MR James

Montague Rhodes James (Goodnestone, August 1, 1862-Eton, June 12, 1936) was a British antiquarian, medievalist, and writer of horror stories, specializing in ghostly fiction.

Biography

He was born at Goodnestone Rectory, Dover, County Kent, where his father was a curate. He moved to Suffolk at the age of three when his father became rector of Great Livermere, near the Norfolk border. The family made Livermere his home from 1865 to 1909. That place was apparently full of ghost stories, and James had frequent nightmares in his room at the rectory. Some of his scariest stories are set in that county: & # 34; El fresno & # 34;, & # 34; Warning to the curious & # 34; and the chilling "Whistle and Ill come". The last short story he wrote, & # 34;A Vignette / Una viñeta & # 34; (1935, published posthumously in 1936), was founded on an actual experience, the vision of a spook in the garden that he had in Livermere as a boy. The fact is that, from the age of six, he felt a great fondness for ancient literature and bibliophile. He was educated at the elitist Eton College, later going on to King's College, Cambridge, where he would eventually be director and vice-director of both.

His horror stories stand out for the development of subtle effects framed in an atmosphere of restlessness and anxiety, often in a context of triviality and common sense that serve as counterpoint and contrast. There is never a lack of skepticism in his works, a touch of irony and humor, as well as the background of a great scholarly culture. He was, and still is, one of the masters of the short ghost story, the only non-academic genre in which he created.

His life was that of an antiquarian preoccupied with the continuous investigation of the past, among old manuscripts, classes and faculty meetings, visits to ancient ruins, dusty libraries and godforsaken churches. He never married or had children. College, Eton, and books made up his entire existence. He was a renowned medievalist, linguist, and biblical scholar. He translated the Apocryphal New Testament ( Apocryphal New Testament ) in 1924.

His interests and hobbies include archeology (he became a member of the archeology department at the Fitzwilliam Museum); paleography (he cataloged many of Cambridge's manuscript collections, a task that took him 40 years to complete, as well as a foreword to the Romance of Alexander, held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford); philology and sacred art (uncovered a 15th century lowercase mural in Eton Chapel, and restored the chapel's stained glass windows of King's College); in short, antiquities (he was a member of the Society of Antiquaries) in historical and bibliographical studies, reviewing copies for specialized bibliographical and historical societies. Without neglecting the translation (such as an excellent English version of the Tales of Hans Christian Andersen), the essay, or the academic dissertation with The Apocalypse of St. Peter (The Apocalypse according to Saint Peter), with which he was distinguished with the Fellow of King's order at King's College. His investigations took him abroad, to countries like Cyprus, Denmark, Bavaria, Austria or Sweden, where he located his ghost story Count Magnus, El conde Magnus, inspired by the royal personage of the 17th century, Count Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie.

The Ghost Story in M. R. James

Although this type of story was only a hobby for him, it is what he remembers the most from his production; As for his scholarly studies, they are only of interest to specialists. He wrote these stories for pure entertainment, as a relief from his intellectual labors. He admired the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu, this being perhaps the most representative influence on his works. This admiration led him in 1923 to publish an anthology with his best stories and to make him fashionable again: Madame Crowl's Ghost . In the preface to this book he went so far as to state that Sheridan Le Fanu was far superior to Poe.

If for many M. R. James is the best writer of ghost stories, he nevertheless recognized Le Fanu with such a qualification. James always tries to distance himself from the Victorian ghost, characteristically livid, ecstatic and pitiful for his misery. James's spectral apparitions are abominable manifestations, creatures whose origin can only be Hell, sometimes extravagant, disgusting or subhuman beings, hardly described and almost monstrous. In the words of H.P. Lovecraft:

"The usual spectre of M. R. James is thin, dwarf and hairy, a lazy and informal abomination of the night, halfway between the beast and man... This spectre has a constitution of the most eccentric: it is a roll of flannel with spider eyes, or an invisible entity modeled with the clothes of a bed whose face forms a wrinkled sheet."

