by Roger Dobson
Miss Lally certainly has a sense of humour. She even refers to ‘our church’—the baggage!—that of All Saints, Kemeys Inferior,6 high above the Usk. Helen a churchgoer: surely her and Machen’s little joke.
One crucial point to consider in the Impostors is whether the interpolated stories are entirely fictional. The impostors have documentary evidence to support their tall tales. Wilkins has a newspaper cutting about the Colorado lynchings; Miss Lally explains that she carries Gregg’s statement with her always; and Miss Leicester produces Dr Chambers’s conclusions on the astounding properties of the White Powder, which Dyson sees, even if he does not read the report. This evidence lends a pleasing ambiguity to the stories, adding a level of meaning that is absent from The Dynamiter. Machen does not press the case for the validity of these documents and rather glosses over their significance. Are we to assume that they have been manufactured by the impostors? If not, their existence hints that some elements of the impostors’ tall tales may be authentic. One can posit an alternative version of the book in which the hoaxes contain certain strands of truth. Perhaps Frank Burton thrusts Mathias into the arms of the Iron Maid in order to secure the device for Lipsius’s museum. M.R. James stated with regard to the ghostly tale: ‘It is not amiss sometimes to leave a loophole for a natural explanation; but, I would say, let the loophole be so narrow as not to be quite practicable.’ Machen does the reverse: he makes the loophole the supernatural, rather than the rational. The stories mirror the art of the tale-weaver. Clara and Helen’s tales differ from conventional fiction only in the fact that it is admitted that they are inventions.
It would be instructive to know precisely when Machen read The Dynamiter: in spring 1885, when it was published, or afterwards? There seems a precedent for the ironic presentation of the impostors’ tales in The Chronicle of Clemendy (1888). Clemendy was a burlesque of the romantic medieval tales Machen loved. The Impostors can be seen as a burlesque of the wonder tale. Rabelais mixed humour and satire, giving his name to a type of grotesque bawdiness blended with fantastic romance and Machen followed suit, eliminating the grossness so as not to offend Victorian sensibilities. Clemendy’s naughtiness is so innocuous that certain readers might feel Machen is overly coy.
Several stories in the book are revealed to have protean aspects. After Sir Jenkin Thomas, the mechanical knight who strikes the hours with his axe in the monastic church of Abergavenny, disturbs the monks, lovers and townsfolk by descending from his tower, the knight is tried for his crimes, one of which is being ‘in two places at the same time; the which was a pernicious, hurtful and heretical practice, of itself very worthy of the stake’—a clue to what follows. The knight is consigned to the flames, but the twist is that a company of merry wags have conspired to impersonate Sir Jenkin. Griffith the Delver is mazed by the talk of two monks who, compiling a history, heap up a vast imaginary treasure of gold and jewels in St Julian’s Wood and under the Round Table—the amphitheatre—at Caerleon. Though paradoxically Machen was a champion of tradition, this is his satire on how legend and lies become history. The adventures of Sir Nicholas Kemeys and Sir Dru de Braose are revealed to be pure make-believe: the knights have been revelling, feasting and making love in Abergavenny when they were supposedly wandering overseas. The story of the miraculous Rose of Cathay, recounted by the mysterious stranger at Penhow Castle, may be intended to be a complete fable, though the matter is left ambiguous. The tale’s ‘hero’, Rupert de Launay, uses it to seduce Sir Roger’s wife, Eva, and the two elope. The tale-teller is urged to drown the couple when the story is recounted in future to serve a moral warning. He pledges to ‘make those poor sinners die most miserably and wretchedly; or better still, Eva shall live and turn into a shrew, and so make Rupert’s days a burthen unto him’. Sir Philip Meyrick’s battle with the evil magician Maurice Torlesse, who conjures up storms to rage over Gwent, is turned on its head at the end by an alternative version in which Sir Philip, conspiring with Edith Torlesse, murders her father, described as ‘an honest grave gentleman’.
Here is Machen manipulating fiction and rewriting tales through his narrators. He subverts romance and demythologises his own mysteries. If the reader does not care for one version of a tale, why here is Mr Machen, that versatile young master of romance, both grave and satirical, to refashion it to your taste. Machen takes the uncharacteristic role of rationalist in providing Jamesian loopholes, which may be viewed as nineteenth-century rationalisations of medieval legends. This adds a further layer to his romantic fables, allowing the reader to decide which interpretation to accept: the now well-established technique of the unreliable narrator, dating back to Poe, taken to ultimate lengths.
