Ghostland

by Edward Parnell

  The Machens were married for twelve years, for half of which Amy was engaged in a struggle against an unspecified form of cancer. This trying time happened to be a period of surprising creativity for Arthur, during which he wrote many of his best works of fiction. Yet mentions of Amy in his autobiographies, written a quarter of a century later, are notable by their absence. Just a single sentence in the second volume, Things Near and Far, alludes to the enormous sense of loss and grief that overwhelmed him following her death in 1899: ‘Then a great sorrow which had long been threatened fell upon me: I was once more alone.’

  In his own memoir, Jerome K. Jerome (who two years after penning his most famous book wrote Told After Supper, a collection of ghost stories that fuse humour and the supernatural) recalled visiting the couple at their Gray’s Inn house shortly before Amy’s death:

  The windows looked out onto the great garden, and the rooks were cawing in the elms. She was dying, and Machen, with two cats under his arm, was moving softly about, waiting on her. We did not talk much. I stayed there until the sunset filled the room with a strange purple light.

  The Hill of Dreams was written between the autumn of 1895 and the spring of 1897, although it remained unpublished for a decade; three years before it came out in book form it was serialised in Horlick’s Magazine and Home Journal for Australia, India and the Colonies, issued by the manufacturer of the famous malted hot drink.¶ Many critics regard the novel as Machen’s finest literary achievement, a view Arthur himself shared. The Anglo-Irish fantasy author Lord Dunsany, who provided an introduction to a later reissue, commented how ‘clearly and beautifully’ Machen transferred his vision to paper. I too can appreciate its aesthetic, visionary qualities, though I will admit finding The Hill of Dreams a more difficult work to enjoy than some of his others. Perhaps its subject matter – its depiction of isolation and of artistic rejection – is too close to the bone? I suspect it’s one of those books that reveals more of itself on re-reading – and on each subsequent revisit the quiet power of its cryptic pages have resonated more strongly with me. At its heart is the struggle of its central character Lucian Taylor’s quest to perfect his art – and his struggle against crippling depression and self-doubt – swapping his native Caermaen (a barely disguised Caerleon) and the ‘the faery dome of Twyn Barlwm’ for the loneliness and brooding menace of London and the life of a writer.

  It’s a journey that mirrors Machen’s own, though Machen avoided the doomed, opiated Dorian Gray-esque demise of his novel’s alter ego and managed to emerge from the despair of Amy’s death; for most of the first decade of the new century he successfully took up the less solitary career of acting (in a touring repertory theatre company), marrying his second wife, Purefoy, in 1903. The pair remained happily together for the rest of their lives, eighty-four-year-old Arthur following his beloved into the hereafter nine months after her death, in December 1947. Their shared headstone in the graveyard of St Mary’s churchyard, Amersham, contains a cross bearing the Latin inscription OMNIA EXEUNT IN MYSTERIUM. Everything ends in mystery.

  The first two words, at least, we know hold true.

  After university I too moved to London for my own adventure, half-fancying myself as a writer, though doing little to pursue it other than enrolling on an evening scriptwriting course in Ealing, just up the road from the studios where two of my favourite films of the supernatural, The Halfway House and Dead of Night, were made. Indeed, Dead of Night, a portmanteau movie from 1945, features a groundbreaking (and still influential) framing device linking together its disparate strands that wouldn’t be amiss in one of Machen’s early books. The most remarkable episode stars Michael Redgrave in a performance which captures a similar fragility and nervousness to that of his lighthouse keeper in Thunder Rock. Here he plays a disturbed ventriloquist increasingly under the spell of the wooden half of his act. ‘What sort of dummy do you think I am? You shot him, didn’t you?’ taunts the terrifying, undersize figure of Hugo in the final scene of the segment.**

  I also find the more low-key Christmas-party storyline in which a teenage Sally Ann Howes ends up consoling the ghost of a young boy particularly affecting, with its dreamlike tone and setting reminiscent of the children’s fancy-dress games from the aborted wedding festivities of Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier’s 1913 masterpiece. The French author wrote just that one solitary, magical novel – an exploration of how our adolescent dreams can never live up to their unrealistic possibilities – before, like William Hope Hodgson and countless others, his own youthful promise was extinguished in the all-consuming conflict of the Great War.

