by Roger Dobson
That there is some order,some purpose, seems a certainty; my mind, at all events, refuses to grasp the idea of a universe which means nothing at all. But just as unable am I to accept any of the solutions ever proposed. Above all, it is the existence of natural beauty which haunts my thought. I can, for a time, forget the world’s horrors; I can never forget the flower by the wayside and the sun falling in the west. These things have a meaning—but I doubt, I doubt—whether the mind of man will ever be permitted to know it.
Notes
1. Wilkins’s description of the book as ‘charming’ and the novelist as ‘famous’ may be intended ironically, but the Impostors is a great exercise in irony. Professor Pierre Coustillas, one of the great Gissing scholars, suggests the book might be Walter Besant’s All in a Garden Fair (1883): a novel Gissing himself read with ‘really extreme delight’.
2. Reardon has been immortalised in popular culture as the curmudgeonly hack Ed Reardon, created and played by Christopher Douglas in the delightful Radio Four comedy series Ed Reardon’s Week. Ed Reardon, who is much more celebrated than his prototype, is described as ‘author, pipesmoker, consummate fare-dodger and master of the abusive email’. Not the least of the jokes in this witty series is the name of Reardon’s nemesis—Milvane [sic].
3. Gissing worked as a clerk at the St John’s Hospital for Diseases of the Skin, Leicester Square, in 1878. In one poignant scene, Reardon recalls meeting an ‘unfortunate’ young woman (i.e. a prostitute) whose dignity impresses him: ‘I shall always hear her voice saying, “I’m unfortunate, sir.” ’ This reads very much like an authentic incident, but in such speculations may partly lie the novel’s appeal.
4. Orwell’s essay on Gissing, written in 1948, was unpublished until 1960. His novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) is a kind of reworking of Gissing: Orwell’s hapless poet Gordon Comstock is a great comic creation, and the novel satirises the advertising industry. Orwell repudiated the book in later years since it did not accord with his elevated aim of political writing.
5. In writing this, I paused for a break after keying in, not composing, 3655 words (appallingly) and was shattered. Having incorrectly saved the file, I then promptly lost everything I had written.
6. George Edward Mudie’s Select Library, 509-511 New Oxford Street, features in a scene where Amy meets Milvain. Machen wrote to Montgomery Evans that Mudie (actually his son by 1894) ‘refused to put “The Great God Pan” in his monthly lists or on his counters; but if a subscriber asked for the book, he would be furnished with it’.
7. After the circulating libraries stopped ordering them as a reaction to cheap editions, publishers abandoned the three-volume format in the mid-1890s.
8. In 1924 Vincent Starrett excavated the short stories Gissing contributed to the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers while in America, publishing them as The Sins of the Father and Other Tales.
9. Reardon says he should have married a simple work-girl but Biffen warns such a union would be a disaster. ‘To begin with, the girl would have married you in firm persuasion that you were a “gentleman” in temporary difficulties, and that before long you would have plenty of money to dispose of. Disappointed in this hope, she would have grown sharp-tempered, querulous, selfish.’ Critics have been astonished that Gissing took this same path to misery, but Edith initially seemed ‘peculiarly gentle and pliant, with a certain refinement’. She later rebelled against Gissing’s Pygmalion act.
10. Photographs of Cornwall Mansions, in Allsop Place, demolished in 2007-08, can be found online. Machen and Purefoy married at the nearby St Marylebone Church in 1903, seven months before Gissing’s death.
11. Gissing appears in Peter Ackroyd’s gory mystery thriller Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994)—the climactic twist rivals Psycho (1959)—where he reports on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine: a harbinger of the technological marvels the twentieth century would bring. Some of us would trade all our scientific wonders (well, almost) for one day spent in the 1890s.
12. Bentley, one of Gissing’s publishers, is alluded to in The Three Impostors: it is said that Dyson’s gifts might have placed him ‘among the most favoured of Bentley’s favourite novelists’, who included Dickens and Thackeray. This presumably refers to George Bentley (d.1895) rather than the firm’s founder Richard (d.1871).
13. Gissing’s only sustained periods of happiness stemmed from his travels in Italy and Greece, echoed by Lovecraft’s antiquarian explorations of colonial America.
