Arthur Machen, page 1 of 3

I wasn’t sure at first whether I was going to read The Great When, but bought it on a impulse pretty much the day it came out. I haven’t read Moore’s previous novel, the imposing Jerusalem, and stalled on his short story collection Illuminations at the super-long “short story” satirising the comic industry (I’ll wait for the edition with footnotes, if there is one). But I’m glad I read The Great When; it was just right. It kicks off “The Long London”, a five book series that, I’m sure, Moore has got mapped out already, so there’s bound to be elements in this first book whose significance will become evident as the series progresses.

After a somewhat confusing prologue with glimpses of various characters and scenes from World War II Britain (some of whom don’t appear in the rest of the novel, though I can’t really complain about that because I like the opening chapter of A Voyage to Arcturus), the story settles down to one main character, 18-year-old Dennis Knuckleyard, a war-orphan now (1949) living and working at Lowell’s Books & Magazines, which is owned and run by the terrifying Ada Benson — or Coffin Ada, as she’s known, and not entirely because of the consumptive coughing that peppers her every sentence.

Ada sends Dennis on a seemingly simple task: to buy a box of Arthur Machen books from a fellow dealer, saying he can keep the change if he manages to haggle it down below £15. Imagine his joy when the dealer all-too-quickly offers the lot for £5. Included in the box is a book not by Machen, the Reverend Thomas’s A London Walk: Meditations in the Streets of the Metropolis — a book, it turns out, that’s not supposed to exist. It was invented by Machen, and mentioned in one of his more intriguing and subtle tales, “N”. Dennis, of course, doesn’t realise this, he just thinks Coffin Ada will only be pleased with him (or, knowing her, be a little less angry with him) for getting such a bargain. As soon as she discovers the rogue volume, though, she sends him back out with it, saying he’s not to return — and she means she absolutely does not want to see him again — till he’s got the book back to the dealer by any means possible. Of course, when Dennis tries, he not only finds the dealer now dead, but gets chased by a couple of heavies.

Running desperately, he takes an unusual turn — and finds himself somewhere else. Somewhere that shouldn’t be there. Almost as if there’s another version of London, lurking behind the scenes, and he’s somehow found his way into it. Which isn’t to say things have improved. He may have lost his thuggish pursuers, but the street itself — though paved with actual gold — keeps opening its crocodile jaws to try and eat him, while fragments of broken crates and litter begin to animate in a decidedly predatory manner…

Dennis has, it turns out, ended up in a particularly lively area — a “vividistrict”, in fact — of a place that’s variously known as the Great When, Real London, “the superior London”, “London’s theory, not its practice”, “the imaginary o’ London”, “London’s sacred essence”, “the Theoria”, “the Higher Town”. It is, one character explains, “a Symbolist substratum” of our London, “an ’idden attic o’ mankind’s imagination, what’s only accessible to them oo’s stairs go up that ’igh.” It’s the realm of “the Arcana”, as they’re known — living archetypes or aspects of London’s life and history — and my favourite summation is that it’s a “matter-phor”: a metaphor, only one that happens to actually exist, “built up across the centuries from dreams o’ London”.

The Reverend Thomas’s shouldn’t-exist book was a “breach” — an instance of that London leaking into this one. And that London takes such breaches seriously. The last time such a thing happened, when one Teddy Wilson somehow acquired a copy of the should-be-fictional Fungoids by Enoch Soames, he was subsequently found… inside-out.

Dennis’s quest to return the book brings him into contact with a number of lively characters, from the up-and-coming crime boss Jack Spot to the bookish streetwalker Grace Shilling, and brings in a number of real-life figures from the time, including occult artist Austin Osman Spare, Ironfoot Jack Neave, and Prince Monolulu — “the greatest racing forecaster this land has ever seen”, who claims to be an Abyssinian Prince. Moore, you can be sure, has done his research.

There’s something of an air of Mythago Wood about the relationship between London and its higher/archetypal other — something perhaps exaggerated in my mind because I’m also reading the mythago-themed anthology Heartwood at the moment, and one of the early stories there, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Paved with Gold”, treats the capital as a mythago-generating landscape. Both Tchaikovsky and Moore make use of one of London’s most evident archetypes, Jack the Ripper. Moore, of course, has dealt with the Ripper before, in From Hell, and I’m wondering if one of the themes that will play out in the Long London series is the existence of such killers, who murder coldly, and at random, or at least for seemingly impersonal reasons. One of Dennis’s friends, the reporter Tolerable John McAllister, remarks that “the war put paid to simple reasons, and we shan’t be seeing ’em again”, which is perhaps another theme the series might be exploring.

