Backlisted - Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary by M.R. James

Episode Date: October 31, 2023

Pour yourself a glass of sherry and light a candle, as we dedicate this year's Halloween special to Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), the first collection by M.R. James, probably the most celebrated and influential exponent of the weird tale. With the help of undead guests Andrew Male and Laura Varnam we illuminate the life and work of a strange and singular author, one whose writings, like the engraving in 'The Mezzotint', have truly taken on a life of their own. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BetterHelp.com. meeting with friends before the show, we can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. hello and welcome to the halloween edition of backlisted the podcast which raises old books from the grave today you find us on a desolate stretch of beach in Suffolk.

A bitter wind blows from the north. The pale ribbon of sand is intersected by black wooden groins, and the sea lies dim and murmuring as it stretches out to the darkening horizon. Some way behind, we notice a rather indistinct personage who seems to be making great efforts to catch up with us, but they make little, if any, progress. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, where people crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and joining us for this special Halloween episode, joining us for this special Halloween episode, episode 198. They tried to bury us, but we keep going like the zombie horde that we are.

Welcome back, Andrew Mayle and Laura Varnum. Hello. First up, we welcome back Batlisted's most celebrated revenant, master of the macabre, keeper of the dark vault, the fellow who put the folk into folk horror, Andrew, the indistinct personage male. Hello. Hello, Andrew. Hello, Andrew. It's very lovely to be here.

Andrew is a regular contributor to Mojo, the magazine, The Guardian, and The Sunday Times. He's also Sight & Sound magazine's regular TV columnist and presenter of the much vaunted Mojo Record Club podcast. Yeah. It is vaunted. It is vaunted. Much vaunted. Yeah, much vaunted. I'm given to understand people can actually listen to it now as well.

They can. Is that right? Yes. And for free, which is a revolution in the world of podcasting. Who is the most recent guest you've had on the Mojo podcast? Don't ask me who the most recent guest was, Andy, because I can't remember. Was it Andy Miller? No.

Where is my invitation? Where is my invitation? That's the issue. Anyway, who was the most... Was it Joni Mitchell? I think it was either Norman Blake of Teenage Fan Club or possibly James Skelly of The Coral.

The internet says it's The Coral. Okay, thank you. And all those previous episodes, like Prometheus and a certain certain publisher are now unbound and can be listed to yeah there's about 30 or three so you can just kind of brilliant work your way through them and um delight in the deep musical knowledge on offer okay great thank you for coming back uh and joining andrew for a fourth time we are are delighted to welcome back the tutoress of terror, the rector of the spectre,

the headmistress of the unheimlich, Dr. Laura Varnum, off of... Laura is... Hello, Laura. What, everybody? What? off of... Laura is... Hello, Laura. What, everybody? What?

Delighted to be back. Call back. Thank you. Laura is a lecturer in Old and Middle English at University College, Oxford. She's written a book on the late medieval church and co-edited an essay collection

on the medieval mystic spooky Marjorie Kemper. She's also a poet and is writing a feminist adaptation of Beowulf. And of course, it is Beowulf with which you first joined us on Batlisted. And then you were here for Daphne du Maurier, weren't you? I think that was first. I think it was Daphne first, then Beowulf. Oh, yeah.

Yes. And then you were here for Elizabeth Jane Howard. I was indeed. And what a special episode that was. That's one of my favourite of our Halloween episodes. But actually, I'll tell you what, it's really nice to put the old Halloween gang back together to do, well, John, why don't you say,

to do this specific author we've chosen for this year's special. This year. Could we just say listeners, John is not sexy. I mean, he is to some of you, I know, but he's ill. He's not sexy. He's ill. I'm ill, but I'm here, as they say.

The book we're here to discuss is a stony cold classic, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by Montague Road James or M.R. James or indeed Monty to his friends. It was first published by Edward Arnold in 1904 and it's widely regarded as one of the greatest collections of ghost stories ever published. And it's a foundation stone in the genre of horror writing. in the genre of horror writing. Comprising eight tales, each of them combining a strong sense of place, a middle-aged male scholar,

and the discovery of an object or a book that acts as a portal to the supernatural. They first emerged 140 years ago as a Christmas tradition at King's College, where every Christmas Eve, James would extinguish all the lights in his room, save a candle, and read a story out loud to the fellow members of the chit-chat club. Each story is a variation on the same theme, which James himself described as, 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 all but one of these stories has been adapted for the television

that's part of the bbc's kind of landmark ghost story for christmas series and we will be talking about that series as part of our discussion because obviously um that is a big uh part of the so-called folk horror revival of the last 10 or 15 years the rediscovery um republication of the bbc's ghost stories for Christmas. So we'll talk a little bit about those. But before we do that, let me ask you first, Laura, when did you first read the work of the master storyteller, M.R. James? Well, Andy, I have to confess, about a month ago, when you invited me to join you for Halloween again, I am absolutely ashamed. I am ashamed as a medievalist not to have read M.R. James. But since I started reading him, almost everyone I talk to is a massive M.R. James

fan, my students, my colleagues. And it's been absolutely fantastic. And I felt completely haunted and disturbed and troubled. So it's been great. I feel those all the time anyway. Those things. I don't need M.R. James for that stuff. Laura, also, we wanted to have you back for all sorts of reasons, but one of which is, of course, you are an actual Don like M.R. James.

So it's not just the spooky element of M.R. James' story that you must have found interesting. There's also the kind of the cloistered existence of the academics, such as it was 140, 130 years ago. Did you recognize any aspects of the academic existence in James' stories that you could relate to? I mean, there was definitely some that I couldn't relate to. My sense of the academics in James is that they have a great deal of time for leisure and play a lot of golf. They don't seem to do a lot of teaching. Any research they do gets them into all sorts of trouble outside the college. What I did relate to was the sort of sense that you can get of the, you know, being inside the cloistered walls, the kind of safety of the college that in some ways

keeps at bay the terrors outside. But certainly in terms of thinking about academic inquiry and curiosity and the sort of temptation of forbidden learning, that definitely spoke to me and the kind of frisson that you have when you find something in your research, particularly if you work on things as I do, like old church buildings and medieval crumbly texts. So yes, it's given me the fright of my life, I have to admit. That's so interesting. Gosh, we're going to come back around to that. Andrew, though, let me ask you as well. When did you first... I suppose there's two questions really for you.

