The Library of the Lost: In Search of Forgotten Authors

by Roger Dobson

  But as certain chapters are described in Dorian Gray it becomes apparent that the yellow book cannot be À Rebours. Wilde’s young Parisian is portrayed as having a decayed beauty, whereas in the opening to À Rebours Huysmans describes the Duc Jean Des Esseintes as atavistically resembling a strange, sly forebear; he is frail, hollow-cheeked, anaemic and the product of inbreeding. He has never been handsome. Wilde’s character dreads mirrors, polished metal surfaces and still water, since they would reveal his lost looks: an echo with Dorian who has his ageing portrait hidden away in the playroom of his innocent childhood. Des Esseintes has no such fear of mirrors, though the idea may have originated with Huysmans quoting, in Chapter Fifteen, from Mallarmé’s poem ‘Hérodiade’, when Herodias mourns over her reflection in a mirror.

  Des Esseintes buries himself among gems, old books, Latin folios, perfumes and strange plants. Dorian similarly devotes himself to collecting and studying perfumes, jewels, embroideries, tapestries and ecclesiastical vestments. When writing the first version of Dorian Gray for Lippincott’s Monthly Wilde gave the poisonous book in yellow a title and an author, ‘Le Secret de Raoul’ by Catulle Sarrazin, but later deleted these specifics, leading casual readers to assume that the book referred to was À Rebours. It was after all À Rebours that was cited by the prosecution during Wilde’s trial. The great Huysmans scholar and translator Robert Baldick does not, for example, draw the distinction between À Rebours and the imaginary work in the Introduction to his translation published as Against Nature (1959). Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellmann calls the invented book ‘the pseudo-A Rebours’. A curious real-life parallel exists: when Wilde was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel in April 1895 he carried to the waiting carriage outside a yellow book, an unknown French novel, beneath his arm. This was misreported in the press as The Yellow Book, published by John Lane at The Bodley Head. John Betjeman has immortalised the myth in his poem about Wilde’s arrest: ‘He rose, and he put down The Yellow Book.’

  How does all this relate to The Hill of Dreams? In Chapter Eleven Dorian reflects ‘that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions’. He imagines himself experiencing the lives of people from antiquity and the Renaissance. Wilde colourfully evokes a number of decadent daydreams:

  The hero of the wonderful novel that had so influenced his life had himself known this curious fancy. In the seventh chapter he tells how, crowned with laurel, lest lightning might strike him, he had sat, as Tiberius, in a garden at Capri, reading the shameful books of Elephantis, while dwarfs and peacocks strutted round him and the flute-player mocked the swinger of the censer; and, as Caligula, had caroused with the green-shirted jockeys in their stables, and supped in an ivory manger with a jewel-fronted horse; and, as Domitian, had wandered through a corridor lined with marble mirrors, looking round with haggard eyes for the reflection of the dagger that was to end his days, and sick with that ennui, that terrible tædium vitæ, that comes on those to whom life denies nothing; and had peered through a clear emerald at the red shambles of the Circus, and then, in a litter of pearl and purple drawn by silver-shod mules, been carried through the Street of Pomegranates to a House of Gold, and heard men cry on Nero Cæsar as he passed by and, as Elagabalus, had painted his face with colours, and plied the distaff among the women, and brought the Moon from Carthage, and given her in mystic marriage to the Sun.

  It is not a vast leap from this to Lucian Taylor conjuring up the lost Roman world of Isca Silurum and dwelling there as Avallaunius in his splendid garden of delights. Did the ‘mystic marriage’ allusion inspire Lucian’s fantasy of being summoned to the dark sabbat with his flame-haired streetwalker mistress, when the nightmares of Gwent and London are intermingled in phantasmagorical delirium? Though of course Machen’s imagination, weirder than Wilde’s, was rich enough not to require any such stimulus.

