Američki
pisac Majkl Šejbon (Michael Chabon) kod nas je objavljivan i kao Čabon i kao
Čebon i kao Šejbon (for the record: među svim tim čobanima jedini ga je kako
treba preveo Nikola Pajvančić). Ali to nema veze s ovom temom. Pominjem ga zato
što je on u svojoj knjizi eseja MAPS AND LEGENDS pored ostalog objavio i jedan
vrlo dobar esej o M. R. Džejmsu, u kojem pokušava da objasni zašto je M.R. Džejmsova priča “Zazviždi i ja ću ti doći, momče…” jedna
od najboljih kratkih priča ikada napisanih. Pored toga, u ovom eseju on pravi i
brojne paralele sa Lavkraftom (čovekom i piscem), i mada neke od njih ne stoje
(Šejbon očigledno ne zna baš mnogo o Lavkraftovom društvenom životu i pati od
zablude „povučenog usamljenika“), zbog njih je ovo dodatno vredno pročitati.
Ovaj
esej nije do sada bio dostupan onlajn, ali ja sam ga iskopao u toj knjizi, pa
vam ga sad nudim na čitanje, proučavanje i uživanje. Pisan je jasnim i
popularnim jezikom – istina, engleskim, ali to valjda neće biti problem
čitaocima ovog bloga.
Ujedno
vas podsećam da sam prošle godine priredio izbor najboljih Džejmsovih horor
priča koji je nazvan upravo po ovoj priči – knjiga se zove ZAZVIŽI
I JA ĆU TI DOĆI – detalje imate na linku, a ako vam je do sada
nekako promakla, svakako gledajte da je nabavite na Orfelinovom štandu na
predstojećem Sajmu knjiga u Beogradu!
Evo
šta je Šejbon imao da kaže o Džejmsu i njegovom masterpisu stravične priče, u
produžetku... A ako je nekome lakše i draže da čita PDF fajl, isti tekst sam u
tom obliku okačio na Mediafire, pa ga možete skinuti OVDE.
THE OTHER JAMES
Michael
Chabon
I’LL JUST COME RIGHT out and say it: M. R. James’s
ghost story “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” is one of the finest
short stories ever written. The problematic term in that last sentence, of
course, is not “finest” but “short stories.” It’s a mark of how radically we
have changed our ideas of what a short story, and in particular a fine one,
ought to be, that there should be something odd about ranking this masterpiece
of the Other James in the same league with, say, “The Real Thing” or “Four
Meetings.” The ghost story has been consigned to the ghetto of subgenre. Rare
is the contemporary anthology of “best short stories of all time” that includes
even a token example of the form.
Once it was not so. Once,
you could argue, the ghost story was the genre itself. Balzac, Poe, de
Maupassant, Kipling—most of the early inventors—wrote ghost stories as a matter
of course, viewing them as a fundamental of the storyteller’s craft. Edith
Wharton was an enthusiast and master of the “subgenre”; her ghost stories are
the cream of her short fiction. And Henry James himself, of course, gave us the
one ghost story whose status as literature is not open to debate: “The Turn of
the Screw.” It was only the best of a good two dozen that he produced during
the heyday of the form, in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Maybe our taste has grown
more refined, or our understanding of human psychology more subtle. Maybe we
don’t really believe in ghosts anymore. Or maybe for the past sixty years or so
we’ve simply been cheating ourselves, we lovers of the short story, out of one
of the genre’s enduring pleasures.
A great ghost story is all
psychology: in careful and accurate detail it presents 1) a state of
perception, by no means rare in human experience, in which the impossible vies
with the undeniable evidence of the senses; and 2) the range of emotions
brought on by that perception. And then, by the quantum strangeness of
literature, it somehow manages to engender these same emotions in the reader:
the prickling nape, the racing heart, the sense of some person standing
invisibly near. Everyone has felt such things, coming up the basement stairs
with darkness at our backs, turning around at the sound of a footstep to find
only an empty room. I once saw a face, intelligent and smiling, formed from the
dappled shadow of a stucco ceiling in a Los Angeles bedroom. The face remained,
perfectly visible to both my wife and me, until we finally turned out the
light. The next morning it was gone. Afterward, no matter how we looked at the
ceiling, in daylight or at night, the face failed to reappear. I have never to
this day forgotten its mocking leer as it studied me.
