More on winter’s tales for when the year ends: the ghost stories of M. R. James

From Number 13 (Greg Wise as Professor Ander hard at work and Tom Burke as Tom Jenkins, a cheerful sinister presence)

Gentle readers and patient friends,

A few years ago, pre-pandemic, I wrote a series of blogs asking what is a Christmasy Story, and basically came up with a moral model, often, tellingly, involved with the death of someone (or near destruction), most of the time with a redemption, or renewal of hope in the future at story’s end. As I did this year over Trollope’s two American Civil War Christmas stories, I brought up how central to these winter tale traditions was the ghost story, mentioning in passing how Dickens’s A Christmas Carol differed so in its happy ending, poetic justice. Most ghost stories are Kafkaesque, nightmarish, uncanny, unnerving.

What I’ve been leaving out is then a mystery of why these have been so much a part of Christmas, becoming explicitly so in the Victorian era. M. R. James in particular is utterly out of whack with most professed goals of festivity, joy, forgiveness and whatnot. This year seeking once again to watch and talk about Christmas stories on my now ancient Trollope & his Contemporaries listserv (@ groups.io), I proposed reading his Stalls of Barchester Cathedral and watching (it’s on YouTube), the 1971 film adaptation. I did both, but then dissatisfied with the weak film, too familiar with the story, I cast about to see what other films, if any, were available as ghost stories, and lo and behold discovered that in 2005 and again in 2017 the BBC attempted to revive the old traditions of the 1980s and make 30-40 minute films of short ghost stories, but this time in all cases, from M. J. James. The first one I watched was A View from the Hill (which held and made me very nervous), and then found short reviews of these, rightly recommending them.

Wandering in a tomb: “Imagine, if you will … ”

I found (as in the earlier ones), superb but not super-famous actors involved, intelligent subtle scripts, e.g., Number 13 (which begins in bright cheerful light). They do not seem to me as masterly as those done way back in the ’60s (Whistle and I’ll come to You, and the brought back Andrew Davies’s Signalman), but they are in color (not a small thing still), so beautifully photographed, or like illustrations, and as a group, compel me to wonder not why people want the thrill of magic, but why, as C.S. Lewis insisted, pain remorseless terror tropes of inexplicability as part of the season’s diet of renewal, remembering, human communal activities.

I’ve no good answer to that, for it’s not enough to say it’s a metaphoric experience which makes us take into account our own powerlessness against the forces of the natural and social worlds. These stories are much more effective when the ghost is genuine, not a psychological projection. I did several years ago write about Oliphant’s ghost stories and the relationship of the gothic ghost story to Christmas. What is terrifying about Whistle and I’ll Come to You is you feel you have yourself brought the ghost out without quite meaning to, and you are not sure you won’t be tempted to do or somehow do that again. This resembles how Hyde begins to be able to come out of Jekyll and take over at will.  The horror is also in this demon’s mocking breaking pf fundamental taboos against dwelling on death’s remains (e.g., playing with a corpse). Sometimes there was a crime perpetrated by the now victim (as in The Stalls) and sometimes (in Number 13), our researcher is digging up from the past real cruelties perpetrated by real people connected to present people’s interests and is warned away.

I now invite you to watch A View from the Hill (the notable actors are Pip Torrens, David Burke, Mark Letheren)

I provide four others in the comments.

So there is a typical structure and mood to all M. R. James whether in verbal story form or film. He builds mood slowly; a character goes to a remote place meaning to do research into the past. When he does, he evokes either a lingering malignant presence whom others living there are half-aware of and too unnerved to speak. Small things are felt; say a claw put out, a cat’s meow; this then grows nervily, louder, and from just an intrusion becomes overwhelming in its brutality. The demonic presence attacks him swiftly.  The ghost or revenant is not always a male in other authors, for example in Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, where the ghost is a woman in black with unforgettable ferociously hating eyes, a mother whose child was taken from her and let die.

When this eruption from some other realm is effective, the attack is fatal; the person vanishes forever; but it can also be the ending is inconclusive, and you are left waiting with that victim-person who is trying to flee, like say in A View from the Hill, where our previous researcher is waiting for a train that is not coming. What’s chilling is the obtuse person (Pip Torrens) he is visiting appears not to know about this murderous presence and yet is ever leading our victim-character into danger — and then walking off. A blow by blow account — if you need it.

But this is what he sees:

From far

Then he is suddenly inside

In A View from the Hill it’s this pair of binoculars that allows the central victim-hero to see and be inside a cathedral that is no longer there literally. He is then (apparently) hanged for doing this.

The closest contemporary novels that come near this are by Kazuo Ishiguro: his Never Let Me Go has the same realistic surface as a ghost story, while the science fiction that is going on is cruel, and its apparent rational mirrors the senselessness of some modern medical technology uses — and connects us back to Shelley’s Frankenstein. But no one thinks of these as Christmas stories.

M. R. James

And now this delightful documentary by Mark Gatiss, about M.R. James as a man, his career, how these ghost stories emerged, and a brilliant analysis of them. It is 55 minutes, worth every second of it — many clips from BBC years. (I apologize if the link only takes you to a blockED video. You can type in M R James + Mark Gatis into the YouTube search engine and that may take you to this documentary. Poke around.) Gatiss suggests an important literary source of James’s visual imagination are the pictures in the medieval illuminated manuscripts James catalogued. And that James was repressed probably non-practicing homosexual. One amusing moment: Jonathan Miller (who did a brilliant adaptation) quietly insisting on how we are to see what happens in that story as nightmares (no ghost there literally), as if reassuring himself …

Any thoughts, anyone? at any rate, back again (we hope) next Winter Solstice.

