Arthur Machen: The
House of Souls.
London: E. Grant Richards, 1906.
xvi + 515 pp.
I had heard of Machen before,
as a pioneering horror writer and an influence upon H. P. Lovecraft
and the like, but had never read anything by him except for a hasty reading of
The Great God Pan a number of years ago.
The present volume, which collects several stories of varying length that he had
published during the 1890s, and one or two new ones, seemed like a useful
introduction to his work, so I decided to read it.
The book begins with Machen's introduction with many delightful if bitterly
sarcastic remarks about the English spirit of Puritanism and its insistence that
literature must be realistic and useful for moral instruction: “English
fiction must justify itself either as containing useful doctrine and
information, or as a manifest transcript of life as it is known to the
average reader” (p. viii) — by contrast, “in Paris it is
agreed that imagination and fantasy are to work as they will and as they can,
and are to be judged by their own laws” (p. vi). He concludes
by pretending that conventional moral lessons can be extracted from his
tales as well, but also admits more honestly that his real aim was to hint
at “a belief in a world that is not that of ordinary, everyday experience,
that in a measure transcends the experience of Bethel and the Bank” (p. xii).
[Bethel, I guess, probably
stands for conventional religion here.]
(Note: major spoiler warnings apply throughout the rest of this post.)
A Fragment of Life
Edward and Mary Darrell are a middle-class couple;
he has a job in the City, they rent a house in the suburbs and employ a maid,
and they treat each other nice and are happy together. They are admirably
careful in spending their money, and we learn a good deal more than I cared
to know about their plans to buy new furniture for a spare room in their house (pp. 5,
10–15, 18–21) or a new cooking-range for their kitchen (pp. 29–34),
but I guess these things are there to provide a more striking contrast with what comes later.
Edward in particular has always had a mystical side as well,
a vague sense that the tangible world we are used
to is not quite real, but more like a dream that we may, with some effort,
wake up from. In his younger years he had made a walking tour of “London
and its environs”, which in his account becomes an area of
wonder and mystery (pp. 48–56): “I found the Strange Road. I saw
it branching off from the dusty high road, and it looked so green that I turned
aside into it, and soon I felt as if I had really come into a new country.”
(P. 53.)
There's an interesting chapter involving Mary's aunt, whose
husband has been behaving very strangely, their walks through the woods have
been followed by queer whistling sounds, he was seen talking to a strange
red-headed boy and spending long hours away from home (pp. 59–68).
Was he having an affair with an actress, and the boy was merely that woman
in disguise, as the aunt says? Or has he too been communing with some mystical
and supernatural forces? Or is the aunt simply going insane, which is the
explanation eventually given by her husband (p. 89)?
Edward takes an increasing interest in old papers left behind by his
late father, and even begins learning Latin for that purpose, and he
talks about moving to their old family farm somewhere in the depths of Wales
once his grand-uncle, its current owner, dies (p. 97). It seems that
his Welsh ancestors have long been involved in mysticism, and Edward himself
as a child had once seen a little of their ceremonies when visiting them
with his uncle (pp. 103–107). Now, with the aid of his family papers,
Edward applies himself to finally crossing the boundary that separates the
everyday material world from the real mystical world behind it. “So
day by day the world became more magical; day by
day the work of separation was being performed, the gross accidents were being
refined away.” (P. 100.) The story ends on a hopeful
note, with Edward reporting: “I awoke from a dream of a London
suburb, of daily labour, of weary, useless little things; and as my eyes
were opened I saw that I was in an ancient wood” etc. (p. 109).
I really enjoyed this story and it seems to be a splendid introduction
to Machen and his particular brand of mysticism. He is careful never to
define things too clearly, and the mystical world that Edward and his Welsh
ancestors are working towards does not seem to have much to do with the
conventional christian ideas of the afterlife; it is more like partly
faerie and partly magic, and it is not trivially happy and blissful but
has its dangers as well, which are only hinted at (p. 101).
I always liked those who spit into the face of reality, as it deserves
little else but to be spat upon, and I was glad
to see that Machen delights in putting our material world down in
extraordinarily blunt terms, which were perhaps meant to shock some of
his more conventional readers: Edward comes to “a firm belief that the
whole fabric of life in which he moved was sunken, past all thinking,
in the grossest absurdity; that he and his friends and acquaintances and
fellow-workers were interested in matters in which men were never meant to
be interested, were pursuing aims which they were never meant to pursue [. . .]
Life, it seemed to him, was a great search for—he knew not what”
(p. 84). “Again and again the spirit of nonsense that had
been implanted in him as in his fellows assured him that the true world
was the visible and tangible world [. . .] But in spite of
these arguments, in spite of their acceptance by all who were about him,
he had the grace to perceive the utter falsity and absurdity of the
whole position. [. . .] Darnell knew by experience that man is
made a mystery for mysteries and visions, for the realization
in his consciousness of ineffable bliss, for a great joy that transmutes
the whole world, for a joy that surpasses all joys and overcomes all sorrows.” (Pp. 85–6.)
One thing that surprised me a bit is that Machen spends a good
deal of space introducing side-characters that don't end up going anywhere
or having anything to do with the main story: glimpses of the more or less
odd neighbours of the Darnells' (pp. 25–6), and the story of the maid's boyfriend
and the atrocious behaviour of his mother (pp. 36–44).
Not that I object to episodes
in a long story, but this story isn't really *that* long and I think that
even episodes should still have *something* to do with the main story.
The White People
In the prologue, a man named Cotgrave is introduced by a friend to a strange
mystic and recluse named Ambrose and listens to his interesting but highly
idiosyncratic ideas of sin and sinners. In his view, your average everyday thief
or murderer aren't sinners in the proper sense of the word; it is true that they
are a nuisance to us, they violate our social rules, and we are right to persecute them,
but true sin requires a certain positive commitment to evil which such everyday criminals
lack. True sinners are even more rare than true saints; “holiness [. . .]
is an effort to recover the ecstasy that was before the Fall. But sin is an effort
to gain the ecstasy and the knowledge that pertain alone to angels, and in making
this effort man becomes a demon. I told you that the mere murderer is not
therefore a sinner; that is true, but the sinner is sometimes a murderer.
Gilles de Raiz
is an instance.” (P. 117.)
This was fascinating, but I have no idea how it's connected to the rest of the
story. The bulk of the story consists of the text of the “green book”,
a manuscript which Ambrose gave to Cotgrave to read, as giving an example of sin (in
Ambrose's sense) in the modern time (p. 122). This green book I found almost
completely unreadable. It is written by a teenage girl in a strange, almost stream-of-consciousness
style, and in my opinion her greatest sin is against paragraph breaks;
Gilles de Raiz may have murdered children for sport, but I don't know that he ever sank
so low as to write a paragraph extending over twenty-seven pages (pp. 127–54).
