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A warning to the curious
Insight
Montague Rhodes James, who died 80 years ago, was a medievalist scholar, provost of both King’s College, Cambridge, and Eton College, and the author of some of the most unsettling ghost stories ever written. “In an age where every man is his own psychologist, MR James looks like rich and promising material”, wrote Nigel Kneale in 1973. Kneale—himself an author of acclaimed unsettling drama for TV and film—was introducing his own selection of the best of the ghost stories for the Folio Society. “Such a story as The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,” he went on, “with its groping down a fetid well and the implications of its climax—but never mind, analysis becomes nonsense here, as irrelevant as smashing a pearl to get at the original particle of grit.” Perhaps it’s not entirely nonsensical to search for some insight into James’s mind in his ghost stories. Some argue that the tales were an outlet for James’s repressed homosexuality, or expressed a fearful thrill at bodily contact. Kneale himself, for all he counsels against such biographical interpretation, concludes that the stories suggest “there must have been times when it was hard to be Monty James.” James (1862–1936) was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), and it’s tempting to look for the subconscious in James’s writing. But I think his intuitive, conscious understanding of psychology is what makes the stories so effective. For example, A School Story begins with two men dismissing a range of other ghost tales, their scares feeble, their plots pilfered from elsewhere. This suggests we’re about to hear something different, something more convincing. But the man who shares his story then confides: “I really don’t know...It happened at my private school thirty odd years ago, and I haven’t any explanation of it.” Despite the circumstantial evidence, no one quite admits to the presence of the supernatural. And that’s key, because we as readers provide that explanation ourselves. By casting doubt, James uses reverse psychology to make his ghost more convincing. The nature of the evidence presented is important, and the title of his first collection is telling: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. He frequently utilises his professional, scholarly knowledge, including precise details about architecture and books as if inviting us to double-check. That’s not to suggest the stories are dry and dusty as old manuscripts. The tone is often deceptively conversational, even chatty, and peppered with wry humour. This intimacy and realism is all part of an effect, argues Kneale, that “conditions us to accept the unbelievable” when it inevitably comes. That “conditioning” isn’t unique to James—remember the use of the epistolary form in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. However, James’s stories also represent a new divergence from the English Gothic tradition. Frankenstein’s creature can discuss the merits of Plutarch, Milton, and www.thelancet.com/psychiatry Vol 3 October 2016
Goethe, and Count Dracula, plotting his trip to England, spends “many hours of pleasure” reading the London Directory, “Whitaker’s Almanac, the Army and Navy Lists, and...the Law List”; but James’s horrors, while literary, are rarely literate or vocal. They are more abstract: a figure seen briefly in a picture, a ghost animating a bedsheet. We’re not quite sure what has been experienced, and that uncertainty haunts us. Often, his horrors are barely sketched in: the horrible spiders in The Ash-Tree are “the size of a man’s head”, “veinous” and “covered with grey hair”. That is all we’re told, so they remain as if barely glimpsed, a fleeting impression of horror, all the more unsettling than if fully exposed. Perhaps these absences are also the mark of James the antiquary, a man surely familiar with the thrill of piecing together history from remaining fragments, understanding our need to complete a picture. In fact, there’s a tangible materiality to many of his stories. Often, ancient documents and objects hold innate power, as if history itself were a physical force. That is how James the scholar can make a “not specially exciting” mezzotint view of a house or an old whistle found while out for a walk so arresting and disturbing. Those adapting James’s stories for film and TV are presented with a problem: using visual media, they must show what James made effective by leaving largely unshown. Night of the Demon (1957) is an adaptation of James’s Casting the Runes. In the original story, a villain called Karswell is apparently able to summon a demon to kill his enemies by passing them—without their realising—a paper covered in runes. A scholar called Dunning discovers he has been passed such a paper and manages to return it to Karswell. The unwitting Karswell is then killed in an accident—the implication being that he is the victim of his own monster. Even by James’s usual standards, this demon is thinly defined. People who see it are frightened but they all die without describing it, and a woodcut depicting it has been mutilated before we can be told what is shown. The film, however, clearly shows us the demon when it attacks, and the demon appears prominently on the poster advertising the film. According to Jonathan Rigby in his recent book English Gothic, the design of the creature was “drawn direct by [film studio] Elstree’s special effects maestro, George “Banger” Blackwell, from medieval woodcuts.” That fits the original story, again using the potency of real history, just as location filming at the British Museum and Stonehenge help make events seem more convincing. But the prominence of the demon in the film was apparently imposed by producer Hal E. Chester, against the wishes of writer Charles Bennett, who described it as “the biggest balls-up of a good script that I have ever seen”, and of director Jacques Tourner. Speaking in 1973, Tourner said, “I wanted...to include only four frames of the monster coming up ... Boom, boom—did I see it or didn’t I?”