Ellen

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Anthony Trollope’s Two American Civil War Christmas stories: The Widow’s Mite & The Two Generals

Jo (Maya Hawke) in the 2017 British TV serial version of Little Women: opening Christmas scene anticipating the war to come

Gentle friends and interested readers,

For this Christmas I researched into two of Trollope’s little or lesser-known Christmas stories, especially his two American civil war Christmas “The Widow’s Mite” and “The Two Generals.” I had been taking a course in the politics of the 30 year period leading up to the Civil War, and had realized I had misunderstood some of the finer points of Trollope’s two Christmas stories whose context and settings were that of the US Civil War. So when I became aware that no one in our online every-other-week Trollope reading group (sustained by the Trollope Society) had volunteered to discuss “Christmas at Kirby Cottage,” I volunteered to talk of these two powerful and in our era newly relevant Christmas war stories.

My interest in Trollope’s Christmas stories is nothing new for me (scroll down to “Christmas stories”). I’ve been very interested in Victorian and Edwardian Christmas stories, and had over several years led groups of people on my listserv to read not only Trollope’s but other 19th century writers’ Christmas stories. I was fascinated by their connection to the gothic, for many of them are ghost stories. Dickens’s toweringly famous A Christmas Carol is a ghost story (at least 4 of them) whose difference and deep appeal derives from the ghosts acting in redemptive ways — in most ghost stories, including those written for Christmas, the ghost is a revenant coming back seemingly to retaliate on some unpunished crime or evil act, but where the ghost hits out hard on some innocent person who just happens to be around when this ghost arrives.

The effect is often Kafkaesque, with reactions of the characters in the story to the readers listening from uncanny-terrifying to unnerving irretrievable loss to mind-pausing endlessly disquieting unforgettable enigma. I recommend my reader try the ghost stories of Sheridan LeFanu (collected as In a Glass Darkly), Margaret Oliphant’s Stories of the Seen and the Unseen, and the variously published ghost stories of Elizabeth Gaskell, and M. R. James. Our own modern rewrites of these that have become popular are similarly seriously intended traumatic ghost tales, e.g., It’s a Wonderful Life.

This kind of thing is not in Trollope’s repertoire. I cannot remember one re-telling of a dream or nightmare in all of Trollope’s 47 novels and 42 short stories. At the close of “Aaron Trow,” about an English worker who is turned into a raging terrorist after having been put for untold years in a convict prison; he is brutally murdered after he wreaked a violent disfigurement on a lone woman living on the Bermudas. We are told the dead man’s revenant (it is said) may be seen haunting the recesses of this remote place, but it’s not clear this isn’t rumor brought about by guilt of those who destroyed this man.

He found himself driven to write at least eight (eight are found in the Trollope Society edition), or ten — if you include two more which he denominated an Antipodes Christmas story and had published in a number of Good Words called Good Cheer for the Christmas market: Harry Heathcote of Gangoil and “The Telegraph Girl.” It’s my view Trollope did succeed in writing powerful memorable true Christmas stories a number of times — although none that I know of are cozy, magical or readily comforting. The best of them challenge us to think about what a Christmas story should be, what Christmas itself stands for in our imagination and experience, and push us into being better people.

His view of what a Christmas story should contain is found within a longer complaint he made about having to write stories to order for a Christmas market in these words fits these stories:

A Christmas story, in the proper sense, should be the ebullition of some mind anxious to instill others with a desire for Christmas religious thought, or Christmas festivities, – or, better still, with Christmas charity

As Christmas stories in Trollope’s mode, “The Widow’s Mite” questions the nature of charity. What is it? Why do we do it? How does it relate to sacrifice? “The Two Generals” is about a serious communal tragedy, a savage break-up of a society where we see the cost of sustaining and routing out a deeply unnatural evil which hurts too many people centrally, and against which when enough numbers of people objected deeply, has become unbearable. Both are very Trollopian tales with Trollopian political and social complications and tropes — though the core matters, desperate poverty and chattel slavery, are unusual.

For example, Trollope in both stories has a pro-union or abolitionist heroine marry a pro-confederacy pro-slavery male. This is very like what he does in The Warden: there he exposes the exploitation and greed of the church by showing how an income meant to support elderly impoverished workers has become a large income for a wealthy cleric in a caste patronage system; but since Mr Harding is such good and well-meaning man, and we are told (somewhat improbably) unaware of the evil he was perpetrating, we are thwarted from truly acting out the implied criticism of the church’s norms and structures themselves. Trollope is drawn to these perverse collocations. He thwarts us, in these two stores he presents two couples whose choices make it difficult for us to take a side.

I have wondered if these knots Trollope invents are ways his conservative POV amid a radical examination of issues prevents us from having a clear way to talk about it and supposedly act.

The two stories I researched are filled with a particular historical content — the US Civil War — which is today still wreaking racial class and regional repercussions in the US, and closely relevant to food insecurity, heat and electricity deprivation in the UK (class and income inequality). I hope I have given information enough to make clear the nuances in the depictions of the characters and their arguments in the two stories.

You may find the transcript and video on the Trollope Society website here

You can also reach the video of my talk on YouTube.

and the transcript by itself on academia.edu

https://www.academia.edu/93447840/Trollopes_American_Civil_War_Christmas_Stories_The_Widows_Mite_and_The_Two_Generals_

I wish all who read this a satisfying contented — peaceful, happy, joyous (if possible) Winter Solstice holiday and good year to come. The way I observe and participate is to watch Christmas movies. I began with John Huston’s The Dead last night and intend tomorrow night to re-see for an umpteenth time the 1951 British movie of A Christmas Carol (apparently originally titled Scrooge), featuring famously Alistair Sim.

Scrooge at first superficially unnerved by Marley’s ghost (Marley was dead, to begin with …. “)

Ellen

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