Supernatural shock and traumatic terror in the ghost stories of M. R. James

‘So jarred were all my nerves’:
supernatural shock and traumatic terror in the ghost stories of M. R. James

Ralph Harrington
BA (Lond.), MSt (Oxon.), DPhil (Oxon.)

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(This paper was presented at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford, on 16 October 2006, as part of the Wellcome’s seminar series on ‘Mind, Brain and Trauma’. I am very grateful to the acting director of the Unit, Dr Sloan Mahone, for the invitation to contribute to the seminar series, and to participants in the seminar for their comments, questions and insights.)

IN AN ESSAY published in 1929, M. R. James observed that ‘the things which the ghost can effectively do are very limited in number, ranging about death and madness and the discovery of secrets’.[1] From a modern perspective, James’s summary of the ghost’s sphere of activity coincides suggestively with some of the characteristic parameters of traumatic experience: terror, madness, the uncovering of what is hidden. His outline of the roles available to the ghost echoes modern clinical definitions of trauma, such as that given by Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery (1992) – ‘threats to life or bodily integrity … extremities of helplessness or terror’[2] – or in the standard work The Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry: ‘intense fear, helplessness, loss of control, and threat of annihilation’.[3] As for ‘the discovery of secrets’, the recent emphasis in clinical and cultural studies of trauma upon the relationships between memory and traumatic events, survivors accounts of trauma, and trauma as an ongoing discourse located in notions of selfhood and conceived as developing over time give this notion added resonance.[4] Considered through the prism of characteristic patterns of traumatic experience and set in the context of the literary figuring of trauma, the ghost story can be seen as inherently traumatic. Not only does it rely on threat, terror and moments of shock; at a deeper level, it uses traumatic histories, the stripping away of constructed narratives and identities to reveal dark secrets, events from unacknowledged or concealed pasts that reach forward to disrupt the present. If the shock of confrontation with supernatural horror is one form of trauma, the role of the revenant, revisiting the dark secrets of the past upon the present, is another.

Furthermore, within the ghost story can often be found a deployment of narrative that echoes the fragmented stories constructed by individuals and communities attempting to deal with traumatic events and their consequences.[5] The ghost story narrative, dealing as it does with events and phenomena on (or beyond) the edge of human understanding and experience, subverts its own ordering purpose: for in ghost stories the ‘facts’ do not tie up neatly, could not do so, even if they were fully known or capable of being fully known. There are dark gaps, not everything is or can be explained. The particular kind of fear associated with narratives of the supernatural, as Freud notes in his 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’, arises from the confusion of ‘imagination and reality’ and the intermingling of the ‘familiar and the unfamiliar’.[6] Ghost stories depend upon such confusions, omissions, and the blurring of boundaries, unsettling their readers with their disturbance of the divisions between familiar and unfamiliar, known and unknown, past and present.

The Freudian interpretation of the uncanny provides a convincing rationale for the popularity of the ghost story in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period marked by tension between belief and scepticism, faith and doubt.[7] Ghost stories were certainly very popular; when a character in Mary Louisa Molesworth’s late Victorian ghost story The Story of the Rippling Train suggests, ‘Let’s tell ghost stories’, the response is ‘Aren’t you tired of them? One hears nothing else nowadays’.[8] The vigorous market in periodicals[9] in particular provided an avenue through which ‘all classes of readers’ could satisfy their addiction to a form of literature which offered ‘the thrill of momentarily losing rational control over the ordered Victorian world’.[10]

The popularity of ghost stories during this period and their potential as rich source-material for studies of the era’s mentalities, anxieties, perceptions and preoccupations has not, however, been reflected in modern academic interest: as one scholar observed in 2003, ‘it appears we are today as unlikely to see new scholarship on the subject as we are to see an actual ghost’.[11] This is partly because the genre itself is not seen, perhaps, as particularly respectable. Writers such as H. P. Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood can safely be consigned to the fanzine, the internet and the publications of the amateur devotee, realms where serious scholarship does not tread; ghost stories by the likes of Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling and Walter Scott are worthy of attention because their authors wrote plenty of other work that does merit heavyweight literary and historical analysis, but the genre itself remains marginal and neglected.

