The Hill of Dreams (1907)

I’m probably way out of line to compare Arthur Machen’s short, semiautobiographical novel to James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Both come from outer precincts of Britain. Machen was about 20 years older. I have no idea where Joyce was on genre writing. Certainly his Portrait is more naturalistic than Machen’s Hill of Dreams. Machen is trying to ground the events he recounts here even though, as a mystic, he can’t seem to help some indulgence of the weird. His young man / artist, Lucian Taylor, is in his early to mid-20s here, raised in rural Wales and eventually moving to London as he begins more seriously to write. In Wales, he is always distracted by the deep woods and by the Roman architecture. He’s drawn to an old Roman fort, in a clearing in the woods, and something happens there. Machen supplies few specific details. It involves Lucian taking off all his clothes and falling into a deep sleep with strange dreams. I have an idea what happened here—masturbation, possibly for the first time. That’s likely more crude and bound to this plane than Machen intends, but there is plainly something sexual about it. Machen wrote this in the 1890s but it was not published until 1907. Surely the rules of the time regarding sexual propriety applied—in short, don’t ever talk about it. So Machen may have felt he had to be coy. Full disclosure, I’m not sure what happens in much of this novel, although it is usually interesting to see Lucian grow and change. In Wales, he writes a first novel. When he submits it for publication it is stolen by another author and published as by him. Incredibly, Lucian doesn’t seem to mind that much. He’s already at work on another. He moves to London to work on it. The woods and nature of his homeland worried and discomposed him but he misses them keenly in the big city. The Hill of Dreams, according to Wikipedia, is “Generally considered Machen’s masterpiece.” That’s news to me—I hear a lot more about “The Great God Pan” (or “The White People,” which is actually his masterpiece). I would not suggest starting on Machen with The Hill of Dreams. But it’s one to get to sooner rather than later if you’re into him.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.