THE DEEP ONES: "Out of the Picture" by Arthur Machen

"Out of the Picture" by Arthur Machen

Discussion begins January 18.

First published in The Children of the Pool and Other Stories (1936).



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://tinyurl.com/hom28ge

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?40223

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Ritual and Other Stories
The Terror and Other Stories

MISCELLANY

http://www.arthurmachen.org.uk/
http://www.victoriangothic.org/arthur-machen-an-ecstasy-of-fear/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxJ_CCWUXMo
http://tinyurl.com/h4k4h54
http://tinyurl.com/gslrxbx

It's apparently located somewhere in the Googlebooks link up above under Online Versions, but so far I can't figure out how to get to it.

After following the link, there's a CONTENTS button near the top right. From the menu window, scroll down to Children of the Pool, and select it. This will bring you to a table of contents page for Children of the Pool. It seems that "Out of the Picture" should be selectable from here, but I can't get the hyperlink to the story itself to work, so I page down until I reach it.

Thanks, @KentonSem, it's online for me and I'm looking forward to a new (to me) Machen story.

ETA Perhaps this direct link will work, posting here to test it.

ETA 2 That worked, had to navigate to the page, then select the link icon once on that page, and use that URL. Here it is long form:
https://books.google.com/books?id=e90ZAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PT5&dq=Delphi%20Colle...

>3 elenchus:

Those direct links work. Much appreciated!

ETA link up in >1 gwendetenebre: replaced.

The Works of Arthur Machen from Delphi Classics for me.

The Tartarus Press reprint of The Children of the Pool, from 2015, for me.

This one struck me as a curious mix of "The Shining Pyramid," "Fragments of Life" (for the aesthetic theory), and "Pickman's Model." It almost seemed like there were parts missing from the story I read: the way that the speaker omitted his own letter, leaving the reader to infer its contents from the correspondent's reply, the "package in Irving Square" that was never described, and so forth.

Was the "twisted man" of the paintings really a self-portrait? How did M'Calmont--if he were actually one of Machen's malign little people--manage to present himself as the "dark, slight man with a black moustache" who was the artist? Why should such a creature become preoccupied with the kabbalah to the extent that M'Calmont evidently is?

>8 paradoxosalpha:
All good questions. The narrator's missing letter threw me initially, too, but in the end I appreciated the economy of storytelling it provided.

This story is reminding me of another we read, but I can't place it: the story in which a newspaper ad accused the antagonist of sorcery, I think, and flushed him out. Sound familiar to anyone? In any case, there was something about the travel by train and through city streets that put that story in mind.

My other observation is that this story fits among that approach which essentially uses one small bit of Weird, otherwise propelling the tale along by non-Weird plot and storytelling. The last story "Strange Old Man" would be another example. In each case, the Weird element is fairly contained: HPL's use of bottles to commune with a murderous force which is hinted at but never onstage, Machen's brief description of the "twisted man" and offstage descriptions of scares and assaults. The effect of the story is in the contrast between that one item and the rest of what seems mundane, and in the delayed gratification of a confrontation.

Contrast that with the approach of stories like van Vogt's "Black Destroyer" or Ligotti's "Red Tower", which are pretty much crammed with Weird front to back.

I appreciated the poltergeist bits as an example of 1930 psychic notions as well as the presentation of aesthetic theories.

Ultimately, the poltergeist-"young Richards" connection seems to not be behind the dwarf attacks.

As an aside, I wonder if Daphne du Maurier's "Don't Look Now" is indebted to this story for its dwarf.

I'm not sure I fully understand the main plot but I think M'Calmont's experiments in abstract art, because they do not attain the highest spiritual spheres, unlock something ugly in his psyche.

I don't think the dwarf is meant to be one of the "little people" - I wonder if the inspiration was Richard Mansfield - the actor who first portrayed Jekyll and Hyde on stage, performing the transformation through mime (no make-up effects) and was briefly a Ripper suspect because of it?

There’s a curious linking of the unlikely but explicable, with the apparently genuinely supernatural in this story, both types of phenomena being called upon as evidence of Machen’s anti-materialist (even anti-scientific worldview). As well a the “red herring” of the poltergeist activity in North London, there are the passing mentions of strange things that Machen as reporter covered (if not all of them in reality, then presumably in the fictional world of the story). He did indeed cover the Battle of Sidney Street (a siege ending in a gunfight between the police and army, and Latvian anarchists); wrote about Campo Tosto (an elderly gentleman who defended his property with bow and arrow) elsewhere; Mark Valentine has discovered corroboration of the JHVS syndicate (see a recent article on the Wormwoodiana blog); and the passing mention of “poor Bill Terriss” is supposed, I think, to remind the reader that this actor was murdered and his ghost reputedly haunts Covent Garden tube station (there are no stairs at Covent Garden, by the way; so if he did haunt you, you’d have to wait for the lift in order to get away!).

So although the explanation is in a sense prosaic and would pass muster in a golden-age detective story (if one accepted that the psychological changes could have a physiological expression), there’s this penumbra of weirdness all about it.

One of my favorite late Machen stories.

The pictorial travels of the twisted man remind me of M R James's story The Mezzotint, and the twisted man's chilling appearance reminds me of the demon in James's Canon Alberich.

Also, see the 'London Monster', who stalked and stabbed women with needles...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Monster

>12 Crypto-Willobie:

Ah, "The Mezzotint!" Nice connection!