by Roger Dobson
In a brilliantly conceived mimesis Machen echoes Lucian’s amnesia, keeping obscure much of the action that occurs between the end of Chapter Six, when Lucian trembles before the bottle containing his drug on the mantelpiece, and the climactic events of Chapter Seven. How he joins his fortunes to those of the streetwalker and their going to live in ‘the sad house in the fields’ go unchronicled. Lucian cannot recall these events so the reader is not told. So often it is what Machen does not say that proves vital. As Thomas De Quincey writes in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822) ‘the opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time’.4 Or, in Lucian’s case, too tortured. Readers must fill in these narrative gaps from clues embedded in the text. The shadow of De Quincey’s Confessions, one of Machen’s favourite works, lies behind The Hill. De Quincey’s opium-fuelled rambles in London are referenced in the book. Machen never specifically names Lucian’s drug, but could it be anything other than laudanum when much of The Hill consciously parallels De Quincey’s classic? Machen may withhold the nature of the drug partly because this signals to the reader that here the darkness begins to gather.
Up to the end of Chapter Six Machen has provided a clear linear narration, chronicling the events of Lucian’s life, but from the next chapter his hidden life begins and incidents are presented more obliquely. Where the art of the veil was concerned Machen was a master. This involved the selection and omission of crucial plot details; readers themselves must determine what has happened. Not all readers appear to grasp this method.5
ow he joins his fortuHoHowWesley D. Sweetser in his Arthur Machen (Twayne, 1964) states that Lucian marries the Demon Lover. Lucian’s fantasies of being summoned to the Sabbath with the prostitute are intended as a debased form of the marriage sacrament, so perhaps Sweetser’s theory is correct. Married or not, the two move to the isolated cottage. This, the book’s most grimly evocative location, becomes a house of nightmare. Around the cottage are rosebushes, box trees, a rocking elm and a stained trellis-work porch: these become symbols of doom and decay, a parody of Lucian’s garden of Avallaunius. Lucian ‘had asked himself who could be so brave as to sit in that room, darkened by the dreary box, and listen of winter nights to the rain upon the window’. This and the line ‘Here the dead had lain’ are prophetic.
In the final chapter Lucian sits ‘before his desk looking into the vague darkness he could almost see that chamber which he had so often imagined’. He can almost see the chamber because he is in the chamber. The cottage fascinates Lucian when he discovers it, in flashback, in Chapter Seven: he is already living there when the chapter opens. From minute clues in the text, and from Far Off Things and other writings, it is possible to speculate on the cottage’s location. One bleak March day Lucian wanders north off ‘the high road’, presumably the Uxbridge Road, and following a lane initially choked with ‘obscene refuse’ eventually reaches open country and finds the house. His exploration can be seen as mirroring his wandering in Gwent in Chapter One. In Far Off Things, Chapter Five, Machen writes of how the ravenous London suburbs trespass on the meadows and green pastures. He describes how ‘new, rabid streets are to rush up the sweet hillside and capture it; here the well under the thorn is choked with a cartload of cheap bricks lately deposited’. Machen would be walking in the country only to be ‘confronted by red ranks of brand-new villas: this would be Harlesden or the outposts of Willesden’. He had never experienced such things in Gwent. It was the ‘violent irruption of red brick in the midst of a green field’ that startled him, just as Robinson Crusoe is shocked by finding that footstep on his desert island.