14. In a speech to the House of Commons in November 1947, a few weeks before Machen’s death, even Winston Churchill admitted: ‘Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’
15. Having loyally rushed from Sandgate to his sickbed, Gissing’s friend H.G. Wells may have inadvertently hastened his end by overfeeding him: Gissing’s temperature rose, straining his heart; though the novelist may have been past recovery. The character ‘N—’ in Ryecroft (Summer XXIII) is based on Wells.
LUCIAN IN THE LABYRINTH: LONDON LOCATIONS IN THE HILL OF DREAMS
Faunus 25, Spring 2012
One of Machen’s accomplishments in The Hill of Dreams is the transformation of the waste places of London into regions as mysterious and mystical as his native land. Who else could set fiction in the environs of Shepherd’s Bush and Acton without descending into banality and sordidness? The same technique is employed in ‘A Fragment of Life’ and ‘The Holy Things’, in Ornaments in Jade, where divine revelations occur in prosaic locales. The Hill of Dreams, in contrast, presents a darker vision. To paraphrase Wilde, anyone can be mystical in the country, but to do this in the heart of the stony metropolis stands as a remarkable feat. In the winter fog the city is transformed—transmuted to borrow a more appropriate Machenian term—into a mystic labyrinth: ‘All London was one grey temple of an awful rite, ring within ring of wizard stones circled about some central place, every circle was an initiation, every initiation eternal loss.’ Here the capital and the hill of dreams of Gwent become one. In Lucian’s mind London mutates into the dead Roman city he has resurrected in his imagination, but this time to an arid wilderness of mist and grey stone. To Lucian it seems ‘the rocky avenues became the camp and fortalice of some half-human, malignant race who swarmed in hiding, ready to bear him away into the heart of their horrible hills’. In Lucian’s disordered psyche London degenerates into a nightmarish version of his homeland. Gwent was as Avalon for Machen, where he returned to heal his wounds after his terms of trial in London. Unlike Machen, Lucian is not permitted a return to his homeland: that would never do. Why? Because that would spoil the unrelenting atmosphere Machen is seeking to evoke. Lucian must be allowed no relief, no respite from his sufferings.
Readers can, if they wish, follow in Lucian’s footsteps, and with a map trace his odyssey through western London. There is an argument for letting the locations in The Hill remain oblique, just as Machen leaves them unnamed in his novel: their mysterious nature perhaps makes them all the more beguiling; removing the veil may destroy the magic. Some readers therefore might wish to stop here and progress no farther.
Despite Lucian’s wanderings, The Hill possesses a claustrophobic atmosphere, with the character’s explorations limited to suburbia, perhaps because Machen wishes to mirror Lucian’s mind and soul. The book focuses on the microcosm of a single consciousness, not the macrocosm that is London. It is a voyage into the mind of a solitary man. London is too immense a universe to be captured in The Hill. Even Mr Dyson, that profound student of London, can only hint at the city’s immensity: ‘Yet I feel sometimes positively overwhelmed with the thought of the vastness and complexity of London. . . . London is always a mystery.’ Machen writes in The London Adventure that the city has grown so vast that no man can know it or even begin to know it. Is this why we are never told of Lucian visiting Soho or Bloomsbury, Holborn or the Strand, the streets that knew Machen’s tread when he lived in Clarendon Road, Notting H
ill Gate? Lucian’s London is narrowly circumscribed, consisting of the streets around Shepherd’s Bush1 and Acton Vale and the environs of Notting Hill. Machen names only a few localities in the three London chapters: Shepherd’s Bush, Acton Vale, the Uxbridge Road, Notting Hill, while Islington, Stoke Newington and Hampton are alluded to in passing. His book is a romance not a travel guide, yet it is possible to identify several unidentified scenes.
The Strand, London, c. 1880.
