The White People And Other Weird Stories Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Foreword

  Introduction

  THE INMOST LIGHT

  NOVEL OF THE BLACK SEAL

  NOVEL OF THE WHITE POWDER

  THE RED HAND

  THE WHITE PEOPLE

  A FRAGMENT OF LIFE

  THE BOWMEN

  THE SOLDIERS’ REST

  THE GREAT RETURN

  OUT OF THE EARTH

  THE TERROR

  Explanatory Notes

  CLICK ON A CLASSIC

  THE STORY OF PENGUIN CLASSICS

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE WHITE PEOPLE AND OTHER WEIRD STORIES

  ARTHUR MACHEN (Arthur Llewelyn Jones), a Welsh author of supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction, was born on March 3, 1863. He grew up in Caerleon, Monmouthshire, and attended boarding school at Hereford Cathedral School. Due to financial constraints, he could not continue his education at university. He moved to London in 1881 and worked as a journalist, children’s tutor, and publisher’s clerk, finding time to write at night. In 1887, he married Amelia Hogg and met writer and occultist A. E. Waite, who had a profound influence on his writing and philosophy. In that same year, an inheritance he received following the death of his father gave him the freedom to spend more time on his writing. By 1894, Machen had his first major success. “The Great God Pan” was published by John Lane and despite widespread criticism for its sexual and horrific content it sold well and went into a second edition. Following this success, he published The Three Impostors (1895), Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature (1902), “The White People” (1904), and The Hill of Dreams (1907). After his first wife’s tragic death, Machen took up acting, becoming a member of Frank Benson’s company. He also pursued his interest in Celtic Christianity and the Holy Grail at this time. He married Dorothie Purefoy Hudleston in 1903. From 1910 to 1921, he accepted a position at the London Evening News, though he disliked his job and only kept at it for a steady paycheck. In the 1920s Machen’s work became immensely popular in the United States, but Machen experienced increasing poverty; he was saved in 1931 by receiving a Civil List pension from the British government. Among his later works are The Green Round (1933), The Cosy Room (1936), and The Children of the Pool (1936). Arthur Machen died on March 30, 1947.

  S . T. JOSHI (born 1958) is the author of such critical studies as The Weird Tale (1990), H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (1990), and The Modern Weird Tale (2001). He has prepared corrected editions of H. P. Lovecraft’s work for Arkham House and annotated editions of the weird tales of Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, and M. R. James for Penguin Classics, as well as the anthology American Supernatural Tales (2007). His exhaustive biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996), won the British Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association; an unabridged and updated edition has appeared as I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010). He has also edited works by Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken, and other writers, and has written on religion, politics, and race relations. He is at work on a comprehensive history of supernatural fiction.

  GUILLERMO DEL TORO (born 1964) is a Mexican director, producer, screenwriter, novelist, and designer. He cofounded the Guadalajara International Film Festival, and formed his own production company—the Tequila Gang. However, he is most recognized for his Academy Award–winning film, Pan’s Labyrinth, and the Hellboy film franchise. He has received the Nebula, Hugo, and Bram Stoker awards and is an avid collecter and student of arcane memorabilia and weird fiction.

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  First published in Penguin Books 2011

  Introduction and notes copyright © S. T. Joshi, 2011 Foreword copyright © Guillermo del Toro, 2011 All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Machen, Arthur, 1863–1947.

  The white people and other weird stories / Arthur Machen; edited with an introduction

  and notes by S.T. Joshi; foreword by Guillermo del Toro.

  p. cm.—(Penguin classics)

  Summary: “Machen’s weird tales of the creepy and fantastic finally come to Penguin Classics.

  With an introduction from S.T. Joshi, editor of AMERICAN SUPERNATURAL TALES,

  THE WHITE PEOPLE AND OTHER WEIRD STORIES is the perfect introduction to

  the father of weird fiction. The title story “The White People” is an exercise in the bizarre leaving

  the reader disoriented and on edge. From the first page, Machen turns even fundamental

  truths upside-down, as his character Ambrose explains, “there have been those who have

  sounded the very depths of sin, who all their lives have never done an ‘ill deed’” setting the

  stage for a tale entirely without logic—Provided by publisher.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-55268-1

  1. Fantasy fiction, English. 2. Horror tales, English. I. Joshi, S. T., 1958–II. Title.

  PR6025.A245A6 2011

  823’.912—dc22

  2011027590

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  Foreword

  The Ecstasy of St. Arthur

  It is a rare breed of fabulist who transcribes and records—rather than invents—a reality invisible to most of us. These scribes, like St. John the Divine, are possessed of a near-religious certainty that such worlds exist. Arthur Machen was one of these.

  Much like Algernon Blackwood, Machen had no doubts about ancient worlds beneath us and the power their inhabitants exert over our souls and, ultimately, our flesh. There are, he knew, barbarians at the gate, hiding somewhere in the darkness below.