What also bothered me was that I had no idea if Machen had really thought everything
through and if the things we see in the green book all have a carefully concealed symbolical
meaning, or is he just making up a string of random nonsense as he goes along, rubbing his
hands gleefully as he gets us readers to swallow it (my bet is on the latter).
The whole thing reminded me a little
of some of Lovecraft's dream-stories, which are easily my least favourite part of his work.
The author of the green book, as a little girl, was introduced by her nurse
to a sort of fairy-world inhabited by mysterious “white people” (p. 126).
Later we follow the girl on a long walk through a strange forest landscape,
where one damn random thing follows another; there's dancing amongst rocks, climbing
through thickets and passages, drinking of spring-water with dubious side-effects,
and so on (pp. 130–3). There's the tale of another girl who had apparently
visited the fairy realm by way of a hollow pit; she came back wearing all sorts of
finery, and even got married to the king's son, but was soon taken away (back to the
fairy world?) by a mysteious “black man” (pp. 134–6). Our narrator
is determined not to repeat her mistakes, and returns home without bringing anything
from the fairy realm (p. 137).
She remembers another of her nurse's tales, about a young man who, while out hunting,
was lured into the fairy realm by a mysterious white stag, dallied a little
with the queen of the fairies, but was then returned back to the real
world fairly unharmed (pp. 140–2).
The nurse clearly had access to a deep and ancient tradition of fairy-related
lore, rituals, tales and the like, passed down from her great-grandmother in whose
time the cult had still been going strong. We see a story of one of their festivals,
with dancing and drinking magical wine and singing in an “old, old language that
nobody knows now” (p. 144), and making and worshipping mysterious clay
figurines (pp. 145–7), which the nurse also teaches the girl to do.
Later she also teaches her various other magical rituals and practices, often in the
guise of games (p. 154, 157). [One of these is a very close parallel to
Haitian zombification: “you could take a person out of himself [. . .]
and his body went walking about quite empty, without any sense in it”.]
There's a charming tale of a young noblewoman whose real identity was actually
the queen of the fairies; being pressured (in her human form) to choose among several
suitors, she eventually made clay dolls of them and killed them, voodoo-style;
but she was found out and burnt as a witch (pp. 148–53).
A few years later, the nurse now having disappeared, the girl wonders what if
anything of all this was true; and she manages to retrace their old footsteps and
re-enter the fairy realm (p. 158‐61). The manuscript ends abruptly,
but by the end she is able to have regular communication with “nymphs”,
which seem to come in two varieties, light and dark (p. 162).
There is a short epilogue where Ambrose explains that much of the obscurity
of the manuscript is clearly deliberate, similar to what you see in alchemical
literature (p. 164). The girl has been found dead, having poisoned herself
next to a mysterious ancient idol (p. 165–6). There is a hint here
that the fairy cult was a survival from prehistoric times.
This was in a way an interesting story, but a little too random for my
taste, and the “green book” was very painful to read.
The Great God Pan
The story opens with a slighty too well-worn bit of mad science. Dr. Raymond believes
that our tangible world is just an illusion and that a real, mystical world is hiding somewhere
behind it, and that a person's mind can come into contact with this real world if certain
connections in the brain are severed (pp. 170–3). Apparently the ancients
described such a contact with the ‘real’ world as “seeing the god Pan”.
Raymond performs this operation on a young girl, Mary (who has technically volunteered
for it, but the doctor has
“rescued [her] from the gutter” (p. 173) so we may wonder how free her
choice in the matter actually is), but she merely goes insane from it — perhaps,
as Dr. Raymond seems to think, because her soul, having seen the real spirit-world,
now can't stand being trapped in the body any more.
Years later, Mr. Clarke (a friend of Raymond's who had witnessed the operation and who
possesses a sharp sense for both practical and mystical matters; p. 207), hears from
a friend named Dr. Phillips a curious story of a mysterious young woman, Helen V., who
was in the habit of spending whole days in a forest and quite possibly cavorting with
some sort of satyr-like monster (pp. 184–5), the sight of which drove one or
two other children mad before she finally disappeared without a trace.
Next we hear of a man named Charles Herbert, formerly a prosperous squire who got
married to a mysterious woman named Helen Vaughan; she “corrupted my soul [. . .]
In a year, Villiers, I was a ruined man, in body and soul” (p. 192). She also
convinced him to sell his land and then disappeared with the money, leaving him a beggar.
His friend Villiers, who has encountered him in this sorry condition, later finds out more
details from another acquaintance, Austin: the Herberts had had a house in a shady part of
the town and at one point a gentleman had been found dead in front of it, apparently of
fright (p. 196).
Villiers later visits that house, now empty, and feels an inexplicable sense of dread
himself while there (pp. 201–3). In it he finds some old papers, including a
sketch of the mysterious Mrs. Herbert; he discusses the matter with Clarke, who is shocked
at the similarity between Mrs. Herbert and poor Mary from that mad-science operation years before
(p. 205).
Villiers gets a couple more pieces of the puzzle from Austin. He hears about Mrs. Beaumont,
a mysterious rich woman who has recently moved to London, apparently from South America,
and quickly became popular in high society. Austin also shows Villiers a collection of
drawings by Meyrick, an artist friend of his who has recently died in Argentina. The drawings are
mostly monsters — satrys and fauns — but on the last page, you will not be surprised,
is a portrait that Villiers immediately recognizes as that of Mrs. Herbert (p. 213).
In the next few weeks, London is shaken by a series of suicides of several gentlemen
without any very obvious motive. Austin, discussing the subject with Villiers, mentions
that one of the victims was a friend of his, Lord Argentine, who had dined at Mrs. Beaumont's
the night before his suicide (p. 219). A little later another man also commits
suicide after a visit to Mrs. Beaumont's — Villiers, by sheer chance, saw him as he came
out of her house in the middle of the night: “I knew I had looked into the eyes
of a lost soul” (p. 224).
Villiers, making some inquiries in a shady part of the town, hears of an unusually infamous
young woman calling herself Miss Raymond who had lived there a few years before, and recently
returned; seeing her in a window, he easily recognizes her as Mrs. Herbert from the drawing. And then following
her discreetely as she leaves the house, he eventually discovers that she is none other than Mrs.
