The White People and Other Weird Stories (2 page)

Freudian interpretations of these fears, focused on images of fertility, femininity, and the earth, seem to me to miss the point and can only be yielded as reductive arguments. Philosophers, writers, and artists are rarely emotionally successful human beings. A more interesting connection springs from the fact that fear can be recognized as an eminently spiritual sensation. Here is the darker side of faith, if you will, for what is fate but the belief in that which cannot be proven or rationalized?

Machen knew that to accept our cosmic insignificance is to achieve a spiritual perspective and ultimately realize that, yes, all is permitted. And that no matter how wicked or how perverse we can be, somewhere in a long forgotten realm a mad God awaits, leering—and ready to embrace us all.

 

GUILLERMO DEL TORO

Arthur Machen's own life is perhaps his greatest creation; for it is exactly the life we might expect a poet and a visionary to have lived. Born in 1863 in the village of Caerleon-on-Usk in Wales (the site, two millennia earlier, of the Roman town of Isca Silurum and the base of the Second Augustan Legion), Machen was fascinated since youth by the Roman antiquities in his region as well as the rural Welsh countryside. He attended Hereford Cathedral School, but in 1880 he failed an examination for the Royal College of Surgeons; he felt he had no option but to go to London to look for work, where he hoped that his ardent enthusiasm for books might land him some literary work.

But only poverty and loneliness were his portion. Dragging out a meager existence as a translator (his translation of the
Heptameron
of Marguerite de Navarre [1886] long remained standard, as did his later translation of Casanova's memoirs), tutor, and cataloger, he knew at first hand the spiritual isolation that his alter ego, Lucian Taylor, would depict so poignantly in
The Hill of Dreams
(1907). In his first autobiography,
Far Off Things
(1922), he speaks of this period with a wistfulness that scarcely conceals his anguish. Consider the description of his attic garret on Clarendon Road:

Although Machen published a few works during this period—
The Anatomy of Tobacco
(1884), an owlishly learned disquisition on various types of tobacco, and the picaresque novel
The Chronicle of Clemendy
(1886)—they were commercially unsuccessful and today are not highly regarded.

But the death of Machen's father in 1887 suddenly gave him, for the next fourteen years, the economic independence he required to write whatever he chose, without thought of markets or sales. And yet, one of his first works of fiction of this period—“The Great God Pan” (1890)—created a sensation, especially when it appeared in book form in 1894. It shocked the moral guardians of an enfeebled Victorian culture as the diseased outpourings of a decadent mind; but the reviewers who condemned it as sexually offensive could not know that Machen shared the very inhibitions he seemed to be defying. This tale—as well as the infinitely superior “The White People” (1899)—succeeds largely because Machen himself, as a rigidly orthodox Anglo-Catholic, crystallized his horror of aberrant sexuality by giving it a supernatural dimension.

That Machen chose to work in the literature of the supernatural—one branch of what has come to be called weird fiction, which also encompasses fantasy and psychological suspense—is of interest in itself. Canonically, the supernatural in literature commenced with Horace Walpole's short novel
The Castle of Otranto
(1764), which ultimately ushered in the age of the Gothic novel, whose most notable exponents were Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, and Charles Robert Maturin. It is not paradoxical that this literature emerged in a century typified by the rationalism of Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, for the supernatural can only manifest itself in literature when a relatively stable and coherent idea of the natural has been arrived at. In this sense, the supernatural must keep pace with science: Although it draws upon myth and folklore in its exhibition of ghosts, vampires, werewolves, haunted houses, and other such elements, it can only do so at a time when these elements are generally believed to defy what are commonly understood to be the laws of nature; for only in this manner can they constitute the imaginative liberation that many writers and readers seek. At the same time, the best weird writers understood that supernatural motifs could serve as metaphors for the expression of truths about the human condition (the vampire as social outsider, for example) in a more vivid and pungent manner than in conventional mimetic realism.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was a seminal figure in supernatural literature. He recognized that the novel was a poor vehicle for the conveyance of such a fleeting emotion as terror, and so he restricted the weird to the intensity of the short story; he also had a keen understanding of the psychology of fear, so that he was able to meld supernatural and psychological horror in a particularly potent manner. Subsequent to Poe, the most viable weird literature was embodied in short stories, and Machen, whose admiration of Poe was high, followed him in this regard.

The later nineteenth century was a tremendously fertile period for weird writing, especially in England: Such writers as Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (“Green Tea,” “Carmilla”), Nathaniel Hawthorne (“Rappaccini's Daughter”), Ambrose Bierce (“The Death of Halpin Frayser”), Rudyard Kipling (“The Mark of the Beast”), Robert Louis Stevenson (
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
), Bram Stoker (
Dracula
), and a legion of ghost story writers made the supernatural a highly visible component of the literature of the period. Indeed, Machen was a harbinger of a kind of golden age of weird writing that encompassed such figures as Lord Dunsany (1878–1957), Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), M. R. James (1862–1936), Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), and, a little later, H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). Dunsany was predominantly a writer of fantasy—a literary mode where the author invents an entire world or cosmos out of his or her imagination, a mode whose best-known example today is J. R. R. Tolkien's
Lord of the Rings
trilogy (1954–55)—but the others worked chiefly in the supernatural. Machen, therefore, was working in a recognized literary genre when he produced his earliest tales.

