Wednesday 9/4/24
It is autumn now, or at least what I consider autumn, so we will talk a bit about ghost stories (not that it has to be autumn for this). I read the ghost stories of M.R. James more than I do those of E.F. Benson, but it was Benson's I returned with greater regularity early on.
Benson's ghost stories tend to have a circular shape. They don't fire off in a line, but rather hang out for a period of time, especially at the outset. They can be like turning up at a gathering and chatting before the night's program--if there is one--gets underway.
I do like that about them. We feel as if we're in this comfortable spot with people with people we're we're happy to be. Benson can temporize in this manner, with chit-chat (ironically, given M.R. James's involvement with the Chit-Chat Society) and convivial catching-up. M.R. James's stories work much less well when he prevaricates and moves in a circle, which makes for the charm in Benson.
This temporization for James is often one of an author trying to figure out--while he writes--what his story is. That's not what you want to be doing. Whenever James does this, his stories become prolix, and they don't really go anywhere. But when James moves in a line--and I'm not saying it has to be this super-straight shot, but there's a discernible path nonetheless, and, additionally, a discernible overall rhythm--then he's much more successful and able to produce works that Benson can't, in terms of their artistry and the impact resulting from that artistry.
Benson could be chummy, but James could be witty and/or funny--these being two different things, in a sense, though they may also perfectly overlap--but only in his works with that discernible path. He needed to have that focus in his writing in order to have range within the story. That's a key point. That's usually how it works. Range of emotion, feeling, seriousness and humor.
There are the so-called "big three" M.R. James stories of "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad," "A Warning to the Curious," and "Casting the Runes," which I've written and talked about often in various places, but one not too far behind them is "Martin's Close," which is in James's 1911 collection More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.
"Martin's Close" is one of those stories where when you read a short description of what it's about, you might not be that keen to read it. It's a historical piece, M.R. James doing a period costume drama. James doesn't do much of this. And I find that in general period pieces have more period to them, if you will, than the guts of humanness. I'm interested in those guts, not clothing and the like. Historical fidelity. I want the people stuff, not period stuff.
But it's a people story--living people and dead people. Or person, rather. It's also a courtroom story. Those can be very stagey. They don't have to be, but they usually are. Courtroom TV shows are stagey. The best courtroom dramas find a way to be less stagey. Think of Anatomy of a Murder. That's a better film than Witness for the Prosecution because it has more mobility. We don't feel like we're stuck in a courtroom.
With "Martin's Close," we have a courtroom setting in 1684, and you think in advance that this is going to be something old-fashioned and diffuse. We're already back in time, we're probably going back in manner of speech, so how direct can James be? Sounds like we'll be on a bunch of different roads, rather than going down the one prevailing path.
But he handles his story so well that it's as focused in its way as the big three. It's one of the only ghost stories--perhaps the only ghost story--to be both a courtroom drama and a work of folk horror. As far as the fear factor goes, this could be James's scariest story. Now, I don't need a ghost story to be scary--or certainly not in the outright horror sense, being that there are other ways to be scared and scared more at that--for it to reach a high level in my estimation, but this one is horror-scary. Eldritch.
James makes excellent use of music and song in the story. The dialogue, too, works like music. It's sharp. We also get a cross section of classes. People of various means and walks of life come together in this story.
That's something else James isn't seen as doing much of, but there's more of it in his work than many James readers think because they get caught up in James spending almost all of his life in academic settings.
Consider, for example, the interaction with the two tram workers in "Casting the Runes" or the interplay with hotel staff--and the little boy--in "Oh, Whistle." James wasn't some miserable classist like, say, a no-talent such as Bradford Morrow is. James may have lived in this shut-away corner of the world in academia, but he knew of large parts of the rest of it. Further, James understood people. And that's something that no one who writes right now does at all. They haven't any clue how people really are. They don't write about people as how they really are. They don't know the first thing about people, any person, or themselves. You will not write well then.
