On a Ghastly Black Seal

 On a Ghastly Black Seal

1.

H.P. Lovecraft, the American writer of horror fiction, is rediscovered about every 15 years.  He is a having a “moment” at this time, during the eerie Autumn of 2020.  Lovecraft, who died in 1937, was forgotten for a generation.  His short stories and novellas were published in science fiction and horror magazines, Weird Tales, for instance and he saw only one of his tales issued in a cheap paperback format.  (Lovecraft lived in poverty; the money he made from his magazine publications was insufficient to support him.)  Other writers in his chosen genre kept his memory alive and, about the time of the great counterculture movement in the mid-sixties, interest in his work revived.  Lovecraft’s pervasive paranoia and his description of another, sinister world contiguous with our reality but mostly invisible to our senses, appealed to young people, many of whom were experimenting with psychedelic substances.  August Derleth’s Arkham House press, a small but influential publisher located in Derleth’s home town Sauk City, Wisconsin, a tiny village in the center of that State, continued to publish paperback collections of Lovecraft’s writings, editions with garish covers featuring castles and flying lizards.  (I’m happy to report that Arkham House still exists and continues to issue Lovecraft in volumes with lurid covers.)  Derleth admired Lovecraft and was a sometime collaborator with him and he kept the flame burning for the thirty years following his mentor’s death.  (Derleth wrote genre fiction: horror and mystery stories, sci-fi, and nostalgic novels about this Wisconsin homeland, the empty country behind the Baraboo Mountains along the Sauk River Valley.)  I first read Lovecraft in the Arkham House paperbacks when I was in my early teens – that is, around the time of the Lovecraft revival in the mid- to late sixties. 

The next surge in interest in Lovecraft was in the mid-eighties, reliably about twenty years after the first revival.  This moment was triggered by the movie Reanimator, a successful tongue-in-cheek horror film adapted from Lovecraft’s zombie novella “Herbert West Reanimator”.  A series of “Reanimator” films followed, gradually losing cachet as the series advanced.  Then, the writer Joyce Carol Oates took up the cause and praised Lovecraft in an essay published in The New York Review of Books.  Oates is a best-selling literary novelists and is highly regarded.  Her celebration of Lovecraft’s fiction once again nudged the writer toward the edges of celebrity.  This status was affirmed in 2005 when the prestigious Library of America published a thick volume collecting all of Lovecraft’s prose and poetry, as well as an extended, and thoughtful essay, that he had written about his precursor in the craft of weird fiction.  (Stephen King, an admirer, had earlier endorsed this essay as a fine work on the horror genre).  Lovecraft again slid into oblivion, but is now very much prominent in pop-culture.  HBO’s Lovecraft Country is a sardonic TV series made with high production values that explores some of the themes intrinsic to the author’s writing.  

Lovecraft’s overwrought prose is an acquired taste and, generally, interest in him can not be sustained when his writings are closely scrutinized.  His waxing and waning reputation can be explained by three factors.  First, Lovecraft is a practitioner of a disreputable genre, horror fiction.  His stories weren’t published in respectable periodicals but wretched pulp magazines.  When I was young, literary fiction viewed itself as an impregnable fortress, devoted to realism and social commentary.  The uncanny and fantastic were despised by critics such as Edmund Wilson – the prevailing idea was that genre fiction was a degraded form of literature, descended in an unseemly way from serious writing.  This view began to collapse with the publication of magical realists like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Guenter grass in this country.  Kurt Vonnegut, long considered a science fiction hack, was promoted to the literary pantheon with Slaughterhouse Five.  Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow destroyed the distinction between garish genre writing and high literature to such an extent that the sort of condemnation of popular forms such as mystery and detective novels, hard-boiled fiction, Westerns, Sci-Fi, and romance novels prevalent in the fifties and early sixties is literally unimaginable today.  In current thought, literary fiction with serious pretenses is just another genre, no less and no more than other forms.  Indeed, we now recognize that literary fiction, like Agatha Christie, has its own conventions, stylistic habits, and characteristic themes.  In this analysis, Lovecraft is just as interesting as John Updike or Saul Bellow.  And, of course, far more readers have read Agatha Christie than Cormac McCarthy.  With the playing field leveled and critical prejudice against horror fiction, more or less, abolished, a writer like Lovecraft can be appreciated on the basis of his own particular (and peculiar) merits.

