edited by Jane Mainley-Piddock and published by Unbound, the crowdfunding publisher, proves a rather different source of discomfort. Noble in intent, if sometimes rather sketchy on details, this is not a scholarly edition of James’s letters from a university press – there is no such edition, much to the shame of academe. But it is an edition by a scholar, of the modern kind: informal, idiosyncratic, highly engaged and engaging.

“I had over 16,000 followers on Twitter,” writes Mainley-Piddock in her highly personal introduction to the collection, explaining why she embarked upon her task, “who had been following my PhD journey and who were all very big fans of James and his ghost stories.” The book has clearly been a labour of love, with Mainley-Piddock’s notes to the letters often affectionate in tone, if perhaps occasionally grating. “Poor James always suffered with his teeth”; “Reading this letter, the main impression one discerns is how James was an utterly lovely man.” Some of the notes, it has to be said, by an old curmudgeon reviewer, seem a touch too cut-and-paste casual.

Like any edition of anyone’s letters, there is much material here that can be skipped. An early epistle from James to his mother in September 1873: “We do a great many books here; Greek Delectus Latin Primer, Gr Grammar, Wilkins’s Exercises Penroses verse book, McCleans Scriptures History, Children’s Garland from the best poets Principles,” etc. “Booth is a booby. Wilkinson major has a bad eye.” What’s most interesting to observe in these early missives is James trying out different voices and tones, as he was later to do in his stories: “Your affectionate offspring takes up his pluma with the full intention of telling you all he can.”

James was no Byron nor a Virginia Woolf: even the best of the letters here are merely businesslike. There are no startling discoveries of the kind encountered by James’s characters. We learn no more, for example, about his relationship with James McBryde, his long-time travelling companion and illustrator. Close friend? More? In the absence of any new evidence, Mainley-Piddock concludes, “All in all there is much to wonder about here.” The greatest wonder is perhaps how little the letters reveal – as in his stories, James remains everpresent and yet entirely absent.

It is perhaps worth noting that this book’s title borrows the title of one of James’s finest stories, which was later adapted for what is arguably one of the greatest horror films of all time, Night of the Demon (1957). That “Casting the Runes” is a classic. This Casting the Runes is still worth reading. And Night of the Demon is unforgettable. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.