The Blasted Heath

THE TWISTED MAN
“And so, one windy night in October, a few weeks after our meeting, I set out from somewhere in the west and made up the Gray’s Inn Road. I am not certain by which street I turned from it. I think, but I am not sure, that it was by Acton Street. I know I had gone too far north, and that when I came to the bottom of the street, and traversed the King’s Cross Road, I found out my mistake, and had to incline somewhat to the right in climbing the hill. It is a district both devious and obscure, and I suppose that its twisting streets and unexpected squares of dusty trees will all come to ruin before they are intelligently explored.”
Out of the picture, Arthur Machen 1936.
The Reverend William Lloyd Baker made it clear to the surveyor John Booth that “we must have things done handsomely” when they talked about building an estate on the slopes of Penton Hill in the 1820s. The Lloyd-Baker estate as it is known was finally finished in the 1830s and the Reverend stringently supervised, from his rectory in Gloucestershire, all the developments in the construction of the buildings, red brick villas that were indeed handsome, which gripped the hill and grouped themselves around Lloyd Square. A later development, not as distinguished as the early villas, was built lower on the slope around Granville Square in the 1840s. Arnold Bennett describes this district in his 1923 novel Riceyman Steps where Riceyman Square (Granville Square) is seen as decrepit and slatternly. During a massive demolition in the 60s the old shops in Gwynne Place, still called Granville Place in Bennett’s time, were razed to be replaced by a car park, but the old steps that climb up from King’s Cross Road to Granville Square are still there and the Square itself is much smarter than it was in Bennett’s novel. The old church of St. Philip’s that used to squat in the square garden was demolished long before this in 1938. Here and there in the whole complex on the slopes an alley cuts through between the streets, sometimes dipping down into shallow basins and then rising into the street again.
Arthur Machen was born at Caerleon , but lived for most of his life in London. In his writing old houses and roads are the frontier zones between different worlds. King’s Cross Road was once Baggnige Wells Road and was a main road to the City for travellers coming from the north. Drovers taking their herds and flocks to Smithfield Market also used it. That’s why it twists and turns, following the lie of the land. Machen was also fascinated as a child by the old hill forts of the Caerleon area and hills have for him a special significance in his eldritch tales of both town and countryside. Peter Ackroyd refers to the Penton hill as one of three sacred mounds controlling London, the others being Tothill and the White Mound alias Tower Hill.
Like De Quincey and Dickens before him, and Henry Mayhew in his own way, Machen took to wandering randomly through the streets and districts of London. When his beloved wife Amy died of cancer in 1899, Machen was driven mad with grief. Like the crazed Sir Lancelot wandering in the wilderness, Machen suffered a breakdown. But he did not sojourn among brambles, thickets and deep forests but in the London streets and alleys. Thanks to friends like A. E. Waite, he made a recovery, but his period of disorientation and other-worldliness, is already presaged in his stories.
Machen lived near the Penton hill in Guilford Street in 1890-1 and he and Waite often went in search of books on the Pentonville Road. Out of the Picture dates from his under-appreciated late period. The doomed artist M’Calmont encounters the narrator, A.M. at a gathering. M’Calmont, “a dark, slight man with a black moustache” takes him “ by devious and obscure ways” to an equally obscure tavern, where they drink Lagavulin, “not the trash they sell in London for whisky”. A.M. is not just introduced to the joys of fine malt but to the mysteries of the Kabbala, to Kether and Daath. Indeed M’Calmont’s artistic principles are founded on that arcane Hebraic body of knowledge. A further meeting takes place at the artist’s residence on Penton Hill, down a black passage and a short flight of steps into an irregular open space, then through a green door in a wall, down another passage , to a studio hemmed in by trees. Here, over glasses of Islay, M’Calmont displays his profoundly disturbing paintings to the narrator. And in them, and increasingly to the fore, the figure of the Twisted Man.
A length of time elapses. Then The Horrible Dwarf starts to terrorise London. An amalgam of Hyde and the Ripper, he makes sudden attacks at night, punching and piercing arms with a long needle, battering a child on a waste ground. This promotes him in the media to the rank of The Devilish Dwarf. Another length of time passes. Then the horribly mutilated body of a girl is found in the fictional Irving Square in Bloomsbury. A.M., suspecting the worst, makes his way again to Sandy M’Calmont’s studio two nights later. He sees the green door open slowly and then a man, twisted and bent goes capering with “fantastic and extravagant gestures” and vanishes into a narrow passage. The narrator calls at the studio, and discovers from the handyman that M’Calmont has just gone out.
M’Calmont never reappears. Ten years later, the works of the vanished artist, recounts A.M., are becoming sought after by collectors.
FOOTNOTE.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the great American writer of the macabre, acknowledged a debt to Machen. Witness one of his best stories The Haunter of the Dark . A writer of tales of terror who also paints “profoundly alien, non-terrestrial landscapes” living in the city of Providence becomes fascinated by a hill in the distance, the Italian quarter of Federal Hill “whose unknown streets and labyrinthine gables so potently provoked his fancy”. This fascination ends in terrible consequences for the writer.

Labels: Arthur Machen, London, Twisted Man