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And Once Again the Truth is Found (Part 2)

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Continuing a consideration of ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ by M.R. James and its BBC television adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark.  Here is Part 1 of this essay.  It really is one continuous and continuing piece.

I had no heart to post this last week.  But that was last week.

 

4. Just what kind of Anglican churchman is Dr John Benwell Haynes?

i.

We will start with the most basic trait of the story’s main character: his name.  It is hard to believe that M.R. James used this name without referential intent, since it takes us right back into the heart of the early English Reformation.

Simon Haynes, sometimes Heynes, (c.1495-1552), was, writes Professor Alec Ryrie in The Gospel and Henry VIII – Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation, “one of the most well connected evangelicals of the period.”

Simon Haynes attended Queens’ College, Cambridge; the same college where Erasmus studied during his time in England.  Erasmus would have been there at the same time as Haynes, so it seems likely they met.  Erasmus of Rotterdam was not a Protestant – he remained a Catholic and originally refused to take sides in the Luther / anti-Luther debate, eventually coming down against Luther – but his humanist critiques and satires paved the way for reformist, eventually Protestant ideas.  And it is difficult to argue that his 1516 publication of a translation of the New Testament into Latin and Greek had no influence on the Reformation, which began almost immediately afterwards.  1516 was the same year Erasmus left Queens’ College, and in which Haynes graduated and was made a fellow.  After taking holy orders, he continued to rise through the college positions, eventually becoming president (same thing as ‘master’ in most colleges).

In 1533, Haynes was one of the delegates to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s special court at Dunstable Priory, which was tasked with judging the arguments Henry VIII was putting forward for his divorce from Catherine of Aragon.  Unsurprisingly, Henry’s archbishop and his panel agreed with Henry’s position, and Cranmer declared the marriage annulled.  The following year, Haynes teamed up with Bishop John Skip (or Skypp) – chaplain of now-Queen Anne Boleyn – to preach against papal supremacy at Cambridge.  Haynes then served as an ambassador to France alongside Christopher Mount (or Mont), as an agent of evangelical reformer – and first architect of the English Reformation – Thomas Cromwell.  Their secret mission was to establish lines of communication with Martin Luther’s collaborator Philip Melanchthon, and possibly persuade him to come to England.  As Dean of Exeter Cathedral, Haynes attended the baptism of the baby who would later be crowned Edward VI and oversee the most ideologically and governmentally thoroughgoing phase of England’s Protestant Reformation.  In combination with the arch-persecutor of English Catholics (and future backslider) Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, Haynes accused Sir Thomas Wyatt (Ambassador to Spain, poet, and rumoured lover – or at least adorer – of Anne Boleyn) of unlawful contact with the English Cardinal Reginald Pole. …

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And Once Again the Truth is Found (Part 1)

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On ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ by M.R. James and its BBC television adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark

 

  1. Introduction

‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ was one of the stories that M.R. James wrote in order to perform for his friends and guests at the famous Christmas meetings of the Chit-Chat Club.  It was subsequently published in Contemporary Review in 1910, and then republished in a book entitled More Ghost Stories (a sequel to his first published volume of stories Ghost Stories of an Antiquary) in 1911.  In an introduction, James describes the fictional Barchester Cathedral as “a blend of Canterbury, Salisbury, and Hereford”, and is clearly also riffing on the Barchester of Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire novels.  James was a reader of contemporary fiction.

‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ was adapted for television by the BBC in 1971.  Under the slightly truncated title ‘The Stalls of Barchester’, this adaptation inaugurated the famous strand of TV films known as the A Ghost Story for Christmas series.

The story was also adapted for television in 2000 by BBC Scotland as one episode of the four part series Ghost Stories for Christmas with Christopher Lee.

 

  1. The Story (including total spoileration)

‘The Stalls of Barchester’ is a murder mystery without a mystery and a ghost story without a ghost.

There follows a necessary recitation of the plot.  I strongly urge the reader to experience the story for themselves first.

In the early 19th century, Dr John Benwell Haynes, the unmarried and widely admired precentor of Barchester Cathedral, succeeds to the post of archdeacon after the death of the extremely elderly archdeacon Pulteney.  Pulteney has died in a fall down the stairs, reportedly as a result of a stair rod being left under the carpet by an inefficient maid servant, Jane Lee.  Lee, we hear, has been dismissed.  In contrast to the deaf and senile Pulteney, Haynes is a zealous and efficient administrator.  A big part of his job seems to be to get the tenants on diocese-owned land to start paying their rents again, something the late archdeacon Pulteney permitted to lapse for years (may the angels guard his grave).  It takes Haynes three years to put the affairs of the cathedral and diocese to rights again.  Once this is achieved, things start to go badly for him.

One evening, during prayers in the cathedral, Haynes is touching “an exquisitely modelled figure of a cat” on his choir stall and, instead of wood, feels fur and a living body under his fingers.  On another occasion, he is touching another carved figure – an ambiguous character with a mutilated face and a noose around its neck, cowled like “a monk, or ‘friar of orders grey’”, who seems to represent Death himself – and feels the dank fabric of its robes.

