M. R. James, the kindliest of frighteners

Over the weekend, I spent some more time dipping into the second volume of the correspondence of George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis, and I happened across a couple of brief references to Lyttelton's friend M. R. James, scholar and writer of ghost stories, that seemed worth passing on.

First, from a Lyttelton letter of September 13, 1957 ("Friday!" interjects Lyttleton in his own dateline):

It is time we met again and had a long crack, feet on fender. . . . A monstrous suggestion to make to an overworked publisher--or would be if I didn't know you have that engaging and impressive trait of M. R. James, i. e. however busy he was, he was always ready for a talk.

A trait to aspire to, no?. And one that is particularly irritating not to possess, for the only things preventing us are our solipsism and our well-nurtured sense that the world should accommodate itself to our timetables, other folks be damned. How better to be like James, ready to listen at any time.

That accords with a further sketch of James's personality that Lyttelton presents in a letter from October 9, 1957:

I was particularly pleased to meet Edmund Blunden again. One gets in his company the same--what shall I call it?--easeful satisfaction that one used to get from Monty James. It comes--doesn't it?--when great kindliness of heart accompanies great distinction of mind. I remember M.R.J.'s cordial listening to a story which I knew he knew, and on another occasion to a man making assertions about the history of some cathedral which were so wrong that they had to be corrected, but how gently and beautifully M.R.J. did it.

Interestingly, it seems that many of James's contemporaries, while agreeing about his kindness, wouldn't have said the same about his "distinction of mind." Darryl Jones, in the introduction to the recent Oxford University Press of James's Collected Ghost Stories (1931), writes,

His extraordinary intellectual capacities were matched by a commensurate anti-intellectualism which amounted, at times, to a genuine fear of ideas--a fear which his stories, with their consistent themes of the danger of knowledge, reflect quite clearly.

He offers an amusing example:

His longtime King's colleague Nathaniel Wedd recalled James's admonishing two students who were discussing a philosophical problem: "He rapped sharply on the table with his pipe, and called out: 'No thinking gentlemen, please.'"

James's friend A. C. Benson, who also wrote ghost stories, said of him,

[His] mind is the mind of a nice child--he hates and fears all problems, all speculation, all originality or novelty of view. His spirit is both timid and unadventurous. he is much abler than I am, much better, much more effective--yet I feel that he is a kind of child.

Children of course can be terribly cruel, but a kind child can be a marvel, ready to take the time to talk, and listen, and be patient with others.



{Photo by rocketlass.}

Michael Chabon, in his introduction to a pocket collection of James's stories from OUP, Casting the Runes, tries to figure out the roots of the frightening visions that came from the pen of this writer who "seems, for the entire duration of his life, to have considered himself the happiest of men.":

And what of the childhood fascination with the tortures suffered by Christian martyrs, each date and gruesome detail of beheadings, immolations, and dismemberments lovingly memorized the way some boys memorize batting averages? And the spectral face at the garden gate, pale and wide-eyed, reeking of evil, that one evening peered back at the young James across the lawn as he looked out through the windows of the rectory? And the intimate eleven-year friendship with a man named McBryde, illustrator of some of James's best stories, traveling companion and inseparable confidante, whose rather late marriage in 1903 was followed, scarcely a year later, by his untimely death? And the boys, the tens upon hundreds of thousands of boys of Eton and King's on whom James had lavished his great teacherly gifts, cut down in the battlefields of Belgium and France? And the empty lawns, deserted commons and dining halls, the utter desolation of Cambridge in 1918?

But perhaps we don't need to look that far, or dig that deep, to find the origins of James's horrors. For really, who better to write ghost stories than the timid, who if he looks can find fear in everything? Or, as Chabon concludes:

Violence ,horror, grim retribution, the sudden revulsion of the soul--these things, then, are independent of happiness or suffering. A man who looks closely and carefully at life, whether pitiable as Poe or enviable as the Provost of Eton, cannot fail to see them.

On a drizzly August Monday, hints of autumn are in the air. October, with its darkness and its stories, is just around the corner.

An invitation to Byron, were he alive

Most of the pleasure of the correspondence between George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis, aside from the pair's obvious joy in literary friendship, consists of pithy judgments, apposite and relatively obscure quotations, and references to books and authors long forgotten (a fate that seems to befall biographies, belles-lettres, and criticism with sad frequency). But once in a while there are unexpected gems of a different sort, such as the poem below, written by Duff Cooper, explains Hart-Davis in a letter of January 26, 1957, in response to a contest by “one of the newsweeklies,” asking for poems titled “On first hearing that Wordsworth had had an illegitimate child.”

I’ve written before about Wordsworth’s illegitimate child—and the tentativeness of judgment on the topic that mars Adam Sisman’s otherwise excellent book on Wordsworth and Coleridge, The Friendship—but I can’t imagine a better person to hammer the old Sheep of the Lake District for his hypocrisy than Byron, and I can’t imagine a better bugle call to the charge than this one:

Byron! Thou should’st be living at this hour, We need thy verse, thy venom and thy wit To castigate the ancient hypocrite. We need thy pith, thy passion and thy power— How often did that prim old face turn sour Even at the mention of thy honoured name, How oft those prudish lips have muttered “shame” In jealous envy of thy golden lyre. In words worth reading hadst thou told the tale Of what the Lakeland bard was really at When on those long excursions he set sail. For now there echoes through his tedious chat Another voice, the third, a phantom wail Or peevish prattle of a bastard brat.