When can you first remember a story by M.R. James in whatever format? And when did you first become aware it was by M.R. James? I think the first time I encountered a story by M.R. James would have been as one of the ghost stories for Christmas in the 1970s. I was allowed to stay up late on

Christmas Eve, the eve of Christmas Eve, and watch. And I think the first one I remember seeing is A Warning to the Curious. And I liked how they seemed to simultaneously comfort and unnerve.

This kind of evocation of a remote, isolated, rural Britain that seemed kind of beautiful and unsettling. And going back to them as well, just that kind of thing that's really striking about them that makes them spooky is their use of silence and their use of kind of weird sort of electronic drones and keening violins on the soundtrack it was probably watching those ghost stories that got me into spooky literature and horror films in general that was probably the the gateway drug. M.R. James was my gateway drug. Those in turn, those TV adaptations,

become lost artifacts themselves, don't they? I mean, we deal with them now as though they've been common currency for the last 50 years. But of course they haven't. They were released on DVD by the BFI about 10 years ago. But until then, they were tremendously difficult

to get to see. Well, especially until YouTube. I mean, when YouTube arrived, there was a real sense of revelation when people started posting their VHS copies of them. Yeah. And that kind of faded VHS quality

adds something to the uncanny, eerie nature of them. So when you couldn't watch them on the telly, that's probably when I sought out the short stories. And we'll talk a little bit about his style later. But at first, when I was kind of about 11 or whatever,

I found the opening preamble of the M.R. James Ghost story incredibly boring as a young man. I would always jump and skip to the spooky bits. But rereading them for this, and actually not just rereading them for this, reading them in my 20s and then 30s, you realize how integral that introduction, that preamble, that entry into the world is.

John, I don't know, when did you first, I don't know, read M.R. James? Should I tell you when I first read m.r james it's about a month ago um when we were reading i i felt i feel i've known his work all my life but i had i realized i'd never actually read any of the stories i knew what they were about i'd watched the tea i'd like uh you and andrew i've i'd seen several of the ghost stories at christmas so I'd seen several of the ghost stories at Christmas. So it's almost like M.R. James had sort of seeped into my unconscious in a way.

And what I found incredibly pleasurable was actually reading. And for this, I've obviously read the book we're talking about, but I read the whole, all 33 of the ghost stories and have not enjoyed myself more for a long, long time. Believe the hype, everyone. They're both incredibly familiar, but you're reading something, the detail of them is what I found quite striking, that they were different in some ways, different to what I expected. In other ways, exactly what we've sort of, the culture, I think the culture, as you say,

folk horror kind of has come out of these stories. Let me give you the biography then of Montague Rhodes James, because I think it's important to set up these stories as a product of time and place. And I'm going to ask Andrew and Laura to comment on how they feel that feeds into the work after we've gone over the details of the biography.

So M.R. James was born in 1862 at Goodnestone in Kent. His father was perpetual curate, though they soon moved to Suffolk, and Suffolk is, of course of the setting of so many of James's stories he was educated at Eton and then at King's College Cambridge he took a first and became in due course fellow dean tutor and in 1905 provost in 1895 the year he was awarded his DLIT degree he published the first of his pioneering descriptive catalogs of manuscripts and the same year also saw the magazine publication of the two earliest ghost stories canon alberic scrapbook and lost hearts ghost stories of an antiquary

a collection of eight stories including these first, which is the book we're focusing on today, appeared in 1904. And there are three further volumes, more ghost stories of an antiquary 1911, a thin ghost and others 1919, and a warning to the curious 1925. The collected ghost stories was published in 1931, and it has been in print ever since. But he didn't just write and tell ghost stories and scholarly publications. James also wrote two popular architectural and historical guidebooks, one to Abbey's and one to Suffolk and Norfolk,

a children's fantasy called The Five Jars. You haven't read that, have you? No, I haven't. The Five Jars, 1922. If any listeners have read that, do tell us what it's like. As well as publishing a volume of recollections, Eton and King's 1926, and a translation of 40 Hans Anderson stories. In 1918, he accepted the provostship of Eton,

and in 1930 received the Order of Merit. And it says here, he died, comma, unmarried, comma, in the Provost's Lodge at Eton in 1936. I think it's important to get the details of the life because, Andrew, I found on revisiting the stories for this, they are much more the product of the cloisters of the university than I remembered them being. Absolutely.

Two of the things that struck me. One is that sense of him unearthing objects from the pre-Christian past to scare us with. You know, the fact that he is going deep into, because I guess he was working in the early days of what would now be called medieval studies and going deep into these medieval texts and finding medieval ghosts, you know, finding stories of ghosts from medieval times and finding kind of haunted objects from medieval times and then bringing them back into the present so the idea of the that you know the whistle or the or the ash tree these are pre-christian items with which to scare and he's kind of like in the same way that an antiquarian would unearth

these objects he's unearthing them with which to terrify us. But the other fact that I find is absolutely interesting is that sense in which there is that world of the male-ordered intellectual world of the often quite lonely single man and how it is kind of upended by these encounters with the supernatural so all these things that these lonely academics surround themselves with the you know the rational and the certain are just kind of blown out of the water and there's something quite lonely about these stories. And there's a real sense of kind of both James and his characters

keeping something at bay all the time. Endlessly pursued, right? Yes, absolutely. By the other, by the self. Yeah, and also, you know, there are so many readings in terms of James' bachelordom.

