The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Evidence:

M. R. James, Biography, and the Limits of What We Can Know

Darryl Jones’s new biography of M. R. James, For the Dead Remember, is an important book. It is extensively researched, lively, intelligent, and frequently illuminating. Oxford University Press presents James as a “fascinating, complex, troubled, difficult man,” and the book substantially enlarges the social and sexual context within which previous biographers have placed him. John Connolly, reviewing the book in the Irish Times, goes further: “It’s difficult to imagine a better account of James’s life ever being written.”

That is precisely why one significant aspect of the book troubles me.

Jones makes a considerable advance over earlier biographers in placing James within the sexual culture of late-Victorian and Edwardian Cambridge. That is valuable work. James lived for most of his adult life within intensely homosocial institutions. He formed profound friendships with men. He never married. He inhabited Eton and King’s during a period in which same-sex desire unquestionably existed among pupils, Fellows, and dons. Indeed, Jones devotes substantial attention to “the prevalence of same-sex desire in Victorian public schools.”

But contextual possibility is not biographical proof.

Jones ultimately describes James as “a celibate gay man whose desires were almost certainly unacknowledged and unarticulated, even to himself.” William Whyte, quoting that conclusion in Literary Review, finds it “too crude.” The Oxford synopsis of Jones’s chapter on the Fitzwilliam goes further still. James McBryde is identified unequivocally as “the love of his life”; their relationship was “platonic, but intense and devoted.” The “love of his life” is a phrase familiar to anyone who has read the M.R. James newsletter, Ghosts and Scholars, over the past twenty years; yet it remains an assertion that has not (even now) been substantiated with tangible proofs, for there is an epistemological difficulty here which deserves more attention than it has received.

I have spent many years among James’s surviving correspondence while researching my own biography, M. R. James: The Chance of a Ghost. What strikes me is not the presence of evidence for a concealed homosexual life but the remarkable absence of recoverable evidence for a sexual life of any description.

James does not tell us whom he sexually desired. His friends do not tell us. There is no surviving confession, diary, love correspondence, or sexual relationship (whether documented or even suggested) that allows us confidently (or even tentatively) to classify him as homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, or, for that matter, asexual.

The archive has fallen silent at precisely the point at which the modern biographer most wants it to speak.

The Problem of James McBryde

The strongest case is usually made from James’s relationship with James McBryde. The two travelled together. James was profoundly attached to him. McBryde’s sudden death from appendicitis in 1904 unquestionably affected him, and from this Jones concludes that McBryde was “the love of his life.” A rare surviving letter from James certainly concludes affectionately: “I think you know how much I value you, my dear thing.” Patrick J. Murphy has reasonably observed that the surviving correspondence suggests an intimacy beyond the merely formal, while carefully locating it within a pedagogical tradition in which such intimacy was an acceptable form of male bonding.

All of that is evidence.

But evidence of what?

It establishes affection, intimacy, and grief. It does not establish sexual desire.

My own reconstruction of McBryde’s final months produces a rather more complicated emotional picture. McBryde was enthusiastically illustrating James’s ghost stories; James repeatedly deferred the project. After McBryde’s unexpected death, James waited until the other mourners had departed before dropping flowers into his grave that he had picked from the Fellows’ Garden. Within two days of receiving McBryde’s completed drawings from his widow, James approached Edward Arnold about publishing the stories. My conclusion was that James’s sudden determination “suggests something more than a desire to create a memorial to his friend. It looks like guilt.” He had postponed McBryde’s cherished project, and “now, suddenly, it was too late.”

Grief is unquestionably present. So is love, if we use that capacious word in its proper sense. But grief over a dead friend does not identify the sexual orientation of the survivor.

A comparison with James’s other friendships is instructive. When William Johnson Stone died in 1901, James immediately wrote, “We have had a great blow,” confessed that he did not “at all know what to make of it,” and described the loss as “a large” gap. His father understood how severely it had affected him: “It will touch you deeply.” James promptly travelled to Marlborough for Stone’s funeral precisely as he would three years later for McBryde’s.

Still more striking is Walter Morley Fletcher. Fletcher entered James’s circle in the 1890s and became one of his closest lifelong friends. When Fletcher died in 1933, James found beginning a memoir of him “appallingly difficult”: “I am quite paralysed at present.” Fletcher’s widow later described James straightforwardly as “Walter’s closest friend.” My reading of the correspondence is that James was so overcome by grief that he was unable to complete the proposed memorial.

Why, then, should intense grief for McBryde uniquely establish erotic love?

It may. But that is an interpretation of the evidence, not something the evidence itself demonstrates.

The Women Who Disappear

There is another difficulty. Evidence pointing towards women tends to be dismissed or ignored in the Jones account although it deserves to be examined, albeit cautiously. And, then, precisely the same caution must also then be extended to the suggestions Jones seizes upon when pointing towards men.

