Curious Warnings - The Great Ghost Stories Of M.R. James (93 page)

Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary
also featured four atmospheric illustrations by a close friend of the author, James McBryde. Ten years James’ junior, McBryde had arrived in Cambridge from Shrewsbury in 1893 to read Natural Sciences and the already distinguished academic soon encouraged his new friend’s habit of “dropping in uninvited at a late hour of the evening, and joining a congregation which was usually to be found in the inner room.”

By 1904, McBryde had enrolled at the University’s Slade, and was studying to become an artist. When it was suggested that he might illustrate James’ first collection of ghost stories, even the author’s interest in the project was rekindled, and he wrote to his young friend: “They are at present in a very rough manuscript. Shall I have them typewritten or bring or send them as they are? Or do you remember any of them well enough to sketch out any ideas?”

McBryde’s contributions to the book were his first professional commission, and he undertook it with gusto. In May 1904, he wrote to the author: “I don’t think I have ever done anything I liked better than illustrating your stories. To begin with I sat down and learned advanced perspective and the laws of shadows … I have finished the Whistle ghost … I covered yards of paper to put in the moon shadows correctly and it is certainly the best thing I have ever drawn …”

Unfortunately, the artist never lived to see publication. James McBryde died at 9:30 a.m. on the morning of June 5th, a few days after undergoing an apparently routine operation to remove his appendix.

Only four illustrations had been completed, along with two unfinished drawings for “Count Magnus” and a preliminary sketch for “Number 13.” Another illustration for “The Ash-tree” was planned but never started. However, when the publisher suggested that another artist should be brought in to finish the work, James firmly rejected the idea. Instead, he decided that the volume would stand as a tribute to its illustrator.

“I wrote these stories at long intervals, and most of them were read to patient friends,” James explained in his Preface to the book, “usually at the season of Christmas. One of these friends offered to illustrate them, and it was agreed that, if he would do that, I would consider the question of publishing them.

“Four pictures he completed, which will be found in this volume, and then, very quickly and unexpectedly, he was taken away. This is the reason
why the greater part of the stories are not provided with illustrations.

“Those who knew the artist will understand how much I wished to give a permanent form even to a fragment of his work; others will appreciate the fact that here a remembrance is made of one in whom many friendships centered.”

That same year, James McBryde’s
The Story of a Troll-Hunt
was privately published—upon M.R. James’ inducement—in a very limited subscription edition by the University Press, Cambridge, as a memorial to the artist. The illustrated comic fantasy, about three young men setting out to capture a living troll, was based on the bicycle holidays that McBryde, James and another young Cambridge friend, Will (W.J.) Stone, took around Denmark in 1899 and 1900. (These trips also supplied the background material for James’ story “Number 13.”)

McBryde and his wife Gwendolen had been married for just a year, and James agreed to become legal guardian to their daughter, Jane, who was born six months after her father’s premature death. For the rest of his life, the author maintained a kindly and supportive correspondence with both Jane and her mother.

Jane McBryde was not the only child James wrote to; another of his young correspondents was Sibyl Cropper, whom he addressed as “Dear Fellow-Scientist” or “My Dear Apple Pie” in a series of fairy-tale epistles following a visit to her family’s home in 1902. Thirty-seven years later, Miss Cropper collected and edited these letters, and they were published in the November 1939 issue of
Cornhill Magazine
.

Meanwhile,
Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary
went through eight printings that included McBryde’s interior illustrations, before the book reverted to a cheaper format in the 1920s and ’30s.

In his “Supernatural Horror in Literature” essay, H.P. Lovecraft wrote:
“Gifted with an almost diabolic power of calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of prosaic daily life, is the scholarly Montague Rhodes James, Provost of Eton College, antiquary of note, and recognized authority on medieval manuscripts and cathedral history. Dr. James, long fond of telling spectral tales at Christmastide, has become by slow degrees a literary weird fictionist of the very first rank; and has developed a distinctive style and method likely to serve as models for an enduring line of disciples.”

Unfortunately, after receiving a copy of the amateur magazine that Lovecraft’s piece originally appeared in, James declared himself not overly impressed with the American pulp author’s tribute. “In it is a disquisition of nearly 40 pages of double columns on Supernatural Horror in Literature by one H.P. Lovecraft,” he wrote to a correspondent, “whose style is of the most offensive. He uses the word cosmic about 24 times.”

Some years later, Lovecraft’s friend and contemporary, Clark Ashton Smith, wrote: “James is perhaps unsurpassed in originality by any living writer: and he has made a salient contribution to the technique of the genre as well as to the enriching of its treasury of permanent masterpieces. His work is marked by rare intellectual skill and ingenuity, by power rising at times above the reaches of pure intellection, and by a sheer finesse of writing that will bear almost endless study.

“The peculiar genius of M.R. James, and his greatest power, lies in the convincing evocation of weird, malignant and preternatural phenomena such as I have instanced. It is safe to say that few writers, dead or living, have equaled him in this formidable necromancy and perhaps no one has excelled him.”

“The second volume,
More Ghost Stories
, appeared in 1911,” explained the author. “Some years ago I promised to publish a second volume of ghost stories when a sufficient number of them
should have been accumulated. That time has arrived, and here is the volume. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to warn the critic that in evolving them I have not been possessed by that austere sense of the responsibility of authorship which is demanded of the writer of fiction in this generation; or that I have not sought to embody in them any well-considered scheme of ‘psychical’ theory.