There are so many readings of his text, especially something like A Whistle Now Come to You, My Lad, with its seductive title, that can be read as the fear of the erotic self, the kind of the fear of the repressed, and all that kind of stuff. James would have been the first

person to sort of poo-poo all that and sort of reject anything like Freudian reading of his stories. But he would say that. But he was almost exact contemporary of Freud. Yeah, exactly. And he drew up these

lists of academics who he disliked. And Freud wasn't in it, but it was people like Huxley and bertrand russell and john maynard canes and everything and they were the the new wave of academics and they were the ones who were kind of interested in the human psychology and there is this sense of like as andy says of that fear of something being unearthed which shouldn't be which is what all his stories are about laura what do you in your reading of james can you

enumerate a few of the things that you think james might be scared of when he's not trying to scare us what are the things that cause him distress? I mean, as specific or general as you like. I think actually one of the things, to follow on from what Andrew's just said, is that actually the academic life might be quite hollow. And that all of these texts that you're trying to constantly uncover to find the true answer or to justify your existence as a lonely bachelor, there might be nothing there on the one hand. Or in fact, there might be something awful there. There's this real sense of a desire to possess knowledge that then turns

into being possessed. One is possessed in these stories by demons and devils. And a real feeling that in these medieval texts that he's looking at, I mean, his knowledge is just extraordinary across so many fields from biblical apocrypha to Christian archaeology, biblical apocrypha to sort of Christian archaeology, churches. His catalogue of manuscripts is just unparalleled. But there's always this sense when someone is almost overproductive, you know, that they're trying to hide from something or to use all of that knowledge to escape from something. The knowledge is, if you will, whistling in the

dark. It's like the sense that, well, this is holding the darkness at bay, but be under no illusion, it's there. Yeah. And many of the medieval texts that James is interested in, that I teach, have within them this fear of the known and the unknown, the kind of fear of the pagan past that Andrew was talking about, that the Christian edifice is built on these pagan foundations and that if you dig down into them, you might find things that are frightening, that you can't read, runic inscriptions that you don't know what they mean, and that your knowledge, and particularly your Christian knowledge, might be found wanting.

You know, the kind of ultimate sort of imposter syndrome as an academic. You don't know what you're talking about. The document might crumble in your hand, right? The document and what it represents, its meaning and its substance, might crumble away to dust. John, I just want to bounce to John and ask you. to dust um john john i'm just want to bounce to john and ask you john two of the things it strikes me that uh monty james was disturbed by are women and hair um he he so many of the manifestations of his of evil let's call it evil tend to have thin wisps of hair over emaciated frames.

They're not female per se, are they? But there's a kind of physical terror of intimacy. It sounds like I'm giving a proper Freudian interpretation of these stories, and yet at the same time, however jolly he might seem, however clubbable and sherry by candlelight, there's still a kind of where does the loathing stem from? It stems from the body, often. Yeah, I mean, it's one of the things that really stands out about the stories is that kind of, I mean, he's kind of brilliant in the way that he, and it makes them very difficult to adapt, is that he gives you this sense of genuine, visceral, physical horror. I mean, you're right to say that it's Freudian, the sort of fear of the body and fear of hair. So many, I don't know if you've noticed this, Laura, but so many of the ghosts are women.

There's famously no women in, I've been listening to it on audio and Rachel's saying, oh my God, is it another story about a middle-aged academic with no women in it? I said, yes, it is. But often the ghosts are women, aren't they? I mean, I could talk about the ash tree lace, particularly brilliant female kind of spectral presence in it, but he's not interested in explaining or understanding what these ghosts are. He's not interested in psychoanalysis or psychologizing the stories. He's just pursuing the things that he fears the most.

And he was a man who was cloistered in academia and probably was a closet homosexual. But we don't know that absolutely. But he did seem to have strong friendships with men. Out of that repression comes these extraordinary stories. Going back to the thing about academic learning, a lot of the characters who are punished in James' stories are similar to him. They're dilettantes.

They're people who, as going back to what Laura was saying, their knowledge crosses boundaries. They're not just focused on one subject. And yet within his stories, when people stray from one subject to another, they're punished for it. If their Latin is a little rusty, or their knowledge of a particular area of antiquarian study is not up to scratch, they'll get it in the neck

and it's so it's interesting how so often that it's almost like james himself is the subject of yeah punishment there's a sort of weird massacism going on in the stories as well i think one of the things that struck me um i'm just going to read something in a sec but one of the things that struck me was so interesting is on revisiting the stories how particular and specific and geographically um located they are uh and and the more you look at them the more they seem incredibly unlikely to spread out to a mass audience and yet that's exactly what they've done over the course of a century it seems it seems more baffling to me having gone back and read them again, than less, that they have that power because so much they're rooted in such a specific time and place. And we're going to move on to discussing specific stories from Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in a moment.

But I wanted to just share with you something that seems to sum up a lot of what we've talked about already. In 1990, our much-loved backlisted author, Penelope Fitzgerald, produced a novel called The Gate of Angels. And given that this is a slightly retrospective episode, it seemed lovely to bring Penelope Fitzgerald back into the frame with a book that we didn't talk about when we made a show on her work. And it's set in Cambridge in 1912 amongst the academics. And Penelope Fitzgerald said she put it there and then for two reasons. Firstly, because she was fascinated by the debates that were going on about the absurdity of the mind-body relationship in academic circles at that time. And also because her uncle had known Monty James. Her uncle had attended some of the ghost story readings by the provost, who was M.R. James, who would gather undergraduates and colleagues together in his rooms, normally on Christmas Eve, light a candle and read his latest story.