It is tempting to say that,
like his contemporaries Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, Montague Rhodes
James is something of a ghost himself, nowadays, at least in the United States.
He haunts the pages of foxed anthologies with titles like Classic Chilling
Stories of Terror and Suspense, his name lapsed into obscurity along with those
of the authors of durable gems of the genre such as “The Beckoning Fair One”
(Oliver Onions) and “The Monkey’s Paw” (W. W. Jacobs). But in England he is
still remembered, and even beloved. James is about as English as it is possible
for an English writer to be. A hungry Anglophile, one with no interest whatever
(if such a creature exists) in the ghosts that haunt old abbeys, dusty
libraries, and the Saxon churches of leafy villages, could survive very happily
on a steady diet of M. R. James. These are stories that venture to the limits
of the human capacity for terror and revulsion, as it were, armed only with an
umbrella and a very dry wit. They are still read aloud on the radio over there,
in particular at Christmastime, when, as during the season that frames “The
Turn of the Screw,” it is apparently traditional to sit by a crackling yule
fire and scare one’s friends out of their wits. (And it would be hard to
imagine anything more English than that.)
M. R. James presents a
nearly unique instance in the history of supernatural literature—perhaps in the
history of literature, period: he seems, for the entire duration of his life
(1865–1936) to have considered himself the happiest of men. His biography,
insofar as it has been written, is free of the usual writerly string of
calamities and reversals, of intemperate behavior, self-destructive
partnerings, critical lambasting, poverty, illness, bad luck. His childhood,
though it sounds to modern ears to have been a tad heavy on devotional
exercise, Christian study, and mindfulness of the sufferings of Jesus and his
saints, was passed in material comfort and within the loving regard of his
parents and older siblings; the candlelit gloom of the paternal church
counterbalanced, if balance were needed, by ready access to the beauties of the
East Anglian countryside that surrounded his father’s rectory. His early school
years were notable, if at all, only for the consistent excellence of his
academic performance and for the popularity he attained among his fellow
students, in part through a discovered knack for spinning a first-class
frightening tale. At the age of fourteen he entered the world of Eton, and,
though he spent the middle portion of his life as a laureate, fellow, and
finally dean of King’s College, Cambridge (itself a sister school to Eton), he
never really left that sheltered, companionable green and gray world, assuming
at last the mantle of provost of Eton in 1918, a position he held until he
died. He was a brilliant, prize-winning, internationally known scholar of early
Christian manuscripts who devoted his personal life to enlarging, slowly and
knowledgeably, his circle of gentleman friends, a task made simpler by his
brilliance, charm, wit, kindness, and affability. He took no interest in
politics, involved his name in no controversy or cause, and traveled in comfort
through Denmark, Sweden, France, and other tamer corners of the globe. The
seeker after shadows who turns, in desperation, to discover what untold
sufferings James, like H. C. Andersen or E. A. Poe, might have undergone for
the love of a woman, will discover here a profound silence. James never
married, and as far as we are allowed to determine, the complete absence of
romantic attachments in his life caused him no pain or regret whatsoever.
And the childhood
fascination with the tortures suffered by Christian martyrs, each date and
gruesome detail of beheadings, immolations, and dismemberments lovingly
memorized the way some boys memorize batting averages? And the spectral face at
the garden gate, pale and wild-eyed and reeking of evil, that one evening
peered back at the young James across the lawn as he looked out through the
windows of the rectory? And the intimate eleven-year friendship with a man
named McBryde, illustrator of some of James’s best stories, traveling companion
and inseparable confidant, whose rather late marriage, in 1903, was followed,
scarcely a year later, by his untimely death? And the boys, the tens upon
hundreds upon thousands of boys of Eton and King’s, on whom James had lavished
his great teacherly gifts, cut down in the battlefields of Belgium and France?
And the empty lawns, deserted commons and dining halls, the utter desolation of
Cambridge in 1918?
