THE DEEP ONES: "N" by Arthur Machen

Talk The Weird Tradition

Join LibraryThing to post.

THE DEEP ONES: "N" by Arthur Machen

This topic is currently marked as "dormant"—the last message is more than 90 days old. You can revive it by posting a reply.

2RandyStafford
May 14, 2018, 7:24 pm

Reading it out of the very large e-book collection Collected Works of Arthur Machen.

3housefulofpaper
May 15, 2018, 7:10 pm

I'm reading it in the Tartarus Press reprint of The Cosy Room.

4gwendetenebre
Edited: May 16, 2018, 10:05 am

The narrative for the first half definitely meanders as supernatural tales of this vintage often do, at least until it gets to the “ancient circle” in the tavern house. There, at the mere mention of “jazz” and “hot blues” (hah!), things get a little more interesting, as we are introduced to Himalaya House and an escaped madman. The madman (or is he?) and his colorful visions recall our recent read of HPL’s “He”, which also featured time-displaced visions with a window view. I also had the shivery thought that “the one who lived in the white house on the hill” might have been Helen Vaughan. And why not? The landlady was clearly terrified of something behind her tenant's door and this is Machen country, after all. That last paragraph is particularly haunting. What good Lovecraftian hasn’t had similar musings?

5AndreasJ
May 16, 2018, 12:56 pm

>5 AndreasJ:

Meanders wildly indeed! Funnily enough, I actually enjoyed the three friends' idle talk than the supernatural mystery that eventually arose.

I'm not sure there's a reason to assume the visions are displaced in time? The narrator at the end speaks of perichoresis (a word I had too look up) and interpenetration, but I took it to be the co-occurence of different world worlds (ours and Faerie?) rather than of different times.

6gwendetenebre
May 16, 2018, 1:37 pm

>5 AndreasJ:

Windows on other worlds, at any rate. I must confess that I don't get the title. What did I miss?

7AndreasJ
May 16, 2018, 2:52 pm

Can't say I got the title either. I did wonder if it's a reference to the use of N (more often lowercase n) as a generic quantity in mathematics, as in "assume that n deep ones read this week's story", but I'm not sure exactly what that has to do with the story. The garden isn't so much generic as unknown, which would more typically (and more recognizably to laymen) be denoted as x.

8housefulofpaper
May 16, 2018, 5:01 pm

Thos. Kent Miller had an article about this story in the Autumn 2012 edition of Faunus (The Journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen). Although the title of this story is ambiguous and goes unexplained, he has some suggestions as to the meaning:
London postcode "N" for North London, the postal district within which Stoke Newington falls
"North" more generally (noting the recurrences of the words "north" and "northern" throughout the story). Donald R Burleson is quoted, noting the events of the story "revolve around the Stoke Newington area north of London proper (a region and a direction treated rather mystically in the tale)".
Dr Burleson has suggested other possibilities, the printer's measure "en":"suggesting the spacing or differentiation that lies at the linguistic heart of texts".
The mathematical suggestions - infinity or an indefinite number.
"Nemo" (no one), recalling Bleak House and also (in English law) the indicator of a person whose name is unknown.

9housefulofpaper
May 16, 2018, 7:09 pm

I think this the last piece of fiction Machen wrote. If this is true, it's fitting that it manages to encapsulate so much of his writing in a relatively short work. There is the apparently casual, anecdotal manner of telling the story (a mode of writing that grew out of Machen's reluctantly taking up a career as a newspaperman). There's the evocative writing about the past that one finds in his three autobiographical works and much of his non-fiction (as an essayist he's been compared to G. K. Chesterton. I haven't read enough of Chesterton's work to judge, but one writer I do see a resemblance to is the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, when he's in essayist mode).

Would you say that, despite the casual surface, the story focuses, in the end, on Machen's awed but fearful approach to mystical experience? This is a constant theme in his fiction (he had had such an experience himself, after the his first wife's early death).

10RandyStafford
Edited: May 20, 2018, 1:16 pm

The chronological listing of Machen tales in the Delphi Collected Works of Arthur Machen lists two more tales after this one: "The Happy Children" and "The Dover Road".

I liked this tale, especially the juxtaposition of the three men attempting, in their nostalgic discussions, to bring that world back into existence.

But being, like most humans, corrupted, they don't have the access to the "Heavenly Chaos" unlike Wilson.

On the other hand, why does Wilson have it? By virtue of insanity? (If he is insane ... we know that Himalaya House had at least one inmate who shouldn't have been there.) And does Glanville's mention of the Heavenly Chaos provide the real explanation for the mysterious garden in Stoke Newington?

