Ghosts and Scholars
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darkling_talesI've been a fan of M R James for decades now, and have always sought after stories by other authors that embody 'Jamesian' literary values. So imagine my excitement when I finally landed a cheap copy of Ghosts and Scholars: Ghost Stories In The Tradition of M R James. This 1987 anthology, edited by Richard Dalby and Rosemary Pardoe (editress of the original G&S magazine that inspired the collection), is now cruelly out of print, and had over the years acquired a semi-mythical status in my eyes as I strove in vain to find a copy - any copy - for under £70. Last month, my luck finally turned, courtesy of a second-hand book dealer who generously parted with a copy for only £7.00 (possibly due to a typo with the decimal point. I didn't hang around to ask.) So obviously I am dying to spout my thoughts on this scarce collection all over the internet, now I've finished reading it.
The book opens with a chatty essay by the 'Master' himself, Ghosts, Treat Them Gently!, in which Monty lays down his rules for writing a successful Jamesian ghost story. A good, contemporary setting is vital; the prose should be as uncluttered and concise as possible; gratuitous romance and/or sex should be avoided; and the ghost must be malevolent, though a certain reticence should be exercised to avoid the 'charnel house reek' of the mere horror story. It's all great advice, and should (in my opinion) be followed by all authors, even if they don't care a fig about James. Of course, nowadays the word 'Jamesian' also evokes images of haunted cathedrals, Cambridge colleges and English stately homes - the author's own world - and all these locations are well represented here. We then proceed with the fiction proper. I don't think the tales are arranged in an exact chronological order, but things do kick off with a proto-Jamesian tale, On The Leads, by the fearsome Rev. Sabine Baring Gould. Written a few years before James got to work, it still represents a decent example of a 'Jamesian' haunting and may have inspired the man himself!
The anthology then skips forward a few decades, where we meet a bunch of men who were so keen on James they couldn't even wait until he was dead to start paying tribute: the famous 'James gang'. There is some debate among critics as to which authors can most rightly be said to form part of this little circle of followers, but the gang is represented here by the brothers A.C. Benson and R.H. Benson, R.H. Malden, E.G.Swain, Arthur Gray and L.T.C. Rolt. Many of these authors were friends of James' or colleagues at King's, who heard him read his own stories at fireside social gatherings. (The most famous Benson, E.F., is in my opinion rightly omitted from the collection as he is too famous in his own right (and too innovative) to have real novelty value for the reader.) There is also a story from the pen of the mysterious 'B', an anonymous author thought to be either James or one of the 'gang'. Personally, I don't think The Stone Coffin is savage enough to be written by James, and I think A.C. Benson is the most likely author.
For me, the strongest of these authors is LTC Rolt (with the creepy tale of pagan revenge, New Corner), though funnily enough his position in the 'gang' is the most contentious of this lot, since, although he uses Jamesian economy and restraint and isn't afraid of a nasty haunting, he stays well clear of academic and antiquarian settings and prefers to use the industrial landscape, e.g. canals, mines and, in this case, a haunted motor race-track. More importantly, his stuff has a more modern feel to it, with no wandering off into anecdotes about golf or saints' names, and that's one reason I like his work so much! Arthur Gray and E.G.Swain submit the weakest tales in the book, though to be fair they are poorly represented (the editors have chosen humorous and light-hearted stories from both men, never a good idea, according to James.) A.C. Benson (an especially close friend of 'Monty') writes in slightly archaic language matching his historical settings, and in doing so flies in the face of James' injunction to use contemporary settings, but his black magic story The Slype House has a few moments of real horror while remaining characteristically compassionate and a little bit strange. In fact, despite the olde worlde feel, his descriptions of the things that drive rather lonely, unloved people to seek power over others through occult practises reminded me sorely of many Satanists of today!