Beaumont as well (p. 229–30). He also manages to obtain “an account of
the entertainment Mrs. Beaumont provided for her choicer guests” (p. 231) from one
of the latter, who has not committed suicide — not yet, at any rate.
Austin, meanwhile, provides one more piece of the puzzle, though it is scarcely necessary
at this point: having written to a doctor in Buenos Aires, he has learnt that Meyrick the
artist had died of nervous shock and that his only acquaintance there was a woman of
doubtful reputation named Mrs. Vaughan (p. 235).
The story ends with a few fragments of communication between the protagonists, which
provide for a rather more vague conclusion than I would have liked. Apparently Villiers
and Clarke confronted Mrs. Beaumont and got her to hang herself, threatening to call the
police otherwise. She, alias Helen Vaughan or Mrs. Herbert, was, at any rate, the daughter
of poor Mary that Dr. Raymond had operated on, born nine months after the operation (Mary
died soon afterwards). Being the daughter of the god Pan, she could transform into
monstrous shapes, “from woman to man, from man to beast, and from beast to worse than
beast” (p. 242), and also summon satyr-like companions to play with, and it
was displays like these that drove her guests and acquaintances to madness or suicide.
*
This is probably one of Machen's best-known stories, and the only one I had read
before. I like the way it reveals things to us little by little, as we switch between
the perspectives of several different characters who independently come into contact
with the mystery and only gradually manage to put the pieces of information together.
That being said, there were also a few things I didn't like about this story.
One thing is that Dr. Raymond's contribution to mad science strikes me as a little
too cliched, as I already said above; but perhaps it wasn't quite as cliched more than
a hundred years ago, when Machen wrote this story.
Another thing is that the connections
between the pieces of the puzzle are a little too obvious at times; sure, in principle
there must be many women named Helen V. in a country the size of Britain, but when
you hear about Helen V. in one chapter (p. 181) and of Helen Vaughan in the next chapter
(pp. 192–3) of the same story, they are obviously the same person.
Similarly, we hear about Mrs. Beaumont coming from South America; almost in the
same breath we hear about her new favourite (and soon to be victim), Lord *Argentine*
(p. 210; surely an implausible name for a British nobleman); and shortly afterwards
we hear about Meyrick's mysterious death in Buenos Ayres (p. 212). It's all a
little bit too on the nose. And the idea that one of Mrs. Beaumont's
victims was seen just as he was coming out of her house in the middle of the night
before his suicide, by Villiers who had not been deliberately stalking Mrs. Beaumont's
house at the time — is a good deal too improbable for my taste. It smells of
cheap deus ex machina.
The connection to Pan also struck me as a little far-fetched. Sure, let's grant
for the moment that our material world is but an illusion and that there is a real
mystical world behind it (this seems to be a recurring idea with Machen, we've seen it
before in this book and will probably see it again later); but why would the ancients
describe contact with this world as “seeing the god Pan”? Why not, I don't know,
Zeus, who was surely a much more important god? You will say that ‘Pan’ can also
mean ‘everything’, which surely makes him a very appropriate god for contacts
with the ‘real’ (mystical) world; but in that case, why would you connect
this kind of Pan with the goatlike woodland creature that we usually imagine him as?
If you are in direct contact with the real world, surely you could summon a
unicorn, a butterfly or a pink elephant just as well as a satyr or faun — so why do
all of Helen's transformations or summonings involve satyrs and never any other creature?
Machen does not give us any clear explanation of this, beyond some handwaving about
Pan being a symbol because the “secret forces which lie at the heart of all things
[. . .] cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol” (pp. 231–2).
Another thing I disliked a little is the vagueness of the last chapter.
Is Dr. Matheson's statement (pp. 235–7) the same manuscript that
Villiers has referred to on p. 230? What exactly happened to Rachel on one of
those day-long trips deep into the woods with Helen — did Helen transform
into a satyr and mate with her or something (p. 237, 240–1)? And how
exactly did this cause Rachel's death later? (If we're going to have furry pr0n,
we at least want all the nasty details! :P)
And I can't help wondering if the mad-science bit at the start makes the story weaker
rather than stronger. It's easy enough to accept the premiss that cutting a few
connections in the brain might allow one's mind to experience something odd — fine, perhaps
to experience the real spirit-world behind our illusive material world. Fair enough.
But how on earth will severing a few neurons in the brain help poor Mary get
pregnant with the Great God Pan and give birth to a child with a paranormal ability
to shapeshift? (Thank god for the shapeshifting ability or we'd have to wonder if Dr. Raymond
‘operated’ on something else besides Mary's brain :])
It would have been better to provide no material explanation at all
than to provide such an obviously inadequate one as “a slight lesion in the
grey matter” (p. 171). All we get is Raymond's vague non-explanations
about how the operation “broke open the door of the house of life”, with
the possibility that “there may enter in that for which we
have no name” (p. 242).
*
I don't know if I was mistaken in approaching this as a horror story; I know that
Machen was an influence upon Lovecraft and his tales of cosmic horror, and
The Great God Pan specifically is often mentioned as a story that
influenced Lovecraft's The
Dunwich Horror. But as a horror story,
The Great God Pan didn't strike me as all that horrifying. Machen
goes to great lengths trying to prepare us for something really horrible, putting the
pieces together little by little, beating about the bush for ages,
but in the end when the facts are revealed, the
whole thing feels a little anticlimactic.
I never really saw why
Helen and her contacts with the real world are supposed to be *quite* so terrifying.
She never seems to really harm anyone in any obvious way; we just have vague reports of
how she supposedly corrupts people. They are shocked to see her transform into a satyr,
but it's not like she ever transformed into a dinosaur and bit off their heads.
Nor does she transform into some sort of Lovecraftian abomination and threaten to
destroy mankind. (Besides, if she were *really* powerful and/or dangerous, she
wouldn't have allowed Clarke and Villiers to talk her into committing suicide.)
Frankly, the only clearly bad thing we see her do in this story is
when she runs away with her husband's money — and this bit struck me as being
poorly motivated. She seemed to be living happily and prosperously enough as his wife,
so why did she need to rob him and run away? And moreover, with her ability to transform,
you would imagine she could easily rob a bank (which I consider a victimless crime)
or something like that.
The Inmost Light
This story has a few characteristics in common with the previous one, but it
is much shorter. Dyson dabbles at being a writer, but in truth spends most of his
time studying “the physiology of London” (p. 249), i.e. walking about
the city and imagining it to be full of wonder and mystery. He tells his friend
Salisbury about the strange Dr. Black, who used to live with his wife in an
out-of-the-way suburb, but she gradually dropped out of sight and died a few
months later. The authorities ordered an autopsy, where her brain was found to be
in a very odd state, but the death was ruled a natural one. Dyson was interested
in the matter because he had seen the woman in a window once and found the sight
indescribably disturbing.
