THE DEEP ONES: "A View from a Hill" by M. R. James

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THE DEEP ONES: "A View from a Hill" by M. R. James

3housefulofpaper
Gen 30, 2022, 7:37 pm

I went with the Oxford edition of the Collected Ghost Stories edited by Darryl Jones.

4housefulofpaper
Feb 2, 2022, 8:32 pm

When I saw the running order for these winter discussions it seemed anachronistic for M. R. James to follow a Weird Tales story. But in the event "When the Green Star Waned" proved to have its archaic elements. And "A View from a Hill" is a late story but in a traditional Jamesian mode, neither a rather knotty tale like" Two Doctors" or (seemingly) causually anecdotal like "There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard".

I would have read this story for the first time in the 1990s and I've read it several times since. It's an old friend, really. That does mean I can't approach it with fresh eyes. It's a story where the gruesome elements are kept to the sidelines as it where - Fanshawe's roughing up by spirits on Gallows Hill and the story of Baxter's career and death are recounted in the safety of the Hall (I'd point out that the very next story in A Warning to the Curious and Collected Ghost Stories, which is in fact "A Warning to the Curious", is much more pitiless, and some elements were borrowed for the 2005 televsion adaptation (link in the miscellany). James isn't necessarily a cosy author).

I think I remember a genuine feeling of the uncanny, on my first reading of the story, when the binoculars are first tried out and they show the landscape as it had been in the past. There's an essay in Rosemary Pardoe's excellent book The Black Pilgrimage & Other Explorations which asks the question "How did Mr Baxter find his Roman Villa?" (because of course most of his discoveries are made before the binoculars are completed). She suggests inspiration came from Archeologist Frederick Bligh Bond who excavated Glastonbury Abbey, and found the remains of a Chapel which was an extension to the eastern side of the Abbey, and a separate Loretto Chapel at the northeast corner of the nave.

This was reported as being made possible through the guidance of spirits, communicating via the automatic writing of his friend and fellow psychic investigator Captain John Allen Bartlett.

M. R. James did know about this, as he mentions it in passing in hs book on Abbeys, but diplomatically says of Bligh Bond's methods "Here is obviously a highly controversial field, into which I do not feel myself called upon to enter."

5RandyStafford
Feb 28, 2022, 6:57 pm

That's an interesting bit of background. I had vaguely heard of British archaeologists using paranormal means to find sites to dig. I was unaware of Bond's name or that James himself was aware ot it.

How Baxter made those finds without his binoculars is a question I wondered, and this bit of history provides an answer.

I liked this story and thought the ideas of binoculars empowered by sorcery was novel.

The people buried beneath those peculiar grave markers were presumably hung witches, but that wasn't made entirely clear to me.

James could have related the tale very differently. He chooses to have almost all the important events related via dialogue rather than having them directly depicted on stage.

6elenchus
Feb 28, 2022, 11:12 pm

I read this online, so I'm not sure it's in my edition of A Warning To The Curious and therefore I'd have read it before. It did not seem familiar to me.

Without having a clear understanding of James's methods, I agree he could have relayed his story myriad other ways, but somehow the way he chooses (including the authorial intrusions) seem fitting and contribute to the unease. Such instances as a "branch" grabbing Fanshawe's ankle before he crosses out of the wood, is both incredibly obvious and yet still more chilling than if it were depicted "on stage".

How Baxter made those finds without his binoculars
Of course, he did have the "little mask covered in black velvet", presumably later used in the binoculars themselves, which Lawrence was said to pick up and be warned against by Baxter. Could Baxter not have used these to "look through a dead man's eyes"?

7RandyStafford
Mar 1, 2022, 12:45 am

>6 elenchus: Yes, that's a possibility I hadn't thought of for Baxter's finds though he would have to get a hold of said eyes of an age to have seen traces of those sites. I like some kind of Bond-like techniques on Baxter's part. However, there's less evidence of that in the story than your suggestion.

8housefulofpaper
Mar 7, 2022, 8:01 pm

>5 RandyStafford:
The people buried beneath those peculiar grave markers were presumably hung witches, but that wasn't made entirely clear to me. - I asumed that they were ordinary criminals. James's world is curiously reminiscent of Japanese horror - the state of being dead grants powers, but the dead are invariably melevolent. It's a fact, though, that witches sentenced to death in England were hanged and not burned at the stake, so you could be right.

>6 elenchus:
Rosemary Pardoe's suggestion of Bligh Bond as inspiration for Baxter is not supported by anything in the text of James' story, of course. But the report of Baxter "looking like someone straight out of the asylum" suggests a kind of altered state like clairvoyance.

In any case I think James provides enough information for us to understand that Baxter had constantly refined his methods and the binoculars were his crowning achievement. Incidentallyl, I don't think the mask was used in making the binoculars. Presumably it was part of a skull containing the eye sockets, whereas the binoculars used whatever came out of the boiled-up human bones in the binocular lenses.