The Brooklyn Rail

No wonder they didn’t like it.

As Welsh writer and novelist Arthur Machen (1863–1947) related long after the fact, when he sat down to write the novel The Hill of Dreams, he had already published two works of fiction that had repelled some critics for their “decadent” and supernatural themes, but had earned him at least a following, including praise from Oscar Wilde. Despite his distance from any best-seller list, Machen might have continued to plough that same darkly fantastic ground, but he was particularly stung by a criticism of his stylistic and thematic debt to Robert Louis Stevenson—the Stevenson of the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde. “I resolved to try to amend my ways,” he writes. “No more hanky-panky with the Great God Pan…” (the title of his most famous supernatural story and one that has influenced writers from H.P. Lovecraft to Stephen King).

Instead, he doubled down on his commitment to all-or-nothing prose and wrote one of the most extreme books about writing and not writing ever done. Worse than bad reviews, he could not find a publisher for The Hill of Dreams, and the work in which he clearly invested the most of himself and his vision of art had to wait a decade for publication. The problem this time, it appears, was twofold. Machen had backed off the occult themes that had “made a mild sort of sensation with the old ladies,” as he mordantly put it. Mores, too, had shifted with the persecution of Wilde for indecency, and the outré was, for the time being, out. The book was caught between a rock and a hard place. Without the prancing satyrs and secret sects of “Pan,” there was only the solitary fictional figure of a very bookish writer and his extravagant inner tribulations to sustain a narrative in which almost nothing happened. And a provincial Welsh writer to boot. No wonder they didn’t like it.

The story portrays the journey from childhood to early maturity and from the Welsh countryside to the dark heart of London taken by one Lucian Taylor, son of a provincial cleric, who seeks to become a writer. Lucian is hypersensitive to the mood and atmosphere of the rural landscape, like a semihysterical William Wordsworth. He is also deeply attuned to what we might call the primordial resonance of the local geography—the remnants, for example, of ancient Roman occupation. His encounters with nature begin on an apocalyptic note and never let up: “There was a glow in the sky as if great furnace doors were opened.” That furnace presages the hell Lucian will enter as he attempts over many years to give written form to his sense that behind the surface of things lies a more profound and enduring reality, whose rules are not comforting to human society.

Lucian’s sensitivity separates him from his schoolmates and impels him (with a little help from his father) toward literature. His world becomes books and wandering the hills, which alienates him even further from the entire social milieu of country life. He gains that worst possible thing, a reputation. In his attitudes toward the home country, Machen is far closer to Caradoc Evans and James Hanley than he is in his Gothicism to Edgar Allan Poe or Joris-Karl. Huysmans. The sting of autobiographical truth runs though the entire narrative, and Machen is casually savage about provincial bigotry and narrowness. In an especially gruesome scene, Lucian watches some local boys hang a puppy. He is equally bitter about publishing. Lucian’s first book is patronizingly dismissed by a London publisher then plagiarized in a novel issued by the same house. The acid tone presages Evelyn Waugh’s by decades.

All this is compounded by sex, or the lack of it. The snobbish local elite being repellent, Lucian focuses on a country girl named Annie, who at least has a genuine affection for him. She becomes more than a muse (and less than a human being) as he transforms her into a repository of goodness and beauty. She is a portal to transcendence, an idol before whom he can abase himself and punish his physical body in ways anyone familiar with the hot house poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne will understand. By the time he gets to London, the die is cast. He lives squalidly, maintains no human contact, wanders the streets, and pursues in his writing a vision of pure language, referring to nothing and impelled only by the beauty of each chosen word. When he comes across a child in his wandering, she runs from him in terror as if from an apparition.

Max Beerbohm, a contemporary of Machen’s, parodied the entire genre of the alienated writer-artist in the brilliant story “Enoch Soames,” whose eponymous hero makes a deal with the devil to learn what his future reputation will be. Given Soames’s fustian adjectives and the hints of occult and cosmic forces in his writings, it’s hard to imagine Beerbohm didn’t have Machen’s Lucian top of mind. But looking beyond the reliance on words such as “curious,” “strange,” and “hideous,” and the atmosphere of gloom and fog, he would surely have recognized Machen’s own streak of self-parody and the genuine pathos of a writing life stunted by self-criticism and unbuoyed by success.

The handsome Mandylion Press edition contains illustrations from the period, including images from Edvard Munch and Gustave Moreau. They add contextual flavor but also have the “curious” effect of anchoring Machen in a bygone period, as if the editor and publisher, the astute and enthusiastic Madeline Porsella, had fallen under the spell of Lucian’s own antiquarianism. Yet anyone who has suffered the pendulum swings of mood, the transcendent exhilaration and lacerating self-doubt, and above all, the profound sense of isolation that can seem tragically baked into a writing life will find in Machen’s Lucian a companion to commiserate with, admonish for his indulgences, and ultimately mourn.