Cambridge, October 1893.
Halloween is approaching
and literary and horror history is about to be made.
Welcome to the Chitchat Society, where some of the brightest
and best connected young men in the country gather to entertain
each other with witty conversation and the reading of erudite papers.
Tonight, our host is MR James, a fellow and Dean of King's College.
But word has it he's got something rather unusual planned.
Do the audience have any inkling that they are present at arguably
the most important event in the history of the English ghost story?
The moment when Monty James, its greatest master,
unveils his first two tales of terror.
The boy, a thin shape, with black hair and ragged clothing,
raised his arms in the air.
The moon shone upon his almost transparent hands
and Stephen saw that the nails were fearfully long
and that the moonlight shone right through them, and as he thus
stood with his arms raised, he disclosed a terrifying spectacle.
On the left side of his chest, there opened a black and gaping rent.
SCREAMING
Over the coming years, the mind of Montague Rhodes James would
spawn more than 30 classic stories of the supernatural.
Nightmarish forces that pursue their unsuspecting victims.
SCREAMING
Monstrous guardians with ancient buildings.
EVIL LAUGHTER
Horrors that lurk in the idyllic English countryside.
Violent retribution and black magic.
Yet all these horrors were conjured up by a man who seemed
the quintessentially respectable Victorian, a leading scholar,
a devout Anglican.
How did MR James come to create such an extraordinary body of work?
I'm going to find out the truth behind this contradiction
and see how the strange world of MR James' childhood,
his precocious imagination, his unrivalled knowledge
of morbid legends,
and his repressed sexuality all came together to produce the finest
and most frightening ghost stories in the English language.
To get a feel for who MR James was, I am following in his footsteps...
or rather, his cycling route.
Monty's idea of a perfect summer's day was riding through France,
finding a new church or cathedral to explore.
Such were the pleasures of a scholarly English bachelor
in the late 19th century.
And it was one of these excursions that brought Monty here, to the
foothills of the French Pyrenees.
The Cathedral of Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges
inspired Monty's first published ghost story.
It must be one of the few tales of the supernatural that could
double up as a tourist guidebook.
Previous ghost story writers tended to favour atmosphere over detail...
..but Monty carefully draws the reader's attention to the
stained-glass,
choir stalls,
and the dusty stuffed crocodile that hangs over the font.
Monty had been fascinated by church architecture since childhood,
and you can see why he would be taken with this place.
There is also an atmosphere of heavy superstition here that's quite
different to the strict Anglicanism with which he was raised.
Just as Monty's emphasis on believable settings was
unprecedented, the central figure of his story was a new, yet easily
recognisable, kind of protagonist.
The main character, Denniston, is not dissimilar to Monty himself,
and other figures in the stories are cut from similar cloth.
Fussy, bachelor academics with an interest in sacred buildings,
medieval manuscripts, ancient artefacts and above all, an abiding
curiosity that rather gets the better of them...
with grave consequences.
As Denniston wanders round the empty cathedral,
he gets a strange sense that someone, something is watching.
And this feeling of unease increases when Denniston
comes across a book of pages cut out from old religious manuscripts.
Canon Alberic's Scrapbook.
His attention is caught by one illustration in particular.
A demon from the Testament of King Solomon.
The hands were of a dusky pallor, covered, like the body,
with long, coarse hairs, and hideously taloned.
The eyes, touched with burning yellow, had intensely black pupils.
If you can imagine one of the awful bird-catching
spiders of South America
translated into human form
and endowed with an intelligence just less than human
then you would perhaps have some faint conception
of the terror that is inspired by this appalling effigy.
Monty's account of the picture is the first genuinely chilling
moment in his work.
His description of the demon would certainly discomfort anyone
with a fear of spiders. Monty was a notorious arachnophobe.
But it's a line at the end of the passage that continues to
haunt my memory.
One remark is universally made by those to whom
I have shown the picture.
It was drawn from the life.
It was drawn from the life. Those few, simple words like a punch line,
opening up a terrifying possibility that a mythical demon
could actually exist.
As the unfortunate Denniston discovers,
when he retires to his lodgings to pore over the scrapbook.
His attention was caught by an object lying on a red cloth
just by his left elbow.