James had an ability to render voices believable in their respective vernaculars. These days, everyone talks like an idiot. No one has command of language. But in James's time, there was this kind of linguistic separation of state between the educated and what were thought of as commoners. Especially in England. Think of the comic trope of the Cockney. The passages with such people are painful to try and get through in much fiction of this era. You have a person out of touch with that kind of person trying to write that person, and matters become very broad and none of it reads naturally. As a reader, you try to power forward to when the writing gets "back to normal."
What writers of "literary fiction" do at present is create the worst dialogue which shows how out of touch with reality and people they are. It always reads like something from an academic paper. They have no idea what they're doing. We see it in the prose offs. But James could capture who he needed to capture. You connected with those characters. You felt like you knew them. Were coming from a similar place, at least in your way.
Everyone has been in a situation like the two train attendants in "Casting the Runes." We understand their concerns. We don't think of them as different from us. We empathize. Not out of some large heartedness, but because their situation is one like situations we've known and may very well still be concerned about because we'll be in those situations again. There's no classism here, but a form of equality.
In MFA fiction right now, everything is tiered. A character, in the author's mind, is "better" than other people, better than the reader, because that character--given that so much of this autobiography--went to an Ivy and has an advanced degree. Insecure people who are also arrogant because of the nature of their insecurity want others to think they're below them. David Remnick, as we've seen.
The good writer is secure in who he or she is. If one is not, one won't write well. There's no way around that. Very few people in history have ever written well. Not truly well. James wrote well. You cannot be a classist and write well. Sigrid Rausing--whose own work we will be taking apart soon--could never create any writing of any value nor allow the inclusion of the work of anyone who she saw as a threat to class privilege. None of these people can. There are many, many, many reasons for that, but this is one of them.
John Meston, who wrote most of the Gunsmoke radio plays, was another writer who had class and education mobility within his work and across the range of his characters. Look at all of the double negatives in Gunsmoke, all of the wrenches launched into "proper" English, and yet I'd argue that Shakespeare was no greater a dramatical poet than Meston. Back in the prose-on-the-page medium, Joseph Jefferson Farjeon showed himself to have a similar ability with his Ben the Tramp books and the coming together of classes under one snowy roof in Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story, which is one of my favorite books.
People don't judge each other in "Martin's Close," which is ironic, given the courtroom component. They're aware of each other and their differences, but they've come together. The judge doesn't automatically think the hostelry woman giving her testimony in her "folk" language isn't a valuable person to listen to. Everyone does judge Squire Martin, but he has bigger problems than their judgment of him, and they all seem to know that.
James is commanding language and narrative in this story, and he's also in command of himself. That requires self-awareness. James could seem close-minded. He had these rules for what he thought should be in a ghost story. He was prudish. But these personal limitations didn't manifest in his actual writing--not in his best stories, that is.
I was talking recently in these pages about "What the Mouse Knew," and the irony that the best story ever written about a cat was written by someone who hates cats and thinks they're vile, disgusting creatures. Now, you can contend that's a flaw in that person. I'm not here to dispute that one way or the other. But you could say it. Let's say it is, for argument's sake. But it didn't stop that person at all from writing that story, which is as beautifully, richly, touchingly, stirringly, heartrendingly a pro-cat story as could be.
The great writer is able to separate. They are not "just them" in their writing. They may be going against the grain of a portion of their just them-ness. They have moved into a different realm and a different self. Parts of the other self and the other realm may remain, but a great writer realizes they're doing something else. What would otherwise be their non-writing state predilections don't apply. They may have no relevance whatsoever. They may be diametrically opposed. This takes things that all of these simple, basic, small-minded, MFA people do not have. They could never do this and they'd struggle to understand how it could even be done. It would never occur to them on their own, without seeing it here now.
James could be this way, which is part of how he was able to create his best stories. "Martin's Close" is right up there. There's an entry in the Ghost Story for Christmas series based on the work, which is pretty good, and there's also a BBC radio adaptation from 1963, but read the actual story.
Comments