His stories abound with a healthy sarcastic humor and some unconvincing hint of rational clarification for the mysteries that are shown, a detail also unusual in the literature of the genre to date although, in his own words, "this loophole it must be so narrow that it is barely practicable', so that the story does not lose strength or be reduced to a mere sick suggestion of its protagonists at a given moment in the plot.

James went so far as to cite the characteristics of the classic ghost story in the preface to Ghost and Marvels (The World's Classics, Oxford, 1924): & #34;Two most important ingredients to cook a good ghost story are, in my opinion, the atmosphere and a skilfully achieved crescendo, to which one must not forget to add &# 34;certain degree of realism". Although in the first thing he often does not reach the level of his predecessor Arthur Machen, with his peculiar style of enveloping and oppressive atmosphere, or contemporaries like Lovecraft, regarding the adequate development of the story, he appears as a consecrated master. That crescendo that leads to the final denouement between the monstrosity and the troubled protagonist, manages to maintain an attentive tension until the final climax. "Let us be, then, presented the characters with great placidity; let's watch them go about their daily chores, oblivious to any bad feeling and in complete harmony with the world around them', adds James. His characters speak, live, move, like his potential readers at the beginning of the XX century.

Until James' irruption, ghosts belonged to another time; James installs them in the bourgeois society of the time. To induce this everyday familiarity, he uses easy-going humour, conversational expression and a fine British irony. "In this reassuring atmosphere, let's make the sinister element poke an ear out, discreetly at first, then more insistently, until it finally takes over the scene," he says. Never completely revealing the ghost, leaving the recreation of what is vaguely suggested to the reader's imagination, is already clearly seen in Le Fanu, although James impeccably forges it, surpassing his teacher in the firm intention of disturbing by accumulating barely discernible clues, but that progressively end up becoming exhausting. What is most disturbing is precisely what James mentions in passing, seemingly unimportant details that take on all their meaning in the final outcome. Only the victim does not suspect anything. The anguish is not in her, as in the stories of Le Fanu or Guy de Maupassant, but in the reader. This technique allows M.R. James to maintain suspense until the last second, when the monster brutally pounces on its victim, who finally opens his eyes to reality.

According to James, "spectral phenomena must be malevolent rather than beneficial, since the emotion to be aroused above all is fear," technical jargon of the occult or pseudoscience, so that casual plausibility is not drowned out by unconvincing pedantry". For this reason, in addition, in all his stories, he shows in a contemptuous way his excellent knowledge in the various subjects that marked his life. His protagonists are like him, gentle, restrained, upright men, with no suspicious background related to paranormal events: archaeologists ("Notice to the curious"), antique dealers ("Mr. Poynter's Diary"), paleographers ("The Rune Curse"), Latinists ("The Treasure of Abbot Thomas"), Biblical scholars ("The Treatise Middoth"), historians ("Number 13"), librarians, and other characters related to their own concerns. In the same way, also his settings, in addition to being common and recognizable to his contemporaries, could be described as belonging to erudite environments, reflecting his own natural habitat: libraries, forgotten archives, churches, cemeteries and rural inns far from the city, settings where he he felt at ease, conveying to the reader his own love for those places.

The documentation of the environments is meticulous, but false: he invents books, manuscripts or quotations in Latin that give greater depth to the events that were narrated in his stories, a mechanism that later authors copied from him.

