Buchan, Weird Pagan Survivals, and the Weird Mind of Imperialism: Reading notes on Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939 by James Machin (Palgrave 2018).

Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939
by James Machin (Palgrave 2018).

Chapter 4: Buchan

....if Machen, Stenbock, Shiel, and Gilchrist represent weird fiction's provenance within the Poe tradition valorized at the fin de siècle, both in terms of form (the commercial viability of the short story) and content (Decadence), then Buchan represents a comingling of this tradition with the (more popular) colonial weird of Haggard and Kipling. I will argue in the final section of this thesis that the content of Weird Tales was iterative of the genre tensions thrown up by its accommodation of these two traditions. I will look at how Buchan anticipates these tensions, between the psychological horrors of introspective Decadence and the more outward-facing engagement with colonial liminalities. I will examine relevant aspects of Buchan's life and posthumous reputation, Buchan and his relationship with Decadence, and Buchan as a writer and critic of weird fiction. I will also posit Paganism as a key commonality working across Buchan's weird and other fiction, one which ties together—through the notion of 'backsliding'—the Decadent and the colonial, and also serves to situate his weird fiction more firmly within the same tradition as that of the 'martyr' writers discussed in previous chapters.

....his avoidance of genre cliché was intentional, and contrasts with his contrived exploitation of genre cliché in his thriller writing. Because this aspect of his fiction doesn't neatly dovetail with his image as an establishment figure and author of jingoistic adventure novels, it is—again—usually sidelined or simply ignored within the context of wider literary scholarship.

....Buchan's particular resistance to Gothic cliché and the obviously horrific, meaning that his weird fiction is difficult to place within such traditions. Rather, it is perhaps more comfortably positioned within his own wider oeuvre. Juanita Kruse's comment that Buchan's 'best fiction contains a sense of an uncanny world beneath the veneer of civilization—a world both fascinating and terrifying'—is not aimed at his weird fiction only (Kruse 1989, 7:7). Similarly, Christopher Hitchens observed, referring to Buchan's writing generally rather than his supernatural fiction specifically, that 'the occult […] provides a continual undertone of fascination, attractive and repulsive in almost equal degrees' and that generally Buchan's 'writing shows an attraction […] to the exotic and the numinous' (Hitchens 2004).

....Buchan's weird fiction has a particular focus on that 'sense of the uncanny' that, while less immediately obvious, still underpins his other writing, and his entire worldview. John Clute's term 'equipoise' is a particularly useful referent when considering the operation of this worldview on the interplay between the quotidian and supernatural in Buchan's fiction: Equipoise describes […] a very loose category of stories which—rather than 'failing' to achieve generic closure, or 'failing' to give birth phoenix-like to some new form of genre—can be seen as taking their nature precisely from their refusal of closure. (Clute 2006, 63)

Equipoisal writing credits the reader with the wherewithal to deal with not only a 'duration of uncertainty' but with uncertainty itself, and the resulting frisson and/or jolt is the reader's reward, not, necessarily, the narrative conclusion. Contrary to Buchan's enduring reputation, 'full-blooded' and 'healthy' it is not.

[Emphasis mine. J.R.]

....Buchan's weird fiction is on the whole a more sophisticated venue for his anxieties regarding the fragility of civilization and modernity than the more reductive propagandizing of the work for which he is more well known, and which was often written with explicitly that agenda. Like much adventure fiction of the time, Buchan's casual racism and imperialist flagwaving make it difficult if not impossible for the contemporary reader to engage with it other than at arm's length. Buchan's weird fiction, however, is often free from explicit and problematic politicking and it has been argued that 'Buchan perhaps revealed more of himself in apparently ephemeral magazine fiction than in the works by which he was best known during his lifetime' (Freeman 2008, 25). The 'thinness' of civilization with which many of these stories is concerned is more an existential anxiety than a political one, relating to human vulnerability in a chaotic and hostile cosmos.

In his weird fiction, this concern of Buchan's slips easily into outright horror, and what he identified in Poe's work as the revelation of 'the shadowy domain of the back-world, and behind our smug complacency the shrieking horror of the unknown' (Buchan 1911, 7). Although it is his adventure fiction which has been described as being based upon the notion of 'something familiar, reliable, and dearly loved threatened by the unknown and the incomprehensible,' this theme is addressed even more explicitly in his weird fiction....

.... I shall examine Buchan's pre–Thirty-Nine Steps literary career, partly to reclaim this aspect of his output from comparative disregard, and also to look at how Buchan's weird fiction tracks a course—both stylistically and in terms of publishing history—between the 1890s and the Modernist period. Buchan was not only a transitional figure in terms of this imperialism, but also between the literary cultures of the 'yellow nineties' and the age of pulp modernism. As I shall argue in the Conclusion and with specific regard to Weird Tales, these two ostensibly very different cultures were in fact intractably entangled, especially through and with regard to weird fiction....

....expression of Buchan's anxiety over his reactions to Decadence and Paganism: fascination and repulsion in equal measure, and a palpable sense of psychological, as well as social, threat.

....This same admixture is situated in a colonial context—informed by Buchan's familiarity with the South African landscape—in 'The Grove of Ashtaroth'. Despite the remoteness of the story's setting from Vigo Street, Buchan's preoccupation with Decadence and 1890s aestheticism remains a reference point. The story is presented as an account by a represented narrator of his friend Lawson—'one of those fellows who are born Colonial'— and his efforts to establish a permanent residence ('a civilised house') in a particular range of isolated country 'some thirty miles north of a place called Taqui' (Buchan 1910, 805). While Lawson is immediately smitten with the spot, the narrator is perturbed by one feature of the landscape:

It was no Christian wood. It was not a copse, but a 'grove,'—one such as Artemis may have flitted through in the moonlight. It was small, forty or fifty yards in diameter, and there was a dark something at the heart of it which for a second I thought was a house. (805)

....The temenos is a space dedicated to ritual and which has a function identical to that of the magic circle which 'delimits a boundary between law and transgression, the legitimate and illegitimate, the sacred and profane' (Thacker 2011, 57). This concept resonates with a childhood conceit of Buchan's which persisted into adulthood:

I came to identify abstractions with special localities. The Soul, a shining cylindrical thing, was linked with a particular patch of bent and heather, and in that theatre its struggles took place, while Sin, a horrid substance like black salt, was intimately connected with a certain thicket of brambles and spotted toadstools. This odd habit long remained with me. (Buchan 1941, 16–17)

....Clute's 'equipoise' is doubled in both the content and the form of weird fiction: both its liminal generic status and the liminality of the 'spectral intimations', bordering the known and the unknown, the mimetic and the fantastic. Eugene Thacker has delineated a difference between the 'supernatural' as employed by weird fiction and that which 'is so often confirmed within the labyrinths of Scholastic theology', which is useful when considering Buchan's weird fiction: 'in the horror genre the supernatural is duplicitous; it is the name for something that is indistinct and yet omnipresent, something that defies easy categorization and that is, nevertheless, inscribed by a kind of logic' (Thacker 2015, 113–114).