At not quite eight years old, James became “smitten” with his sister Gracie’s friend Annie Walker. He instructed her, “Please don’t marry till I am of age,” promised an engagement ring, and commanded her to “Abstain from all lovers.” Sixteen years later Walker remembered the episode well enough to tease the twenty-four-year-old James about it when she was passing through Cambridge for a visit.

Childhood infatuation proves virtually nothing about adult sexuality. But it exists.

More intriguing is Frances Mary Elizabeth Chevallier. The surviving evidence is tantalising precisely because it refuses to resolve itself. Gracie and Frances discussed Monty in his absence, and Gracie teased her brother about going tricycling with Frances “again” while they went church-hunting around Aspall. Elsewhere in my reconstruction I have had to conclude simply that what Frances Chevallier was to Monty, or he to her, “remains shrouded.”

Again: this proves nothing.

Neither does James’s comic report to his mother after meeting Leo Maxse’s attractive sisters: “The sisters are very taking—very French or rather so in appearance . . . Kindly add them to my list of fiancées.”

But that joke is interesting. It presupposes an existing family joke about Monty and prospective female partners. It does not establish heterosexual desire; neither should it be made to do so. Yet if these scraps are rightly regarded as inadequate evidence for heterosexuality, methodological consistency requires us to ask why bachelorhood, holidays with male friends, and affectionate language between men constitute adequate evidence for homosexuality.

They do not.

The Dog That Does Not Bark

The problem becomes especially acute with the concept of repression.

If James never articulated homosexual desire, why must the absence of evidence become compatible with the “repressed gay” hypothesis? If he denied such desire, denial could itself be interpreted as concealment and repression. If his friends failed to record it, again concealment could be used to explain their silence. If his relationships with women prove ambiguous, repression can be called upon to explain those too. We are, in essence, looking for shadows in the dark.

The proposition risks becoming unfalsifiable: if the absence of evidence is used to support the claim, one is essentially proving a negative.

That is not a sound foundation for biographical probity.

And here my own research has produced a piece of evidence that I think substantially changes the discussion.

Jones writes that “If [James] had an inner life at all . . . it stayed resolutely inner.” Connolly quotes the observation approvingly in the Irish Times. However, Whyte detects an unresolved tension in Jones’s account between James concealing “a deep, dark secret” and being simply “a man with no interior life at all.”

But we possess testimony from a man who knew James intimately for half a century.

After reading James’s memoir, Eton and King’s, in 1926, James’s old tutor and lifelong friend H. E. Luxmoore complained that the memoir might give readers the wrong impression. James’s “amazing power of acquisition” was very rare, Luxmoore wrote, and his ideals had “guided him from the first.” The difficulty was James’s deliberate omission of himself:

“his reticence of all about his home & his ‘inner life’ (so called) may make some think it is not there.”

That is contemporary testimony, written by one of the people best positioned to know.

The distinction is crucial.

An inaccessible interior life is not an absent interior life.

Luxmoore does not tell us what that inner life contained. Neither should we make him do so. But he provides contemporary evidence for a third possibility between Jones’s suggested alternatives: James possessed an interior life that he deliberately declined to share.

The contents of that interiority must remain, forever, unknown, inaccessible, and unavailable for interpretation.

When the Ghost Stories Become Evidence

Jones’s most problematic argument comes when he moves from the life into the fiction. He detects in James’s stories a “real horror of touch” and imposes upon that a “genuinely uncomfortable sense of twisted sexuality.” Connolly, whose Irish Times review seems eager to embrace Jones’s homosexual thesis, finds the famous moment in “Casting the Runes” (when Dunning reaches beneath his pillow and encounters “a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it”) implicitly sexual, and connects the physicality of James’s monsters with Jones’s proposed gay repression (without explaining how he finds a hairy mouth indicative of a male rather than a female image).

As literary criticism, however, this is entirely legitimate.

Indeed, queer readings of James can be extremely productive in opening wide-ranging and instructive discussions. His stories abound in secrecy, forbidden knowledge, bachelor scholars, invasions of private spaces, threatening physical contact, encoded messages, and ephemera that cannot safely be named. To read those patterns through histories of sexuality can reveal genuine dimensions of the texts provided they remain firmly within the realms of literary interpretation.

But literary interpretation and biography operate under very different evidentiary rules.

This distinction matters particularly to me because my own biography repeatedly connects James’s life with his fiction. That is, in fact, one of its governing principles. James was not writing autobiography, but his stories are demonstrably informed by “personal experiences, private friendships, and professional interests”; again and again he “placed supernatural fiction not merely within everyday life but within his everyday life.”