A rat. No, it is too black.
A large spider.
Oh, I trust to goodness not.
Good God.
Oh, no.
It was a hand.
Like the hand in the picture.
He flew out of his chair,
deadly inconceivable terror clutching at his heart.
The shape, whose left hand rested on the table, was rising to
a standing posture behind his seat,
its right hand crooked over his scalp.
What's remarkable, perhaps even uncanny,
about Canon Alberic's Scrapbook is just how fully formed it is.
The pacing, the building of atmosphere and menace,
are masterly for a first story. Not a word seems out of place.
And Monty's conversational tone only adds to the feeling of veracity.
Canon Alberic's Scrapbook may have been inspired by MR James's
travels in France but it drew on a lifetime of experience.
The roots of Monty's stories lie in his childhood in England
and his fascination with history and the supernatural was shaped.
Montague Rhodes James was born in 1862 and when he was three,
his family moved to Great Livermere in Suffolk.
There is a mysterious remote atmosphere here.
And even in the 19th century it must have felt a place
apart from the rest of England.
The family came here when Monty's father, Herbert James,
was appointed as the local Anglican priest.
What kind of a congregation and a parish did Herbert James inherit?
He encountered quite a diverse group of people.
People who were inherently superstitious
and Herbert wrote about his concern at the end of the 19th century.
With all the technological innovations there have been,
we've still got people who seek out the wise man and woman from
the village and prefer this esoteric superstition that he called it.
So, it's a real religion.
It was a rural, agricultural community
and most of the people would be working on the land
here at the time, and the land involved both farmland, which
would have been tilled by horses, which is effectively behind you.
And behind me there would have been the land we know as the Brecks,
the Breckland, which is more like open moorland where they
would have kept rabbits and sheep.
In fact, the Breckland, as we know it today, is the nearest thing England
has to a desert, so we are living on the margins and so, wherever you have
got a margin between two types of culture and two types of landscape,
you often get a deeper awareness of the supernatural and the spiritual.
Monty would later draw on the area's history
and superstitions in his writing.
But it is easy to imagine how the powerful atmosphere here might
have fed his boyhood imagination.
Especially when combined with the piety of religious devotion
that characterised family life at the Great Livermere Rectory.
The James household was a devout one but it was also close
and loving, and remained so.
Monty's letters throughout his life are open and affectionate.
All that religion, though, does seem to have filled Monty's childhood
imagination with some quite extraordinary visions.
For a time, young Monty was preoccupied with
thoughts of fiery apocalypses and days of judgment.
And although Monty never claimed his tales were inspired by personal
experiences of the supernatural,
a short work published after his death suggested that on one occasion
he may have glimpsed a frightening figure in the rectory grounds.
A face was looking my way.
Malevolent, I thought, and think it was.
And from just above the eyes the white border of a linen drapery hung
down from the brows.
I fled, but at what seemed like a safe distance within my own
precincts, I could not but halt and look back.
There was no white thing
framed in the hole in the gate...
..but there was a draped form... shambling off through the trees.
Strange apparitions apart,
Monty's childhood appears to have been a very happy one.
He began his education at home, learning Latin
and Greek from his father and French from his mother.
His parents encouraged a lifelong love of learning in him,
but eventually, his schooling had to continue elsewhere.
Monty seems to have been someone with a keen sense of place,
and this would be a theme in both his work and life.
He would become deeply attached to a small number of locations
so when he had to leave Great Livermere at the age of 11 to go to
prep school in London, the wrench was profound.
It's perhaps no coincidence that the next story Monty published,
after Canon Alberic, centres on an 11-year-old orphan boy.
Lost Hearts tells of Stephen,
sent to live at the home of his sinister, much older cousin.
The cousin turns out to be an alchemist, seeking immortality
and the house is haunted by the spectres of two children
he has murdered in the course of his experiments.
Quick or we will be late. Quick, dear boy.
Dear boy, we have so little time, the potent hour has come!
It's one of Monty's grimmest stories.
The lasting impression is of isolation
and the vulnerability of children.
Munificent engine,
soul bread,
strong rhythm of eternity.
But with its occult references,
Lost Hearts is also suffused with arcane knowledge...