The ghost story, furthermore, can be dismissed as a minor sub-branch of literature undeserving of sustained scholarly analysis and discussion. An academic reviewer of S. T. Joshi’s study of ghost and horror literature, The Weird Tale, expressed this view succinctly when he asked whether Joshi ‘had perpetrated a hoax … by writing a detailed, insightful book about a minor subgenre?’[12] As Nina Auerbach has recently noted, when supernatural tales are taken into account by scholars they tend to ‘use ghosts as a fulcrum for other issues … or individual ghosts disappear in sonorous generalizations’.[13] This tendency must be countered by an insistence on the particularity of the ghost story and its place in the historical and literary context of its age.[14] The ghost story may represent a minor subgenre of literature, and may not always be found in respectable company, but it remains a highly significant element of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary landscape, and is surely worthy of scholarly attention.

It has to be admitted, however, that M. R. James himself would not have been impressed with the notion that his ghost stories should be the object of serious study. ‘The stories themselves do not make any very exalted claim’, he wrote in the preface to his first collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), while in More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911) he merely expressed the hope that the stories would ‘serve to amuse some readers at the Christmas-time that is coming’.[15] Those who have written about James’s work in this area have often followed this unassuming authorial lead, writing of his fiction as ‘the bagatelle for an idle hour’,[16] and ‘tales that are meant to frighten, and nothing more’.[17] Yet, as Nicole Coffey has pointed out, ‘The fact that many of the most effective Victorian ghost stories are entertaining need not impede any serious study’ of ghost stories as a genre.[18] Furthermore, it is important not to take authorial self-deprecation at face value. As Julia Briggs has observed, ‘The assertion of the author’s detachment from his work may reasonably arouse the suspicion that he is less detached than he supposes’.[19] In a genre concerned with the unacknowledged, with concealment and secrets, in which imaginative expression is given to desires and motivations often deeply-rooted in the human psyche, such assertions of authorial detachment are themselves significant and revealing. The ghost stories of the Victorians and Edwardians, like the ghosts within them, articulate fears, anxieties and insecurities which can tell us much about their creators, their audiences, and the era that gave them birth.

By the time M. R. James’s stories began to appear in print in the 1890s, a mature and established market for supernatural tales was ready to receive them. Public taste for this form of fiction had been sharpened not only by the countless ghost stories appearing in the periodical press but also by sensation fiction and drama and the lurid qualities of contemporary journalism, covering events such as wars, murders and railway accidents in gory detail. It is as instances of ‘sensation’ literature, rather than as literature in the gothic tradition, that Victorian ghost stories, with their largely contemporary and mundane settings, should be approached.[20] The quality of sensation, and specifically of shock, was present across a broad range of late-Victorian cultural production, within which ghost stories found their place. ‘Shock’, as Walter Benjamin notes in his essay ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, constituted one of the fundamental characteristics of modern life in the nineteenth century.[21] The experiences offered by mechanization and the acceleration of life, new forms of travel and communication, new social and cultural forms, exposed people to unprecedented levels of sensory assault, nervous stress and potentially shocking stimuli.[22]

The latter part of the nineteenth century also saw the range of recreational shock made available to consumers greatly increase; the seeking of the stimulus of shock was the basis of the appeal of sensation fiction, drama, journalism – and ghost stories. M. R. James’s introduction to his 1904 collection Ghost Stories of an Antiquary made clear reference to this, in a characteristically understated way:

If any of [the stories] 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.[23]

In a review of James’s second volume, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, the Times Literary Supplement’s reviewer enlarged upon the nature and role of supernatural shock in the successful ghost story: ‘The mind set wandering in homely surroundings, all congruous one with another, is startled to imagination, and through imagination to horror, by the sudden inrush of the incongruous’.[24] It is in that ‘sudden inrush’ that the shock of the ghost story is located; it is through the imagination that it does its work, and to be effective it must have about it elements of a dramatic eruption into an otherwise tranquil setting, bursting abruptly upon the reader’s sensibility. The defining characteristic of the ghost story, its raison d’être, wrote E. Beresford Chancellor in 1913, is that it should ‘send a thrill through us’.[25]

That thrill originates in fear, in the experience or the apprehension of something terrifying. The basis of the ghost story’s appeal is of course not limited to fear, as Nicole Coffey points out, but involves ‘the awakening of a system of emotions initiated by fright, and ranging from anger and agony, to sorrow and pity, to an often bitter-sweet empathy’.[26] However, as Coffey indicates through her use of the words ‘initiated by fright’, fear is the main-spring of the ghost story’s mechanism. It is the role of fear that distinguishes the ghost story from other types of story that may appeal to a range of emotions in the reader; certainly M. R. James believed that fear was essential to any ghost story worthy of the name, once declaring that he had no use for ‘amiable and helpful apparitions’ in a ghost story: ‘the ghost should be malevolent or odious’.[27] James may have dismissed his own ghost stories as mere entertainments, devoid of any deeper purpose, but he saw the provoking of fear in their readers as essential to their nature. A ghost story incapable of alarming its readers is clearly not worth having. It is all about fear, and the successful provocation of fear can be judged not least, in both reader and fictional character, by physical response.

