Provost of Eton College
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge
As a writer of ghost stories, I should explain that I ventured down a deep rabbit hole recently in pursuit of the best ghost stories of the Victorian/Edwardian era: tales written by the master, medievalist scholar M. R. James. He is revered in the United Kingdom as the gold standard author of the “antiquarian ghost story.”
His tales inevitably involve a highly educated and respected theologian, researcher, or historian who discovers some ancient artifact or manuscript. In mucking about with his discovery, the respected character inadvertently unleashes a supernatural force. And as a man of textbook knowledge, the character is utterly incapable of understanding, much less controlling or containing, the force he has awakened. He has no power or authority over it. He cannot subdue it, reason with it, study it under a microscope, or shut it up in an asylum as he might do with a difficult woman. Beyond titillating fireside stories, James’s tales are about power and control and the sudden lack thereof.
When I ran across an article, “James and his bloody awful handwriting,” I thought the gist of the article was about James’s poor handwriting. However, references to comments made by contemporary author Steve Duffy, who strives to emulates James, made me read further:
“Duffy also notes that James’s attitude towards the publication of these stories was strangely casual: the manuscripts he presented to his publishers were never proofread, and always bore the marks of scratchings out. Duffy wonders if this reveals more than a scholarly disregard for the lowly ghost story.
“It did seem just a little curious—even significant, maybe, that James hadn’t seen fit to present the publishers with a corrected, properly legible manuscript. Again, that question of self-depreciation came up: could it really have been the case that these stories were considered too trifling to take up any more of the Provost’s time than was absolutely necessary? It was at least a tenable hypothesis.”
The assumption that James showed little interest in proofreading, implying that he didn’t take his writing seriously or that he had a “scholarly disregard for the lowly ghost story” boggles me. I am bothered by this enough to stop everything and ponder further on paper.
James loved his ghost stories. At Christmastime, he invited his students to the Chit Chat Club, where they would drink sherry and he would unveil his latest story in a dramatic reading. He wrote from his heart. He sweated out his stories in his “bloody awful” handwriting.
Now, ghost stories come from an oral tradition. James first read his stories to an audience, true. Even so, the tradition of the social gathering to introduce his latest stories implies James had pride in the unveiling, no?
M. R. James had professional publishers. I would bet that he assumed that they would do the fussy clean up.
I am in awe of the copy editors and proofreaders who have the attention to detail that I lack. To me, writing is like plugging in to a peculiar flow, an inner voice, an invisible pathway that must be followed to its conclusion. My heart is in it. There is a story that will find its way to an ending.
Likewise with painting: shapes, colors, details emerge. Often, when painting, I don’t know where that ending is until midway through the process. It slowly reveals itself—if this happens what would be the result? That. Okay. And if that happens, then what? That. Ah-ha. Yes. With painting—oh, needs more blue. More shading to make the color pop.
The writing and painting process is like a birthing. There is the idea that grows and takes shape with more and more detail until it is fully revealed. Once that is fully achieved, I am spent. Relieved. The story is done; the painting is realized. I’ve done it. You see it there on the page or canvas.
The cleanup is not interesting. Cleaning brushes, throwing away the drop cloth or checking for commas and spelling errors is all the same to me. It has to be done, but my heart is not there. The creative burst is over, the cleanup is drudgery. It’s not that I don’t care, yes, I do want the brushes to be clean, yes, wipe the paint dribbles, yes, I want the text to be perfect—but it’s the story itself, the canvas itself that matters most to me.
I wish that I had the luxury that M. R. James had! But to assume that James didn’t care? I can’t claim to be a learned scholar with advanced degrees, but I say with conviction, “utter piffle”!
Mary Bast
Love this, have posted to Facerbook. And I want you to know that your impassioned defense of good ghost stories as fine literature made its marks on me. Jenna Nishida played a final role in this transition with her choices of fiction in this year’s Bacopa Literary Review (read them, you’ll see what I mean), and the final nail on my old coffin of huffily dismissing “genre” fiction was hammered in place with an essay by Ursula K. Leguin in “Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books 2000 – 2016”:
“Genre: A Word Only a Frenchman Could Love” A talk given at the Public Library Association Preconference on Genre in Seattle, February 2004, revised in 2014: “The subject matter of realism is broader than that of any genre except fantasy; and realism was the preferred mode of twentieth-century modernism. By relegating fantasy to kiddylit or the trash, modernist critics left the field to the realistic novel. . . The word genre began to imply something less, something inferior, and came to be commonly misused, not as a description, but as a negative value judgment. Most people now understand ‘genre’ to be an inferior form of fiction, defined by a label, while realistic fictions are simply called novels or literature. . . There are many bad books. There are no bad genres. Of course there are genres that are unappealing to individual readers. . . These differences . . . do not justify any judgment of literature by genre.”
Jess Elliott
YAY! I will look up the Leguin article and will be sure to read Jenna Nishida’s story!
Yes, I find it bizarre and sad that ghost stories end up relegated to children’s fiction here in the U.S. If you ever pick up a copy of either collection of ghost stories by Edith Wharton, you’ll find that they are the graduate level of this “genre”. I’ve had to refer to commentaries to be sure I caught all the nuances. Her ghost stories are, on the surface, a good shudder. But the underlying themes are of the tenuousness of social status for women. One hint of scandal, a betrayal by a man, or worse, war destroying everything, leaves a woman financially and socially bereft. This is the true horror of her stories. Really not about ghosts at all but about loss of power.
Agatha Christie had a go at the spookies. Her story, “The Fourth Man” is terrifying–again, on the surface, about possession, but also about power. Four men share a train compartment: all were directly involved in a court case–judge, attorney, (can’t recall the third off the top of my head) and a reporter. The “educated” men of standing all have their ideas about the case, but it is the lowly reporter who reveals the horrible truth. This is a theme with James– the bookish, sciencey people–the scholars and professors loaded with degrees and accolades, don’t have a clue about spirit or nature. There is a terrific adaptation of this story on YouTube featuring a very young John Nettles as The Fourth Man.
I’m planning on doing a WAG presentation next October on the subject of the ghost story beyond the titter and the jump scare. 🙂
Skipper Hammond
Next October? A year of waiting? We should have a special WAG meeting for this presentation on ghost stories by Jess.
Cynthia Bertelsen
Jess, fascinating piece! Thank you for introducing me to M.R. James.
You might be interested in George Orwell’s take on certain types of literature: “Good Bad Books” (1945) (https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/good-bad-books/)
“A type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days, but which flowered with great richness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is what Chesterton called the “good bad book”: that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished. Obviously outstanding books in this line are Raffles and the Sherlock Holmes stories, which have kept their place when innumerable “problem novels”, “human documents” and “terrible indictments” of this or that have fallen into deserved oblivion.”