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“The Great God Pan”

This was more interesting on a second read, picking up details like how it is a deliberate and thorough inversion of the Jack the Ripper killings, and how Raymond is positioned in the piece a bit more thoroughly insofar as the archetypes he and his charge, Mary, inhabit within Gothic horror, and how this “union” bears out in the events of the story.

“The Fragments”

Three epistolary accounts. We get a doctor who describes Helen’s death, transforming into myriad things both male and female before what I assume is a satyr before her final dissolution; we get Clarke suggesting that the earlier-mentioned Rachel was raped by satyrs, Helen’s playmates, prior to an unmentionable death; and we have Raymond bookending the piece.

“The Encounter in Soho”

Villiers continues to dig and ties everything together. There is a sense of gothic horror as he is compelled, after making eye contact with Helen, to go out and get a stout rope. He knows that it’s either Helen or him. I already know the way the story ends, but Villiers’s account of his uncanny motivation to purchase the rope is still pretty haunting.

“The Suicides”

Well to do London men are hanging or strangling themselves!! What could possibly be going on??

The implication based on Villiers’s account of Crashaw’s face is that Helen is seducing these socialites and, once they are mired in her pagan rituals, spurning them: “Furious lust, and hate that was like fire, and the loss of all hope and horror that seemed to shriek aloud to the night”

“The Letter of Advice”

The dialogue between Villiers and Austin is incredibly awkward. Machen gives them no chemistry; Austin is just a vehicle to link Helen to this mysteriously arrived South American Mrs. Beaumont, and by the way he had a painter friend who just died in Buenos Aires, and by the way, his legacy is this gross book he made of illustrations of satyrs and other adjacent pagan creatures.

“The Discovery in Paul Street”

Villiers just happens to know Clarke and goes to him, ignorant of Clarke’s closeted fascination with the occult. This is an almost painful segment as Villiers somehow manages to avoid telling Clarke Helen’s name, allowing him to play the rational skeptic, until Clarke sees the sketch of her face. This seems HIGHLY unlikely, unless this is just gentrified chauvinism.

“The City of Resurrections”

A young man named Villiers runs into a college buddy who has fallen on hard times. Seems he married a woman named Helen, an unearthly beauty who he blames for the corruption of his soul. After he lets the tramp away, Villiers pokes into his buddy’s past, finding that he was implicated in a mysterious death of a well-to-do man: slain by mortal terror.

“Mr. Clarke’s Memoirs”

Clarke is an interesting character whose obsession with the occult led him to the ill-advised witnessing of Dr. Raymond’s experiment. His “Memoirs to prove the Existence of the Devil” make for something akin to a Necronomicon. We are introduced to the mysterious Helen, who is patently the end product of Mary’s brush with the Great God Pan.

“The Experiment”

“No, I think not, even if the worst happened. As you know, I rescued Mary from the gutter, and from almost certain starvation, when she was a child; I think her life is mine to use as I see fit.”

Forget anything else that happens in this for a moment. The story makes it plain that Dr. Raymond took in an orphan named Mary and raised her and it’s implied that he had sec with her as well.

heyyyy it’s time to reread this since it’s chronologically Machen’s next work in the collection!! I haven’t seen a lot of discourse on Pan online—not as much as some others—but it’ll be interesting as a more recent re-read compared to, say, if I was going through Poe again, given that it’s been 25 or so years since I read most of it.

“The Spagyric Quest of Beroaldus Cosmopolita”

I recognize this as satire but it is so involved with the terms of alchemy that it is incredibly opaque. It’s thematically aligned with the Silurian adoration of alcohol as it’s the key by which Beroaldus accesses higher knowledge. Someone pointed out in Clemendy that Machen uses lists in his prose—for comedy I think—and it’s as subtle as a freight train.

“Epilogue”

Closing the nested narrative, our main man, the chronicler, Leolinus, wraps up his “first” history of Silures before he is sent to become the governor of an island. This is not portrayed as a bad thing! But there may be a subtext that I am wholly ignorant of. In any event, it kind of teases that Machen may have written further “histories”, which I’d be down with.

“The Triumph of Love”

This is just a straight up romance with no twists. A French exile named Symon pledges his service to a Welsh earl, falls in love with the earl’s daughter, Bertha, and then romances her, the two having their plans for marriage and egress to Italy facilitated by the priest who marries them, the priest being more concerned about making sure they don’t have sex out of wedlock.

“The Affair Done At the House With the Lattice”

A knight living by economy gets wind of a local mysterious beauty and sets about wooing her, in spite of her crossbow-toting father. Things go pretty well until she appears to be able to predict stormy weather. He’s worried, but as we find out, his paramour has no supernatural talents whatsoever.