Did Machen evolve this technique independently or did The Dynamiter provide the impetus? We may never know. And, sadly, we shall never know what R.L.S. would have made of The Three Impostors. He died in December 1894, the month The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light was published.
Notes
1. Whether John Fowles ever read Machen is unclear, though The French Lieutenant’s Woman contains a pun, not necessarily derived from Machen, on Pan—‘the great god Man’—in Chapter Five. The first version of The Magus (1966) has a passage from A.E. Waite’s Key to the Tarot (1910) as its epigraph, and Crowley is alluded to. It is interesting to note that both The French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Hill of Dreams contain scenes of auburn-haired Cockney prostitutes beneath a gas-lamp and a naphtha flame. One proves as kind as the other is wicked. Like Machen with his impostors, Fowles experienced the illusion of a character in the flesh. See Eileen Warburton, John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds (2004), pp. 269-70. Fowles’s fantasy A Maggot (1985) is Machenesque in that its mystery remains fiendishly inviolate.
2. Similarly, the misguided savant Dr Black in ‘The Inmost Light’ is pseudonymous, his name created by Dyson.
3. On Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere, see Machen’s letter to Harry Quilter, Faunus 6 (Autumn 2000), p. 40, where he says he would be ashamed to have written Robert Elsmere and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) ‘& all such books as deprave and blaspheme the dogmas & morals of the Catholic Church, turning many from the faith’. Robert Elsmere is not actually an ungodly tract. Mrs Ward’s book, described by her biographer John Sutherland as ‘Probably the best-selling “quality” novel of the century’—hence Dyson’s annoyance—makes the case for non-supernatural Christianity, which Machen would have thought heretical. Elsmere is a young cleric whose faith in miracles and Christ’s divinity is eroded by his studies. In Hieroglyphics the Hermit warns his ‘Boswell’ (Machen, we infer) to condemn Robert Elsmere as inferior literature but not solely because it contains arguments against the faith.
4. Note the contrast between Miss Lally’s attitude and that of the unnamed governess, devoted to Miles and Flora, in ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898). Borrowing his mother’s Scots idiom, Machen thought the novella ‘the finest “ha’nt” in the English language’, though he generally regarded James’s style as ‘quite terrible’ and the Master’s books did not appeal to him.
5. Lalage is the name Sarah Woodruff gives her daughter in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, who both appears, and signally fails to appear, apart from a phrase, in the novel’s dual endings. At one stage in the book an infant begins to lall. The relation to ‘glossolalia’, the gift of tongues, in which Machen took a keen interest, is evident. The American slang terms ‘lallygag’ or ‘lollygag’, origins unknown, mean fooling around. Miss Lally certainly does this.
6. The church at Kemeys, ‘grey and severe and quaint, that hovered on the very banks of the river and watched the tides swim and return’, as Miss Lally poetically describes it, also features in Clemendy’s final story, ‘The Triumph of Love’. Godfrey Brangham went in quest of All Saints some years ago, and found only ruins. See Editorial, Faunus 10 (Autumn 2003).
MADAM SATAN: ANCESTOR OF HELEN VAUGHAN
Faunus 21, Summer 2010
pseudonym ‘Robert Manchester’
‘The trouble with you Occidentals is that you don’t have devils to explain things with.’
Lee, the Chinese cook in East of Eden
Here is some melodramatic dialogue from a great nineteenth-century romance. A hero is admonishing a femme fatale: ‘You are not a woman. You do not belong to the human species; you are a demon escaped from hell, whither we send you back again.’ Such words might have been uttered during the offstage climax of ‘The Great God Pan’, when Villiers and Clarke enter the home of ‘Mrs Beaumont’ off Piccadilly, equipped with a coil of ‘the best hempen cord’; but the above is from Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844). Alexandre Dumas’s heroes capture the wicked Milady de Winter, the Baroness of Sheffield (of all places)—the book’s most engaging character1—and prepare to exact justice: ‘. . . your crimes have wearied men on earth and God in heaven,’ says her former husband Athos, the Comte de la Fère. ‘If you know a prayer, say it. . . .’ Touchingly, the musketeers forgive Milady her many sins. Among her infamies she has poisoned Constance Bonacieux2, D’Artagnan’s love. ‘For the poison which she pours there is no antidote,’ explains Athos, who has all the best lines. The musketeers’ absolution does not prevent them ordering Milady’s head to be separated from her lovely shoulders. ‘Die in peace!’ she is told.