Generous boy.
..something which would define Monty's later childhood.
Here lies your fortune.
Ordained by the heavens,
sanctioned by the ancients.
Your innocent heart must be the beating cornerstone to the gate.
That unspeakable Gateway
by which I will enter into it.
SCREAMING
When he was 14, Monty moved again, to England's premier school,
Eton College.
By now, something about him seemed older than his years.
Perhaps to take his mind off being away from home, Monty had developed
a precocious fascination with the old, the horrific and the obscure.
Particularly medieval manuscripts, Apocrypha
and the outer reaches of religious tradition.
When I left Eton, it was with plenty of hobbies in the bookish line.
I collected martyrdoms of Saints, the more atrocious the better,
and biblical legends.
Nothing could be more inspiriting than to discover
that St Livinus had had his tongue cut out and was beheaded.
With his morbid interests, Monty sounds remarkably like me at
that age, though my teenage obsession was with horror films
and stories.
Monty and his fellow pupils would often pass the long evenings
enjoying the works of Charles Dickens who had done much
to popularise supernatural tales by giving them contemporary
Victorian settings.
And Monty seems to have taken an active interest in this genre.
In a letter written in his third year at Eton, Monty
speaks of engaging in a dark seance, a telling of ghost stories
in which capacity I am rather popular just now.
He doesn't say whether these tales were his own or those of other
writers, but he clearly had a gift for beguiling an audience.
Monty was soon exploring his fascination with ghost stories
in written form.
Eton's library holds his first printed work on the subject
and his understanding of the story's fundamental appeal is very evident.
This is The Eton Rambler, a publication set up by Monty
and a few friends when he was in the sixth form.
The second issue features a short essay by Monty on the subject
of ghost stories.
But the fourth number is of particular interest because it
contains Monty's first real attempt at writing a ghost story.
It's the story of a man who decides to spend a summer night
in the northern aspect of a churchyard.
Never a good idea.
He laid himself down under a buttress on the north side
of the building.
And in blissful ignorance of the fact that he was
surrounded by the graves of murderers and suicides,
he fell asleep.
After a while, he woke with a dim and unpleasant consciousness
that something was pulling at his clothes.
Nothing less than two glassy eyes belonging to a form
that crouched there in the long grass.
It was covered with what looked like a stained and tattered shroud,
and he could dimly discern its long skinny, clawed hands,
eager, as it seemed, to grasp something.
So already, even in these very early attempts,
we can recognise the familiar features of his ghost story writing.
And the actual representation of the demonic presence is familiar
already from Canon Alberic's Scrapbook - with glassy eyes,
the clawed hands tearing at the clothes, the crouched form
and some sort of stained and tattered shroud.
In contrast to his time at prep school,
Monty's years at Eton would be among the happiest of his life.
He became a socially confident and academically accomplished young man.
In true English public school fashion,
he also learned to wear his intelligence and learning lightly.
In 1882, Monty left Eton for King's College, Cambridge.
University offered him an unparalleled opportunity to
pursue his passions and enthusiasms on a bigger canvas.
Monty seized it with both hands.
As an undergraduate at King's, Monty managed to lead a double life.
He excelled academically,
transforming himself from a budding medievalist into a genuine expert.
Yet he also became a leading light in the college's social scene.
No-one knew how we found time to do it all but both
sides of his life would shape his ghost stories.
When it came to his studies,
Monty spent much of his time at the University Museum, the Fitzwilliam.
The museum boasted a wide range of antiquities but what drew
Monty here was its extensive library of medieval manuscripts.
And he didn't come just to read the manuscripts.
Monty had an unprecedented ambition - to catalogue the collection.
It was here at the Fitzwilliam that Monty embarked on what
he truly regarded as his life's work.
Compared to this, he saw his ghost stories as just an
entertaining sideline.
What Monty accomplished here was ground-breaking and has ensured
his lasting reputation in the field of medieval scholarship.
And remarkably, he did much of it as an undergraduate.
The Fitzwilliam's collection of manuscripts
ranged across several centuries before the invention of printing.
Written, illustrated and bound entirely by hand,
many were biblical and devotional texts.
Information about their provenance was often scanty and incomplete.