Over all of this
speculation as to the origins of James’s ghosts and horrors, over any hint of
torment, shame, passion, remorse, or sorrow, the shutters have been drawn. The
only evidence we have for the existence of such emotions in M. R. James is the
disturbing tales he chose, over and over, to tell. Could they possibly be the
work of a man whose life presented him with a nearly unbroken series of
comfortable, satisfying, and gratifying days, from cradle to grave? Let us say
that they could; let us stipulate that the stories are the work of a man whom
life denied none of the fundamentals of mortal happiness. Violence, horror,
grim retribution, the sudden revulsion of the soul—these things, then, are
independent of happiness or suffering; a man who looks closely and carefully at
life, whether pitiable as Poe or enviable as the provost of Eton, cannot fail
to see them.
Along with A. E: Housman,
Thomas Hardy, and even, we are told, Theodore Roosevelt, one of James’s early
admirers was the American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). The two
men shared a taste for old books and arcane manuscripts, for neglected museums
and the libraries of obscure historical societies, and for ancient buildings,
in particular those equipped with attics and crypts; they shared that requisite
of any great writer of ghost stories: a hyperacute sense of the past. We all
have this sixth human sense, to one degree or another, but in the case of
Lovecraft and James the sense of the past is as evolved as the sense of smell
in a professional nez. When it comes to their writing, however, Lovecraft and
James could not differ more—in style, in scale, in temperament. Lovecraft’s
style is the despair of the lover of Lovecraft, at once shrill and vague,
clotted, pedantic, hysterical, and sometimes out-and-out bad. James, on the
other hand, writes the elegant English sentences, agile and reticent, that an
excellent British education of his era both demanded and ensured. The contrast
is particularly stark when it comes to their portrayal of the unportrayable.
Lovecraft approaches Horror armed with adverbs, abstractions, and perhaps a
too-heavy reliance on pseudopods and tentacles. James rarely does more than
hint at the nature of his ghosts and apparitions, employing a few simple,
select, revolting adjectives, summoning his ghosts into hideous, enduring life
in the reader’s mind in a bare sentence or two.
Evil, in Lovecraft, is
universal, pervasive, and at least partially explicable in terms of notions
such as Elder Races and blind idiot gods slobbering at the heart of creation.
In James, Evil tends to have more of a local feel, somehow, assembling itself
at times, out of the most homely materials; and yet it remains, in the end,
beyond any human explanation whatsoever. Evil is strangely rationalized in
Lovecraft, irresistible but systematic; it can be sought, and found. In James
it irrupts, is chanced upon, brushes against our lives irrevocably, often when
we are looking in the other direction. But the chief difference between
Lovecraft and James is one of temperament. Lovecraft, apart from a few
spasmodic periods, including one in which he briefly married a Brooklyn Jew
named Sonia Greene and formed a part of her salon, appears to have liked his
own company best. He could be gloomy and testy, and was perhaps most
appreciated by his friends at a distance, through his lively correspondence
with them. M. R. James, on the other hand, was legendary for his conviviality,
and loved nothing more than whiling away an afternoon over sherry and tobacco
with his erudite friends. Indeed, friends—colleagues, companions—play an
important role in James’s stories, coming along to shore up the protagonist’s
courage at just the right moment, providing him with moral support, crucial
information, or simply another soul with whom to share an unspeakable secret.
In Lovecraft the protagonist has often cut himself off from his friends and
companions, and must face the final moment of slithering truth alone.
Lovecraft wrote, in part,
for money, often as little as one and a half cents a word; James was an avowed
hobbyist of literature, and wrote many of his finest stories as Christmas
entertainments of the sort already described, reading them aloud to his
assembled friends by the light of a single candle. The stories are,
nevertheless, unmistakably works of art, the products of a peculiar
imagination, a moral sense at once keen and undogmatic, and an artist’s
scientific eye for shape and structure. This brings us back to “Oh, Whistle,
and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” whose unlucky protagonist, Parkins, we first
encounter in conversation with his fellow professors over dinner “in the
hospitable hall of St. James’s College.” (James’s stories never originate in
cheap atmospherics, fogs or plagues or blasted landscapes, or with the creaky,
dubious avowals of narratorial sanity so beloved of Lovecraft and Poe.) In the
very first sentence* James displays the remarkable command that qualifies him
as a great unrecognized master of point of view, which is the ultimate subject
of any ghost story and, of course, of twentieth-century literature itself. For
the narrator, or the author, or some indeterminate, playful amalgam of the two,
reveals himself before we are twenty words into the story, and will continue to
remind us of his presence throughout, right up to the final paragraph, when at
last he takes leave, with a strange kind of cheerful pity, of the shattered
Professor Parkins.