“How the Duke of San Giuliano Made Build a High Wall”

Another story about courtly adultery. In this case, the Duke neglects his wife out of a newly acquired scholastic inclination. She tries one straightforward plot, confiding in a doctor, before attempting to make her husband jealous. In the process, she earnestly falls in love with the man she was manipulating. The finish of this story is… different.

“The Journey Homeward”

A short episode where the men on their way home come across a troop of Italian musicians, make nice with them, hearing how they fared at Uske, share their delicious pastries both savory and sweet, and then solicit a story from them. Somewhere in here are some light superstitions regarding violins having souls.

“The Quaint History of a Lord of Gwent, and How His Wife Desired to Smell a Rose”

Young man debauchs in his estate until he is middle-aged and in so much debt he must knight-errant on the continent, comes home in his 60s, and then at the ripe old age of 70 marries a 17 year old. This goes about as well as you could hope, provided—unlike the Cursal Canon—you don’t mind adultery under these circumstances.

“How a Knight of Uske Kept Guard Over a Tree”

A more or less courtly romance where a knight looking for love makes the acquaintance of a beautiful maiden and then pursues a secret but chaste love affair, leading to a daring Romeo and Juliet midnight meeting at her window that places him at great peril. But with a little luck, and a huge sausage, he makes the best of it.

“The Quest of the Dial and the Vane”

A knightly romance parody that is based on a question on what is best in love: constancy, or variety? Two knights are charged to quest for the answer and then return with fantastic tales of imprisonment that suggest that neither constancy nor variety are superior. But, in Machen’s twist ending, it’s revealed that the knights were telling fabulous lies.

“What Fell Out in the Ancient Keep of Caldicot”

There’s a dubious alchemist and a lovely, chaste maiden. The tone of Machen’s writing did not prepare me for Loyse’s fate, ensorcelled by dark powers to become the alchemist’s sex slave. This story leverages orientalism for the background of the alchemist’s powers, going so far as to curse the Prophet Mahommed.

“The Lord Maltworm’s First Tale—How a Man of Caerlon Found a Great Treasure”

A story of mistaken truth—a simple man overhears two monks brainstorming details for a history and takes the treasure described to be true and not the least bit embellished—and then spends many years trying to dig it up, before he has a prank played on him, only to pay the misdeed back in kind.

A tale where a demon-possessed statue terrorizes the countryside, surprising them in all manner of illicit trysts and enterprises, until everyone is miserable and the clergy decides to put the statue on trial for being a tool of the devil. It took a while to get into Machen’s prose, but he’s actually great fun, if a bit dry by virtue of his presentation, and very learned in mysticism and the occult.

“The Chronicle of Clemendy: Epistle Dedicatory”

I’m glad that I read The Dark is Rising series now, I’m still pretty lost at sea with Machen’s writing about what is apparently Welsh pub culture but at the very least I have a slightly better grounding in Welsh pronunciation, not to say that Susan Cooper’s crash course in The Grey King really prepared me for whatever… this is going to be.

“A Chapter From the Book Called the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de La Mancha Which By Some Mischance Has Not Till Now Been Printed”

I’m glad that I read Don Quixote because otherwise I would have no idea what Machen was trying to do here. This is a laundry-list of books on mysticism and magic, though it doesn’t appear to mention Agrippa’s Philosophie of the Occult, unless that’s the Agrippa listed.

fragments: Journey to His Mother

in this fragment, two weeks before his execution, he decides to visit his ailing mother. Josef doesn’t reach her within the text, but that’s his intent. is Josef’s execution a metaphor for suicide?

fragments: The Building

in this late fragment, the bizarre nature of Josef’s prosecution and the idea of a metaphorical psychodrama are linked in his mental processing of his own experiences while on his office’s divan. there is an uncanny correlation between the attic law offices and the corridors of K.’s mind—and the office that Josef finds to be completely unapproachable.

fragments: Struggle With the Vice President

this guy didn’t come up much early in the text but as the trial drags on Josef is clearly worried about his professional rivalry with the VP given his struggles to concentrate on his work as his trial (his self-examination of his own character) consumes him. This episode has a bumbling Josef trying to demonstrate his aptitude to a VP who doesn’t care.

fragments: To Elsa

This fragment further unites the idea that the trial is symbolic of Josef’s conception of his own misdeeds. He is going to visit a woman named Elsa, and as he commits to this and flaunts the powers of the court, they become faint to the point of nonexistence and he can proceed on with his life unperturbed by his self-judgment.

fragments: Public Prosecutor

the given text has no friends for K.; he is mostly concerned with the attentions of women. This extract has his sole friendly relationship with a man, Hasterer, who appears to be of a similar if less discerning character than K.