Years before, Athos attempts to hang his wife after he discovers the fleur de lis branded on her—the mark of a criminal: she has stolen sacred vessels from a church. He leaves her for dead but a fiend in human form is not so easily extirpated. ‘You certainly are a demon sent upon the earth!’ Athos tells Milady in one encounter. ‘I thought I had crushed you, Madame; but either I was deceived, or hell has resuscitated you!’
Did Milady’s character unconsciously influence ‘The Great God Pan’? The parallels are striking. Both Milady de Winter and Helen Vaughan operate under various aliases—in Milady’s case Anne de Breuil, Charlotte Backson, Milady Clarik—ensnaring and destroying men. Irony surrounds Helen’s pseudonyms—Mrs Herbert, Miss Raymond, Mrs Beaumont. ‘Only human beings have names, Villiers,’ says Charles Herbert, Helen’s doomed husband. Blonde, blue-eyed Milady is executed in her mid-twenties; dark Helen dies just short of twenty-three. Athos tells D’Artagnan of his married life with the demon just as Herbert relates to Villiers the story of his nightmare marriage. The origins of both women are initially shadowy: both are said to come from nowhere: Milady has formerly been a nun. A young priest seduced by Milady hangs himself in his prison cell, while Helen drives five supposedly respectable gentlemen to hang themselves; hence the summary justice exercised by Villiers and Clarke. Helen is locked in a room, ordered to bind the noose around her neck and kill herself. To ensnare her jailer John Felton, Milady stages a fake suicide.
Alas, for the literary critical house of cards that is built on sand! Many theories that a particular work of fiction influenced some other work are often mere suppositions. In this case it seems that two imaginative geniuses have alighted upon the same theme: a beautiful, seductress who is an agent of evil and who meets her end at the hands of male executioners. According to Machen in his ‘Queer Things’ column, written in the 1920s, he did not read Dumas’s romance until after 1900 when dependent on his landlady’s library as an actor in theatrical digs in Leeds. Whether he reached the end is unclear since he claimed the book, though set in his beloved seventeenth century, bored him. Dumas’s swashbuckling sword-and-cloak romanticism was not really his type of romanticism; although Dumas greatly influenced Stevenson and Machen revered R.L.S. C.S. Lewis compared Dumas père unfavourably with Scott; for him Dumas’s sagas remained without roots and with ‘no connection with human nature or mother earth’. For Lewis romance required ‘at least the hint of another world—one must “hear the horns of elfland”.’ Machen would have assented. Anthony Burgess was more appreciative, calling Dumas ‘one of the great myth-makers’.
Dumas’s dialogue certainly had a zest and zing that Machen’s, for all his artistry, lacked. Here Milady and Cardinal Richelieu’s man Rochefort3 bid farewell in the chapter ‘Two Varieties of Demons’:
‘Capital! Adieu, Chevalier.’
‘Adieu, Countess.’
‘Commend me to the cardinal.’
‘Commend me to Satan.’
Mr Dyson in ‘The Shining Pyramid’ refers to The Count of Monte Cristo. Did Monte Cristo (1844-1846) suit Machen’s taste more? It has the folkloric ‘Exile, Return and Vengeance Formula’ that he relished.
There, it seems, the matter ends. And yet . . . did Machen read a synopsis of the Musketeers or a juvenile version when young? Did those bound Victorian periodicals such as Household Words and Chambers’s Journal, which he devoured in his boyhood, ever carry such a précis? I remember as a boy in the early 1960s seeing an adaptation of the musketeers’ first sequel, Twenty Years After (1845), in Look and Learn4. Imagine a children’s paper running such an item today: given the dumbing down it is inconceivable.5 Twenty Years After has stood unread on my shelves for at least twenty years (so many books, so little time), yet I know the plot from the Sunday teatime BBC TV serial from the 1960s. Perhaps Machen knew about the musketeers’ first adventure years before encountering the book.
