Author James Montague Rhodes

h, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'" (Felixstowe), "A Warning to the Curious" (Aldeburgh), "Rats" and "A Vignette" (Great Livermere). He lived for many years, first as an undergraduate, then as a don and provost, at King's College, Cambridge, which university provides settings for several of his tales.[1] Apart from mediaeval subjects, James studied the classics and appeared very successfully in a staging of Aristophanes's play The Birds, with music by Hubert Parry. His ability as an actor was also in evidence when he read his new ghost stories to friends at Christmas time. James is most widely known for his ghost stories, but as a mediaeval scholar his output was phenomenal and remains highly respected in scholarly circles. Indeed the success of his antiquarian ghost-stories is rooted in his life as an antiquary. His discovery of a manuscript fragment led to excavations in the ruins of the abbey at Bury St Edmunds, West Suffolk, in 1902, in which the graves of several twelfth-century abbots described by Jocelyn de Brakelond (a contemporary chronicler) were rediscovered, having been lost since the Dissolution. His 1917 edition of the Latin Lives of Saint Aethelberht, king and martyr (English Historical Review 32), remains authoritative. He catalogued many of the manuscript libraries of the Cambridge and Oxford colleges. Among his other scholarly works, he wrote The Apocalypse in Art, which placed illuminated Apocalypse manuscripts into families. He also translated the New Testament Apocrypha and contributed to the Encyclopaedia Biblica (1903). The fact that he was not a "dry" scholar is shown in his Suffolk and Norfolk (Dent, 1930), in which a great deal of knowledge is presented in a popular and accessible form, and in Abbeys (Great Western Railway, 1925). Another of James' finest achievements occurred during his directorship of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge [1893–1908]. He managed to secure a large number of important paintings and manuscripts, including notable portraits by Titian. James's ghost stories were published in a series of collections: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), and A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925). The first hardback collected edition appeared in 1931. Many of the tales were penned as Christmas Eve entertainments and read aloud to select gatherings of friends. This idea was used by the BBC in 2000 when they filmed Christopher Lee reading four stories in a candle-lit room in King's College. James perfected a method of story-telling which has since become known as Jamesian. The classic Jamesian tale usually includes the following key elements: According to James, the story must "put the reader into the position of saying to himself: 'If I'm not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!'" He also perfected the literary technique of the genre: narrating supernatural events principally through implication and suggestion, letting his reader fill in the blanks, and focusing on the mundane details of his settings and characters in order to throw the horrific and bizarre elements into greater relief. He summed up his approach in his foreword to the anthology Ghosts and Marvels (Oxford, 1924): "Two ingredients most valuable in the concocting of a ghost story are, to me, the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo.… Let us, then, be introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings; and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage." A further important point he made was: "Another requisite, in my opinion, is that the ghost should be malevolent or odious: amiable and helpful apparitions are all very well in fairy tales or in local legends, but I have no use for them in a fictitious ghost story." Despite his suggestion (in the essay "Stories I Have Tried to Write") that writers employ reticence in their work, many of James's tales depict scenes and images of savage and often disturbing violence. For example, in "Lost Hearts", pubescent children are drugged by a sinister dabbler in the occult who then removes their hearts from their paralysed bodies. In a 1929 essay, James stated: Reticence 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 much blatancy in a lot of recent stories. They drag in sex too, which is a fatal mistake; sex is tiresome enough in the novels; in a ghost story, or as the backbone of a ghost story, I have no patience with it. At the same time don't let us be mild and drab. Malevolence and terror, the glare of evil faces, 'the stony grin of unearthly malice', pursuing forms in darkness, and 'long-drawn, distant screams', are all in place, and so is a modicum of blood, shed with deliberation and carefully husbanded; the weltering and wallowing that I too often encounter merely recall the methods of M G Lewis.[2] Although not overtly sexual, plots of this nature have been perceived as unintentional metaphors of the Freudian variety. James's biographer Michael Cox wrote in M. R. James: An Informal Portrait (1983), "One need not be a professional psychoanalyst to see the ghost stories as some release from feelings held in check." Reviewing this biography (Daily Telegraph, 1983), the novelist and diarist Anthony Powell, who attended Eton under James's tutelage, commented that "I myself have heard it suggested that James's (of course platonic) love affairs were in fact fascinating to watch." Powell was referring to James' relationships with his pupils, not his peers. Other critics have seen complex psychological undercurrents in James's work. His authorial revulsion from tactile contact with other people has been noted by Julia Briggs in Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (1977). As Nigel Kneale said in the introduction to the Folio Society edition of Ghost Stories of M. R. James, "In an age where every man is his own psychologist, M. R. James looks like rich and promising material.… There must have been times when it was hard to be Monty James." In addition to writing his own stories, James championed the works of Sheridan Le Fanu, whom he viewed as "absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories", editing and supplying introductions to Madame Crowl's Ghost (1923) and Uncle Silas (1926). James's actual beliefs about ghosts were ambiguous. He wrote, "I answer that I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me." There have been numerous television adaptations of James's stories, mostly in Britain. Two of the best-known TV dramas include Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968, directed by Jonathan Miller) and A Warning to the Curious (1972; directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark), starring Sir Michael Hordern and Peter Vaughan respectively. Both were released on DVD by the British Film Institute but are now out-of-print. Although ITV produced four black-and-white adaptations of James's ghost stories between 1966 and 1968, no surviving copies are known to exist. However, a short preview trailer featuring several scenes from Casting the Runes survived and has been shown at cult film festivals. "Casting the Runes" was also adapted for television in 1979 as an episode of the ITV Playhouse series.[3] From 1971 to 1978 the BBC broadcast a new ghost story each Christmas in a series titled A Ghost Story for Christmas. Five dramatizations of James stories were included: The Stalls Of Barchester (1971), A Warning to the Curious (1972), Lost Hearts (1973), The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (1974) and The Ash-tree (1975). In 1975 Yorkshire Television produced a twenty-minute adaptation of "Mr Humphrey's Inheritance" for schools. In 1979 they produced a contemporary version of "Casting the Runes", with Lawrence Gordon Clark directing. In December 1986 BBC2 broadcast partially dramatized readings by the actor Robert Powell of "The Mezzotint", "The Ash-Tree", "Wailing Well", "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" and "The Rose Garden". In a similar vein, the BBC also produced a short series (M. R. James' Ghost Stories for Christmas) of further readings in 2000, which featured Christopher Lee as James, who (in character) read adaptations of "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral", "The Ash-tree", "Number 13" and "A Warning to the Curious". The 1970s Ghost Story for Christmas tradition was briefly revived in December 2005, when BBC Four broadcast a new version of James's story "A View from a Hill", with "Number 13" following in December 2006. These were broadly faithful to the originals and were quite well-received. On 19 November 1947, the thirteenth episode of the CBS radio series Escape was an adaptation of "Casting the Runes". On 12 January 1974, the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, hosted by E. G. Marshall, presented the episode "I Warn You Three Times", which was an updated, loose adaptation of "Casting the Runes". In 1981, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a dramatic adaptation of "Casting the Runes", entitled The Hex, starring Conrad Phillips and Kim Hartman.