THE DEEP ONES: "The Novel of the Black Seal" by Arthur Machen

"The Novel of the Black Seal" by Arthur Machen

Discussion begins July 3rd.

First published in The Three Imposters, or, The Transmutations (1895).



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601861h.html
http://manybooks.net/titles/machenarother06black_seal.html
(both links are to versions that include the story's prologue)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1039565

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Hastur Cycle
H.P. Lovecraft's Favorite Weird Tales
The White People and Other Weird Stories
Tales of Horror and the Supernatural

MISCELLANY

https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150439579530610
http://www.teemingbrain.com/2012/10/22/lovecraft-machen-and-nightside-of-conscio...
http://www.thecimmerian.com/machen-on-the-mind/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Impostors
http://tinyurl.com/pxbv6qd

H.P. Lovecraft's Favorite Weird Tales for me.

The Tartarus Press Tales of Horror and the Supernatural for me, I think.

The Great God Pan and Other Weird Stories from Arcane Wisdom for me, which I don't see listed on the ISFDB page.

>2 RandyStafford:

Me too.

Same Here H.P. Lovecraft's Favorite Weird Tales

I re-read this one out of the same volume where I originally read it, the Joshi Chaosium edition of The Three Impostors and Other Stories. Since that book has it embedded in the larger Three Impostors text, I'm wondering how the excerpting was done for separate publication. Although there is a heading for "The Novel of the Black Seal," and the story in the voice of "Miss Lally" seems to come to a discrete end, it refers to a few facts introduced immediately before and after.

So, in my book, the "Novel" proper begins with, "I must now give you some fuller particulars of my history," and ends with, "his body must have been swept into the open sea." Does anyone have anything different?

8 > The version I read (a stand-alone epub from Gutenberg) has a scene-setting prologue before "I must now ..." and an final closing paragraph after "... the open sea".

I confess I'm now curious as to how the story fits into the greater whole of The Three Impostors, tho not enough I expect to have a go at the whole work in the immediate future (too much else to read!).

Anyway, read on its own, I thought it was a lot of nice atmosphere married to a slightly disappointing plot. I would, I guess, have liked some more satisfying insight into the Other than the tentaculate absurdity of the Pitt relocation.

Muse on the "Issachar" Wikipedia entry.

And contemplate the "Ixaxaar" Tumbler channel.

About half a page before "I must now," Miss Lally says, "You appear to be under the impression that Professor Gregg is dead; I have no reason to believe that is the case." And yet the "Novel," with his own "Statement," suggests that it is the case. The main thing that the larger Three Impostors frame adds to "The Novel of the Black Seal" is the conviction that Miss Lally is an unreliable narrator.

I thought that the tentaculate absurdity was scarier on a second read, somehow. It seems a critical gap in the plot that Jervase's later disposition is never described. On the basis of the "Statement," he should have been tried as a guide to Gregg's possible path of exploration in the Grey Hills.

In his introduction to the volume, Joshi points particularly to what I consider the cornerstone thesis of this story (and the larger Machen oeuvre), outweighing any particulars of scary-fairies lore:

I have told you I was of sceptical habit; but though I understood little or nothing, I began to dread, vainly proposing to myself the iterated dogmas of science that all life is material, and that in the system of things there is no undiscovered land, even beyond the remotest stars, where the supernatural can find a footing. Yet there struck in on this the thought that matter is as really awful and unknown as spirit, that science itself but dallies on the threshold, scarcely gaining more than a glimpse of the wonders of the inner place.

>8 paradoxosalpha:

The Arcane Wisdom volume contains the entirety of The Three Imposters. Interestingly, it also contains an appendix containing Machen's original introduction to the story (not to be confused with the story's preface). He begins by stating, as he has elsewhere, that earlier in life he was a skeptic and would have scoffed at anyone who would have asked him if such things could have actually happened, but he's now claiming to be much more open-minded.