....As a reader for John Lane in the 1890s, Buchan demonstrated well-- developed and clearly articulated beliefs on what sort of supernatural fiction was credible for the modern reader, using these distinctions as the basis for his advice to Lane as to whether to accept or decline manuscript submissions for publication. Advising Lane to decline a manuscript titled Miss Crump by a C. H. Campbell, Buchan acknowledges that as 'a ghost-- story this book is quite well-done' and that 'the mystery is kept up till quite the end, and the explanation is most credible'. 9 However, one of the grounds upon which Buchan advises against publication is that 'the ghosts, though well-done, are a little out-of-date', adding that 'we want something a little more recondite nowadays than sheeted monks, vaults, iron chests and missing marriage certificates'. He concludes that the interest of the novel is 'narrow, conventional and [again] out-of-date' and would therefore 'not be successful'.

....['Basilissa'] potent example of both the Gothic's preoccupation with the sublime affect of infinite recession and spatial disorientation, and weird fiction's distortion of architectural space.

....Buchan's deployment of what he had previously suggested as out-of-date and conventional language of horror works here because of the sudden gear change after this episode, where the main narrative of the novel [The Dancing Floor] begins in earnest.

From this northern Gothic beginning, the action abruptly shifts to a Greek island and a discussion of pre-Olympian paganism, of satyrs, pan pipes, and Attic mysteries. Milburne and Leithen are now on a yachting holiday some time later and alight on a small, obscure island. Both are immediately affected by some quality of the landscape and Milburne launches into a lengthy disquisition on the origins of Catholicism in antique paganism, thus establishing the subsequent tone of the narrative. However effective the atmosphere created by the notion of an inexorable doom steadily approaching through an impossibly arranged series of rooms may be, Buchan's use of traditional Gothic tropes at the outset of the novel lulls the reader into a false sense of familiarity, resulting in the novel being all the more effective for being not really 'a thing like a ghost story' at all.

.... 'I use the word legitimate merely from the commercial point of view, as equivalent to what is read and tolerated by readers of fiction.' Once again, however, he emphasizes the importance of the recondite: 'In a book of horrors we demand that the absorbing interest does not lie in the horrors themselves, but in some mystery, intrigue, or some human passion of love or sacrifice.' Buchan regards Henham's tale [The Fratricide, later published as Tenebrae] as a failure in at least this respect, although he does acknowledge that 'the book is ably written and in parts very powerful'.

....Buchan negatively compares Henham's execution of the story with three writers who, in the context of this thesis, are by now familiar names: Stevenson, Poe, and Machen:

Take Dr. Jekyll. What made that book a great work of art was the sense of indefinable mystery which hung over it to the very end, as also the genuine romantic quality of contrast between the horror and the humdrum life around. Take Poe's better tales. All have some plot, mystery, tragic adventure, as the framework on which their web of horrors is woven. Take Arthur Machen's Great God Pan. There is the romantic element, the feeling of impossible adventure, which gives credence to the horror and makes the book tolerable to the reader.

....Buchan concludes his analysis by stating unequivocally that a text which is no more than an 'exclusive analysis of madness and horrible nightmare is an offence against art and the ordinary interests of men'. His strength of feeling is also suggested by his statement that he 'cannot recommend any alterations, for the error seems to […] lie very deep', regardless that 'the author has genuine talents'. Buchan is not interested in, and actively dislikes, prurient depictions of the horrific for their own sake, but accepts the horrific if it is employed towards a larger end of evoking a 'sense of indefinable mystery' which 'hangs over […] to the very end'; in other words, the unresolved equipoise typical of weird fiction. Buchan's theorizing here is subsequently put into practice in his own later output in this vein....

....One work that succeeded in meeting Buchan's criteria for successful supernatural fiction while he was a reader for Lane was 'Twixt Dog and Wolf by C. F. Keary (1848–1917), submitted to Lane for consideration in 1897. Charles Francis Keary is described in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as a 'numismatist and writer', which gives only an indication of the polymath range of his career ("Oxford DNB Article: Keary, Charles Francis" 2004). He was, additionally, a scholar and antiquarian, a spiritualist, he worked in the Department of Coins at the British Museum, and was a reasonably successful novelist, as such described by the Academy as one whose failures were 'more interesting than the successes of most people' (Academy 1899, 689).

....The strength of the impression made on Buchan by 'Twixt Dog and Wolf is also evident in Buchan's own subsequent career as an author. As mentioned above, a trope frequently employed by Buchan in his weird fiction was that of sacred grove, or temenos. This is anticipated and explored in Keary's 'The Four Students', in which Keary makes the chilling geographical association between the site of the mass executions of the Terror and that of the hideous rites of antique pagan ritual, suggesting that the influence of the same maleficent genius loci is responsible for both. Both this theme and Keary's 'witch-tale' 'Elizabeth' clearly resonates with, and perhaps directly influenced, Buchan's own novel of seventeenth-century 'diablerie', Witch Wood (1927), arguably the template for the 1970s 'folk horror' films Blood on Satan's Claw (1970) and The Wicker Man (1973). The structural theme common to both Keary's work and Buchan's is the conflict between pre-Classical paganism and modern religion, a theme which underpins so much of Buchan's weird and other fiction that it demands to be examined in further detail.

....The structural theme common to both Keary's work and Buchan's is the conflict between pre-Classical paganism and modern religion, a theme which underpins so much of Buchan's weird and other fiction that it demands to be examined in further detail.

Weird Pagan Survivals

....Christianity is generally supposed to have annihilated heathenism. […] In reality it merely smoothed over and swallowed its victim, and the contour of its prey, as in the case of the boa-constrictor, can be distinctly traced under the glistening colours of its beautiful skin. Paganism still exists, it is merely inside instead of outside. (Wood-Martin 1902, I: viii)

....The insistence that Christianity wins out over the older faiths it supplanted in truth suggests not that it has conquered them outright but that the island is a form of spiritual palimpsest where the Christian overlays and partially obscures something far more ancient and perhaps more powerful. (Freeman 2008, 30)

....While at Brasenose, Buchan had discussed the possibility of the survival of such 'ancient cults' with his tutor, Dr F. W. Bussell, college chaplain and erstwhile friend of Pater (Richards 1976, 41).

....This 'shattering' of the modern world by ancient mysteries is, in this instance, a purely subjective experience for Leithen, and, typically of the equipoise of Buchan's writing of this type, there is no conclusively supernatural manifestation. The work remains generically slippery: not quite a thriller, certainly not realism in the widely understood sense, but also lacking a tangible representation of the supernatural, only the perception by the represented narrator of some immanence which 'smites the brain', and, in Lovecraft's words, a 'breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces', a facility for which Buchan demonstrated time and again in his fiction.

