[In the following excerpt from Chapter IV of his book, Sullivan looks specifically at ghost story authors who wrote in the tradition of M. R. James, especially Wakefield.]

The publication of M. R. James's Ghost Stories of an Antiquary set in motion a spectral procession of tales about confrontations between antiquaries and beguilingly far-fetched horrors: in E. G. Swain's “The Place of Safety,” the Vicar of Stoneground Parish is visited at night by an order of gigantic monks from the sixteenth century; in R. H. Malden's “The Dining Room Fireplace,” a travelling collector is scared out of his wits by a Dublin fireplace which breathes; in L. P. Hartley's “The Travelling Grave,” an antiquary is swallowed up by a mobile grave with teeth; and in Walter de la Mare's “A. B. O.,” two antiquaries are pursued by a living abortion. James, a highly civilized man, would undoubtedly not want to be held responsible for all this, and indeed he wasn't. A larger share of the blame would have to be assigned to Le Fanu. As we have seen, the modern ghost story as a strict literary genre originated with his work. James himself fell heavily under Le Fanu's sinister spell. But we have also seen that there are telling differences between Le Fanu and James, and there are enough stories in English fiction with a palpably Jamesian flavor to justify R. H. Malden's mention of a James “tradition.” This chapter is a survey of that tradition, examining both the widespread expropriation of James's basic plot, and the more limited emulation of his style.

In 1927, H. P. Lovecraft wrote that James “has developed a distinctive style and method likely to serve as models for an enduring line of disciples.”¹ But if James's place in the hierarchy of modern ghostly fiction is secure, his line of “disciples” is not always easy to trace. Writers who owe a large debt to James—T. G. Jackson, Arthur Gray, Eleanor Scott, and A. N. L. Munby, to name a few—are often hardest of all to track down. An example is Arthur Gray, Master of Jesus College, who in 1919 published a collection of period pieces called Tedious Brief Tales of Granta and Gramarye. Only the second adjective in the title is accurate. Gracefully narrated and generously illustrated, the collection is nevertheless nearly impossible to obtain, even through book auctions in the most esoteric horror fanzines.

In addition to the exasperating problem of finding the works, there is also the difficulty of sorting out which writers are authentically Jamesian. Numerous writers have capitalized on James's antiquarian milieu, but most use it as an erratic motif rather than a definitive thematic texture. E. F. Benson, R. H. Benson, Walter de la Mare, Russell Kirk, William F. Harvey, L. T. C. Rolt, and William Hope Hodgson have all attempted an occasional M. R. James tale.

One of the most memorable examples is de la Mare's “A. B. O.,” a tale which Edward Wagenknecht unearthed from the Cornhill Magazine for Arkham House. Wagenknecht, an authority on de la Mare, declares that “A. B. O.” “seems rather in the manner of M. R. James.”² If the double qualification is awkward, it does accurately reflect the way in which the tale feels its way about in different fictional worlds, never quite sure of its identity. Like so much British ghostly fiction, it is both in and out of the James manner.

It certainly begins like James, with two antiquaries digging up a mouldy box of indeterminable age and origin. That the box will contain something hideous and alive is guessed quickly by the reader, but not by the characteristically obtuse diggers, who proceed undaunted in spite of several ominous clues. The remarkable heaviness of the box is one such clue; the corrosively nauseating odor it emits is another; most sinister of all is a rusty tube-like appendage beginning in the base of the box, twisting in serpentine patterns under the earth and somehow connecting above ground with the gnarls of a yew tree. The inscription on the box, A-B-O, consists of the first three letters of a word, the remainder of which has been effaced by time. The box-opening scene, with its revelation of a thin, hairy creature of “monstrous antiquity,” is also vaguely Jamesian:

When he again set to work upon the chest he prised open the lid at the first effort. The scrap of broken steel rang upon the metal of the chest. A faint and unpleasant odour became perceptible. Dugdale remained in the position the sudden life of the lid had given his body, his head bent slightly forward, over the open chest. I put one hand upon the side of the chest. My fingers touched a little cake of hard stuff. I looked into the chest. I took a step forward and looked in. Yellow cotton wool lined the leaden sides and was thrust into the interstices of the limbs of the creature which sat within. I will speak without emotion. I saw a flat malformed skull and meagre arms and shoulders clad in coarse fawn hair. I saw a face thrown back a little, bearing hideous and ungodly resemblance to the human face, its lids heavy blue and closely shut with coarse lashes and tangled eyebrows. This I saw, this monstrous antiquity hid in the chest which Dugdale and I dug out of the garden. Only one glimpse I took at the thing, then Dugdale had replaced the lid, had sat down on the floor and was rocking to and fro with hands clasped over his knees.³

Yet already the analogy with James begins to break down. The passage is pitched in a different key than James, assaulting the senses and sensibilities in a way James would probably consider to be “Gothic” and excessive. (This, despite the narrator's pledge to “speak without emotion”). The stylistic influence of Poe, whom de la Mare admired, hangs oppressively in the air.