Salisbury, later the same evening, wanders into an unfamiliar part of the
town and witnesses a quarrel between a woman and an old man; she throws away a
crumpled piece of paper, which Salisbury picks up. It mentions a street name and
a nonsense-rhyme (p. 263).
A week later, Salisbury visits Dyson, who tells him more about his investigation
into the case of Mrs. Black. One of the doctors who had performed the autopsy on her
told Dyson that her brain seemed to be not a human brain but that of a devil (p. 268).
By coincidence, Dyson also came across Dr. Black, who seemed to have aged greatly in
a short time and was now living in great poverty in a poor part of the town; he professed
a keen interest in mystical or occult subjects. A couple months later Dr. Black died
suddenly, believing he had just been robbed of something immensely valuable.
Salisbury shows Dyson the piece of paper with the nonsense rhyme, and Dyson
agrees to look into it. He realizes that a part of the message is an address
of a shop and, once there, he uses the nonsense rhyme as a pass-phrase, acting
as if he knew what it was all about; he succeesfully bullies the shopkeeper into
handing over a parcel which he had evidently been keeping with instructions to
give it to someone who knew the pass-phrase.
The parcel proves to contain an unusually large and lustrous opal-like gem,
as well as a diary of Dr. Black. Thanks to his occult studies, he had been able
“to bridge over the gulf between the world of consciousness and the world
of matter” (p. 284), and couldn't resist going so far as to draw what
was presumably the soul of some sort of devil or demon from that other world
into ours; but to make space for it, he had to transfer the soul of his wife from
her body into the opal-like gem — that's why the gem was so lustrous,
and why he had to kill his wife, whose body was of course inhabited by the
soul of a devil by then. The most bizarre detail about this story is that he
had supposedly managed to persuade his wife to agree to this insane experiment,
though with great reluctance and much crying (p. 285).
*
My complaints about this story are similar as those about The Great
God Pan. The reveal at the end is rather too sudden, the doctor's diary
explains everything a little too quickly and too directly; I felt a bit let
down by that. The idea that his wife agreed to the experiment is even more
ridiculous than where Mary agreed to Dr. Raymond's experiment in The Great
God Pan. The idea that you can summon a demonic soul from the other world
into this one, but to make space for it you have to draw some human's soul out of
his or her body (p. 284), also struck me as a bit too arbitrary. If he
could transfer his wife's soul into a gem, why couldn't he draw the devil's soul
into that gem instead, and leave his wife alone?! Moreover, once the
devil's soul was in his wife's body, why should this have caused a physical
change in her brain, such as was described by the doctor who autopsied her?
Moreover, what exactly could there be about the physical structure of her brain
that could give that doctor the idea that it was “the brain of a devil”
(p. 269)?
And we have again the implausible coincidence where Salisbury happened
to come across that quarrelling couple and picked up that piece of paper
and gave it to Dyson so the latter could solve the puzzle. This sort of
coincidence strains the reader's ability to suspend his disbelief. It's
easier to imagine that an occultist can draw a devil's soul from the spirit-world
than that such a coincidence as Salisbury's finding that piece of paper
is likely to occur.
Moreover, there's too much that we don't find out:
how exactly was Dr. Black robbed of the box containing his diary and the gem
with his wife's soul? Who robbed him and why? Why was the box then deposited
in that shop? Who was the “Mr. Davies” that was supposed to come
pick it up (p. 280)? Who was the mysterious Q. mentioned in the
message (p. 263) and why did he have to travel to Paris? What was the
role of the woman who threw away the message, and of the man Sam she was
quarrelling with (p. 261)? By the time the story ends, you can't help
feeling that the mystery has been barely half solved. Sure, you can imagine
all sorts of scenarios that might explain things, but that should be the
writer's job, not the reader's.
The Three Impostors
This story has much in common with the others in this book, but it is by
far the longest and the most ambitious. Again we have a mystery involving
unexplained and vaguely diabolical forces from some world beyond our material
one; again we have references to fauns and fairies and vaguely menacing
goings-on in remote Welsh forests; again we have a few cheaply garish and
all too material horror effects thrown in (pp. 433, 472), which feel curiously at odds
with Machen's otherwise predominant style of creepiness based
largely on vague allusions to supposedly fearsome supernatural things;
and again we have several protagonists who gradually piece together the
various parts of the puzzle, except that this time there is more of everything
and it is more intricate than in the other, shorter stories in this book.
In fact the individual sections of The Three Impostors have
titles of their own, and you end up with stories nested two or sometimes
three levels deep in a manner reminiscent of the Arabian Nights.
I quite enjoyed this particular aspect of the story, though at the same
time I did occasionally find it hard to keep track of everything, and
if I'm going to write a detailed plot summary below it is going to be as much
to clear things up for myself as for the benefit of any (most likely nonexistent)
readers of this blog.
*
The story starts with a prologue which is deliberately unclear, but it
will become clear later as you read more of the story. We see three people
leaving a house; the author, very considerately, gives us descriptions
by which we will be able to recognize them when we encounter them again
later in the book: Helen has a “piquant” face, Davies is
smooth-shaven, and Richmond has a ginger moustache merging into chin-whiskers
(p. 289). They are apparently leaving behind one Joseph Walters,
and make several references to a man with spectacles who we may guess is the
same person. They didn't get the “gold Tiberius” that they wanted from him,
but they do have something that may well be the poor man's finger (p. 202).
They also make reference to several other names, evidently
aliases under which these three impostors have recently
operated: Mr. Burton, Mr. Wilkins, Miss Lally and Miss Leicester (p. 290);
we will encounter them all again later, and I will indicate references to
them by a ‘(!)’ mark. And lastly, they mention a
Dr. Lipsius who is not present himself but seems to be the one who sent
them (the finger, or whatever it is, is for his “museum”, p. 202).
As they leave the scene, two other men, Dyson and Phillipps, approach
the abandoned house, and the story moves a few months back in time
when their acquaintance began. They are both something of dilettante
writers (Machen must have despised the type, judging by how he describes
them here); Dyson is more interested in mystery while Phillipps is a thorough
materialist and has written on scientific topics (p. 295).
One night in a dim and remote alley, Dyson saw a man drop a small parcel while
running from a knife-wielding pursuer; Dyson picked it up unobserved and
found it to contain a gold coin bearing the image of Tiberius, the Roman
emperor; a rare and practically legendary coin (pp. 298–300).