The rest of the collection is a good mixed bag, with a lot of original subject matter. For me, the stand-out stories are Blind Man's Hood by John Dickson Carr (why had no one thought to write the incredibly sinister game of blind man's buff into a ghost story before this?), Eleanor Scott's Celui-La (a faultless tale of unburied evil on the Breton coast, with a nod to James' 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You') and my personal favourite, The Face In The Fresco by Arnold Smith. The latter almost deserves a paragraph to itself, so convincing and fresh is Smith's blend of ecclesiastical menace and modern psychology, and the setting (a little church, with a terrifying fresco, in the bleak Sussex countryside) is breathtaking. It follows the familiar James pattern of 'Curious scholar unearths a holy (or unholy) object, disturbs its supernatural guardian, pays the price', but the mental mechanisms by which the hero struggles with the Thing he has unwittingly conjured up, and his D.I.Y. approach to half-remembered ritual, feel much more lifelike than the reactions of many beleaguered fictional dons.
And it helps that the hero is in fact not a don or any kind of professional scholar, just an ordinary educated man wishing to improve himself. This democratic attitude towards ghostly encounters is actually rather rare in this enclave of the supernatural genre. Many authors of James 'homages' nowadays evince a snobbish nostalgic obsession with the obscenely privileged groves of Academe and the stately homes in which James (and his heros) spent most of their lives, and the authors who are too young to have any first-hand experience of this vanished world are usually the worst of the lot! Luckily, the stories in this collection escape that trap, and it's a great testament to the editors' good taste.
In one case however, it's actually the story's lack of originality that makes it interesting. Christmas Reunion by Sir Andrew Caldecott has an unusual angle: he is the only author ever to attempt to flesh out one of the skeleton plots tantalizingly mentioned by James in his essay 'Stories I Have Tried To Write', which made mention of a nasty message inside a Christmas cracker. It's moderately successful, and avoids Caldecott's annoying tendency to flippancy, but not brilliant. I've read that essay, but what I didn't know is that James once made an even more direct appeal to readers: in 1930 he judged a 'Ghost Story Competition' run by The Spectator magazine. Entries were limited to about two pages of text, which is quite a restriction! The two competition winners are both included here. Curiously for a subgenre so heavily dominated by men, both are women, (I suppose James can't have been that much of a misogynist then...) I actually found Winifred Galbraith's offering dull, but Emma S. Duffin's The House Party is terrific and managed to pierce right through my usual distaste for very short short stories.
There is a decent sprinkling of modern authors throughout the book too. A.F. Kidd is the best of them, with her grim London church frightener An Incident In The City, from 1985. Not a lot actually happens, when you think about it, but the atmosphere is so gripping that you feel you've seen a whole pageant of horrors. The most famous has to be Ramsey Campbell, but his story is disappointing and really not all that Jamesian. I've recently got into David G Rowlands, and his contribution Sins of the Fathers is well written and fun, though perhaps not filled with enough doom and malevolence for my liking. The hero seems a bit too unruffled by his experience with a black hound and a flooded basement! Though I suppose somebody has to get out of this type of tale unscathed from time to time, or the whole genre would lose its suspense...
As you may have gathered, I love this anthology. It's the best I currently own, and it's full of rarities by the likes of Fredrick Cowle (an author long overdue a revival). And it's not just words! Unusually for a modern book, Ghosts and Scholars also features a liberal helping of original black-and-white illustrations, all very atmospheric. (A.F.Kidd even illustrates her own story, proving she's a lady of multiple talents!) There is a knowledgeable Foreword by James' biographer Michael Cox, and a bundle of photographs of James and his friends at the back of the book. Jamesian completists will also love the select biography of (even more) obscure authors who don't appear in the collection. I came across many names to investigate there! Of course, no collection is absolutely perfect. There are a couple of notable absences - there is no M P Dare and no ANL Munby, and H Russell Wakefield is an especially glaring omission, since he's brilliant, and was one of M R James' favourite authors in the field! And the book's a little out of date: since the 80s a crop of newer authors has sprung up who use Jamesian techniques and subjects - indeed, I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say that the 'Jamesian' ghost story is enjoying a little revival at the moment.
