Arthur Machen
wrote a quality novella called The Great God Pan.
That story succeeds, not so much because of what it says but because
of what it does not say. It is a book of understatement and the most
important elements of the narrative are hinted at without explicitly
being described. Unfortunately, it is possible that some critics in
Machen’s time said The Great God Pan was
weak for not saying enough. Maybe that is how we ended up with the
sloppy mess of short stories included in The White People
and Other Weird Stories.
In
the beginning of this collection we get four quasi-Sherlock Holmes
type mysteries with a supernatural twist. “The Inmost Light”,
“Novel Of the Black Seal”, “Novel Of the White Powder”, and
“The Red Hand” all follow the same narrative trajectory. Two
people stumble into some kind
of mystery. Each story has a different pair but who these characters
are is never fully explained; they are just random people, seemingly
petit bourgeois Londoners at the lower rungs of the upper class. The
elements of the mystery are explained and then some inexplicable
coincidence occurs that acts as the key to explaining
the mystery. There is a suspenseful build-up towards the end and then
the mystery is solved. Machen uses and reuses the same narrative
template each time, simply filling in the blank spaces with different
details. In each story the run up to the climax is exciting but the
resolution at the end is
always disappointing. One
man finds a glittering stone while another turns into a blob for no
apparent reason; these endings do not actually say anything and seem
to be more functional than meaningful. After all, what good is a
mysery if the mystery is never solved? In
contrast, the experienced
reader will recall one of the greatest mystery novels of all time,
Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon, which
was exactly that: a mystery
that remained a mystery at
the end. This
mystery-by-numbers technique
of writing is too formulaic and by the end of the fourth story, it
becomes apparent that Arthur Machen was working with a limited
imagination. This is not
good for an author trafficking in fantasy literature.
Those
first four stories were the best in this collection.
The
same framework of two people discussing strange matters
is taken up in the titular story “The White People”. It starts
with a couple men discussing the difference between real sin and
vulgar stupidity. One man insists his friend read a book he has which
is a teenage girl’s diary describing her encounter with the land of
fairies. The diary has absolutely nothing to do with the conversation
that takes place at the
beginning and end to frame the entire story. “The White People”
is actually little more than an explication of Celtic folklore which
does have the potential to be interesting. However, if you have read
Frazier’s The Golden Bough, The White Goddess by
Robert Graves, or even the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm,
Machen’s version seems trite, mundane, and trivial by comparison.
He takes
the most generic elements of folklore and presents
them as if they were something new and spectacular which they might
be if you are new to that type of literature. The diary section is
even worse because it is written in three paragraphs over a span of
thirty pages making it a tiring slog of a read.
Similar
themes are taken
up the rest of the stories. “A Fragment of Life” is about a
mundane married couple who spend a lot of time talking about buying
furniture before a crazy aunt
shows up and thinks her husband is cheating on her because he talks
to fairies in the park. Then the husband becomes obsessed with a
parallel universe fairy land and decides his job at an office is no
fun. It had the potential to be a good story but Machen’s poor
writing skills ruin it entirely. The pacing is slow and irregular
like driving a car with a flat tire. He spends entirely too much time
describing the dullness of the couple’s lives and
introduces thematic elements, like
the aunt’s bizarre church group, that
never get taken up again later in the story. Loose
plot threads make reading frustrating. Finally, the
descriptions of the alternate universe of the fairies is just as
plain
as the description of the couple’s boring life. And it all goes on
and on…
There
are other big mistakes in these stories that make them a terrible
read too. One is that they all arrive at the same predictable
conclusion: modern life is unfulfilling
and a supernatural world exists alongside of it, solely to make our
lives more entertaining. Machen uses the same description of the
Welsh landscape with the same exact words in every story; cutting and
pasting descriptions is a lazy way of writing, even for a late
Victorian Decadent author
like him. The vocabulary range is limited and redundant: the word
“queer”, meaning “strange” or “unusual” is utilized in
almost every story as if Machen was not pragmatic enough to consult a
thesaurus. In the final story
called “The Terror”, the narrative shifts inexplicable between
first and third person as if he started writing it, put it away for a
long time, and then started it again without going back to read what
he had already written. Editing, proofreading, and revision would
have gone a long way to make these writings more engaging. Then
again, if you are familiar with the pulp horror genre you already
know that presenting a polished finished product is not the priority
of the publishers.
Worst
of all is Arthur Machen’s tendency to describe too much. His
stories have brief events and short descriptions of scenery but the
bulk of his writing is explication
of those events,
sometimes in the form of dialogue and sometimes in the narration.
Treating a short story like an essay is a bad idea. And in every
story he comes around to trying and failing to prove that science is
wrong and the supernatural is the true reality. Machen attempts
to demolish science by saying that facts do not mean anything,
science is a lie, and
scientists only deal with surfaces; these are dumb assertions making
the reader wonder if Machen slept through his grade school chemistry
and physics classes. He
never develops or supports these ideas in any way, proving
that he did not have a deep enough understanding of the scientific
method to be able to disprove it.
Circular logic does his cause
no good. It is as if he
wanted
to be the Arthur Conan Doyle of
the occult though
his attempts at solving mysteries using fallacious reasoning,
tortured logic, massive leaps
of faith and clumsy
deductive reasoning make
him look rudimentary, amateurish, naive,
and sometimes just plain
stupid.
It appears that Arthur Machen
did not have the intellectual prowess necessary
to comprehend how science
works or what it really is so he reacted by indulging in some
childish fantasies about supernatural beings. In the end, if you want to write an occult horror story, just write it as a story; don't use it to preach to your audience. A
bit of street-fighting wisdom would apply here: if you try to kick
someone in the balls, make sure you do not miss because if you do you
will lose.
David
Lynch, on the other hand,
does a great job of creating mysteries. In Twin Peaks the
audience is led into the Black Lodge. The more time we spend there
the less sense it makes. The
only thing we know for sure is that it is visually interesting and
everything about it is very, very bad. The Black Lodge is never
explained, though. It remains mysterious and the lack of closure is
what makes it unforgettable. Arthur Machen introduces us to an occult
fairy land but it represents nothing more than an escapist fantasy
for bored adults. His version of the mystery is like a grade school
play where kids wear tin foil costumes and prance around in flashing
colored lights and smoke made by a dry-ice machine. It is not
believable and comes off as hokey.
Reading
Arthur Machen’s short stories proves that having a unique idea is
often not enough. The craft of writing counts as much as the
substance. If you are interested in this brand of late Victorian and
early modernist Decadent literature, spend an evening reading his
superior work The Great God Pan. Otherwise
leave this stinking bag of crap alone.
Machen, Arthur. The White People and Other Weird Stories. Penguin Books, 2011.
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