  Yet, as Lord Henry Wotton says, ‘Nothing is ever quite true’. It may be that Machen had a different passage in mind, and readers of Dorian Gray might care to suggest other influences. It is perfectly feasible that all the above is a coincidence. More than five years passed between Dorian’s début in print and Machen beginning The Hill of Dreams. Because Dorian’s identification with the ancient world is not a vital part of the story it is possible that Machen may have entirely forgotten this sub-plot. The influence of Dorian Gray may lie in Lucian’s amoral, and very Wildean, detachment from notions of good and evil while he resides in the garden of Avallaunius. Lucian dismisses as absurd the insistence on ethics as ‘the chief interest of the human pageant’. As one of Wilde’s more tiresome maxims has it, ‘Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right and wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.’ In Wilde’s novel ‘Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realise his conception of the beautiful.’ Similarly, ‘Lucian saw a coloured and complex life displayed before him, and he sat enraptured at the spectacle, not concerned to know whether actions were good or bad, but content if they were curious.’ In his Arthur Machen (1964) Wesley D. Sweetser ascribes this philosophy to the author, since Machen was famously opposed to moral didacticism in art—consider his original Introduction to The House of Souls—but surely Machen is dispassionately depicting Lucian’s state of mind here. He is not necessarily endorsing his hero’s decadent phase. Consider the lustful Roman beauty in Chapter Four who sends her slave to die in the arena after she has seduced him; and, in Chapter Six, after startling the woman in the mist, Lucian yearns for ‘some dark place where they might celebrate and make the marriage of the Sabbath, with such rites as he had dared to imagine’. Do these sentiments win Machen’s approval? Hardly; but to condemn them would be to state the obvious and fall into the didactic trap.

  There may be another minor influence from a Wilde story on one of Machen’s works from the 1890s. Readers might care to hunt for it. One can perhaps detect the influence of Wildean paradox in Mr Dyson’s observation on Edgar Russell to ‘Miss Leicester’ in The Three Impostors that ‘no Carthusian monk can emulate the cloistral seclusion in which a realistic novelist loves to shroud himself. It is his way of observing human nature.’

  Anyone who has read or leafed through Marius the Epicurean (1885) by Wilde’s master Walter Pater—hailed as ‘the golden book of English prose’ by George Moore—may find elements possibly relating to The Hill of Dreams. Although Machen confessed himself bored by Pater, Glen Cavaliero has detected ‘Paterian echoes’ in the last chapter of The Hill of Dreams. Lucian’s namesake, the classical writer, makes an appearance in Marius. Had Lucian gone to Oxford, for ‘B.N.C.’—Brasenose College—to knock all the ‘nonsense’ from his head, as his father forlornly hoped, he would doubtless have encountered the university’s ‘saint of sensation’, a fellow of Brasenose. Despite his eventual tragedy, readers can only be grateful that Lucian opted instead for ‘the city of the unending murmuring streets’.

  Iain Smith and Roger Dobson outside the Hanbury Arms, overlooking the River Usk, Caerleon, March 1990.

  NEW ARABIAN FRIGHTS: UNHOLY TRINITIES AND THE MASKS OF HELEN

  Faunus 19, Summer 2009

  ‘Do you think I should waste my time and yours by concocting fictions on a bench in Leicester Square?’

  Helen/Miss Lally in The Three Impostors

  ‘I am not what I seem.’

  Clara/Teresa in The Dynamiter

  Every reader of The Three Impostors must have pondered on its central conceit: why does Machen fabricate fantastic narratives only to undermine them by revealing they are inventions? The technique was partly to fit his title: the trio of villains not only masquerade as people they are not but provide complex back stories for their characters. Decades before it became fashionable, Machen is playing teasing fictional games with the reader, exploring the art of narrative itself. The French Lieutenan
t’s Woman (1969) by John Fowles1 is the most celebrated example of this genre, boldly admitting it is fiction. In the significantly numbered Chapter Thirteen Fowles tells his readers everything they have read so far is false and never happened: ‘This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind.’ Despite this reneging on the tacit contract between author and reader we continue, if only to discover what other innovations the author has up his sleeve. His novel famously has two misleading chapters and a dual ending—one happy and one sad—while Fowles himself appears as a minor character.

  Our suspension of disbelief is activated every time we pick up a novel. We know Sherlock Holmes, Heathcliff, Mr Pickwick, Roderick Usher, Catherine Sloper and Sarah Woodruff never existed, but how often does this occur to us when we are enjoying their exploits? They are so much more engaging than most of the real-life people we know. Machen estimated that Mr Micawber was born somewhere about 1785, yet how many real people were as alive? The status of fictional characters is hardly ever questioned by us: we simply accept the convention that the world of fiction is worth exploring because we know we shall be entertained, informed and diverted. On the simplest level, when there is already a good deal in the world to weep about, beings that have never existed have the power to make us cry.