Second, Lovecraft isn’t really all that good.  The more you read his prose, the less you like him.  Like most genre practitioners, his narratives are highly predictable, stylized, and repetitive.  His melodramatic style featuring words like foetid and chthonian doesn’t wear well – after awhile, his big vocabulary and complicated syntax begins to seem an affectation, precocious, a child trying to impress adults with the big words that he knows.  His mythos based on an assertion that reality is governed by evil gods, the creatures of the Cthulhu pantheon, is unconvincing and relies on formulaic imagery of slimy sea creatures with writhing tentacles, formless blobs of protoplasm studded with staring eyes, reanimated if decomposing corpses, and various kinds of mushrooms displayed in non-Euclidean geometries becomes tedious after its tenth iteration.  A perpetual problem with horror fiction is that the real world is full of sufficiently terrifying phenomenon for us to have to invent artificial terrors.  

Lovecraft’s third failing is more prominent today than in the past.  The man was an inveterate, overt racist.  Lovecraft’s racism and his xenophobia are encoded into the fabric of all of his more successful tales.  In these stories, a White Anglo-Saxon of neurasthenic tendencies encounters manifestations of lurid evil that seem to symbolize the invasion of the body politic by non-white Others.  Lovecraft’s monsters are self-evidently allegorical representations of African-Americans or the Portuguese immigrants to Providence, Rhode Island where the writer lived and died.  This is not some sort of farfetched literary theory – Lovecraft’s racism is pervasive and explicit: we don’t have to tease these offensive meanings from his stories – they are generally presented in a baldly declarative fashion.  It is this disturbing aspect of Lovecraft’s personality and his writings that is exploited in the recent HBO series Lovecraft Country – “Lovecraft Country” refers to a nation that is both fascinated with people of color and horrified by them.  In the current milieu, Lovecraft’s explicit racism will, inevitably, result in his “cancelation”, that is, his expulsion from empyrean of America’s serious literary writers.  But, like the zombies that some of his stories describe, you can’t quite drive a spike through the heart of his literary beast – the monster will rise again.

2.

“The Novel of the Black Seal” is a horror story published in 1895 by the Welsh writer Arthur Machen,  Machen, born Arthur Llewellyn Jones in 1867, wrote novellas that were a decisive influence on H.P. Lovecraft.  Indeed, both writers are said to be practitioners of something called “Cosmic Horror” – this is the quasi-theological assertion that the universe is controlled by powerful evil deities indifferent to human striving and that to glimpse one of these fearful beings is to risk a descent into madness.  Machen asserts, and Lovecraft follows, the decree that only our ignorance as to the true state of reality preserves our sanity.  To know that reality is the plaything of vicious and hideous gods is to court madness.  Lovecraft, as we have seen, invents his divine monsters and names the pantheon Cthulhu.  Machen was an educated man with a background in Greek and Latin – he tends to associate his evil deities with the great god Pan.  Lovecraft’s notion of a truth to terrible for humans to endure is the direct legacy of his study of Machen.  The two men’s career overlapped and Machen’s last weird stories were published around the time that the Lovecraft’s first tales appeared in the pulps.  Like Lovecraft, Machen’s work was too strange to endure and, after a period of fame in the mid-1890's, his star was eclipsed.  (Machen had brief public resurgence when a ghost story that he wrote, “The Angel of Mons”, was taken for journalism, that is a recounting of an actual event: the intervention of celestial beings in the form of angels on the side of the British during a World War One battle.)  We don’t need to speculate on Machen’s influence on Lovecraft.  In his essay on the progenitors of weird fiction, Lovecraft directly praises Arthur Machen as well as Lord Dunsany and Algernon Blackwood as his literary masters.       

Machen’s story “The Novel of the Black Seal” is an adventure in “cosmic horror” and acknowledged by Lovecraft as an inspiration for his works.  The story was published as part of a suite of tales comprising a short book called The Three Imposters.  “The Black Seal’s” meaning is controlled in large part by its context in the The Imposters.  However, the story stands on its own and has been frequently anthologized out of the context of the larger book – this has the effect of diluting some of the meanings of the tale and falsifies (or considerably simplifies) its ultimate effect.  But, since, the story is best known in isolation from the Three Imposters, it must first be considered out of its original context.

Briefly, the story involves a young woman who calls herself “Miss Lally”.  She is the principal narrator of the tale although the story ends with an extended coda in which the doomed protagonist explains his fate by way of a last testament – a writing that is purported to be delivered to us verbatim.  Miss Lally seems to “recite” the testament from memory, something that seems a little questionable in retrospect – she doesn’t have the text on her when she tells her story to the interlocutor, Mr. Phillips.  (This is something that the reader notices only on close inspection – the tale is so compelling and seamlessly presented that we don’t pause to wonder how Miss Lally has managed to memorize Dr. Edward Gregg’s written confession.)  