....The survival of the pagan and its threat to modernity was a concern sustained by Buchan over the course of his writing career, informed by his family background, his education, and his wider experiences as a colonial administrator. Buchan's upbringing in a Calvinist household, the son of a minister of the Free Church of Scotland, was tempered by his enthusiastic interest and education in the Classics, including works of late Roman pagan philosophy: he described the 'Latin and Greek classics' as his 'first real intellectual interest' (Buchan 1941, 39). This interest was nurtured under the tutelage of Gilbert Murray, 'then a young man in his middle twenties and […] known only by his Oxford reputation', who left an indelible impression on Buchan at Glasgow University:

To me his lectures were, in Wordsworth's phrase, like 'kindlings of the morning.' Men are by nature Greeks or Romans, Hellenists or Latinists. Murray was essentially a Greek; my own predilection has always been for Rome; but I owe it to him that I was able to understand something of the Greek spirit and still more to come under the spell of the classic discipline in letters and life. (34)

....I think I was born with the same temperament as the Platonists of the early seventeenth century, who had what Walter Pater has called 'a sensuous love of the unseen,' or, to put it more exactly, who combined a passion for the unseen and the eternal with a delight in the seen and the temporal. (Buchan 1941, 39)

....Buchan's fin-de-siècle Paganism was learned in schoolrooms and lecture theatres rather than in occult lodges and Bohemian salons, and, far from instilling in him any antiestablishment animus or moral incontinence, inculcated him with 'classic discipline':

This preoccupation with the classics was the happiest thing that could have befallen me. It gave me a standard of values. […] The classics enjoined humility. The spectacle of such magnificence was a corrective to youthful immodesty, and, like Dr. Johnson, I lived 'entirely without my own approbation.' Again, they corrected a young man's passion for rhetoric. This was in the 'nineties, when the Corinthian manner was more in vogue than the Attic. Faulty though my own practice has always been, I learned sound doctrine—the virtue of a clean bare style, of simplicity, of a hard substance and an austere pattern. (35)

....Throughout his corpus, many of Buchan's characters reveal a pragmatic loyalty to Christianity while regularly being tempted or part-seduced by the dark glamour of paganism. Despite the fact that his upbringing was not blighted by the grim repression experienced by, for example, Algernon Blackwood, and often associated with Calvinism's sometimes dour doctrine of predestination, Buchan's sustained occupation with this dissonance between his faith and his fascination with Roman antiquity demonstrates that it was clearly on some level a troublesome one for him.

....For Buchan there was no disputing either Paganism's dark seductive power nor the vigilance against which that power must be resisted if modernity is to remain civilized. His attitude in this respect informed the equivocalness of his view of literary Decadence and resonated with contemporary concerns discussed in previous chapters. Buchan's discomfort with valences of contemporary culture that he thought resulted from dangerous atavism informed his fiction for decades into the twentieth century.

....the term 'Pagan' would have evoked a complicated set of resonances for Buchan and many of his contemporaries. The education of many was built upon the valorization of the historical pagan culture of the Classical age as a model for an Empire partly justified by its attempts to eradicate paganism from the territories it controlled. Although often discussed only in terms of bohemian 'occulture', in actuality Classical Paganism was as much of an intellectual and philosophical bedrock of the establishment Right as Christianity: every eager public-school boy being groomed for imperial and public service would have been weaned on Homer and Virgil and known his Greek and Latin tags. Buchan, no public-- school boy, nevertheless found his Calvinism to be 'confirmed' by his study of the Classics.

....Perhaps Buchan wore his Calvinism too lightly for there to be any similar transgressive appeal in abandoning it to pursue esoteric, Catholic-leaning branches of Christian ritualism. Buchan's interest in Classical paganism was, therefore, in no way an indication of any predisposal to involve himself in any of the occult societies flourishing at the time.

....Buchan's attitude to paganism can be contextualized within a wider establishment resistance to the appropriation of Classical paganism by what the Saturday Review described as 'les jeunes'. These two competing 'Paganisms', new and old, were already recognized by the Saturday Review in 1892:

There can be no better cure for the errors of Neo-paganism than a study of the old pagans: HOMER, SOPHOCLES, VIRGIL. They, not M. Paul Verlaine , not even Mr. George Meredith , not even Baudelaire (as the Pagan Review calls that author, who himself smote the Neo-Pagans in a memorable essay) are the guides to follow. (Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art 1892, 269)

....In Buchan's 1928 story 'The Wind in the Portico'....

....Buchan's presentation of the dangerous, destructive potential of Roman mysteries here is certainly far removed from the popular view of Classical paganism as 'an elegant and poetic Bank Holiday, a perpetual riot, a rosy debauch' (Machen 1924, 9). The Paterian seriousness with which Buchan approached Classical paganism was informed by and informed his experience of contemporary pagan cultures. Like other writers of his age, Buchan's position regarding the cultures of modernity and his anxieties over the dangers of pagan recidivism were reinforced by his first-hand experiences as a colonial. In 1900 he took a job on Lord Milner's staff as a colonial administrator in South Africa. His role was 'hands on' and he spent much of his time travelling on horseback and personally overseeing Lord Milner's efforts to ameliorate the worst effects of the Boer War, specifically the disastrous sanitation situations in the concentration camps (Adam Smith 1985b). He was keenly aware of the vulnerable attenuation of the colonial presence in some areas and saw this in terms of a conflict between 'civilization' and 'savagery'.

Janet Adam Smith identifies the central conflict of Buchan's 1910 colonial adventure novel Prester John (1910) as being 'not between black and white; it is between civilization […] and savagery' (Adam Smith 1985a, 144). In The Power-House (1913) the main antagonist Andrew Lumley opines at length on the contingency of civilization, arguing that its 'tenure' is 'precarious':

'You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.' (Buchan 1913, 731)

Furthermore, the fragility of civilization is actually exacerbated by modernity: 'Consider how delicate the machine is growing. As life grows more complex, the machinery grows more intricate, and therefore more vulnerable.' While Lumley sees this increased vulnerability precipitated by industrial modernity as a weakness to be exploited, Leithen is of the view that it is his responsibility to do everything in his (and by implication, the reader's) power to safeguard civilization's survival. Adam Smith draws a line between Buchan's alarum at civilization's fragility in The Power-House, written immediately before the Great War, and his earlier Classical interests as evident in 'The Watcher by the Threshold', where the bust of Justinian which obsesses one of the main characters has an expression suggestive of 'the intangible mystery of culture on the verge of savagery', Constantine being a liminal Janus figure between the Classical and Christian eras (Adam Smith 1985a, 253). In fact, Adam Smith asserts categorically that 'in all the tales there is a stress on the thinness of civilization' (103).

