Imaging M R James

The days are drawing in, and here at Ty Isaf it’s the time for stacking the logs high on the fire, shuttering the windows against the early dusk and pulling a little reading matter from the shelves appropriate to this dank, blustery season. To celebrate Halloween, I offer Artloggers a brief canter through some of the artists who have created images for the ghost stories of the great M R James.

Hardcover edition by Tiger, 1991, with drawings by Rosalind Caldecott

While the M R James ghost stories are acknowledged the best of their genre, they haven’t always been served well by illustrators or by the artists who produced images for dust-wrappers and paperback covers.  James’ writing is so evocative that illustrations are not at all necessary, though as a lover of illustrated books I admit I’ve long wanted to meet the M R James-ian challenge of creating page decorations that might chill the eye as effectively as his prose icily clutches at the heart. One day, perhaps. (You can see an image I once made while thinking on MRJ, HERE)

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A Pleasing Terror: the complete supernatural writings of M R James. Published by Ash Tree Press, 2001

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Paul Lowe illustration for A Pleasing Terror. Ash Tree Press. 2001

I’m intrigued by Paul Lowe’s images for the Ash Tree Press ‘complete supernatural writings’ edition of 2001, though I like the cover rather less. (Badly designed… the lettering is terrible… and the image is too ‘pulpy’ for MRJ.) The drawing illustrated above has a quality of Mervyn Peake, who I think would have made a spectacularly good job of  James’ tales. (it’s a shame they never came his way.) Lowe works his images in different techniques. The crispness of the ink drawing above has a nightmarish clarity, while the softness of his drawing for the story Rats (see below) is wonderfully creepy precisely because of the lack of detail.  Despite its merits, I prefer a more consistent visual character than is managed in this edition.

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Above and below: Charles Keeping made some evocative images for a 1973 Folio Society edition of The Ghost Stories of M R James

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These vintage Pan editions have a period charm, but are far from the M R James-ian spirit.

Above: 1953 edition  of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary from Pan.

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Above: 1955 edition of More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary from Pan.

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Above: the ever reliable Penguin make an elegant job of atmospherically wrapping James’ ghost stories in a paperback. This edition is titled The Haunted Dolls’ House and other stories. The image is by photographer Simon Marsden, better known for his book Visions of Poe (Webb & Bower, 1988) in which he selected stories and poems by Edgar Allan Poe, and accompanied them with his photographs.

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Finally, I come to James McBryde, illustrator for the first edition. In 1893 McBryde came up to study Natural Sciences at Cambridge, and while there become friends with the Dean of King’s and deputy director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, M R James. McBryde was ten years younger that MRJ, but the friendship flourished and continued beyond his time at Cambridge in annual summer vacations the two took together in Denmark and Sweden. (1899 -1901)

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James McBryde’s illustration for Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad from M R James’ Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, has in this version been cropped and tinted for a paperback edition.

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McBryde would have known the ghost stories first hand from the readings MRJ had given to his circle of friends at Kings, and when the suggestion was made that he illustrate the first edition of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, he accepted the challenge.

In his excellent article on McBryde for The Spectator in 2010, Robert Lloyd Parry writes of Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad:

‘McBryde captures perfectly the bleak atmosphere of the tale and the stark terror of its finale. Told in James’s dry, unhurried style Oh, Whistle… is, nonetheless, a story full of frantic movement — of stumbling and flapping, scurrying and darting, leaping and running — and the same sense of agitation is brilliantly conveyed in the picture. Those uncanny, wriggling shadows seem to zoom in on Parkins, trapping him in that shaft of moonlight. The bedsheets roll on, like a wave about to break over him.’

‘In the story it is the apparition’s ‘intensely horrible face of crumpled linen’ that provides the focal point of terror. McBryde concentrates more on the grimace of the victim: Parkins is skeletal, his mouth a lunatic rictus, his cheeks hollowed out by a scream. The story has him lurching out of the window to escape his attacker; McBryde hems him in against a chest of drawers, his clawlike hands reaching out to fend off a being that he is too terrified to touch.’

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On 6 May 1904, McBryde wrote to MRJ:

‘I have finished the Whistle ghost…I covered yards of paper to put in the moon shadows correctly and it is certainly the best thing I have ever drawn…’

While working on the illustrations the young artist had been suffering from appendicitis, and he was convalescing from an operation to remove his appendix when his pregnant wife Gwendolyn wrote a letter to James assuring him that all was well. However McBryde had not completed his work when on 6 June 1904, he died from complications arising from his surgery. His widow returned the manuscript to MRJ, together with her husband’s last drawings. James’ publisher suggested that another artist resume where McBryde had left off. But the author was adamant that the edition would stand as a memorial to his friend, and it was subsequently published with just four completed McBryde illustrations.

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McBryde illustration of the apparition from Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad

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McBryde  illustration for Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad

McBryde illustration from Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

McBryde illustration from Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

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MRJ was named the legal guardian of McBryde’s daughter Jane, who was born six months after her father’s death, and he remained life-long friends with mother and daughter. James never married, and the two women became as close to him as he would ever come to having a family of his own.

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LINKS

John Coulthart on Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, my Lad.

Robert Lloyd Parry on James McBryde in The Spectator.