As is common in such tales, the antiquaries make the very bad mistake of deciding not to bury the “damnable thing” until the next day. By then it is too late; the creature escapes from the box, pursuing the two collectors until “hope is eaten away by horrors of sleep and a mad longing for sleep.”⁴ By the end of the tale, the narrator is headed for madness. His friend, who sits in the creature's chest reading his Bible, has already arrived there.

James would probably consider all this to be a bit much. Though many of his demons seem abortion-like, it would surely never occur to him to create an actual abortion as the supernatural pursuer. But that is exactly what de la Mare does: “The vile consciousness of that thing on its secret errand prowling within scent never left me—that abortion—A-B-O, abortion; I knew then.”⁵ This is the first (and hopefully the last) living abortion in fiction. Though it is an early tale, and though it bears a superficial resemblance to James, “A. B. O.” is characteristic of de la Mare's bizarre originality. The exotic symbolism of the yew tree with its rusty umbilical cord, pregnant with living death, is quite unlike a James tale.

If anything, the tale is reminiscent of Hawthorne. The content of the symbolism is an obvious example: “There lay the wretched abortion:—it seems to me that this thing is like a pestilent secret sin, which lies hid, festering, weaving snares, befouling the wholesome air, but which, some day, creeps out and goes stalking midst healthy men, a leprous child of the sinner. Ay, and like a sin perhaps of yours and mine.”⁶ This is clearly the voice and message of Hawthorne—almost a steal from Reverend Hooper's deathbed sermon on “secret sin”—emerging in a new and sinister context. What begins with James is contaminated with Poe and Hawthorne until it bears only a passing resemblance to its ostensible model.

Numerous other tales pay similar homage to James without sacrificing their individuality: de la Mare's later “The Connoisseur” and “The Tree,” Harvey's “The Arckedyne Pew,” Hartley's “The Travelling Grave,” Rolt's “Hawley Bank Foundry,” A. C. Benson's “The Slype House,” E. F. Benson's “Negotium Perambulans,” and Kirk's “What Shadows We Pursue” all in varying degrees have Jamesian settings and story lines. Each is either too allegorical (“The Slype House”), too steeped in personal damnation (“The Arckedyne Pew,” “The Connoisseur,” “What Shadows We Pursue”), too visionary (“Negotium Perambulans,” “The Tree”), or simply too perverse (“The Travelling Grave”) to suggest more than a casual influence, a ghostly nod of the head at the James canon. In America, even the Lovecraft circle owes a debt to James's antiquarianism, but Lovecraft's gargantuan Cthulhu creatures, like so many hyperbolic American apparitions, are a far cry from James's more discreet, emaciated horrors.

What distinguishes James above all from many of the writers who use him as a model is his narrative temperament. The patches of post-Decadence purple prose endemic to so much of this fiction, particularly to Chambers, E. F. Benson, and Lovecraft, are never allowed to blossom in a James tale. An example of what James would not do is this sentence from the opening of Benson's “The Man Who Went Too Far”: “Winds whisper in the birches, and sigh among the firs; bees are busy with their redolent labor among the heather, a myriad birds chirp in the green temples of the forest trees, and the voice of the river prattling over stony places, bubbling into pools, chuckling and gulping round corners, gives you the sense that many presences and companions are near at hand.”⁷ Like James, Benson is attempting to communicate a romantic sense of place. James, however, would probably not subscribe to Benson's animistic point of view, and he certainly would not use the aggressively “poetic” diction which reinforces that kind of vision. Indeed, he would undoubtedly cringe at some of Benson's banalities: there are no chuckling brooks or busy bees in James's work.

Two writers who do bear a close stylistic resemblance to James are H. R. Wakefield (1890-1964) and L. P. Hartley (1895-1972). Their work is marked by the Jamesian combination of tight economy and generous wit. Although luckless antiquaries often appear in their stories, the plots do not remind us of James so much as do the polish of the language and the intricate fusing of the mysterious with the particular.

