In summer 2005 I was approaching the end of a contract at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, where I’d been employed as an in-house writer. It was interesting work, researching and interpreting the museum’s collections for their new website, and developing an interactive, multimedia guid. After five years, however, the stream of Heritage Lottery money that had paid my wages had run dry.

My final task for the museum was writing and recording an audio guide for its latest exhibition. The Fitzwilliam had recently acquired the Maccles- field Psalter, an important 14th century illuminated manuscript, and this was to be the headline attraction in The Cambridge Illuminations, a dazzling display of painted books from Cambridge University collections.

The foundations for this exhibition had been laid over a century before by M R James, who’d been the first to systematically describe the hundreds of medieval manuscripts held in the various colleges and libraries of Cambridge. Between 1895 and 1925 he published his descriptions in a series of catalogues, which are still consulted by scholars today. MRJ had first started looking at the Fitzwilliam’s manuscripts when he was an undergrad- uate in the early 1880s, and between 1893 and 1908 he had served as the museum’s director. The Founder’s Library, which would have served as his office, looks much the same today as it had during his tenure. The great marble fireplace at which he’d warmed himself is now deemed unsafe to use, but the clock on the mantlepiece still keeps time, and the huge mirror in which he must have occasionally adjusted his tie, still gleams behind it.

During a conversation with the exhibition’s curator, I suggested that it would be interesting to acknowledge MRJ’s ghost stories alongside his scholarly work, and not long afterwards arrangements were made for me to perform two of his tales in the Founder’s Library in the run up to Christmas. With its curatorial protagonist and cache of medieval manuscript paintings, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’ was the obvious choice for the lead story; and given the museum setting and the reappearance of the “Cambridge man” Dennistoun, ‘The Mezzotint’ made for a suitable companion. A weekend in December was chosen.

I’d become aware of MRJ’s connections with the Fitzwilliam when I first started working there, and had looked again at his stories for the first time since childhood. I can still recall the thrill of remembrance as I reread the passage in ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’ in which Dennistoun comes face to face with the demon in his hotel room: “What did he do? What could he do? He has never been quite certain what words he said, but he knows that he spoke, that he grasped blindly at the silver crucifix, that he was conscious of a movement towards him on the part of the demon, and that he screamed

with the voice of an animal in hideous pain.” I remembered my 13-year-old self being impressed by the dramatic power of the writing. Those first two questions in particular – I’d wondered about their intonation. How would they work out loud? I’d practised muttering them to myself.

I’m not sure how, or when, I learned that MRJ had written his tales to read aloud in the first place. But once the event at the Fitzwilliam was confirmed, I got hold of Michael Cox’s biography, and became interested in the way in which the stories had originally been presented. The two earliest – ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’ and ‘Lost Hearts’ – had been read out one late October night in 1893, to a Cambridge University club called The Chit-Chat. No contemporary accounts of that evening survive, beyond a bald note in the club minutes that “Mr. James read two ghost stories.” But so adept did MRJ prove at ghostly storytelling, that it became his habit to compose a new tale each Christmas and read it to friends in his rooms. He dedicated his first collection to “all those who at various times have listened to them”, and some of those privileged listeners have left descriptions of the author in action.

Twenty-eight years after MRJ’s death, Oliffe Richmond (1881–1977) recalled the atmosphere of those Christmas gatherings: “Monty disappeared into his bedroom. We sat and waited in the candlelight, perhaps someone played a few bars on the piano and desisted, for good reason... [He] emerged from the bedroom, manuscript in hand, at last, and blew out all the candles but one, by which he seated himself. He then began to read, with more confidence than anyone else could have mustered, his well-nigh illegible script in the dim light.”

When Charles Tennyson (1879–1977) was an undergraduate at King’s in the 1890s, he was a regular guest in MRJ’s rooms. We don’t know whether he ever heard an original ghost story, but in his 1957 memoir he gave a vivid impression of MRJ as host: “He moved silently and with deliberation, spoke softly, seldom laughed but often chuckled, and when he read aloud, as he was fond of doing – generally tales of humor or horror – he seemed able to make dramatic effects without raising his voice or exceeding a purely

conversational emphasis. By a pause, and the slightest variation of tone – perhaps the raising of an eyebrow or a forefinger – he made his audience realize all that he himself realized in the passage and all that the author had intended it to convey.”

Samuel Gurney Lubbock (1873–1958), who was a regular guest at Christ- mas in King’s, confirms this image of a charismatic raconteur in his memoir of MRJ: “his reading [of the ghost stories] aloud was – like his reading of the Bible – entirely untheatrical and immensely effective.”

The impression, then, is of an understated, low-key delivery, well suited to the restrained tone of much of MRJ’s prose. But I wondered whether that was the full story – and I hoped that it wasn’t. Certainly, there are plenty of moments in MRJ’s tales that are the more chilling for their quietness, and he’s an expert at stirring up fear with a handful of seemingly innocent words – “There will be guests at the Hall”; “Who is this who is coming?”; “He has some power over your eyes” (open your collected M R James at random and you’ll soon come across an example). But there are also unforgettable moments of screaming panic in the stories; breathless losses of self-control by his protagonists. I felt that this aspect needed to be acknowledged in performance too. I wanted the teller of these tales to be able to raise his voice from time to time – even scream when the time was right.