Miss Lally presents herself as a young woman of good education but impoverished.  She has expended what little remains of her family wealth caring for her sick mother who has died.  Miss Lally’s brother lives in London and so she goes to the big city to seek her fortune.  For some reason, she is unwilling to summon her brother’s help when she sinks into hopeless poverty – the theme of the missing or absent brother is central to The Three Imposters but occurs in “The Black Seal” only as curious plot point; it’s unclear why Miss Lally is unwilling to ask her brother for aid in her dire straits - she says it’s because she doesn’t want to strain his limited means, but this seems a bit implausible in light of the extremityh of her situation.  Simply put, Miss Lally who has been living on tea and crusts of bread is starving to death.  She decides to simply walk herself to death.  Leaving the apartment that she can no longer afford, Miss Lally wanders around London in the wintry mist, a white fog that depletes her energies and seems to her to be “the threshold of death.”  She collapses against a lamp pole and is about to fall down when a man approaches her, asking the way to “Avon Lane.”  The man is the kindly Dr. Edward Gregg, an anthropologist.  He recognizes that Miss Lally is desperately hungry and disoriented.  So, according to Miss Lally’s account, he kindly offers her a job as nanny to his two children.  Machen’s prose is very stately and confident and the reader probably isn’t distracted by the sheer improbability of this encounter – a well-educated upper-class professor offers a young woman a job caring for his children on the basis of her curriculum vitae that is limited to starving herself to death and blindly wandering around on the streets of London.  But so it happens.  

Safely ensconced in Gregg’s home, Miss Lally is promoted from nanny to amanuensis and the professor dictates to her his renowned book Principles of Ethnology.  (Miss Lally seems more of a collaborator in some ways than a secretary.)  Her ostensible reason for boarding with the widower Gregg, his two children, is, more or less, forgotten – indeed, the children are notable for their absence. They are never really described (one of them is named “Anne”) and simply vanish from the tale – this is also peculiar and suggests some problems with Miss Lally’s credibility as a reliable narrator.  With his magisterial book on ethnology published, and admired by all, Gregg can retire to the Welsh country to continue his research.  So with Miss Lally and the mysteriously insignificant children, Gregg decamps to a remote valley on the edge of a wilderness characterized by bare mountains, impenetrable forests in their valleys, and eerie limestone outcroppings that are weathered to look like “men or strange beasts.”  This location is the generic place set apart, the Gothic castle in the Carpathian mountains or the prototypical “cabin in the woods” – that is, a lonely setting far from the customary haunts of men where weird horrors can occur.

Gregg is studying certain mysterious disappearances and murders in the region.  He has a fetish object, a black seal that is described twice as looking like an “old tobacco stopper.”  A “tobacco stopper” is a rod with a flattened wedge-shaped end designed to be inserted in the barrel of a pipe – the device is used to tamp down the tobacco that will be burned by the smoker.  (Customarily, these sorts of objects were decorated with jocular figures – many of them, for instance, were carved to represent Wellington and Napoleon.)  This fetish object is carved with sixty figures in “degraded cuneiform.”  The thing is self-evidently phallic, a sort of abbreviated dildo.  Gregg has learned that the sixty characters on the seal, carved “four-thousand years before” were found recently scribbled on a wall of crumbling limestone in the mountains near his rural retreat – and these characters were freshly written, found by a shepherd who had earlier passed through the area only a couple weeks before and not seen the inscription.  There is more weird evidence: an old man has been killed on the public highway by an unknown assailant wielding a paleolithic stone axe – the axe is counter-weighted in some way that defeats modern people attempting to use the tool as a weapon.  Miss Lally finds an old book containing texts by Latin geographers.  Reading in this book, she learns that the debased inhabitants of the mountains of Libya worshiped a lethal stone of some sort engraved with sixty characters – this is called the “sixty stone” or, in Latin, the hexecontalithon.  She shows this text to Professor Gregg – they are both “burning with lust” to learn the strange truth of the sixtystone (the “sex stone”?), and said to be “quivering with excitement.”

Things get seriously kinky when Gregg brings retarded local boy into his household menage.  The boy is the product of a rape that left his mother, a girl from the town, demented and shuddering with horror while babbling all sorts of strange imprecations.  The woman was raped in the Grey Hills where the evil inscription in red (blood?) was discovered.  The boy is odd and speaks with a strangely sibilant, hissing articulation.  He has seizures in which his face turns black and he writhes on the ground.  Dr. Gregg locks the boy up in his study and continues his researches.  A bust of William Pitt, presumably the Younger, is placed on a high cupboard to remote to be reached without climbing a stepladder.  This bust of Pitt now has inexplicably moved and it is covered with slime such as a snail might secrete.  Gregg manages to translate the characters on the sixty stone and he determines that he will embark on a foot tour of the Grey Hills.  Nonchalantly, he mentions that he will either return in a day or two or suffer a “nameless doom.”  