Wakefield has always been seen as a kind of ghostly explorer of the territory mapped out by James. The most recent association was made by Jaques Barzun and Wendell Taylor in their annotated bibliography of ghost stories.⁸ Perhaps the most interesting critical assessment was made by poet-critic John Betjeman, who wrote that “M. R. James is the greatest master of the ghost story. Henry James, Sheridan Le Fanu and H. Russell Wakefield are equal seconds.”⁹ Wakefield himself has been careful to link himself with M. R. James, calling James's stories “the best ghost stories in the English language.”¹⁰ Wakefield also cites James's fictional world as the proper domain for a writer of ghost stories: “Antiquarian lore, old legends of antique places, old ruins and enigmas—from such worn stones and hallowed dust ghostly inspiration is readily breathed.”¹¹

Even James's strange habit of simultaneously deflating both the genre and his contribution to it is seen by Wakefield (at least in his later years) as worthy of emulation. The results are humorous and sometimes surprisingly brutal:

Many—perhaps most—people simply can't read ghost stories, those poor relations of fiction. They'd as soon read binomial theorem stories. A large number of strangers have written to me over the years to this effect: “Why concern yourself with such inane tripe? Why waste a small talent on this bogusness? You're capable of better, saner things.” I've found that the cult of such tales is confined to a small subset of highest brows. They are extremely hypercritical, somewhat resembling ballet-maniacs in their encyclopedic knowledge and zeal for odious comparisons.¹²

Wakefield does not move from here to the expected defense of the genre: he comments on the decline of interest in supernatural fiction (a situation which has dramatically reversed itself since he wrote this piece in 1961), but without tears.

The stories themselves, from They Return at Evening (1928) to Strayers from Sheol (1961), have a distinctly identifiable Jamesian flavor. Beginning in a deceptively low key, they manage, with few words, to work themselves up to a terrific intensity. For the most part, they shut off abruptly after the climax; when a denouement does occur, it is extremely brief. As a member of the generation following James, Wakefield takes up where his model leaves off. Like James in his later phase, Wakefield creates a maximum of horrific effects from a minimum of clues, so that our reaction to a given story depends crucially on how many other Wakefield stories we have read. After a while we simply accept stories like “Into Outer Darkness” or “The First Sheaf,” even though the sense of horror they deliver is unbreakably contiguous with a sense of puzzlement. The stories also convey a quality of dark wonder which, as in a James story, is so tersely rendered that we almost miss it: “It was strange and lovely, for the wind had increased to a gale, and yet the great moon swung through the stars from a cloudless sky. The earth seemed vehemently alive, and on such a night, thought Camoys, it was easy to realize that one was whirling through the infinite heavens on a lonely ball” (from “The Alley”).¹³ Instead of doting on this image, as Blackwood or Benson would do, Wakefield begins a new paragraph and moves briskly back to the plot.

It is primarily the language, then, which establishes the continuity with James. The James tradition really has more to do with linguistic toughness than with “antiquarian lore” or “old ruins and enigmas.” In itself, such lore is as much the domain of Poe as of James; the difference is in the treatment.

Wakefield's use of language depends on the accumulation of small but telling details. An example is this passage from “Old Man's Beard,” the story of a young woman pursued by a ghoulish old man who attempts to smother her with his beard. The participants in the conversation are the victim's father and her newly-hired psychiatrist:

“What does she hear whispered?” asked Mr. Bickley.

“She is uncertain about that. She thinks she has heard the words ‘September the tenth,’ but usually it sounds more like vague chatter. She likened it rather vividly to those soft husky mutterings one often hears between items on the radio. And once or twice she fancies she hears a sort of sniggering chuckle. She believes she heard such a sound first before she felt that tickling sensation.”¹⁴

It is the seemingly innocuous radio analogy (surely as much as the “sniggering chuckle” or the “tickling sensation”) which makes this passage so peculiarly horrifying. In recapitulating the stage-by-stage escalation of the horror, the passage reminds us that Le Fanu is the ultimate source for the modern ghost story. By the end of the story, the old man's beard is even attacking the girl when she goes swimming, creeping up her legs from under the water.

Another striking quality of the passage is its tone: the detachment somehow adds an additional dimension of terror to the writing. Wakefield alternates between aloofness and drollery, the last qualities one would expect in fiction which conjures up fear. He can be every bit as witty as James, as another passage from “Old Man's Beard” illustrates:

The following August she became affianced to a certain Mr. Peter Raines, whose past is as bland and innocent as an infant's posterior, but concerning whose future stupendous prophecies are made. He has just left Oxford, where he was President of the Union, and only the fact that he has been adopted as Conservative candidate for a Midland constituency has prevented him from completing a really “brilliant and daring” novel. As it is, he is about to publish a slim volume of essays entitled, Constructive Toryism.¹⁵

As is the case with James, many of Wakefield's most pungent jibes are at the expense of writers or antiquaries: “The whole place just suited Lander, who was—or it might be more accurate to say, wanted to be—a novelist; a commonplace and ill-advised ambition, but he had money of his own and could afford to wait” (“The Frontier Guards”).¹⁶ The clarity, wit, and wide-awake skepticism of Wakefield's tone give his fiction a credibility which seduces the reader into accepting the most fantastic supernatural phenomena. This is precisely the strategy which James exploits so winningly and which contrasts so strikingly with the occultist fiction of Yeats and the neo-Gothic fiction of Hugh Walpole and Bram Stoker.