  Hulton Archive/Stringer via Getty Images; Richard Dadd photographed in the act of painting Contradiction: Oberon and Titania, c. 1856 (Wikimedia Commons)

  I was twenty-two when I came to the capital, a decade fresher than Machen when he began The Hill of Dreams. I spent those two years in west London localities frequented more than a century before – though I did not know it at the time – by the young Arthur, and not far from Chiswick where the nineteen-year-old Henri Alban Fournier (the French novelist’s real name) lived during the summer of 1905, working in the unlikely setting of a large nearby factory that manufactured wallpaper. My first shared flat was located in a former council house on the seedier fringes of Ladbroke Grove, a short walk from the Clarendon Road attic that Machen moved to in 1883 and close to the famous market which forms the backdrop for Muriel Spark’s terrific narrator-reversing 1958 ghost story ‘The Portobello Road’.

  Machen’s predilection for nocturnal rambles intensified after his arrival in the city – ‘the habits of the country, unlike those of London, generally fail to give reason or excuse for night wanderings’ – an experience vividly captured in The Hill of Dreams and in his oddly compelling 1904 novella of suburban domesticity, ennui and transcendence, A Fragment of Life. Somewhat eerily, the name of the main character of the story, Edward Darnell, is only one letter different to my own. I too had taken solace in late-night walks through the more mundane surroundings of the Fenland town in which I grew up, as I tried to make some sense of what was happening around me; Lincolnshire, though, lacked the magic of the hills of Gwent, and shared nothing of the atmosphere of the capital that so captivated my near-namesake:

  London seemed a city of 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.

  On a late winter’s evening, aged seventeen, when I could no longer stand the suffocating sorrow of our family house, I went on one of my circuits of the town, orange-washed under sodium streetlights. I passed through the stillness of the centre – it must have been the middle of the week as the place appeared so empty it might as well have been deserted – along the artificial straightness of the river and over the disused railway bridge where, as a young boy, trains had still crossed before the line was closed during the early 1980s. I can recall the feeling of lying in bed searching for sleep, listening for the far-off sound of the train’s horn while I waited for my father’s footsteps to fall on the drive. Sometimes, when he was back very late from whatever work meeting or committee he’d been away at, snatches of muffled speech would float up from the street below my room. I loved hearing these odd splinters of conversation in the darkness, usually men walking home from the pub; there was something reassuring about their banality, something that reminded me that the world was as it should be.

  My route pressed on past countless diminutive terraces and a 1960s housing estate where the identikit streets were named after royal palaces. Somewhere near the church, in which a few years before I’d wasted far too many Sundays as a choirboy, there was an old, white-haired woman standing in front of her house, staring across at me through the darkness. She was only there for a few seconds before she slipped back inside, but she had an unnaturally pale, lime-lit look, which I found unnerving.

  I half-wonder now whe
ther I imagined her. Whether she had even been there at all.

  I love Machen’s autobiographical writing, with its meanderings around the capital, but it’s his earlier supernatural work to which I was first drawn, particularly that which relates to the ‘Little People’ who dwell beneath the hills of our wild, ancient places. To me, the most memorable of these dark tales is ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’. Often printed as a self-contained story it originally formed part of The Three Imposters, a collection of linked narratives that takes its title from an apocryphal heretical work (De Tribus Impostoribus) mentioned by Sir Thomas Browne – a favourite of Machen, and later of W. G. Sebald – in his Religio Medici of 1642. The structure of Machen’s book was influenced by Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights, with one of its stories, ‘The Novel of the White Powder’, containing a sickening, chemically induced bodily transformation reminiscent of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

  I prefer ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’ as a standalone story, which is how I first encountered it. Despite the undoubted manic energy of The Three Imposters, Machen ends up undermining the power and authenticity of its various plots through the trickery of the device he employs to bring them together. Yet even here, as a separate work, ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’ utilises several stories-within-a-story as a way of conferring validity upon its hyperreal goings-on. After the opening framing section showing the interchange between Miss Lally (stripped here, in the standalone version, of the duplicity she is revealed to possess in The Three Imposters) and the amateur detective Phillips, the distressed young woman recounts her version of events before reading out an expositional account left by the now-vanished William Gregg.