Gregg walks resolutely into the hills and, of course, vanishes.  After he has been absent for a few days, Miss Lally finds an envelope inscribed in Gregg’s handwriting.  Helpfully, the note tells her to destroy the contents of the envelope by throwing it “forthwith into the fire.”  If she opens and reads the testament, Gregg warns her that she will not “sleep better” in the future.  Of course, with this kind of tease, Miss Lally immediately opens the envelope, reads the testament enclosed, and, then, proceeds to recite those words verbatim to her interlocutor, Mr. Phillipps.  

In the testament, Gregg says that he has come to believe that hills in this part of Wales are infested with “fairies”.  The word “fairy” means the “fair folk” but this is word magic – in fact, the fairies are not fair at all, but hideous wizened creatures with dark skin that hiss when they speak.  Gregg remarks that the ancient Greeks often used euphemisms to describe monsters too horrible to depict in words – for instance, the “Eumenides” or furies, thought to be terrifying monsters, are named “the kindly or beneficent ones”, the exact opposite of their function in Greek myth.  So, similarly, the fairies or the “white people” or sometimes called “the shining ones” are, in fact, grotesque and disgusting monsters.  They are capable of sexual congress with human women.  The retarded boy, Jervase Cradock, is the offspring of a fairy father and human mother.  Gregg has discovered the meaning of the cuneiform inscription on the phallic seal.  (The text is said to be “unspeakable” and, therefore, Mr. Machen’s gentle readers are spared confrontation with that horror.)  Evidently, the inscription is an incantation that transforms people into giant, slimy, and betentacled snakes.  Gregg has witnessed the transformation of Jervase Cradock into such a creature.  As a serpent monster with writhing tentacles Cradock has shown an unseemly interest in the bust of William Pitt and moved that object around the study, leaving a gooey residue on the statue.  Armed with this knowledge, Gregg has decided to explore the deserted country, presumably to seek out the monstrous fairies.  Miss Lally has suspected that Professor Gregg has become obsessed with the fairies and, indeed, has descended into a kind of madness that makes his in league with these forces of darkness and that induces him to torture poor Jervase Cradock.  Somewhere in the Grey Hills, we presume that Gregg has encountered the fair folk and, probably, been turned into a monstrous snake.  On this note, the Novel of the Black Seal ends.  

3.

The first part of “The Novel of the Black Seal” is set in London, described as the “city of dreadful night” – the title of a famous poem describing the horrors of the place written by James Thomson around 1874 (and released in book form in 1880).  London is the center of the world and a boundless, enigmatic city, in one chapter of The Three Impostors, said to be has magical and uncanny as Baghdad.  All of the detritus of the British empire has gathered in London – every artifact and jewel famous in infamy has been seized and transported to the capitol city, brought by rapacious British capitalists.  Like Walter Benjamin’s Paris, London is a vast, mysterious bazaar traversed by weary, nihilistic flaneur – men of the boulevard who wander the streets of the metropolis seeking weird and uncanny adventures.  (Benjamin characterizes the flaneur – that is, wanderer or saunterer in the maze of the city as the archetypal detached consciousness of modernity.)  Several times in The Three Impostors there are episodes explicitly showing characters acting as flaneur – they set forth from their abodes to wander the endless labyrinthine streets in search of wild sensations to inflame senses corroded by too much study and too much spectacle on the teeming streets.  When men go forth as flaneur they seek adventure; women wander the streets to commit suicide – they seek death.  The confluence of the twain is the encounter between the world-weary flaneur, Dr. Gregg, and the suicidal Miss Lally.  