When it comes to the reaction he expected from his readers, James is, as we have seen, understated and genteel, while being clear that he expects them to be frightened. His emphasis on the physical manifestations of fear within the stories, however, is of quite a different order. Again and again, the bodies of his characters respond in a fleshly, physical way to the horrors that they experience. Dennistoun, in Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book, feels ‘the intensest physical fear’, terror sufficient to constitute a form of physical agony: ‘he screamed with the voice of an animal in hideous pain’.[28] The librarian Mr Garrett, in The Tractate Middoth, suffers what is reported as ‘an attack, what you might call it, of illness’ when confronted with his spectre.[29] Mr Humphreys, in Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance, becomes seized with ‘a really agonizing conviction that terror [is] on its way’, and when it duly arrives that terror provokes ‘a convulsion of despair’.[30] These responses are located in the real world of nerves and flesh, but are brought about by otherworldly, supernatural agencies; the implication is that of all the boundaries transgressed in the ghost story, that between the physical and the non-physical is the most potent, and potentially the most traumatic.

The notion that non-physical, emotional stimuli could produce physical effects, potentially of great severity, in the body was well-established – although never regarded as unproblematic – in medical science by the end of the nineteenth century. In 1871 Dr Mathias Roth described how ‘fearful, dreadful, frightful, horrible and terrible impressions’ acted on the senses, which ‘were connected by the nerves with the various organs’ in which the effects of fear could be observed, notably the cardiovascular and respiratory systems: thus fear and terror caused ‘shortness of breath, irregularity of pulsation, palpitation of the heart, derangement of the circulation’.[31] The nerves played the crucial role, and with their omnipresence throughout the body they served to channel the effects of sensory or emotional shock into the physical substance of the organs and influence their function: ‘the nervous system is everywhere throughout the organism’, wrote the surgeon Herbert Page in 1897, going on to argue that it was ‘attested by the evolution of the nervous system itself, that mind and body are forever acting and reacting upon each other, now in the undisturbed harmony of health, now in the obtrusive discomforts of disease’.[32]

The ghost stories of M. R. James, argues Penny Fielding, ‘offer a canvas on which some of the most common social phobias of the period loom large’.[33] Those phobias include degenerationism and recidivism, for the model of fear-induced shock present in James’s stories is not only a reflection of contemporary medical-clinical models, it also embodies widespread notions of the role of trauma in undermining or reversing evolutionary progress. In the early 1870s Charles Darwin developed themes already present in his The Descent of Man (1871) into The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which argued that fear-induced responses such as hurried breathing, dilated nostrils, perspiration, trembling and pounding heart represented an instance of the passage of habit into reflex actions. They constituted the inherited relics of the natural and universal animal response to perceived danger – flight.[34] The implication is that fear is associated with animality, with the lower faculties of the organism; and thus that one of the sources of the tale of terror’s potency is its ability to bring about a stripping away of the outer layers of civilization to reveal the beast beneath. ‘I screamed out … like a beast’ recounts Somerton of his ghastly experience in The Treasure of Abbot Thomas.[35] The supernatural appearances themselves – one can hardly call such very physical entities ‘ghosts’ – reinforce the recidivism inherent in James’s conception of his agents of terror; thus the demon which terrifies Dennistoun in Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book has a ‘lower jaw [which] was thin – what can I call it? – shallow, like a beast’s’ and it possesses ‘intelligence of a kind … intelligence beyond that of a beast, below that of a man’,[36] while the creature that emerges from the tomb in An Episode of Cathedral History is ‘A thing like a man, all over hair, and two great eyes to it’.[37]