By studying and comparing the manuscripts,
Monty sought to pin down their origins and authorship.
It was an opportunity to both draw on and expand his detailed
knowledge of the medieval period.
How would you say Monty's approach was
different in terms of examining these manuscripts?
Up to that point,
manuscript research was primarily driven by the importance of the text.
But he was one of the very first people to pay consistent
and considerable attention to the pictures, the illuminations.
Monty's catalogue of the Fitzwilliam's manuscripts was
published in 1895. He would go on to document many
more of the country's great collections including
those at Lambeth Palace and Westminster Abbey.
Well, it is truly staggering and more or less unrivalled to this day,
the sheer scale of his achievement is unmatched.
Can we take a look at some of the manuscripts? Of course.
This one, which is a Mirror of Sinners,
so a highly moralising poem on what awaits you after death,
especially if you have been a self-indulgent, lustful,
and avaricious sinner.
That is me doomed!
James commented on the images in this manuscript as a very fine
execution but most terrifying and repulsive,
and they truly are.
You can imagine that he had these sort of things
in mind for his demons. Oh, easily.
When there is such a recurrence of hair, and red eyes or yellow eyes,
and small teeth and things.
And the scaly nature.
Yes, you can imagine that our Victorian antiquaries
put their hand down and touched one of these.
Yes.
The one that terrifies me most is actually this one.
Cos you see the corpse. Oh, yes. And the worms. Worms, yes.
I suppose it really is his unique contribution to the ghost
story form, is that nobody else had this incredible
reservoir of material to draw on.
You get the feeling from his notebooks alone that all these
things came together for him,
and this cross-fertilisation, of course,
helped with the ghost story writing.
The historically accurate detail that creates
the background for the supernatural in the ghost stories
derives from this very wide-reaching research
and absolutely thorough understanding of history.
Alongside cataloguing the Fitzwilliam collection,
Monty became a Fellow of Kings and then Dean of the College,
all by the time he was 28.
The young academic seemed more than happy to remain in the cloistered,
overwhelmingly male world of university.
When he wasn't working, his main diversion was pure socialising
and Cambridge clubs like the Chitchat Society
provided the ideal forum.
'Cambridge and Oxford are great places for societies
'and particularly around the great art which is the favourite art
'of such people which is talking.'
So, as soon as James came here,
he would have been a good talker,
and people would have said, "that James character,
"we should have him in the Chitchat Society."
It is a place where you get together over a
glass in the evening with people you like,
and you would take it in turns to entertain each other.
But for Monty and many of his peers, the perfect soiree wasn't all talk.
As the evening wore on, Monty and his friends would often end
up on the floor engaged in lively horseplay.
They called this ragging and Monty was a dab hand.
One participant recalled writhing on the floor during the rag, with
Monty James' long fingers grasping at his vitals.
Monty later made a point of saying, "Sex is tiresome enough in novels.
"In a ghost story, I have no patience with it."
So what are we to make of the peculiarly tactile
nature of his writing?
Hairy clutching arms, slimy tentacled embraces?
Monty may have been a lifelong bachelor,
but he understood the frisson of physical contact.
What it touched was, according to his account,
a mouth...with teeth
and with hair about it.
And not, he declares, the mouth of a human being.
Like ragging, Monty's stories were perhaps an outlet for energies
he found difficult to express elsewhere.
Gordon Carey, a former chorister at King's, was one of a number
of younger men with whom Monty had close friendships
during his time at Cambridge.
Do you think your father had a particular sort of brightness
which appealed to Monty? He seems to have been drawn to intelligence.
I am not sure that his brightness wasn't his good looks. But...
I remember my father saying of him, long after his death,
"I suppose he was what would nowadays be called
"a non-practising homosexual."
So, that was Papa's opinion.
It feels like a very modern thing to place upon Monty James
because he is a very complicated man, I think,
but there is a strong sense that throughout his life,
he had passionate friendships but there almost seems to be no
evidence that anything...
I am sure there wasn't.
That was fairly general in those times.
He liked young people. And chatting with young people.
He was very genial.
It leapt towards him upon the instant,
and the next moment,
he was halfway through the window backwards,
uttering cry upon cry, at the utmost pitch of his voice.
