Supernatural Horror: Authors and Themes

M R JAMES' NEW ENGLAND READING

What would M R James read while visiting his friends? According to Gwendolen McBryde's Letters to a Friend he was fond of stories with a New England setting. He is recorded as reading and re-reading one of the best New England novels, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) by Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909).

In a letter of January 1928, James discusses H P Lovecraft's major study "Supernatural Horror in Literature". Although he has no time for Lovecraft's style, he agrees with some of his judgments, including his praise of another New England writer, Mary E Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930). Freeman wrote a respectable number of excellent supernatural stories set in New England, as part of her prolific output of stories and novels. M R James characterizes the collection The Wind in the Rosebush (1903) as 'quite successful domestic New England: I like it'(2).

While both Freeman and Jewett wrote supernatural fiction, it is probably true to say that it is Freeman who is the better known for her contributions to the genre. And both wrote mainstream stories of domestic New England, but it seems that Sarah Orne Jewett is the better-known of the two contemporaries for that.

Always partial to a good ghost story, it is to be expected that M R James would be acquainted with Freeman’s and Jewett’s supernatural fiction. But here I offer a few suggestions as to why James seemed to have enjoyed The Country of the Pointed Firs so much. Nothing too serious is to be read into these speculations!

Perhaps the main reason is that Jewett describes a complete and living place that the reader can enter into and inhabit, being welcomed there unconditionally just as the novel's narrator is. The small town of Dunnet Landing, Maine, together with its back country and offshore islands, is like a second home: intimate, friendly, quiet, inviting.

Much of the novel is structured around visits made by the narrator to various inhabitants of the town. She is also taken around by the main character, Almira Todd. These are model visits, revealing depths hidden behind the outward New England calm and poise, and allowing the narrator to take part as a trusted friend rather than as a newcomer. M R James could have found his positive experiences, and wishes, reflected in The Country of the Pointed Firs.

James is usually regarded as at best having an ambivalent attitude towards women; at worst he could exhibit signs of misogyny (3). The Country of the Pointed Firs has been described as 'so thoroughly a woman's book about the world of women -- old women at that' (4). In Dunnet Landing it is the women who reign supreme. A typical Dunnet Landing woman (to say nothing of most of the female characters in the rest of Jewett’s -- and Freeman's -- work) is unmarried, or a widow. The men are absent: most have died young, lost at sea, leaving their women to outlive them, and to continue their lives, playing both traditional male and female roles.

What men there are, are fairly peripheral to the story, or, are characterised as being somewhat incompetent, or lacking the fire and ambition of the women. The Country of the Pointed Firs can be read as offering a fascinating (and safe) glimpse into a world of challenging and unconventional women.

A small community, where everyone knows each other, and their business, where everyone has their place, would be a setting that M R James would be familiar with. School and college life, and James’ academic world, have their parallels with Dunnet Landing in this respect. It would have the allure that New England has always had to the English: trees in the fall, white-spired churches, and so on. It would be sufficiently different from James’ Cambridge to be worth escaping to, and yet also a little safe in this similarity of the sense of feeling a part of it. And in a work of fiction, there is no-one to offend or make demands.

As in M R James' world, Jewett celebrates age, and makes it clear that age is no barrier to usefulness or carrying on as usual. Almira Todd is 67; her mother, Mrs Blackett, is still active at 86. A Jewett character is elderly, but shows the superiority over younger people of wisdom gained through age and experience.

Perhaps James found the world of Dunnet Landing and its people the place to have the best of all possible worlds: a vividly realized world away from his ordinary one, a home away from home, yet also a place that is also home.

The novel contains exemplars for people who live a single life, and who make the best of their circumstances and surroundings, if not actually triumph over them. The narrator experiences the unconditional acceptance and love of Dunnet Landing's inhabitants. These are basic Christian teachings, and, in theory at least, experiences. M R James never expressed as 'Christian' a world-view as might be expected; the values of Jewett's novel may well have been more real and meaningful to him than those of the orthodox Christian tradition, including the Bible (5).

There are two episodes in The Country of the Pointed Firs that could be considered supernatural. The first was originally a separate story. In Chapter VI, "The Waiting Place", Captain Littlepage tells the narrator about a strange town in the Canadian arctic that he himself was once told about:

[The town was] like a place where there was neither living nor dead. ...when they got close inshore they could see the shape of folks, but they could never get near them, -- all blowing gray figures that would pass along alone, or sometimes gathered in companies as if they were watching. (6)

The second is "The Foreigner" (1900), one of four independent Dunnet Landing stories usually published with the novel. Mrs Todd tells the narrator about the death of Mrs Tolland:

All of a sudden she set right up in bed with her eyes wide open... I looked the way she was lookin', an' I see someone was standin' there against the dark. ...I couldn't tell the shape, but 'twas a woman's dark face lookin' right at us; 'twa'n't but an instant, as I say, an' when my sight came back I couldn't see nothing there. (7)

Just before Mrs Tolland dies, she asks Mrs Todd if she had seen something. Mrs Todd answers her: "'Yes, dear, I did; you ain't never goin' to feel strange an' lonesome no more."'

To never feel out of place, and alone, is a natural human desire. I think that the world of Dunnet Landing helped M R James to fulfil that desire.

Notes

1. The letter is reprinted in Jack Adrian, “An M R James Letter”, Ghosts & Scholars 8, 1986. Adrian     also speculates about how Lovecraft’s essay came to be in James’ possession.

2. Ghosts & Scholars 8, p.31

3. For example, see Michael Cox, M R James (Oxford University Press 1983) p 164ff

4. Solomon, p5

5. See Simon MacCulloch, "The Toad in the Study" (Part 1) Ghosts & Scholars 20

6. Jewett, p 25

7. Jewett, p184

8. Jewett, p186

Bibliography

Page references to The Country of the Pointed Firs are to the 1982 Norton paperback edition. This has two useful introductions, plus atmospheric illustrations. Barbara Solomon has edited an excellent book Short Fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman (Signet Classics 1979) which also contains Jewett's novel, and introductions and bibliographies by the editor.

An excellent selection of Mary Wilkins Freeman’s supernatural fiction is to be found in Collected Ghost Stories (Arkham House 1974). Lady Ferry and Other Uncanny People edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson (Ash-Tree Press 1998) collects several of Sarah Orne Jewett’s supernatural stories, including “Captain Littlepage and the Waiting Place”.

A slightly different version of this article was published in Ghosts & Scholars 21, 1996

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Copyright (c) 2002 John Howard