London is corrupt because it has been infiltrated by many strange tribes and weird non-Anglo-Saxon people from the Orient.  The British empire has turned colonized into its colonizers – the city streets teem with people speaking strange tongues.  This is why Gregg is an ethnologist – his trade is to understand the people in the colonies who are now streaming into London, the capitol of the far-flung empire.  Artifacts like the dildo-shaped Black Seal are now on display at the British Museum, where, of course, cuneiform was deciphered around the middle of the 19th century by Reverend Hincks, Rawlandson, and the Germanm Johannes Oppert.  There is a danger implicit in learning to read cuneiform – the ancient texts from Sumeria and Assyria represent a counter-narrative to the Christian Bible.  Cuneiform writing tells of a Great Flood that destroyed mankind and these sorts of stories undermine the authority of Holy Scripture.  The immigrants to London are dark-skinned, like Jervase Cradock, they have an “olive complexion.”  An uncanny sense exists that the center can’t hold and that, in the end, the dark-skinned races, the “fair folk,” will prevail and displace their pale Anglo-Saxon masters.  This fear is embodied in the account that Gregg gives of rural housewives finding their “plump and rosy little Saxon babies” replaced by grotesque changelings: “a thin and wizened creature with sallow skin and black piercing eyes, the child of another race.”  And, in fact, these Others (in my view the colonized peoples of the British Empire) don’t have to steal our babies – they have other means of infiltrating our blood stream.  Indeed, the Others are “demons who mingle...with the daughters of men.”  In other words, the pure Anglo-Saxon master race can be copulated out of existence.  We see this in the story of Mrs. Cradock, molested on the moor, who gives birth to the awful Jervase Cradock, a half-human monster.  (By contrast with the sexual energy of the fairies, the good British stock are strangely asexual – Machen sets up the tryst in the cottage between Professor Gregg and Miss Lally as a conventional romance.  But no romance of any kind ensues – Miss Lally spends her days reading Latin geographers and Gregg is obsessed with deciphering the characters on the dildo “Sixty Stone.”  The dark-skinned races are more sexually efficient and lustful than the repressed and erotically reticent British gentlemen and gentlewomen – so, of course, they will prevail in the competition to produce viable offspring).  

I noted that the decoding of cuneiform undermines the authority of the Christian Bible.  Of course, there is another text in play that also subverts religious doctrine: this is Darwin’s writing on the origin of the species and the descent of man.  Anxiety about Darwin’s theory of evolution quivers in the phrasing of Miss Lally’s narrative.  If beings can evolve out of the primordial slime, then, so can they also devolve or revert to earlier, nightmarishly atavistic forms.  Evolution goes in both directions.  Human beings contain evidence of the “Nilotic mud and the Mexican forests” from which they have originated – the incantation on the Sixty Stone induces a radical, immediate de-evolution of human into serpentine creature concealed within us.  Gregg, the most refined and civilized of men, meets a horrible fate – he is de-evolved, we presume, into the form of a slimy giant snake-monster.  Science teaches us that all human beings are merely another form of animal – people are necessarily bestial and they each contain the atavistic seeds of a sinister reversion to the primordial slime.  The colonizers have lived too long among the dark-skinned races – they have gone “native” in effect.  Too much contemplation of the uncivilized races in the world occupied by the British empire has infected the colonialists with radical doubt as to their own pride of place in creation – the colonialists are reverting to earlier forms of existence on the evolutionary scale.  

This interpretation is bolstered by the bizarre interaction between the slimy monster and the bust of William Pitt – this narrative element is risibly grotesque:   just imagine the mucous-dripping tentacle caressing poor plaster Pitt and, then, moving the bust fifteen or so feet in its slimy embrace.  Horror, sometimes, seem an unmediated cry of outrage from the subconscious of the writer, a blast of dreamlike imagery that the author doesn’t seem to exactly control.  The use of the bust of Pitt as a prop in the grip of the slime monster is an exegetical gift to the interpreter of the story of the kind that “you can’t make up.”  What does Pitt represent?      

William Pitt was a Tory (Conservative) politician who served as the Prime Minister of Great Britain.  He was the youngest person ever to serve as Prime Minister, first succeeding to that office when he was 24 in 1783.  He consolidated the British empire’s control over India and repelled revolutionary ideology flowing from France in the wake of the French Revolution.  Under him, the United Kingdom of Ireland, Scotland and Great Britain was formed.  It was during his regime that the Spithead Mutiny to which Melville makes an allusion in Billy Budd was thwarted.  In general, Pitt espoused conservative values in opposition to the winds of change blowing from America and France.  He supported British hegemony over its empire and affirmed that Ireland was part of the United Kingdom.  Although there is some possibility that Pitt’s father, called “the Elder”, is the figure depicted in the “Black Seal”, the balance of probabilities favors the younger Pitt.  A very well-known bust of him was produced by Joseph Noellekans and there’s no reason that this statue could not have been mass-produced for sale to upper middle class (and Tory) art collectors.  Either asexual or homosexual, the younger Pitt was an alcoholic, a condition that led to his death in 1806.  He was known to be a “three-bottle man”– that is someone who consumed three large bottles of strong Port wine daily. 