The primitivism of such demons stands in contrast to the rational, intellectual type embodied in James’s central characters, who are scholars with a high degree of intellectual and aesthetic sensibility. By the same token, however, they tend to be more vulnerable to the trauma of supernatural terror than lower-class individuals with simpler, more robust constitutions. In The Treasure of Abbot Thomas Somerton’s valet Brown is able to look after his master, summon help and recount the horrible events coherently while his master is prostrated in bed in a state of nervous collapse; an ordinary countrywoman in A Neighbour’s Landmark deals with the haunting of Betton Wood in a far more matter-of-fact and robust way than the narrator of the story, a cultivated bibliophile; the college servant Mr Filcher quickly recovers from his sight of the horror revealed by The Mezzotint and carries on with his daily tasks; the innkeeper and his wife in Rats have lived with their spectre – modus vivendi does not quite seem the right term when discussing the undead – for many years before the bookish Cambridge student Thomson blunders in on the arrangement. It is, as the surgeon Herbert Page observed in 1897, the more advanced and therefore more delicate nervous constitutions that are vulnerable to shock and disturbance: ‘Throughout the whole animal kingdom simplicity of structure … denotes stability of equilibrium; complexity of structure and elaboration of function … entail instability’.[38] As S. T. Joshi has noted, the lower-class characters represent ‘a kind of middle ground between the scholarly protagonists and the aggressively savage ghosts’ and ‘they frequently sense the presence of the supernatural more quickly and more instinctively than their excessively learned betters’,[39] but it is also the case that they bounce back from the experience much more quickly.

Written at a time when the ‘modern nervous body’ was a well-established literary and cultural construction,[40] the notion of mental and/or emotional shock and its traumatic accompaniments is clearly present in James’s tales of supernatural terror. The moment of traumatic shock in his stories is markedly shocking, a violent jolting of the story’s characters and of the reader, its abrupt – and often fleeting – occurrence standing out all the more dramatically in an otherwise mundane and unsensational setting. A classic instance of this is to be found in A Neighbour’s Landmark, one of James’s most striking and memorable stories. The narrator of the story is leaning on a gate in the countryside, looking out over a beautiful landscape of ‘the village church spire … a fertile plain intersected by hedgerows, and bounded by distant hills’, and musing to himself in an aimless, pleasant way, when:

All at once I turned as if I had been stung. There thrilled into my right ear and pierced my head a note of incredible sharpness, like the shriek of a bat, only ten times intensified – the kind of thing that makes one wonder if something has not given way in one’s brain.[41]

This is not simply a case of a moment of terror followed by a recovery. The traumatic encounter leaves its mark – a wound, a trauma – upon the sufferer; he is no longer the man he was, and the world is no longer what it was before he heard the sound.

… when I turned to [the view] again, the taste was gone out of it … I thought no longer of kind mellow evening hours of rest, and scents of flowers and woods on evening air, and of how someone on a farm a mile or two off would be saying ‘How clear Betton bell sounds to-night after the rain!’; but instead images came to me of dusty beams and creeping spiders and savage owls up in the tower, and forgotten graves and their ugly contents below, and of flying Time and all it had taken out of my life.[42]

The narrator’s perception of the landscape has been entirely transformed by the traumatic experience of the cry on the hill. The church tower with its bell, formerly a benign focal point for the landscape and a symbol of natural and divine order, has become dark and threatening. From being preoccupied with beautiful and benign exteriors, the narrator has suddenly been confronted with dark, malign interiors: the shadowy, sinister spaces within the tower, the ugly graves in the earth. His own interior has been shocked and jolted by trauma. The ‘switch-point, or crash-point, between inside and outside is, above all, the wound’, writes Mark Seltzer,[43] and in James’s story the world pivots on that instant of terror and turns inside-out, becomes hollowed out; and hollowest of all, suddenly, is the narrator’s own life: ‘All its effect was to take away every vestige, every possibility, of enjoyment, and make this no place to stay in one moment more’.[44]

It is this emphasis on the sequelae of that instant of intense fear that marks out James’s interest in what can justly be termed traumatic terror – terror that leaves a wound. The terror that his narrator in A Neighbour’s Landmark has experienced leaves him, literally, lost and unable to cope with any further stimuli, anything at all unexpected no matter how seemingly minor or harmless:

I hurried back to the lane and down the hill. But when I came to the arch in the wall I stopped. Could I be sure of my way among those dank alleys, which would be darker and danker now! No, I confessed to myself that I was afraid: so jarred were all my nerves with the cry on the hill that I really felt I could not afford to be startled even by a little bird in a bush, or a rabbit. [45]