Cottages at East Acton
In Far Off Things, Chapter Five, writing of his wanderings in the early 1880s, Machen states: ‘Then I became learned in Wormwood Scrubs and its possibilities. It was and is a very barren and bleak place itself, but in those days there was an attractive corner on the Acton side of the waste, that I was fond of contemplating.’ This corner is Old Oak Common. Machen refers to a ‘sort of huddle of old cottages and barns and outhouses with a fringe of elms about them’. In The Hill an elm overshadows the cottage, and in his delirium in the final chapter Lucian hears its boughs moving in the wind. During his narcotic phantasmagoria Lucian’s memories of his idyllic boyhood in Gwent and his harsh years in London fuse in his imagination; just as his memories of the rectory and the house in the fields merge, linked by the motif of the creaking elm—elms surround the Gwent rectory. ‘Truth and the dream were so mingled that now he could not divide one from the other.’ Caught in an amnesiac nightmare, Lucian believes he imagines the bough creaking since the street where he lodged previously, in his ‘calm hermitage’, is treeless. ‘It was strange how in the brick and stucco desert where no trees were, he all the time imagined the noise of tossing boughs, the grinding of the boughs together.’ Lucian hears the branches moving because there is indeed a tree outside. Lucian cannot see the brass gas-jet by his bureau, not solely because it is dark but because the gas-jet was a fixture of his former cell. ‘He had only to get up and look out of the window and he would see the treeless empty street, and the rain starring the puddles under the gas-lamp, but he would wait a little while.’ All this is an illusion: though he knows it not, Lucian is trapped in the cottage’s death chamber. These are subtle points in the text, and a careless reading may lead to error. The bungled synopsis of the book in Masterpieces of World Literature in Digest Form (Second Series: Harper & Row, 1952) is amusing: ‘His landlady, not hearing him stir for many hours, looked into his room and found him dead at his desk, his writings spread about him. Even she felt little sorrow for him, although he had made over his small fortune to her.’ For ‘landlady’, read the Demon Lover, who certainly feels little sorrow since she has connived at his death. The Masterpieces précis also alters the plot somewhat: ‘Lucian called his land of make-believe Avallaunius. . . .’
Like Lucian, the reader has no way of knowing how much time has elapsed between the end of Chapter Six and the beginning of Chapter Seven, and the matter remains deliberately obscure. Lucian’s death may occur six months after the publication of his tale The Amber Statuette, for that is the period in which he is working on his last manuscript, and it is difficult to imagine him not writing something. ‘Even about the little book that he had made there seemed some taint, some shuddering memory, that came to him across the gulf of forgetfulness.’ The Statuette conjures up the figures of the nocturnal orgies and reminds him of the life he is leading with the streetwalker, the naphtha flares illuminating the path to the cottage in the fields.
The events that occur after the publication of the Statuette are ambiguous, as Lucian suffers from amnesia caused by his addiction. One extravagant reading would be that the publication of the Statuette, and the ‘doubtful’ incidents surrounding it, are illusory and part of Lucian’s dream-fugue. ‘Dimly he remembered Dr Burrows coming to see him in London, but had he not imagined all the rest?’ But this is the type of wild theory a critic would spin, merely to offer a fresh interpretation. ‘His mind was sluggish, and he could not quite remember how many years had passed since that dismal experience. . . .’ The dismal experience is Lucian’s desolation suffered the winter after he arrives in London. Noting that Machen does not always say what he means, or mean what he says, it may be that, since this is Lucian’s subjective view, the reference to years is ironic: months rather than years may have passed. Time for the addict appears distorted, De Quincey explains in his Confessions that sometimes he seemed to have lived for seventy or a hundred years in a single night.
Trapped in his semi-comatose state, Lucian’s mind roams through the distant and near past. At the beginning of Chapter Seven he awakes from ‘an utter forgetfulness’ that has descended on him in the interval separating him from the scene introducing the laudanum bottle at the end of Chapter Six. There is irony in that passage in Chapter Six: ‘His only escape was in the desk; he might find salvation if he could again hide his heart in the heap and litter of papers, and
again be rapt by the cadence of a phrase. . . . He resolved that he would rise early in the morning, and seek once more for his true life in the work.’ These resolutions fail, and he becomes involved with the Demon Lover: her subsequent summons, though we are not privy to it, he does not refuse.
Does the cottage in the fields have a real-life counterpart? The house may be intended to stand on Old Oak Common, then as in Machen’s day, an extensive patch around Wormwood Scrubs prison. The novelist and Machen admirer Peter Ackroyd lived nearby as a boy. Machen refers to the Wormwood Scrubs district as being a favourite haunt in his Introduction to The Anatomy of Tobacco (1926), reprinted in Faunus 11 (Winter 2004). Machen’s memories of the 1880s were of a time when Acton seemed ‘more like a country town than a modern suburb’. In Mainly Victorian (1924) Stewart M. Ellis writes of the cottage in The Hill:
I always think this fateful house was suggested by Old Oak Farm and Friar’s Place Farm—a sort of composite picture of two lonely houses beyond Wormwood Scrubs. But, as Mr Machen observed to me years ago, when we took a ramble together to revisit these two old farms, the house of The Hill of Dreams was a thing of fantasy and does not need too close an identification.
