CANON ALBERIC’S SCRAPBOOK
[SHORT-STORY]
The lead story from Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, M. R. James’ first collection of tales originally
spun to rapt students around a Yuletide fire.
[Richard Holmes, “Of ghosts and King’s,” The Times, November 23, 1974] “Dons, of course, had
strange quirks of humour in those days… Montague James’s ghost stories fitted into all these
categories of cloister recreation…
“…the sudden and unexpected occasion of their advent, at an October meeting of the Chitchat
Society, in 1893, a rather prosaic institution dedicated to ‘the promotion of rational conversation’
and habituated to nothing wilder than dissertations on church portals or Breton ballads. The
minute still exists: the 601st meeting, eleven members present, and ‘Mr. James read Two Ghost
Stories.’ There were serious scholars in attendance: Walter Headlam, and Dr. Waldstein of the
Fitzwilliam Museum (where James was to follow as director); yet no explanation of this
aberration is forthcoming.
“We know only that the first story was Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook, one of the most horribly
violent and deliberately autobiographical of them all: in it, a travelling antiquarian, clearly
identified with James, is set upon one lonely night in his auberge bedroom by a fiend whose
picture he has just discovered in a priceless folio of medieval manuscripts.”
In addition to radio versions of the story itself, there have also been several broadcasts of
Kaikhosru Sorabji’s 1941 piano opus, St. Bertrand de Comminges “He was Laughing in the
Tower,” which was the second of two pieces inspired by James’s stories.
[Jonathan Powell] “Sorabji wrote two pieces based on ghost stories by Montague Rhodes James,
the academic and expert on early manuscripts and Christian apocrypha. The first of these
compositions — Quaere reliqua hujus materiei inter secretiora — was based on James’s story
Count Magnus and was written in 1940. A year later, Sorabji provided this piece with a
companion — St Bertrand de Comminges “He was Laughing in the Tower” — suggested by
James’s Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook. The subtitle refers to a line from the story: “A few remarks
passed between father and daughter, of which Dennistoun only caught these words, said by the
sacristan, ‘He was laughing in the church’, words which were answered only by a look of terror
from the girl”. The story is set in the Pyrenean town of St Bertrand de Comminges, and
exemplifies the most effective elements of James’s style with its ironic but generous portrait of the
English academic abroad finding himself out of his depth dealing with the supernatural. Sorabji’s
music, while not strictly programmatic, mirrors James’s depictions of the supernatural with its
strong sense of atmosphere, employment of shock tactics and the palpable sensation of climax
towards the end.”
10/06/1987 Yonty Solomon (piano)
BBC Radio 3, London, UK [B] 09/08/1992 Michael Habermann (piano) [x]
Radio Bremen, Bremen, Germany [+B]
Hauptabteilung E-Musik, Redaktion Neue Musik 15/10/1992 Yonty Solomon (piano)
BBC Radio 3, London, UK [R]
“Sacred and Profane” programme 11/09/2003 Michael Habermann (piano)
CKCU, Ottawa, Canada [+B]
[CHRONOLOGY]
TALES OF THE SUPERNATURAL (CJRC, WINNIPEG)
[Wednesday—10:30-11:00 PM}
Circa 1940 “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook”
THE LATE BOOK—“GHOST STORIES” (RADIO 4, LONDON)
[Monday-Friday—12:30-12:48 AM]
December 29, 1997 “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook”
[“…A collector of antiquities encounters a hideous demonic figure in his
hotel room. But did he really see it?…”]
SCRIPT: Paul Kent (adapter).
PERSONNEL: Paul Kent (producer), Benjamin Whitrow (narrator).
EXTANT RECORDING