All this can only mean one thing: we need a revised and updated second edition! It's criminal that Ghosts and Scholars should still be out of print. On the bright side, if you can't get your hands on a copy, many of the stories featured here have reappeared on the shelves in miraculously cheap paperback form recently! Wordsworth Press, for instance, do a collected Caldecott, and Penguin do a paperback Sleep No More, a cracking LTC Rolt anthology. And there's always the internet...for those of you who don't mind reading off a screen (or a print-out), there's plenty of E.G.Swain and Benson stuff at Horrormasters.com. G&S magazine has also made available online versions of Arnold Smith's The Face In The Fresco (a must-read!) and B's The Stone Coffin. And as time goes by, more and more of these authors should start appearing in the public domain, so all is not lost :)
The book opens with a chatty essay by the 'Master' himself, Ghosts, Treat Them Gently!, in which Monty lays down his rules for writing a successful Jamesian ghost story. A good, contemporary setting is vital; the prose should be as uncluttered and concise as possible; gratuitous romance and/or sex should be avoided; and the ghost must be malevolent, though a certain reticence should be exercised to avoid the 'charnel house reek' of the mere horror story. It's all great advice, and should (in my opinion) be followed by all authors, even if they don't care a fig about James. Of course, nowadays the word 'Jamesian' also evokes images of haunted cathedrals, Cambridge colleges and English stately homes - the author's own world - and all these locations are well represented here. We then proceed with the fiction proper. I don't think the tales are arranged in an exact chronological order, but things do kick off with a proto-Jamesian tale, On The Leads, by the fearsome Rev. Sabine Baring Gould. Written a few years before James got to work, it still represents a decent example of a 'Jamesian' haunting and may have inspired the man himself!
The anthology then skips forward a few decades, where we meet a bunch of men who were so keen on James they couldn't even wait until he was dead to start paying tribute: the famous 'James gang'. There is some debate among critics as to which authors can most rightly be said to form part of this little circle of followers, but the gang is represented here by the brothers A.C. Benson and R.H. Benson, R.H. Malden, E.G.Swain, Arthur Gray and L.T.C. Rolt. Many of these authors were friends of James' or colleagues at King's, who heard him read his own stories at fireside social gatherings. (The most famous Benson, E.F., is in my opinion rightly omitted from the collection as he is too famous in his own right (and too innovative) to have real novelty value for the reader.) There is also a story from the pen of the mysterious 'B', an anonymous author thought to be either James or one of the 'gang'. Personally, I don't think The Stone Coffin is savage enough to be written by James, and I think A.C. Benson is the most likely author.
For me, the strongest of these authors is LTC Rolt (with the creepy tale of pagan revenge, New Corner), though funnily enough his position in the 'gang' is the most contentious of this lot, since, although he uses Jamesian economy and restraint and isn't afraid of a nasty haunting, he stays well clear of academic and antiquarian settings and prefers to use the industrial landscape, e.g. canals, mines and, in this case, a haunted motor race-track. More importantly, his stuff has a more modern feel to it, with no wandering off into anecdotes about golf or saints' names, and that's one reason I like his work so much! Arthur Gray and E.G.Swain submit the weakest tales in the book, though to be fair they are poorly represented (the editors have chosen humorous and light-hearted stories from both men, never a good idea, according to James.) A.C. Benson (an especially close friend of 'Monty') writes in slightly archaic language matching his historical settings, and in doing so flies in the face of James' injunction to use contemporary settings, but his black magic story The Slype House has a few moments of real horror while remaining characteristically compassionate and a little bit strange. In fact, despite the olde worlde feel, his descriptions of the things that drive rather lonely, unloved people to seek power over others through occult practises reminded me sorely of many Satanists of today!
The rest of the collection is a good mixed bag, with a lot of original subject matter. For me, the stand-out stories are Blind Man's Hood by John Dickson Carr (why had no one thought to write the incredibly sinister game of blind man's buff into a ghost story before this?), Eleanor Scott's Celui-La (a faultless tale of unburied evil on the Breton coast, with a nod to James' 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You') and my personal favourite, The Face In The Fresco by Arnold Smith. The latter almost deserves a paragraph to itself, so convincing and fresh is Smith's blend of ecclesiastical menace and modern psychology, and the setting (a little church, with a terrifying fresco, in the bleak Sussex countryside) is breathtaking. It follows the familiar James pattern of 'Curious scholar unearths a holy (or unholy) object, disturbs its supernatural guardian, pays the price', but the mental mechanisms by which the hero struggles with the Thing he has unwittingly conjured up, and his D.I.Y. approach to half-remembered ritual, feel much more lifelike than the reactions of many beleaguered fictional dons.