And the linen face was thrust close to his own.
So it's not hard to see why Monty hit upon the idea
of entertaining the Chitchat Society with ghost stories
and why he followed them up with dozens more.
He could combine his historical expertise,
his scholarly fascination for the strange and obscure,
with his desire to thrill, delight, and above all,
to connect with his friends.
His face is not there,
because the flesh of it has been sucked away off the bones.
What else allows you to hold an audience in the palm of your hand,
to manipulate their emotions and expectations,
better than a ghost story?
What must have made the readings really compelling
was the rich detail and knowledge Monty brought to them.
It sounded as if he knew whereof he spoke.
Monty had started something of an institution.
His stories became an annual ritual at King's,
where he'd often present a new one each Christmas.
But he was hardly a prolific ghost story writer.
His academic commitments came first.
In addition to his duties at King's,
Monty had been appointed director at the Fitzwilliam Museum,
even before his catalogue of its manuscripts had been published.
Still only in his early 30s,
Monty was very much a Cambridge high flyer -
albeit something of a traditionalist.
Uncomfortable with pressures to modernise the university,
he was particularly resistant to women being awarded degrees.
Monty may have been blessed with a remarkable intellect,
but he wasn't exactly what we might call a free thinker.
The modern world was being born around him here at Cambridge,
but Monty's response seems to have been highly conservative.
And that suspicion of change, his struggle with it,
underlies what is perhaps his best-known story.
SOMETHING MOANS
Oh!
Set mainly on the Suffolk coast,
Oh, Whistle, And I'll Come To You, My Lad,
is the cautionary tale of Professor Parkins,
an overconfident Cambridge academic who represents a more modern,
rationalist mindset than Monty's own.
Parkins openly dismisses talk of the supernatural.
But during a golfing holiday by the seaside,
a terrifying encounter shakes his certainties.
It's not surprising Monty found the Suffolk coast so evocative.
The powerful winds blowing in from Scandinavia in northern Europe.
The sea defences struggling to hold back the water's relentless
attempts to reclaim the land.
Pagan, elemental forces are at work here.
Purposeful ones.
Wandering back from an afternoon on the links,
Parkins stumbles across a strange artefact.
Give a dog a bone.
A whistle with an engraving in Latin.
"Quis est iste qui venit?"
"Who is this who is coming?"
As Parkins soon discovers, something is indeed coming.
He can't resist blowing the whistle,
and finds himself caught in a strange dream.
He seems to have released some kind of power in the wind.
In the air itself.
Help!
Parkins represents the aggressive modernity that Monty despised
and possibly feared.
The elemental menace that he unleashes is a punishment,
not for his curiosity, but for his intellectual pride.
The dream finally crosses over into reality
when the bed sheets in Parkins' hotel room billow into life.
PARKINS WHIMPERS
The sense of being trapped in a waking nightmare was brilliantly
captured by Jonathan Miller in his celebrated television adaptation.
PARKINS GROANS
The real visceral power of Whistle,
is 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.
Actually, everything that happened in Whistle And I'll Come To You,
erm, he finds it hard to distinguish what he dreams about
and what he thinks he actually sees,
if indeed he actually sees anything.
PARKINS GROANS HELPLESSLY
There's a very particular sort of slowed-down groan
that Michael Hordern makes.
Well, that's what I remember,
in the moments when I've had bad dreams and have woken suddenly.
I often find it very difficult to articulate something.
I'll say, "Er, urgh...ohh,"
and then suddenly you wake up.
And then what has been in the dream diminishes and disappears,
but nevertheless, it remains perhaps for a little while
because the dream itself is very disconcerting.
Oh, no.
I always certainly think that that's it for Professor Parkins!
Yes, well, I don't think it is, you see.
I think what happens is that he would be,
if he told the story again when he went back to Cambridge,
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?
"But nevertheless, that moment, which was obviously a dream, erm,
"I did have a dream to that effect."
Oh, Whistle, And I'll Come To You, My Lad
features some of MR James' most memorable images,
captured in these illustrations
which were approved by Monty himself.
They were the work of a young artist called James McBride,
who would go on to play a pivotal role
in the publication of the ghost stories, and for a few years,
was perhaps the most important person in Monty's life.
