Crikey - no-one’s been that pleased to see me since I smuggled a bottle of vodka on a school trip to York Minster; I knew that wearing Lynx deodorant at my age was a bad idea.
A while back a friend of mine sent me a copy of an LRB review of the Oxford edition of the stories. It's okay, but it repeats some of the clichés I think appear too often, and with too little justification, in reviews of James work. (Sorry, the review doesn't seem to be available online - you'll have to take my word for it.)
For instance:
But the ghosts themselves are so often women, spurned or murdered or guilt-ridden: Mrs Mothersole in ‘The Ash Tree’, Ann Clark in ‘Martin’s Close’, Theodosia Bryan in ‘A Neighbour’s Landmark’ and the terrible figure in ‘a shapeless sort of blackened sun-bonnet’ in ‘Wailing Well’.
Well, actually no. Of the thirty-one stories in my battered old Penguin edition, a grand total of six revolve around female ghosts. (Another one,
Lost Hearts, has one of each sex - and the
Haunted Dolls House has a mix.) So 'so often women' is not just pushing it, it's more or less nonsense.
The author of the review then rather hedges his bets:
And even when the ghosts and their victims are both male, the erotic overtones still hum. How horrified James would have been to find ‘Lost Hearts’ or ‘The Residence at Whitminster’ included in an anthology of gay ghost stories, but both would certainly deserve their place, especially the latter.
Really? I have to say that neither actually jumps out at me as particularly homo-erotic. (The author of the review misses the one story which I actually do think contains elements which might conceivably be read this way -
An Evening's Entertainment.)
I'm not one of those people who is averse to the idea of subtexts, both conscious and unconscious (the opposite idea, that it's always just about the story, seems ridiculous) - but I can't help feeling that sometimes people are telling you much more about their own subtext than they are about the thing they are reviewing.
And on that note, did anyone ever read Hugh Walpole's
Mrs Lunt, which I posted a link to some while back? I'd be really interested to know if the tensions I sensed were apparent to anyone else. I first heard this story in a very good reading by Andrew Sachs on a Penguin audio collection of ghost stories and I did wonder if it may have been that his nuancing over-emphasised the relevant elements - and sometimes once you’ve got the idea in your head it's very difficult to get over first impressions.
That said, Walpole was gay and kind of preoccupied with the search for what he called the 'ideal friend' (and there's a fair bit of play on this idea in Mrs Lunt, albeit without any mention of sexuality). However, I didn’t know any of that when I first came to the story - which maybe means that it's a very good story with which an author told me something indirectly which he wasn't actually able to put directly on paper.
I think it's probably a good example of sexuality being an element of the ghost story. The works of M R James, I think, are not.
Edit: Actually, my apologies - looks like I didn't post a link to the story before, and I can now only find a partial version on the internet. Bugger!