Oxford University Press
A warning to the curious
Collected Ghost Stories MR James, Edited by Darryl Jones Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp 528. £8·99. ISBN 9780199674893
929
Insight
Paul Avis/Science Photo Library
That uncertainty would match James’s method of unsettling an audience. Elsewhere in the film, the horror is much more subtly wrought. Rigby—who is not convinced that the demon ruins the whole production—speaks of Tourner having a “shadowy, suggestive style” and praises his “making a corridor of the Savoy Hotel appear to stretch into infinity, its every inky recess sheltering some lurking horror.” But, like James, the effect is not all from shadows: “from a car’s headlight beam cutting through the dark of a wooded roadway to the phosphorescent glow of a train that thunders past”, “Tourner makes eerie light-sources just as threatening as the darkness they illuminate.” In the way these scenes are framed and cut, everyday, bright modernity can be as potent as ancient terrors. Interestingly, Night of the Demon’s hero is American psychologist Dr John Holden (Dana Andrews), who initially doesn’t believe in Karswell’s power. As viewers, we know that Holden is wrong, but watching the sceptic gradually change his mind makes us buy into the idea of the supernatural. There are other psychological tricks. Karswell (Niall MacGinnis) is, to quote Jonathan Rigby, “something of a mummy’s boy”. Freud described such men as suffering from castration anxiety, which might explain Karswell’s need to dominate others. Karswell also admits that he is not really in control of the demon, that, “I do what I do out of fear.” This psychological
930
insight into his frustrations and fears makes him seem small and rather ordinary—and so his powers more real. In one scene, Karswell is dressed as a clown to entertain children at a party. We know that Karswell is a killer, so that even though the children are never in any particular danger from him it all feels deeply wrong. This is the film appealing to the emotional rather than cognitive parts of our brains—our instincts to anticipate danger, and to protect the young. James’s story concludes with a one-sentence coda set “after a judicious interval” from the death of Karswell, and in which Dunning has not recovered from the experience. The same is true of James’s Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad. At the start, Parkins—Professor of Ontography or the study of things as they are—doesn’t believe in ghosts and gets cross at their being mentioned. As he explains, “I hold that any semblance, any appearance of concession to the view that such things might exist is equivalent to a renunciation of all that I hold most sacred”. While on holiday, he discovers an old whistle bearing an inscription that it will summon someone or something. When Parkins blows the whistle, he is haunted by a ghost that stalks him and eventually manifests as a figure shrouded in his bedsheets. Parkins is not said to be a believer at the end of the tale, but the one-time sceptic’s “views on certain points are less clear cut than they used to be.” The version of the story made for BBC television in 1968 by Jonathan Miller omits this coda—it ends on Parkin (without an S) being so haunted he is left groaning in dumb terror, the scholar rendered inarticulate. In his 2013 documentary MR James: Ghost Writer, the writer and actor Mark Gatiss says that “the real visceral power of Whistle is [that] it really is like a nightmare. I think a lot of people would watch that and say that’s the closest they’ve seen to someone getting or representing what it’s like to have a nightmare.” However, Miller, who trained as a physician specialising in neurology, responds to Gatiss’s enthusiasm cautiously. Yes, he tells Gatiss, “the dream itself is very disconcerting”. Parkin, “finds it hard to distinguish what he dreams about and what he thinks he actually sees—if indeed he actually sees anything.” Note that last qualifier. Nor does Miller believe— as Gatiss does, or as implied in the original story—that Parkin would be changed by his experience. “If he told the story again when he went back to Cambridge,” says Miller, “he might have said, ‘I was very disconcerted by something that happened to me, but of course how could I possibly believe that the sheets would get up and attack me?’” For Miller, the ghost isn’t real; the story is of interest because of its insight into the mind. Is he right, or is Gatiss? I think that’s rather the point. The best of James, and of the adaptations of James, leave us uncertain, inarticulate, haunted.