Monty met James McBride around the time he presented his first
stories to the Chitchat Society.
McBride was a student at King's, ten years younger than Monty,
but they struck up a close friendship,
travelling together on Monty's beloved cycling holidays in Europe.
On one occasion in France, McBride disposed of a particularly
large spider that had crept into their bathroom.
Greater love hath no man.
This is Dippersmoor Manor in Herefordshire,
once the McBride family home,
where some of Monty's letters to James McBride have been preserved.
Should really blow the dust off,
there isn't really any, but it's...it feels correct.
Ah, there's some.
It's on King's College notepaper.
"My dear boy,
"long since I heard of you, but not so long since I wrote.
"What is happening? I hope you are getting along with your exams.
"I think you'd better keep Christmas here, had you not?"
This is the 3rd of January 1900.
"My dear boy, how are you?
"I took a slight influenza on Christmas Day,
"which has left me weak from that day to the next.
"My principal object in writing is to get news of you.
"I want to know that you are recovered
"and that you have had no relapses or other unpleasant adventures."
As many people commented, Monty's handwriting is execrable,
almost indecipherable.
Though at some point, in several of these letters, he refers back
to their beloved holidays in Scandinavia
and actually lapses into Danish or Swedish, I can't actually tell...
..cos I am not a scholar.
There's nothing hear that would trouble a biographer
trying to find hidden depths of passion,
but there is a gentle thread of affection and solicitude
from Monty towards McBride which is actually very touching.
Each of the letters begins, "My dear boy,"
and ends, "Ever your affectionate, MRJ."
James McBride's marriage in 1903 appears to have had no ill effect
on his friendship with Monty.
And that friendship seems to have led Monty to collect his early
stories in book form the following year.
And here it is, a first edition of Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary.
Very beautiful book.
Now nicely mottled and foxed with age as is appropriate.
I feel a bit like Monty must have done with his Medieval manuscripts.
McBride wanted to be an artist, and Monty probably saw the book
more as a means to promote his friend's work than his own.
There's a very good one here. Canon Alberic's Scrapbook.
It's probably the first visual representation
of one of Monty's demons.
The seated figure here was thought by many of Monty's friends
to be a thinly-veiled portrait of Monty himself.
He certainly looks as genial as everyone says.
It's very evocative.
The other thing that strikes you as unusual is the curiously
unfinished quality of this book. There are only four illustrations.
Monty may have meant it as a way of pleasing and promoting
James McBride, but it turned into something quite different.
A memorial.
In May 1904, McBride, who had trouble with his appendix,
became gravely ill.
Despite an apparent improvement, he died the following month,
with his wife still pregnant with their daughter.
McBride was buried in Lancashire on the 8th of June.
Monty, in the words of a friend, was broken hearted.
On the day of James McBride's funeral,
Monty took the train to Lancashire
carrying a selection of flowers from the Fellows' Garden at King's.
He waited until the other mourners had gone,
and then threw into McBride's grave lilac, honeysuckle and roses.
It wasn't in Monty's nature to be demonstrative about his feelings,
but that may well have been the saddest day of his life.
BELL TOLLS
Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary was published not long before
Christmas 1904, just a few months after McBride's death.
The book sold sufficiently well that a second impression was issued.
Not only his Cambridge friends,
but the public had a taste for MR James' ghost stories.
Inevitably, Monty was asked whether he believed in ghosts.
He gave a somewhat evasive answer.
"I am prepared to consider evidence
"and accept it if it satisfies me."
Perhaps it doesn't matter,
because what he clearly understood was fear, and he had
an uncanny skill for finding the exact words to express it.
That skill is especially evident in The Treasure Of Abbot Thomas,
the last tale in the collection.
Drawing on Monty's expertise in stained glass,
it tells of an antiquary who discovers a set of clues in some
windows that led him to a trove of buried gold in a German monastery.
Although the tale was inspired by Monty's fascination with windows,
its climax is perhaps the most claustrophobic in all his work.
The antiquary identifies the location of the treasure
in the monastery's well.
One night he descends into it to find the bag of gold.
Or what seems like it.
The great bag hung for a moment on the edge of the hole,
then it slipped forward onto my chest,
and put its arms around my neck.