MRJ was sober in appearance and earnest in vocation, but he was no introvert. Celebrated among his friends for his mimicry and aping of his fellow dons at King’s, he loved to put on funny voices, to be the centre of attention. And he enjoyed appearing on stage.

In 1883 he played the lead role, Peithetairos, in a production of Aristo- phanes’ 5th century BC comedy The Birds. Performed in the original Greek, this was an ambitious undertaking, a cut above the usual undergraduate theatricals – and a great popular success. Between 27 November and 1 December, over two and half thousand people crowded into Cambridge’s Theatre Royal to see The Birds. A special train was scheduled to take audience members back to London after the Saturday matinee. And MRJ’s Peithetairos was one of the talking points.

The Cambridge Independent Press noted in his performance “a certain half-imaginative, half-crazy earnestness, mixed with assurance, resource and vigour...” The Cambridge Review praised his “great comic power and... careful and spirited performance.” The Daily News offered just a hint of criticism: “Mr. James... displayed considerable vivacity and much command of gesture, but hardly enough modulation of voice.” Production photographs suggest the comic energy that MRJ invested in the production; there’s nothing undemonstrative or reticent about the man wielding Zeus’s thunderbolt in the photograph on the previous page. I wanted to allow some of this theatrical vigour to be present in my performances too.

For me, the most significant quotation that I found in Michael Cox’s biography came from an article that MRJ had written in 1880, as a 17-year-old schoolboy. In the second installment of a two part essay for The Eton Rambler, entitled ‘Ghost Stories’, he wrote that the teller of supernatural tales “should assume the tone of one who believes in the truth of what he is relating.” From the beginning, this has informed my approach and many of the changes that I’ve made to MRJ’s texts.

I deliberately try to look like MRJ, and I’ve researched his background in depth, but I’m not attempting a precise historical reconstruction of the man. Rather than MRJ, it’s the Jamesian narrator that I seek to embody – a subtly different, and more theatrically interesting character. A man with MRJ’s scholarly and social background, he is both enthralled and disturbed by the events that he relates, because he inhabits the world in which they have taken place. He cannot shake the fact that, for him, they are true stories.

Many of the textual changes you’ll find in these scripts have been made in the name of naturalism, in an attempt to suggest spontaneity on the narrator’s part, to make him relatable to audiences, and to promote in their minds the thought that they are co-inhabitants of his time and space.

Preparation

I’m often asked how I learn my lines and I wish the answer were more interesting.

I usually allow eight to ten weeks to memorize and rehearse an individual story, so to prepare two for a touring show is the job of a summer. I read the original story several times and retell it in my head, in my own words, to familiarise myself with the shape and structure. I often do this as I fall asleep, or lie awake at night. I then download the text and, continually muttering to myself, edit it to sound as conversational as possible. I aim to keep faith with MRJ’s grammar, language and tone of voice but from the beginning, I mold the words to fit my mouth and make sure that the story is comprehensible to a modern ear. This usually involves repunctuating shortening sentences and paragraphs, trimming superfluous details or words, and weeding out archaisms. A comparison of the original opening of ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’ with the script printed here gives a good idea of what I mean. More significant changes are also made to some stories at this point, which I will discuss below.

Next, I break the script down into segments of about 300 words and concentrate on one of these each day. I repeat the segment out loud dozens of times and am almost always on the move – pacing a room or outwalking. The aim is that, by the end of each day, I’ll have acquired a detailed sense of the content and language of each segment and can recite an approximate version of it without consulting the script. (When I say a ‘day’, I mean three to four hours spread throughout a day, not nine to five). Additional editing of the text goes on during this process; sentences are further tweaked to sound natural and spontaneous. Memorizing and rehearsing take place at the same time: as I absorb the words, I test out different intonations and rhythms.

After the whole story has been roughly learned, I incorporate any fresh textual changes into the script and redivide it, into longer segments than before. I then force myself to memorize this version precisely, segment by segment, and rehearse until it is ready to put before an audience. The only way of doing this is by repetition, and it can be tedious, frustrating work. Fortunately, by this point, I have committed to performing the story by a certain date, so giving up, though sometimes tempting, is not an option.

I try to be tough on myself at each stage of learning, but unintentional changes do slip in, through laziness or impatience or faulty memory. And changes will continue to be made, through happy accidents or sudden intuitions, as the show tours and matures. I allow myself a certain amount of freedom when performing, and alterations might be made on the wing, to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of a particular venue or the character of an audience. I regularly make mistakes and some of these have become ingrained or deliberately retained. So by the time the show has made itself at home on stage, MRJ’s original text has undergone many small alterations.