Work

The work of M. R. James in terms of ghost stories is made up of 31 stories collected in five volumes:

• Ghost Stories of an Antiquary1904, with the stories "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book" ("The Alberico Canon album"), written in 1894 and previously published in the magazine National Review; "Lost Hearts" ("Lost Hearts"), previously published in Pall Mall Magazine; written in 1895, "The Mezzotint" ("The Engraving"); "The Ash-Tree" ("The Fresno"); "Number 13" ("The Number Thirteen"), written in 1890; "Count Magnus" ("The Count Magnus"); "O Whistle, and I'botll Come To You, My Lad!"; and "The Treasure of Ab.
• More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary1911. It consisted of the following stories: "A School Story" ("A school story"), written expressly for the choir school of King's College; "The Rose Garden" ("The Rosewood"); "The Tractate Middoth" ("The Middoth treatise"); "Casting the Runes" ("The Rune's brief"), the story taken years later, in 1950, to the film in the film Curse of the Demon; "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral", written in 1910 and published in the Cathedral of Barchester. Contemporary Review; "Martin's Close" ("Martin's fence"); and "Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance" ("Mr. Humphreys and his heritage"), written in the words of James himself with the sole purpose of completing this second volume, but no doubt one of the best stories of the author.
• A Thin Ghost and Others1919. In it you can find: "The Residence at Whitminster" ("The Whitminster Residence"); "The Diary of Mr. Poynter" ("Mr. Poynter's Diary"); "An Episode of Cathedral History" ("An Episode of the History of a Cathedral"), previously appeared in the journal. Cambridge Review; "The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance" ("History of a Disappearance and an Appearance"), appeared equally in Cambridge Review in 1913; and "Two Doctors" ("Two Doctors").
• A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories, the fourth book of stories he published, dated his publication in 1925. In it are found: "The Haunted Doll's House" ("The House of Embryed Dolls"), written for the library of the House of Dolls of Her Majesty the Queen, and which also appeared in the Empire Review; "The Uncommon Prayer-Book" ("The Uncommon Prayer-Book"), previously published in the Atlantic Monthly; "A Neighbour's Landmark" ("The Mojones of a Neighbour's Landmark"), written in 1924 and published in The Eton Chronic; "A View From a Hill" ("Panorama from a Hill"); "A Warning to the Curious" ("Notice to the Curious"), previously published in the London Mercury; and "An Evening's Entertainment" ("An evening by fire").
• The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James, published in 1931, five years before his death, is his last book. It is a compilation of all of its aforementioned accounts with the inclusion of five more, published in various publications. The stories not included in previous books are: "There was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard" ("There was a man who lived next to a cemetery"); "Rats" ("Ratas"), originally written for At Random in 1929, and subsequently included in an anthology entitled Shudders; "After Dark in the Playing Fields" ("When it lasts in the park"); "Wailing Well" ("The Well of Lamentations"), written expressly for the Boy Scouts group of Eton College in 1927; and "Stories I Have Tried to Write" ("Historystory I have tried to write"), which more than a story properly said is a small commentary to some ideas that did not come to be written.
• The Five Jars, The five jars (1922), is a short novel of supernatural fantasy for children.

There are also three separate stories that have not appeared in any of the author's collections: "The Experiment: A New Year's Eve Ghost Story", published in The Morning Post (December 31, 1931); "The Malice of Inanimate Objects", appeared in The Masquerade #1.1 (June 1933); and "A Vignette", published posthumously in the London Mercury (November 1936); as well as the short essay note "Ghosts—Treat Them Gently!" (or "A Ghostly Cry"), appeared in the London Evening News (17 April 1931). These four texts were finally published along with other stories by M. R. James in the book Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, edited and with a foreword by Michael Cox through Oxford University Press, in July 1987.

Translations into Spanish

• Thirteen ghost stories. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1973.
• The riddle of the runes. Buenos Aires: Editions Librería Fausto, 1977.
• Fantasmas Tales. Madrid: Siruela Editions, 1988.
• Supernatural Stories. Madrid: Editions Mirach, 1991.
• Lost hearts. Spain. Valdemar, 1997.
• A inconsistent ghost. Spain. Valdemar, 2005.
• More ghost stories from an antiquarian. Spain. Valdemar, 2003.
• Stories of ghosts of an antiquarian. Spain. Valdemar, 2002.
• Silba and I will come. Argentina. Amazon, 2016.