If you missed the last one…
In “Ghosts– Treat Them Gently!” (Evening News, 17 April 1931) , M. R James writes:
On the whole, then, I say you must have horror and also malevolence. Not less necessary, however, is reticence. There is a series of books I have read, I think American in origin, called Not at Night (and with other like titles), which sin glaringly against this law. They have no other aim than that of Mrs. Wardle’s Fat Boy.
Trust a scholar to use a literary reference! Now you may be fully familiar with Dickens, but I had to look that one up. Mrs. Wardle in The Pickwick Papers has a servant named Joe, who is the Fat Boy. In that book he says: I wants to make your flesh creep. This is done not with horror but revealing a romantic episode between two characters who meet in secret. What James is getting at is the Fat Boy has no subtlety and in a sleazy way wants to excite people, like one who gawks at a car accident. It is visceral and common. I suppose he is criticizing the lack of style that doesn’t hide the gruesome but exposes it.
That newspaper piece was published in 1931, so as many as seven of the Not at Night series may have been available to James:
Not at Night (1925)
More Not at Night (1926)
You’ll Need a Night Light (1927)
Gruesome Cargoes (1928)
By Daylight Only (1929)
Switch on the Light (1931)
At Dead of Night (1931)
James accuses the books of being “American” which is both right and wrong. The editor of the series, Christine Campbell Thomson was British, born in London in 1897. (The publisher was London-based Selwyn & Blount.) Her husband, Oscar Cook, who appeared in some of the volumes was also British. But much of the contents of these books were taken from Weird Tales Magazine. The first volume includes stories Frank Belknap Long, Greye La Spina, R. G. MacReady, H. Thompson Rich. Later books have Galen C. Colin, Sewell Peaslee Wright, Seabury Quinn, August Derleth, Eli Colter, Paul S. Powers, Bassett Morgan, H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur J. Burks, Anthony Rud, Amelia Reynolds Long, Edmond Hamilton, Hugh B. Cave and David H. Keller. So, yes, the Americans certainly were present.
This is not to say all the contents were written by Yanks. Gruesome Cargoes contains stories by authors who I suspected were all Brits. Edmund Snell wrote for the UK weekly, The Thriller. Harry De Windt was an explorer of some fame. John Palmer, Hilary Saint George Saunders, Thomson herself under her Flavia Richardson pseudonym, Oscar Cook and many others who are obscure. Benge Atlee is the exception, a Canadian from Nova Scotia, but not a Weird Tales writer. Perhaps James didn’t read this one.
What I think is more interesting is that M. R. James could have read two of H. P. Lovecraft’s stories, “The Horror at Red Hook” and “Pickman’s Model”. I have written before about how Lovecraft used James’s ghost stories as a model for Cthulhu Mythos fiction. You would think James would recognize this and appreciate it. I truly wish James had commented on “Pickman’s Model”. The greatest ghost story writer of the Victorian Age commenting on the 20th Century’s most important writer of the weird…
Now let’s look at the realities here: Weird Tales was a Pulp magazine, even if it wasn’t a typical one. Jamesian subtlety was not what most Pulp editors wanted. Farnsworth Wright was well-versed in ghost stories and horror fiction in general. As far as I can recall, Wright never reprinted any James in the magazine. (Please correct me if I am wrong.) I do remember Paul S. Powers complaining about not receiving any money for the reprints from Not at Night. When a writer cashed that check from WT, all rights became the property of the magazine. Wright made some extra coin by selling the reprints to editors like Thomson. Powers imagined this as being a very large amount of cash but I think Wright received only a small fee for them.
Is it reasonable to expect M. R. James to feel that ghost stories had lost their finesse? Born in 1862, he would have been sixty-eight when he wrote the newspaper piece. An academician, James wrote his stories to entertain friends at Christmas parties. Collected they gave him some small amount of fame in ghost story circles. The point is, he never relied on his fiction to pay the bills. Paul S. Powers refers in his autobiography, Pulp Writer (2007) to his two stories in Not at Night as “… work that I had done on a rather empty stomach ten years before…”.
This dichotomy reminds me of another situation that I think is very similar. When people argue about Robert E. Howard’s Sword & Sorcery versus J. R. R. Tolkien’s High Fantasy. Again we have a Pulp writer making a living versus an academician with a hobby. The results of what a writer can produce when he wants to buy food versus what he does to while away his spare time in evenings after dinner, are different. Many Pulp writers published their first drafts, moving onto the next story almost immediately. Polishing a manuscript was a luxury for amateurs.
The one intersection between Weird Tales and M. R. James is H. Russell Wakefield, perhaps the last of the Jamesians. Though not acquaintances, both James and Wakefield shared scholarly schools (for Wakefield it was at Oxford). Wakefield was born more than twenty years after James, and so he just caught the last part of the Victorian ghost story period. His first book was They Return at Evening (1928). His last during his lifetime was Strayers from Sheol (1961) from August Derleth’s Arkham House. Unlike James, Wakefield relied on his writing for some of his income. One of his best stories, “Ghost Hunt” appeared in Weird Tales, March 1948, the same year it appeared in the third Alfred Hitchcock anthology, Fear and Trembling: Shivery Stories. I suspect James would have found this story too gruesome, though I believe it uses “reticence” rather effectively. I wrote about the story here.
Conclusion
I guess what we have to do– eighty-two years after Farnsworth Wright retired then died; and eighty-six years since James’ last story “Vignette”– is figure out how much of this is true. Had ghost stories become too graphic, obvious, gruesome and in poor taste? Or was M. R. James just making the usual “old man’s complaint”, the equivalent of the Buddy Holly fan bitching about the Beach Boys like Paul Le Mat does in American Graffeti.
I think it is a little of both. James’ best stories like “Lost Hearts” and “Wailing Well” are super creepy but in a way that requires the reader to fill-in-the-blanks. This is why when they are done as short films on the BBC the results are less than stunning. The story requires that “reticence” to creep you out. Alternately, H. P. Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” has been filmed as well by Rod Serling for The Night Gallery. Lovecraft’s tale comes off pretty cheesy too. Ghost stories are hard to film well. (Take for example the two versions of The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson. The older Robert Wise film has some scares while the remake, which reveals everything, is a yawn-fest.) So, James’ “reticence” does have value.
But does this mean the Weird Tales school of Horror lack this quality? I don’t think so if you look at the best example of a magazine that ran for over thirty years. H. P. Lovecraft’s better material like “The Rats in the Walls” works fine. (I imagine James didn’t care for those italics at the end of Lovecraft’s stories, but he essentially uses them at the finale of “The Treasure of Abbott Thomas”.) Frank Belknap Long’s “Second Night Out”, Fritz Leiber’s “The Hound”, August Derleth’s “The Drifting Snow” even Seabury Quinn’s “The Phantom Farmhouse”, all of these feel like they owe something to James, and are good stories that use some reticence. The Victorian threshold for what is frightening changed with time. Perhaps that is what M. R. James was sensing more than anything.
Thanks to Richard Dalby and Rosemary Pardoe for reprinting “Ghosts– Treat Them Gently!” in Ghosts & Scholars: Ghost Stories in the Tradition of M. R. James (1987).