And presumably many of these stories were intended to play well with that audience. So they're full of in-jokes references to whatever academic discourse was happening at the time. Anyway, Penelope Fitzgerald in this novel, chapter 17 is called Dr. Matthew's Ghost Story. And it contains a absolutely perfect pastiche of an N.R. James ghost story. But rather than read you that, because we're going to hear the real thing after the break, I thought it might be really fun to hear Penelope Fitzgerald's account of how a story came into being in Monty James's mind and how it affected his listeners. So that's what we're going to hear. Since the meeting of the Disobligers Society, Dr Matthews, aka M.R. James, had been pondering over Fred's accident and had come to regard it as much

more mysterious than it really was. Rayburn could tell him so little, but then Rayburn, though he worked conscientiously, was a fool. He made a series of notes that Carter, who was responsible for the accident that disappeared. One would assume that, having seen what he had done, he ran away, not down the road, but into the open country. What kind of country is it? Open, hedgeless country, with lines of willows marking the streams, such as you find in our inland fen country. Where to hide? Very hard to say. We must assume that the Carterter either wanted to get to his home, or since that would hardly be the best place for someone being inquired for by the police,

let us say to a safe friend. He was a local man, the farmer said, and our local men are not great travellers. He may have lodged in a barn or between two potato clumps, but in the end, he would have had to go back to the road and proceed on foot. But he was not seen on the road. I return then to the carter. The carter could be heard, seen, shaken hands with, and I dare say if he was an honest day worker he could also be smelled. Yet he was not found on the road. He was not found on either side of the road or anywhere within many miles of it. I believe, after all, that the best way to the truth may be to tell you a story. We shall have to proceed, you see, by analogy, which is a less respectable method than it

used to be with theologians, but more respectable, I am told, with scientists. That is to say, I am going to compare the present moment with a past one, in the hope that it may throw a little light on our difficulties. I say this even although I do not much care for talking about or even remembering my experiences of 42 years ago. You will have to see what you can make of them. And then the story begins. So Fitzgerald utterly brilliantly takes you through the thought process, the raison d'etre of a Monty James ghost story. He then tells us, the reader, the story. And it's followed with this postscript.

tells us, the reader, the story, and it's followed with this postscript. Dr. Matthew's story was written. Where and to whom should it be read aloud? This was the second part of his usual exorcism of whatever lay on his mind. It was his habits to wait until October for the Feast of All Souls and All Saints, when the past year's dead are invited to return from their uncanny kingdom to their old places and sit at their own table. He often read aloud this season to the Burrowers, a society for medieval paleographers. But he did not feel like waiting for their next meeting. A singular impatience, he said to himself. Crossing the protector's court at St. James's with his manuscript in his pocket, he met the junior dean. Ah, Hartley!

Hartley could scarcely refuse to spare his provost half an hour. The two of them went back to Dr. Matthews's house. When the reading was over, Dr. Matthews read deliberately, imitating each voice in turn. He paused and looked searchingly through his round glasses. I enjoyed that very much, Provost, said the junior dean. There was silence, which couldn't be what was required. So he added, there was a certain symbolism in it, I thought, and perhaps a hint of sex? I hope there is nothing of the kind.

I never make alterations in my stories once written, and I shan't alter this one. Still, as I say, there is, I hope, nothing of the kind. Sex is tiresome enough in novels. In a ghost story, I should have no patience with it. Surely if one doesn't find sex tiresome in life, it won't be tiresome in fiction, said the junior dean. I do find it tiresome in life, Dr. Matthews replied, or rather I find other people's concern with it tiresome. One is told about it and told and told. is told about it and told and told and there you have the anatomy of monty james laid bare by penelope fitzgerald i think and that's almost almost a direct quote of something that james himself said about sex and the ghost story as well so perfect. And that seems like a very good point, to take a quick break and hear from voices from beyond the veil.

And we'll join you again in a moment. Thank you. All right. Right. So before we turn our attention to the individual stories in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, we've talked about the stories as the product of a specific time, place,

thology, all those things. When you watch one of the ghost stories for Christmas on the BBC, such as I whistle and I'll come to you or a warning to the curious. When you watch night of the demon in no sense are those shackled to the specificity of where and when they were written. Absolutely not, no. And I would be interested to know what you think it is that has endeared them to generation after generation of reader then. I think it is that thing that we talked about earlier, that sense of people unearthing something that upsets their ordered world, that sort of opens up the ideological abyss, all those things in which you shore around yourself. To me, to stop yourself going mad in a way. But I also think that one of the things that's really significant

about M.R. James' ghost stories and the way in which they're different from other ghost stories is M.R. James' ghosts, for the most part, don't haunt. They're not located in buildings. You don't go to a haunted house and find a ghost there they are awoken they are unearthed they are disturbed they are sentinels watching over something that should not be opened or should not be disturbed or they are punishers who punish the curious you know the the curiosity right is the is the great cat killer yeah in in these stories right the curiosity is often presented as

sort of benign and unthinking rather than the product of deep ambition yeah i think that's one of the really interesting things about it, that a kind of idle curiosity is almost more dangerous, that there's both a real serious curiosity and a desire to know. But this kind of, and you will talk about this with Whistle, that Professor Parkins just thinks, oh, just blow this whistle, see what happens. You know, don't do that kind of thing. Just don't do it. Don't pull that string. Don't do that. Maybe just don't. A button mark, do not press. That's the fundamental thing, isn't it? Now, let me press that. It's a terrifying thing. I was watching this with previous backlisted guests and my current partner, Marie Phillips. And Marie said to me,

would you blow the whistle? And I went, absolutely not. And she said, Marie Phillips. And Marie said to me, would you blow the whistle? And I went, absolutely not. And she said, I would. Would she? And so we're done for, we're cursed now. I look forward to Halloween around yours. That'd be very good. But one of the things about that, there is something about it. There's a class thing going on there as well, isn there there's something in m.r. james which is about knowing your place and kind of just oh absolutely how do you yeah yes and stay agree staying in your lane staying in your lane yeah yeah and not literally and metaphorically not crossing over boundaries not putting a foot into that you know old templar church but also not meddling in in areas that don't belong to you, not kind of, you're an ontologist,

you're not a medieval scholar, don't go into that little area, you know. So there's very much a sense, and also I think, I felt re-watching Night of the Demon, did anyone not just feel a little bit of sympathy for Carswell? Totally, yes. Especially in the actual original casting of The Rune.