I don’t think any writer
has handled a narrator in quite the same way as James in “Oh, Whistle.” For the
narrator here is not merely a disembodied authorial voice in the classic
nineteenth-century manner. He is involved in the lives of the characters he
describes, he knows them, he sees them on a regular basis—he is, albeit
invisibly, a character in the story, cut from the same cloth, as it were, as
Professors Parkins and Rogers and the rest of the St. James faculty. There are
portions of the story, he suggests, that could be told, that actually
happened—most of them having to do with the game of golf —but which he
gratefully lacks the expertise to set down. This accords with a fundamental
operation of the supernatural story, from “The Facts in the Case of M.
Valdemar” to The Blair Witch Project, which is to make the explicit
point—generally implicit or finessed in “literary” fiction—that what is being
given is a factual account. All ghost stories are “true” stories. We love them,
if we love them, from the depth and antiquity of our willingness to believe
them.
M. R. James, more than any
other writer, explores the wobble, the shimmer of uncertainty that results when
quotation marks are placed around the word “true.” Because at the same time
that the narrator of “Oh, Whistle” is implicating himself in his
story—scrupulously telling us what he has seen for himself and what parts of
the story he has only heard second- or third-hand—his supremely “authoritative”
voice and evident easy control over the materials establish him as unmistakably
the writer of the story, its inventor, hurrying us past characters we need not
overly attend to, rendering the events with an impossible familiarity. This, in
turn, calls into question the fictional status of the narrator, and hence that
of the author himself.
All of this, I know, sounds
dubiously postmodern. And indeed James, not merely in his approach, at once
careful and cavalier, to point of view, but also in fitting out his stories
with the full apparatus of scholarly research (footnotes, learned quotations
from Latin, references to obscure medieval tracts), often anticipates Borges
and the postmodernists—and with every iota of their self-conscious playfulness.
But the playfulness is worn so lightly, and the experiments in point of view
are undertaken with such a practical purpose—scaring you—in mind, that even a
critical reader may scarcely be aware of them the first time through. James is
like some casual, gentleman tinkerer yoking a homemade antigravity drive to the
derailleurs of his bicycle because he is tired of being late to church every
Sunday.
“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come
to You, My Lad” is, in many ways, the prototypical M. R. James story. It
presents a man who stumbles, through benevolent motives, upon a historical
puzzle that cannot fail to interest him and, poking innocently around in it,
inadvertently summons—more literally here than in other stories—an unexpected
revenant of a bygone time, with frightful results. Professor Parkins—“rather
hen-like, perhaps, in his little ways; totally destitute, alas! of the sense of
humour, but at the same time dauntless and sincere in his convictions, and a
man deserving of the greatest respect”—kindly agrees to take time away from his
golfing vacation on the Suffolk coast in order to investigate the ruins, in the
neighborhood where he plans to stay, of an old Knights Templar church in which
one of his colleagues takes a scholarly interest. Parkins, we have seen, is an
avowed skeptic when it comes to the supernatural—to a fault, perhaps. Digging
with his pocketknife in the earth around the ruins, he uncovers a strange metal
flute bearing an enigmatic Latin inscription. When —as inevitably he must—Parkins
plays a few notes on the flute, he calls up a series of increasingly terrifying
disturbances, both atmospheric and psychic: winds, night terrors, and puzzling
disarrangements or disturbances of the second, supposedly empty bed in his room
at the Globe Inn. These disturbances culminate in the awful apparition—a marvel
of James’s gift for creating horror through understatement and suggestion—of a
thing, some thing, with a woeful face of crumpled bed linens.