  The United Kingdom, for all its pomp and phlegm, is permeated with a sense of spiritual doom. No matter how many churches were built in its fields and villages, no matter how many saints walked its newly paved streets, pagan powers had long before claimed the blood-soaked land. Thus, every year, the River Thames’s muddy banks at low tide yield ancient figurines, human bones, and Roman coins. Here is a raw reminder that we share this world with impish beings with unbridled hunger and desire, who watch us and our silly conc
erns with bemusement.

  Machen’s magisterial style and labyrinthian storytelling (“The Great God Pan” and The Three Imposters come to mind) have influenced many authors, from H. P. Lovecraft to Jorge Luis Borges, and portions of the Machen literary universe, with its dense, Chinese-box formalism and the meta-dialogue between reader and author will become a hallmark of generations to come.

  Much like Borges, Machen was an acolyte of Robert Louis Stevenson, one of the most painstaking writers in the English language. And also like Borges, Machen seemed to believe that reading and writing are a form of prayer, each an extension of the other. But where the world was a library to Borges, to Machen it was an all-encompassing concrete geography, even as he was fascinated by traces of pre-Roman cults. Today, as then, his words are neither scholastic nor philosophical, but rather an alarm, a frantic denunciation.

  The coherence of his tales and beliefs was not fueled by the fanciful invention of Marcel Schwob (another Stevenson devotee) or Lord Dunsany or, even later, Clark Ashton Smith. Machen didn’t need to visit Zothique or Bethmoora or any other distant land. He simply turned to the hills and promontories around him—those timeless green sentinels that confided to him all the Eleusinian mysteries buried in the earth.

  Overheated paganism surrounded Machen: the Symbolists, the Decadent movement, the Golden Dawn, Tarot, Spiritualism, and Egyptian magic were everywhere in a pre-war Europe sated with Victorian morality, deflowered by industry, and seeking spiritual fulfillment in truths older than the Anglican Church.

  The lustful pursuits of the modern pagans took place in exquisitely decorated salons; even absinthe had its own patron saint. Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke delineated foreign geographies as Felicien Rops (the perfect counterpart to Machen) and Oscar Wilde demolished moral ones. Machen translated François Béroalde de Verville and Giacomo Casanova and was thus familiar with their notions of philosophy, alchemy, and lust, but unlike many of his counterparts, he articulated his world through naked fear rather than fascination or desire. Far from being a libertine, he was afraid not only of the corruption of the spirit but also the more palpable corruption of the flesh. The price of lifting the veil and glimpsing the face of Pan is high and real.

  The dichotomy between sexuality and spirituality can only take root in countries founded on puritanical principles—countries that cannot laugh at the Devil because they would be mocking God, too.

  Machen recorded these articles of faith with great zeal as an explorer in a lonely spiritual universe. He abandoned the safety of his humble quarters, the sanctity of his God-given name, and the veneer of metropolitan sophistication to achieve an ecstatic vision. Much like Lovecraft, he believed in the transitory nature of our agency in this world and the unyielding ferocity of the cosmos.

  This fear tenuously also links Machen with that other great antiquarian, M. R. James, but in his case it is not scholarly arrogance that dooms his characters, but curiosity and fate. Unlike Machen, James deals with hauntings of such specificity that they never allude to a grander scheme. Yet both men seem to share the conviction that our condemnation lies in our past, in the sins of our forefathers. In “The Great God Pan,” the impregnation and curse of a character blooms in the next generation. Evil is never dormant—it gestates.

  Freudian interpretations of these fears, focused on images of fertility, femininity, and the earth, seem to me to miss the point and can only be yielded as reductive arguments. Philosophers, writers, and artists are rarely emotionally successful human beings. A more interesting connection springs from the fact that fear can be recognized as an eminently spiritual sensation. Here is the darker side of faith, if you will, for what is fate but the belief in that which cannot be proven or rationalized?

  Machen knew that to accept our cosmic insignificance is to achieve a spiritual perspective and ultimately realize that, yes, all is permitted. And that no matter how wicked or how perverse we can be, somewhere in a long forgotten realm a mad God awaits, leering—and ready to embrace us all.

  GUILLERMO DEL TORO

  Introduction

  Arthur Machen’s own life is perhaps his greatest creation; for it is exactly the life we might expect a poet and a visionary to have lived. Born in 1863 in the village of Caerleon-on-Usk in Wales (the site, two millennia earlier, of the Roman town of Isca Silurum and the base of the Second Augustan Legion), Machen was fascinated since youth by the Roman antiquities in his region as well as the rural Welsh countryside. He attended Hereford Cathedral School, but in 1880 he failed an examination for the Royal College of Surgeons; he felt he had no option but to go to London to look for work, where he hoped that his ardent enthusiasm for books might land him some literary work.

