ARTHUR MACHEN’S
‘THE HOUSE OF SOULS’

 

One of my longest-held ambitions—not a particularly lofty one, but the sort that all too easily gets put off, decade after decade, until one suddenly discovers it’s too late—is to spend a year or so motoring around the British Isles, from Penzance to John o’ Groats, stopping wherever I please. The back seat of my car would of course be filled with books: with the dozens of travel guides, highway atlases, and gazetteers of haunted houses, prehistoric sites, battlefields, and castles that I’ve been collecting all my life.

But in addition to the carload of reference works, I’d want to take three volumes of memoirs and a book of supernatural tales. The memoirs are those of Arthur Machen and, together, they constitute a rambling autobiography: Far Off Things, Things Near and Far, and The London Adventure. The story book is Machen’s The House of Souls.

Machen (rhymes with “blacken”) was a Welsh clergyman’s son who, as a young man, left the countryside behind and moved to London in the hope of becoming a writer, nearly starving in the attempt; later he toured with a company of Shakespearean actors, but for most of his eighty-four years he made his living as a journalist. He was born in Caerleon-on-Usk on March 3, 1863, and died in Amersham, near London, on December 15, 1947. I was privileged to share the earth with him for precisely five months.

Machen is, to my mind, fantasy’s preeminent stylist. What makes his work so special is the rhythmic quality of his prose: one hears in it the short, seductive cadences of a fairy tale or the Bible. With the eye of a visionary and a language that is, for all its simplicity, at times truly incantatory, he reveals the wonder—and frequently the terror—that lies hidden behind everyday scenes. No other writer’s work so perfectly blends the two elements of Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s phrase “the ecstasy and the dread.” (Indeed, Machen’s longest foray into literary criticism, Hieroglyphics, sees the key attribute of great literature as “the master word—Ecstasy.”) Jack Sullivan has noted that in Machen’s best tales “beauty and horror ring out at exactly the same moment,” and praises Machen for “his ability to make landscapes come alive with singing prose.” Philip Van Doren Stern saw Machen’s imagery as “rich with the glowing color that is to be found in medieval church glass.” No one is better at evoking the enchantment of the Welsh hills, or the sinister allure of dark woods; no one makes London a more terrifying or magical place, a latter-day Baghdad filled with exotic dangers and infinite possibilities. Wherever he looked, he saw a world filled with mystery. Every word he wrote, from youth to old age, reflects his lifelong preoccupation with “the secret of things; the real truth that is everywhere hidden under outward appearances.”

But perhaps this “secret of things” is too shocking for the human mind to accept. That, at least, is the premise of The House of Souls’ best-known story, “The Great God Pan,” in which a ruthless scientist seeks to rend the “veil” of everyday reality. (“I tell you that all these things—yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet—I say that all these are but dreams and shadows: the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes.”) In a laboratory set amid “the lonely hills,” he performs a delicate operation on the brain of a young girl, reawakening atavistic powers and enabling her to glimpse that real world—a process he calls “seeing the god Pan.” The result is not enlightenment but horror: the child goes mad from what she’s encountered and dies “a hopeless idiot,” but not before giving birth to a daughter, a malign being who, decades later, in the form of a seductive woman, causes an epidemic of sin and suicide in Victorian London.

Today, for all its power, the tale’s decadent frissons may seem rather dated, but at the time, “Pan” outraged the more prudish English critics. Machen, who took a perverse pleasure in his bad reviews (he even collected them all in a book, Precious Balms), relished “the remark of a literary agent whom I met one day in Fleet Street. He looked at me impressively, morally, disapprovingly, and said: ‘Do you know, I was having tea with some ladies at Hampstead the other day, and their opinion seemed to be that … “The Great God Pan” should never have been written.’ ”

Two other stories in the book, “Novel of the Black Seal” (part of a longer work, The Three Impostors) and “The Red Hand,” can still provoke a shudder, even today. They theorize—as do later Machen tales—that the so-called “Little People” of British legend, the fairy folk, were in fact the land’s original inhabitants, a dark, squat, malevolent pre-Celtic race now driven underground by encroaching civilization, yet living on in caves beneath the “barren and savage hills” and still practicing their unsavory rites, occasionally sacrificing a young woman or some other luckless wanderer they can catch alone outdoors at night. Writers such as John Buchan have also made use of this theme, but none so chillingly.

The book’s most remarkable story is “The White People.” (It was the direct inspiration, incidentally, for my own novel The Ceremonies, which quotes from it at length.) Most of it purports to be the notebook of a young girl who, introduced by her nurse to strange old rhymes and rituals, has a series of nearly indescribable mystical visions involving supernatural presences in the woods. We learn, at the end, that she has killed herself. The girl’s stream-of-consciousness style, at once hallucinatory and naive, lends a spellbinding immediacy to the narrative, and for all its confusion and repetitiveness, it remains the purest and most powerful expression of what Jack Sullivan has called the “transcendental” or “visionary” supernatural tradition. Most other tales of this sort, such as Algernon Blackwood’s “The Wendigo,” E. F. Benson’s “The Man Who Went Too Far,” and Machen’s own “Black Seal” and “Pan,” merely describe encounters with dark primeval forces inimical to man; “The White People” seems an actual product of such an encounter, an authentic pagan artifact, as different from the rest as the art of Richard Dadd is different from the art of Richard Doyle. Lovecraft, who regarded Machen as “a Titan—perhaps the greatest living author” of weird fiction, ranked “The White People” beside Blackwood’s “The Willows” as one of the best horror tales ever written. Machen, who often denigrated his own efforts, and who once wrote “I dreamed in fire, but I worked in clay,” himself termed the tale merely “a fragment” of the one he’d intended to write, “a single stone instead of a whole house,” but acknowledged that “it contains some of the most curious work that I have ever done, or ever will do. It goes, if I may say so, into very strange psychological regions.” E. F. Bleiler’s assessment strikes me as more accurate: “This document is probably the finest single supernatural story of the century, perhaps in the literature.”