The Other James

It never ceases to amaze me how many times we depend on sheer luck. In WWI, a young German soldier left a trench seconds before it was blown away by enemy fire. Just a few more seconds lingering, and Chancellor Hitler would have never been (I must admit that this could well be a myth, since similar stories are told about Franco during the Spanish-Moroccan conflict of 1911-27). Luck, fortune, fate... Call it what you please, it is unsettling how importat a role it often plays. Taking it to the extreme, what if you struggle to excel in a field where you share a name with someone brilliant by all accounts? Every time your name is mentioned, the first thought of all present will be for the other. You will always remain as "the less famous X" or, even worse, "Oh, that X". M. R. James was roughly a contemporary of Henry James, the Nobel Prize; he was "Oh, that James". He never achieved such a recognisition but, truth be told, I suspect he never truly wished to. M. R. had other sources of self-assurance; he was a scholar in Cambridge, a antiquary who enjoyed his job, and, above all, he was an English gentleman as English gentlemen wished themselves to be - meaning he probably never allowed himself to feel anything as demeaning as jealousy. M. R. "Oh, that James" went on writing little, deliciously creepy terror stories. Yes, his short stories always follow the same pattern and, after a while, they become repetitive, but the same can be said of other writers writing at the same time who become deservedly famous: Arthur C. Doyle and Agatha Christie. You do not read them in hopes that the originality of their plots will take you by surprise: you read them because they are reassuring in their familiarity, and because you know you're in for a treat and little else. No earth-shattering self-discoveries through the experience of literature here.
 Despite his monotonous plots, M.R. James devised some strategies that have become classic in the horror genre. First, the complicity between writer and reader without the character involved being wholly conscious of what's going on. The main character, staying with some old friends, trips over a huge form while going downstairs in the middle of the night. He is half-asleep and thinks it must be the kitchen cat (but we know it isn't). You have bought a cheap engraving of a manor house. Your friend comments that the sinister hooded figure in the background is remarkable. Although you hadn't seen the figure when you bought the engraving, you tell yourself it must have always been there (but you're wrong). Cheap it is, easy it is, but it works.
 A second reason why everyone (that is, everyone interested in the Gothic genre) should give James a chance is the amazingly modern treatment of time and space in some of his tales. It is not that ghosts do not seem to be affected by the physical laws (that has always been their premise): James literally achieves to recreate vertigo, with his characters, and vicariously the reader, experiencing the unexplainable: alone in his library at night, and observing the map of the perturbing maze in his garden, a little black point catches the attention of a man - he intensely stares at it until the point becomes a hole, so deep it makes black look pale, and feels he is falling through it to meet what lies on the bottom (while a part of his mind is perfectly conscious of him being at his library having a look at a map). So (splendidly) scary.
 The other James, maybe. But what a James.