  There exist individuals, and we have doubtless all met them, who have no time for fiction. Fiction is all invented and untrue, so why bother? It requires a certain degree of imagination to enter into the spirit of a story. At the other extreme are those strange souls who write to 221B Baker Street in the hope that the great man is still in practice and will be able to aid them in some way. Then there are the folk who live in hope of one day finding the Necronomicon on the dusty shelves of a second-hand bookshop. Surely Lovecraft only thought he was writing fantasy: cosmic forces were controlling him and using him as a mouthpiece, though he knew it not. Why, the very name of his grimoire came to him in a dream: surely proof of its existence. Similarly, actors playing nasty pieces of work in television drama can find themselves assaulted by viewers, unwittingly paying tribute to the power of their performances.

  It is not clear how much Machen realised he was experimenting with the line dividing fiction from the fiction that overtly declares itself as such. In The Three Impostors he is telling lies as all fiction writers, good and bad, do, convincing us that the impossible is true, then dynamiting—a key word in this context—the whole edifice and admitting that the stories are just stories. The process has similarities with that of Ann Radcliffe whose supernaturalism is ultimately rationalised, much to the annoyance of M.R. James and Lovecraft. As James wrote in ‘Some Remarks on Ghost Stories’, Mrs Radcliffe explained away her phantoms ‘with exasperating timidity’. In ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ Lovecraft commented that she had ‘a provoking custom of destroying her own phantoms at the last through laboured mechanical explanations’.

  Yet how thoroughly Machen destroyed his phantoms, if without mechanical explanations, in the Impostors. S.T. Joshi’s puzzlement in The Weird Tale (1990) is legitimate: why does Machen undermine, and so weaken, his supernatural narratives? Complete consistency is not to be found, or even desired, in Machen. He attacks works with a didactic purpose in his foreword to The House of Souls and immediately embarks upon the exceedingly didactic The Secret Glory. In The London Adventure he says he cannot read George MacDonald’s dream fantasy Phantastes (1858) ‘with any relish, simply because it tells you in the first few sentences that there is not a word of truth it in; that it is an allegory and nothing more’. Yet in the Impostors the stories are similarly revealed as fantasies. Had he wished Machen could have made Miss Lally and Miss Leicester recount stories that are not ultimately exposed as fakes. It would surely be enough to suit his title that she and the other impostors had assumed false names. Machen states in the Henry Danielson bibliography that he had the title, from the fanciful De Tribus Impostoribus, ready in his notebook from 1885. Interestingly, there seem to be four impostors in the book: Joseph Walters refers to ‘the man calling himself Dr Lipsius’.2 This suggests that this name is also a pseudonym.

  Machen has freely borrowed the manner and the style of Robert Louis Stevenson, from More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1885) but he has also transformed—transmuted perhaps is the more appropriate term—and improved on his model. R.L.S. has the greater reputation, but Machen’s book is more powerful because he writes not of anarchists but of darker matters. In ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ Lovecraft argued that the work’s ‘merit as a whole is somewhat marred by an imitation of the jaunty Stevenson manner’, but the jauntiness is part of the book’s charm. Who would be without Dyson’s slightly pompous observations on life and literature?

  The stories in The Dynamiter were originally related by Fanny Stevenson in 1883 at La Solitude, a chalet at Hyères, Switzerland, after near-fatal pneumonia and a haemorrhage confined R.L.S. to bed. Having caught Egyptian ophthalmia, running wild through the district, he asked Fanny to take a walk each day and recite a tale to him in the evening. Thus Fanny became a real-life Scheherazade. This was the period of Fenian outrages in London and Fanny invented a series of dynamite tales. Later the stories were written down, continued and revised at Skerryvore in Bournemouth, with R.L.S. still seated, as he said, on ‘Charon’s pier-head’.