CREATURE SLURPS
MAN SCREAMS
I believe that I am now acquainted with the extremity of terror
and repulsion that a man can endure without losing his mind.
I was conscious of a most horrible smell of mould.
Of something like a face pressed closely to my own,
moving slowly over it.
Of several, I don't know how many,
arms or legs or tentacles or something clinging to my body!
The Treasure of Abbot Thomas was among the first stories to
kindle my own passion for the work of MR James.
But I didn't encounter it in book form.
Rather, it was one of a series of television versions shown
every Christmas when I was a child.
Monty's most chilling phrases were brought to life by
a succession of fine actors.
I can vividly recall the BBC's MR James adaptations of the early '70s,
and the profound impact they had on me.
Robert Hardy's desperate exhortation,
"I must be firm,"
in The Stalls Of Barchester.
Michael Bryant's chillingly logical response
to The Treasure Of Abbot Thomas,
"It is a thing of slime. Slime and darkness."
And perhaps most memorable of all,
Peter Vaughan in A Warning To The Curious.
When asked what he will do
with his recently rediscovered crown of East Anglia, he simply says...
I'm going to put it back.
I beg your pardon? I'm going to put it back, back in the ground.
Everyone's in a hurry, hurry, hurry.
It was my love of these dramatisations that led me to direct
my own interpretation of an MR James story,
The Tractate Middoth.
TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS
My inspiration as a director is Lawrence Gordon Clark,
the man behind the 1970s adaptations.
His first rendering was The Stalls Of Barchester in 1971.
February the 21st.
I must be firm.
I was so excited to get this chance,
and erm, we were fortunate enough
to cast Robert Hardy to play the lead, and, erm...
He was terribly enthusiastic about it, cos he loved MR James.
He gave a superb performance.
BELL DINGS
Robert Hardy's portrayal of the murderous archdeacon
who gets his comeuppance
was wonderfully complemented by the evocative location filming.
FOOTSTEPS
James has a very strong sense of place and of location.
Were you drawing heavily on that from the written word?
Absolutely.
He gives you freedom to exploit and explore...
..English countryside, English architecture,
in a way very few people other than Dickens actually do.
It's a joy.
BELL TOLLS
And it gave one a wonderful excuse to rediscover or discover areas
and choose places where you could best impart tension and atmosphere.
You get into your little car and you set off with MR James
and a dog, if you've got one, and drive off for five days,
staying in unlikely pubs and walking and looking at places.
And finding yourselves in increasingly Jamesian hostelries?
Absolutely, looking nervously over your shoulders.
I think James was the absolute master. Why do you think that is?
What does James have that others don't? He has a great sense of evil.
He's a great manipulator, like all great storytellers.
To make people frightened when you want to, it's a wonderful power.
MAN GASPS
CLAW SCRATCHES
BODY CLATTERS TO THE GROUND
That's basically what we're all in this for, isn't it?
You know, it's that wonderful ability to entertain
and to entrance.
James had that.
Monty would go on to produce three more volumes' worth of stories,
usually unveiling a new tale every year.
And while he was now better known to the wider public as MR James,
the ghost story writer,
his academic duties at Cambridge remained
the overwhelming focus of his life.
In 1905, Monty was accorded the highest honour at King's,
he was elected Provost, or Head of the College.
Within a decade, he was also appointed
Vice Chancellor of the University.
As one of Monty's contemporaries later said,
"It really looked like he was leading a life without a jolt."
At least until events took a turn
that would leave no-one in Europe untouched.
It's difficult now for us
to realise the great traumatic psychological effect
of war at that time, because the late Victorian period
before the war seemed a very mellow, golden age.
Wonderful summers and the height of the British Empire and
we were on top of the world and everything was fine and so on.
And then, suddenly, four years of the leading nations in the world
tearing themselves to pieces
really made the watershed between eras.
The university provided a stream of young men for the officer class,
many of whom were known to Monty,
and many of whom never returned from the war.
A military hospital was even set up on the King's playing fields.
All around him, not only the reports of young people who he'd known being killed,
but also perhaps going daily
and seeing some of the ghastly effects of the war
and the gassing and shell shock, erm, had a terrible effect.