To begin at the beginning of Chapter Five: Lucian comes by ‘curious paths to his calm hermitage between Shepherd’s Bush and Acton Vale’. Why ‘curious paths’? Does this signify that he has lived elsewhere while trying to find a permanent refuge? The hotel in Surrey Street, off the Strand, where Machen and his father stayed in that famous June of 1880, for example? The hotel apparently appears, unnamed, in the ‘Novel of the Dark Valley’ in The Three Impostors: Mr Wilkins, alias Richmond, says he stayed there on first coming to London from the West Country, though everything that gentleman says is suspect. Is he, like Lucian and his creator, really the son of a clergyman? It may be that the phrase in The Hill simply refers to Lucian’s wanderings in the suburbs scouting for suitable digs. It is a tiny puzzle, never elucidated in the text. Lucian finds a ‘terrible “bed- sitting-room” ’, in a western suburb: a ‘square, clean room, horribly furnished, in the by-street that branched from the main road, and advanced in an unlovely sweep to the mud pits and the desolation that was neither town nor country’. Despite its silly wallpaper, Machen states that Lucian’s room is a friendly place, and this subsequently proves significant. The Victorian terraced streets, running north off the Uxbridge Road, still stand today. ‘On every side monotonous grey streets, each house the replica of its neighbour, to the east an unexplored wilderness, north and west and south the brickfields and market-gardens, everywhere the ruins of the country. . . .’ These stony streets lie to the east and lie around Wormwood Scrubs and Old Oak Common to the north of Lucian’s lodgings. The streets are patterned in identikit format, though in some the architect and builder have indulged themselves; some dwellings are larger, having elaborate porches with tall flights of steps. Whichever street Lucian inhabits, he lives near the southern end since he is able to see John Dolly, who proves so inept in providing details of Poe’s old school at Stoke Newington, board the tram at the junction with the Uxbridge Road. Personally I think Lucian lives somewhere around Ormiston Grove or Thorpebank Road but Machen is never so specific.
Lucian ventures out for an hour each day between twelve and one while his landlady makes his bed and, Machen tells us, invariably walks east along the Uxbridge Road. His journey would take him past Shepherd’s Bush Green, that ‘bald, arid, detestable’ patch as Machen describes it in Far Off Things, Chapter Five. Among the sights seen by Lucian along the way is ‘a church in cheap Gothic’. Machen was notoriously fussy over ecclesiastical architecture. He dismissed the Brompton Oratory as a joss-house, and in his scathing remarks on Spiritualism in The London Adventure he scoffs at the humble ‘Mount Zion Chapel (Particular Baptist), Beulah Road, Tooting Bec’. In The Secret Glory he heaps scorn on the ‘Little Bethel’ of the Nonconformists, while Lucian is affronted by the Independent chapel, ‘a horrible stucco parody of a Greek temple with a façade of hideous columns that was a nightmare’. It is just as well that Machen did not live to see that modern monstrosity, the red-brick St Luke’s Church, on the Uxbridge Road near the junction with Wormholt Road; it looks more like a fire station. Is the ‘church in cheap gothic’ in The Hill where the Darnells worship in ‘A Fragment of Life’? Machen attacks it in similar fashion as ‘a Gothic blasphemy which pretended to be a church’. In ‘A Fragment of Life’ St Paul’s stands in a street near the imaginary Edna Road, Shepherd’s Bush: ‘its Gothic design would have interested a curious inquirer into the history of a curious revival . . . it would have been quite difficult to explain why the whole building, from the mere mortar setting between the stones to the Gothic gas standards, was a mysterious and elaborate blasphemy.’ Darnell and his wife later find another church (Catholic or High Anglican?) to worship in. The sham Gothic church and its rituals are criticised because Machen is suggesting that the faith Darnell and his wife Mary initially follow is not the genuine mystery religion of Christianity but a fake substitute. To Machen, it bears the same relation to the faith that those works by Mrs Scudamore Runnymeade, A Bad Un to Beat and With the Mudshire Pack, bear to fine literature. Does the church perhaps still stand today? It may be the Church of St Stephen and St Thomas located on the corner of Coverdale Road. Inside, its white plaster walls and calm are refreshingly peaceful after the roar of the Uxbridge Road.