*
Some time later, whilst taking a stroll, Dyson sees a scared-looking
man with spectacles (!) practically run into a carriage, and shortly afterwards
meets a man with ginger chin-wiskers (!), who introduces himself as Mr. Wilkins (!)
and is apparently interested in the man with spectacles, whom he had seen
from across the street (pp. 304–7).
Wilkins tells Dyson about a curious adventure he had had some time before.
He had got a job as secretary to a hesitant-looking (!) gentleman named Mr. Smith
(p. 312; how could such a generic name be anything other than fake!) and accompanied
him on a journey to the United States (p. 312). They lived for some time in a cabin
in a very remote area of the Rocky Mountains; Wilkins had no real work to do
and no clear idea what Smith was doing, but the inhabitants of the area were
clearly intensely hostile to both of them (p. 320). Smith seems to be leading
some sort of cult or gang, and he shouts “blood for gold” as his acolytes
throw gold coins on a scale (p. 323). Rumours of kidnappings and disappearances
are rife, and eventually the locals form a mob and lynch most of Smith's gang.
They nearly lynch Wilkins too, thinking he is Smith; but the the real Jack Smith
is nowhere to be found (pp. 325–7).
Upon returning to London, Wilkins found his affairs prospering unusually
well, but was constantly in fear that Smith might show up and do him harm (p. 328).
Apparently he recognized the man with the spectacles as Smith, and this is
why he inquired of him from Dyson.
*
Meanwhile, Phillipps has a curious encounter as well. In a park he
encounters a distressed young woman with a piquant (!) face (p. 333); she had been in the habit of meeting her
brother there every Saturday, but then one day he showed up late, in the
company of a nondescript figure whose hand was like that of a rotten corpse (p. 338);
the brother said only that he could not stay, and the two walked past and soon
disappeared behind a corner. The brother, incidentally, is a timid-looking man
with spectacles (!) (p. 339). Phillipps tries to console her: surely
the corpse-like figure was only her hallucination (p. 340).
To explain why she can no longer subscribe to such cheap rationalism,
she tells him more about her previous experiences with supernatural phenomena.
Her name is Miss Lally (!) and she used to work as the assistant of Professor Gregg,
a prominent ethnographer. Over the years, Gregg had accumulated a series of clues
that seemed to point to some deeper mystery: he has an ancient Mesopotamian seal with
a 60-character inscription in an unknown script, and more recently the exact same
inscription, though of an obviously recent date, had been found on a rock
in Wales (p. 351); an ancient Roman geographer mentions a people worshipping
a stone with such an inscription, called Ixaxar (p. 359).
Gregg moves to the Welsh countryside to investigate some local rumours and
folklore there. He hires Jervase Cradock, a mentally retarded lad who is prone
to mumbling to himself in some unknown language that includes the word
“Ishakshar” (p. 370). Eventually Gregg disappears on an
expedition into the woods that was supposed to be the culmination of his
investigations; but fortunately he has left behind a manuscript explaining the matter.
Apparently local beliefs about fairies who sometimes attack or kidnap people
are based on something real and dangerous, some sort of primitive humanoids with
a touch of the supernatural (pp. 382–5); and Jervase's
biological father was one of these ‘Little People’, who had
molested his (human) mother on her way through the woods (pp. 388–9).
Gregg had managed to decipher the seal-inscription, whose phrases “tell how
man can be reduced to the slime from which he came” or turned into a reptile
(p. 392); and it seems he had used this method to put Jervase out of his misery.
We are not told, however, how Gregg met his end on his expedition to meet
the Little People in the forests.
*
Dyson, sitting in a bar and thinking about Wilkins's strange fear of the
spectacled man, mutters something about this to himself and is overheard by
a smooth-shaven (!) gentleman named Mr. Burton (!). Burton is a dealer
in rare gems, and has recently tried to buy one such gem very cheaply
in Italy by putting on a sort of con together with his assistant, one Robbins.
They got the gem, but then Robbins disappeared with it (p. 407),
and apparently Robbins matches Dyson's description of the spectacled man.
[In the first edition of The Three Impostors, there is an additional
section involving Burton at this point. He begins visiting Dyson regularly,
and on one occasion tells him a gruesome story about an acquaintance of his,
one Mr. Mathias, who once invited Burton over and unexpectedly turned out to be a
keen collector of medieval torture devices. One of these was a sort of statue-like
contraption that strangled its victim; while showing his collection to Burton,
Mathias accidentally presses a button on the statue and gets strangled by it.
After hearing a few more stories along these lines, Dyson concludes that
Burton is probably making it all up.]
*
Dyson has another odd experience some time later. On a visit to a
friend named Russell (another failed writer), Dyson is approached by Miss Helen (!) (p. 430) Leicester (!),
a mysterious woman with a piquant face (!) who lives in the same house (pp. 414–16).
Her brother Francis had fallen ill after studying too hard for too long;
Dr. Halberden, his physician, prescribed him a drug; but once he started
taking it, Francis changed, staying out all night revelling in the town;
and before long, we find his hand suspiciously bandaged (p. 423),
in a way that we are surely meant to identify with the corpse-like hand
of the figure that accompanied Miss Lally's brother on p. 338.
Miss Leicester asks Dr. Haberden to investigate; it turns out that the drug
is not what he had prescribed, evidently something has been mislabelled at
the pharmacist's who had mixed it; but nobody knows what exactly it is.
Soon Francis shuts himself up in his room, letting nobody enter, and his
sister sees a creepy faceless figure at his window. Of course it is him;
in a few more days, he dissolves into a “putrid mass”, bubbling and
writhing in a corner of his room, with “two burning points like eyes” (p. 433).
In a scene that is more funny than horrifying, Dr. Haberden puts the mass out of its
misery with a few whacks of an iron bar :))
A friend of Haberden's
analyzes the drug Francis had been taking and pronounces it to be the powder
from which the “wine of the Sabbath” was once prepared (pp. 437–8)
and given to neophytes to receive them into the ranks of devil-worshippers.
Miss Leicester tells Dyson that her relatives suspect her of having
murdered her brother, and sent detectives to trail her, notably one nervous
man with spectacles (!). Dyson seems to be rather fed up with bizarre mysteries,
especially those involving a/the man with spectacles, and assures her he has
not seen him.
*
A few days later, Dyson encounters the spectacled man in a bar;
Burton shows up and leads the spectacled man away. The latter addresses
him as Davies (!), not Burton, and begs for pity but doesn't actually
resist him in any more vigorous way (p. 447). But before being
taken away, the spectacled man drops a parcel, which Dyson later picks
up (p. 448).