An allegory is at work in the affection shown by the snake-monster for William Pitt’s bust.  The creature’s embrace of Pitt defiles him – this suggests that the slimy tentacle horror stands for the opposite of whatever it is that Pitt represents.  If Pitt embodies the stolid bourgeois capitalism of the British Empire, an institution based on law, looting, and the repression of brown and black people, then, the monster represents those forces that must be kept in check if the empire is to prosper.  But, perhaps, the monstrosity in Jervase Cradock is drawn to a similar atavistic monstrosity in the British temperament as reflected by the arch-conservative Pitt.  As the name implies, there may be something hellish and infernal about Pitt – his values may represent the morality of Hell.  In that case, the monster embracing Pitt’s effigy may suggest the affinity of like to like.  (Machen was a member of the Golden Dawn, and like his fellow member Yeats, a part of the Celtic revival  – therefore, it’s no stretch to imagine the author as a crypto anti-Imperialist.)  

The first-time reader of “The Black Seal” expects that Professor Gregg and Miss Lally will consummate their love affair in the remote rural cabin.  But Gregg is really in love with the dark secrets represented by the dildo-shaped Hexeconthelithos (the “Sixty Stone”).  He has gone to the mountainous wilds of Wales to meet “the great secret of (his) life”.  So what is that secret?  It may be summarized this: there are Others with dark skin and strange customs.  They are ancient.  One of them tempted Eve in the garden.  These Others are waiting outside the circle of our electric or gas lights.  Our study of them corrupts us and demonstrates that, despite our purported civilization, human beings have only recently crept out of the primordial slime.  Deep time is like deep space – a hideous thought that make evolution, and, correspondingly,evolution possible.  God has been ousted from his heaven.  For the time being, we rule as masters in our Empire – but the repressed will return and, ultimately, seduce us to our doom.  

3.

The Three Impostors is the matrix of stories in which the “Novel of the Black Seal” is embedded. Study of the book as a whole both confirms and enriches our interpretation of the “Black Seal.”  The title page to The Three Impostors provides the reader with Machen’s bona fides.  The author is said to be the translator of Heptameron of Marguerite of Navarre, a Renaissance collection of 77 short tales enclosed by a frame narrative (and an imitation of Boccacio’s Decameron).  The Heptameron operates on the basis of two narrative principles – first, the stories are linked by the frame narrative and, second, each story represents a dramatization of the character said to telling us the tale – the choice of the tale and the way it is narrated discloses to us details as to the story-teller.  These concepts are operative in The Three Impostors.  (Machen was also the translator of the libertine classic, the autobiography of Casanova – this also establishes the author’s credentials as a free-thinker, a student of the occult – as was Casanova – and someone who may be politically liberal to the point of blasphemy.)  

The Three Impostors is also scandalous on the basis of its title.  Beginning in the 12th century, medieval writers rumored the existence of heretical text proving that Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed were all confidence men, grifters who impersonated God in order to prey upon credulous mankind.  The three impostors, in other words, are the rogues who have invented the three monotheistic religions as a means to control and defraud humanity.  Every generation has produced men who claimed that they had seen and read The Three Impostors but no treatise of this name has ever been discovered and it is, generally, thought that the book is a fiction, a way of asserting atheism without seeming to endorse that idea.  (I dispute this generally held conviction: I recall reading the book in a small tallow-colored volume bound in some nameless vellum in the most remote part of the stacks in Walter Library around 1975 – the volume made a deep impression on me.)  In 1711, a French philosophe named Prosper Marchand wrote a version of the supposed book.  This text was briefly a cause celebre – Voltaire penned a famous rejoinder to the book, his Letter to the Author of the Three Impostors in which he makes the famous claim that “if God did not exist, we would have to invent Him.”  

Machen plays with this occult history in his title to the story collection in which “The Novel of the Black Seal” occurs.  So what is the overarching frame plot in The Three Impostors?  Although the story is told elliptically and we must construct the narrative from clues scattered throughout the book, this much can be said: an evil mastermind named Lipsius is the magister of a secret society, apparently devoted to some kind of sexual orgies.  Lipsius covets a golden coin, the so-called “Gold Tiberius.”  This is a coin minted by the Roman emperor Tiberius that displays the profile of the libertine Caesar on on its face; the back of the coin is imprinted with an image of the Great God Pan, or the Faun rampant.  The coin is a souvenir of a particularly “infamous orgy” and was struck by Tiberius to commemorate that outrage.  Lipsius has seduced into his coven, a person known as the “young man with spectacles.”  This character is like Faust – he desires to know everything and, so, because he is very poor he spends his days in the Reading Room of the British Library, under the “great dome.”  (No doubt he shares the Library with another famous student, Karl Marx, who announced his own radical theory in occult terms: “A specter is haunting Europe” – that is, the specter of Communism as declared in his famous Manifesto.)  The young man in spectacles is dispatched to meet an agent arriving from the Orient with the gold Tiberius.  He loses the coin by accident and, then, must hide himself from Lipsius and his servants who threaten horrible punishment for what they regard as the young man’s betrayal and his own greed in misappropriating the Roman gold coin.  