For this story is also
prototypical James in that when at last we encounter the Horror, there is
something about its manifestation, its physical attributes, its habits, that
puts the reader in mind, however reluctantly, of sex. I say reluctantly in part
because the cool, fleshy, pink, protuberant, furred, toothed, or mouthed
apparitions one finds in M. R. James are so loathsome; and in part because
James keeps his stories studiously free—swept clean—not merely of references to
sexual behavior but of all the hot-and-heavy metaphor and overt Freudian paraphernalia
with which supernatural fiction is so often encumbered. James is a hospitable
writer, and one wishes not to offend one’s host. But the fact remains that “Oh,
Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” is a story about a man pursued into the
darkness of a strange bedroom, and all of the terror is ultimately generated by
a vision of a horribly disordered bed. The bodily horror, the uncanny, even
repulsive nature of sex—a favorite theme of the genre from Stoker to
Cronenberg—is a recurring element in the stories of M. R. James, rendered all
the more potent because it feels so genuinely unconscious. Sex was undoubtedly
the last thing on the mind of M. R. James as he sat down to compose his
Christmas creepers, but it is often the first thing to emerge when the stays of
reality are loosened.
At times, as in traditional
ghost stories (e.g., “A Christmas Carol”), James’s characters engender and
deserve their ghastly fates, bringing them about through excesses of ambition,
pride, or greed. Professor Parkins, one senses, does not entirely meet with the
author’s approval—he is priggish, skeptical, he plays golf—but in other stories
the protagonists are men whose profession, temperament, and tastes barely
distinguish them from their creator. Most of the time they are innocents,
ignorant trippers and travelers who brush up against the omnipresent
meaningless malevolence of the world, and the sins for which they are punished
tend, likely as not, to be virtues— curiosity, honesty, a sympathy for bygone
eras, a desire to do honor to one’s ancestors. And, often, their punishment is
far grimmer than the scare that Professor Parkins receives.
The secret power of James’s
work lies in his steadfast refusal to explain fully, in the end, the mechanisms
that have brought about the local irruption of Evil he describes, and yet to
leave us, time and again, utterly convinced that such an explanation is
possible, if only we were in possession of all the facts. He makes us feel the
logic of haunting, the residue of some inscrutable chain of ghostly causation,
though we can’t—though, he insists, we never will be able to—explain or
understand that logic. In “Oh, Whistle” the elements—the Templars’ ruined
church, the brass flute with its fragmentary inscriptions, the blind pursuing figure
in white, the whistled-up wind—all hang together seamlessly in the reader’s
imagination: they fit. And yet, in the end, we have no idea why. For the
central story of M. R. James, reiterated with inexhaustible inventiveness, is
ultimately the breathtaking fragility of life, of “reality,” of all the
structures that we have erected to defend ourselves from our constant nagging
suspicion that underlying everything is chaos, brutal and unreasoning. It is
hard to conceive of a more serious theme, or a more contemporary plot, than
this.
It may be, in fact, that
the ghost story, like the dinosaur, is still very much with us, transformed
past the point of ready recognition into the feathered thing that we call “the
modern short story.” Perhaps all short stories can be understood as ghost
stories, accounts of visitations and reckonings with the traces of the past.
Were there ever characters in fiction more haunted by ghosts than Chekhov’s or
Joyce’s?
The short story narrates
the moment when a dark door, long closed, is opened, when a forgotten error is
unwittingly repeated, when the fabric of a life is revealed to have been woven
from frail and dubious fiber over top of something unknowable and possibly very
bad. Ultimately all stories—ghost stories, mysteries, stories of terror or
adventure or modern urban life—descend from the fireside tale, told with wolves
in the woods all around, with winter howling at the window. After centuries of
the refinements, custom fittings, and mutations introduced by artistry and the
marketplace, the short story retains its fundamental power to frighten us with
its recognition of the abyss at our backs, and to warm us with its flickering
light.
* “ ‘I suppose you will be getting away pretty soon,
now Full term is over, Professor,’ said a person not in the story to the
Professor of Ontography, soon after they had sat down next to each other at a
feast in the hospitable hall of St James’s College.”