It proves to be a sort of autobiographical account of the unfortunate
spectacled man, Joseph Walters (!). A man of reclusive and scholarly habits,
he used to frequent the reading room of the British Museum, and there encountered
one Dr. Lipsius, a rather Mephistophelean figure who gradually corrupted
Walters and turned his interest to “the science of art and pleasure”
(p. 452). Before long, Walters found himself initiated into some sort
of cult or secret society, was given “the wine of the Fauns” and
participated in strange rites (p. 455).
He had fun at first, but soon was given work to do.
A certain Mr. Headley would be arriving to London with the gold Tiberius;
Dr. Lipsius had apparently arranged for a cabman to bring Headley to the wrong address,
and Walters was instructed to intercept him there and lead him to Dr. Lipsius's place (p. 455).
Walters executed his commission and, visiting Lipsius next day,
was shown the gold Tiberius as well as Headley's corpse, wrapped
like a mummy and ready for dispatch to “a local museum” (p. 464).
Walters ran away in horror, the coin still in his hand, but
he threw it away during his flight (p. 464).
(This, then, is what Dyson saw on p. 298.) Ever since then, Walters
has been trying to evade capture by Lipsius and his three servants,
two men and a woman. He had a few close calls, most recently when he
visited Russell (Dyson's friend from p. 410) and was seen by
the woman, Miss Leicester; he is sure that he will soon be captured (pp. 465–6).
*
The story ends with a scene that harks back to the prologue.
Dyson and Philipps are taking a stroll, talking about the gold Tiberius
and wondering whether Walters can really have anything to fear.
Curiosity leads them to enter an abandoned, dilapidated old house;
after admiring the gloomy atmosphere for a while, they hear odd
groans and smell a sickly odour. Finally they go upstairs
to investigate, and find the body of the very recently expired
Mr. Walters, who had been tortured horribly and left to die (pp. 471–2).
*
What are we to make of this bizarre, insanely tangled plot?
The title clearly refers to Lipsius's three agents, Helen, Davies and Richmond;
many of the other characters we have encountered in the story are
only their aliases, and their stories we must therefore regard as false:
Mr. Wilkins the private secretary is a fiction, and so is the odd cult or gang
he had seen in the Rocky Mountains;
Miss Lally's brother is a fiction, as is the corpse that had accompanied him;
Miss Leicester's brother is also a fiction, and is quite possibly identical with
the fictional corpse-like companion of Miss Lally's fictional brother (or, alternatively,
both fictional brothers have been issued with monstrous companions in accordance
with the process described by the fictional Dr. Chambers on p. 438);
Mr. Burton is a fiction, as are his efforts to buy a valuable gem by deceit;
and the tale of Professor Gregg's occult researches into the black seal
and the fairy folk of Wales is also a fiction.
(But Gregg himself must be real, as Philipps knew of him and his work;
but I guess that his death was then really an accident, as Philipps thought (pp. 342–3),
and not a case of actually being abducted by the fairies. And speaking of
Mr. Wilkins's story, he did have a newspaper clipping about the lynching (p. 329).
What are we to make of that? Did he go to the trouble to have a fake newspaper
page printed just to make his story more convincing? Or did he find a real
newspaper story about a “gang of desperadoes” getting lynched and
then adapted his fictional account to fit in with it? Either way seems like
more work than it's worth.)
If we dismiss all these things as mere falsehoods put forward by the three
impostors (and are thus free of the obligation to wonder how Jervase could have
turned into a snail, or how Francis could have turned into a putrid mass of cells),
we are then left with the following story: Dr. Lipsius is running
a cult, in the course of whose activities many horrors are perpetrated.
He lured the unfortunate Wilkins to join his organization and used him
for some low-level dirty work, but Wilkins got cold feet and fled, whereupon
Lipsius's three henchmen eventually tracked him down and tortured him to death.
This would make it merely a story of insane, gruesome criminality
by a gang of fanatics with a penchant for adopting false identities and
backing them up by wild tales. But this cannot be the whole story.
For one thing, how was Lipsius able to predict when exactly Headley
would be coming to London and which cab he would take? Indeed Wilkins
himself is wondering the same things on p. 458. This would seem to
suggest that there is something supernatural and diabolical about Lipsius;
he is not merely a human criminal-boss-cum-cult-leader, even if perhaps his
three henchmen are.
*
Besides, I can't help wondering if dismissing the impostors' tales
isn't an inadequate way to deal with them. For one thing, it doesn't
do anything to explain why they felt the need to tell such wild tales
to begin with — how did they think this would help them track down
Wilkins, or get information that would lead them to him? Wouldn't a
more plausible and less insanely paranormal story have served them
better?
Moreover, the wild stories they tell are in very good accordance with
everything we've seen in this entire book. Sure, the tale of Gregg's
research into fairies is completely insane in our real world, but in
the not-quite-real world that Machen presents to us again and again in every
story in the present volume, a tale like Gregg's is utterly unremarkable —
after all, things like that happen all the time in this book.
For all we know, Gregg may well have carried out his occult research
into fairies; perhaps Helen, alias Miss Lally, had even posed as his assistant —
and perhaps made sure that the fairies did get him in the end.
And even if Francis was not her brother, he may very well have been some
unfortunate whom Dr. Lipsius's insane cult had tricked into taking a magical
drug that turned him into a putrid mass.
And even if Walters, the timid
spectacled man, has never been in the Rocky Mountains leading a cultish
gang of desperadoes, with Wilkins alias Richmond as his hapless secretary,
such a gang may yet have existed anyway and possibly had an association
with Dr. Lipsius's group — for all we know, it could have been led
by Richmond himself, under the alias of Jack Smith. After all, he mentions
having “seen rougher things in the States” in the prologue,
when he is talking to his fellow impostors (p. 290).
And even if Burton, the antique dealer, is merely Davies's alter ego,
the story of his trying to buy a gem in Italy by deceitful means
could well be true. It may have been part of a wider programme by the
Lipsius cult of acquiring precious items, a programme that also included
Lipsius's efforts to lay his hands on the gold Tiberius.
Note that Lipsius also mentions “the Hittite seal” (p. 454),
which is perhaps the same we have heard of in the story of Gregg's research.
*
I enjoyed reading this story, but what I liked best were some of
the individual episodes or nested stories — Burton's con in
Italy, Gregg's fairy research in Wales, Francis turning into a putrid mass — these
invariably drew me in and made it hard to stop reading. The story
as a whole, however, has some of the same downsides that I already
complained about earlier in this post about earlier stories in this book.