Moore’s style is playful throughout, and though that can make for confusing moments — as in the prologue, where it was occasionally hard to work out, at first, wether Moore was being playfully metaphorical or was describing something actually weird going on, which is one of the downsides of using a heightened style when the reality being described isn’t behaving as it should — but after that the narrative style got along nicely, leading to the one sentence that, for me, justified the entire novel:

“He was too full of unfamiliar voltage to consider sleeping straight away.”

— one of those so-it’s-not-only-me moments you get from a writer who tries.

The story itself did seem to conclude a couple of chapters short of the end of the book, and though it was pleasant enough to tag along with Moore’s cast of postwar Bohemians — to attend, for instance, an Austin Osman Spare exhibition — it did mean that an extra ending had to be achieved, and one that felt (to me) insufficiently foregrounded by the rest of the novel, so a little bit tagged on. But, no matter. I felt The Great When was basically there to introduce us to Moore’s other London, and perhaps a character or two. The fact that it works as a novel on its own — meaning you can read it without having to commit to the entire series — is a bonus.

The next book, apparently, is going to be called I Hear A New World, which, along with the mention of Joe Meek in the epilogue, makes me sure the legendary pop producer will be appearing in it. (And, I wonder, as it’s presumably going to be set in the 1950s, will Colin Wilson be popping up too?)

I decided to read King’s 2014 novel Revival after hearing it recommended, on two separate occasions, by Ramsey Campbell and Guillermo del Toro — and was delighted to find it was dedicated to a host of classic horror writers from Mary Shelley onwards, with a particular emphasis on Arthur Machen for The Great God Pan (from which it borrows one of its final scenes).

The story starts with its narrator, Jamie Morton, at the age of six, meeting the new pastor for his town, Charles Jacobs. Jacobs is surprisingly young for a pastor, and comes with a pretty wife (who all the local boys immediately fall in love with) and a very young son. His hobby is electricity, and when Jamie comes to him, desperate for help with his brother Con’s loss of voice after an accident, Jacobs cures the boy with a hastily-made electrical device that stimulates his paralysed nerves back into activity. But when Jacobs’s wife and son are killed in a car accident, the young pastor delivers a bitter, despairing sermon about how religion is nothing but “the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam”, and leaves town.

Jamie grows up, becomes a gigging, getting-by musician, develops a drug habit, and is on the verge of a nosedive into junkiedom when he meets Jacobs once more. No longer a pastor, Jacobs has nevertheless not lost his faith in electricity (“If you want truth, a power greater than yourselves, look to the lightning” as he said in his infamous final “Terrible Sermon”), and is now making a living on the carnie circuit (he mentions playing in Joyland) as a purveyor of “Portraits in Lightning”, a sort of animated melding of photograph and fantasy. But his main passion is what he calls “the secret electricity”, something which bears little relation to the thing that powers lightbulbs, being infinitely more powerful, and capable of curing virtually any illness. He cures Jamie of his drug addiction, briefly inducing a few odd side-effects, and the two part.

When Jacobs comes into Jamie’s life again, he’s in the religion game once more. Jacobs is now a revivalist preacher and faith-healer, using his electrical touch to make the lame walk and the blind see. But Jamie is unconvinced — not by the healing, which he knows to be genuine, but the faith. He knows Jacobs is only using the pose of religion to go deeper still in his pursuit of the “secret electricity” — something Jamie’s friend Bree tells him was called potestas magnum universum by the alchemists and mages of the past: “the force that powers the universe”.

The trouble is, this “force” isn’t a passive thing like the electricity we know. People cured by Jacobs’s electrical touch don’t relapse, but a significant number go on to commit irrational crimes, including the murder of loved ones, or taking their own lives. It’s as if being touched by the power of the “secret electricity” lets something other get hold of them, something malignant and perhaps insane, but certainly inhuman — something Jacobs is steadily moving closer to encountering in the raw.

The dedication to Machen, an epigraph from Lovecraft, and the appearance in the story of De Vermis Mysteriis (invented by Robert Bloch, Latinised by Lovecraft), imply that, here, King is having a go at cosmic horror. And it’s evident the narrative is heading towards some cosmic-level revelation as we move ever closer to discovering the nature of the “secret electricity” that powers our universe.

But is what we get cosmic horror? Reading this book got me thinking about whether King — and this is no criticism of him as a writer or storyteller — is capable of what I’d call cosmic horror. And this is true, I’d say, of many writers, even some of the best horror writers. Lovecraft can do cosmic horror through conjuring the sheer indifference to humanity of his vast and alien, god-like entities. Ramsey Campbell, I think, does it in the way his cosmic entities, though apparently interested in individual humans — enough to prey on them, anyway — ultimately only want to absorb them into their inhumanity. Alan Moore does it in Providence, in the way deeply traumatic transformations are doled out to his characters so casually, irrevocably shattering their humanity, and then doing the same to the world as we know it. But conjuring the cold bleakness, and the crushing inhumanity of the authentically cosmic is a rare — and perhaps not enviable — talent. Clive Barker, for instance, can do perverse hells and transformed beings who follow weird philosophies, but I’d say he’s too invested in the fleshiness of the human experience to conjure something so resolutely anti-human as the cosmic. And King, also, has too much belief in the meaning of human life to go truly, bleakly cosmic.