The problem with Wakefield is that the sophistication of his method is sometimes at odds with trite material. He has a fondness for unabashedly melodramatic story lines and singlemindedly villainous characters. James is careful to make his antiquaries neutral and interchangeable so that interest is focused on the supernatural occurrence. Wakefield's supernatural concepts are wonderfully imaginative, but our interest in them is often deflected by gratuitously nasty characters who scheme and foam at the mouth in the manner of Vincent Price in a Roger Corman movie. “The Triumph of Death,” “That Dieth Not,” “In Collaboration,” and “Four Eyes” are examples of this tendency: they are all supernatural revenge tales in which the reader is invited to take delight in the final, gruesome victimization of nefarious victimizers. In addition to their triteness, revenge tales have the additional weakness of eliminating any sympathy we might feel for the character. Furthermore, since the character is getting what he deserves, such tales are always dangerously on the verge of becoming allegories. As James points out, the ghostly and the didactic do not mix well.

A related weakness is Wakefield's penchant for violence. James uses violence selectively, but Wakefield, at least in his later tales, dwells upon it pornographically. His pen is deeply immersed in blood. “Four Eyes,” which describes what happens when the wrong person wears a pair of haunted glasses (a “dead man's specs”) is cruelly typical:

She went out of the room leaving him standing there. And then it was as if some soundless, piercing power poured through the house. He reeled as it passed him. He heard Bella utter a high, thin scream. He dashed from the room and out into the little backyard. Bella was lying on her face; her arms outstretched.

“Bella!” he cried. But there was no reply. He bent over and gently turned her body. And then he dropped and jerked back, for her face was a mask of blood and splinters of glass driven hard into it. She had no eyes.

Old Tarzan, who had followed his master out, moved forward with dragging tail and sniffed at her uncertainly.¹⁷

Beginning with The Clock Strikes Twelve (1946), Wakefield's increasing reliance on violent endings becomes a kind of tiresome, sadistic mannerism. A story like “The Alley” (which has marvelously menacing touches along the way) erupts into such a gory chaos of physical mutilation that the effect is muddled as well as sickening. The addiction to shock endings becomes a trap in which the success or failure of a story is simply a function of whether the shock registers. Bierce's horror tales have the same pitfall, as do more than a few tales by contemporary writers (such as Robert Bloch, Charles Birkin, and Brian Lumley).

Wakefield is at his best when he blends brutality with carefully timed apparitional sequences rather than when he unleashes it in a final assault. An example is “Death of a Poacher,” a Le Fanuesque pursuit tale. Barzun and Taylor accurately call this a “stunning” tale;¹⁸ it works because the conclusion is a powerful culmination rather than a shock. Dread and cruelty take on metaphysical qualities, much as they do in Le Fanu. Indeed Sir Willoughby's hyena, a creature “infinitely loathsome and sinister,” seems much like a gigantic version of Jennings's monkey in “Green Tea.” The spare, businesslike style is closer to James than to Le Fanu, but the tale is a worthy successor to either.

Notes

1. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Fiction, p. 101.

2. Edward Wagenknecht, “Introduction,” Walter de la Mare, Eight Tales (Sauk City, Wis., 1971), p. xiii.

3. Ibid., pp. 96-97.

4. Ibid., p. 108.

5. Ibid., p. 104.

6. Ibid., p. 106.

7. E. F. Benson, The Room in the Tower (London, 1912), p. 206.

8. Jaques Barzun and Wendell H. Taylor, A Catalogue of Crime (New York, 1971; Second Impression Corrected, 1974), p. 720.

9. Quoted in Books From Arkham House, ed. Roderic Meng (Sauk City, Wis., 1972), p. 18.

10. H. R. Wakefield, “Why I Write Ghost Stories,” The Clock Strikes Twelve (New York, 1946), p. 7.

11. H. R. Wakefield, “Introduction,” Strayers from Sheol (Sauk City, Wis., 1961), p. 3.

12. Ibid., pp. 3-4.

13. Wakefield, The Clock Strikes Twelve, p. 34.

14. H. R. Wakefield, Others Who Returned (New York, 1929), p. 23.

15. Ibid., p. 34.

16. The Third Omnibus of Crime, Dorothy Sayers, ed., p. 780.

17. Wakefield, Strayers from Sheol, p. 136.

18. Barzun and Taylor, p. 720.