In “The Great God Pan” we are asked to believe that a scientific experiment performed upon a young woman of seventeen results in her “seeing” the Great God Pan; she instantly loses her mind and becomes an idiot. Some years thereafter a strange woman named Helen Vaughan plagues London society, causing a rash of suicides and destroying the lives of several prominent men about town. In the end we learn that Helen is in fact the daughter of the young woman, born nine months after the fateful experiment.

Another scientific experiment is at the focus of “The Inmost Light,” written in 1892 and first published in 1894. Here we find that a doctor has persuaded his own wife to allow him to extract her soul and place it in a gem—the “inmost light” in that gem
is
her soul. The result is that the woman continues to live, but presents—like Helen Vaughan—a visage of mingled beauty and horror. One man who sees her in a window thinks of her as a “satyr.” To one of Machen's conventional religiosity, a person without a (Christian) soul can only appear as a figure of pagan antiquity.

“The Shining Pyramid” (1895), although not included here, is worth discussing as one of Machen's first expositions of what might be called his “Little People mythology.” Although it features a spectacularly potent scene in which the stunted, primitive denizens of Britain—now dwelling in caves, having been driven out by successive waves of fully human peoples—perform a hideous ritual around a pyramid of fire, “The Shining Pyramid” is perhaps too much of a detective story to be fully effective as a weird tale. But what might be called the “Little People mythology” (perhaps most exhaustively treated in “Novel of the Black Seal”) is of some interest in itself. Machen makes it clear that he himself believed in the former existence of just such a race of creatures as he depicts in these stories:

This was written more than two decades before the publication of Margaret A. Murray's
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe
(1921), which gave a momentary stamp of approval to the thesis. But Machen knew that the really adventuresome aspect of his theory—or, rather, the radical extension of it that he made for fictional purposes—was that “the people still lived in hidden caverns in wild and lonely lands,” something he maintained was “wildly improbable.”
³

But behind all this speculative anthropology is the symbolism of the Little People. They are horrible and loathsome, to be sure, but they have at least one advantage over modern human beings: They have retained that primal sacrament (perverted, of course, by bestiality and violence) that links them with the Beyond. There is something of awe mingled with the horror experienced by the narrators when they witness the “pyramid of fire” summoned by the Little People in “The Shining Pyramid,” and this signals the truth uttered by the protagonist of “The White People”: “Sorcery and sanctity . . . these are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life.”

Probably Machen's most sustained weird work is
The Three Impostors,
published in 1895. Also poorly received, it was criticized for being excessively imitative of Robert Louis Stevenson. It is commonly believed that the model for the novel—both in its episodic structure and in its somewhat flippant and jaunty style—is Stevenson's
New Arabian Nights
(1882); but the true model is that novel's sequel,
The Dynamiter
(1885), written by Stevenson in conjunction with his wife, Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson. Machen ultimately acknowledged this criticism, and for the next two years he worked with difficulty, even agony, to hammer out his own style; the result is that luminous novel of aesthetic sincerity,
The Hill of Dreams.

What is
The Three Impostors
? On the surface, it appears to be a random collection of episodes strung together with the flimsiest kind of narrative thread. One episode—“Novel of the Iron Maid”—had in fact been written and published in 1890, and for copyright reasons it and its introductory segment (“The Decorative Imagination”) do not appear in many American editions of the novel. Other episodes—notably the celebrated “Novel of the Black Seal” and “Novel of the White Powder”—have been abstracted from the narrative fabric and reprinted as self-standing stories. This occurred on several occasions during Machen's lifetime, and he appears to have registered no great complaint; but Machen was scarcely in a position to do so, as the period between 1901 and 1931 (when he received a Civil List pension of £100 a year) was of considerable poverty for him, and he could ill afford to pass up any revenue his writings yielded.

Both the title and the subtitle of
The Three Impostors
(the latter frequently omitted from reprints) may provide the clue to the interpretation of the novel. Who are the “three impostors” of the title? Who can they be but the two men and a woman we encounter in the prologue, who have at last captured and perhaps killed the “young man with spectacles” they have evidently been pursuing? For it is they who, under a series of guises, tell the various “novels” (from the French
nouvelle,
or tale, especially one of a romantic or fantastic character) scattered throughout the work. Their sole audience is a pair of friends, Mr. Dyson and Charles Phillipps, who wage an ongoing philosophical battle on the nature of reality and the nature of fiction, and it becomes gradually clear that the tales spun by the “three impostors” may be entirely fictitious, being instead somewhat laborious contrivances meant to dupe Dyson and Phillipps into leading them to the spectacled young man.

Toward the end it begins to dawn upon the two gentlemen that the stories they are hearing are perhaps not entirely reliable; Dyson finally resolves to “abjure all Milesian and Arabian methods of entertainment”—a reference to the Milesian tale (the Greek version of the tall tale) and, of course, to the
Arabian Nights.
This connects with a theme that runs throughout
The Three Impostors
and Machen's work as a whole—the fantastic nature of the metropolis of London. “A Fragment of Life” (1904), a pensive novella on the borderline of the weird, conveys this conception poignantly: “London seemed a city of the Arabian Nights, and its labyrinths of streets an enchanted maze; its long avenues of lighted lamps were as starry systems, and its immensity became for him an image of the endless universe.”