What I found to be most interesting was Machen detailing how, in a freshly re-imagined, mysterious, "Arabian"* London, he found himself seated at a dining table next to none other than The Three Imposters' "young man with eye glasses" (probably Aleister Crowley) who proceeded to regale him with shocking details of all manner of occult dealings he had recently been involved with. A young woman whom he referred to as "Miss Lally" also made his acquaintance and both of these people, and others, seemingly sprung from his fiction, would join him at his flat for get-togethers. In effect, Machen believed to some extent that his story - or at least the characters in it - was springing to life around him!

It's a fascinating piece. I imagine it's included in other volumes besides the original The Three Imposters, but I haven't found it online yet.

ETA

*Corrected from "Egyptian" - my bad.

> 12

I doubt it was Crowley, though that would certainly be cool. Crowley had a high opinion of Machen as a writer, and wouldn't have failed to mention any social contact with him somewhere in his vast body of autobiographical texts.

Machen was never very active in the Golden Dawn (where his motto was Avallaunius), although he was initiated through the Isis Urania lodge in London. In his memoir Things Near and Far, he described how GD initiate W.B. Yeats (a "dark young man") reacted to the internecine struggles in which Crowley figured as an agent of Adept S.L. MacGregor Mathers. Machen writes:

He described the doings of a fiend in human form, a man who was well known to be an expert in Black Magic, a man who hung up naked women in cupboards by hooks which pierced the flesh of their arms. This monster--I may say that there is such a person, though I can by no means go bail for the actuality of any of the misdeeds charged against him--had, for some reason which I do not recollect, taken a dislike to my dark young friend. In consequence, so I was assured, he had hired a gang in Lambeth, who were grievously to maim or preferably to slaughter the dark young man; each member of the gang receiving a retaining fee of eight shillings and sixpence a day--a sum, by the way, that sounds as if it were the face value of a mediaeval coin long obsolete. (quoted in Do What Thou Wilt)

It seems more likely that the "young man with eye glasses" come-to-life was Yeats.

>9 AndreasJ:

I thought that the tentacle was kind of unusually blatent for Machen, but he was trying to emphasize the "natural" in "supernatural", I suppose, to explain how it could happen, as in the statement "The amoeba and the snail have powers which we do not possess; and I thought it possible that the theory of reversion might explain many things which seem wholly inexplicable."

Notice that in this tale instead of the usual young girl or woman, Machen allows a young male to be the vector of ancient evil.

Miss Lally's being hired as a governess for Gregg's children reminded me of The Turn of the Screw, although the story went nowhere near that territory. The mating-with (or rape by) the unknown which produces the supernaturally-attenuated Jervase Cradock must have been an influence on HPL's Wilbur Whateley. I wonder if Jervase has a twin?

>13 paradoxosalpha:

If Machen's real-life "young man with eye-glasses" mentioned being on the lam due to a death-threat and also young women being "hung on hooks" in a closet, it's easy to see how Crowley would be a natural suspect (actually named by Joshi in the Arcane Wisdom notes). Would Yeats fit this profile?

ETA

Machen's intro seemed to indicate that his dining companion had actually committed the deeds. I don't have it with me, but I'll re-read it later to clarify.

A little detail that surprised me enough I did some online digging: Gregg refers to Shelta as being Turanian. This struck me as more than a little absurd, but it seems there was an idea in Victorian times that the pre-Indo-European population of western Europe had been "Turanian" (in some sufficiently expansive sense of that term), and Gregg's (Machen's) point is that Shelta is ancient, a relic from elder days.

Now, this is still an odd thing to say - in the real world, Shelta certainly isn't a pre-Indo-European relic like Basque is - but more within the expected scope of oddity in a weird tale, where intimations of vertiginous antiquity are more important than linguistic accuracy.

> 15

It looks like you (and Joshi?) are confused. Machen's dinner companion (the "dark young man," who by my hypothesis is the "young man with eye-glasses") described a third party (almost certainly Crowley) with the lurid (and probably false) details of hanging women from hooks in the closet.

