A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult

by Gary Lachman

  Although written in 1897, during Machen's most creative decade, The Hill of Dreams would not find a publisher until 1907. The reason is simple: if not the most decadent book in all of English literature, it's certainly a good candidate; the scenes of self-flagellation alone suggest that. Its ironic that it took a decade to find a publisher: in writing the book, Machen was consciously attempting to fashion a new style. The Three Impostors, a fascinating, if erratic occult adventure, met with even more criticism than The Great God Pan. The book was a commercial failure, and Machen, seen as merely a second-rate. Stevenson, was determined to recreate himself as a writer. Drawing on his own harrowing early days in London, Machen set out to write a "Robinson Crusoe of the soul," a book that would embody the aesthetic philosophy that he would later spell out in his work of literary criticism, Hieroglyphics (1906): the belief that ecstasy, not fidelity to life, was the touchstone of real literature.

  Though a slim novel the work took Machen two years to finish, and it's possible that in depicting his own descent into hell through the figure of Lucian Taylor, Machen worked off some of his hatred of modernity. At any rate, the frisson of horror and decadence is less apparent in his later writings, the mystical light less tinted by the demonic. He had, I think, got through some of his world rejection, and in his imagination worked out the fate of an individual who adopts Axel's attitude toward life, yet lacks the spiritual stamina to put something in its place. Like Brother Serapion, Lucian lifts anchor on reality, and embarks on a dream voyage. Unlike Brother Serapion, he found no safe harbour in a monastery and slowly goes under. Increasingly, the qualities that set Lucian apart from other people, his genius and sensitivity, draw him into an underworld of his own dreams, visions and fantasies, until eventually his link with the world is severed. The Hill of Dreams has its roots in The Golden Flower Pot, and depicts a third choice along with the foot of the cross and the barrel of a gun: madness.

  Guy De Maupassant

  Although known for the most part as a laconic and cynical chronicler of late-19th century French manners, Guy De Maupassant had a lifelong obsession with madness and death. This later emerged in a series of gruesome and disturbing supernatural tales, whose mood is quite unlike that of his more famous stories, like "La Parure" and "Soule-de-suif." Some commentators suggest Maupassant's morbidity started with the mummified hand of a parricide given to him at fourteen by the poet Swinburne. If Swinburne thought it an appropriate gift, however, he must have known Maupassant already had a taste for such items. Maupassant grew up in a household familiar with mental abnormality. His mother suffered from a variety of neurotic and hysterical complaints, and his younger brother Herve had an unstable personality and would eventually die insane. That Maupassant himself would succumb to the same fate suggests that in some way his fascination with madness and premature death was an intuition of what lay ahead.

  Guy De Maupassant was born in Chateau de Miromesnil, near Dieppe in Normandy on 5 August 1850. His father, the son of a successful business man, was a handsome amateur painter who had a reputation as a dandy. His mother, a brilliant and strong willed neurotic, was equally well off but more cultivated than her husband. She had an interest in philosophy and literature and was a friend of the novelist Gustave Flaubert, later the young writer's mentor. At Guy's birth the doctor gave his head a vigorous massage, rounding it off like a pot with a twirl of his thumb. This, he said, would ensure an active brain and a first rate-intelligence. Whether it was the doctor's handiwork or not, Guy grew up a very bright little boy. His parent's relationship, however, was crumbling, and at the age of six, Guy's father left him and his younger brother to be brought up by his mother. Extremely territorial, she would prove to be the strongest influence on his life. In later life Maupassant saw women as things to be enjoyed - he was an obsessive seducer - and his stories have a strong misogynist streak, and often depict the weakness of a negligent father.

  At thirteen Maupassant was sent to a seminary near Rouen; here he spent three unhappy years before being expelled. In his teens he came under the influence of the poet Louis Bouillet who introduced him to Flaubert's circle. After finishing at the lycee Maupassant saw service in the FrancoPrussian war and many of his stories depict the cruelty and stupidity he experienced during this time; it was probably then that he developed his lifelong pessimism, corroborated by a reading of Schopenhauer. (He would later write to a friend "On certain days I experience the horror of everything that is . . .") Although writing constantly, under Flaubert's advice Maupassant took a position with the government, working as a clerk in Paris, and refrained from publishing. He earned a precarious living and hated the job, but at same time under the master's tutelage he learned his craft. For the next ten years, Maupassant worked diligently and patiently at his task. Then, in 1880, only a few weeks before Flaubert's death, his first book appeared.