Lipsius dispatches three of his evil servants to hunt down the young man with spectacles.  They plan to torture him until he confesses to the whereabouts of the coin – but this torture will be unavailing: the young man with spectacles has no idea where the coin can be found.  It was cast aside in the street and, presumably, picked up by some random wayfarer.  This random wayfarer is, in fact, a flaneur named Dyson.  Dyson is a dreamer and student of the occult, much given to long ambles through the suburbs of London.  Dyson’s sidekick is another flaneur, Phillipps.  This fellow is a rationalist and skeptic.  Accordingly, Dyson and Phillipps form an “odd couple” – one practical, skeptical and hardheaded and the other a fantasist and dreamer.  (This formula will be familiar to viewers of the X-Files in which FBI agent Dana Scully argues for reason, logic and science in the face of objections by her partner, a conspiracy theorist named Fox Mulder – Mulder’s slogans, it will be recalled, are “I want to believe” and “Trust no one.”).  Dyson has picked up the gold Tiberius and has the coin in his pocket.  Lipsius’ agents know that Dyson and Phillipps have seen the young man with spectacles and, so, they set out to convert them into unwilling (and inadvertent) allies in the hunt for the coin thief.

Lipsius’ confederates are the titular “three impostors” – Wilkins with ugly “ginger-colored” whiskers, Burton, called by the epithet, the “smooth man” (because clean-shaven), and unnamed young woman.  First, Wilkins encounters Dyson and tells him an elaborate story about a gang of robbers in the California goldfields and how they were hanged en masse by a group of vigilantes.  Wilkins says that the leader of desperadoes, a man named Smith, has escaped back to London and is hunting for him.  He admonishes Dyson to contact him if Smith, described as young and wearing spectacles turns up somewhere.  The story about crime in the California gold fields is the first of several “novels”, the so-called “Novel of the Dark Valley” – although it isn’t immediately apparent, the reader comes to understand that these novels are essentially devices for encouraging Dyson and Phillips to report back to the Impostors any encounters that they have with the “young man with spectacles.”  Next, Burton tells Phillipps about the theft of a precious gemstone, the Khan’s Opal.  Burton instructs Phillipps to be on the lookout for the alleged thief, of course, the young man with spectacles.  A young woman meets Phillipps during one of his rambles and tells him the “novel of the Black Seal” – there is a coda to the tale that is cut from the presentation of the story in horror tale anthologies.  The young woman, we know her as Miss Lally, encourages Phillipps to report to her if he encounters while strolling about the city a “young man with spectacles.”  Burton, then, tells Dyson about how he spent the night with a collector of antique torture devices with dire consequences – this is the “Novel of the Iron Maiden”.  Again, Dyson is implored to report any sightings of the young man with spectacles.  This is followed by another much-anthologized horror story, “The Novel of the White Powder”, narrated by Miss Lally who is now called “the young woman from Leicester Square.”  This tale involves a law student who over-indulges in his studies.  In order to work long hours, he takes some kind of Victorian equivalent to methamphetamine, a white powder provided by an elderly and incompetent apothecary.  The druggist has supplied this substance in error and it has the unfortunate effect of reducing the hapless scholar of the law into a puddle of writhing putrescent goo.  This tale is reprise of an earlier story called “The Adventure of the Missing Brother,” another of Miss Lally’s narratives involving her brother, a man that the woman’s meets weekly in a public park.  Miss Lally tells Phillipps that her brother, appearing late for his weekly rendevous with her, seemed out of sorts, not surprising since he was led around by a cloaked figure who looks “like a formless thing that has mouldered for many years in the grave.”  Since vanishing with the hideous apparition, Miss Lally’s brother has not been seen since.  She implores Phillipps to keep a look out for him during his perambulations around London – of course, Miss Lally describes her brother as a young man “with spectacles.”  This short tale, I think, is the most effective in the book because it is the most suggestive, the least explicit, and its weird atmosphere is enhanced by the tale’s appeal to the reader’s imagination.  