In her last moments Milady predicts the sequel. ‘Beware! If I am not saved I shall be avenged,’ she cries. In the next instalment Mordaunt—Milady’s son by John Felton, the Duke of Buckingham’s real-life assassin—masquerades as a monk and stabs to death the executioner of Lille, who beheaded his mother: a scene anticipating the revenge murders of The Godfather, another ‘Exile, Return and Vengeance’ scenario. Mordaunt is also responsible, in 1649, for the demise of—but see the book.
Did Machen, one wonders, ever contemplate a successor to ‘The Great God Pan’, in the form of a child for Helen? This would have meant repeating himself, which he disliked; even though he was sometimes guilty of this vice. Despite vowing to A.E. Waite ‘I shall never give anybody a White Powder again’, feeling he had squeezed all the juice that was to be had from the horror genre, he returned to it again and again.
Helen Vaughan’s character famously inspired the shapeshifting Alma Mobley in Peter Straub’s Ghost Story (1979). Is there anyone else? To indulge in ‘mere supposition’ for a moment: does Cathy Trask, also known as Kate, the satanic murderess, brothel madam and blackmailer in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1952), owe anything to Helen? She, too, is described, by her husband Adam Trask, as not a human being but a demon. In her girlhood Cathy leads an obsessive young man to kill himself. A shooting star—a meteorite—is discovered on Adam’s ranch near Salinas, California, the day Cathy gives birth to twins. This may or may not relate to Dr Raymond’s aphorism, derived from the wisdom of Oswald Crollius, that ‘In every grain of wheat there lies hidden the soul of a star.’ Cathy’s flat, inhuman eyes make Samuel Hamilton, Steinbeck’s grandfather, shiver, reminding him of the eyes of a ‘fiend’ he saw hanged in Londonderry as a boy. Helen Vaughan’s eyes, her smile or her expression also unnerve those who meet her: Machen typically leaves the matter mysterious. Cathy bears a scar on her forehead: the mark of Cain—the novel’s biblical symbolism is unsubtle—comparable to Milady’s fleur de lis, and, curiously, she owns a gold watch with a fleur-de-lis pin. Like Helen, Cathy dies by her own hand.6
Steinbeck was close to his publisher Pascal Covici, who had issued The Shining Pyramid and The Glorious Mystery in the 1920s, and Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare (1922), the subject of an obscenity trial. Steinbeck’s first book, Cup of Gold (1929), about the privateer Henry Morgan, was written under the florid influence of Machen enthusiast James Branch Cabell. Steinbeck, the winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature, also shared Machen’s love for Arthurian myth. His uncompleted The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights appeared posthumously in 1976.
All the above was written in a singularly fanciful mood, until I discovered from A John Steinbeck Encyclopedia (2006) that Steinbeck read Machen in the 1920s and owned a signed Ornaments in Jade. The critic and poet Joseph Warren Beach has
pointed out that Steinbeck’s second novel To a God Unknown (1933) shows some Machen influence. So Cathy Trask may well represent the literary offspring of Helen Vaughan. . . .
A few concluding points: as was stated in Faunus 20, just as there are four impostors in The Three Impostors, there are four musketeers in The Three Musketeers. It is noteworthy that John Gawsworth characterised M.P. Shiel as a modern Dumas père since Shiel was a prolific writer of romantic and heroic works. One wonders whether this parallel also covertly allowed Gawsworth to hint at Shiel’s mixed roots: Dumas’s grandmother was black.
Dennis Wheatley’s heroic quartet from The Forbidden Territory (1933) and The Devil Rides Out (1934), and their largely inferior sequels, were explicitly modelled on Dumas’s quartet. Does a twenty-first century Dumas exist? Undoubtedly: Michael Moorcock7, that master of the multiverse, chronicler of the high histories of Elric, the Runestaff, Corum, Erekosë, Gloriana, Oswald Bastable, the von Bek and Begg families, Colonel Pyat, Jerry Cornelius and his relatives and of the denizens at the End of Time, eminently qualifies through the breadth and depth of his imagination. His Grail fantasy The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), set against the backcloth of the Reign of Terror and part of the von Bek cycle, is Dumasesque, with dashes of Stevenson and Baroness Orczy.
It is surely psychographically significant that Machen lived in Clarendon Road, Notting Hill Gate, in the 1880s, while Blenheim Crescent, into which Clarendon Road leads, was, a century later, home to Michael Moorcock.