Montague Summers's Ghost Stories

After Montague Summers died in August 1948, a number of his manuscripts and personal papers disappeared, including (it was believed) the manuscript of Six Ghost Stories, which Summers had listed in a Who's Who entry for 1938 as having been published in 1937. Of course it hadn't been published in 1937, and the reference remained a tantalizing bibliographical ghost for the next several decades.

Tantalizing, especially because of Summers's clear knowledge of the whole ghost story field, as evidenced in his three anthologies of such stories, The Supernatural Omnibus (Gollancz, September 1931; the US edition from Doubleday, Doran, March 1932, has different contents)*, Victorian Ghost Stories (Fortune Press, October 1933; no US edition), and The Grimoire and Other Supernatural  Stories (Fortune Press, November 1936; no US edition). All three anthologies have extensive introductions by Summers. And the first anthology reportedly went through multiple printings in both England and America.  Yet in the third one, Summers also included, under his own name, a ghost story entitled "The Grimoire," as well as another he had written, "The Man on the Stairs," published anonymously.  "The Grimoire" is excellent, and "The Man on the Stairs" pretty good, so there would be considerable interest in a volume of Sunmmers's own ghost stories.

A bunch (but not all) of Summers's missing manuscripts and papers turned up about a decade ago in Canada. The whole story is told in an article "The Manuscripts of Montague Summers, Revisited" by Gerard O'Sullivan, published in The Antagonish Review, Fall 2009.  In brief, Summers had left the papers to his live-in companion, Hector Stuart-Forbes, who in turn died in 1950, and whose brother retrieved the papers and shipped them to Canada where he lived. And thus they passed out of public knowledge. The archive was later sold to Georgetown University.

Now, at last, Six Ghost Stories has ceased being a bibliographical ghost and become an actual book, published by Snuggly Books in trade paperback (Amazon UK listing here;  Amazon US listing here), with an introduction by Daniel Corrick. This edition is based on a hand-written manuscript in the Georgetown archive. It includes the two Summers stories mentioned above ("The Grimoire" and "The Man on the Stairs") and four more which have never been published before, and a short introduction by Summers. Being based on manuscript versions, the texts of the two previously published stories are thus slightly different.  (A "Note on the Text" rather confusingly circles around these facts, but I think I've got it sorted out correctly.  The Note reads, in part, "The current versions of those stories, therefore, presented in the current volume, have been significantly amended, comparing the previously published versions to the original hand-written version and, in the case of 'The Man on the Stairs', to an existing typescript as well.")

The four newly published stories have some fine moments, as well as some exasperating ones (e.g., some instances of run-on dialogue, like one passage stretching out over four pages in "The Governess") but none challenge "The Grimoire" in terms of quality.  It's good to have the chance to read this volume at last, though some modern readers might find the prose a bit too Victorian. Summers's own introduction notes his preference in stories against the beneficent ghost and for Spirits that are "no kindly commonplace apparitions but veritable powers of darkness, grisly evil things of terror and dread and doom."

The editorial introduction, however, is barely adequate. It give no account of the discovery of the Summers papers in Canada, deferring the reader to a forthcoming second volume of Summers's fiction, and then refers the reader to Gerard O'Sullivan's article without saying when or where it was published. (Fortunately, I already had a photocopy in my files.)  The title of the second forthcoming volume is given as The Bride of Christ and Other Fictions, and the title story is subsequently described as a "Catholic symbolist novella" without the additional information found in O'Sullivan's article that its sixty pages of holograph manuscript "appears to be unfinished because it lacks a signed and dated colophon page," something found in other Summers manuscripts. The introduction also notes that "Six Ghost Stories does not represent the entirety of Summers' ghost oeuvre." One wonder if some other organization of the two volumes of Summers's fiction might have been better.

Some curious statements are also made about the manuscript. We read that from "recently discovered correspondence, we learn that [M.R.] James himself read and commented favorably on the collection in draft form." M.R. James died in June 1936, so how does one square this with the statement that "addresses given on some of the manuscripts allow us to date its completion to the last part of the '30s, although the stories originated at the very least a few years earlier."  What addresses on the manuscripts?  Are they just submission addresses?  It seems likely that Summers had completed the stories by the time he submitted his Who's Who entry for the 1938 volume, which would have been published sometime in 1937. Summers likely had the already-named volume done by early 1937, if not at least a year earlier for it to be shown to M.R. James. (And certainly two of the stories appeared in the November 1936 publication of his third and final ghost story anthology.) Probably Summers expected Six Ghost Stories to be published by the Fortune Press, who had published his second and third ghost stories anthologies in 1933 and 1936. Summers first met R.A. Caton, the niggardly and eccentric owner of the Fortune Press, in February 1927, and through 1940 he published seven books with the Fortune Press, but he had planned or even completed other volumes for the press that never appeared (like Summers's edition of A Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft, by William Perkins, which Summers had similarly and optimistically listed as published in 1934 in his Who's Who entry for 1935.)  Presumably after his failure with getting the Fortune Press to publish Six Ghost Stories, Summers is known to have offered it in late March 1939 to the very short-lived firm Laidlaw and Laidlaw (initially Laidlaw and Butchart), an eccentric publisher of fantasy and modernism that managed to release eleven books in 1938 and early 1939 before dissolving. (My article on Laidlaw and Laidlaw is forthcoming.) After the Second World War began, Summers apparently kept the manuscript to himself.

Whatever the case, we can now read the former bibliographical ghost, Six Ghost Stories. And I look forward to the follow-up volume.


* The UK edition has 38 stories, the US edition 36. They have thirty stories in common, with eight appearing only in the UK edition, and six appearing only in the US edition.