Following the Music

As deputy literary editor of the Independent on Sunday in the mid-1990s, it was my job to organize and compile several of the routine book columns and features every week. One such was the long-running ‘The Book that Changed Me’. It involved typing up a short telephone interview with a literary or other type of celebrity; less frequently, the contributor would write the copy themselves. It can be difficult to drum up fresh ideas once a column has been underway for some time, but we never ran short of suggestions and contribu­tions. One highlight for me was hearing Christopher Lee declaim at length down the line in Elvish, in his fanatical enthusiasm for The Lord of the Rings. I can only imagine how delighted he must have been to be offered the part of Saruman.

This little feature was more profound than it might have looked at first glance; it wasn’t merely ‘my favourite book’ but the rather more exacting ‘the book that changed me’. Some ideas were turned down as not quite fulfilling the brief. As with most newspaper features, the piece was usually ‘pegged’ to a timely event or release. The cellist Julian Lloyd Webber must have had a forthcoming album to pro­mote when his publicist contacted me with a pitch. What surprised me about Lloyd Webber’s choice was that I had never heard of the author, let alone the book – Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams. His impassioned manner during the interview impressed me. Although I no longer remember in detail what was said, this mysterious novel, first published in 1907, immediately became a book I wanted to get my hands on. But, appropriately as it turned out for such a mystical writer, it proved difficult to track down. Machen’s work should really be discovered after a vigorous quest, rather than at the click of a button. The search should involve much scanning of dusty shelves in out-of-the-way bookshops in quiet towns. One such establishment, on its last legs, yielded a signed copy, numbered 22, of Machen’s The Shining Pyramid (Martin Secker, 1925, 42s). The elderly, bearded bookseller let me have it for a tenner on account of the wormholes. (Bookshop and proprietor had both utterly vanished on a subsequent visit, which seemed somehow very appropriate.) Other volumes of Machen began to accumulate on my shelves, as well as associated material: the graphic novelist Alan Moore is a fan, featuring Machen extensively in his book A Disease of Language (2005). I even went on a Machen-themed walk one Sunday, starting at the British Museum and led by a man whose gleaming eyes and long pointed fingernails were equally disconcerting. The Three Impostors of 1895 had been republished by Oxford Classics. A novella, The Great God Pan (1894), had come out with a small press. But of The Hill of Dreams I found no trace, until a battered 1970s paperback was eventually run to ground in an occult bookshop in Bloomsbury. The price reflected the book’s rarity rather than its condition. Once devoured, that paperback was eventually launched back into the sea of the second-hand, to find a new Machen enthusiast. My current copy is the handsome 2006 hardback edition from Tartarus Press, in which luxuriously thick pages add bulk to a fairly slender text: seven dense and luscious chapters detailing the rapturous boy­hood and despondent manhood of one Lucian Taylor, like Machen himself the son of a Welsh clergyman. Mark Valentine’s perceptive introduction remarks on the ‘sense of some secret reality behind the outward form of the world’ which ‘Arthur Machen strove . . . to communicate in all his work, especially in this, his finest book’. Born in 1863, Machen grew up in Caerleon and went to London in his teens to scrape a living on the fringes of the book trade, and his experiences of poverty fed directly into the analogous story of Lucian Taylor. Machen had begun this visionary work a decade before publication, while living in Verulam Buildings in Gray’s Inn, where friends included M. P. Shiel, the writer of macabre tales, and A. E. Waite, of Rider-Waite tarot deck fame. For a masterpiece, its passage into print was surprisingly rocky. Repeated rejections, even accusations of madness, ensued before the world was ready for Lucian’s story. The opening chapters deal with the young Lucian’s rapturous explorations of the hills and vales around Caermaen (the fictionalized Caerleon) with its deserted Roman fort. ‘He liked history, but he loved to meditate on a land laid waste, Britain deserted by the legions, the rare pavements riven by frost, Celtic magic still brooding on the wild hills and in the black depths of the forests, the rosy marbles stained with rain, and the walls growing grey.’ It is a lonely adoles­cence, with the scholarly yet academically unsuccessful boy alienated from his peers. The adjective ‘healthy’ is used of the local bully with some scorn. The cataclysmic central experience of Lucian’s life takes place in the deserted Roman fort. Exhausted by the climb up to it, he flops to the ground, ‘indulging a virgin mind in its wanderings’. His clothes seem to fall off of their own accord; he cannot see his hands. The reverie intensifies, ‘the gleaming bodily vision of a strayed faun. Quick flames now quivered in the substance of his nerves, secrets of life passed trem­bling through his brain, unknown desires stung him.’ He awakes nearly an hour later, in confusion, ‘as with electric heat, sudden remem­brance possessed him. A flaming blush shone red on his cheeks, and glowed and thrilled through his limbs.’ Profoundly shaken, Lucian makes his way back home, determined to capture the visionary experi­ence in words. His path – to become a writer – seems clear. Yet the path is filled with obstacles. His father’s social status as vicar has been eroded by his unorthodox views. The smug pettiness of the locals revolts Lucian, with very few kindly souls willing to give the boy a chance. He gradually learns to abstract himself from soci­ety, but his calm contemplation of the torture of a helpless puppy by the ‘healthy’ lad makes for the novel’s most horrible scene. Machen’s presentation of Lucian is ambivalent, never moralistic, as befits a work of the decadent fin-de-siècle. (Machen had been a casual acquaintance of Oscar Wilde.) On the other hand, Lucian’s bitterly funny denunciations of successful contemporary fiction have the ring of being Machen’s own. The Hill of Dreams owes a clear debt to J. K. Huysmans’s 1884 novel À rebours, whose protagonist, Des Esseintes, withdraws from a surly, uncouth world into a private haven of aesthetic delights. Lacking Des Esseintes’s fortune, Lucian finds refuge only in his imagination, choosing to live, not in present-day Caermaen, but in the town as it was at the time of the Romans. In visions, he drinks the ancient vintage, sees the torchbearers, hears ‘the crash of cymbals, the calling of the flutes, and the surge of the wind in the great dark wood’. Hence the significance of Machen for occultists, for whom to imagine is to experience and become. Transposed to London in one of Machen’s skilful time-shifts, Lucian tries desperately to fix his visions on the page in a drab west London bedsitter. The portrait of a part of town now gentrified (Machen lived in Notting Hill) but then still surrounded by rem­nants of farmland is fascinating. As earlier he tramped the Welsh hills, now Lucian wanders the streets, high on hunger and self-righteousness. The broken trees, smouldering brick-kilns and encroaching villas, row upon identical row, fill him with horror. In another great set-piece he wanders at night among shops lit by gas-jets and naphtha lamps, aghast at the cackling and howling of the populace: drunken women and men, discordant music and crazed dancing. ‘He was oppressed by the grim conceit that he himself still slept within the matted thicket, imprisoned by the green bastions of the Roman fort. He had never come out, but a changeling had gone down the hill, and now stirred about the earth.’ Julian Lloyd Webber contended that The Hill of Dreams is dear to musicians for being the closest words can come to having the effect of music. Certainly it’s not a book you read for the plot. It’s a verbal symphony evoking dream states and ever-changing moods, from light and playful to blank and despairing. Though there are passages of sharp realism, it leaves the reader with impressions rather than characters or incidents (the puppy excepted). Its most dramatic events occur on the astral plane rather than in the everyday. Lucian’s great love affair with local girl Annie seemingly takes place entirely in his own head, the farmer’s daughter becoming Astarte, Venus, even such sinister avatars of womanhood as Salome. As a portrait of intense loneliness and isolation, the novel could not be more timely. Machen leaves us one last ambiguity to ponder: just how good a writer is Lucian? Is his plight due to the habitual contempt of medi­ocrity for genius, or is he merely a hyper-sensitive who lacks the talent to express his insights? Linger in these pages and you too may find yourself tormented by the clashing of cymbals and the eerie piping of flutes.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 73 © Suzi Feay 2022