Curious Warnings - The Great Ghost Stories Of M.R. James (94 page)

“The first six of the seven tales it contains were Christmas productions, the very first (‘A School Story’) having been made up for the benefit of the King’s College Choir School. ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ was printed in the
Contemporary Review
; ‘Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance’ was written to fill up the volume.”

James’ early title for “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral” had been “The Cat of Death,” while the other tales collected in the volume were “The Rose Garden,” “The Tractate Middoth,” “Casting the Runes” and “Martin’s Close.”

Although the book’s cover simply read
More Ghost Stories
, the title page carried the full designation of
More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
.

This second collection did much to enhance James’ reputation as a writer of supernatural fiction, and his celebrity admirers included Arthur Machen, Montague Summers, Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman, Theodore Roosevelt and even the Prince of Wales.

“
A Thin Ghost and Others
was the third collection, containing five stories and published in 1919,” recalled James. “In it, ‘An Episode of Cathedral History’ and ‘The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance’ were contributed to the
Cambridge Review
.”

The book also featured “The Residence at Whitminster,” “The Diary of Mr. Poynter” and “Two Doctors.”

“I have had my doubts about the wisdom of publishing a third set of tales,” admitted the author in his Preface. “Sequels are, not only proverbially but actually, very hazardous things.

“However, the tales make no pretense but to amuse, and my friends have not seldom asked for the publication. So not a great deal is risked, perhaps, and perhaps also some one’s Christmas may be the cheerfuller for a story-book which, I think, only once mentions the war.”

Despite the author’s apparent reticence to see yet another collection of his works published, this third volume was issued by Longmans Green in America the same year.

James’ single attempt at a longer work, the almost 25,000-word
The Five Jars
, was published by Edward Arnold in 1922, and has rarely been reprinted since then. Subtitled “Being More or Less of a Fairy Tale Contained in a Letter to a Young Person,” the story is about the discovery of a series of jars containing magic ointments that open up the senses to the hidden realms of animals and fairy-folk.

In a letter dated 1916, James first talked about his plans to write a story for Gwendolen McBryde’s then eleven-year-old daughter, “to explain to Jane what I have heard
from the owls and other neighbors, and how it came about that I was able to do so.”

In the war between the powers of good and evil, the author was careful to include his beloved cats on the side of the “Right People” while spiders—of which he had an almost pathological loathing—were one of the creatures aligned with the forces of darkness.

The Five Jars
also shares certain characteristics with James’ 1924 story “After Dark in the Playing Fields,” and some scholars have speculated that the shorter work may have had its origins in an abandoned attempt by the author to write a sequel to the novella.

When
The Five Jars
finally appeared in print, Jane McBryde was seventeen, and although her mother was inspired enough after reading the final draft to produce a series of illustrations for the book, the publisher decided to go with an artist named Gilbert James (no relation) instead. The author was reportedly not impressed with the other James’ depictions, but that could have been because his friend had lost out on the commission.

Although the book never became an established children’s classic—possibly because parents may have thought it was too dark for younger readers at the time
—
The Five Jars
did have its supporters, including
Peter Pan
author J.M. Barrie.

The novel was reprinted just a couple of times over a period of more than seventy years before Ash-Tree Press issued a hardcover printing with a new Introduction by Rosemary Pardoe in 1995. This edition was limited to around 300 numbered copies and two lettered copies in a deluxe binding.

James’ fourth collection,
A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories
, was published in 1925 and went through four impressions between October and February the following year. As the author revealed, of the six stories contained in the book, “The first, ‘The Haunted Dolls’ House,’ was specially written for the library of Her Majesty the Queen’s Dolls’ House, and subsequently appeared in the
Empire Review
. ‘The Uncommon Prayer-book’ saw the light in the
Atlantic Monthly
, the title-story in the
London Mercury
, and another, I think ‘A Neighbor’s Landmark,’ in an ephemeral called
The Eton Chronic
.”

Also in the book were “A View from a Hill,” “A Warning to the Curious” and “An Evening’s Entertainment.”

Seven years later, James revealed to Gwendolen McBryde that he was “startled” to see “A View from a Hill” reprinted in the February 1932 issue of
Pearson’s Magazine
, apparently without his permission. “The publisher ‘thought I wouldn’t mind’ and no more I do, particularly as they pay,” continued James, who revealed that he received half of the ten guineas fee. “But I also noticed that they left out a number of sentences: and this I protest against. The publisher palliates his crime by saying he has sold about 3,000 copies of the number—which is doubtless a good result.”

In fact, once the matter was settled,
Pearson’s Magazine
went on to also reprint James’ stories “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’” and
“Number 13” later that same year, after the author received a promise from the editor “to leave out as little as he can in the future.”

Another story, the grimly humorous “Wailing Well,” which James described as “a story of a terrible nature,” was written especially for the Eton College troop of Boy Scouts, and the author read it aloud around a campfire at Worbarrow Bay in Dorset, on July 27, 1927. It apparently led to several of the boys having “a somewhat disturbed night.”

The story was privately published the following year by Robert Gathorne-Hardy and Kyrle Leng under the Mill House Press, Stanford Dingley imprint in a hardcover edition limited to just 157 copies, of which seven were signed by James that had the title page printed in blue and black.

The first omnibus edition of the author’s short stories,
The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James
, appeared in both Britain and America 1931. As the author explained in his Preface: “In accordance with a fashion which has recently become common, I am issuing my four volumes of ghost stories under one cover, and appending to them some matter of the same kind.

“I am told they have given
pleasure of a certain sort to my readers: if so, my whole object in writing them has been attained.”

The volume contained all the stories in James’ first four collections (written, he later claimed, “at fever heat” in his notoriously illegible hand-writing), and also added a number of other pieces: “Not all of them strictly stories,” as the author helpfully pointed out. This additional material included “There Was a Man Dwelled by a Churchyard,” “Rats,” “After Dark in the Playing Fields,” “Wailing Well” and the essay “Stories I Have Tried to Write.” Except for “Wailing Well” all of these had previously been first published in Eton “ephemerals.”