William Hope Hodgson's House on the Borderland Introduction by Alan Moore
Before this introduction gets into its stride, it should own up and make things clear, right from the outset: this is not an introduction to the work that's in your hands, which indeed this introduction's author has not seen in its entirety. (He has, however, seen enough to realize that this volume represents its artist, Mr. Richard Corben, in his finest visionary form, a genuine giant of his chosen medium. But then, if you've already bought this book, you scarcely need an introduction to inform you of that fact.)
This introduction then, concerns itself less with the current adaptation than with the material which is that adaptation's source: William Hope Hodgson's magnificent early 20th-century fantasy, The House on the Borderland. This book, along with its author and some of his equally illustrious contemporaries or near-contemporaries, represents a buried treasure-seam of literature which might immeasurably enrich our current largely moribund cultural landscape, if only it were not buried, had not been ruthlessly buried alive in the first instance.
For "buried," read forgotten, marginalized, disqualified. It seems as if, with the arrival of Jane Austen on the literary map, there was a sudden and unanimous consensus reached within the critical fraternity to the effect that socially realistic parlor-dramas and sparkling comedies of manners were not merely the most lofty point to which all writing might aspire, they were the only form of writing that could be considered genuine, serious literature. Thus, at a sweep, all genre fiction and all fantasy were ruled unclean, consigned to the outlying slums and ghettos past the ivory battlements of literary respectability.
There are a few names, it is true, that have somehow survived the purge: Poe. Lovecraft (just). Maybe Bram Stoker, simply based on Dracula's enduring success. Possibly another one or two whose names evade the memory at present, which, if anything, just serves to underline the basic point: Buried. Disqualified. Forgotten.
What about Lord Dunsany, with his perfect little one- or two-page fables? What about Clark Ashton Smith, his opalescent prose style, his retirement partly spent in carving pebbles into leering and fantastic demon-heads then throwing them away, perhaps to be found decades later by some stranger, who would surely marvel all their lives? What about Arthur Machen, with The Three Impostors or The Great God Pan, who joined the legendary magic brotherhood, the Golden Dawn; who saw visions of Sion rise above the wind-scoured squares and terraces of Holborn? What of M.P. Shiel, "the gem-encrusted magus," overweight and running from his health through London's twilight streets, wearing a vest of battery-driven lights to alert coachmen and pedestrians to his approaching presence? What about William Hope Hodgson?
Hodgson was born in 1877 in a rural Essex village, one of twelve children fathered by a strict Anglican clergyman. Although three of the children died in infancy, the tensions and privations that existed in such a large and impoverished rustic family of this period can be easily imagined. Evidently, by the age of fourteen, Hodgson felt the need to break from his origins and was apprenticed as a cabin boy, at sea those next eight years and in conditions that must have made his earlier, overcrowded and impoverished family seem like a lost idyll by comparison. Hodgson abandoned the seafaring life in 1899 and turned towards his other interests, writing and photography as means by which he might support himself, submitting stories to that era's popular magazines. His first novel, The Boats of the "Glen Carrig," was first published in 1907. His acknowledged masterpiece, The House on the Borderland, appeared in 1908.
It is no easy matter to describe this work, the aura and charisma that surrounds it, evident before the book is even opened. The mad whirlpool of fantastic imagery and wild, apocalyptic notions it contains. The aftertaste it leaves upon the mind, like that of flaming and primordial-vintage brandy.
Why is it so powerful, and so memorable?
Perhaps the greater part of Hodgson's novel's eerie resonance may be attributed to the intuitive and probably unwitting psychological depth-profile it provides, both of Hodgson as the author of the piece and of ourselves as avid readers. Jungian without recourse to Jung, the teetering multileveled edifice from which the story takes its name, with bestial swine-things bursting up from the ancestral depths beneath the lowest cellar, is a perfect metaphor for human consciousness; the attic towers of the mind whose windows overlook vistas of prophecy and vision, with the dreaming basement dark beneath. The hog-eyed brutal impulses that sometimes surface. Poet and author Iain Sinclair, traveling on the Western coast of Ireland, came across a ruin near identical, near identically positioned to the house in Hodgson's book, but even so. The true location of the house, and of the borderland it straddles, between waking thought and the night-land of the unconscious, is within us.