It's almost like he's been, it's like the worst kind of peer review that he's subjected to. He's not one of us. Yeah. He's not one of us. He's vulgar. I know.

He's got money. He writes a vulgar book. He writes a vulgar book and everyone makes fun of it. And in all the versions of casting The Runes, in the 1970s TV version as well, people mock Carswell. They make fun of it. And in all the versions of Casting the Runes, in the 1970s TV version as well, people mock Carswell.

They make fun of him. He's not a proper scholar. He's not a proper intellectual. I'm on his side. Okay, so we're talking about adaptations of M.R. James. And because this is Halloween, and M.R. James' stories were meant to be listened to, weren't they?

That's the thing. They were written to be read to, weren't they? That's the thing. They were written to be read aloud. We've got a little quiz now, and fellow panel members, you are going to hear an excerpt from an audiobook reading of a story by MR James. I would like you to identify the reader of the story and then, for a bonus point, the story in question. So I'm going to start with you, John, and because you're very poorly,

I've given you the easiest one. So could we hear clip number one, Nicky? Everyone who has traveled over eastern England knows the smaller country houses with which it is studied. They're rather dank little buildings, usually in the Italian style, surrounded with parks of some eighty to a hundred acres. For me, they have always had a very strong attraction, with the grey paling of split oak, the noble trees, the mirrors with their reed beds, and the line of distant woods. Then I like the pillared portico,

perhaps stuck on to a red-brick Queen Anne house, which has been faced with stucco to bring it into line with the Grecian taste of the end of the 18th century. The hall inside, going up to the roof, which hall ought always to be provided with a gallery and a small organ. I like the library too, where you may find anything from a psalter of the 13th century to a Shakespeare quarto. Marvellous.

That's obviously from The Ash Tree. And I... Obviously. That's your bonus point. And who was that? Is it Michael Horton? Oh, it's not Michael Horton.

I'm so sorry. It's Derek Jack. It's Derek. It's our old friend about listed. So you get the bonus point, but not the point. That's one point to John Mitch. And I'm sorry,

John, let's move on to Laura. Here comes your one. I want to hear, no, who is reading the story. And then I would like to know the story in question please. Seabar on the east coast along seafront and a street red cottages church and distant

Martello tower to the south I used to go there pretty regularly for golf in the spring. I would put up at the bear with a friend called Henry Long, and we used to take a sitting room and be very happy there. Since he died, I haven't cared to go there, and I don't know that I should anyhow, after the particular thing that happened on our last visit. Laura, who was that? I think it's warning to the curious is the story. It is a warning to the curious, the bonus point.

And who is the... The voice, oh my goodness. No, Andrew and John, you can't have this no i'm gonna guess christopher lee but i don't think that's right get in come on get in come in it was it's lord summer isle himself the white okay well that's excellent and let's turn to you, Nikki. Put yourself on mic, please. Okay.

Here I am. Oh, shit, as Nikki was saying. Hi, Nick. Hi. Feeling really confident here. We're going to hear an excerpt from a story. So tell me who's reading it and which story it is, please. I hope it's one of the three that I've read.

By what means the papers out of which I have made a connected story came into my hands is the last point which the reader will learn from these pages. But it is necessary to prefix my extracts from them, a statement of the form in which I possess them. They consist then partly of a series of collections for a book of travels, such a volume as was a common product of the 40s and 50s. Horace Marriott's Journal of a Residence in Jutland and the Danish Isles is a fair specimen of the class to which I allude. Nicky.

Well, the one of the ones I thought it was in Sweden that he went to the one I read and the story is and the story is Count Magnus oh yes bonus points

okay well and we've heard the name of that reader already there's the clue do you know what because I have the initials of who what the answers are in the clips

I put two and two together and thought that John gave me the answer here. He did. That is Michael Horton. It is Michael Horton. Very good. Okay.

All right. And finally then we turn to, let's just say, you know, we're having a nice time, aren't we? Everyone's level peg. Andrew Nail, here is your clip. Who is the narrator and what is the story? What he saw made him very nearly drop the candle on the floor. And he declares now that if he had been left in the dark at that moment, he would have had a fit.

But as that did not happen, he was able to put the light on the table and take a good look at the picture. It was rankly impossible, no doubt, but absolutely certain. It was rankly impossible, no doubt, but absolutely certain. In the middle of the lawn in front of the unknown house, there was a figure where no figure had been at five o'clock that afternoon. It was crawling on all fours toward the house, and it was muffled in a strange black garment with a white cross on the back. Well, it's obviously the mezzotint.

It is the mezzotint. That's your bonus point correct but who but who was reading that i have no idea i'm gonna guess at colin jevons oh that's a very good guess god colin jevons that's a good guess no anyone else wants to hazard a guess about who which recently deceased actor was reading the mezzo tint there I can give you the initials if that helps. Yeah, tell them. Okay, M.M. Oh, it's Michael... No, it's gone. It's the late Murray Melvin. Murray Melvin? Murray Melvin.

From The Taste of Honey, Smashing Time, The Devils, and all sorts of other brilliant ones. And it's a fantastic reading, Murray Melvin's reading, because it's done not in the ponderous and sepulchral terms of Christopher Lee, but in the rather waspish tones that bring out the kind of more camp element of James. And I would really recommend that's on YouTube.

