A fellow whom I have never met but whose work continues to exert a heavy influence upon me, especially at this season, has been in his grave for 75 years now. MR James (his full appellation is Montague Rhodes James – died peacefully in 1936, unmarried but not lonely in his post as provost of Eton. Always a scholarly type, he was never happier than when immersing himself in antiquary … but could even he have guessed what reach his work would have so long after his death?
So might begin – with much more aplomb, of course – a typical MR James outing. He is (quite rightly in my opinion) considered the master of the English ghost story, and I always make a point of reading at least a few of his high points from my battered Wordsworth Classics edition (£1.50 from the Whitby Bookshop, about eight years ago) around Halloween.
Many of us came to James through what became a joyous annual treat in the form of the BBC's Christmas adaptations of his best work throughout the early 1970s. The Beeb made a valiant stab at reviving the tradition last year with a John Hurt-led version of James's wonderfully bleak Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad, but as yet there is no word on whether we should expect another Jamesian treat this winter. For now, though, there are adaptations running on Radio 4 Extra of four of James's best-known tales, from 31 October.
Like the Carnacki stories of William Hope Hodgson, James's ghostly tales were written to be read aloud to a group of friends, on a chilly night, with the fire blazing in the hearth. James liked to lull his audience into a false sense of security: an academic and antiquarian, as were many of his close acquaintances, his stories often began with like-minded fellows going about their business.
Take the opening of Oh, Whistle: "'I suppose you will be getting away pretty soon, now Full term is over, Professor,' said a person not in the story to the professor of Ontography, soon after they had sat down next to each other at a feast in the hospitable hall of St James's College." Certainly, it's no "Happy families are all alike", no "It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen", not even a "Call me Ishmael". In fact, though, by James's standards, it's positively zippy. Witness The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, in which our story begins with someone reading an obituary in the Gentleman's Magazine "for an early year of the nineteenth century", then proceeds to print said obituary verbatim for a page and a half. Less arresting still is the opening gambit for The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, which comprises precisely 15 lines of Latin followed by our hero huffing to himself: "I suppose I shall have to translate this."
To modern ears, then, his stories can appear to begin with baffling lethargy – and occasionally, when I think of James at the height of summer, I wonder what it is I see in him. On top of their slow starts, his stories, which were published for the first time in 1904, have a tendency to telegraph their plot like the Beatles with semaphore flags. (Look! There is strange laughter coming from this lonely church! And the ancient book the hero wants to buy, the old local guy can't wait to get shot of!) Even when the ghosts show themselves, it's often in a matter-of-fact, blink-and-you'll-miss-it way, such as the spooky, snatching arm in Number 13 or the animated unmade bed in Oh, Whistle.
But these are minor, even occasionally endearing, quibbles – and when I cosy up in the winter months with my Collected Ghost Stories by MR James, I remember just why I keep coming back. I thrill again to that creepy prose, those downbeat denouements, the genuinely scary dam-breaking moments after he's ratcheted tension up to snapping point. Understatement and omission may be unfashionable for a generation reared on torture p*rn, but by allowing his ghosts to populate the spaces between his lines of prose, and leaving the reader to surmise much from the sometimes abrupt endings, James builds a far creepier, more enduring atmosphere of dread.
In the 75 years since James died, the horror genre has seen it all. No shock is too gruesome for the movie screen, no internal organ too taboo to be eviscerated five minutes after the watershed. The best pleasure in reading MR James is in forcing ourselves to forget that we've already seen, whether in CGI or make-up, every monster imaginable. To fully appreciate James, we need only allow a rattle of the window pane and a footfall on the stair to remind us we don't really know what populates the dark beyond the circle of candlelight.