This sense of fragility following shock can be found in several of James’s stories. Mr Somerton, the quiet, scholarly gentleman who encountered something frightful in The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, is described by his valet, Brown, as having had ‘a Nastey Shock and keeps His Bedd. I never’, Brown adds, ‘Have known Him like this’. [46] When he first sees Somerton, crouching in bed in his darkened room and crying out with fear at every sound outside his door, his friend Gregory experiences his own instant of shock: ‘Mr Gregory saw, with a shock of pity, how drawn, how damp with drops of fear, was the usually calm face of his friend’ as Somerton ‘stretched out a shaking hand to welcome him’.[47] It is clear that Somerton’s experience has changed him. He is also unable to describe what happened to him, to shape a narrative from his experience – ‘I’m not up to explaining it yet; it would throw me back’.[48] Professor Parkins, who suffers a ghastly encounter in ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, is described as having a marked reluctance to talk about his experience: ‘Parkins, who very much dislikes being questioned about it …’[49] Then there is Mr Dillett, who witnessed the dreadful events associated with The Haunted Dolls’ House and who ‘does not like to dwell upon what he saw’.[50]

The experiences James’s characters have gone through are, literally, unspeakable. While what can be labelled the ‘talking cure’[51] does have some value for James’s victims, Somerton being one and Paxton, in A Warning to the Curious, another, overall, pain, fear and its consequences are all shut away. The experiences these characters have gone through are locked away within them and inaccessible to others, no matter how concerned and sympathetic. The trauma cannot be communicated, and they cannot escape its presence and its consequences. ‘O’, says the man who entered the haunted maze in Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance, ‘’tis here in my Breast: I cannot flee from it, do what I may’;[52] while Dunning in Casting the Runes feels increasingly isolated from the world around him, from the moment he unwittingly accepts the runes that are intended to seal his fate:

The next weeks were no doubt a severe strain upon Dunning’s nerves: the intangible barrier which has seemed to rise about him on the day when he received the paper, gradually developed into a brooding blackness that cut him off from the means of escape to which one might have thought he might resort. No one was at hand who was likely to suggest them to him, and he seemed robbed of all initiative.[53]

The victims of supernatural trauma in James’s stories find themselves trapped in a nightmare dimension from which there is no access to the world around them; and their only company, sealed in with them from the initial moment of terror, is the thing they have most to dread. James’s own distancing narrative strategies can be seen as reflecting this inaccessibility, with the use of such phrases as ‘I entirely despair of conveying through any words’ of the demon in Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book, and ‘he gained his friend’s room, and that is all we need to know’ of James Denton’s flight from the spectre he has inadvertently conjured up in The Diary of Mr Poynter.[54]

This reluctance directly to describe the horrors at the heart of his own narratives is one of the distinctive features of M. R. James’s ghost stories. It is of a piece with what his friends and contemporaries described as his reticent nature;[55] it also accords with his own expressed views on the most effective way in which a ghost story can be constructed, a matter of hints and oblique approaches rather than blatant horror. ‘Reticence’, he wrote in 1929, ‘may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from the artistic point of view I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it, and there is too much blatancy in a lot of recent stories’.[56] Yet James’s reticence can also be seen as a symptom of repression. Freud argues that there is a direct relationship between the uncanny and the phenomenon of repression: to be more precise, the Freudian uncanny is something repressed which recurs’,[57] and ‘uncanniness pertains to the return of that which has been repressed or surmounted’.[58] James’s central characters are all much like himself: scholarly, somewhat unworldly, comfortable with the paths their lives have taken.[59] Yet their security is, perhaps, illusory, even self-deluding, and its foundations can be knocked away in an instant. The lives of men such as Parkins in ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, Wraxall in Count Magnus and Humphreys in Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance are based upon the repression of emotion, instinct and passion, and the subjugation of these lower drives to the higher centres of intellectual enquiry and aesthetic appreciation. It is the rising of the primitive to overwhelm that structure of control in an instant of traumatic terror that gives James’s stories their particular potency; what has been shut away beneath the surface rises and bursts out to overwhelm his characters in both mind and body.