And also the point of Cambridge was lost
because you didn't have the teachers and you didn't have the students.
As a Victorian, which he was, erm,
he must have suddenly felt much older,
must have felt that everything he knew, all the relations,
all the symbols, all the myths, all the stories, all the friends,
were gone.
Monty never referred to the war directly in his ghost stories,
but his later works betray a deepening sense of loss and despair.
None more so than A Warning To The Curious, published in 1925.
It begins along familiar Jamesian lines, a treasure hunter
called Paxton uncovers a mythical Anglo-Saxon crown,
said to be imbued with magical powers...
..and is pursued by its guardian.
"What is to be done?" Paxton broke in impatiently.
"The truth is that I've never been alone since I touched it."
"There was always somebody, a man.
"I always saw him with the tail of my eye on the left or the right,
"and he was never there when I looked straight for him.
"I think he's there, but he has some power over your eyes.
"He won't forgive me. I can tell that."
A Warning To The Curious feels like a kind of companion piece to
Oh, Whistle, And I'll Come To You, My Lad.
But the playfulness of the earlier story is nowhere evident.
Paxton is a truly tragic character.
We sense his vulnerability from the outset,
and he pays very dearly for his theft.
His death has a symbolic, ritual quality to it.
We heard what I can only call a laugh.
And if you can understand what I mean by a breathless...
a lung-less laugh, then you have it.
But I don't suppose you can.
It came from below and swerved off into the mist.
We bent over the wall...
..and there was Paxton at the bottom.
You don't need to be told, of course, that he was dead.
His mouth was full of sand and stones.
And the teeth and jaw had been smashed to bits.
I only glanced once at his face.
A Warning To The Curious was Monty's last great ghost story.
It was included in his final collection,
published after his Cambridge days were over.
In a strange way, his life had come full circle.
In 1918, with the war still raging,
Monty had been invited to go back to Eton as Provost of the College.
He seized the chance
and was installed as Provost just a few weeks before Armistice Day.
Monty had returned to the place where he'd spent his adolescence,
perhaps his happiest years.
Coming back seems to have brought a similar contentment.
Monty was popular with his pupils,
largely thanks to his keen sense of humour.
This was something that sustained him,
even in the last months of his life,
when his health was failing badly.
At the end,
he had cancer, he knew he had cancer.
Er, he knew it was terminal unless he had an operation.
And he decided not to have an operation.
As a pupil at Eton in the 1930s, Adrian Carey regularly
visited the ailing Monty, a long-time friend of his father.
And I would find him in bed,
in a dressing gown with the bedclothes over it,
and I used to wonder,
"Surely you're getting pretty hot,"
but I think old people don't get hot in the same way!
And he would talk away, spilling tea down the dressing gown,
there was always a cup of tea there. It must have been nearly cold.
But he would still drink a little and then prattle away.
He would turn to Dickens or PG Wodehouse,
which were among his favourite reading.
He loved the moment when Bertie Wooster,
having been through some scrape or other,
appears like a tramp and approaches...
some respectable person who says to him,
"Sad piece of human wreckage though you look,
"you speak like an educated man."
And Monty applied this to himself in his dressing gown in bed...
As he lay there. ..in a feeble state. But, er, he was a lovely man.
Montague Rhodes James died in the Provost's Lodge at Eton
at three o'clock in the afternoon on the 12th of June 1936, aged 73.
BELL TOLLS
CHATTER
'It's 120 years since Monty unveiled his first two ghostly tales.
'He could never have imagined just how long his work would endure.'
It was a hand!
While Monty can be seen as very much a Victorian figure,
something about his personality resonates through the ages,
and I think chimes with anyone who loves horror and fantastic fiction.
His obsessive tendencies, interest in marginalia, and, above all,
his enthusiasm, mark him out as what we would perhaps call "a fan."
In his writing, his wry, scholarly eye and reticence
are immensely appealing.
But equally attractive is his desire to go for the jugular
when necessary, to show the horror lurking beneath the tattered shroud.
But it's important to remember that Monty intended his ghost stories
as entertainment, a pleasing terror.
And that's what the work of this immensely lovable,
talented man will continue to be.