The Ghost Master

...Pfaff, has been written, focusing largely on his accomplishments as a textual critic, editor, and translator...

...in fact it was—yes, certainly it was—actually no more nor less than a whistle...

...More precisely, he remains unrivaled in evoking not terror but anxiety and foreboding—and of how easy it can be to awaken the undesirable attention of things that should sleep quietly in their tombs or hiding places...

...By then, the excesses and Grand Guignol of late 18th- and early 19th-century Gothic fiction have died down...

...Moreover, the main characters are lightly sketched, and James never makes us care greatly about their fates...

...S.T...

...I've only mentioned a few of the 15 mini-classics collected in Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories, edited and annotated by the well-known scholar of supernatural fiction, S.T...

...In truth, what we most deeply enjoy is the storytelling itself...

...but his peasants, workmen, and servants may be his most Dickensian triumph...

...What could be better for a cold dark night...

...In life, he was noted as a mimic, adept at replicating the mannerisms and idiosyncrasies of his colleagues...

...And yet could it, perhaps, just possibly, be something else...

...life was regulated by loyalty, devotion to family, honor, and sacrifice...

...Then he thought he was mistaken: for happening to move his hand which hung down over the arm of the chair within a few inches of the floor, he felt on the back of it just the slightest touch of a surface of hair, and stretching it out in that direction he stroked and patted a rounded something...

...After all, 'tis now the season for tales "of sprites and goblins," and there are none better than these by M.R...

...Not sexual, of course— heaven, forfend!—but rather the passions typical of the academic life: the allure of an arcane discovery, perhaps envy and spite or the desire for revenge, sometimes just the thrill of figuring out a riddle or solving a historical mystery...

...And prolific writers like Bulwer Lytton and Wilkie Collins, or somewhat later Mrs...

...Indeed, Le Fanu stands unrivaled in the history of the ghost story—until 1893, when a young scholar named M.R...

...He put it to his lips...

...Everyone who has travelled over Eastern England knows the smaller country houses with which it is studded—the rather dank little buildings, usually in the Italian style, surrounded with parks of some eighty to a hundred acres...

...An entire biography of 460 pages, by R.W...

...He blew tentatively and stopped suddenly, startled and yet pleased at the note he had elicited...

...Bunch in "Lost Hearts": "Well," she said, "Master Stephen, it's a funny thing to me how them marks and scratches can 'a' come there—too high up for any cat or dog to 'ave made 'em, much less a rat: for all the world like a Chinaman's finger-nails, as my uncle in the tea-trade used to tell us of when we was girls together...

...Joshi...

...Swain, H.R...

...Aubrey records numerous spectral appearances, including one of an apparition that disappeared "with a curious perfume and a most melodious twang...

...Toward evening, he notices that "the church began to fill with shadows, while the curious noises— muffled footfalls and distant talking voices that had been perceptible all day—seemed, no doubt because of the fading light and the consequently quickened sense of hearing, to become more frequent and insistent...

...Anyone, of course, might wish to go after "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas," some "ten thousand pieces of gold laid up in the well in the court of the Abbot's house of Steinfeld...

...Joshi's new Penguin is a handsome volume, and it will be convenient to have all the stories available in two paperbacks, with useful annotation...

...Taking a vacation at Barnstow, Professor Parkins strolls along the beach and almost literally stumbles upon the ruins of a Templar preceptory...

...Williams orders a view of an English manor house, one that seems disappointingly ordinary and unimaginative—apart from the hideous skeletal figure crawling on all fours across the front lawn...

...To begin with, they are elaborately framed, often set in the past, and laced with a dry humor...

...Who wouldn't...

...They are the narrative equivalent to a warm blanket and a mug of hot cocoa, standbys of the fireside library...

...The classic ghost story, in particular, thrives best against just such a starting-point of solid, Biedermeier reality...

...Oh, at this time one can and should also turn back to Sherlock Holmes in "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," set just after Christmas day, or to PG...

...Invariably, James's heroes shrug off what at first only seems "curious...

...Don't we, after all, reread the Sherlock Holmes canon more for those scenes of the great detective and Watson snug in their flat at 221-B Baker Street than for the ostensible mystery...

...What he had been touching rose to meet him...

...Oliphant, soon supply them aplenty...

...A generation later, Daniel Defoe published his sensational, and still frequently reprinted, pamphlet, "A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs...

...In particular, they stand virtually unchallenged as after-dinner entertainment for those melancholy evenings between Advent and Twelfth Night...

...Cox has also written M.R...

...Back in his hotel he decides to blow the whistle again: "Goodness...

...Yes, quite a nice little archaeological find, with a bit of Latin on it, too...

...James's tales aimed to elicit what he called "a pleasing terror," and this oxymoron aptly hints at his artistry...

...James (edited by Barbara and Christopher Roden...

...Only after the Great War, and its blood sacrifice of an entire generation, could Western culture no longer wholly believe in civilitas and nobility...