The farm buildings may have inspired Machen with the idea for the cottage. For plot reasons it is essential that the house lies solitary in the fields; having a neighbouring farm would not do. Machen has perhaps played with geography in the way he does by placing the Roman fort at Common Cefn Llwyn near Llanddewi Rectory in Gwent. If the cottage in The Hill does lie on Old Oak Common then the fringes of the suburb Lucian sees may be Harlesden, the blatant new district that so disturbs Dyson in ‘The Inmost Light’. Lucian notes the ‘raw red villas’ of the suburbs, while Dyson is aghast at the red brick homes invading the green fields. Harlesden, beyond railway depots and industrial estates, is only a short distance from the northern end of Old Oak Common. One argument against the common being the site of the cottage is that Wormwood Scrubs Prison, still being built in the 1880s, lies nearby and of course nowhere does Machen allude to the prison in the text, though he does refer to the region’s burning brickfields. ‘For a mile he had walked on quietly. . . .’ It is a minute but debatable point whether the cottage lies a mile from the high road, or if the mile referred to is the distance Lucian walks after the initially débris-strewn path becomes an attractive winding lane. The southern portion of Old Oak Common lies a mile north of the Uxbridge Road, but the latter reading would take Lucian deeper into the common and so nearer to the presumed suburb of Harlesden.
A further mystery concerns the decaying house that appears in the final pages, with its blotched stucco, skeletal laurels, blighted flowerbeds and fungus sprouting on the lawn: Lucian’s glorious garden of Avallaunius has descended into corruption. In his delirium Lucian mistakes the house for the rectory, as the Demon Lover explains in her final dialogue: ‘He was carrying on dreadful, shaking at the gaite, and calling out it was ’is ’ome and they wouldn’t let him in.’ The house is situated on the ‘same terrible street, whose pavements he had trodden so often’. One infers that it stands somewhere in Notting Hill, since Lucian has gone to buy ‘paper and pens of a certain celestial stationer in Notting Hill,.7 Whether the house existed is probably now impossible to determine. As with the laburnum-shaded dwelling in ‘concealed Barnsbury’, which does, or did, stand—it inspired the Hermit’s house in Hieroglyphics (see Machen’s letter to J.P. Hogan in Arthur Machen: A Biography, Aidan Reynolds and William Charlton, 1963, pp.179-180)—the address awaits unearthing. Can one hope that Machen letters existing in some archive provide details?
We rest on firmer territory with other allusions. Lucian ‘loved a great old common that stood on high ground, curtained about with ancient spacious houses of red brick, and their cedarn gardens’. This seems to be Ealing Common, described in Far Off Things, Chapter Five. Here Machen pondered on The Anatomy of Tobacco, mourning that his first book could not be better: ‘I stood by an old twisted oak, and thought of my book as I would have made it, and sighed, and so went home and made it as I could.’ On the road leading to the common was an oak tree and a pool where Lucian lingers. The ‘barbaric water tower rising from a hill’ that he sees from a height, presumably Campden Hill, is the hill’s Italianate water tower, demolished in 1970, which figures prominently in G.K. Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904). In a poem in the book Chesterton writes:
This legend of an epic hour
A child I dreamed, and dream it still,
Under the great grey water tower
That strikes the stars on Campden Hill.
Campden Hill looking north-east towards the water tower.
One closing puzzle: why did Machen have Lucian live off the Uxbridge Road, rather than in Notting Hill where he had dwelt himself? What follows is pure speculation without warrant from any of Machen’s writings. Even as a very young man, Machen surely knew that he would one day write his autobiography. His notion for the memoir ‘A Quiet Life’ had alarmed George Redway who counselled him to ‘defer the writing of that type of book until I was eighty or thereabouts’ (Far Off Things, Chapter Six). He had a poignant tale to tell of his lonely struggles in London, and two wonderful scenic backdrops to work with: the metropolis and Gwent. If Machen had Lucian live in the Gate region the novel would perhaps have seemed inescapably autobiographical: Lucian must be Machen, critics would argue, whereas Lucian is very like his creator but is not quite Machen. As Machen informed Vincent Starrett in 1917, The Hill is not strict autobiography ‘since I am still alive’: unlike Lucian he had survived into middle age. Also, he had already written of a struggling author in the district: Edgar Russell, the obscure realist in The Three Impostors lives in the fictitious Abingdon Grove. Russell, a realist rather than a romancer, could never be mistaken for a Machen self-portrait, even though, like Lucian and his creator, he experiences ‘the pains of literature’ and lives on a starvation diet of bread and tea. Machen treats Russell’s authorial battles semi-humorously. For narrative purposes it is important for Lucian to explore Notting Hill in all its strangeness, witnessing its Bacchic orgies in the way in which he roams through ‘outland and occult territory’ in Wales. Had he lived on the doorstep of the Gate, in an unnamed Clarendon Road, say, the effect would not be nearly so dramatic. In Gwent Lucian walks in fairyland; in Notting Hill he wanders in nightmare. What a pity John Gawsworth did not quiz Machen about these matters of literary geography. If he did, he left no record in the biography, preferring to ask his hero such vital questions, thirty-six years after the event, as ‘In 1894 do you think Casanova appeared in Jan, Feb, March or April?’ But at least, to borrow a phrase from ‘The Idealist’ in Ornaments in Jade, such enduring puzzles provide ‘singular matter for speculation’.