(Plus it has the additional downside of being longer and more intricate than those
earlier stories, so it's harder to keep track of everything that's going on.)
There is too much vague hinting at horrors that remain conveniently
unexplained, too much random and unrelated stuff that never ends up
cohering into a sensible larger whole — who or what is Lipsius,
what is his group trying to accomplish, what are their connections to
the gang in the Rockies, how are they connected to the subjects of
Gregg's research, why are they trying to get things like the gold Tiberius,
etc. etc.
And most importantly, why do Dyson and Philipps keep bumping
into these people without even trying to? You would be surprised by this
many random meetings of the same handful of people if it occurred in a small village,
let alone in a metropolis the size of London. As I already complained before,
we can suspend our disbelief about fairies and diabolical forces, but
this sort of implausible coincidences really make it hard to swallow the
whole thing. (Perhaps they aren't meant to be coincidences? But in
that case Machen should tell us a bit more about what is causing them
to keep happening and how.)
A comparison with the first edition of The Three Impostors
At the end of The House of Souls there is a note by the
publisher saying that the text of The Three Impostors
“has been subjected to some revision and curtailment”,
so naturally I wondered what exactly was changed. It had previously appeared
as a standalone book in 1895, and fortunately, archive.org
has a scan of it
(though unfortunately it's the American edition rather than the British one).
I went though the whole text with the two versions side by side on the
screen; I'll refer to the two versions as TT and HS in the remarks below.
The only nontrivial omission in HS is the chapter where Burton's friend
shows him his collection of torture devices (TT 137–47). There is one
reference to this section elsewhere: “Burton, who had displayed so
sumptuous a gift in lying” (TT 187); which is accordingly reduced
to just “Burton” in HS 447. I'm not sure why Machen thought
it necessary to remove this chapter when revising the tale; it is true
that nothing is really lost by removing it, but there was no harm in having
it there either.
A line by Richmond in the prologue: “And then the smell— But my
stomach was never very strong.” (TT 9) is omitted in HS 290.
From “nasturtiums, geraniums, and marigolds” (TT 26),
the geraniums are omitted in HS 306. TT 110 has “frankly, Professor Gregg,”,
while HS 385 has just “frankly”. The rhetorical understatement
of “you would have no repulsion in assisting the ends of justice” (TT 124)
is replaced by the more straightforward “you would be glad to assist the ends
of justice” (HS 397).
All other differences between the two versions are only in fairly
trivial matters of punctuation, capitalization, the use of italics,
quotation marks, British vs. American spelling (TT is fairly consistent about
using American spellings, with the curious exception of “farm labourers” on p. 128),
different preferences in the spelling of compounds (when to use a hyphen, when a space and
when to merge the two parts into a single word). Sometimes one edition has a comma
where the other has a semicolon, or one has two sentences where in the
other they are linked with “and”, etc.
I think most (though not all*) of these revisions are improvements;
on the whole, they do make the HS version better than the TT one,
and get rid of some of the latter's eccentricities, such as the spelling
“gayety”, or its bizarre tendency to insert
a space in abbreviated verbs, such as “did n't”, “I 've”, “he 'll”
(fortunately, “don't”, “can't” and “won't” are spelt normally),
which I thought had died out by the early 19th century at the latest.
[*For example: TT 44 has “Desire and lust, for gold on the scales.”
HS 323 omits the comma, which can mislead you into parsing it as
“(desire and (lust for gold)) on the scales” instead of
“(desire and lust) for (gold on the scales)” — but surely the
latter is what makes sense in that context.]
TT has a more detailed table of contents, showing the second-level
nested substories as well, which the table of contents in HS doesn't.
Another notable difference between the two editions is that TT
has a subtitle: The Three Impostors, or The Transmutations.
This struck me as intriguing because, once you see the subtitle and
start paying attention, you do notice the word “transmutation”
being used quite a lot in this story. Phillipps extols the writer's
skill “in taking matter apparently commonplace and transmuting it
by the high alchemy of style into the pure gold of art” (p. 294);
and Dyson similarly refers to the writer's work as “transmuting vision
into reality” (p. 413).
Miss Lally, looking through the window, “saw the whole landscape transmuted
before me” (p. 358). Miss Leicester refers to “the transmutation
of my brother's character” (p. 420; and of course we can't help
noticing that it was to be followed soon afterwards by an even more horrible
transmutation of his body into a putrid mass).
Prof. Gregg “read the key of the awful transmutation of the
hills” (p. 391), “the phrases which tell how man can
be reduced to the slime from which he came, and be forced to put on the
flesh of the reptile and the snake” (p. 392).
And in the decrepit 18th-century house where the story begins and ends,
the gaily dancing cupids on the ceiling “seemed transmuted into other work
[. . .] the dance of the Loves had become a Dance of Death” (p. 470)
thanks to mould and decay.
To these examples of transmutations we could add one or two others
even though the word itself is not used in connection with them. A day after the unfortunate Mr. Headley
has been murdered, his flesh is already “black with the passing of centuries”
(p. 464) — surely a kind of transmutation, as is the three impostors'
constant putting on of fictional personas.
Incidentally, the 1895 edition was part of the Bodley Head's
“Keynotes”
series of contemporary fiction, decorated with designs
by Aubrey Beardsley — one of the classics of
fin-de-siècle British publishing. Machen's The Great God
Pan had also appeared in the same series the year before.
The Red Hand
This is one of the shorter stories in this volume, and much ligher
on the paranormal element than some of the others. It is also refreshingly
free of garish attempts at cheap horror, and almost felt more like a
detective story.
Again we meet Phillipps and Dyson, whom we have already
encountered in one or two earlier pieces in this volume. Phillipps, the
amateur anthropologist, shows his friend some prehistoric fish-hooks,
to which Dyson trollishly suggests that they look recent and that
primitive troglodytes may still survive even in the modern world (p. 476).
But Dyson comes to regret his joke when later that night, while out on a stroll,
they come across the corpse of a prominent physician, Sir Thomas Vivian, who has
evidently been murdered with a prehistoric flint knife (p. 480)!
Another odd detail of the crime scene is a drawing of the
fig sign on a nearby
wall. What is even more bizarre is that this relatively innocuous gesture
is described as “one of the most horrible signs connected with the
theory of the evil eye” (p. 483), “now only used
by Italians” (p. 484), and as “the symbol of a hideous
faith” (p. 497) — all very far-fetched, but perhaps
English readers circa 1900 were sufficiently unfamiliar with the sign
that this could sound plausible enough for a story like this.