The opening nod to Auden’s “Letter to Lord Byron” makes up for the inevitable “words worth” pun. None of which should obscure the truth that Lyttelton notes in his reply to Hart-Davis’s letter:

Wordsworth . . . must have been uniquely dried-up, stiff, dull, self-satisfied, arrogant, but at his poetic best—Who was it said “He stumps along by your side, an old bore in a brown coat, and suddenly he goes up and you find that your companion is an angel”, i.e. is at home in a region where Byron saw only George III and Southey having their legs pulled.

That said, I think that despite the perils, had I a single dinner invitation to send, it’d be Coleridge or Byron, not Wordsworth, who’d receive it.

Handwriting

Thursday's post started out as a simple one: I was going to quote a letter from George Lyttelton to Rupert Hart-Davis about handwriting. But merrily off into the weeds I wandered, demonstrating along the way perhaps the most salient characteristic of the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis letters: their infectious, engaging, popcorn-like readability. They're bonbons, and you open the book meaning to read just one--or perhaps two, to get a taste of their back-and-forth--and an hour later you've wandered through fifty pages of them. Unlike bonbons, however, they bring neither surfeit nor regret. Scheherazade could have kept the Sultan's headsman at bay for weeks just by reading these aloud (though only, honesty compels me to admit, if he happened to be an Anglophile lover of literature). One of the pleasures of letter collections is how easily their discrete units are to parcel out in the midst of reading other, more immersive works; this collection is far too addictive to enable that.

But now--handwriting! Early in the correspondence Hart-Davis writes that he hopes Lyttelton can easily read his handwriting, to which Lyttelton replies:

In a world where nearly all is dark, as Bishop Gore used to say, two things are luminously clear: viz that your letters are of first-class interest and quality, and that your handwriting is perfectly legible, and, in fact, very pleasant to look on. And the second is very important. Did you ever get a letter from Monty [M. R.] James? I once had a note from him inviting us to dinner--we guessed that the time was 8 and not 3, as it appeared to be, but all we could tell about the day was that it was not Wednesday.

To which Hart-Davis replied,

I never saw Monty James's writing but doubt whether he can have been more illegible than Lady Colefax: the only hope of deciphering her invitations, someone said, was to pin them up on the wall and run past them!

My handwriting, as my small band of far-flung correspondents and nearby coworkers would loudly attest, is abominable, a disgrace to civilization and possibly even a chink in the armor of evolutionary theory. It is only a lifetime's familiarity with the primary uses of pencil and paper that enable readers to determine that yes, those marks are intended to be letters and words. Fortunately, as I have neither Lady Colefax's title nor M. R. James's antiquarianist's pedigree, I received my first typewriter at age ten and have blissfully never looked back.

"This is not so much the first over, as a gentle limbering up," or, Embarking on the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis letters

While waiting to get back to my local bookstore to pick up a copy of Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies--I'm nothing if not loyal!--I've been reading the first volume of the collected correspondence of George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis, a book that made its way to my shelves a few years back on the recommendation of Michael Dirda. In the course of a piece on the pleasures of James Lees-Milne's diaries at the Barnes and Noble Review, Dirda included the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis correspondence in a list of his ten favorite books, alongside such IBRL favorites as Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Casanova's memoirs, Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel, and In Search of Lost Time. About the list Dirda wrote,

If literature is news that stays news, as Ezra Pound famously said, then such books as those on my list represent what one might call the higher gossip. Their pages are packed with amusing anecdotes, erotic adventures, moral observations, lyrical evocations of the past, bits of biography, encounters with unusual people, and glorious descriptions of nature, art, places, and society. These are, in short, works that recreate a time and a place, while also plunging us deep into a tattered human heart.

I'm only 150 pages into the six volumes of Lyttelton/Hart-Davis letters, and I've already encountered all these elements. These are truly wonderful letters.

The correspondence began in charming fashion: Hart-Davis, a publisher, had been a pupil of Lyttelton at Eton, and when they met again at a dinner party in 1955 Lyttelton complained of being lonely in rural Suffolk:

"Nobody even writes to me," he said. Flushed with wine, I accepted the challenge.

"I'll write to you, George."

"When will you start?"

"Next week-end."

"Right. I'll answer in the middle of the week."

For seven years, until Lyttelton's death, that's what they did.

The first couple of letters are, as you might expect, a bit awkward: tentative and self-consciously literary. But amazingly quickly the pair settle into a true exchange that feels as comfortable as any rambling conversation with an old friend. They're both highly educated and steeped in English literary culture in that oh-so-English public school way that can positively boggle even the relatively literate mind at times. References--most caught, some requiring resort to research--abound, as do quotations, all feeling organic, markers of the mind at work. Hart-Davis, dismissing Lyttelton's apology for the "tediously otiose" act of quoting Dr. Johnson, sums up the pleasure of quotation:

[I]t's such a pleasure to write down splendid words--almost as though one were inventing them.

The most fun part of these early letters is the simple joy these two men are discovering in each other's company--finding that this lark on which they've embarked is, after all, a genuine meeting of the minds, a friendship that seems almost from the start to be infinitely capacious. Most collections of letters are best suited for dipping into rather than reading straight through; this one, at least thus far, seems the rare exception where following the trajectory and growth of the correspondence would more than make up for any of the inevitable tedium brought on by letter after letter after letter.

I'm sure I'll be sharing more in the coming weeks--this post, actually, was a sidetrack from what was to be a simple post about a tossed-off remark by Lyttelton about M. R. James's handwriting, which I promise I'll get to soon. For now, I'll leave you with a line that Hart-Davis quotes from the notebooks of another IBRL favorite, Thomas Hardy*:

Nine-tenths of the letters in which people speak unreservedly of their feelings are written after ten at night.

Being as we're long past that hour, I'll attempt to retain my reticence by retiring.