This concern was of course far from unique to Buchan, and shared by at least some of his contemporaries. Joseph Conrad, for example, begins 'Heart of Darkness' by foregrounding Britain's pagan past and the contingency of its Imperial dream with Marlowe's account of the Roman soldier 'in some inland post [feeling] the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed around him' (Conrad 1899, 195–196). The first part of 'Heart of Darkness' was published in Blackwood's (as 'The Heart of Darkness') the month after it concluded Buchan's 'No-Man's-Land', in which Buchan speculated on the survival of pre-Roman 'savagery' into the present day. Described by Griffith as a 'parallel journey into the remote anthropological past' to that of 'Heart of Darkness', 'No-Man's-Land' elaborates on the 'images of British barbarism at the beginning of Conrad's novella' (Griffith 1995, 118). Griffith regards the tale as 'an interesting example of the Victorian fascination with their own culture's past savagery, and, by implication, with the latent savagery still existing in some dark corner of their own mind' (Griffith 1995, 119). Although Griffith makes explicit the shared thematic concerns of 'No-Man's-Land' and 'Heart of Darkness', he is evidently reticent about acknowledging the fact that Buchan's story is unarguably weird where Conrad is realist, Buchan drawing heavily on Machen, the lost race stories of Rider Haggard, as well as the 'Turanian pygmy' theory of Scottish folklorist David MacRitchie (1851–1925), who argued that fairy lore was folkloric memory: the 'primitivism' of Buchan's text is represented by an actual relict population of prehuman hominins lurking in the Pentland Hills (Fergus 2015)....

The Weird Mind of Imperialism

In this chapter I have sketched out two fin-de-siècle contexts that provoked and informed the weird mode in Buchan's fiction: paganism and imperialism. The former obtrudes into Buchan's fiction, often destabilizing an otherwise ordered and stable establishment figure's life (Buchan's protagonists are predominantly politicians, aristocrats, soldiers, or a mix of all three). This destabilization can also occur in an imperial context, where the stakes are arguably higher since it calls into question the integrity of what Robinson and Gallagher called 'the official mind of imperialism'. This 'official mind' was the fardel of 'beliefs about morals and politics, about the duties of government, the ordering of society and international relations' (Robinson et al. 1981, 20).

Buchan may have been a participant in as well as a theorist of the British Empire (in, for example, The African Colony (1903) and A Lodge in the Wilderness), but his weird fiction was, in effect, a subversive challenge to the idea that the Victorian imperial psyche was unassailably, or even particularly, robust (Buchan 1903, 1906). On a fundamental level, it is confirmation that 'stereotypes of "colonialists" or similar convenient groupings are as superficial as stereotypes of nations' (N. Machin 1998). One of the characters in A Lodge in the Wilderness—a fictionalized discourse on the state of the British Empire in the aftermath of the landslide Liberal victory at the 1906 general election—argues that 'Imperialism, if we regard it properly, is not a creed or a principle, but an attitude of mind' (Buchan 1906, 77). Although much of Buchan's fiction and nonfiction celebrates this 'attitude of mind' as a strong and unhesitant force for good in the world, short stories like 'The Watcher by the Threshold' (1900), 'The Kings of Orion' (1906), 'The Grove of Ashtaroth' (1912), or 'Tendebant Manaus' (1926) conversely present the reader with characters whose psyches are vulnerable, damaged, and fragile....

....Buchan demonstrates a trait of Scottish literature identified by G. Gregory Smith, and described by him as 'Caledonian Antisyzygy', a 'combination of opposites' and 'the contrasts which the Scot shows at every turn' in his literature (Smith 1919, 4)....

....Buchan's reputation as a doughty servant of the Empire—dispensing solid good sense and Christian benevolence in his political office, and healthy invigorating diversion as a popular author—operated in tandem with a 'fey' aspect to his nature, which occasionally expressed itself in his fiction as both a visionary strain of mysticism and the troublesome nightmares and fever dreams of the otherwise stolid imperial mind. The claim that Conrad's fiction 'calls into question the rationalities that govern concepts of race, geography and history' applies equally well to Buchan in this respect (Baxter 2010, 14).

....Buchan's weird tales can be seen as an exercise in caution against imbalance, arguably what he feared as his own potential for imbalance in reconciling his imaginative life with his public life. When discussing the 'official thinking' of the oligarchy that controlled the British Empire, Robinson and Gallagher emphasize the importance of considering the wider beliefs and moral structures underpinning the 'mechanical choices and expedients' of colonialists: 'England's rulers shared an esoteric view of desirable and undesirable trends stretching from the past and present to the future' (Robinson et al. 1981, 21). Buchan's weird fiction demonstrates this argument well beyond its immediate and intended scope and application. Buchan's sense of the past was one that encompassed not just British imperial history but Old Testament lore and pre-Christian gods, and he saw the Empire as a contingency operating within this macroscopic context, with nebulous pagan forces and revenants from antiquity both pressing upon and latent within the modern mind; the civilized mind that must remain ever-vigilant against their potential to reassert themselves and destroy it utterly.

Jay
15 June 2019

Prurient misogyny in The Great God Pan? Reading notes from: Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939 by James Machin (Palgrave 2018).

Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939

by James Machin (Palgrave 2018).

I posted some excerpts from earlier chapters on Facebook here, here, and here.

This is an expensive book from an academic press, but if you can afford the ebook (cheaper than hardcover) you will not regret it. Machin pulls it all together: the writers, the market, the era, into a rich and exciting synthesis free of jargon. (And free of the idiosyncratic axe-grinding

and egocentric pretensions of "horror critics").

From Chapter 3: Shiel, Stenbock, Gilchrist, and Machen

....Machen's erudition and interest in alchemy was informed early in life by his employment in 1885 to catalogue a library of antiquarian works on 'occultism and archaeology' for the publisher John Redway in preparation for sale (Gawsworth 2013, 57). The depth of his interest is evident from the fact that his last novel, The Green Round (1933) still includes various discourses on the subject, and also on Machen's suspicion of scientific materialism, five decades on (Machen 1968).

Understanding the spiritual symbolism of Helen Vaughan's protoplasmic collapse and its employment of the alchemical notion of the prima materia is, therefore, more commensurate with both Machen's interest not only in alchemy, but in quiddity and numinosity (and their evocation in his understanding of 'realism' of literature), and his relative ignorance of and outright hostility to science. Bearing in mind that the male protagonist of 'The Novel of the White Powder' suffers a similar climactic disintegration to that of Helen Vaughan, this interpretation of the latter's doom may also absolve Machen of occasional charges of misogyny that are made against him.