>17 paradoxosalpha:

That would make more sense, and Joshi could still have been referring to the third party as being Crowley. Will check.

I don't have much to say on this one. My attention must have been really wanting the first time I read this, because, this time around, it seemed fairly straight forward.

After reading the BBC article I recently posted a link to under the Arthur Machen thread, I was interested to see the long opening description of walking through London, how Lally discovers what she needs as well as a secret in her amblings. I was also reminded of just what a popular suicide method drowning in the Thames was for down-and-out Londoners of an earlier age.

>12 semdetenebre: By coincidence, I was listening to a podcast with British author M. John Harrison today. He spoke of how he was influenced by Machen at an earlier age, how he didn't think you could read either Machen or Yeats in isolation and understand them fully without reading the other, and how they were of the final generation of ecstatically religious British writers. (My acquaintance with Machen, Harrison, and Yeats is pretty shallow, so I have no opinion as to the value of this observation.)

> 19 It's funny you should mention M John Harrison. The first time I read this story (2007, I think) , I hadn't read very much weird fiction and consequently lacked a yardstick to measure it against (is this good? is this bad? is this typical - those were the sort of questions that were bubbling unbidden while another part of my brain was just trying to enjoy the story).

However, for about 10-15 years from the mid-70s onwards, I'd read pretty much nothing but science fiction(much of it reprints from decades earlier, of course); and the story that I kept being reminded of was M. John Harrison's novella "Running Down" - it was nothing to do with the plot, there was just something about the language and the sensitivity to landscape, I think.

> 11 Unreliable narrator, or another piece of evidence that Machen believes there literally is a fate worse than death?

> 19

The first M. John Harrison book I read was The Course of the Heart. I think it's still my favorite among his books that I've read, and I read somewhere a claim that it was modeled on Machen somehow.

> 15, 18, 18

Also: Yeats wore spectacles; Crowley didn't.

I think if you wanted one story to exemplify Arthur Machen as a writer, this one would do very well. There’s Machen the London writer (describing the fashionable West End and the raw new suburbs), Machen celebrating the South Wales landscape of his boyhood, the 1890’s decadent in certain turns of phrase, hints of his occasional, rather odd, forays into detective fiction (such as “The Red Hand”, also featuring Mr Dyson), even disguised autobiography in the poverty and despair of Miss Lally (as we have considered the story in its stand-alone form and not as a part of The Three Impostors, I’m assuming that we can take her story and identity at face value).

The storytelling is quite leisurely but never felt slack. It’s structure, on reflection, seems a bit odd but that may well be because it dates from a time before ghost/supernatural stories and thriller/detective stories separated out into distinct genres. Machen’s story can build through an accumulation of unsettling incidences (like a ghost story) as well as laying a trail of clues (like a detective story). The payoff can be supernatural in origin, but told (in Professor Gregg’s final letter) like the confession/explanation at the end of many a Sherlock Holmes story.

The mystical element in Machen’s writing should also be mentioned. Mind is superior to matter (as is evidenced in Gervase Cradock’s involuntary transmutation), which is - so I gather - the . It’s also implicit in the sensitivity to atmosphere in the writing, whether in London or the Welsh hills.

Machen’s sensitivity to place - he’s been co-opted as a pyschogeographer avant la lettre (at least in some parts of the British media) - is demonstrated in the early scenes set in London and also the beautiful depictions of the Welsh landscape. The fact that these environments can be threatening as well as beautiful of course adds to the power of the storytelling, but I think also shows the mystical side of Machen’s character. His character, an attractive one in many ways (I loved reading his essays and journalism collected in two Tartarus Press hardbacks) is undeniably conservative and fearful where other s would seek or see religious ecstasy or religious awe.

I suppose I ought to say whether I liked the story or not - I liked it. The first reading was genuinely creepy, the ending wasn’t a let down. Reading it again with a lot more background knowledge (and knowing the ending) was a different experience but just as rewarding.