But this is not to say he is writing confessionals, either: establishing that James used a church he visited, an architectural controversy he knew, a manuscript he catalogued, a family joke, a friend’s ghost story, or a landscape from childhood is categorically different from diagnosing an unexpressed sexual desire from an imaginary monster.

A literary interpretation is entitled to ask, What if? That is, what becomes accessible if we read this story through the lens of sexuality, repression, masculinity, or queer theory? The value of such a reading lies in its explanatory power and ability to invite explorations into socio-dynamism.

The biographer, however, faces a different question:

What happened?

Fiction cannot (must not!) simply be reverse-engineered into confession.

William Whyte in Literary Review makes essentially this objection. Jones’s conclusion that James was a celibate gay man seems to him “too crude”; more importantly, Whyte argues that James’s sexuality does not, in truth, explain very much about the stories. He proposes instead that the tales can be understood through James’s institutional identity and antiquarian persona, which operate as another species of literary performance not to be confused with some privileged access into a concealed, repressed self.

That distinction seems crucial.

A story may permit, even reward, a queer reading without proving that its author was queer. “Casting the Runes” may dramatise sexual panic without establishing the object of Montague James’s sexual desire. Otherwise, biographical exploration becomes a circular exercise in question-begging: we posit that James was homosexual, why?, because we interpret the stories to reveal homosexual repression, and then we ‘know’ that the stories represent homosexual repression because we have posited that James was homosexual.

This is an unacceptable bibliographical approach.

The Temptation of the Missing Interior

The temptation is understandable because James presents the biographer with an infuriating absence. It is, in fact, the same calibre of biographical absence that has driven Shakespearean scholarship (and frustration) for four centuries.

A. C. Benson exposed himself across millions of words of diary. James did nothing comparable. His own memoir resolutely avoided precisely what later biographers would most like to recover. But Luxmoore, who had known him since James was fourteen, recognised that reticence for what it was. The omission of James’s inner life from Eton and King’s might, he feared, make readers suppose “it is not there.”

That is almost uncannily prescient, for it is the suggestive trap into which Jones’s argument steps.

The absence naturally tempts the biographer to fill the vacuum. Yet the responsible response to missing evidence is to identify, acknowledge, and preserve the vacancy.

There is a third possibility between a secret waiting to be decoded and an empty interior waiting to be supplied: James possessed an interior life which is simply, and intentionally, unavailable to us.

That possibility is less dramatically satisfying.

Yet it is also historically (and biographically) defensible and, indeed, responsible.

What We Actually Know

None of this requires returning to the coy biographies of an earlier generation, in which sexuality simply disappeared from respectable lives. Quite the contrary. We should, as Jones has done, reconstruct the sexual and homosocial worlds of Eton and King’s as fully as the evidence allows. We should discuss Benson, Keynes, the Apostles, contemporary concepts of friendship and sexuality, and James’s complicated position within those environments. Jones is entirely right to insist that this context belongs in James’s biography. His chapter on Eton explicitly places James within the prevalence of same-sex desire in Victorian public schools; that is historical context which cannot responsibly be omitted.

We should examine McBryde without embarrassment, but we should examine Annie Walker and Frances Chevallier without embarrassment as well. We should permit queer criticism to ask difficult questions of the stories but not to the point of imposing itself onto salient biographical evidence.

And, after doing all that, we must distinguish what the evidence truly demonstrates as opposed to what interpretation only suggests as one possibility.

James may have been homosexual.

He may have been heterosexual.

He may have experienced forms of desire poorly accommodated by either category. He may have been substantially or wholly asexual. His profound emotional attachments may not have corresponded neatly to sexual desire at all.

We do not know.

And “we do not know” is not a failure of scholarship. Sometimes it is its most exacting conclusion.

The irony is that Connolly’s strongly favourable Irish Times review ultimately arrives very near this position despite accepting the homosexual interpretation much more readily than do I. James remains elusive, he concludes; only something like the discovery of a private diary could finally expose what remained concealed.

Precisely.

Without that hypothetical diary, we possess relationships, letters, recollections, institutional contexts, and fiction. We can interpret all of them. What we cannot legitimately do is transform the absence at their centre into certainty or even, for that matter, probability.

The question of James’s sexuality remains resolutely unknown and very probably unknowable.

There is another useful irony here. James spent his scholarly life examining manuscripts, establishing provenance, distinguishing textual states, dating hands, and refusing to make documents say more than their evidence would bear. Perhaps his biographers owe him the same courtesy.

We can document whom Montague Rhodes James loved, valued, befriended and mourned.

We cannot, on the evidence presently available, know whom he sexually desired.

The distinction may seem frustratingly narrow. But between interpretation and biography there lies a bright-line threshold that James himself would have understood very well.

And we should be wary of crossing it in the absence of compelling evidence.

Ever, your fellow spirit,

Brian Jay Corrigan