And it helps that the hero is in fact not a don or any kind of professional scholar, just an ordinary educated man wishing to improve himself. This democratic attitude towards ghostly encounters is actually rather rare in this enclave of the supernatural genre. Many authors of James 'homages' nowadays evince a snobbish nostalgic obsession with the obscenely privileged groves of Academe and the stately homes in which James (and his heros) spent most of their lives, and the authors who are too young to have any first-hand experience of this vanished world are usually the worst of the lot! Luckily, the stories in this collection escape that trap, and it's a great testament to the editors' good taste.
In one case however, it's actually the story's lack of originality that makes it interesting. Christmas Reunion by Sir Andrew Caldecott has an unusual angle: he is the only author ever to attempt to flesh out one of the skeleton plots tantalizingly mentioned by James in his essay 'Stories I Have Tried To Write', which made mention of a nasty message inside a Christmas cracker. It's moderately successful, and avoids Caldecott's annoying tendency to flippancy, but not brilliant. I've read that essay, but what I didn't know is that James once made an even more direct appeal to readers: in 1930 he judged a 'Ghost Story Competition' run by The Spectator magazine. Entries were limited to about two pages of text, which is quite a restriction! The two competition winners are both included here. Curiously for a subgenre so heavily dominated by men, both are women, (I suppose James can't have been that much of a misogynist then...) I actually found Winifred Galbraith's offering dull, but Emma S. Duffin's The House Party is terrific and managed to pierce right through my usual distaste for very short short stories.
There is a decent sprinkling of modern authors throughout the book too. A.F. Kidd is the best of them, with her grim London church frightener An Incident In The City, from 1985. Not a lot actually happens, when you think about it, but the atmosphere is so gripping that you feel you've seen a whole pageant of horrors. The most famous has to be Ramsey Campbell, but his story is disappointing and really not all that Jamesian. I've recently got into David G Rowlands, and his contribution Sins of the Fathers is well written and fun, though perhaps not filled with enough doom and malevolence for my liking. The hero seems a bit too unruffled by his experience with a black hound and a flooded basement! Though I suppose somebody has to get out of this type of tale unscathed from time to time, or the whole genre would lose its suspense...
As you may have gathered, I love this anthology. It's the best I currently own, and it's full of rarities by the likes of Fredrick Cowle (an author long overdue a revival). And it's not just words! Unusually for a modern book, Ghosts and Scholars also features a liberal helping of original black-and-white illustrations, all very atmospheric. (A.F.Kidd even illustrates her own story, proving she's a lady of multiple talents!) There is a knowledgeable Foreword by James' biographer Michael Cox, and a bundle of photographs of James and his friends at the back of the book. Jamesian completists will also love the select biography of (even more) obscure authors who don't appear in the collection. I came across many names to investigate there! Of course, no collection is absolutely perfect. There are a couple of notable absences - there is no M P Dare and no ANL Munby, and H Russell Wakefield is an especially glaring omission, since he's brilliant, and was one of M R James' favourite authors in the field! And the book's a little out of date: since the 80s a crop of newer authors has sprung up who use Jamesian techniques and subjects - indeed, I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say that the 'Jamesian' ghost story is enjoying a little revival at the moment.
All this can only mean one thing: we need a revised and updated second edition! It's criminal that Ghosts and Scholars should still be out of print. On the bright side, if you can't get your hands on a copy, many of the stories featured here have reappeared on the shelves in miraculously cheap paperback form recently! Wordsworth Press, for instance, do a collected Caldecott, and Penguin do a paperback Sleep No More, a cracking LTC Rolt anthology. And there's always the internet...for those of you who don't mind reading off a screen (or a print-out), there's plenty of E.G.Swain and Benson stuff at Horrormasters.com. G&S magazine has also made available online versions of Arnold Smith's The Face In The Fresco (a must-read!) and B's The Stone Coffin. And as time goes by, more and more of these authors should start appearing in the public domain, so all is not lost :)