These quotations come from Haynes himself.  James gives us sections from a letter Haynes drafts (but apparently never sends) to Sylvanus Urban, some time before his supernatural experiences begin.  Sylvanus Urban was the pen name of Edward Cave (1691-1754), the founder, editor, and publisher of The Gentleman’s Magazine (he thus coined the term ‘magazine’ to refer to a printed periodical). …

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Uncommon Prayer-Books

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(Also: The Crack Down the Spine, Part 2)

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In the last essay, I remarked upon a paradox: M.R. James is thought of as ‘the father of the modern British ghost story’ (etc. etc.) and yet rarely wrote about ghosts as such.  This is not a particularly original observation but it is one that remains, perhaps, under-theorised – something I hope to address.  As also intimated last time, James is a fanatically material writer.  His ghosts are not ghosts but – as we will see in the next essay – cats and carvings, monks and stair carpets, and many other material things besides.

This is not actually as puzzling as it might seem at first glance. In fact, the ‘ghost story’ as we know it does not restrict itself to stories about spectral figures of the dead.  While we separate the uncanny story into various subsections based on content and/or tone – the vampire story, the Weird tale, etc – we also use the term ‘ghost story’ as an umbrella term.  And this is a paradox which goes back to the start of the modern ghost story, itself an inherently modern category as we have already seen in the previous ‘Crack Down the Spine’ essay.

A story about a ghost is simply that: a story with a ghost in it.  A Ghost Story is an example of a particular literary form, which may encompass many more kinds of entities than simple spectres of dead souls.

In the anthologies I read as a young child in my grandparents’ spare room at night, anthologies entitled as collections of Ghost Stories, I found stories featuring not just ghosts but also vampires and werewolves and curses, incomprehensible creatures, inkblots on the fabric of reality, predatory feelings and impressions…  The Ghost Story is a form tending into a genre.  It is a particular kind of expression of a particular class of social feelings, generated by the anxiety, alienation, and vertigo of the modern world.  There is a crack down the spine of the history of the ghost story.  It is a crack which separates the modern Ghost Story from the perennial story about the ghost, to the point of making it debatable whether we are actually talking about one continuous phenomena.  The crack is, of course, modernity.

Just as capitalism adapted phenomena which pre-dated its triumph – such as the nation state – to its own purposes, and in so doing altered it qualitatively as well as quantitatively, to the point where the phenomena are linked by little more than a continuity of terminology, so too did it do this to the story of the supernatural irruption and the uncanny presence.

Long before the Ghost Story there were stories about ghosts.  Pliny tells of a stoic philosopher who moves into a house haunted by a proper chain-rattling spectre which can only be laid (i.e. put to rest) when the phantom’s corpse is discovered and properly buried.  And such stories go back all the way through antiquity, and further back still.  …

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A Ghost Story for Samhainn

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Calder’s Room

(Amended with new draft 12/11/21.)

 

Thomas Calder, a lieutenant in the 1st Surreys, was sent back to England in autumn 1917 after being injured during the Battle of the Somme.  He spent a week or so in a conventional military hospital in France, but his wounds were primarily psychic rather than physical, so he was sent back to England, and to Sandilands.

Sandilands had by that time come under the directorship of Dr. K. J. Ravichandra.  Ravichandra was marked out by his universally acknowledged skill, and by his advanced and humane ideas.  Before his advent, Sandilands had effectively been a torture chamber for men who were considered weak and cowardly, in need of being shocked or bullied back to obedience.  Whatever our modern opinion of Ravichandra’s approach, there can be little doubt that his informal and conversational style represented an improvement on treatment through freezing cold water, or electric shock, or cigarette burn.  The men who came under Ravichandra’s care at Sandilands – an Elizabethan manor in East Anglia, bought by the government and converted for use as an Army psychiatric hospital – generally showed great improvement.  Calder, it must be said, turned out to be something of an exception.

One of the things Ravichandra insisted upon was that all patients should have single rooms, or at least share with only one other person.  Accordingly, the old system of shared bunks (officers excepted, naturally) was abolished, and the large rooms of the old house were converted into a great number of small but pleasant single and double cubicles.  This not only increased the comfort of the patients but also expanded the hospital’s capacity, so the Army was inclined to be pleased despite the expense.  Ravichandra had made a rod for his own back in that he immediately found that he was being sent a great many more patients.

Not only did Ravichandra find his staff and budget severely stretched, he soon found that space was running out.  Calder was literally the last man to be sent to Sandilands before Ravichandra was forced to tell the Army that he could not possibly accept any more patients.  Consequently, Calder was not put into a cubicle like the vast majority of the patients, but was billeted in a small attic room.  It was the last remaining scrap of space usable for habitation.

By the account of Lumsden, the orderly who showed Calder up to his room via a narrow, cramped, and creaking old spiral staircase, the new arrival was pleased when he saw the room.  He seemed to like its privacy and remoteness – though he certainly remarked upon its peculiarities, as nobody could help doing.

Its walls, floor, and angled ceiling were of dark, old wood.  Even the loam between the tarred black beams was dark.  At some point, probably during the early nineteenth century, the room had been refurbished with new panelling and floorboards. but even then the dark colour scheme had been retained.  The wood of the panels and floorboards was stained so dark as to be almost black.…

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