This point returns us to the character of the author, of M. R. James himself. ‘It’s odd’, commented Lytton Strachey after reading James’s 1926 autobiographical sketch Eton and King’s, ‘that the Provost of Eton should still be aged sixteen. A life without a jolt.’[60] Strachey’s typically acid observation certainly reflected the general tone of Eton and King’s, which James subtitled, not without reason, ‘Recollections, mostly trivial’. The reader of this urbane memoir is left with the clear impression that their subject is determined to say as little as possible, as innocuously as possible; Michael Cox, in his biography of James, describes the volume as ‘a deeply frustrating book’ characterized by ‘superficial blandness’.[61] However frustrating it may be to biographers and scholars, Eton and King’s is an accurate reflection of James’s attitude towards self-examination, and most particularly public self-examination: he did not like it or approve of it. Many writers on James, even those who have explored the area of his work that might appear to offer the most fertile ground for self-revelation, his ghost stories, have been content to take their lead from their subject’s attitude. ‘There seems to be no evidence’, writes Richard Pfaff in James’s Dictionary of National Biography entry, ‘that [the ghost stories] reflect conflicts and ambivalences deep inside their author’,[62] while for Clive Bloom ‘there is nothing hidden except the horror in M. R. James’.[63] Furthermore, it is but a small step from the suggestion that the stories do not reveal anything of their author to the argument that there was, in fact, nothing significant to reveal; thus, in her introduction to a collection of the ghost stories Penelope Fitzgerald, after noting that James ‘did not like talking about himself’, asks ‘How much, in fact, did he have to say?’[64]

In short, the image of James’s life and character presented by the man himself and reflected across a range of writing about him is one of somewhat banal serenity, a life of tranquil scholarship, unmarked by passion, ambition or anxiety: ‘a life without a jolt’. Yet there are jolts aplenty in his ghost stories. How far do those jolts reflect otherwise unacknowledged and unarticulated tensions and anxieties in James’s life? It is certainly easy to draw conclusions about James’s attitudes to sex and indeed intimate personal contact of any kind from some of the supernatural encounters in his narratives: the tentacled horror that presses its ‘cold kind of face’ to Somerton’s own and ‘put[s] its arms round [his] neck’ in The Treasure of Abbot Thomas; the animated bedclothes that assault Parkin in ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’; the disturbing face of ‘smooth pink skin’, nestling amid folds of soft membrane, that appears in Two Doctors; the ‘mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it’ that Dunning finds in his bed in Casting the Runes.[65] The women in his stories, while far from being mere ciphers, are few in number and mainly play the role of supporting characters to the men (and the spectres) who take centre-stage. These elements of the stories can be viewed as consistent with James’s sexless bachelor life and his reputation as someone who was happiest in male company, and was indeed something of a misogynist.[66] But what of the traumatic terrors of his stories, the encounters that shock with terror and wound the victim lastingly?

Friendship meant a great deal to James, and he was deeply affected by the deaths of close friends such as James MacBryde in 1904 and H. E. Luxmoore in 1926.[67] He found the personal losses he suffered in the Great War hard to cope with, writing in the spring of 1916 that his grief and worry over one of his friends who was away on active service ‘dries my pen and incapacitates’.[68] These emotions must have found their way into the stories, with their sense of the fragility of life amid the ever-ready ‘snares of death’,[69] the helplessness with which those who survive must witness others passing into the shadows, the horror of traumatic events sealing those who have suffered them into a world from which they cannot escape and where others cannot reach them. His religious world-view, which was a profoundly important influence on the ghost stories, gave him a strong conviction of the existence of an afterlife, but also had its dark side, with its intimations of final judgement and the price to be paid for sin and folly.

Yet M. R. James, profoundly reticent, unwilling openly to discuss feelings of any kind, his private life hidden behind his impenetrable gentlemanly reserve, gives few clues as to the darker side of his personality and one is inevitably left confronting the limitations of the hard ground of evidence and the potentially limitless but treacherous seas of speculation. Passages such as the one which follows, however, do give one pause for thought. This extract comes from an unpublished draft story called John Humphreys, elements of which eventually found their way in to Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance. Humphreys has just had an encounter with the supernatural, although he did not recognize it as such at the time; in effect, he has had a curse of a sort laid upon him, and this is James’s description of his reaction:

The fairly well-known pasture seemed in a moment to widen into an illimitable grey expanse – an acute feeling of extreme loneliness and of being on a hopeless and endless journey came over him and his whole being cried out for companionship and protection, and yet he felt that there was none, none whatever to be had: he was helpless in a world of hostile shadows. Nothing was interesting any more, nothing was or could be important, and for all that, there was an insistent pressure of being no time to stop and think. It was a bitterness of despair which could not, he said, be put into any human words, and he believes he sank down and cowered on the ground, fortunately not in sight of any passer-by, and here for how long he couldn’t tell he wrestled for his life and … his reason.[70]

Drawing parallels between accounts of melancholic, depressive or otherwise disordered mental states from the past and modern clinical categories is always problematic.[71] However, this passage can credibly be read as a remarkably powerful and accurate description of what would today be recognized as an acute anxiety attack or an episode of severe clinical depression. Its presence in James’s writings suggests that his sense of the power of traumatic experience and of its potential effects upon the mind and body was perhaps based upon a more direct experience of the ‘jolts’ of life than we might imagine.

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Notes

1. M. R. James, ‘Ghosts – treat them gently!’, Evening News, 17 April 1931; reprinted in Michael Cox, M. R. James: An Informal Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 349-50.

2. Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 33.

3. Nancy C. Andreasen, ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder’, in H. I. Kaplan & B. J. Sadock (eds.), The Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry (2 vols., Baltimore, OH: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 1985), vol. 1, p. 919.

4. Roberta Culbertson, ‘Embodied memory, transcendence, and telling: recounting trauma, re-establishing the self’, New Literary History, vol. 26, no. 1 (Winter 1995), pp. 169-70; Judith L. Alpert, ‘No escape when the past is endless’, Psychoanalytic Psychology, vol. 18, no. 4 (Fall 2001), pp. 735-6; Geoffrey H. Hartman, ‘On traumatic knowledge and literary studies’, New Literary History, vol. 26, no. 3 (Summer 1995), p. 532.

5. See, for example, Paul Antze, ‘Telling stories, making selves: memory and identity in multiple personality disorder’, in Paul Antze & Michael Lamber (eds.), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 7.

6. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (24 vols., London: Hogarth, 1953-74), vol. 17, pp. 243-4.

7. Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber, 1977), p. 16.

8. Mary Louisa Molesworth, The Story of the Rippling Train (1887), in Michael Cox & R. A. Gilbert (eds.), Victorian Ghost Stories: An Oxford Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 319.

9. Michael Cox & R. A. Gilbert, ‘Introduction’, in Cox & Gilbert (eds.), Victorian Ghost Stories, p. xv; Briggs, Night Visitors, pp. 11, 16.

10. Eve M. Lynch, ‘Spectral politics: the Victorian ghost story and the domestic servant’, in Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett & Pamela Thurschwell (eds.), The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 68.

11. Srdjan Smajic, ‘The trouble with ghost-seeing: vision, ideology and genre in the Victorian ghost story’, ELH, no. 70 (2003), p. 1107.

12. Peter Wolfe, review of S. T. Joshi, The Weird Tale (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990), in Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 27, no. 4 (Fall 1990), p. 615.

13. Nina Auerbach, ‘Ghosts of ghosts’, Victorian Literature & Culture, vol. 32, no. 1 (March 2004), p. 278.

14. Cox & Gilbert, Victorian Ghost Stories, pp. ix-x.

15. M. R. James, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (London: Edward Arnold, 1904), p. viii; M. R. James, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (London: Edward Arnold, 1911), p. vii.

16. Briggs, Night Visitors, p. 125.

17. Peter Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Fiction (London: Peter Nevill, 1952), p. 191.

18. Nicole Coffey, ‘Every Word of it is True’: The Cultural Significance of the Victorian Ghost Story (unpub. M.A. thesis, Department of English, University of Manitoba, 2004), p. 2.

19. Briggs, Night Visitors, p. 23.

20. Coffey, ‘Every Word of it is True’, p. 23.

21. Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (1939), in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 151-200.

22. Mark S. Micale & Paul Lerner, ‘Trauma, psychiatry and history: a conceptual and historiographical introduction’, in Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry and Trauma in the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 10-11.

23. James, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, p. viii.

24. ‘Some ghost stories’, Times Literary Supplement, 3 October 1912, p. 402.

25. E. Beresford Chancellor, ‘Ghost Stories’, The Academy, vol. 84 (January-June 1913), p. 178.

26. Coffey, ‘Every Word of it is True’, p. 26.

27. James, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, p. viii.

28. Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book, in M. R. James, Collected Ghost Stories (London: Edward Arnold, 1931), p. 16. Henceforward abbreviated as ‘CGS’.