  A chance meeting with Gregg, a noted professor of ethnology, on a London street results in Miss Lally becoming the governess of his children and his unofficial secretary. She accompanies the professor on a trip to ‘a country house in the west of England, not far from Caermaen, a quiet little town, once a city, and the head-quarters of a Roman legion’.†† There, having completed his monumental ethnology textbook, he aims to solve a mystery connected to the small black, rune-inscribed stone in his possession.

  I wasn’t familiar with any of Machen’s work until a few years ago. My introduction came with ‘The Shining Pyramid’, another short story in which the existence of a race of hideous fairy folk sequestered beneath our hills is uncovered by a pair of amateur gentlemen detectives.‡‡ Its climactic scene, in which the two men witness a writhing mass of hidden beings upon an ancient summit, is mirrored in a tale by L. T. C. Rolt – Robert Aickman’s co-founder of the Inland Waterways Association – set in the Welsh borderlands. Rolt’s atmospheric ‘Cwm Garon’, which takes place north of Abergavenny in the Black Mountains, sings from the same unholy hymn sheet as Machen’s dark tales with its midnight rites populated by squat, guttural-sounding figures that the protagonist initially confuses with children: ‘Their bodies, however, belied this impression, as did their faces, for their countenances were such that Carfax was grateful for the smoke which prevented him from seeing them clearly.’

  I was not alone in coming late to Machen. His literary star, which had risen fleetingly in the 1890s, was already waning once the twentieth century got under way. Ironically, his re-emergence into the popular consciousness was the result of a rather slight story – Machen thought it ‘an indifferent piece of work’ – composed while a journalist on the Evening News. ‘The Bowmen’ first appeared in the London newspaper at the end of September 1914 and is Machen’s own piece of unintentional Great War myth-making, written in response to the British army’s retreat from Mons at the beginning of the war. In ‘The Bowmen’, Saint George and a division of shining Agincourt archers materialise just in time to beat back the German onslaught; later Machen was to say he was inspired by Kipling’s Afghanistan-set ‘The Lost Legion’, a tale with a similar premise.

  For a period after ‘The Bowmen’ was printed (it was subsequently published in a high-selling standalone edition), events took on a life of their own, and it came to be widely believed that supernatural forces really had come to the aid of the embattled Tommies in the trenches, despite Machen’s insistence there was no factual basis behind what he’d written. This didn’t seem to matter though, and in the fake news of the time the Agincourt archers morphed into a more divine form of assistance, the so-called ‘Angel of Mons’ – with numerous people reporting that their soldier sons, brothers and uncles had been witness to the Heaven-sent help. Unfortunately Machen, who throughout much of his life walked a precarious financial tightrope, did not fully benefit from the story’s popularity, as the copyright was held by the paper.

  Machen’s work draws on Celtic and northern European folklore – of changelings and of hidden fairies, of the Welsh ‘Tylwyth Teg’. Less mystically, in Dreads and Drolls, a 1926 anthology of his writing that deals with historical mysteries, Machen entertains the euhemeristic view that his little people of the Welsh hills are subterranean-dwelling ‘small, dark aborigines who hid from the invading Celt somewhere about 1500–1000 B.C.’ This chimes with the major theme of Kazuo Ishiguro’s surprising fantasy novel The Buried Giant. Set in the Dark Ages and taking place after the death of King Arthur, the book explores how we are capable of jointly forgetting – or burying – unwholesome truths about our shared past: in this case the earlier ethnic cleansing of Britons by the Anglo-Saxons that has been obscured behind a fog of enchantment emanating from the breath of a dragon. One of its most powerful scenes could be straight out of Machen’s fairy stories, when a swarming mass of malevolent pixies emerges from a river to take Beatrice, the wife of the novel’s central character Axl: ‘He knew more and more creatures were rising from the water – how many might have boarded now? Thirty? Sixty? – and their collective voices seemed to him to resemble the sound of children playing in the distance.’

