The Hill of Dreams, Arthur Machen [spicy books to read txt] 📗

was puzzling my head to find a spring for the book that was to be written, Mr. Whibley’s dictum occurred to me, and applying it to another eighteenth century masterpiece, I asked myself why I should not write a Robinson Crusoe of the soul. I resolved forthwith that I would do so; I would take the theme of solitude, loneliness, separation from mankind, but, in place of a desert island and a bodily separation, my hero should be isolated in London and find his chief loneliness in the midst of myriads of myriads of men. His should be a solitude of the spirit, and the ocean surrounding him and disassociating him from his kind should be a spiritual deep. And here I found myself, as I thought, on sure ground; for I had had some experience of such things. For two years I had endured terrors of loneliness in my little room in Clarendon road, Notting Hill Gate, and so I was soundly instructed as to the matter of the work. I felt, in short, that I had my notion firmly by the tail; and so at once I set to work.

Not to writing, be it understood, but rather to the daily consideration of my topic; to taking it every night to bed with me as a child takes his toy; to putting it on the breakfast table beside my morning tea, again as a child with a new toy is apt to set it down on the cloth beside his plate of bread and butter. The notion (and my faithful bulldog Juggernaut) went with me on my dim Bloomsbury walks on grey mornings and wintry darkening afternoons, and when occasionally I went out and dined with a friend, the notion was in my pocket, and every now and then I would take it out, as it were, and glance at it for a moment, to make quite sure that it was safe and still there. Unnoticed, I put a few drops of the notion in the wine and sprinkled it lightly on the meat and found that it improved the aroma and flavor of both enormously; and whenever I was a little bored or down in the mouth and out of sorts, I took a couple of spoonfuls of the notion and felt better at once.

And then I began to plan it out on paper, and to try to reduce it to some logical form, to think of incidents that would show forth the idea to the best advantage, to determine the main course of the story, and now and again to write down “bits” that occurred to me. I proceeded in this manner for some weeks. The precious “notion” had been given me, let us say, toward the end of October, but it was not till early in February that I put pen to paper in dead earnest, and launched with a trembling heart on the first chapter. And then the trouble began.

For, in the first place, I had vowed myself, it will be remembered, to a change of style. Or rather, I was to abandon the manner in which The Three Impostors had been written, which was not my manner but Stevenson’s and to get a style, or something like a style, of my own. The gracious rounding of the sentence, the bright balance of words, the sonorous rise and fall of the cadences were done with; no more of costume; all was to be plain, everyday clothes. But it was a hard struggle. The player in private life does not want to “take the stage” as if he were Charles Surface in bloom-colored satin; but, on the other hand, he wants still less to enter a drawing room as if he had a game leg and a club foot: I had a horrible todo with my sentences in that first chapter. The old rules were gone, the new ones were yet to learn and most vilely I sweated at the task of learning them. The manuscript of that first chapter was a mass of erasures, corrections, interlineations. But somehow it was done, and, I thought, not so badly, all things considered. And then I started, more hopefully, at the second chapter. And then I was done.

I have said that I had planned the book out on paper, that I had, as it were, drawn it to scale, devising and arranging a due succession of incidents and events. And no sooner had I written two lines of that second chapter, according to plan, than I found that the book as planned could not be written at all. My clay model broke into bits in my hand. It had looked all right in the clay, but in the stone it most certainly would not do. It was a horrible moment.

For three weeks I sat down night after night with blank paper before me. Night after night I began to write that second chapter; night after night I groaned and shut up my desk. Sometimes the night’s work amounted to two lines; sometimes to two folios; but it was no good. There was neither life, nor fire, nor movement, nor reality in a word of it. Here was I with one chapter of the book finished and all the rest impossible. But all the same it was going to be done. I was as stubborn in those days as my good bulldog, Juggernaut; and I cannot say more than that.

And here I would say that to the best of my belief, I was brought to a dead stop precisely because I had explored the way and laid it out so thoroughly. I have told how I rolled the “notion” up and down and round about in my mind; how I planned and plotted and blew up the rocks and cut away the brushwood and felled the trees, so that there should be no difficulties in the track; and there was the mischief of it. For the truth is,