  Maupassant's story, "Soule de suif," appeared in the collection Les Soirees de Medan, published under the auspices of Emile Zola. (J.K.Huysmans was also a contributor.) The book was a success and Maupassant's story was singled out as a masterpiece. His introduction to the literary world couldn't have been more different than Arthur Machen's, and almost immediately Maupassant was a bestselling author, with newspapers clamouring for his articles. Maupassant quickly made enough money to build a villa in Rouen; he also bought a house for his mother, and for himself a yacht, on which he spent a good deal of his time sailing.31 A great lover of the physical world - Maupassant in many ways reminds us of Hemingway or Albert Camus - he enjoyed sport, travel and sex. For the next decade he worked at a highly lucrative and well publicized career. Calling himself an industriel des lettres (literature manufacture) he wrote mainly for money, and produced close to three hundred stories, along with six novels, some plays, travel writings, and hundreds of articles. Yet the beginning of his rise also saw the first signs of the malady that would kill him. During a sailing excursion on the Seine, Maupassant contracted syphilis. His doctors, however, didn't recognize this and it went untreated; now the first symptoms began to show. Maupassant's eyes became extremely sensitive, and he took to wearing dark glasses. He complained of "head pains," and took a variety of drugs for relief. For one in particular, ether, he developed a taste, and used it regularly, enjoying its stimulating effects; in a short story, "Reves" ("Dreams"), he describes how under its influence he felt that ,,all mysteries were solved;" his brain "became a battlefield of ideas" and he saw himself "a superior being, armed with an invincible intelligence" and experienced a "fierce joy in the discovery of my power." This sense of a powerful superior being would hover in the background of Maupassant's mind, eventually coalescing into a threatening presence.

  Many of Maupassant's horror stories centre on the uncertain borderline between sanity and madness and question our everyday assumptions about reality. The titles themselves suggest this: "Mad?", "Was it a Dream?", "Am I Insane?", "He?", "Who Knows?". Like many occultists, Maupassant was fascinated with the idea that our senses reveal only a fraction of reality; and like R.M. Bucke, Maupassant believed in a superior `coming race', an evolutionary advance that would eventually supplant us. Yet unlike Bucke, Maupassant did not believe that this super race was a future development that would arise out of present humanity, but that it already exists in a dimension or sphere unperceived and hence unknown to us. Superior beings already share the planet, and are preparing our downfall. Where many saw higher space as a region of wonder and insight, Maupassant recognized it as the source of a threat.

  The idea that beings exist in a kind of matter or dimension too fine or subtle for our senses to detect is a familiar one in occultism. Bulwer-Lytton discusses it in Zanoni, as does Poe in his `magnetic tales'. Eliphas Levi talked about it in his reflections on astral light and the notion of a fourth dimension found a home in the doctrines of spiritualists. Maupassant was a great reader of Poe as well as of Hoffmann, and he was fascinated by abnormal mental states. In the 1880s he attended the psychiatrist J.M. Charcot's famous lectu
res at the Salpetriere Hospital (as did Sigmund Freud). Journalists, writers and famous actresses would sit enthralled during Charcot's exhibitions of hypnotism and grande hysterie.32 Maupassant was also fascinated by Mesmer and mesmerism and mesmerists and magnetism appear in several tales. In "Was He Mad?" the magnetist Jacques Parent is cursed with a kind of telekinetic power, the ability to move objects at a distance, and is forced to conceal his hands lest the strange force operate against his will. In "Magnetism" Maupassant combines his interest in strange forces with his central entertainment, seduction. Here a sceptic explains an apparent precognitive vision leading to a spontaneous erotic encounter as sheer coincidence. For Maupassant, as for Balzac and other earlier Romantics, `magnetism' was a catch-all term for paranormal phenomena, and here Maupassant links it to the more common animal kind. In "Who Knows?," inanimate objects move of their own accord, and the phenomena so shatters the narrator that he puts himself in an asylum, a remarkable intimation of Maupassant's own fate.