Trying not to get too spoilery, here, Revival moves towards a revelation of what, it seems, is behind our world, and the vision King paints is of a Boschian Hell: insane, obscene, monstrous and grotesque, but, I’d say, not cosmic. It’s not cosmic because it has a place for human beings. Even though it’s horrific, it misses what for me is the truly cosmic note, the cold, bleak indifference to humanity. Just as space doesn’t care you can’t breathe in its vacuum, the cosmic doesn’t care what happens to you when it casually crushes you — or, failing to crush you, leaves you insane and traumatised. The cosmic doesn’t hate, it just doesn’t care.

But the devils of Bosch’s Hell — and the equivalent in Revival’s ultimate revelation — do care. They care enough to be really, really horrible to human beings, so I’m not saying King paints a nice picture; but humans have a place in it, so it’s not cosmic. (Not that I’m saying cosmic horror is the best or only sort of horror, it’s just one I like, and like to see done well.)

Another aspect of the cosmic is it’s horrific at a philosophical level. Its revelations have deep implications, and it is these that really deliver the blow. And the thing is, King’s revelation doesn’t even make much sense. That may be the point — King may be saying, here, that the ultimate order behind the universe is insane — but the slow build-up, with its laying out of clues as to what the “secret electricity” seems to be, imply there is an order. In a Lovecraftian tale, the final revelation of cosmic horror would bring those clues together in a way that made perfect, but terrible, sense. I don’t think that happens here.

King a few times has his narrator and Jacobs debate the ethics of what Jacobs is doing with his quest for the truth behind the “secret electricity”, but as with The Institute, while both sides raise valid points, ultimately King backs away from laying out a full, convincing argument. His narrator instinctively adopts an emotional response before Jacob’s self-dehumanising but logically-stated obsession, and that’s okay, but I’d have liked the narrator’s response to be equally convincing.

Still, it was an enjoyable read. King is a great storyteller, and at no point was I disappointed in Revival. It’s just that, once I’d finished it, I couldn’t think of much that was particularly memorable about it, either.

“On Fairy-Stories” is one of those rare windows — along with Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, Moorcock’s Wizardry and Wild Romance, and Le Guin’s key essays in The Language of the Night — into the thinking of a major fantasy writer about fantasy itself. They’re often as much (if not more) about what the writer thinks others are doing wrong than how to do it right, and usually end up having to be mined for a few insightful gems — which, though rare, are always well worth the mining. Tolkien’s idea of the Eucatastrophe, the “sudden, joyous ‘turn’” which he believes ends the truly effective fairy-story, doesn’t appear till about a page before the end of his essay, but it’s certainly worth everything that comes before.

He first presented this piece as “On Fairy Tales”, delivered on 8th March 1939 as an Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St Andrews. (Other Andrew Lang Lecturers include John Buchan, the Scottish Symbolist painter John Duncan, and, much more recently, fantasy writer Jane Yolen.) It was then published as “On Fairy-Stories” in Essays Presented to Charles Williams in 1947, alongside C S Lewis’s “On Stories”, and others. It would only have reached a wider public in 1964, when it was collected in Tree and Leaf.

Tolkien starts by asking, “What are fairy-stories? What is their origin? What is the use of them?” Much of what he says might sound commonplace today, certainly among people who read — definitely among those who read about — fantasy, but even when I first read it in the late 80s, it was the first time I’d encountered such positive statements about fantasy as a literary form. Perhaps the only thing that seemed off at the time was that Tolkien was using the term “fairy-stories” for what by the 1980s was firmly called “fantasy”, but his definition certainly fit:

“…fairy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy, that is Faërie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being.”

A lot of what Tolkien says in his essay serves to defend fantasy against what was then the generally held view, that it was basically for children, and wasn’t worth taking seriously once you’d grown out of it. Fantasy was seen, at the time, purely as an exercise in “the willing suspension of disbelief” (Coleridge’s phrase), and thus an indulgence, a temporary dip out of the real world. Tolkien instead puts forward the idea of fantasy being an exercise in Sub-creation, in which the writer “makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world.” This might at first sound basically the same as “the willing suspension of disbelief”, aside from its being presented from the creator’s, rather than the reader’s, point of view, but Tolkien’s language is already hinting at the conclusion of his essay. “Sub-creation”, and “Secondary Worlds” are secondary to “Primary Creation” and “the Primary World”, which were, to the Catholic Tolkien, the works of God. Human beings couldn’t create as God did, but also couldn’t help imitating their creator by some act of creation. (Which recalls George MacDonald’s idea that “The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God”, and thus is a route to knowing God.) Fairy-stories, then, aren’t an indulgence, but a fulfilment of all that makes you human.

