Ghosts of Desire::

On the Question of M.R. James’s Sexuality

Of all the questions one might bring to the life of M.R. James, the matter of his sexuality is among the most difficult to pose and least likely to be resolved. The evidence is sparse, the commentary more sparse still, and James himself was reticent to the point of silence on all matters personal. In The Chance of a Ghost, I take care to ground biographical speculation in textual evidence and lived circumstance, and I shall do no less here. The question, if it is to be asked at all, must be approached narrowly and with deference to what is known—and with a clear boundary drawn between imaginative projection and honest inference.

Last known photo of Monty (centre) c.1936

There are facts. James never married. He had no known romantic relationships with women, nor, it must be said, with men. He lived closely with his parents and remained intimately tied to his siblings and childhood home, where he returned regularly even during his long tenure at Cambridge. He was beloved by his male students, particularly at Eton, where his kindness, wit, and intellect left an enduring impression. His letters are full of warmth, affection, and gentle teasing, especially toward younger men and boys whose minds and promise he cherished.

But they are not erotic.

There are no known love letters even amongst the unpublished, secreted letters that I have uncovered in my researches. No confessions. No scandals. What we find instead is a pattern of deep and affectionate companionship—familial, collegial, and pedagogical. One might be tempted to call him celibate, though that too would be an impermissible guess. What can be said with some confidence is that James lived a life of emotional intensity and physical reserve, a life that privileged intimacy of the mind over expression of the body.

And what of the fiction? The ghost stories are almost entirely devoid of women. There are no courtships, no flirtations, no domestic partnerships beyond the incidental marriage in “The Rose Garden” and the traditionally happy ending of “The Tractate Middoth.” Protagonists are nearly always men—unmarried, scholarly, inward. These characters live alone or in male institutions: colleges, rectories, parsonages. Women, when they appear, are most often peripheral: a landlady, a witch, a figure in the past. The emotional landscape is male and reserved, shot through with curiosity and fear but not with love or desire.

This absence has prompted speculation. But absence is not evidence. What we have instead is a psychological landscape in which solitude, secrecy, and repressed forces dominate. In story after story, something hidden is unearthed. A whistle is blown, a room is opened, a document is read—and a thing appears. That thing is usually terrifying, but it is also animated by the energy of what has long been buried. The metaphor, if one seeks it, is not sexual so much as existential. James was interested not in what draws people together, but in what presses on them from beyond.

There are moments, of course, where interpretation might lean. The figures that terrify James's protagonists are often tactile. The ghost in “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” climbs into the bed. In “The Diary of Mr. Poynter,” hair appears on the pillow, and the mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it appears beneath Dunning’s pillow in “Casting the Runes” (though this was surely inspired by Le Fanu’s “Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand”). There is a pronounced intimacy in the way these creatures approach. They breach the personal space of the protagonist with a kind of dreadful familiarity. But if this suggests anything about sexuality, it is indirect and more likely connected to James’s fear of proximity itself—the loss of physical autonomy, the violation of intellectual distance.

James’s fiction may not be coded expressions of sexuality, but rather expressions of its suppression—of the dread and mystery that gather around physical and emotional closeness when one is trained, by belief or temperament, to avoid them. And here, one might tentatively extend the question back toward the man himself. The possibility that James was asexual has real merit: not as a label imposed retroactively, but as a description of someone who seems to have lived a rich emotional life with little need—or perhaps little capacity—for erotic fulfillment.

At the same time, one can reasonably imagine that he may have experienced latent or unexpressed homosexual desire, what Mark Gatiss has termed his “nonpracticing homosexuality“ and what Michael Cox vehemently rejects in his Intimate Portrait on the grounds of, one suspects, personal aversion. If such feelings existed, James may well have found them theologically troubling. A devout Anglican, steeped in a moral world that prized restraint, he would likely have seen such impulses as incompatible with the virtuous life as it was then conceived. It is equally possible, of course, that he experienced moments of heterosexual attraction, especially given the few faint indications I have discovered—incidents involving Grace’s friends and the reference in Grace’s will to a “future wife.” But these are so mild, so socially inflected, and so unpursued as to feel more speculative than indicative.

If anything is revealed by this inquiry, it is not James’s orientation towards a particular desire but rather his orientation toward restraint. He was not, in any sense accessible to us now, a man at war with his desires. Rather, he seems to have constructed a life in which desire—whatever its shape—was subordinated to structure, affection, intellect, and faith. He lived in a way that allowed for warmth without confession, closeness without contact.

So what, finally, can be said? Only this: that M.R. James guarded his interior life with the same care he brought to his ghost stories. He disclosed much, but never everything. He let his characters encounter what he himself never named. And in doing so, he left us with stories that shiver—not because they scream of longing, but because they murmur of what might have been touched, and was not.

Ever, your fellow spirit,

Brian Jay Corrigan