  But only poverty and loneliness were his portion. Dragging out a meager existence as a translator (his translation of the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre [1886] long remained standard, as did his later translation of Casanova’s memoirs), tutor, and cataloger, he knew at first hand the spiritual isolation that his alter ego, Lucian Taylor, would depict so poignantly in The Hill of Dreams (1907). In his first autobiography, Far Off Things (1922), he speaks of this period with a wistfulness that scarcely conceals his anguish. Consider the description of his attic garret on Clarendon Road:

  It was, of course, at the top of the house, and it was much smaller than any monastic “cell” that I have ever seen. From recollection I should estimate its dimensions as ten feet by five. It held a bed, a washstand, a small table, and one chair; and so it was very fortunate that I had few visitors. Outside, on the landing, I kept my big wooden box with all my possessions—and these not many—in it. And there was a very notable circumstance about this landing. On the wall was suspended, lengthwise, a step-ladder by which one could climb through a trap door to the roof in case of fire, and so between the rungs or steps of this ladder I disposed my library. For anything I know, the books tasted as well thus housed as they did at a later period when I kept them in an eighteenth-century bookcase of noble dark mahogany, behind glass doors. There was no fireplace in my room, and I was often very cold. I would sit in my shabby old great-coat, reading or writing, and if I were writing I would every now and then stand up and warm my hands over the gas-jet, to prevent my fingers getting numb.1

  Although Machen published a few works during this period—The Anatomy of Tobacco (1884), an owlishly learned disquisition on various types of tobacco, and the picaresque novel The Chronicle of Clemendy (1886)—they were commercially unsuccessful and today are not highly regarded.

  But the death of Machen’s father in 1887 suddenly gave him, for the next fourteen years, the economic independence he required to write whatever he chose, without thought of markets or sales. And yet, one of his first works of fiction of this period—“The Great God Pan” (1890)—created a sensation, especially when it appeared in book form in 1894. It shocked the moral guardians of an enfeebled Victorian culture as the diseased outpourings of a decadent mind; but the reviewers who condemned it as sexually offensive could not know that Machen shared the very inhibitions he seemed to be defying. This tale—as well as the infinitely superior “The White People” (1899)—succeeds largely because Machen himself, as a rigidly orthodox Anglo-Catholic, crystallized his horror of aberrant sexuality by giving it a supernatural dimension.

  That Machen chose to work in the literature of the supernatural—one branch of what has come to be called weird fiction, which also encompasses fantasy and psychological suspense—is of interest in itself. Canonically, the supernatural in literature commenced with Horace Walpole’s short novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), which ultimately ushered in the age of the Gothic novel, whose most notable exponents were Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, and Charles Robert Maturin. It is not paradoxical that this literature emerged in a century typified by the rationalism of Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, for the supernatural can only manifest itself in literature when a relatively stable and coherent idea of the natural has been arrived at. In this sens
e, the supernatural must keep pace with science: Although it draws upon myth and folklore in its exhibition of ghosts, vampires, werewolves, haunted houses, and other such elements, it can only do so at a time when these elements are generally believed to defy what are commonly understood to be the laws of nature; for only in this manner can they constitute the imaginative liberation that many writers and readers seek. At the same time, the best weird writers understood that supernatural motifs could serve as metaphors for the expression of truths about the human condition (the vampire as social outsider, for example) in a more vivid and pungent manner than in conventional mimetic realism.

  Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was a seminal figure in supernatural literature. He recognized that the novel was a poor vehicle for the conveyance of such a fleeting emotion as terror, and so he restricted the weird to the intensity of the short story; he also had a keen understanding of the psychology of fear, so that he was able to meld supernatural and psychological horror in a particularly potent manner. Subsequent to Poe, the most viable weird literature was embodied in short stories, and Machen, whose admiration of Poe was high, followed him in this regard.

  The later nineteenth century was a tremendously fertile period for weird writing, especially in England: Such writers as Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (“Green Tea,” “Carmilla”), Nathaniel Hawthorne (“Rappaccini’s Daughter”), Ambrose Bierce (“The Death of Halpin Frayser”), Rudyard Kipling (“The Mark of the Beast”), Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Bram Stoker (Dracula), and a legion of ghost story writers made the supernatural a highly visible component of the literature of the period. Indeed, Machen was a harbinger of a kind of golden age of weird writing that encompassed such figures as Lord Dunsany (1878–1957), Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), M. R. James (1862–1936), Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), and, a little later, H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). Dunsany was predominantly a writer of fantasy—a literary mode where the author invents an entire world or cosmos out of his or her imagination, a mode whose best-known example today is J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954–55)—but the others worked chiefly in the supernatural. Machen, therefore, was working in a recognized literary genre when he produced his earliest tales.