Tolkien goes on to present four terms for what he believes are the function of fairy-stories: Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, and Consolation. Of these, Fantasy is the vaguest, perhaps because this is the sense in which we now use the word (of literature, films, and so on, anyway). For Tolkien, “Fantasy” is:

“a word which shall embrace both the Sub-creative Art in itself, and a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression, derived from image… the power of giving to ideal creations the inner consistency of reality.”

Though perhaps he puts this best by saying:

“To the elvish craft, Enchantment, Fantasy aspires…”

“Recovery” is a more useful idea, though one that can, really, be applied to all creative art. By “Recovery”, Tolkien means a “regaining of a clear view”:

“We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity — from possessiveness.”

Reading a poem about a cat, you might see all cats in a wholly new light; but having seen a dragon (even in your imagination), you’ll find all of reality renewed. One thing that’s interesting in the above quote is how Tolkien links the “drab blur of triteness” by which we can come to see the world when tired or jaded or cynical, with “possessiveness” — which recalls Gollum’s possessiveness of his Precious, and the One Ring’s even greater possessiveness of him.

As to “Escape”, it seems fantasy is less and less dismissed as pure escapism these days, but certainly it felt like the biggest criticism applied to it when I was growing up. Tolkien, though, ties Escape with Recovery in a neat comparison. Fantasy is not “the Flight of the Deserter” but “the Escape of the Prisoner” — the prison, in this case, being that “drab blur of triteness”. (Though in some cases it’s an actual prison, as with Malory or Bunyan.)

Tolkien’s final factor, “Consolation”, is perhaps the one that’s still easiest to dismiss, though it’s the one that, being tied to his idea of Eucatastrophe, is the key idea (for me) of this essay. Consolation is “the Consolation of the Happy Ending”, and is embodied in Eucatastrophe, “a sudden and miraculous grace” that provides “a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart’s desire”. It’s this point, probably, that most critics would say is the essentially escapist (as in “Flight of the Deserter” escapism) aspect of fantasy, because “real life” doesn’t have happy endings. But Tolkien’s point could be taken as saying that it’s to return to the belief in the possibility of happy endings, or at least happy turns, that leads to the strongest sense of Recovery. But Tolkien’s actual point was that there is a happy ending to life, only it’s not in life, but after it. For him, the “Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of the story of Man’s history”, and Heaven is the happy ending. But I don’t think you have to believe as he believed to accept the psychological benefits of experiencing a happy ending, however artfully (sub)created, every now and then.

It’s interesting to compare Tolkien’s ideas to those of other creators in a fantastic vein. Just as “joy” is, for Tolkien, the true function of a fairy-story, Arthur Machen, in Hieroglyphics (1902), puts forward “ecstasy” as the only mark of “fine literature”. And even though Machen allows other words to stand in for “ecstasy”, it’s obvious he means something darker, perhaps wilder, and certainly more troubling than Tolkien’s “joy”:

“Substitute, if you like, rapture, beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery, sense of the unknown, desire for the unknown. All and each will convey what I mean; for some particular case one term may be more appropriate than another, but in every case there will be that withdrawal from the common life and the common consciousness which justifies my choice of ‘ecstasy’ as the best symbol of my meaning.”

Machen’s is a mystic’s joy.

There’s even more of a contrast with Lovecraft, particularly over Tolkien’s idea that the “joy” he finds in fairy-stories is “a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality of truth”. For Tolkien, this is a glimpse of the underlying reality of Christian truth, but for Lovecraft, whose tales also sought to attain “a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality of truth”, that truth was the antithesis of anything remotely Christian. Nevertheless, for each author, it was the truth — the truth of how they felt about the world, anyway.

Both Tolkien and Lovecraft saw their chosen literary form — fairy-stories and weird fiction — as existing to convey a single feeling, the essence of the world they felt they lived in. And this seems true of many writers, and artists generally, that they have a single essential thing — that might be named by a single word, but which, to them, conveys a whole universe of meaning — a feeling more often than a thought, which sums up reality, or their take on it.

And these are the writers, I think, who keep being read long after their deaths. They come to represent, through their works and their fictional worlds, access to their particular feeling, the thing they were most focused on conveying. I don’t know if this is as true of Tolkien — who you can enjoy as adventure and whose actual happy ending is tempered by a sense of sadness — but it certainly rings true for Lovecraft and Machen.