Modern explorers of the Vale of Acton and Shepherd’s Bush can still see the ‘corner publics’, ‘the blatant public-houses’, referred to in The Hill or ones very much like them: the Princess Victoria, the Queen Adelaide, the Coningham Arms, the British Queen and others. Walk east along the Uxbridge Road, from the junction with Old Oak Lane, midway between the Vale and Shepherd’s Bush, and you will see the buildings that Machen and Lucian knew: Victorian stucco villas with elaborate porticos, ‘like smug Pharisees’, turned into offices as their owners moved to more affluent districts. Nowadays the villas are interspersed with ugly modern flats, and the main artery is an array of food stores, kebab shops and takeaways.
The Uxbridge Road, in the early years of the twentieth century
As Lucian travels from the Uxbridge Road into Holland Park Avenue (unnamed) he would pass Royal Crescent where a young poet named Fytton Armstrong would one day dwell2, and skirt Clarendon Road, where Machen lived in his tiny cell in the 1880s. Progressing up the slope Lucian would reach Notting Hill Gate: ‘He had passed through the clamorous and blatant crowd of the “high street”, where, as one climbed the hill, the shops seemed all aflame, and the black night air glowed with the flaring gas-jets and the naphtha-lamps, hissing and wavering before the February wind.’
Notting Hill Gate, c. 1900.
At Notting Hill Gate, just after Ladbroke Terrace, the incline—more of a gentle incline than a hill—levels out, a row of shops arises, now as in the era of The Hill. In Campden Hill Square, initially called Notting Hill Square, now like many of the surrounding streets a millionaire’s row, you will see Evelyn Underhill’s home at No. 50, where she lived from 1907-1939 (plaque). Machen and Waite presumably visited her here. Violet Hunt, whom Machen also knew, lived at South Lodge at 80 Campden Hill Road (plaque). Holland Park Avenue leads into the ‘high street’ of The Hill: Notting Hill Gate, where Lucian sees the clamorous public houses with their drunken orgies, symbolically contrasted with the sensuous memories of his Roman dream. Located along here, on the Gate’s south side, was The Coronet Theatre, now a cinema, where Machen played the conjuror Bolingbroke, summoning the hosts of hell, in Henry VI, Part II. With his Stratford performance of the role this marked his farewell to the stage in 1909.
At the Gate Lucian has his fateful encounter with the bronze-haired prostitute who will lure him to his doom, as foreshadowed in the lines, ‘He knew that he had touched the brink of utter destruction; there was death in the woman’s face, and she had indeed summoned him to the Sabbath.’ He flees from her down the hill, echoing the scene in the first chapter when he runs away after apparently seeing, or imagining he sees, the lovely face of the faun, the Queen of the Nymphs as she may be termed, gazing at him from between the boughs: a memory reprised in the last chapter.3 The nymph has been replaced by a femme fatale even more perilous: the deadly Votary of Venus as we may think of her, or perhaps the Demon Lover would be a more fitting title. Machen quotes, a little imprecisely, a haunting line from ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘By woman wailing for her demon-lover!’, ironically foreshadowing Lucian’s meeting with the prostitute. The woman herself ultimately becomes the Demon Lover, in an act of transmutation; just as Lucian himself, in a further instance of metamorphosis, fears he has become inhuman.
Machen never even tells us the nameless girl is a prostitute.
‘Kubla Khan’ suggests a double allusion. Coleridge’s masterpiece concerns an opium vision: ‘For he on honey-dew hath fed,/And drunk the milk of Paradise.’ Lucian is fated to meet the streetwalker again and she will become his mistress, though nowhere in the text does Machen state this explicitly: the reader must infer it from the events obliquely portrayed in the final chapter. In reality a lonely maiden might well invite a handsome young fellow to join her in a nocturnal walk. In Victorian fiction, and against such a saturnalian background, such an invitation can have only one meaning.
At the end of the novel, in a final transformation, the prostitute, her veils of glamour stripped away, reveals her cockney accent, with her ‘crool’ and ‘ashaimed’; she becomes an infernal and reverse Eliza Doolittle. Whether she cares at all for Lucian is left veiled throughout; she cares for his legacy more. The ‘fiery street, the flaming shops and flaming glances, all its wonders and horrors lit by the naphtha flares and by the burning souls’ are illuminated by a hellish radiance, echoing the ‘burning aureole’ fashioned by Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter, a sacred text for Lucian. His attempt to escape the Demon Lover through his work fails: lust and desire conquer him, and he pays a fatal price.