M R James is one of the most famous authors of ghost and weird tales and this is one of his best. I’d actually forgotten how chilling ‘Count Magnus’ is and how little it tells us, how much it suggests. You can read it with your eyes here and enjoy a great audio version here. Reading it this time, it stuck home what a master of the form M R James is.
We start with a found narrative, a collection of papers, whose connection to their current owner is deliberately kept hidden. The opening line teases us:
By what means the papers out of which I have made a connected story came into my hands is the last point which the reader will learn from these pages.
The narrative is obtrusive throughout, visibly controlling the narrative, informing us of the need for patience, that there is information to be had but not yet (and no indication of how much information there will be or how revealing it will be). The effect is that of a story-teller, one who knows he has his listeners hanging on every word and is enjoying that power of revelation and obfuscation. We are constantly tantalised with unfinished hints about the original author of the notes (which we never see unfiltered, they are always relayed through the narrator), the experience he underwent, the situation in which he found himself, the history of Count Magnus himself.
One of the aspects of the tale I particularly enjoy are the gathering signs that something is terribly wrong that the author of the notes seems to be aware and the narrator isn’t telling us. He’s teasing us to find them out ourselves. The ‘woman cleaning the church’ who dropped ‘something metallic’ on the floor is, of course, the first of the padlocks falling but the narrator won’t tell us and the author of the notes doesn’t know. We might miss this first clue but the others building up: the padlocks falling off, the various periods of loss of time, the unconscious (and conscious) draw of the mausoleum, the muttered words of the note-writer which leave him without conscious will or effort around the mausoleum. Something is very wrong and the tension ratchets up apace even before our note-writer has anything concrete happen. The rising of the coffin lid isn’t allowed though to release any tension. It isn’t a denouement or a final revelation – it is the start of a pursuit.
What I had chiefly forgotten about this tale (and what I very much enjoyed) was how truly horrifying it is. I often hear Count Magnus described as a vampiric tale but this isn’t a thing of fangs and elegant seduction. The story the landlord tales of the men who went hunting in the forest is bone-chilling. The scream in the night, the unearthly laugh and the morning’s discovery.
Anders Bjornsen was there; but he was dead. And I tell you this about Anders Bjornsen, that he was once a beautiful man, but now his face was not there, because the flesh of it was sucked away off the bones.
When we’re told that 7 men fainted at the sight of Mr Wraxall’s dead body (the note-writer), the earlier tale gives a fairly clear idea of why. M R James is a master of ‘just enough detail’. There is no ultimate unconvincing revelation, a clear sight of the hooded or cloaked figures (tall and short). There isn’t even a final sight of Wraxall’s body left for the reader. There is only the knowledge that something terrible, something truly horrible, has occurred. We’ve been given enough information earlier on for us to have far too many ideas about what exactly that is and for the relative lack of information now to be suggestively horrifying. Revelation could only, ironically enough, diminish the horror.
The greatest mystery of the text is, of course, what exactly is Count Magnus, who did he ‘bring back’ with him and what happened on his ‘black pilgrimage’. He goes on the pilgrimage to Chorazin which, in the New Testament, is one of the city’s unwilling to hear the gospel and an anathema is pronounced against it (see Matthew 11: 20-24)
Then Jesus began to denounce the towns in which most of his miracles had been performed, because they did not repent. “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, it will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon on the day of judgment than for you. And you, Capernaum, will you be lifted to the heavens? No, you will go down to Hades. For if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Sodom, it would have remained to this day. But I tell you that it will be more bearable for Sodom on the day of judgment than for you.”
In the apocryphal Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, Chorazin is identified as the site of the birth of the antichrist who will, so says the text, grow up in Bethsaida and rule in Capernum (the three towns noted above). Chorazin in more recent history was the site of the Palestinian town ‘Khirbat Karraza’ which was ‘depopulated’ during the Nakba in 1948 and the town was almost completely destroyed, save for the shrine to al-Shaykh Ramadan. In the story, the town is the site of Count Magnus’ pilgrimage in which he goes to meet the Prince of….something. Prince of the air is the suggested answer from our narrator (based on the hastily and poorly erased word in the manuscript notes). It seems clear that Count Magnus’ visit demonic but its exact nature and results is left open to the reader’s interpretation…
The story ends with the revelation of how the papers were found. It’s a playful ending to me because it’s been sold as a mystery but it’s one that doesn’t really matter. The narrator seems to glance over the really unsettling open-ending left us at the end of the tale, leaving us with our wonder and, perhaps, our fear.
Where are the two mysterious figures now… and what exactly are they up to?
Romancing the Gothic 