Simon Guerrier www.thelancet.com/psychiatry Vol 3 October 2016
Montague Rhodes James, who died 80 years ago, was a medievalist scholar, provost of both King’s College, Cambridge, and Eton College, and the author of some of the most unsettling ghost stories ever written. “In an age where every man is his own psychologist, MR James looks like rich and promising material”, wrote Nigel Kneale in 1973. Kneale—himself an author of acclaimed unsettling drama for TV and film—was introducing his own selection of the best of the ghost stories for the Folio Society. “Such a story as The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,” he went on, “with its groping down a fetid well and the implications of its climax—but never mind, analysis becomes nonsense here, as irrelevant as smashing a pearl to get at the original particle of grit.” Perhaps it’s not entirely nonsensical to search for some insight into James’s mind in his ghost stories. Some argue that the tales were an outlet for James’s repressed homosexuality, or expressed a fearful thrill at bodily contact. Kneale himself, for all he counsels against such biographical interpretation, concludes that the stories suggest “there must have been times when it was hard to be Monty James.” James (1862–1936) was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), and it’s tempting to look for the subconscious in James’s writing. But I think his intuitive, conscious understanding of psychology is what makes the stories so effective. For example, A School Story begins with two men dismissing a range of other ghost tales, their scares feeble, their plots pilfered from elsewhere. This suggests we’re about to hear something different, something more convincing. But the man who shares his story then confides: “I really don’t know...It happened at my private school thirty odd years ago, and I haven’t any explanation of it.” Despite the circumstantial evidence, no one quite admits to the presence of the supernatural. And that’s key, because we as readers provide that explanation ourselves. By casting doubt, James uses reverse psychology to make his ghost more convincing. The nature of the evidence presented is important, and the title of his first collection is telling: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. He frequently utilises his professional, scholarly knowledge, including precise details about architecture and books as if inviting us to double-check. That’s not to suggest the stories are dry and dusty as old manuscripts. The tone is often deceptively conversational, even chatty, and peppered with wry humour. This intimacy and realism is all part of an effect, argues Kneale, that “conditions us to accept the unbelievable” when it inevitably comes. That “conditioning” isn’t unique to James—remember the use of the epistolary form in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. However, James’s stories also represent a new divergence from the English Gothic tradition. Frankenstein’s creature can discuss the merits of Plutarch, Milton, and www.thelancet.com/psychiatry Vol 3 October 2016
Goethe, and Count Dracula, plotting his trip to England, spends “many hours of pleasure” reading the London Directory, “Whitaker’s Almanac, the Army and Navy Lists, and...the Law List”; but James’s horrors, while literary, are rarely literate or vocal. They are more abstract: a figure seen briefly in a picture, a ghost animating a bedsheet. We’re not quite sure what has been experienced, and that uncertainty haunts us. Often, his horrors are barely sketched in: the horrible spiders in The Ash-Tree are “the size of a man’s head”, “veinous” and “covered with grey hair”. That is all we’re told, so they remain as if barely glimpsed, a fleeting impression of horror, all the more unsettling than if fully exposed. Perhaps these absences are also the mark of James the antiquary, a man surely familiar with the thrill of piecing together history from remaining fragments, understanding our need to complete a picture. In fact, there’s a tangible materiality to many of his stories. Often, ancient documents and objects hold innate power, as if history itself were a physical force. That is how James the scholar can make a “not specially exciting” mezzotint view of a house or an old whistle found while out for a walk so arresting and disturbing. Those adapting James’s stories for film and TV are presented with a problem: using visual media, they must show what James made effective by leaving largely unshown. Night of the Demon (1957) is an adaptation of James’s Casting the Runes. In the original story, a villain called Karswell is apparently able to summon a demon to kill his enemies by passing them—without their realising—a paper covered in runes. A scholar called Dunning discovers he has been passed such a paper and manages to return it to Karswell. The unwitting Karswell is then killed in an accident—the implication being that he is the victim of his own monster. Even by James’s usual standards, this demon is thinly defined. People who see it are frightened but they all die without describing it, and a woodcut depicting it has been mutilated before we can be told what is shown. The film, however, clearly shows us the demon when it attacks, and the demon appears prominently on the poster advertising the film. According to Jonathan Rigby in his recent book English Gothic, the design of the creature was “drawn direct by [film studio] Elstree’s special effects maestro, George “Banger” Blackwell, from medieval woodcuts.” That fits the original story, again using the potency of real history, just as location filming at the British Museum and Stonehenge help make events seem more convincing. But the prominence of the demon in the film was apparently imposed by producer Hal E. Chester, against the wishes of writer Charles Bennett, who described it as “the biggest balls-up of a good script that I have ever seen”, and of director Jacques Tourner. Speaking in 1973, Tourner said, “I wanted...to include only four frames of the monster coming up ... Boom, boom—did I see it or didn’t I?”