He doesn't, there's no other readings by Murray Melvin or MR James stories, but that one is really worth, that's worth checking out. That's a great point, Andy, that they are quite camp. Yes,

they are. They're quite performative. Well, they were. And why? Because they were made to be performed in a room lit by a candle to a group of young men the other thing that's worth mentioning about the clips that you played is and i did obviously i was saying earlier that i did it i downplayed them myself when i was um

younger but how great james was a great mimic but he wasn't just a great mimic of voices. He was a great mimic of literary styles. And how brilliantly he evokes the feel of a European guide and then gradually there's this kind of peeling away of style to reveal something horrible at their heart. But that only works because he's such a brilliant literary mimic. Tell us then about your choice of story from Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Which one have you gone for? I've chosen A Whistle and I'll come to you my lad and i'm and for those of you if anyone who hasn't read it could you give us just your one line blurb about what happens in this story a rational oxford academic with a poor

understanding of latin blows a cursed ancient whistle belonging to the knight's templar and unwittingly summons a malevolent spirit. That's going to go wild on TikTok. Thank you very much. That's good. That's wonderful. Thank you very much. And now, Whistler, I'll come to you. One of the early stories, one of the famous stories. How does James achieve the effects he achieves in that story? It's like so many of his stories. It's kind of what I said about it's this gradual peeling away of the comforting elements of the stories until you reveal something horrible and it's about a character who is very kind of ordered and cozy and quite foosty in his kind of notion of personal space

and the ordered world and so james places him in this kind of you know holiday cottage and gradually just kind of loosens his grip on the the ordinary the rational the normal and the thing that I think is kind of quite terrifying about it is that in many ways that the ghost is, there's absolutely nothing there, the nothingness of the ghost. It seems when it appears, it says there seemed to be absolutely nothing material about it, save the bedclothes of which it had made itself a body. of which it had made itself a body. And I re-watched with Marie, I re-watched the 1968 TV version by Jonathan Miller. And the interesting thing about that is he says at the start what he thinks it's about. So there's a quote at the start which says,

it's a story about the dangers of intellectual pride and how a man's reason can be overthrown when he fails to acknowledge those forces inside himself. So it kind of gives you one particular interpretation of it. But one of the things that's brilliant about it is you realize that these, I think we kind of mentioned it before, these are very lonely men. These are kind of lonely men sort of going about through their sort of very ordered and solitary worlds. And he often takes these academic men

and then places them outside of the world of academia where they seem utterly vulnerable. And the thing that really struck me about the adaptation, which Michael Horton, who we've heard earlier, plays the main character, is that Jonathaner also makes him quite childlike and then people said this about mr james that he was somebody who because he'd never existed outside of academia he was very much like a child um the his friend and fellow cambridge fellow a.c benson said um he hates and fears

all problems all speculation all originality or novelty his spirit is both timid and unadventurous i don't know anyone alive who knows so much or so little worth knowing his knowledge is extraordinary but it's mainly concerned with unimportant matters. He has no intellectual, religious, or philosophical interests. It's a beautiful sort of life, in a way, but a superficial one when all is said. And I think that's kind of the thing that's striking about I Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad. So many of the men in James' stories, they lack for something. They are innocents. Innocents abroad.

And again, going back to the masochistic, so often they're looking for something and they find something and they're punished for it. If they were alive today, they'd have a podcast. They would, yes. No, that's exactly what Marie said. That's exactly what she

said. They are those kinds of men. They are men together in a community of men who don't quite know how to express themselves. Welcome to Backlisted. Andrew, that's brilliant. So interesting. Laura, which story did you choose from Tales of Manticore? So I chose Lost Hearts and can you give us a line on that please? I can Orphan Stephen's uncle turns out to be malevolent rather than benevolent and both Stephen and Mr Abney

thank you very much both Stephen and Mr Abney are menaced by the ghosts of the children he has removed very very good thank you so Lost Hearts was one of the early adaptations by Lawrence Gordon Clark for the ghost stories for Christmas and is perhaps the most grisly of the stories, as indeed befits the subject of this one. Laura, what role does learning play in this story? It's slightly more malicious, isn't it? Very much so. And the reason I chose this story is because I found it just utterly unbearable. I thought it was just unspeakable and it genuinely haunted me and the adaptation. And I actually had nightmares about the children. It's this version of the kind of gothic house story, you know, rather than a mad woman in the attic, we've got this evil scholar in the library and these

vengeful ghosts of the children. And the horror, it's so incredibly done. There is the grisly horror of the ghosts of these two children, the boy with transparent hands and fearfully long nails and a black and gaping rent on his side where his heart has been removed. And that is appalling. But what's really, really appalling is how the story concludes with Mr. Abney's papers, where we find out what it is he's actually been doing and why these ghosts have been haunting Stephen and then come to punish Mr. Abney. One of the things that James said about ghosts is that he felt they ought to be malevolent and odious. And he means malevolent in that etymological sense of bearing a very ill will against the person they are haunting.

But at the end, we get this passage from Mr. abney's papers where he explains that he has in his words been absorbing the hearts of these children under 12 to gain magical powers and immorality and i'll just read a little extract from what he says and this is i mean it's utterly chilling he says to the testing of the truth of this receipt i have devoted the greater part of the last 20 years, selecting as the corpora vilia of my experiment such persons as could conveniently be removed without occasioning a sensible gap in society. The first step I effected by the removal of one Phoebe Stanley, a girl of gypsy extraction on March the 24th, 1792. The second by the removal of a wandering Italian lad named Giovanni Paoli on the night of March the 23rd, 1805. The final victim to employ a word repugnant in the highest degree to my feelings must be my cousin Stephen

Elliot. And this phrase corpora vilia is this Latin term that means a body living or dead that has so little value it can be used for any kind of experiment. I mean, emotional detachment barely covers what's going on here. The lack of empathy, the lack of humanity. Yeah. Horrifying. It's fundamentally a Nazi perspective on how you achieve your ends

via disposing for experiments of people who won't be missed or don't deserve to be here anyway. Which is a fairly heavy thing to be carrying around in the late 19th century. Yeah, extraordinary.

Very much so. And, you know, spoke to all kinds of things going on in the world today, and it just really, you know, it did really stay with me. You know, fashions come and fashions go, but evil never goes out of style, does it? That's the great news. Sadly not. John, which story have you chosen?

I've chosen The Ash Tree, which is a story that is… Can you give us a line? Give us a line. What's your pitch? The pitch is a large country house and a tree, The pitch. The pitch is a large country house and a tree. And within that tree live things that mean no good.