...There is that old legend . . . No matter what the exact circumstance, the past eventually reaches into the present, and the most seemingly ordinary object or discovery may serve to summon up the horror...

...A Thin Ghost and Others and A Warning to the Curious, as well as the various uncol-lected stories, will form the basis of a forthcoming volume two...

...James once said that even a Christmas cracker has its possibilities "if the right people pull it, and if the motto which they find inside has the right message on it...

...How Victorian...

...James's scholars and antiquaries generally bring their fates down upon themselves, sometimes inadvertently but often because they give in to excessive passion...

...The clever Mr...

...Consider Mrs...

...The backdrop of these wonderful, wonder-filled stories is the long summer afternoon of the Pax Britannica, when there was still consensus about what civilization should mean...

...In "Count Magnus" he mentions alchemical tracts convincingly titled "The book of the Phoenix, book of the Thirty Words, book of the Toad, book of Miriam, Turba philosophum [Assembly of Philosophers...

...In this regard, he's rather like Agatha Christie...

...However, none of them equals Sheridan Le Fanu, who, over in Dublin, steadily perfects the chilling shocker with a succession of classics such as "The Familiar," "Green Tea," and that finest of all vampire stories, "Carmilla...

...Sometimes he would open with a leisurely bit of scene-setting, as in "The Ash-Tree...

...During the Renaissance ghosts appear regularly in both literature and history...

...But the feel of it, and still more the fact that instead of a responsive movement, absolute stillness greeted his touch, made him look over his arm...

...it selects from all the stories, and comes close to being a "best of" collection...

...Yet these aren't merely the ideals of the Christian bourgeoisie...

...His stories abound with fabricated documents, from every period between the Middle Ages and the present...

...Our age of irony had been born, its unhappy hour come round at last...

...Somerton learns of their location by deciphering an elaborate cryptogram...

...James reads "Canon Alberic's Scrapbook" to the Chitchat Society at Cambridge...

...and just turn the key of the door when you go to your bed...

...Something about somebody coming...

...they are also the characteristic virtues of the hero, and so nearly all the great popular stories of the era are ultimately about the heroic...

...Reading along, we do more than suspend disbelief, we happily surrender to the spirit of the game...

...He is, in fact, a great master of narrative reticence: Nothing gross or gruesome is described, only hinted at...

...But the confirmed fan of M.R...

...They all prepare his protagonist for the Liber nigrae peregrationis—the book of the Black Pilgrimage...

...Indeed, that nostalgia-laden period flavor is just what we now value most in fiction from the late Victorian and Edwardian era...

...In Europe and America, literacy had finally come to people of all classes, popular magazines like the Strand and Harper's Weekly were supplying fiction for every taste, and the distractions of radio, movies, and television were hardly gleams in ±e eyes of a few visionaries...

...I wouldn't say nothing to master, not if I was you, Master Stephen, my dear...

...James's own Eton and King's: Recollections, Mostly Trivial, is utterly devoid of confession or introspection, but remains deeply enjoyable as high-table conversation, the old gent's reminiscences of his teachers and friends...

...James's other gift is a flair for pastiche...

...By a single candle, after I all other lights had been extin-I guished, the bespectacled I scholar would effordessly cre-I ate a sense of unease, of growing eeriness...

...Certainly none can match the perfection of "Count Magnus" or, that favorite of many readers, "Casting the Runes...

...James will want more...

...More often than not, they first sense the growing wrongness...

...James: An Informal Portrait, which presents an agreeable overview of Monty's life...

...Veal, the Next Day After Her Death...

...James's career as a writer of ghost stories almost exacdy mirrors the golden age of what one might call light reading, escape literature, or popular storytelling...

...James (1862-1936) was the greatest English authority on the New Testament apocrypha, a bibliographer of medieval manuscripts, an amateur expert on early church architecture and decoration, a Cambridge don, and, eventually, the Provost of Eton...

...Virtually all those golden-age titles listed earlier now function as "comfort" books or "children's classics...

...As James deftly creates an atmosphere of suggestion and anticipation, we wonder just how and when his various hobgoblins will appear...

...Atmosphere—James himself called it "mood"—is all-important to the cozy style of the English ghost story...

...It is the first of two volumes, reprinting James's Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary...

...Let me quote an example, but not from a story in this volume, and without giving away its title: Then he dozed, and then woke, and bethought himself that his brown spaniel, which ordinarily slept in his room, had not come upstairs with him...

...Those muffled sounds must be some odd echo or sympathetic vibration from the thick stone walls, that shadow a trick of the light, and the unexpected nervousness of the locals a normal response to a stranger in their midst...

...Wodehouse's "Jeeves and the Yuletide Spirit...

...Michael Cox's old Oxford paperback, Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, is worth seeking out for its long introduction and many notes...

...These, it's been rightly said, are to horror and the supernatural what Sherlock Holmes's adventures are to the mystery...

...He is—to borrow an epithet usually bestowed on another James—the Master...

