{
  "title": "CANON ALBERIC’S SCRAPBOOK",
  "category": "[SHORT-STORY]",
  "article": "The lead story from Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, M. R. James’ first collection of tales originally\nspun to rapt students around a Yuletide fire.\n[Richard Holmes, “Of ghosts and King’s,” The Times, November 23, 1974] “Dons, of course, had\nstrange quirks of humour in those days… Montague James’s ghost stories fitted into all these\ncategories of cloister recreation…\n“…the sudden and unexpected occasion of their advent, at an October meeting of the Chitchat\nSociety, in 1893, a rather prosaic institution dedicated to ‘the promotion of rational conversation’\nand habituated to nothing wilder than dissertations on church portals or Breton ballads. The\nminute still exists: the 601st meeting, eleven members present, and ‘Mr. James read Two Ghost\nStories.’ There were serious scholars in attendance: Walter Headlam, and Dr. Waldstein of the\nFitzwilliam Museum (where James was to follow as director); yet no explanation of this\naberration is forthcoming.\n“We know only that the first story was Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook, one of the most horribly\nviolent and deliberately autobiographical of them all: in it, a travelling antiquarian, clearly\nidentified with James, is set upon one lonely night in his auberge bedroom by a fiend whose\npicture he has just discovered in a priceless folio of medieval manuscripts.”\nIn addition to radio versions of the story itself, there have also been several broadcasts of\nKaikhosru Sorabji’s 1941 piano opus, St. Bertrand de Comminges “He was Laughing in the\nTower,” which was the second of two pieces inspired by James’s stories.\n[Jonathan Powell] “Sorabji wrote two pieces based on ghost stories by Montague Rhodes James,\nthe academic and expert on early manuscripts and Christian apocrypha. The first of these\ncompositions — Quaere reliqua hujus materiei inter secretiora — was based on James’s story\nCount Magnus and was written in 1940. A year later, Sorabji provided this piece with a\ncompanion — St Bertrand de Comminges “He was Laughing in the Tower” — suggested by\nJames’s Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook. The subtitle refers to a line from the story: “A few remarks\npassed between father and daughter, of which Dennistoun only caught these words, said by the\nsacristan, ‘He was laughing in the church’, words which were answered only by a look of terror\nfrom the girl”. The story is set in the Pyrenean town of St Bertrand de Comminges, and\nexemplifies the most effective elements of James’s style with its ironic but generous portrait of the\nEnglish academic abroad finding himself out of his depth dealing with the supernatural. Sorabji’s\nmusic, while not strictly programmatic, mirrors James’s depictions of the supernatural with its\nstrong sense of atmosphere, employment of shock tactics and the palpable sensation of climax\ntowards the end.”\n10/06/1987 Yonty Solomon (piano)\nBBC Radio 3, London, UK [B] 09/08/1992 Michael Habermann (piano) [x]\nRadio Bremen, Bremen, Germany [+B]\nHauptabteilung E-Musik, Redaktion Neue Musik 15/10/1992 Yonty Solomon (piano)\nBBC Radio 3, London, UK [R]\n“Sacred and Profane” programme 11/09/2003 Michael Habermann (piano)\nCKCU, Ottawa, Canada [+B]",
  "origination": "",
  "duration": "",
  "personnel": "",
  "extant_recordings": "",
  "chronology": "TALES OF THE SUPERNATURAL (CJRC, WINNIPEG)\n[Wednesday—10:30-11:00 PM}\nCirca 1940\n“Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook”\nTHE LATE BOOK—“GHOST STORIES” (RADIO 4, LONDON)\n[Monday-Friday—12:30-12:48 AM]\nDecember 29, 1997\n“Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook”\n[“…A collector of antiquities encounters a hideous demonic figure in his\nhotel room. But did he really see it?…”]\nSCRIPT: Paul Kent (adapter).\nPERSONNEL: Paul Kent (producer), Benjamin Whitrow (narrator).\nEXTANT RECORDING",
  "sources": "",
  "gallery": "",
  "images": []
}