They are. It's a very, very, very, as they say, there is something more than we know of in that tree. And discovering exactly what it is that lives in the tree is what the story tells. It's a terrifying story. Come on, nature writing. Yeah, yeah. That's what's in here.

Come on, nature writing. Yeah, come on, yeah. Sinister. There's an interesting perspective on women in this story, eh, Johnny? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's quite grim, isn't it? It's set in the mid-18th century, but most of the action, the important things happened at the end of the 17th century,

and M.L. James loved the 17th century. So it's got all the things that you would love in an M.L. James story. It's East Anglia, country house. There's a lot of stuff about architecture, which he likes to rant about, know about how the hall has been badly improved i mean it was a many of a kind of older building that's been fancified and turned into a sort of a fancy italian uh palace but of course the thing that's lurking at the heart of the story is witchcraft and matthew fell who's one of the characters in the story is probably feels like

there's a bit of uh of witch finder general matthew hopkins in there and mrs mother soul great name there's a there's a bishop called killmore which is just he loves a bit of you know bit of a pun mother soul the witch is put to death clearly you wrongly. And I suppose she wreaks her vengeance. You first meet her, quite an odd thing to be doing, but she's in the tree outside Matthew Fell's window, collecting sprigs of the ash tree. And when he chases her, it appears through the narrative, she seems to turn into a hare. Anyway, she's a witch and nothing quite prepares you for where this story takes you. And that's one of the reasons I really like it.

There is a little bit of a foreshadowing, I think we call it, where he says, what is it that runs up and down the stem of the ash? It is never a squirrel. They will all be in their nests by now. And you think, okay, what is it? The vicar looked and saw the moving creature, but he could make nothing of its colour in the moonlight. The sharp outline, however, seen for an instance, was imprinted on his brain, and he could have sworn, he said,

though it sounded foolish, that squirrel or not, it had more than four legs. Squirrel or not. Squirrel or not. It's the charm there. I'll read another little bit because this is i think this is him at his best so matthew fell is found dead and black in his bed and nobody knows why he died there's this terrible sickness pestilence known as the castringham sickness that's been killing sheep and animals and somehow you're getting the feeling that wherever the sickness

is coming from the throbbing heart of the sickness is this ash tree outside the window and his grandson sir richard fell the one the modernizer the one who's building all the fancy italian uh kind of bits he sleeps in the same room uh which is where matthew fell which everybody tells him what was it you know don't push the button why sleep in the same room, which is where Matthew fell, which everybody tells him. What was it? You know, don't push the button. Why sleep in the room where your ancestor died, you idiot? Yeah.

Yeah. Don't do that. And guess what happens? So, and now we are in his bedroom and the light out and the squire in bed. The room is over the kitchen and the night outside still and warm. So the window stands open don't leave your window open not when there's something that's got more than four legs running up and down the tree squirrel or not there is squirrel or not better name for the story actually there is a very

little light about the bedstead and there is a strange movement there it seems as if sir richard were moving his head rapidly to and fro with only the slightest possible sound. And now you would guess, so deceptive is the half-darkness, that he had several heads, round and brownish, which moved back and forward, even as low as his chest. It's a horrible illusion. Is it nothing more? There, something drops off the bed with a soft plump, like a kitten, and is out of the window in a flash another four and after that there is quiet again thou shalt seek me in the morning and i shall not be so this is sorted sort of okay they check in the bible and then as with sir matthew so with sir richard spoiler alert dead and black in his bed what what's been going on What is it in the tree? Ah!

You'll have to read the story to find out. I mean, it's one of the, it's also one of the adaptations that, of course, they struggle with slightly, don't they? Totally. Because if you make, what?

Put those non-squirrels on screen, you've got quite a challenge. But anyway. I think they do quite a good job. They do quite a good job. It's one of those stories which just makes you, you know, this is what you can do on the page, isn't it? challenge but anyway i think they do quite a good job they do quite it's one of those stories which just makes you you know this is what you can do on the page isn't it you can make your flesh yeah

it makes you literally makes you flesh it's great it's great all right so i'd like to talk about my my choice of story is the mezzo tint the mezzo tint was my first mr james story and it remains my favorite mr james story um i will pitch it in one line, which is, you won't believe how much this picture of a country house has changed, exclamation mark. I'm clicking on that link. It's a proper clickbait. If you don't know the story of the Mesotint, it's basically some academics look at a picture

and every time they look at it, it's changed and something horrible it manifests itself in the picture so going back to the mezzo tin it occurs to me that the first thing to say about it is the picture you can way the action within the picture unfolds is how the action often unfolds in an M.R. James story, in a ghost story. It has the typical structure. You are shown a scene from the past which is static.

Into it crawls a threat. It manifests itself visually as something thin and bent with a thin layer of hair. And then it vanishes into the background, leaving you with the same static image that you started with, except you can't look at it the same way. And that seems to me to be Monty characterizing his own method via the metaphor of the picture itself. And now, if that's true, in a sense, the next bit is even more interesting. I ended up thinking that this story, the mezzotint, is an actual metaphor for academic versus popular discourse.

How different groups of people talk about art, talk about literature or paintings or whatever. And by extension, therefore, it's a sly comment on how James's stories, he had lost control of them. The picture becomes this thing where it is viewed by his colleagues with degrees of learning and understanding by the narrator's colleagues, but gradually it is viewed by people from outside the college and they interpret it their own way. And it's almost like the thing in the picture is the meaning of the story escaping from the person who wants to control it. And so that seems to me to be an absolutely perfect commentary by James on the success of his own stories. It's made explicit in the very first line of the mezzotint, which is,

Some time ago, I believe I had the pleasure of telling you the story of an adventure which happened to a friend of mine by the name of Denniston during his pursuit of objects of art for the museum at Cambridge. He did not publish his experiences very widely upon his return to England, but they could not fail to become known to a good many. So there it is set up. We are pursuing art, and yet the story we tell seeps out of our control. He also refers to it shortly after that as the whole thing, speaking of the mezzo, it's in the picture itself,

the whole thing gave the impression it was the work of an amateur. In other words, the ghost story is low culture, and yet within it, it contains all this other stuff that you wouldn't expect an academic to come up with. You have this wonderful exchange near the end of the story. Is there any kind of explanation of the figure green? Was the question which Williams naturally asked. I don't know. I'm sure, Williams, what used to be said in the place when I first knew it, which was before I came up here, was just this. It was the last remains of a very old family. I believe they were lords of the manor at one time. What? Like the man in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Williams put in?