I don’t think that meaning has been lost anywhere – and in some cases, clarity has been enhanced – but I acknowledge that there might be places where the elegance and dignity of MRJ’s prose have been eroded. In these scripts, you will come across more sentences and paragraphs beginning with “now” “well” and “anyway” than you might like. While these interjections might read clumsily on the page, they often aid oral storytelling. “Well” often underlines a pause or a change of scene; “now” suggests a surge in energy, or a call to attention.

In the heat of a performance, I might also slip in a scarcely audible “you see” or “I mean” or “you know”, and I’ve not included these in the scripts. Missing also are those inarticulate sounds made to elicit a particular reaction or emphasize a point. There is a certain amount of stuttering and repetition as the narrator searches for a word, and some of these hesitancies I’ve tried to imply with punctuation – you will notice more dashes and ellipses than MRJ himself uses.

Over time I’ve allowed myself more freedom to improvise, and some passages printed here are only approximations of what is said on stage. The rules of grammar are not always strictly observed. In ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, for example, Mr. Somerton’s account of his experiences down the well becomes increasingly fragmented and hysterical, and the exact words he uses are liable to change from performance to performance. Likewise Dr. Oldys’s description of his ordeal in ‘The Residence at Whitminster’ is deliberately broken, at times scarcely coherent. His terror and incomprehension are expressed more graphically out loud than in writing.

Some rewriting has been done for ease of performance. So, in ‘The Mezzotint’, Mr. Garwood’s involvement has been reduced to a handful of lines near the beginning, and he is conflated with Nisbet in later scenes. It’s easier for me to enact a dialogue than a three-way conversation, and I think it adds clarity for the audience.

Other changes have been made to heighten drama and tension. In ‘The Ash Tree’, for instance, I’ve altered the personality of the younger Mr. Crome and the tone of his interaction with Sir Richard Fell; he is intended to be an altogether more unsettling presence in the script than he is in the original story. And I’ve occasionally transposed bits from other stories by MRJ. His final, posthumously published piece, ‘A Vignette’, contains some splendid images and writing, but wouldn’t, I think, work as a dramatic monologue; choice bits, however, can be found in the scripts for ‘Casting the Runes’ and ‘The Residence at Whitminster.’

Some things have been introduced or adapted for comic effect. In ‘Number 13’ I’ve replaced Mr. Anderson’s improvised poem about his neighbor, with a joke that MRJ would surely never have made himself – in print at any rate – but which I like to think would still have made him laugh. In ‘The Mezzotint’ I think it’s funnier if Oxford is explicitly identified as the University where the events take place.

I’ve reincorporated a couple of things that never made it into print but can be found in MRJ’s original manuscripts. There’s a good joke, for instance, about wine in ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’ that does nothing to take away from the tension which, at the time the joke is made, is approaching its peak. Conversely, I’ve excised some intendedly comic passages which to my mind slow proceedings down. Cockneys, I hold, are simply not as show stoppingly hilarious as they seem to have been in MRJ’s day, so the two tram workers who visit Dunning’s house and take up nearly two pages of ‘Casting the Runes’ saying nothing, have been relieved of their duties. (And it’s worth noting here, I think that MRJ’s stories are full of jokes. These are

often deadpan, some are obscure, and others are probably irretrievable today. But MRJ is much more intentionally funny than many people allow, and this is something that I hope is retained in the scripts and their performance. These stories do not need to be listened to in reverent silence.)

I’ve always liked the quiet, gently melancholy diminuendos of ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’ and ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, but the conclusions of some of MRJ’s stories can leave audiences at a loss. I’ve tried to soften the abruptness of the endings of ‘A View from a Hill’ and ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’, but ‘Number 13’ remains a problem; that one is left at the end as baffled as Mr. Anderson, is a barrier to enjoyment for some viewers.

The most radical and extensive rewriting of the source material is to be found in those stories which I’ve changed from third-person to first-person narratives. So ‘A Warning to the Curious’ becomes throughout a direct, personal reminiscence, rather than the reported speech of an unnamed eyewitness. Likewise, ‘A View from the Hill’, ‘An Episode of Cathedral History’, and the opening paragraphs of ‘Casting the Runes’, become accounts of firsthand experience. In ‘Lost Hearts’ I’ve suggested a closer relationship between the narrator and Stephen Elliott than MRJ ever does.

This has all been done to create a greater sense of immediacy; to engage the audience more closely, by suggesting that, through their relationship with the storyteller, they are themselves but one remove from the supernatural events that he relates.

The ‘I’ of these scripts is not himself a direct eyewitness to the supernatural (though at times he comes close), but he knows the people who are, and he owns boxes full of evidence to back up his stories. MRJ’s narrator is already the man who owns Dennistoun’s photo of Canon Alberic’s terrible drawing, and who has seen Professor Parkins’s brow cloud at the memory of a harrowing night in Burnstow. In these scripts, he has also looked through Mr Baxter’s ghoulish binoculars, sketched the empty tomb in Southminster Cathedral, and gazed upon the mangled face of Arthur Paxton.