  Another obsession of Maupassant's was the `double', an `other self who appears in several of his stories. In "He?" a man marries solely in order to avoid solitude; when alone he is plagued by a vision of his doppelganger. Maupassant himself told a friend that, "Every other time I come home, I see my double. I open my door, and I see him sitting in my armchair." Maupassant was known for his practical jokes, and this may have been one of them. But it is also possible that he suffered from external autoscopy, the phenomena of seeing one's body in front of oneself, and that his abuse of ether and other drugs may have been the source of this. In any case, the fear of some other who will take over his life appears in many of Maupassant's weird tales. With the remaining writers in this section - August Strindberg, Gustav Meyrink, and Andrei Bely - we can see Maupassant as a devotee of what we might call psychotic occultism.

  Like Strindberg (and many others we've seen), Maupassant believed that madness might not be a pathological condition, but merely an ultrasensitivity to unperceived phenomena. This, in effect, is a standard Romantic and decadent assumption. In an early version of Maupassant's classic story, "The Horla," the narrator of "Letter From a Madman" explains to his doctor that he "was on the verge of discovering a secret of the universe." He has, he tells him "seen an invisible being." The experience was frightening and he "almost died of terror." The being, he is sure, is intent on dominating him, and now he waits for its return ... In the final version of "The Horla," Maupassant uses the device of a diary to depict the slow deterioration of the narrator's will and his eventual path to suicide as the result of his awareness of an invisible creature". The title itself is suggestive: hors means `outside', but is also the first syllable of horrible. "Horla", Maupassant's coinage, may be translated as "the horror - or horrible thing - from outside."34 This tells us that at least for Maupassant's narrator, if not for himself or his readers, the Horla is not a creature of the imagination, but an objective entity, a being that exists in a nature or reality that lies beyond our feeble senses. This "latent world" is the home of the Horla, who is now intent on colonizing our dimension .. .

  How much Maupassant's incipient madness can account for these ideas is debatable. After "The Horla" (1887), Maupassant went on to write many other works with no connection to horror or the supernatural. We might also wonder if a diseased mind could be the source of the story: madness is usually not responsible for artistic excellence, and "The Horla" is Maupassant at his best: subtle, controlled, economical. Yet if Maupassant and others in the fin de siecle were correct in their belief that at least part of what we call madness is a sensitivity to the inexplicable, then madness in a way played its part. At any rate, by 1891, Maupassant's mind was deteriorating rapidly. He began to suffer from delusions. He saw his own ghost, fired a pistol at an imaginary assailant, and believed his body had been turned to salt. "I have a softening of the brain," he wrote his friend Dr. Henry Cazalis, ". . . the result of washing out my nasal passages with salt water. A saline fermentation has taken place in my brain, and every night my brain runs out through my noise and mouth in a sticky paste. This is imminent death and I am mad ..." Remembering the fate of his insane brother, Maupassant tried to kill himself, but botched the job and was saved by his servant. He was driven to a sanatorium in Paris in a straitjacket, and nineteen months later he died, raving, a month short of his forty-third birthday.

  August Strindberg

  The career of the Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849-1912) shows many parallels with his contemporary Maupassant.35 Both men developed a vivid, economical style and both considered themselves realists, shunning sentimental idealism in favour of the truth. Both were fascinated by abnormal mental states and, for a period at least, Strindberg, like Maupassant, went insane. Unlike Maupassant, however, Strindberg survived his insanity and may be unique in the history of literature as the only writer to write his way out of madness.

  In 1894, after years of painful struggle and almost universal rejection, Strindberg suffered an emotional breakdown that left him incapable of creative work. That Strindberg had reached a dead end isn't surprising. Vilified in his homeland for naturalistic works like Miss Julie and The Father, Strindberg had suffered through two divorces - a third was yet to come - as well as poverty and the loss of his three children from his first marriage. His second marriage, to the Austrian journalist Frida Uhl, had just ended bitterly. This meant estrangement from yet another child and the loss of Frida's considerable dowry. At 45, penniless and alone, that Strindberg might question the point of going on is understandable. But Strindberg had demonic persistence, and after his failure in Sweden and a stint in Berlin, he looked to Paris for a last assault on fame.