Yes, I dare say it. It's not a book I could ever read myself. So you're juxtaposing high literature on the same theme with a ghost story on the theme. And then that's really underlined by this wonderful scene when the picture is left while the Dons go out to dinner. And when they come back, the porter is sitting stunned, staring at the picture the guy who cleans their rooms the working class chap um he started violently he's called filcher by the way he's called mr filcher he filches the meaning of the story from these three academics and presents it his own way as follows. He started violently, then the three men came into the room and got up with a marked effort. Then he said,

I ask your pardon, sir, for taking such a freedom as to sit down. Not at all, Robert interposed. Mr. Williams, I was meaning to ask you sometime, what you thought of that picture? Well, sir, of course, I don't set up my opinion against yours, but it ain't the picture I should hang where my little girl could see it, sir. So the joke amongst the Dons, the fascination of the object, he's turned into horror amongst someone who doesn't have their learning. And that seems to me to be exactly the process that went on with Monty James' stories. And, of course, the story returns to stasis at the end when the academics

have researched, made sense and accounted for what they think it represents. And yet it still manifests in this horrifying way that they cannot control. brilliant andy thank you completely agree i thought that was a brilliant interpretation of the mezzotint and i think you can even extend it into the present day that the final image of the mezzotint is how i think a lot of people and even some people who adapt the stories of mr james see him now as a picture of something that was once scary and showed something terrifying, but is now a rather quaint piece of history. Because it can be explained away. It can no longer summon up the images of terror it once did. summon up the images of terror it once did and i think so it's like almost that they just regard it as a static picture of the past that's rather charming yeah you know what and we just give this

stuff away on a on a free podcast it's incredible isn't it incredible if you cite this academics in the future i expect full chapter and verse thank you you. Right. Now we need to wrap up because it's Halloween and we need to get out there and beg for chocolate. I'm afraid that's all we've got time for. So thank you to Andrew and Laura and to Nikki for her skills in making four people's ectoplasmic contributions into a single ghostly track. If you want show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the 197 that we've already recorded please visit our website at backlisted.fm if you want to buy the book discuss visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose backlisted as your bookshop

and we're still keen to hear from you on twitter on facebook Instagram, on Blue Sky, by pigeon post, by whistle, whistle and we'll come to you. Don't come to us. If you want to hear Backlisted early and ad free, you can subscribe to our Patreon, www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Your subscription brings other benefits. If you subscribe at the lock listener level, you'll get not one, but two extra exclusive podcasts every month. We call it lock listed because it began in the Wendlock Tavern just before lockdown.

And it features the three of us talking and recommending the books, films, and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. For those of you who've enjoyed our, what have you been reading slot? That's where you'll now find it. Plus lock listeners get their names read out, in the previous fortnight. For those of you who've enjoyed our What Have You Been Reading slot, that's where you'll now find it. Plus, a lot of listeners get their names read out, accompanied by lashings of thanks and gratitude like this.

Dr. Jeff Stewart, thank you. Kevin Walsh, thank you. Claire Gordon, thank you. Andrew Roger, thank you. Bella Luna, thank you. Vanessa Pierce, thank you. Former guest Rose Blake, thank you. Ido Goldfarb, thank you. Andrew R. Hughes, thank you. Vanessa Pierce, thank you. Former guest, Rose Blake, thank you. Ido Goldfarb, thank you.

Andrew R. Hughes, thank you. Marie H. Andoha, thank you. Laura, before we go, is there anything you would like to add about M.R. James that we haven't covered on the show today? This week, I gave a lecture on death in the Middle Ages, and I came across a fantastic

late 16th century poem spoken by death that is called, Can You Dance the Shaking of the Sheets? And it made me think of Whistle and I'll Come to You because the metaphor of the shaking of the sheets, apparently this was a country folk dance, but it's also a euphemism for sex so it adds to the kind of campy psychoanalysis reading of of come whistle so i felt i would draw that to people's attention wonderful and also the sort of the horror of the sheeted face pressing itself close to a crumpled linen a face i mean is... It's a shroud or a winding sheet. Yeah, that is a fear of sex,

a fear of the desecrated other bed in the room. That's amazing. As we say, they'd have a podcast now. Yeah. So, finally, Andrew, Halloween just wouldn't be Halloween if we didn't ask you if Ghost Stories of Antiquity or a particular tale within it were a Gene Kelly film. Which Gene Kelly film would it be?

This film is an anthology of different tales in which we are subjected to visions of wordless, inexplicable, chimerical figures that seem to have no goal, no purpose, clowns, characters from nursery rhymes, and a scene in which a naive traveler rubs a magic lamp and awakens an ancient Muslim demon or genie. It is Invitation to the Dance, directed by Gene Kelly from 1956. Oh, it's taken us nearly 200 episodes to get there, but we did it. Well done, Andrew. Thank you. Okay, listen, thanks so much, everybody.

We hope you have a really scary and unpleasant Halloween. Have a horrible time with your loved ones, living or dead. And we'll be back for episode 199. John, do you want to extend thanks to our lovely guests again? I would love to extend thanks to you, everybody. We're getting so close now to the magical 200 number.

But yeah, it's lovely, lovely to be doing this at Halloween. And to be back with Andrew and Laura, thank you so much for coming back. That was great. Thanks for having us back guys bye bye

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