Specifically, 'The Great God Pan' has attracted several casual and un-- interrogated references to 'the text's misogyny', a perhaps inevitable result of Machen's narrative technique of avoiding direct representation of suggested horrors (Smith 2012, 225). The absence of a direct representation of Helen Vaughan in the text can therefore be interpreted as a denial of female agency, although one would have to isolate her absence from the many other narrative occlusions to do so. An interesting comparator in this respect is Vernon Lee's 'Dionea', which, first published in 1890, anticipates and perhaps influenced Machen's narrative strategy with 'The Great God Pan' (Lee 1906). The story of the eponymous foundling, strongly hinted to be at least semi-divine, is related obliquely through an epistolary structure which, like 'The Great God Pan', reveals the history of Dionea and her baleful influence on the small Italian community in which she resides, without ever directly representing the character. Her motives remain inscrutable and inaccessible to the reader, intensifying the mystery central to the tale.

It would seem self-evidently ridiculous to level any accusation of misogyny against Vernon Lee for constructing the story in this manner. Machen, on the other hand, by having the audacity to cast a woman as the principle antagonist, has invited suggestions that 'The Great God Pan' should be read as a representation of late Victorian patriarchal animus against the increasing profile of the 'New Woman' in the public sphere. Consequently, whereas the protoplasmic disintegration of the male protagonist of Machen's 'The Novel of the White Powder' (published the year after 'The Great God Pan') hardly raises an eyebrow, the almost identical fate of Helen Vaughan at the end of 'Pan' is a 'grotesque snuffmurder', adduced as evidence of Machen's 'prurient misogyny' (Miéville 2009, 513). This misreading of Machen is implicitly underwritten by Joshi's insistence on parsing 'The Great God Pan' as symptomatic of Machen's 'horror of aberrant sexuality', a horror evidenced by 'The Great God Pan' (Joshi 2012, 2:362). This circular argument is in fact, as Joshi fully acknowledges, appropriated from Lovecraft's own criticisms of Machen's 'horror of sex', which arguably reveals more about Lovecraft than it does Machen.

The point is worth dwelling on since, beyond the simple expedient of correcting a misunderstanding of Machen's character in this respect, such assumptions also lead to procrustean readings that attempt to fit Machen and his work too neatly into off-the-peg fin-de-siècle critical frames. The circumstantial evidence against Machen's alleged 'horror of sex' is formidable and even insurmountable, unless one is singularly committed to a specific parsing of the finale of 'The Great God Pan' as a synecdoche for some otherwise unperceivable animus of its author, an approach criticized by Todorov. Précising Peter Penzoldt's position that 'a certain neurotic writer will project his symptoms into his work', Todorov goes on to point out that 'these tendencies are not always distinctly manifest outside their work' (Todorov 1975, 152):

No sooner has [Penzoldt] said that Machen's education explains his work than he finds himself obliged to add, 'fortunately, the man Machen was quite different from the writer Machen. … Thus Machen lived the life of a normal man, whereas part of his work became the expression of a terrible neurosis'.

Again, we are left with a circular argument that, contrary to all other available evidence, 'The Great God Pan' demonstrates Machen's 'misogyny' simply because we are able to read it this way. Although such specious assertions serve to demonstrate the political virtue of the critic, they do a genuine disservice to the author as an individual. Machen's first wife Amy Hogg was described by Jerome K Jerome as a 'pioneer' who 'lived by herself […] frequented restaurants […] and had many men friends: all of which was considered very shocking in those days' (Brangham 2006, 37). Machen's second wife, the actress Dorothy Purefoy Machen, was described by A. E. Waite as an absinthe drinker and smoker who 'has no conventions and requires none' (Gilbert 2017, xxi). Dr Raymond's impatient dismissal of the relevancy of Mary's virginal status in the opening pages of 'The Great God Pan' ('That is nonsense. I assure you') could be read as the author's own attempt to remove prurience from the reader's mind from the outset (Machen 2006, 12). As an essayist, Machen dedicated a considerable amount of energy to combating puritanism wherever he found it, but particularly in letters. He began his career by translating the Memoirs of Casanova and the renaissance 'amatory tales' of The Heptamaron by Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, before going on to compose his own ribald Rabelaisian fantasy The Chronicle of Clemendy (Casanova 1894; Valentine 1995, 19; Queen of Navarre 1886; Machen 1888). He produced Dr Stiggins, the above-mentioned satire and condemnation of puritanism, at around the time he completed a stint as a strolling player in the Benson Company. All in all, a peculiar career trajectory for a blushing, neurotic prude.

Approaching the climax of 'The Great God Pan' through the spagyric frame discussed above is simply more commensurate with Machen's own declared interests than with the speculative allegation of misogyny. The influence of the seventeenth-century alchemist and natural philosopher Thomas Vaughan on Machen's fiction also expresses itself through his employment of the motif of 'the veil' in order to describe the liminal barrier preventing ordinary access to the occulted quiddity of nature. In Lumen de Lumine (1651), Vaughan considers the 'fabric of the world' as 'a series, a link or chain, which is extended from […] that which is beneath all apprehension to that which is above all apprehension' (Vaughan 1910, 35). He posits a hierarchy of noumenal being, inaccessible to ordinary intelligence: that which is 'beneath all degrees of sense is a certain horrible, inexpressible darkness', and that which is 'above all degree of intelligence is a certain infinite, inaccessible fire of light', the latter called by Dionysius 'Divine Obscurity' (35). Here is a metaphysical framework for much of Machen's subsequent fiction and an anticipation of his anxiety regarding his 'horrific' work: 'I translated awe, at worst awfulness, into evil; again, I say, one dreams in fire and works in clay' (Machen 1923a, 127). Machen's fiction progresses along Vaughan's 'scale', which 'doth reach from Tartarus to the First Fire, from the subternatural [sic] darkness to the supernatural fire' (36). Between these two ordinarily inaccessible realms lies the quotidian 'substance or chain […] which we commonly call Nature' (36).

In Machen's more overtly horrific fiction, such as 'Pan', the revelation is of the adumbral numinous, the 'subternatural darkness'. In his later, visionary work, such as The Secret Glory (1922) and A Fragment of Life (1904), the encounter is with the 'Divine Obscurity'. Although the analogue isn't a perfect one (Machen often used the imagery of fire and light rather than darkness to evoke an impression of diabolic irruptions into the mundane world), his early and continuing advocacy of Vaughan, and the specific textual similarities to be found by comparing Machen's fiction with Vaughan's discourse on the 'First Matter' offer evidence of his close reading of the latter. Vaughan argues that the 'Divine Obscurity' (analogous to the cabalistic notion of 'Ain') is 'pure Deity, having no veil' and that its emanation into 'that which we commonly call Nature' is effected through the operation of 'a certain water', called the 'First Matter' (36). His description of the 'First Matter' defines it in alchemical terms as an 'animated mass […] the union of masculine and feminine spirits', and discusses it in chemical terms as liquid Mercury.