  In ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’ we see something of the horror of these hidden creatures that have always shadowed us in the ‘not too keen-witted’ boy Cradock – a boy born of a human mother and fairy father, like another supernaturally conceived abomination Machen gave us in The Great God Pan (or like the satanic offspring of Rosemary’s Baby). Miss Lally is shocked one afternoon to watch the boy having an apparent fit and to hear him talking in awful, guttural, half-sibilant whisper, a language the local vicar says is most definitely not Welsh: ‘I should say it must be that of the fairies – the Tylwydd Têg, as we call them.’§§

  Machen’s ‘Little People’ are responsible not just for scaring children, but for their disappearance: the unfortunate Annie Trevor in ‘The Shining Pyramid’ who vanishes on a walk over the hills to visit a relative, or the ‘servant-girl at a farmhouse’ who is lost without trace in ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’. Machen is working, albeit more darkly, with the same strand of folklore that a few years earlier fuelled the Irish poet W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Stolen Child’, written in 1886, when Yeats was twenty-one. The two men were acquainted with one another, as both were concurrent members of the Golden Dawn in London – Machen for a short, grief-stricken spell after the death of Amy in 1899. At least, however, in Yeats’s poem the hope remains that the beguiled boy might have a better faery future in store – in a place perhaps preferable to that of the tumultuous fin-de-siècle human world – which we can assume is not the case for the missing girls in Machen’s stories.

  Come away, O human child!

  To the waters and the wild

  With a faery, hand in hand,

  For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

  In appearance, Machen’s fairies, too, are of an altogether darker persuasion than the classical, angelic winged figures that dominated the Victorian fairy-painting craze which flourished between 1840 and 1870. The ‘little stunted creatures with old men’s faces, with bloated faces, with little sunken eyes’ described in Machen’s later story ‘Out of the Earth’ do, however, bear a resemblance to some of the fig
ures depicted in Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke. The schizophrenic artist’s tour de force was undertaken over a decade while he was incarcerated in Britain’s most notorious asylum for the insane; he was to languish in Bedlam for the rest of his life after stabbing and murdering his father, who he thought had been transformed into a demon.

  The paintings of the less well known John Anster Fitzgerald, a frequent exhibitor at the Royal Academy from 1845 to the first years of the dawning century, occasionally offer an even more disturbing vision of the ‘fair folk’, who appear as grotesque spirits and demonic hobgoblins conjured straight out of a laudanum-induced nightmare, or borrowed from the oils of Bosch.

  Both artists’ work would seem a fitting match for the ‘loathsome forms’ that inhabit Machen’s dark fairyland.

  At the conclusion of ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’, Professor Gregg goes up from his own rented house on the borderland into the ‘Grey Hills’ – which appear to be a gateway into a more foreboding netherworld – to ‘meet the “Little People” face to face’. And though there is no geographic range of peaks in Machen’s home country that shares the name, just seven miles to the east of Llanddewi’s rectory, looming above an ancient wood, stands Mynydd Llwyd – the Grey Hill. Machen’s friend Fred Hando’s 1944 guide The Pleasant Land of Gwent – in which Machen was to pen his last published piece, the book’s brief but lyrical introduction – refers to the word llwyd (grey) as being ‘associated here, in other parts of Wales, and in Brittany with elves, with ghosts, with death itself.’

  Heading towards the Grey Hill’s invisible peak I weave around a narrow road that rises northwards from the plain of the coast. Halfway up I pass an emptied reservoir, its gothic tower emerging forlornly from the muddy dregs of a languishing puddle. The waters were drained in 2017 so that maintenance work could be carried out on the late-Victorian structure; during the process the body of a local woman murdered twenty years previously by her husband was found.