29. The Tractate Middoth, CGS, p. 213.

30. Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance, CGS, p. 356.

31. Mathias Roth, A Few Notes on Fear and Fright, and the Diseases they Cause and Cure; Also on the Means of Preventing and Curing these Emotions (London: British Journal of Homeopathy, 1871), pp. 7, 18-20.

32. Herbert W. Page, ‘On the Mental Aspect of some Traumatic Neuroses’ (1895), in Clinical Papers on Surgical Subjects (London: Cassell, 1897), p. 18.

33. Penny Fielding, ‘Reading rooms: M. R. James and the library of modernity’, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 46, no. 3 (Fall 2000), p. 762.

34. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New York: Appleton & Co., 1898), pp. 291-2, 307. See Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (London: Virago, 2005), pp. 11, 16-18.

35. The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, CGS, p. 176.

36. Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book, CGS, p. 16.

37. An Episode of Cathedral History, CGS, p. 437.

38. Page, Clinical Papers, p. 14.

39. S. T. Joshi, ‘Introduction’, in M. R. James, Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories (London: Penguin, 2005), p. xv.

40. Nicholas Daly, ‘Railway novels: sensation fiction and the modernization of the senses’, ELH, vol. 66, no. 2 (1999), p. 477.

41. A Neighbour’s Landmark, CGS, p. 521.

42. A Neighbour’s Landmark, CGS, p. 521.

43. Mark Seltzer, ‘Wound culture: trauma in the pathological sphere’, October, vol. 80 (Spring 1999), p. 15.

44. A Neighbour’s Landmark, CGS, p. 522..

45. A Neighbour’s Landmark, CGS, p. 522..

46. The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, CGS, pp. 156-7.

47. The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, CGS, p. 159.

48. The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, CGS, p. 160.

49. ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, CGS, p. 148.

50. The Haunted Dolls’ House, CGS, p. 484.

51. Alan Read, ‘The placebo of performance: psychoanalysis in its place’, in Patrick Campbell & Adrian Kear (eds.), Psychoanalysis and Performance (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 150-1.

52. Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance, CGS, p. 339.

53. Casting the Runes, CGS, p. 262.

54. Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book, CGS, p. 11; Mr Poynter’s Diary, CGS, p. 409.

55. Cox, M. R. James, p. 1.

56. M. R. James, ‘Some Remarks on Ghost Stories’, The Bookman, December 1929, pp. 169-72. Reprinted in Michael Cox (ed.), Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 347.

57. Freud, ‘Uncanny’, p. 241.

58. Lis Møller, The Freudian Reading: Analytical and Fictional Constructions (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), p. 132.

59. Joshi, ‘Introduction’, in Count Magnus, pp. xii-xiii.

60. Quoted in Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Biography (London: Penguin, 1971), p. 920.

61. Cox, M. R. James, p. 220.

62. Richard W. Pfaff, ‘Montague Rhodes James’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

63. Clive Bloom, ‘M. R. James and his fiction’, in Clive Bloom (ed.), Creepers: British Horror and Fantasy in the Twentieth Century (London: Pluto Press, 1993), p. 70.

64. Penelope Fitzgerald, ‘Introduction’, in M. R. James, The Haunted Dolls’ House and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 2000), p. vii.

65. The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, CGS, p. 160; ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, CGS, p. 148; Two Doctors, CGS, p. 467; Casting the Runes, CGS, p. 252.

66. Shelley Arlen, ‘“For love of an idea”: Jane Ellen Harrison, heretic and humanist’, Women’s History Review, vol. 5, no. 2 (1996), p. 182. For another perspective, see Michael Cox’s discussion of James’s unmarried state, and downplaying of suggestions that his subject was actively misogynistic: Cox, M. R. James, pp. 164-5.

67. Cox, M. R. James, pp. 125-6, 225.

68. Cox, M. R. James, pp. 193-5.

69. A Warning to the Curious, CGS, p. 582.

70. M. R. James, John Humphreys, in Christopher Roden & Barbara Roden (eds.), M. R. James, A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings (Ashcroft, BC: Ash-Tree Press, 2001), p. 436.

71. Jennifer Radden, ‘Introduction: from melancholic states to clinical depression’, in Jennifer Radden (ed.), The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 3-4, 50-1.

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