Oxford University Press
A warning to the curious
Collected Ghost Stories MR James, Edited by Darryl Jones Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp 528. £8·99. ISBN 9780199674893
929
Insight
Paul Avis/Science Photo Library
That uncertainty would match James’s method of unsettling an audience. Elsewhere in the film, the horror is much more subtly wrought. Rigby—who is not convinced that the demon ruins the whole production—speaks of Tourner having a “shadowy, suggestive style” and praises his “making a corridor of the Savoy Hotel appear to stretch into infinity, its every inky recess sheltering some lurking horror.” But, like James, the effect is not all from shadows: “from a car’s headlight beam cutting through the dark of a wooded roadway to the phosphorescent glow of a train that thunders past”, “Tourner makes eerie light-sources just as threatening as the darkness they illuminate.” In the way these scenes are framed and cut, everyday, bright modernity can be as potent as ancient terrors. Interestingly, Night of the Demon’s hero is American psychologist Dr John Holden (Dana Andrews), who initially doesn’t believe in Karswell’s power. As viewers, we know that Holden is wrong, but watching the sceptic gradually change his mind makes us buy into the idea of the supernatural. There are other psychological tricks. Karswell (Niall MacGinnis) is, to quote Jonathan Rigby, “something of a mummy’s boy”. Freud described such men as suffering from castration anxiety, which might explain Karswell’s need to dominate others. Karswell also admits that he is not really in control of the demon, that, “I do what I do out of fear.” This psychological
930
insight into his frustrations and fears makes him seem small and rather ordinary—and so his powers more real. In one scene, Karswell is dressed as a clown to entertain children at a party. We know that Karswell is a killer, so that even though the children are never in any particular danger from him it all feels deeply wrong. This is the film appealing to the emotional rather than cognitive parts of our brains—our instincts to anticipate danger, and to protect the young. James’s story concludes with a one-sentence coda set “after a judicious interval” from the death of Karswell, and in which Dunning has not recovered from the experience. The same is true of James’s Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad. At the start, Parkins—Professor of Ontography or the study of things as they are—doesn’t believe in ghosts and gets cross at their being mentioned. As he explains, “I hold that any semblance, any appearance of concession to the view that such things might exist is equivalent to a renunciation of all that I hold most sacred”. While on holiday, he discovers an old whistle bearing an inscription that it will summon someone or something. When Parkins blows the whistle, he is haunted by a ghost that stalks him and eventually manifests as a figure shrouded in his bedsheets. Parkins is not said to be a believer at the end of the tale, but the one-time sceptic’s “views on certain points are less clear cut than they used to be.” The version of the story made for BBC television in 1968 by Jonathan Miller omits this coda—it ends on Parkin (without an S) being so haunted he is left groaning in dumb terror, the scholar rendered inarticulate. In his 2013 documentary MR James: Ghost Writer, the writer and actor Mark Gatiss says that “the real visceral power of Whistle is [that] it really is like a nightmare. I think a lot of people would watch that and say that’s the closest they’ve seen to someone getting or representing what it’s like to have a nightmare.” However, Miller, who trained as a physician specialising in neurology, responds to Gatiss’s enthusiasm cautiously. Yes, he tells Gatiss, “the dream itself is very disconcerting”. Parkin, “finds it hard to distinguish what he dreams about and what he thinks he actually sees—if indeed he actually sees anything.” Note that last qualifier. Nor does Miller believe— as Gatiss does, or as implied in the original story—that Parkin would be changed by his experience. “If he told the story again when he went back to Cambridge,” says Miller, “he might have said, ‘I was very disconcerted by something that happened to me, but of course how could I possibly believe that the sheets would get up and attack me?’” For Miller, the ghost isn’t real; the story is of interest because of its insight into the mind. Is he right, or is Gatiss? I think that’s rather the point. The best of James, and of the adaptations of James, leave us uncertain, inarticulate, haunted.
Simon Guerrier www.thelancet.com/psychiatry Vol 3 October 2016