I conclude that the Mosaical earth was the virgin Sulpher, which is an earth without form, for it hath no determinated figure. It is a laxative, unstable, uncomposed substance of a porous, empty crasis, like sponge or soot. In a word I have seen it, and it is impossible to describe it. (46)

A comparable incidence of protoplasmic eruption (or perhaps irruption) can be found in 'The Novel of the Black Seal' episode in The Three Impostors. In an isolated manor house in the middle of the Welsh mountains, a young country boy is suspected by an anthropologist of being the progeny of the sinister 'little folk' whose actuality gave rise to fairy lore. He displays evidence of this alleged provenance one night by producing a pseudopod from his abdomen, leaving a sticky residue on a statue on the top shelf of the Professor's office.

Although it is difficult to read the episode without immediately being struck by its apparently obvious implications of emergent sexuality in a pubescent teenager, Machen claims that it was in fact inspired by his reading of the then nascent trend in spiritualism of producing 'ectoplasm' at séances and of crediting this substance with the production of various associated phenomena:

[Sir Oliver Lodge] advanced the striking hypothesis that the piano was played and the objects fetched from the sideboard by a kind of extension of the medium's body. I forget whether the distinguished Professor used the instance but I know that the impression conveyed to my mind was that something happened similar to the protrusion and withdrawal of a snail's horns: Eusapia's [Palladino, the Italian medium] arm became twice or thrice its usual length, performed the required feat […] and then shrank back to normal size. (Machen 1923c, 107)

Machen goes on to describe the theory as 'in all probability […] a pack of nonsense', but it provided him with a grotesque and striking image that could perhaps add value to the affect, and therefore success, of his story.

Machen, whose son Hilary was unequivocal in describing him as 'never anything but a High Church Tory', failed to display evidence of any doubt or anxiety in his faith over the course of his life, unless one interprets his brief dalliance with the Order of the Golden Dawn as evidence of such a crisis. One could also treat stories like 'The Great God Pan' as expressions of a sublimated fear or anxiety regarding the 'quiddity' of the universe: a negative, adumbral shadow of the 'Holy' numinous reality that formed the basis of his mysticism. Such readings raise similar problems to those involved in making the accusation of misogyny discussed above, however. However, in some respects Machen's antimaterialism was commensurate with the 'new' awareness of humanity's limited knowledge of possibly unknowable 'reality', except that instead of precipitating despair, he revelled in the 'fire and mystery'. His dogma was based on the symbolic value of the Church (especially the pre-Reformation 'Catholic' church) of making the existence of this mystery in some way intelligible, even if the mystery itself was forever ineffable. Although he disapproved of what he considered to be his friend A. E. Waite's 'Pantheism', he was sympathetic to Waite's enthusiasm for Roman Catholicism 'as a great system of symbolism', perhaps meaning that it was an aesthetically pleasing language with which to approach the quiddity of things. Machen was certainly among those who 'seize avidly on the loopholes of the materialistic system and regard each loophole found as an affirmation of man's spiritual life', but despite this he still reached a similar conclusion to the most rigorous sceptics of the age: that the world is essentially unknowable (Lester 1968, 37)....

Creatures of the Pool by Ramsey Campbell (2009)

"Old stories often turn out to be true."

Arthur Machen, "The Children of the Pool" (1936)

It's all true

No one does the hallucinatory experience of waking life flowing from insomnia or concussion better than Ramsey Campbell. (Though for a protagonist's plight with an actual fractured skull bone, David Morrell's 1994 thriller Assumed Identity takes the cake.)

In Campbell's 2009 novel Creatures of the Pool, it is Gavin Newsome who is fed through the author's unrelenting grist mill. In a Liverpool that seems on the verge of drowning in rain and its own cumulative macabre history, Gavin (first-person narrator, present-tense) feels like the last sane man. His dad, obsessed with local history, has disappeared. His mother is on the wrong side of senility. His girlfriend, who works at the city library, is spending a lot of time in its subterranean archives.

All of which leaves Gavin to hold on by the skin of his teeth. His business is leading walking tours, but the new city tourism office head (a U.S. transplant named Hank Waterworth) is slowly wrecking his livelihood.

As with most Campbell novels, dialogue
both conveys action and information, and doubles as commentary on the same.

Creatures is a puzzle chase, and Campbell pulls out all the stops as Gavin begins to fear he might have more in common with Liverpool's hidden history, geography, and citizenry than is safe. Or sane.

I posted some extended quotations here and here.

One little joke the author has at the expense of readers of Creatures is killing our taste for tap water. Not just killing it: making the prospect revolting.

So if you're visiting Liverpool, don't drink the water.

But, of course, never visit Liverpool.

Jay
14 July 2019

The fever of waking life: Intimations of Death by Felix Timmermans (2019: Valancourt Books)

Intimations of Death (1910)
Felix Timmermans
New translation by Paul Vincent
Introduction by John Howard


Kudos to Valancourt for what must be the first-ever English translation of these powerful stories. This brief collection is a fascinating and too-brief reminder of a lost world of European cosmopolitan culture innocent of trench warfare, only a generation removed from rural life.

The intensity, the key and pitch of these tales, epitomizes the weird sublime. Each embodies a strange and uncanny perfection.


INTRODUCTION

....In these stories he portrays and defines his native region with the skill of an author who saw and observed with the eye of an artist. And so it is perhaps not surprising that as well as being a prolific writer, Timmermans also drew and painted. In the stories, words substitute for, and take on, a painting's lines and masses of colour and gloom; and if the illustrations that accompany the stories comprising Intimations of Death are also by their author, as is possible, nothing could be more appropriate. In their stark and brutal simplicity they have a Gothic intensity, matching that of the stories, recalling those series of woodcuts depicting the Dance of Death....

THE MOURNER

....what had a particularly frightening effect on my mind in this thickly overarched lane was that right opposite our house there rose a white wall, above which an army of black poplars raised their black crowns, which in their thick green foliage hid a deserted convent. The rooms and the church were empty, but owls and ravens, rats and bats let their swift shadows glide across the white walls.
....Our house, built centuries ago in Kempen stone, which has the colour of congealed blood, was outlined in black against the bare horizon, along which the evening twilight died out. Oh! it stood there so mysteriously, our house, in the endless space and the silence, like a dark hovel erected to contain the dark mystery of life . . . A deep black moat, covered in green scum, enclosed the thick damp walls. One misty morning a tramp had stumbled into it and drowned....

THE CELLAR

The most shattering story in a collection of emotionally desolating stories. Herman and Mina are wed; but Herman finds his dream, a life of the mind spent pouring over occult books with titles like
The Key to the Dark Chamber Called the Future, thwarted.

....She surveyed me for a long time. It made me feel uncomfortable, and to make the look stop, I asked her: 'Mina, what's wrong?'
    'Oh! . . .' she cried sighing, suddenly jumped on me, threw her arms round my neck and pulled me towards her with masculine strength, began to kiss me, my eyes, mouth and ears, on my forehead, chin and neck, pressing her head against mine, in wild rapture.
    Suddenly the truth hit me on the head like a stone. My wife was sensual. I tore her off me and she fell like a broken woman onto a chair, crying loudly. She did not dare look up, sensing that I had guessed. It was as if my heart had been kicked out of my body, for suddenly I saw all my happiness, my love, life, and future collapse. I felt acutely the futility of our marriage, the mistake I had made by taking her as my wife....