Spread throughout the narrative are strange evasions, dark insinuations, whispers in the mind of the protagonist, perhaps even the author's mind. The sister, frightened, keeping to her room, seemingly more afraid of the recluse himself than of the squealing horrors swarming up from the foundations of the house she evidently shares with him. One wonders, ghoulishly perhaps, about family life back there in rural Essex, a twelve or thirteen people to a house. About Hodgson's experience as a cabin boy for those eight years. Men grunting, beady-eyed, like pigs. All of this experience, real or imagined, percolating into the construction of his nightmare house, into its gloomy architecture.
Then, of course, amongst the horrors, there are fierce and overwhelming wonders: the house suddenly transported, standing at the center of an alien, arena-like plateau surrounded, in the distance, by the mountainous and motionless forms of beast-headed gods. The vision of time speeded up until the passage of the day and night become a stroboscopic blur. Of first the house, then the Earth itself and finally the universe collapsing into chaotic extinction, falling into a "black sun" not totally dissimilar to our contemporary understanding of black holes and their immense properties. For a fantasy writer, ending the Universe in the course of a novel is roughly equivalent to Jerry Lee Lewis concluding his set by setting fire to the piano: a tough act to follow up, in anybody's book.
But it's the image of the horrors that remains, after the story is concluded, glimpses of the swine-things scrabbling over fire-lit ruins in a vision of some unspecified future time, or of a huge face peering in through downstairs windows. Looking back, considering the period when the author first committed these uneasy thoughts and feverish imaginings to paper, it is difficult with hindsight not to catch a whiff of prophecy in Hodgson's world’s-end vision: in 1913, having published the remarkable Carnacki the Ghost Finder (1910) and his extraordinary epic fantasy The Night Land (1912), Hodgson got married, moving for a period to the South of France, returning home to England when the First World War broke out. In 1915, Hodgson was enlisted in the British Army, receiving a commission in the Royal Field Artillery.
The First World War. Half-human shapes run hunched and crouching through the intermittent shell-burst light. Everything, everyone eventually sucked down into the war, into its trench-mud, into the black sun. Thrown from a horse in 1916, Hodgson could have honorably left the war behind him, vanished back to England with his wound a golden ticket home, and written up his memoirs. It would seem, however, that the black sun’s pull upon him was too strong. As soon as he’d recovered, Hodgson reenlisted and, in the last year of the war, April 1918, was killed in action outside Ypres, blown to pieces.
This fascinating man and his unearthly work should not be buried, should not be unrepresented on book-chains’ shelves, unasked-for in the libraries. Neither should any great fantasist be banished to the cultural hinterlands, his reputation left to gather dust, through no more than the high-handed decree of a self-serving, self-appointed literary establishment. Read this book, then go out and track down the original. If you’re still interested, find a copy of Carnacki, then maybe progress to other authors who share Hodgson’s circle of the literary damned, both period work of Hodgson’s vintage (possibly Algernon Blackwood, or David Lindsay, author of the weird allegory Voyage to Arcturus), or that of later fantasists such as Angela Carter, M. John Harrison, Jack Trevor Story, Mervyn Peake or Maurice Richardson.
Fantasy is itself a borderland, between that which is palpable and real and that which is imaginary. In a sense, all writers working in this field set up their houses there in that halfway territory. They become recluses, channeling the visions, trying to describe the creaks and thuds heard sometimes from wine cellars of the unconscious. The strange and wondrous works that they produce are often artifices of a fearful and compelling beauty, to be valued, to be treasured. They represent imagination unbound and without restraint, perhaps the sole defense we have against the swine-things that still snort and root beneath the floorboards of our culture.
Hodgson’s house still stands, whether within the small print of the secondhand book catalogue, or resurrected in a different form, as in this current volume. There’s no need to view. Reserve your room today.
Alan Moore
Northampton
August 2000