If one were to build the archetype of a reactionary, it would probably look a lot like Montague “Monty” Rhodes James. Born in the village of Goodnestone, Kent, James grew up in an environment surrounded by history and legend. His father, the Reverend Herbert James, was an Anglican curate and the rector of Livermere, Suffolk. As he grew older, Monty developed an interest in the medieval world—its cathedrals, manuscripts, and, most importantly, its ghosts.
For the majority of his working life, James was a scholar specializing in apocryphal writings from the middle ages. This specialty earned him positions including director of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum (1893-1908), Provost of King’s College (1905-1918), Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University (1913-1915), and Provost of Eton, a position he held until his death in 1936. A sturdy Anglican with a highly credentialed name, the real M.R. James seems as much a character taken from a Little England novel or an Agatha Christie mystery as a real man.
What separated James from the rest, however, were his ghost stories. A master of the particularly English Christmas ghost tale, James wrote what he termed “antiquarian” ghost stories—subtle, Gothic stories that usually pitted an academic protagonist against ancient evils. A fine example of the antiquarian form is James’s “An Episode in Cathedral History,” which details the unintentional release of an entity from a sealed tomb inside of the Cathedral of Southminster. In typical Jamesian fashion, the story is more about creeping dread and suggestion that outright horror.
Although James was quite capable of producing ghastly short stories (see for example “Lost Hearts” and its spectacularly gruesome reveal), his legacy is primarily defined by his old-fashioned ghost yarns. In this way, James can be regarded as the 20th century progenitor of the conservative ghost story.
Like James’s tales of disquiet, the modern conservative ghost story can be defined by a few key elements:
2. Conservative ghost stories predominately take place in time-worn surroundings, from ruined castles to New England homes from the 17th or 18th century
3. Conservative ghost stories are rarely about politics. Rather, they are about diseased traditions and the role of individual in correcting that malignancy
4. Conservative ghost stories usually show their disfavor with the modern world by hardly presenting it all
Not unsurprisingly, the conservative ghost story has been adapted by a wide assortment of talents from all along the right’s spectrum. Some of the best-known practitioners merely dabbled in the sub-genre, while others used it exclusively. Take for instance, the two very different writers: H.P. Lovecraft and Russell Kirk.
Lovecraft’s interest in the antiquarian ghost stories of M.R. James stemmed from a much more personal concern. Namely, as the son of a once prominent Rhode Island family that had descended into what he would’ve termed “degeneracy,” Lovecraft held closely to the idea of a dying New England aristocracy and thus a formerly golden, but now lost New England. This is the heart of Lovecraft’s much-maligned racism—he was an English-American Anglophile and a Tory who resented his country’s Whig-led Revolution and the culture that succeeded it. As such, Lovecraft preferred the 18th century to the 19th and the 20th; small New England towns instead of immigrant-heavy metropolises like New York; and older forms of storytelling rather than anything that smacked of modernity. When he sat down to write his own stories, Lovecraft looked to men like Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and M.R. James for inspiration. In a March 6, 1935 letter to science fiction writer Emil Petaja, Lovecraft praised James for “his way of weaving a horror into the every-day fabric of life & history.” From James, Lovecraft also took a propensity to use professional and amateur academics as his protagonists.
Long before his fully developed his own concept of “weird” fiction, Lovecraft wrote chilling, James-inspired ghost stories. One such tale, 1924’s “The Shunned House,” describes the history of an abandoned house on Providence’s Benefit Street. Although once the home of a poetess whom Poe frequently visited, the house became infected with a strange miasma that is only defeated by scientific weapons such as flamethrowers and various chemical combinations. In recounting the house’s history, Lovecraft explores not only bygone days of colonial Providence, but also some of Rhode Island’s darker days, such as the vampire panic that gripped the village of Exeter in the late 19th century.
An infection caused by the undead past is also a hallmark of Russell Kirk’s ghost stories. Best known for his work as a pre-eminent political commentator and cultural critic of a traditionalist conservative bent, Kirk also penned several ghost stories and horror novels such as Old House of Fear and Lord of the Hollow Dark. As described by the writer Robert M. Woods, Kirk’s conservative ghost stories feature “retributive ghosts, malign magicians, blind angels, beneficent phantoms, conjuring witches, demonic possession, creatures of the twilight, divided selves.” In other words, Kirk’s fiction is animated by the same reverence for traditional storytelling that touched both James and Lovecraft. Similarly, while James’s protagonists often find themselves in cursed cathedrals or lonely Scandinavian cemeteries, and Lovecraft’s characters stumble upon the ancient secrets of New England, Kirk’s men and women must battle long-forgotten evil in dilapidated Scottish manors or on fog-shrouded island castles. Although Kirk’s work tends to be more overtly political (as is the case with the Soviet-educated revolutionary Dr. Edmund Jackman in Old House of Fear), he should nevertheless be regarded as someone from the antiquarian mold.
Sadly, horror fiction, like science fiction and other genres of speculative fiction, today contains a small minority of shrieking “social justice warrior” types who, like the autocrats of old, demand that other creators conform to their ideas and ideals. As a result, conservative horror fiction and conservative ghost stories are not as prominent as they once were. Still, there are reasons to rejoice during the Halloween and Yuletide seasons. Authors such as Ramsay Campbell and Thomas Ligotti have crafted stellar novels and short stories in the tradition of James, while more contemporary writers such as John Harwood (author of The Asylum) and Kate Mosse (The Winter Ghosts) are doing an excellent job of keeping the traditional, or antiquarian ghost story alive. Happy Halloween.
Benjamin Welton is a writer in Boston.
