M.R. James and class, dialects, humor, Le Fanu, and in relation to John Williams and William Sloane

Sunday 3/22/26

M.R. James loved the ghost stories of Sheridan Le Fanu like I love the ghost stories of M.R. James, even if James did overrate Le Fanu. In his essay about ghost story writers and what, in his estimation, makes for a good ghost story, James's prose practically burbles in with excitement as pertains Le Fanu's writings, which is rare for James.

M.R. James set most of "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" in the fictional coastal town of Burnstow, and then set some of "The Tractate Middoth" there as well.

The manner in which James sets up "Casting the Runes" is brilliant. There isn't an author alive today who could come up with something like that and then pull it off with the economy, finesse, and creativity that James does. It really impresses me.

The thing, too, is that it goes against all these "rules" you'd come across in writing communities and programs, which don't take into someone like this who is capable of doing things way beyond what the people in those groups and settings are.

I've mentioned this before, but I don't know if I've ever heard anyone read anything better than Jonathan Keeble reads M.R. James. Normally I'm not terribly interested in this kind of thing, save with some exceptions--Christopher Lee reading Dracula, Dylan Thomas reading "A Child's Christmas in Wales" (and more of his own work), the recording of F. Scott Fitzgerald reading from John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale"--but when it comes to the reading of M.R. James's stories, Keeble is a kind of artist in his own right. And crucially, James wrote many of these stories to be read aloud. Not only read aloud in his rooms with the members of the Chit-Chat Society foregathered; but that was a thrust.

I've followed Keeble's career as a professional reader out-loud, I suppose you could say, and he must always be at some recording session, but it's evident to me that he either grew up with these James stories and read them over the course of his life, or went into extreme prep mode before doing his voice recordings. He really understands these characters and the nuances in the stories.

I could also add Michael Hordern's readings of M.R. James's stories to the above list. I discussed them in the Scrooge book. Hordern takes a much different approach than Keeble. I listen to both.

James is as witty as Wodehouse. It's a subtler wit, but he can be very funny when it's called on, and that's how his wit is deployed. The best writers can reach for what is required in the moment, and that determines what they use. Lesser writers have a thing, or what they consider their thing, and it's automatically used from the get-go and splattered all over whatever it is they're doing. The story--and the characters--determine what you'll use. Not the other way around.

Consider the train conductor and driver in "Casting the Runes" who pay a call to Dunning's house and the account of their boss--and what's left out--who had given them a dressing down. It's marvelously funny. James excelled at dialects--class dialects, you could say. He was similar to J. Jefferson Farjeon in this regard.

Dialect attempts in fiction are often painful to try and get through; few writers have the ear. You have to take those sounds and then replicate them in the prose. The words will look different, though the language is the same, and you don't want it to be this deciphering battle for the reader.

Think of the think Cockney accent we encounter at times in Farjeon and throughout the delightful Ben the Tramp series; he doesn't make it hard for you to both process and read. You can continue at a similar pace to the one you had before that kind of dialect kicked in. Nor do these writers weaponize dialect as a means of saying, "Here we have a grubby member of the 'folk,' those people beneath you and me, or at least me," as you'll often witness elsewhere.

James spent most of his life in academia, with no desire to leave that world, and yet, unlike most people in that world, he knew much about the people outside of it. How people are. William Sloane is another example of a writer who's this way.

Someone like John Williams isn't. In Stoner, we have an academic raping his wife, and this is treated as a form of stoic heroism on the part of the mediocre, weak, pathetic, rapist whose name supplies the novel's title, which says a lot about how similar the many academics are that pledge their weak, pathetic, mediocre man type of allegiance to this book and its protagonist, a word I don't even like using in this case.

Sloane was another academia, at least in part (he oversaw the Rutgers University Press some years after graduating from Princeton), and in his two novels To Walk the Night and The Edge of Running Water, we're knocked back in our chairs by their displays of how much he knew about humans and humanness, which one won't find much evidence of within those structurally compromised ivory towers of academia. And he was passionate about sci-fi, which was considered grubby and unbecoming by most of his peers, who weren't really his peers because that's not how it works for people and writers like this.

M.R. James was very highbrow, demanding, and yet down-to-earth at the same time. Which is one of the reasons I'm drawn to him. He wanted things done right, deeply, thoroughly, and to always be learning and not limiting your learning. The insecure and selectively uneducated would term him pedantic, I'm sure--or whatever their words were to that effect--but he wasn't. This was instead someone who expected you try hard, think hard, live right.

I can think of very few academics who knew we'll call the common man. M.R. James as no classist. You won't encounter any classism in his writing. Look at the different classes on display in "Martin's Close." Look at how believably he renders the people who work at the tavern and the poor "innocent" of a woman who is used so cruelly by the squire.

That's a large-hearted man in James. That's someone who cares about people, even if, okay, he probably would have had a hard time being around most of those people. He has these prickly kinds of expectations as a man--which is natural with his intellect--but not as a writer, which is how it is for the better writers.

I know that I'll be writing a book as a reader's guide to, and a critical study of, the writings of Thoreau--a companionable, accessible volume of unsurpassed expertise--and I'm also thinking about doing one on M.R. James. And F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Too many writers just write for (insofar as they write truly write for anyone, which they rarely do given that the undertaking is normally for their own egos and the papering over of their insecurities) people already dwelling in that same field or area, so to speak, rather than others who might do so.

They speak to the people who are already in a given room, whereas I want to do that, yes, fine, but give people reason to go into the room, to welcome them there, and for them to find their own bases of operation within the room. This is what I'd seek to do with a book about M.R. James.