The last fifteen pages of The Three Impostors finally clarify the full meaning of the manhunt – we learn the Lipsius has been betrayed by the “young man with the spectacles” who has absconded with the object of his obsessive desire, the gold Tiberius.  The young man’s Faustian desire to “know all things’ and his entanglement with Lipsius sex-cult (if that’s what it is) is explained.  The book loops back to its enigmatic first chapter, a scene that shows the three impostors (Wilkins, Burton, and the young woman) departing a derelict and rotten ruin of a manor house in the remote London suburbs.  The impostors make some sinister remarks, although the young woman seems blithe about the scene that they have just departed.  She is observed to be carrying a sodden parcel of some kind.  In the final chapter, Dyson and Phillipps have wandered onto the grounds of the moribund estate with its “leprous” walls and “gangrenous” rot.  (Apparently, the impostors have just departed a few minutes before their appearance.)  Dyson and Phillipps go into the decaying manor and find the young man with spectacles spread-eagled on the floor, “torn and mutilated in the most hideous manner...a shameful ruin of the human shape.”  The victim of the Impostors is dead, but the “black smoke” of his torment rises from a fire that the torturers have set burning on his belly.  Miss Lally, who has posed as a helpless victim in her tales, is revealed to be mistress of the three impostors and someone who has just gaily tortured the “young men with spectacles” to death.  Her soaking parcel is apparently a souvenir of the encounter – she has cut off part of the young man’s hand (and who knows what else) as a gift for Lipsius.

Much of the force of the book derives from the fact that certain things are not just figuratively, but, literally “unspeakable.”  Tiberius has mounted hideous orgies and commemorated them with the sinister coin stamped with the figure of the Great God Pan – but the nature of those orgies is never described; they belong to the realm of our imagination.  Similarly, we aren’t told exactly what sort of horrible rites Lipsius is celebrating in his coven – again such things are “unspeakable.”  Most of the stories venture to the brink of an abyss concealing something beyond description – we are invited to speculate as to what is really happening beyond the veil that propriety has thrown over these “unspeakable” events.  The death of “the young man with spectacles” is also veiled by Machen’s reticence.  In the draft of the final tale, the book’s denouement, Machen described that the fire set on the victim’s belly had burned into his “entrails” – the word “entrails” was deemed too explicit and suppressed by the author’s publisher.  Horror always succeeds best when it is must suggestive and the censorious strictures under which Machen wrote actually enhance the book, forcing the author to imply horrors that he can’t directly depict.  

Viewed in the context of the book, Miss Lally’s stories take on a particularly sinister aspect.  In each of her stories, she depicts herself as in need of rescue.  Men, of course, are highly vulnerable to narratives that cast them as noble and heroic rescuers, particularly when the person saved is a young, attractive, and helpless woman.  Thus, the implausible aspects of her stories (for instance Gregg hiring her immediately as governess to his two children) are fully explicable in terms of her hidden agenda: she uses these blandishments to enlist the two bumbling flaneur in her scheme to hunt down the “young man in spectacles” so she can torture him to death.  Phillipps and Dyson are allegedly rationalists and skeptics, although Dyson has a mystical bent.  They appear as deluded detectives, a bit like Holmes and Watson if the supernatural adventures that Conan Doyle proposes were not ultimately explicable as the elements of elaborate, but prosaic crimes.  The tenor of The Three Impostors is that of a novella like Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles in which the titular canine demon is not explained away (or solved) in factual terms but, rather, revealed to be a supernatural monster.  (When the book was published, contemporary critics compared it unfavorably, not with Conan Doyle, but with Robert Louis Stevenson’s similarly elaborate suite of interlocking short stories, The Suicide Club or the New Arabian Nights.)

Woven throughout the Three Impostors are themes that we have identified as integral to “The Novel of the Black Seal.”  London, the city of Dreadful Night, is place where all the booty of its farflung empire gathers in great foul hoards.  Nineteenth century subjects of Queen Victoria imagined themselves as the proprietors of an empire on which the sun never set.  Kipling, Conrad, and others make explicit the comparison between the arrogance of the Roman Empire and the power and overweening pride of the British imperial project.  It is no accident that the object of desire in The Three Impostors is a gold Roman coin minted by the Emperor Tiberius.  The book collapses the crimes of the Roman empire into the sins of British Imperialism.  Furthermore, the Impostors revolves around imagery of decay and decomposition – the empire, it seems, has fallen into desuetude; it is rotting before our eyes.  This decay is coded as an encroaching “blackness”, a darkness that is slowly mummifying the empire – the empire is rotting at its core and it is turning “black”.  As dark-skinned people from India and Malaysia and Africa swarm into the northern capitol, it blackens and begins to rot from inside.  Nothing remains forever.  The imperialists have become what they conquered – hideous pagan rites are celebrated in the endless, deserted suburbs and at the end of the train lines where an ancient manor is the site of an awful human sacrifice.  London is not so much a tangible place but a psychogeography, a city that contains every form of human depravity and suffering, a place where every intersection tells a story, but the stories are all lies.