THE SEVENTH GRAVE

A gravedigger in a town beset by cholera and plague makes a terrible error in judgment while trying to keep up with the number of burials needed each day.

....I hurried up and soon finished the seventh grave. I was about to start on an eighth one, but a pilgrimage to the St Rochus chapel was just going past. Everyone not hit by the scourge stumbled along in the foul weather and carried fear and wretchedness on their broken backs. I heard how their prayers choked as they approached this place and how a fearful mumbling rolled over their heads. I saw how they retreated from me into the fields, hastened their step and then continued on their weary way on the white path through the distant plain. The sound of the alarm bell boomed out through the quiet air. I thought how one of them shortly or tomorrow would be here under the ground, in the grave I had just dug. Then it struck my heart like a cold iron fist that I had made a grave not ordered for anyone! I went pale. Was this not a challenge to Death to fetch someone? . . .

THE WHITE VASE

The narrator escapes the oppressive intensity of urban life to some much needed quiet as a guest at a monastery.

....Had these two days of prayer and silence freed my soul of its worldly burden, so that it only now made itself felt?
    A strange, nameless feeling had arisen in me, a kind of unconscious terror of something far away, whose tangible presence I nevertheless felt in myself and all around me. I tried to push it away, but I was fooling myself, because the thing was lodged in my body like the blood in my heart, and it began to spread, like the mist that rises from the meadows at evening. I became afraid of what surrounded me. I suddenly felt the dreari­ness of the country in which I stood so utterly lost and alone. The bare sandy heath, dotted only sparsely with wild cypress trees, stretched endlessly into the distance, far, far away until it stood out dark and sharp as gorse against the pale sky. Neither woods nor towers awakened any hope of continuing human habitation; it was as if the world ended right there and I myself became the boundary of human life....

THE UNKNOWN

    'If it were me, oh I would not leave you alone, Begga,' he said with conviction. 'When I think how we came together, what we have been through and suffered, then I feel we cannot be separated, that is why no rope is necessary here. There is an unbreakable rope joining you and me, which we cannot shake off. Do you know what I sometimes think? . . . That we have only one heart.'
    'I sometimes think that too,' she said. 'There is something in us that draws us together . . . I feel this better than I can say it. And I think, Hendrik, that if I had to lie alone in this water, that I would rise up and get you. Oh, because I love you so much.'
    'And I too,' he sobbed . . . And they wept.
    'We shouldn't have met each other,' she said.
    He said: 'It is as if we already knew each other when we came out of God's hands. We had to know each other.'
    'We must die together too. We shall be so happy there. Let's do it now,' she sobbed.
    'Yes,' he decided....

Jay
14 July 2019

Three Act Tragedy by Agatha Christie

....‘He’s a character,’ said Sir Charles. 

‘I’ve never met him,’ said Sir Bartholomew, ‘but I’ve heard a good deal about him. He retired some time ago, though, didn’t he? Probably most of what I’ve heard is legend. Well, Charles, I hope we shan’t have a crime this weekend.’ 

‘Why? Because we’ve got a detective in the house? Rather putting the cart before the horse, aren’t you, Tollie?’

 ‘Well, it’s by way of being a theory of mine.’ 

‘What is your theory, doctor?’ asked Mr Satterthwaite.

‘That events come to people—not people to events. Why do some people have exciting lives and other people dull ones? Because of their surroundings? Not at all. One man may travel to the ends of the earth and nothing will happen to him. There will be a massacre a week before he arrives, and an earthquake the day after he leaves, and the boat that he nearly took will be shipwrecked. And another man may live at Balham and travel to the City every day, and things will happen to him. He will be mixed up with blackmailing gangs and beautiful girls and motor bandits. There are people with a tendency to shipwrecks—even if they go on a boat on an ornamental lake something will happen to it. In the same way men like your Hercule Poirot don’t have to look for crime—it comes to them.’

--p 28

Lovecraft on Hawthorne

Hawthorne's birthday today.

"The Ambitious Guest" is a favorite of mine. As arresting as ever, like he wrote it yesterday.

Lovecraft wrote:

….America, besides inheriting the usual dark folklore of Europe, had an additional fund of weird associations to draw upon; so that spectral legends had already been recognised as fruitful subject-matter for literature. Charles Brockden Brown had achieved phenomenal fame with his Radcliffian romances, and Washington Irving's lighter treatment of eerie themes had quickly become classic. This additional fund proceeded, as Paul Elmer More has pointed out, from the keen spiritual and theological interests of the first colonists, plus the strange and forbidding nature of the scene into which they were plunged. The vast and gloomy virgin forests in whose perpetual twilight all terrors might well lurk; the hordes of coppery Indians whose strange, saturnine visages and violent customs hinted strongly at traces of infernal origin; the free rein given under the influence of Puritan theocracy to all manner of notions respecting man's relation to the stern and vengeful God of the Calvinists, and to the sulphureous Adversary of that God, about whom so much was thundered in the pulpits each Sunday; and the morbid introspection developed by an isolated backwoods life devoid of normal amusements and of the recreational mood, harassed by commands for theological self-examination, keyed to unnatural emotional repression, and forming above all a mere grim struggle for survival—all these things conspired to produce an environment in which the black whisperings of sinister grandams were heard far beyond the chimney corner, and in which tales of witchcraft and unbelievable secret monstrosities lingered long after the dread days of the Salem nightmare.
    Poe represents the newer, more disillusioned, and more technically finished of the weird schools that rose out of this propitious milieu. Another school—the tradition of moral values, gentle restraint, and mild, leisurely phantasy tinged more or less with the whimsical—was represented by another famous, misunderstood, and lonely figure in American letters—the shy and sensitive Nathaniel Hawthorne, scion of antique Salem and great-grandson of one of the bloodiest of the old witchcraft judges. In Hawthorne we have none of the violence, the daring, the high colouring, the intense dramatic sense, the cosmic malignity, and the undivided and impersonal artistry of Poe. Here, instead, is a gentle soul cramped by the Puritanism of early New England; shadowed and wistful, and grieved at an unmoral universe which everywhere transcends the conventional patterns thought by our forefathers to represent divine and immutable law. Evil, a very real force to Hawthorne, appears on every hand as a lurking and conquering adversary; and the visible world becomes in his fancy a theatre of infinite tragedy and woe, with unseen half-existent influences hovering over it and through it, battling for supremacy and moulding the destinies of the hapless mortals who form its vain and self-deluded population. The heritage of American weirdness was his to a most intense degree, and he saw a dismal throng of vague spectres behind the common phenomena of life; but he was not disinterested enough to value impressions, sensations, and beauties of narration for their own sake. He must needs weave his phantasy into some quietly melancholy fabric of didactic or allegorical cast, in which his meekly resigned cynicism may display with naive moral appraisal the perfidy of a human race which he cannot cease to cherish and mourn despite his insight into its hypocrisy. Supernatural horror, then, is never a primary object with Hawthorne; though its impulses were so deeply woven into his personality that he cannot help suggesting it with the force of genius when he calls upon the unreal world to illustrate the pensive sermon he wishes to preach.
    Hawthorne's intimations of the weird, always gentle, elusive, and restrained, may be traced throughout his work. The mood that produced them found one delightful vent in the Teutonised retelling of classic myths for children contained in A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, and at other times exercised itself in casting a certain strangeness and intangible witchery or malevolence over events not meant to be actually supernatural; as in the macabre posthumous novel Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, which invests with a peculiar sort of repulsion a house existing to this day in Salem, and abutting on the ancient Charter Street Burying Ground. In The Marble Faun, whose design was sketched out in an Italian villa reputed to be haunted, a tremendous background of genuine phantasy and mystery palpitates just beyond the common reader's sight; and glimpses of fabulous blood in mortal veins are hinted at during the course of a romance which cannot help being interesting despite the persistent incubus of moral allegory, anti-Popery propaganda, and a Puritan prudery which has caused the late D. H. Lawrence to express a longing to treat the author in a highly undignified manner. Septimius Felton, a posthumous novel whose idea was to have been elaborated and incorporated into the unfinished Dolliver Romance, touches on the Elixir of Life in a more or less capable fashion; whilst the notes for a never-written tale to be called "The Ancestral Footstep" shew what Hawthorne would have done with an intensive treatment of an old English superstition—that of an ancient and accursed line whose members left footprints of blood as they walked—which appears incidentally in both Septimius Felton and Dr. Grimshawe's Secret.
    Many of Hawthorne's shorter tales exhibit weirdness, either of atmosphere or of incident, to a remarkable degree. "Edward Randolph's Portrait", in Legends of the Province House, has its diabolic moments. "The Minister's Black Veil" (founded on an actual incident) and "The Ambitious Guest" imply much more than they state, whilst "Ethan Brand"—a fragment of a longer work never completed—rises to genuine heights of cosmic fear with its vignette of the wild hill country and the blazing, desolate lime-kilns, and its delineation of the Byronic "unpardonable sinner", whose troubled life ends with a peal of fearful laughter in the night as he seeks rest amidst the flames of the furnace. Some of Hawthorne's notes tell of weird tales he would have written had he lived longer—an especially vivid plot being that concerning a baffling stranger who appeared now and then in public assemblies, and who was at last followed and found to come and go from a very ancient grave.
    But foremost as a finished, artistic unit among all our author's weird material is the famous and exquisitely wrought novel, The House of the Seven Gables, in which the relentless working out of an ancestral curse is developed with astonishing power against the sinister background of a very ancient Salem house—one of those peaked Gothic affairs which formed the first regular building-up of our New England coast towns, but which gave way after the seventeenth century to the more familiar gambrel-roofed or classic Georgian types now known as "Colonial". Of these old gabled Gothic houses scarcely a dozen are to be seen today in their original condition throughout the United States, but one well known to Hawthorne still stands in Turner Street, Salem, and is pointed out with doubtful authority as the scene and inspiration of the romance. Such an edifice, with its spectral peaks, its clustered chimneys, its overhanging second story, its grotesque corner-brackets, and its diamond-paned lattice windows, is indeed an object well calculated to evoke sombre reflections; typifying as it does the dark Puritan age of concealed horror and witch-whispers which preceded the beauty, rationality, and spaciousness of the eighteenth century. Hawthorne saw many in his youth, and knew the black tales connected with some of them. He heard, too, many rumours of a curse upon his own line as the result of his great-grandfather's severity as a witchcraft judge in 1692.
    From this setting came the immortal tale—New England's greatest contribution to weird literature—and we can feel in an instant the authenticity of the atmosphere presented to us. Stealthy horror and disease lurk within the weather-blackened, moss-crusted, and elm-shadowed walls of the archaic dwelling so vividly displayed, and we grasp the brooding malignity of the place when we read that its builder—old Colonel Pyncheon—snatched the land with peculiar ruthlessness from its original settler, Matthew Maule, whom he condemned to the gallows as a wizard in the year of the panic. Maule died cursing old Pyncheon—"God will give him blood to drink"—and the waters of the old well on the seized land turned bitter. Maule's carpenter son consented to build the great gabled house for his father's triumphant enemy, but the old Colonel died strangely on the day of its dedication. Then followed generations of odd vicissitudes, with queer whispers about the dark powers of the Maules, and peculiar and sometimes terrible ends befalling the Pyncheons.
    The overshadowing malevolence of the ancient house—almost as alive as Poe's House of Usher, though in a subtler way—pervades the tale as a recurrent motif pervades an operatic tragedy; and when the main story is reached, we behold the modern Pyncheons in a pitiable state of decay. Poor old Hepzibah, the eccentric reduced gentlewoman; child-like, unfortunate Clifford, just released from undeserved imprisonment; sly and treacherous Judge Pyncheon, who is the old Colonel all over again—all these figures are tremendous symbols, and are well matched by the stunted vegetation and anaemic fowls in the garden. It was almost a pity to supply a fairly happy ending, with a union of sprightly Phoebe, cousin and last scion of the Pyncheons, to the prepossessing young man who turns out to be the last of the Maules. This union, presumably, ends the curse. Hawthorne avoids all violence of diction or movement, and keeps his implications of terror well in the background; but occasional glimpses amply serve to sustain the mood and redeem the work from pure allegorical aridity. Incidents like the bewitching of Alice Pyncheon in the early eighteenth century, and the spectral music of her harpsichord which precedes a death in the family—the latter a variant of an immemorial type of Aryan myth—link the action directly with the supernatural; whilst the dead nocturnal vigil of old Judge Pyncheon in the ancient parlour, with his frightfully ticking watch, is stark horror of the most poignant and genuine sort. The way in which the Judge's death is first adumbrated by the motions and sniffing of a strange cat outside the window, long before the fact is suspected either by the reader or by any of the characters, is a stroke of genius which Poe could not have surpassed. Later the strange cat watches intently outside that same window in the night and on the next day, for—something. It is clearly the psychopomp of primeval myth, fitted and adapted with infinite deftness to its latter-day setting.
    But Hawthorne left no well-defined literary posterity. His mood and attitude belonged to the age which closed with him, and it is the spirit of Poe—who so clearly and realistically understood the natural basis of the horror-appeal and the correct mechanics of its achievement—which survived and blossomed…

From:

Supernatural Horror in Literature
By H. P. Lovecraft
VIII. The Weird Tradition in America