...But James intended virtually all his stories to be enjoyed as Christmas treats...

...Parkins can only make out part of the inscription...

...This is the era of fantasy-adventures ±at everyone knows, at least by tide: Treasure Island, King Solomon's Mines, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Time Machine, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Alice in Wonderland, Dracula, The Prisoner of Zenda, Five Children and It, Tarzan of the Apes, Peter Rabbit, Peter Pan...

...During his lifetime, M.R...

...Instead James will usually deliver a single short, sharp shock...

...Not surprisingly, Ash-Tree brought out the sumptuous A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings of M.R...

...And, indeed, as the Darkness increas'd, it seemed to him that there was more than one . . . With similar virtuosity, James elsewhere imitates the bluff commonsen-sical talk of a British colonel, and the irritated pronouncements of a celebrated hanging judge...

...Riddell and Mrs...

...But only with Queen Victoria does the concisely told ghostly tale come into its own...

...An old print, for instance, can serve as a peephole into the uncanny...

...It's enough to tear the room to pieces...

...In the 17th century, the antiquary John Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for the Washington Post Book World, is the author of two collections of essays, Readings and Bound to Please, as well as a memoir, An Open Book...

...See their website for many other authors in the "school of James," including E.G...

...There among its crumbling tombstones he, unfortunately, makes a small discovery: It was of bronze, he now saw, and was shaped very much after the manner of the modern dog-whistle...

...But why wait...

...Alas, this highly sought-after volume—even the sometimes carping Joshi calls it "admirable"— is currently out of print, but will likely be reissued in the near future...

...So it may sound somewhat less than heretical to say that James's supernatural tales rarely actually frighten the modern reader...

...Let us," writes M.R...

...In "The Mezzotint," Mr...

...James in a preface to an anthology called Ghosts and Marvels, "be introduced to the actors in a placid way...

...For me they have always had a very strong attraction . . . Other stories start even more casually, often when a middle-aged bachelor, typically a don, visits an ancient church or country house, or takes a holiday in Denmark or France, and there stumbles across something from the past—an old diary or piece of correspondence, an enigmatic inscription on a tomb, strange symbols in stained glass, an odd 18th-century maze in which one never feels quite alone...

...No more castles of Otranto and mysterious monks or bleeding nuns, no more lengthy extravaganzas like Melmoth the Wanderer...

...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...

...In The W^int^^'s Tale Hermione invites Mamilius to tell such a story and, as she says, to "fright me with your sprites...

...When he needs to, James can set down a Puritan sermon as readily as an 18th-century squire's diary...

...What force the wind can get up in a few minutes...

...It has just been reissued by Ash-Tree Press, which specializes in preserving the classic ghost-story tradition...

...and that when he should stop, this Companion should stop also, which put him in some Disorder of his Spirits...

...But those later stories, with a few exceptions (such as "The Diary of Mr Poynter," and "An Uncommon Prayerbook"), are a notch below these in their artistry...

...Even "Monty" himself, in the charming reminiscences set down in Eton and King's, virtually passes over his 30 or so "ghost stories of an antiquary...

...He sits down next to her and quietly begins, "There was a man dwelt by a churchyard...

...This last is real, by the way...

...A man once ventured into a maze in search of a great treasure: He went merrily on, and without any Difficulty reached the Heart of the Labyrinth and got the Jewel, and so set out on his way back rejoycing: but as the Night fell, wherein all the Beasts of the Forest do move, he begun to be sensible of some Creature keeping Pace with him and, as he thought, peering and looking upon him from the next Alley to that he was in...

...The story, one of James's supreme masterpieces, takes its deliciously ominous title from a slightly modified line of Robert Burns's: "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad...

...quite mistakenly, however, he fails to pay sufficient attention to the full coded text, which ends with an enigmatic phrase warning that the abbot, a dabbler in the dark arts, has "set a guardian" over his wealth...

...After the seasonal feast and good cheer, he would read one or two aloud to his friends at Cambridge and, later in his career, to the boys at Eton...

...It had a quality of infinite distance in it, and soft as it was, he somehow felt it must be audible for miles round...

...In "Canon Alberic's Scrapbook," for instance, Mr...

...A lady or gentleman believed in service and duty...

...Dennistoun spends an afternoon of his holiday abroad sketching the interior of a decaying French cathedral...

...Wakefield, and E.I^ Benson...

...let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings...

...Take "A Parable of this Unhappy Condition," a religious tract from the late 17th century, cited in "Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance...

...In this gradual, carefully calibrated appearance of ominous things—whether revenants, hungry demons, or spectral guardians—James set his stamp on English literature...

...After Dickens begins to publish Christmas stories in Household Words, every magazine editor naturally wants tales of haunters and the haunted for his December issue...

...We settle back...

...Sadly, Shakespeare gives us no more than this spooky first sentence, though he obviously possessed a taste (and flair) for the supernatural: Just think of the Weird Sisters in Macbeth or the vengeful spirit of Hamlet's father...