11gwendetenebre
Edited: May 17, 2018, 8:27 pm

>8 housefulofpaper:

All intriguing possibilities. I'd say that "Nemo" fits best. In Stephen King's short story homage to Machen, also titled "N", the letter refers specifically to a character's name, so no clue there.

Joshi found The Cosy Room to be lesser Machen in general and did not include "N" in the Centipede Press Library of Weird Fiction: Arthur Machen release, although the story was included in their massive Masters of the Weird Tale: Arthur Machen volume. I don't know about the rest of the stories in "Cosy", but I liked this one well enough.

12elenchus
Edited: May 18, 2018, 11:39 pm

Machen's prefatory tale about the Poe enthusiast was amusing but also serious: serious because it suggests the genius loci ("psychogeography") theme that is to come, and amusing because he almost straight-out tells us he's leading us down a rabbit hole. "Long after my talk with Hare—that was the man who was interested in Poe", Machen has Perrott tell his friends (and us), before embarking on the main story of the mysterious landscape.

The three school chums meander, but they also attempt to revive a departed place they had in common, as @RandyStafford noted, and these early passages invoke alchemy. Misce, fiat mistura. I very much enjoyed the subtle ways Machen builds up the story, it's not so much additional detail as it is additional layers, all equally gauzy and yet hedging the reader along a common track.

I had to look up a number of Machen's references, including perichoresis, but also to the Frith's painting Sherry, Sir? and a few others. Amidst all that, I found this article on the story, worth a read.

13housefulofpaper
May 20, 2018, 8:41 pm

>10 RandyStafford:
Ah, yes. My mistake. Machen produced one more collection of new fiction, The Children of the Pool, also published in 1936 (but "The Dover Road" wasn't in it; instead it was included in - commissioned for? - an anthology of stories based on "missing persons" radio appeals entitled Missing From Their Homes.

>11 gwendetenebre:
The Cosy Room was mostly composed of material - some of it dating back to the start of Machen's career in the 1890s - unearthed by John Gawsworth (who, along with Vincent Starrett in the States did a lot to bring Machen back into the public eye in the 30s). It's a bit of a mixture, from "shocking" (not shocking any more) fin de siecle stuff to ponderously humorous pastiches ("A New Christmas Carol"). I can see why Joshi wouldn't rate it. It does have some (not all) of the prose poems from Ornaments in Jade, some of which come close to "The White People" in delicacy of execution and hint at something of the same transgressively pagan subject matter.

There's a connection between those stories and "N" in that the latter story isn't simply a rather genteel story about a ghostly appearing and disappearing paradise garden - Arnold's "last broken, imperfect chapter" is the sting in the tale (foreshadowed by the recounted story of the escaped asylum inmate overheard "jabbering in what sounded like a foreign language; and then {crying} out in Plain English as if he were talking to a young lady, and making use of very affectionate expressions".

This sounds like a similar encounter to that obliquely described in "The White People" and also like the seductions and betrayals, and time slippages of Faerie (but how would that correspond with the notion of a Heavenly Chaos malleable to the will of Uncorrupted Man, I wonder? No reason to think there's a final answer hidden in the story; Machen held that "everything ends in mystery" - he even had it (in Latin) on his gravestone. Omnia exeunt in mysterium).

14Crypto-Willobie
Edited: May 21, 2018, 9:57 am

I hadn't read this in quite some time but I remember it was one of my favorite Machen stories.

I think the slow everydayness of the early parts helps by contrast to set up the vision through the window when suddenly we are blasted as if by a shotgun filled with LSD. I felt a stab of ecstasy as I read it. (Am I mixing metaphors?). I was also affected by the sense of displacement in the final lines: "It is possible, indeed, that we three are now sitting among desolate rocks, by bitter streams . . . And with what companions?”

And From the 'All Cabell All the Time Dept.':

As to "jabbering in what sounded like a foreign language; and then {crying} out in Plain English as if he were talking to a young lady, and making use of very affectionate expressions" -- I could not help but be reminded of the scene in Cabell's "Concerning Corrina" (1916) when Herrick moaned some 'gibberish' as he was torn from his Faery loves, before destroying himself. Perhaps not coincidentally Concerning Corrina has been described as Cabell 'doing a Machen'.
And the bit where the view through the window shows something different than what is really there, and serves as a portal to Faery might be thought to recall Manuel's window in Figures of Earth (1921).