> 21 Climbers isn't genre fiction - it's about amateur rock climbers - but the sensibility and the quality of the prose are enough to make it feel that it belongs in the same camp as the literary end of the weird (which I suppose is "the-literary-end-of-the-weird camp"!)

>17 paradoxosalpha:, etc.

Checking Machen's introduction after I got home tonight, I can see where my memory was a bit confused. Machen recalls:

As to the Arabian atmosphere of London, for example, I must admit modifications in my point of view. I think it was in the June of 1900 that I was sitting in the New Lyric Club in Coventry Street, taking tea with a young friend of mine. He was telling me of some singular adventures in which he was then involved. It seemed that he had made a deadly enemy and that, furthermore, this enemy was a notorious Black Magician. This personage - who is, I may say, an actual personage - was guilty of the most hideous misdeeds. In the pursuit, doubtless, of his favourite art of Black Magic he had entrapped women into his house and had suspended them by hooks run through the flesh of their arms. There were other tales of strange horror which I forget. But not this. My friend had offended the magician; I do not think I heard what the offence had been. But he went in dread of his life.

"He has hired a gang down in Lambeth way to smash me up and kill me if possible, and he is paying each of them eight-and-six-a-day"

Sounds like it comes from a Tim Powers novel! Machen goes on to explain:

I do not think I realized with whom I had been talking till I got home to my chambers in Verulam Buildings, Gray's Inn. Then I recalled my friend's face and aspect as he told his story; certain phrases came into my mind: "youngish looking man with dark whiskers and spectacles.... of somewhat timid bearing he is pale, has small black whiskers and wears spectacles. He has a rather timid, almost a frightened expression and looks about him nervously from side to side." And so on, and so on; and it was with a shock that I realized that I had been talking with The Young Man in Spectacles, and that he came out of "The Three imposters".

Does that still sound like it might have been Yeats? Wouldn't Machen have known his name or at least described him as a poet? Did he actually believe that it was a character from his story come to life or was he just funnin'? An intriguing little mystery!

Of Miss Lally, he writes:

It was astounding, but it was undeniable; and the discovery opened my eyes to the fact that Miss Lally had also come up out of the book into my life and was involving me daily in strange adventures, in meetings and encounters that would have charmed the ear of the Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid, relating as she went on her incalculable way the most wonderful and unexpected tales. Miss Lally and The Young Man in Spectacles met more than once in my rooms. Naturally, they did not recognize each other since neither had read my book.

>20 housefulofpaper:, 21 And to complete the coincidences, in the same interview Harrison said his story "The Great God Pan" started as an outtake from The Course of the Heart.

The interview is at http://jonathanstrahan.podbean.com/2013/06/22/episode-147-live-with-m-john-harri....

> 24 Does that still sound like it might have been Yeats?

Well, it certainly couldn't have been Crowley! I'm sure Machen knew the name of the bespectacled one, since he hosted him more than once at his rooms.

>26 paradoxosalpha:

There is a novel here, based on Machen's "Three Imposters" intro. What is the true identity of The Young Man With Spectacles? Is Crowley the key to the Black Magician? If characters from "The Three Impostors" can emerge into reality, what of Arthur's other tales? The young girl of "The White People"? Helen? Pan!?! Perhaps Machen finds himself requiring the assistance of a philosophically opposed Algernon Blackwood to unearth the dark secrets of his "Arabian" London and worlds beyond...

Actually, a novel about the Golden Dawn shenanigans, without any sensationalism or embroidery, with Machen as the narrator could be pretty good.

>28 paradoxosalpha:

I'd read that! Especially if it was written by Dan Simmons. Actually, I'm reminded of his novel Drood, featuring Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. And lots of laudunum. If you haven't read it, I think you might enjoy it.

Since it's the July 4th holiday here in the States, naturally I was just sitting around reading the Declaration of Independence. Discussion of Machen has caused me to consider the opening paragraph in a new light:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Why "Nature's God", specifically? Certainly not mankind's god, right? If there were to be one, that is. Could this instead be a reference to something Other by the Founding Fathers? Something belonging to a hidden world which Machen and Blackwood would come to know so well?