Notes
1. In 1908, a year after The Hill of Dreams appeared in book form, the fairy-tale White City opened on land north of Shepherd’s Bush. Machen writes of the city’s decay in Things Near & Far, Chapter Ten, comparing its sham glamour to the gradual fading of the Baghdad and Syon illusion that London assumed for him during his annus mirabilis of 1899-1900. At the time of writing, Wetherspoon’s pub in the West 12 Shopping Centre, overlooking Shepherd’s Bush Green, has a photographic display of the White City.
2. Julian Maclaren-Ross, one of John Gawsworth’s Redondan dukes, lived at various addresses in the district: 19 Holland Park Avenue in 1956; 37 Ladbroke Square and 39 Kensington Square Gardens in 1957; and 4 Dawson Place and 16 Chepstow Place in 1964. Maclaren-Ross was intrigued that 16 Chepstow Place features as the home of one of the victims in ‘The Suicide Club’, one of Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights, and wrote an unmade, updated film script based on the story. Albert Chevalier (1861-1923), the music hall star Machen admired, was born at 17 St Ann’s Villas, off Holland Park Avenue (plaque).
3. The patterning of the novel can perhaps be stretched too far, but we can view the hill in Notting Hill in this scene as a mirror-image of the Welsh fort. The elements of the first ha
lf of the novel—the Roman city, the rectory, Lucian’s illuminated manuscript, the tavern, Annie Morgan—reappear in grotesque forms in the second part. The Demon Lover can be viewed as Annie Morgan’s evil twin. Most obviously, the novel’s opening sentence is reprised in the final line. The symmetries even extend to Lucian moving to London halfway through the book. One can go overboard in noting parallels, but we can perceive the priests of Mithras and Isis, with their mystic theurgy, refracted in the ‘flatulent oratory’ of the Independent Chapel. The exotic shops of the Roman Isca have their counterparts in the ‘row of common shops, full of common things’ of Notting Hill. The lane in Gwent in Chapter Seven, which Lucian retraces in memory ‘not knowing where it might bring him, hoping he had found the way to fairyland, to the woods beyond the world, to that vague territory that haunts all the dreams of a boy’, may well mirror the lane off the Uxbridge Road leading to the fatal cottage.
4. The nymphs and fauns have a metaphorical status in the novel. A rationalistic reading would view them simply as figments of Lucian’s imagination, but we know that in the wider context of Machen’s fictional universe, where rationalism holds no sway, such supernatural creatures exist. This is akin to the case of the mansion Bartholly both being and not being the scene of Dr Raymond’s experiment in ‘The Great God Pan’. Similarly, the episode in the fort when Lucian sheds his clothes in the summer heat and falls asleep is a masterly piece of ambiguity and evasion. While the scene has an undeniable sexual content, Machen draws a veil over precisely what happens and readers are free to interpret the incident as they wish. What other author has had it both ways in such fashion?
5. In his otherwise excellent study ‘The Shock of the Numinous: “The White People” ’ (Faunus 6, Autumn 2000) J.S. Pennethorne [a.k.a John Eatman] is sceptical that the girl commits suicide, since ‘it doesn’t tally with what we are told in her own words, and seems more to be Ambrose’s (or Machen’s) prim summation of an event that would not have passed the scrutiny of the age’. What he has not taken into account is Machen’s art of the veil. As it stands the girl’s narrative provides only a partial picture of her experiences and by the end of her narrative she is still in thrall to the unseen world; but ‘about a year’ passes, by Ambrose’s reckoning, before her suicide. During that time the delights of dabbling with the occult have turned to terror. What happens to the girl during that final year? That is the art of the veil.