  Fanny’s ‘Story of the Destroying Angel’ is the most effective tale in the book: would that all the stories in The Dynamiter measure up to this high standard. It comes as a surprise and a letdown that the story is entirely bogus. According to Roger G. Swearingen’s bibliography of R.L.S., Fanny wrote the ‘Story of the Destroying Angel’ and the ‘Story of the Fair Cuban’ and Stevenson ‘Zero’s Tale of the Explosive Bomb’. The impetus for the book was the bomb blast in the Victorian railway station cloakroom in 1884. Portmanteaus with dynamite triggered by clockwork mechanism that failed to go off were found the next day at other railway stations. When a bomb detonated in Westminster Hall in the House of Commons early in 1885, Police Constable William Cole and Sergeant Thomas Cox were injured. The two policemen were made the dedicatees of the book.

  In The Dynamiter, meeting on the northern pavement of Leicester Square, after years of separation, Paul Somerset and Edward Challoner, adjourn to the Bohemian Cigar Divan in Soho, where they are joined by a third young man about town, Harry Desborough. Prince Florizel of Bohemia, the pre-Ruritanian hero of New Arabian Nights, operating under the nom de plume of Theophilus Godall, runs the Cigar Divan in Rupert Street. (Rupert Street is a regular Machen locale. He sets scenes in ‘The Great God Pan’ and ‘The Inmost Light’ in the unnamed Florence Restaurant, alluded to in ‘A Wonderful Woman’ and in ‘The Lost Club’ as Azario’s. Machen lived in Rupert Street while an actor at the turn of the twentieth century.)

  In this sequel Prince Florizel is no longer centre stage. At the end of the ‘The Rajah’s Diamond’ in the Nights Stevenson states that through his neglect of his realm a revolution has cost Florizel the throne of Bohemia: ‘his Highness now keeps a cigar store in Rupert Street, much frequented by other foreign refugees’.

  Conversing in the Cigar Divan, the three companions Somerset, Challoner and Desborough are waiting for something to turn up, but all are as ‘futile as the devil’. Challoner plays a fair hand of whist while Somerset, like his creator, has studied as a barrister, though he admits he knows little of the law. He resolves that the trio should turn detective—‘the only profession for a gentleman’, he claims. It could be argued that the vocation of detective is the very last profession a gentleman should pursue; the trio in the book prove laughably incompetent. Somerset’s speech on Chance is reflected in Dyson’s hymn to fate in the Impostors. Somerset says:

  Chance, the blind Madonna of the Pagan, rules this terrestrial bustle; and in Chance I place my sole reliance. Chance has brought us three together; when we next separate and go forth our several ways, Chance will continually drag before our eyes a thousand eloquent clues, no
t to this mystery only [a reward is offered for information about a man in a sealskin coat seen in Green Park—Zero—one of the dynamiters], but to the countless mysteries by which we live surrounded.

  After finding the Gold Tiberius Dyson vows to ‘go forth like a knight-errant in search of adventure. Not that I shall need to seek; rather adventure will seek me; I shall be like a spider in the midst of his web, responsive to every movement, and ever on the alert’. These speeches prepare the ground for the coincidences occurring throughout both books. In The Dynamiter Stevenson calls London ‘the city of encounters, the Bagdad of the West’. Machen alludes to this in ‘The Great God Pan’, when Villiers, standing outside the Rupert Street restaurant, surveys the passers-by with curiosity, thinking, ‘London has been called the city of encounters; it is more than that, it is the city of resurrections. . . .’ One can detect, here and there, subtle touches where Machen pays homage to his predecessors. Significantly, Dyson and Phillipps meet one another in a tobacconist’s shop in Great Queen Street, where Dyson repairs to expound his opinions on literature to anyone willing to lend an ear. Phillipps is presumably the same character—note the unusual spelling of his name—from ‘The Lost Club’, Machen’s pastiche of ‘The Suicide Club’, now elevated into an ethnologist and more suited than Dyson to appreciate Miss Lally’s scientific discourse on the Black Seal. Machen’s unholy trinity, two men and a woman, correspond to the Stevensons’ troublemaking trio. Leicester Square, where the heroes of The Dynamiter meet, is the scene of Miss Lally’s narrative, recounted on a bench, of the Black Seal, and the locus of an abortive bomb attempt by one of the plotters. Clara Luxmore/Asenath Fonblanque spins her web on a Hyde Park bench.