  By 1893, some of Strindberg's works had already been performed in Paris, but it was more than literary glory that attracted him. Although a founder of naturalism, Strindberg had a deep interest in magic and mysticism and in the 1890s, Paris, as we've seen, was the occult capital of the world. Strindberg was also fascinated with science, and like Goethe before him, Strindberg thought that he too was a scientist. In 1893 he published his first work of speculative natural history, Antibarbarus, "Anti-barbarian," the man of genius against the academic plodders. Goethe set his own theory of colour against Isaac Newton's, and Strindberg too believed that his poet's eye saw more deeply than that of the professors. Also like Goethe, when it came to the occult, Strindberg's central interest was alchemy.

  By 1894, there were an estimated 50,000 alchemists in Paris. Undoubtedly, between 1894 and 1896, Strindberg experienced a schizophrenic episode, but it's just possible that the weird phenomena he recounts in his obsessive record Inferno - based, in part, on his even more bizarre Occult Diary - didn't originate solely in a mental breakdown. Without doubt, all the ingredients of paranoid schizophrenia are there, abetted in part by Strindberg's taste for absinthe. But the strange events that make up Strindberg's Inferno are precisely the sort that fuelled one of the burning questions of the age: the thin line between genius and madness.

  Throughout his career, Strindberg had periodic bouts of revulsion against literature. His artistic credo practically ensured this. "I regard it as my dreadful duty to be truthful," he wrote, "and life is indescribably ugly," a statement echoing Maupassant's grim pessimism. Such sentiments prompted his devotion to alchemy. It may seem strange that, considering himself a scientist, Strindberg chose alchemy as his path to immortality. But Strindberg's approach to science was anything but orthodox. His aim in Antibarbarus was to explain the nature of sulphur, the transmutation of carbon and other elements, and the composition of water and air. Claiming to be a "transformist" like Darwin and a monist like the German naturalist Ernst Haskell, Strindberg declared "I have committed myself to the assumption that all elements and all forces are related. And if they derive from one source, then they sprang into existence by means of condensation and attenuation, of copulation and crossbreeding, of heredity and transformation ... and whatever else one cares to suggest."

  When the book appeare
d, Strindberg's pretensions were dismissed as a sign of monomania, its author lambasted for his lack of logic and incapacity for experiment. But for the alchemist, transformation is the key, and Strindberg's speculative approach is in the great magical tradition. Writing to his young botanist friend Bengt Lidforss, Strindberg said "I doubt all experiments ... I believe rather in the depth of my conscious thought, or more correctly, my unconscious thought ..." His method was to put himself "into a state of unconsciousness, not with drink, but by distractions, games, cards, sleep, novels ... without bothering about results, or acceptability, and something emerges that I can believe in...

  Strindberg's science was right in line with the latest developments in art.36 Earlier Strindberg had published an essay on "The New Arts, or the Role of Chance in Artistic Creation." This, along with another article on "Deranged Sense Impressions," deals with the curious power of the mind to alter its perceptions, to re-create reality. Like many other artists, Strindberg rebelled against the neat objective universe revealed by an increasingly triumphant rationalist science. He argued instead for a world open to strange forces, and the influence of consciousness itself, a position made commonplace decades later with the rise of quantum physics. In "The New Arts" he describes the "oscillations of his sense impressions," and recounts how, seen from a certain angle, a cow becomes two peasants embracing each other, then a tree trunk, and then something else, and how the figures at a picnic are really a ploughman's coat and knapsack thrown over his cart ... Strindberg would later describe his own method of writing as something like a trance state. His considerable absinthe intake surely had a hand in this. Nevertheless, by the next century, with Dada and surrealism, the notion that reality is plastic, and that consciousness and chance affect what we experience, would become commonplace in aesthetic theory.