Dyson is intrigued by all this and tries to investigate on his own,
especially to decipher the seemingly nonsensical note in a peculiar handwriting
that was found on the body (p. 488). He is helped by one of those improbable
coincidences that appear so often in this book: a drunken woman walks into a bar
and throws something at the barman; it turns out to be a black stone tablet
carved with intricate figures (including a hand showing the fig sign);
Dyson happens to be present, recognizes the tablet as having a connection
with the Vivian case, and buys it (p. 492).
A scrap of a label on the back of the tablet provides some further clues
(p. 496), which Dyson uses to find the murderer (pp. 511–12). This is one
Mr. Selby, who explains everything in the final section of the story. He had
bought the black tablet many years before, but only recently managed to
decipher the symbols on it (p. 504); the drunken woman that Dyson had seen
is Selby's landlady, who stole the tablet planning to sell it and drink away the
money (p. 508). The inscription on the tablet described the location of a
“treasure house of them that dwell below” (p. 507) —
evidently some sort of troglodytes that still survive in a cave in the far west
of England (pp. 513–14).
Selby convinced himself that the treasure is real, and brought a flint knife as proof.
He told Vivian about this, as they had been good friends in their youth, but Vivian
evidently got greedy, tried to stab him, and Selby killed him (with the flint knife)
in self-defense (p. 511).
*
I liked this story quite a bit; we get to see a good deal of Dyson's
detective-style investigation, and much of it relies on cleverness rather than
just on implausible coincidences — although some of these are still present,
and are even elevated by Dyson to a “theory of improbability” (pp. 500,
512), by which he means that even if an event is unlikely to happen within a certain interval of time,
it gets more and more likely the longer this interval is. Mathematically, this is
of course true (under some suitable assumptions), but the probability might still
be low enough that no interval of tolerable length will be sufficient (much like e.g.
you could play the lottery every week for your entire life and would most likely
still never hit the jackpot).
I also liked the fact that vague mysticism about a truer spiritual world behind
our material world, which we saw in some of the earlier stories in this book,
is not present here. The only nod to Machen's obsession with satyrs is a piece of
gold jewellery that Selby has brought from the treasure house and which he describes
as “the Pain of the Goat” (p. 514). And in fact there's one
thing that bothers me here; prehistoric cavemen did not make elaborate ornaments
from gold — metalworking would have been beyond their technological level
(Selby even describes them as “a little higher than the beasts”, p. 514).
So how did they come by this ornament?
Incidentally, this story also contains the passage that was later used by Lovecraft
as the epigraph to his The Horror at Red Hook:
“There are sacraments of evil as well as of good about us, and
we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there
are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight.” (Dyson on p. 489.)
* * *
What to say at the end? This book was an enjoyable read; the stories
in it are connected by a number of recurring elements, so they form something
of a bigger whole, but at the same time they are still entirely standalone
stories that you can read in moderate increments. Machen likes to weave a tangled
web, and it often required a bit of (enjoyable) work to make sense of the plot
in all of its complexity. I also liked the fact that they are taking place
in a world that isn't exactly our real world, but one in which vaguely creepy
mystical forces are present somewhere in the background and occasionally come
through into the tangible world. Another nice thing is that most of the time, the stories
in this book are taking place in London: Machen can put mystical forces at
work in a modern, technologically advanced metropolis, not just deep in the
woods of Wales. And he brings the enthusiasm of a true flaneur to his constantly
recurring descriptions of his characters walking through London — something I couldn't
help admiring, even though I myself don't like cities, especially not large ones.
That being said, there
were also a few recurring things that I disliked in this book: too often
the plot of a story relies too much on implausible coincidences,
the horror relies too much on vagueness and on not explaining things to the reader,
and from time to time it switches too unexpectedly from vague mystical forces
to over-the-top physical horror of the putrid-mass-of-cells type.
And there's only so many times I can read dark hints about satyrs, fairies
and witches deep in the woods of Wales and not get angry that we're still
not told anything definite about them. If he's always going to do no more than
tease us like this, I'd prefer to go back to imagining Wales as a country of
sheep-shagging yokels instead :)
Still, I don't want to complain too much. I don't regret reading this book,
and will hopefully get around to read more by Machen at some point in the future.
Machen on the reactions to The House of Souls
In the 1923 reprint of his next book,
The Hill of Dreams,
Machen included a new preface explaining how he had come to write that novel,
and there he also made a few
very
interesting remarks about the critics' reactions to the stories that
constitute
The House of Souls, especially
The Great God Pan
and
The Three Impostors. Apparently people had complained that
Machen “was merely a second-rate imitator of
Stevenson”,
and he decided to make many changes in his writing: “No more white
powders, no more of the calix principis inferorum, no more hanky-panky
with the Great God Pan, or the Little People or any people of that dubious sort;
and—this was the hard part of it—no more of the measured,
rounded Stevensonian cadence, which I had learned to use with some faculty
and more facility.” (
The Hill of Dreams (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923), pp. vi–vii).
It seems, then, that his next book should be very
different than The House of Souls; but I can't help feeling that he
is throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. Some of the things he
abjures are things that bothered me as well, e.g. the white powder
given to Francis (p. 437) and too many vague references to Pan and
the fairies. But his “rounded Stevensonian cadence” seems to point
at the style of his writing, his sonorous sentences, which I enjoyed very much*
and I think it's very unfortunate if he decided to abandon them in his later
work.
[*And I see I'm not the only one who enjoyed it: John Masefield, in a review
of The House of Souls, wrote that Machen's “style is at all
times exquisite and lovely”, and praised his “beautiful and graceful
English”.]
Well, at least I learnt one other thing from his remarks here:
if his writing was deemed similar to Stevenson's, then I might enjoy Stevenson
for some of the same elements that I enjoyed here in Machen's House of
Souls. I don't think I've read anything by Stevenson so far, except
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; and I mostly thought of him vaguely
as the author of Treasure Island and probably other adventure
stories of that kind, so I wasn't expecting him to have written anything in
the weird or creepy line that we see exemplified here in The House of
Souls. Perhaps, then, it's time to get better acquainted with
Stevenson's writing.
ToRead:
- Arthur Machen: The Hill of Dreams (1907). His next book; a novel rather than a
collection of short stories.
- Nina Antonia: The
Greenwood Faun (2017). I bought this
novel soon after it was published, but since it is apparently influenced by
Machen's The Hill of Dreams, I figured it was better to read some of Machen's works first.
Labels: books, fiction, fin de siècle, horror
