Portrait of the Writer as a Young Man Responding to Editors and Critics

by Tony Fonseca

05/02/2006

Machen, Arthur. The Great God Pan and The Hill of Dreams. Mineola, NY: Dover Editions, 2006. 236 p.

Looking at the Dover Publications 2006 Arthur Machen edition, including two of his best known novellas, The Great God Pan and The Hill of Dreams, I am reminded of a couple of musings I recently read by poets William Carlos Williams and Philip Larkin.  In I Wanted to Write a Poem and Required Writing, both Williams and Larkin respectively argue that the worst thing a writer can do is listen too much to the public, to follow too closely the trends in an effort to be more commercially viable. Neither man did, and both are revered as being two of the better poetic voices of the century.  I mention this because if there is any reason at all that I can recommend that one go out and purchase a new edition of two novellas that have been through more than a dozen editions each and can be found in almost any decent Machen collection (in the case of The Great God Pan, in any decent historical horror anthology as well), it is for the author's introductory notes to the two classics.

In both introductions, readers are allowed to become intimate with the worst fear of any writer—that not a single reviewer or editor will respect his work.

For any of you outsider authors out there, the introductory notes to The Great God Pan ought to bring solace and a sense of vindication.  The problems with classics is that readers see them as having always existed as highly esteemed works, as if  they had sprung fully published and well-received from the author's head. Machen's notes to what has been uniformly considered one of the 100 best horror stories ever is a sobering reminder of the reality behind authorship, especially when a writer attempts something new, different, experimental, or in this case, shocking.  After all, the raison d'etre of any publishing house is to make money, and the types of literature that sell well are those that are familiar, those that are safe.  Not to spoil this wonderful introduction by Machen, suffice it to say that he had a little trouble getting his masterpiece published, and afterwards had to deal with being called a “second rate” Robert Louis Stevenson for much of his writing career.  But more on that later.

For those of you who are not familiar with The Great God Pan, it is a wonderfully gossipy story of sexual depravity and decadence in Victorian London, populated with elitist nobility who are more than familiar with the seediest parts of London's streets, yet are driven to commit suicide when they are faced with the ultimate in depravity—Dionysian excess.  What makes the tale a classic is what novelist Graham Joyce calls its use of “some of the standard furniture of the modern ghost or horror tale: a bungled experiment; a terrified doctor's dying testament; memoirs of a scholar of the supernatural; unspeakable manuscripts and the shocking portfolio of a dead artist.”  But as Joyce points out, what makes The Great God Pan brilliant is the method by which it is told.

Machen uses the friend of a friend of a friend technique.  While the story begins in the laboratory of the mad doctor Raymond (with an experiment witnessed by his assistant, Clarke), it quickly moves in time to some eighteen years later, in the streets of London.  The main character then becomes a gentleman named Villiers, who goes from friend to friend to piece together the mystery of why so many of London's noblemen are committing suicide, or looking as if they were frightened to death.  Villiers, however, is not a “just the facts, ma'am” detective, nor is he an altruistic human being doing what he can to help his fellow man; rather, he is somewhat of a rake himself, and is the kind of person who likes to “slum” to satisfy his curiosity with the sordid. Therefore, his investigations take on the form of gossip sessions, and are all the more entertaining because the people involved are high society types, and are all male.  Machen handles this masterfully.  As Joyce writes, he “forces the reader to go to the heart of the mystery by the assembly of events like swirling photo-chemicals.”

This is not to say that The Great God Pan is without its flaws. For one, it never becomes truly eerie or disquieting, a la any classic by M. R. James, or Oliver Onion's The Beckoning Fair One.  One would never accuse this story of making his or her hair stand on end.  Granted, I understand the idea behind having the horror emerge slowly, gradually taking center stage, something that the new Japanese horror writers and filmmakers master beautifully.  However, this method presupposes that at some point the horrifying entity will get the spotlight, and will be scary.  That never happens here. Rather, all evil is related via innuendo, all manifestations of that evil and interactions with victims occur offstage, and the story ends with a scene reminiscent of Poe's “Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.”  Disgusting?  Maybe.  Scary or disquieting?  Hardly. 

And then there is the idea of creating the ultimate sexually and morally decadent monster—and having it relinquished simply by threatening to expose its human form to the police, so that it is forced to hasten its own demise.  This ranks right up there with the worst of King and Straub, such as killing a monster by singing at it or showing solidarity among humans.  All this reviewer can say is that if the true nature of evil cannot possibly be this wimpy.  It would stand to reason that evil incarnate would be more than a little self-assured and confrontational, and would scoff at such measly attempts to control it.

Nonetheless, sometimes a trip is worth taking because the journey is more fun than the destination.  The Great God Pan is such a trip.

Unfortunately for Machen, as his introduction to The Hill of Dreams attests, he listened to the critics that called him a second rate version of Stevenson, and attempted to change his style to placate those criticisms.  One of the results is The Hill of Dreams, which for good reason is not as well known as The Great God Pan.  To use again the metaphor of the journey, if this novella were a journey, it would be one filled with so many rest stops and tangential side street diversions that even the driver would be silently asking “are we there yet.”  The Hill of Dreams has been attacked as being a second-rate Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, an overly sentimental version of Die Lieden des Jungen Werther, which may be harsh.  My criticism, however, would differ not in kind, but in degree.  Imagine Anne Rice's penchant for unnecessary description multiplied exponentially, and you have some idea of the density of the prose style Machen “discovered” in reaction to his detractors.  Nonetheless, even the harshest critics of the tale point to Machen's “evocation of the magical Welsh countryside” (seen in certain chapters of The Great God Pan as well, though not fully developed).  But a few pastoral descriptions and ominous premonitions do not a good gothic tale make.  Still, for the most part, perhaps in deference to the author’s standing, this novella receives critical acclaim from scholars and fans of classic horror alike.

Sitting down to write my own thoughts about The Hill of Dreams, I am reminded of my review of David Searcy's Ordinary Horror, another work which received a good bit of critical acclaim.  To put it simply, I have a problem with anything of the length of a novel or novella that never strays from the consciousness of one character.  Let's be realistic here: in order for this to work, that one character had better be fascinating, and had better be someone with whom most people can identify—or that character should have the power of uniquely expressing ideas so that even the mundane becomes menacing or wonderous.  The young narrator of this novella, Master Lucian Taylor, a would-be writer, is simply not interesting.  To make matters worse, NOTHING ever happens in this novella, which has the potential to make even Henry James seem like an action-adventure novelist.  James, in fact, once wrote (although I think he broke his rule quite often) that the worst thing a writer could do was fail to be interesting.  The Hill of Dreams, like many James novels, contains a lot of interesting sentences; it just does not contain much of a story.

So now to roll the ball down Machen's metaphoric hill towards the overwhelming question: should you, the reader of this review, go out and buy this edition?  The best answer to that probably lies in my own intention for this text.  Simply stated, this book will not make it to my bookshelf, which I will admit contains only choice and hard-to-find titles.  But it will not be relegated to obscurity either (i.e., I will not 86 it).  It's one of those titles that I feel is important enough to grace the shelf of an academic library, so that others might have access to Machen's introductory deliberations.  I certainly would not agree that The Hill of Dreams is Machen's Joycean portrait of the writer; however, as a whole, this edition is a window into the mind of one of the masters of traditional horror, and as such has value.  In addition, I am a big fan of the Dover editions of reissued classics.  If I could think of one excellent reason for Machen fans, and fans of horror in general, to buy this edition, it would be to encourage Dover to keep 'em coming.