Let's take a glance a the curriculum vitae of Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936), gentleman and scholar.
A noted medievalist, James was an expert in illuminated manuscripts, with a special focus on those dealing with the Apocalypse. He translated the New Testament Apocrypha and was a key contributor to the Encyclopaedia Biblica (1899), a massive reference work (estimated at 20 million words!) that addressed every place and name in the Bible. As Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, he acquired a number of famous paintings, including Titians that still rank among the most cherished works in the collection. James appeared in a successful 1883 production of Aristophanes's The Birds , and was lauded for his acting skills. He was also provost of King's College, Cambridge, and of Eton during the period between the two World Wars.
But M.R. James is remembered today for a very different reason. As an amusing sideline to his more serious pursuits, James wrote ghost stories, intended as Christmas Eve diversions in the spirit of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol . James would invite a select group of friends to his home for the occasion, with the promise of a scary tale along with the usual holiday refreshments. Yet the author would still be laboring over his text even while guests were arriving until, finally, as one participant remembers, "Monty emerged from the bedroom, manuscript in hand, at last, and blew out all the candles but one, by which he seated himself. He then began to read, with more confidence than anyone else could have mustered, his well-nigh illegible script in the dim light."
The stories collected in his most famous book, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary , may have been intended for casual entertainment, but they do convey a philosophy of life —or what, nowadays, we might call a message. And the message is the same in every one of the tales. I could sum it up in three words: ignorance is bliss.
Yes, that’s an odd attitude for a lifelong educator, but James leaves us in little doubt about his attitude toward academic life. He frequently interrupts the course of his ghost stories to deliver a humorous jibe or derisive put-down at the expense of scholars. He makes a running joke, which reappears in several stories, about the obsessive interest in golf among college professors. He never lapses into straight comedy, but James’s dry British humor adds significantly to the appeal of these tales.
The protagonist in a M.R. James horror story always pays a stiff price for seeking after knowledge. His modus operandi is to take the essential ingredients of the Faust legend—a scholar's thirst for knowledge has diabolical consequences—and translate it into the form of a ghost story. In "Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook," a Cambridge scholar is thrilled to find a rare manuscript for sale, but after purchasing it he discovers that it comes with its own demon. In "The Mezzotint" a curator purchases a work of art which looks different depending on the time of day—and gradually realizes that it possesses an evil enchantment left over a long ago murder. In "Count Magnus," an Oxford fellow conducting research in Scandinavia for a travel book gets too curious about an old sepulcher, and is chased back to England by a vengeful ghost.
We are familiar nowadays with the antiquarian as adventure hero. Books and films have created a glamorous Hollywood-ized image of the swashbuckling scholar. We can trace the roots of this type back to the late 19th century and early 20th century genre fiction when figures such as Professor Challenger (from Arthur Conan Doyle) and Otto Lidenbrock (from Jules Verne ) set the pattern for this peculiar character type, a mixture of career academic and action figure. In contrast, when H. Rider Haggard needed a hero for his African adventure King Solomon's Mines (1885) , he delivered Allen Quatermain, big game hunter. That wouldn't do at all nowadays. Remember that dentist who shot the lion ? Hollywood isn't going to make him into a movie hero. We need a different kind of role model for these stories, and fortunately the scholar adventurer emerged to fill the gap. By the time we arrive at Doyle's The Lost World in 1912, the formula has changed, and now the daring deeds are performed by Professor George Edward Challenger. But even before The Lost World , M.R. James had established himself as the specialist in this hybrid—indeed, this kind of academic protagonist appears in every one of his famous ghost stories.
The reader will soon figure out the repeating pattern in James's tales, and may tire of their predictability. But we need to remember that it was a fresh, new pattern back when James wrote these works. Here is the recipe. A scholar is hunting for some rare item that will help him win fame in an academic career, or at least tenure. Almost without fail, a ghost or ghoul arrives on the scene after the midway point of each tale, and the terrified scholar beats a hasty retreat back to the ivory tower. Often the set-up, with its humorous asides and wry observations on antiquarian pursuits, is written with more flair than the perfunctory 'scary parts'. When James takes more care with the supernatural elements in his plots, as in "The Mezzotint," where the protagonist enlists the help of various academics in solving the mystery of his ever-changing artwork, the story proves much more compelling. I am not surprised that the best work in Ghost Stories of a Antiquary is the longest and most intricate narrative in the collection. "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" is almost a novella, and presents in three chapters the adventures of a researcher who believes that hidden clues in a stained glass window can guide him to a buried treasure.
Here the reader can detect the influence of Edgar Allan Poe on James's work. Our author supports the horrific aspects of his story with elements of mystery, where clues must be found and interpreted, and even forces his protagonist to solve a cryptogram—much as we find in Poe’s "The Gold Bug" or Arthur Conan Doyle’s "The Adventure of the Dancing Men." This work, written a decade after the opening tale in the collection, shows how much James had matured as a storyteller during the intervening period. His earlier ghost stories might be suitable for scaring youngsters around a campfire, but by this later stage, James is ready to join the ranks of the leading popular writers of his day, a competitor to his contemporaries H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope, and other pioneers of the genre tale.
But James had too many other options available to him, lucrative and prestigious. The year after he published Ghost Stories of an Antiquary , James took over as Provost of King’s College, Cambridge. This institution was a center of British intellectual life—John Maynard Keynes, a King's College student, graduated that same year, and a few months later poet Rupert Brooke would matriculate. Later he take on the same role at Eton, the most elite secondary school in the world. Given these responsibilities, James could hardly consider his ghost stories as more than a sideline occupation.
But they are his lasting legacy. H.P. Lovecraft, the most innovative horror writer of the first half of the 20th century, included James on his short list of "modern masters" of the genre (along with Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, and Arthur Machen). Stephen King and Ramsey Campbell have also acknowledged James's influence. In subsequent years, James's stories have been adapted for stage, movie and television presentation, and various authors have either imitated or parodied his style to good effect. It isn’t going too far to see bestselling works such as The Da Vinci Code or The Name of the Rose as deriving from the same recipe, combining scholarship, mystery and harem-scarum thrills, that James perfected more than a century ago.
In fact, this formula is even more popular in the cinema and video games. Indiana Jones and Lara Croft stand on the foundation set by this pioneer of stories about scholar adventurers. We encounter it in The Mummy and Romancing the Stone and a host of other contemporary adventure tales. Video game hero Nathan Drake is cut from the same mold. What a strange turn of events! The intellectual accomplishments of James’s day-to-day life now seem antiquarian, but his antiquarian ghost tales are still very up-to-date.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from Basic Books
Long Before Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, M.R. James set the tone with Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) a pioneering work of genre fiction that influenced H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King