I can dream, can't I? :)

> 29

Yeah, you can dream. But it's just a Deist catchphrase: the God evident in Nature, rather than the one peculiar to the Bible.

This has been my first reading exposure to Arthur Machen. The main narrative was enjoyable. The little pieces of connecting material at the beginning and end seemed a little shaky, but that's probably because they are a little out of context without the rest of The Three Imposters being present, I'll probably have to read the whole novel at some point to sort that out. I particularly enjoyed the description of London as delivered by Professor Gregg near the beginning of the story. I will certainly be acquiring more of his work in the future.

I own a handful of stories in various anthologies. I know there is a Three volume set of stories that Chaosium published that looks promising.

When I worked at Barnes & Noble they had one of the Chaosium Machen volumes wrongly cataloged in Bookmaster as 'Young Readers', and always ended up being shelved there, which either started some kids out on the path to awesome weird fiction, or scared the hell out of them, or both ;-) (They also had the Chaosium Call of Cthulhu Source Book 'Secrets of San Francisco' cataloged under American History, which made for some raised Eyebrows)

> 31 at Barnes & Noble they had one of the Chaosium Machen volumes wrongly cataloged in Bookmaster as 'Young Readers'

*chortle*

I've got all three of the Chaosium volumes. I've read and reviewed the first two, and have yet to get to the third, which looks to have been something of an editorial afterthought. It entitles the set to be called Machen's "complete weird fiction," but Joshi claims to have gotten all the good stuff into the first two volumes.

Here's my Arthur Machen "library" - mostly Tartarus Press reprints.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/65741746@N08/9229906331/

> 33

Nice! Besides the Chaosium set, I just have a Dover edition of The Hill of Dreams. When I was an undergrad, my college library had a lovely hardbound collected works of Machen in some twenty volumes.

> 34

I wonder what that edition was? I've read about the "Caerleon Edition" in 9 volumes published by Martin Secker.

> 35

Maybe that was it. My memory has probably made it longer and/or confused it with some other set.

Nice to see such a lively discussion - Machen often seems to provoke those, doesn't he?

This is actually the first Machen story I ever read, back around the end of 2009. I was quite impressed with it at the time, writing in my Amazon review of H.P. Lovecraft's Favorite Weird Tales (http://www.amazon.com/review/R34DQ6IK65ISU/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm) that it was "one of the eeriest stories I've ever read". It didn't have the same visceral impact for me this time (I knew how it turned out this time, for one thing), but it still did its job and strengthened my conviction that this is one of the foundational tales of 20th century weird fiction.

Machen's tale of meeting characters that he created ("Naturally, they did not recognize each other since neither had read my book", in particular, is a priceless example of AM's dry wit) is fascinating; it remind me of another AM (Alan Moore) recounting a tale of meeting his creation, John Constantine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Constantine) in a London restaurant:

One day, I was in Westminster in London—this was after we had introduced the character—and I was sitting in a sandwich bar. All of a sudden, up the stairs came John Constantine. He was wearing the trenchcoat, a short cut—he looked—no, he didn't even look exactly like Sting*. He looked exactly like John Constantine. He looked at me, stared me straight in the eyes, smiled, nodded almost conspiratorially, and then just walked off around the corner to the other part of the snack bar.

I sat there and thought, should I go around that corner and see if he is really there, or should I just eat my sandwich and leave? I opted for the latter; I thought it was the safest. I'm not making any claims to anything. I'm just saying that it happened. Strange little story.

They met again later, as recounted in Moore's Snakes and Ladders (which, interestingly, deals in part with the visionary experiences of (you guessed it) Arthur Machen):

Years later, in another place, he steps out of the dark and speaks to me. He whispers: " I'll tell you the ultimate secret of magic. Any cunt could do it."

*JC was originally created because Swamp Thing (the comic Moore was writing at the time) artists Stephen Bissette and John Totleben told Moore that they wanted to draw a character that looked like Sting.