For the Dead Remember: The Life of MR James by Darryl Jones – Horror upon horror, from public school to the page

When this year ends, and a reckoning is made of its published books and their contents, two early chapters of Darryl Jones’s engrossing biography of the writer and medievalist Montague Rhodes James should find themselves receiving particular mention in dispatches.

They deal with the education system in Early Victorian Britain, and contain such a litany of brutality and violence that the reader is at times forced to question whether Jones has somehow strayed inadvertently from nonfiction into fantasy.

Floggings are routine, to the extent that the study of one master at Eton is smeared with blood and excrement extruded by battered, frightened boys. A headmaster, John Rosewall, is forced to resign after flogging a pupil to death, the resignation less a result of the killing than Rosewall’s subsequent descent into madness. A successor, George Heath, has to retire to his bed from exhaustion after flogging 70 boys in a single session. (Among Heath’s replacements, John Keate manages 80, and without subsequently having to seek out his mattress.)

At Temple Grove prep school, which James attended in the 1870s, the headmaster Ottiwell Charles Waterfield would lacerate pupils with a rhinoceros-hide cane and kiss them afterwards, lending an odiously fetishistic complexion to the whole affair.

When the masters are otherwise occupied, or merely worn out from delivering thrashings, the boys turn on one another. One student is scalped by his peers, another set alight. At Eton in 1825, Francis Ashley is beaten to death by a fellow pupil while Ashley’s older brother urges his sibling to fight “one more round, one more, for the honour of the Ashleys”. At times the level of bloodshed becomes almost blackly funny, though that “almost” is doing some very heavy lifting.

This was a system designed not to educate but to toughen up, even desensitise, the men who would some day run the British empire. It did not encourage independent thought, only conformity. It is not surprising, then, that it should have produced MR James, a conservative academic gripped by what Jones identifies as “a genuine terror of ideas”. What is more surprising is that it also produced MR James, creator of some of the most imaginative and disturbing supernatural fiction ever written.

James presents a number of difficulties for any biographer. The first is that he was not a self-reflective man. Even had he been, it’s not clear what he might have reflected upon. As Jones remarks, “If he had an inner life at all … it stayed resolutely inner”. He was also, as noted above, steadfastly incurious. In fact, one of his finest short stories is titled A Warning to the Curious, and its protagonist comes to a very bad end. For James inquisitiveness is not just inadvisable but also worthy of punishment.

Undoubtedly a brilliant scholar, who knew more about his subjects than any of his peers, “and knew them differently”, he remained, Jones adds, “the only person interested enough to find out about many of them”. He was an authority on obscure manuscripts (the more obscure, the better), medieval stained glass and ecclesiastical architecture, somewhat thin gruel for biography.

Finally, James spent his adulthood entirely in academia. He was provost of King’s College, Cambridge, later vice-chancellor of the university, and concluded his career as provost of Eton. His was a life of the mind, and a closed one at that. Were it not for his short stories, it’s likely he would live on mainly in footnotes. But oh, what stories these are.

James published 30 supernatural tales in his lifetime, with a few more appearing posthumously. Although described as ghost stories, most famously in the collections Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) and More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), many of them, as the critic Brian Showers has pointed out, should more properly be considered accounts of the demonic.

The entities roused by various careless scholars, envious clerics and greedy treasure-hunters are no mere spectres but have an actual corporeal presence. They can be smelt, heard, seen and touched. Worse, they can smell, hear, see and touch in turn, even to the point of murder, and are relentlessly, remorselessly malevolent.

One of the reasons the stories have aged so well, aside from the quality of the writing and the vividness of James’s descriptions of landscapes (and what may lie beneath), is that the terrors depicted are strangely ageless, incursions from a time out of joint. Unlike the eldritch cosmic horrors of HP Lovecraft, they emerge from a version of this world and wisely James leaves their origins largely unexplained. We catch a glimpse of them, they act, then return whence they came.

But the very physicality of these beings, their appalling sensuousness, remains troubling. Repressed feelings will find an outlet, and James was especially repressed. Jones identifies a “real horror of touch” in a number of the tales, and a “genuinely uncomfortable sense of twisted sexuality”. When, in Casting the Runes, Dunning reaches under his pillow to find “a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it”, the threat seems implicitly sexual. What Dunning encounters may not, strictly speaking, represent a vagina dentata, but it’ll certainly do until one comes along.

From MR James to much closer to home, the hauntings that inspired me

However, James had little time for vaginas, dentatae or otherwise. He was, by any reckoning, a closeted gay man, but so concealed as to be unwilling or, more probably, unable to recognise himself as such, even while surrounded by others more at ease with their sexuality. The economist John Meynard Keynes, a Cambridge fellow and bête noire for James, grumbled that “practically everyone in Cambridge, except me, is an open and avowed sodomite”, a complaint that might have held more weight had it not been addressed to one of Keynes’s many boyfriends.

James, by contrast, was simply a chap who lived with other chaps, taught with other chaps, socialised with other chaps, went on bicycling holidays with other chaps and, occasionally, wrestled with other chaps on the common room floor while clutching feverishly at their genitals. If people wanted to make something dirty out of that, well, certain minds were plainly happier loitering in the gutter.

Nevertheless, there was a sadness to James that may be ascribed, in part, to this denial of the self. He admitted to his former tutor and close friend HE Luxmore that “I used to spend a great deal of time alone in the Chapel … It took away the sense of loneliness that was at times unbearable.” The love of his life was a married man, James McBryde, but theirs was a chaste, unconsummated affair, and would have been categorised by themselves as a profound friendship.

Only a single piece of correspondence from James to McBryde survives, and Jones rightly wonders why. The letter concludes: “I think you know how much I value you, my dear thing.” When McBryde died in 1904, following an operation for appendicitis, James was heartbroken, though a diary entry by his friend Arthur Benson records that, even when bereaved, he was intent “not to let himself go, not to dive deep”. Later, McBryde’s wife and daughter would become two of the few women James ever truly cared about.

Because this is a life and not a critical examination of the work, Jones is obliged to set the ghost stories – the meat of the book for many – in the larger context of James’s academic career. In lesser hands, the back-stabbing and jostling for advancement at Cambridge might be dull stuff, but Jones, shrewdly and with a dry wit, concentrates on the often eccentric personalities involved.

Neither does he shy away from his subject’s more unpleasant aspects. James had Jewish friends and colleagues, but was casually anti-Semitic. The number of women he liked could safely be counted on the fingers of one hand, with a digit or two left over for luck, but otherwise he comes across as intensely misogynistic, with a distinct hostility towards female scholarship.

Yet James was also committed to the education of those who studied under him at Cambridge and Eton, and cared greatly for them. One of the most moving sections of the book concerns the annihilation of the junior officer class during the first World War, the same young men James and his peers had, until recently, been trying to instruct and protect. In his final oration as vice-chancellor, James recorded that 450 Cambridge men had been killed in the war, 150 of them still undergraduates. But even faced with such carnage, he never appeared to question the justification for it.

It’s difficult to imagine a better account of James’s life ever being written, short of the discovery, like some forbidden manuscript in one of his tales, of a previously unsuspected diary into which he poured his most private feelings, which is unlikely. And if, by the end, there is the sense that some element of James has proved elusive, it is no fault of the biographer. James was elusive even to himself, and it means that those extraordinary short stories remain essentially mysterious, as they should be.

John Connolly is best known as the author of the Charlie Parker series

Further reading