"The Rules of Folklore" in the Ghost Stories of M.R. James

Folklore, Annual, 1997 by Jacqueline Simpson

A related clue can be gleaned from a posthumously published story entitled "A Vignette," which he sent to the London Mercury, but with the comment that he was "ill satisfied" with it. It is a first-person narrative where the narrator himself experiences the horror (unlike most of his others) and its setting is his own childhood home, giving it, as Michael Cox points out, "an autobiographical flavour" (Cox 1986, 151). In it he speaks of a gate with a square hole cut in it, and how one afternoon, looking from the house towards that gate:

through that hole I could see - and it struck like a blow on the diaphragm - something white or partly white. Now this I could not bear, and with an access of something like courage - only it was more like desperation, like determining that I must know the worst - I did steal down and, quite uselessly, of course, taking cover behind bushes as I went, I made progress until I was within range of the gate and the hole. Things were, alas!, worse than I had feared. Through that hole a face was looking my way. It was not monstrous, not pale, fleshless, spectral. Malevolent I thought and think it was; at any rate the eyes were large and open and fixed. It was pink and, I thought, hot, and just above the eyes the border of a white linen drapery hung down from the brows ... I fled, but at what I thought must be a safe distance inside my own precincts I could not but halt and look back. There was no white thing flamed in the hole of the gate, but there was a draped form shambling away among the trees ... Why I make a lame effort to [describe it] now I cannot very well explain; it undoubtedly has had some formidable power of clinging through many years to my imagination (James 1987, 297-8).

Such experiences, and the childhood nightmare to which James alludes in "Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, my Lad," clearly left a lasting mark on his imagination. Indeed, throughout his life there are occasional signs that, in spite of his strong Christian faith, he could not shake off a lurking fear that ghosts might exist, though his public remarks on the matter were always resolutely neutral (Cox 1986, 194; James 1987, xvi-xvii).

As well as his childhood capacity to feel and recall horror, the young Monty James soon displayed the other essential gift he would be needing - the narrative and dramatic skills to convey horror to others. At Eton, aged sixteen, he found himself "rather popular" for what he called a "dark seance," i.e. a telling of ghost stories, though whether these were stories he had himself devised he unfortunately does not say. At seventeen, he addressed the Literary Society on "The Occult Sciences," particularly black magic and demonology, for which he used Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal; and at eighteen he wrote two essays for the Eton Rambler on ghost stories, including an anecdote of his own which already shows typical features of his later material, though the handling lacks subtlety. At about the same age, he wrote another paper on fabulous animals; these activities caused his Eton tutor to comment that "He dredges the deeps of literature for refuse" (Cox 1986, 38-40). Throughout his life, he enjoyed reading his own stories aloud to small groups of friends, often as Christmas entertainment; some were composed especially for this purpose, and others to entertain the choristers of King's College (ibid. 1986, 132-5).