Things near & far

The Story

The narrative begins in the landscape of the author’s youth: the winding road from Newport to Caerleon-on-Usk in Wales. This region, steeped in Roman history and local ghost lore, serves as the spiritual anchor for the author’s life. He recalls the white city of Caerleon as a place of childhood dreams, a site that remains vivid in his mind long after the physical landmarks—the ancient woods and the Roman ruins—have faded or been altered by time. This setting is the "far" place, the distant origin that informs every "near" experience in the urban sprawl of London.

In the mid-1880s, the author finds himself struggling in London, living in a succession of sparse, often decrepit rooms in neighborhoods like Clarendon Road and Soho. He survives on meager odd jobs—cataloging books, compiling indexes, and attempting to learn shorthand—while existing on a diet of dry bread and green tea. Despite the crushing poverty and the loneliness of his situation, he discovers an insatiable, almost frantic drive to write. He immerses himself in the works of Rabelais and Balzac, attempting to replicate their voices while living a life of isolation. His personal history is marked by a series of moves, each room in London adding a new layer to his experience, from his time in a garret in Great Russell Street to his later explorations of the forgotten streets of Camden Town and the decaying grandeur of Lloyd’s Square.

A pivotal turning point occurs when he enters the employ of "the Brothers," a firm of rare book dealers. While they are successful, conventional businessmen, they provide him with a degree of stability and the opportunity to engage deeply with literature. During this period, he begins to shift away from his early, imitative attempts at writing—the "exotic" French-inspired prose—and moves toward finding a voice grounded in his own heritage. He realizes that the beauty of his native Gwent, with its alder thickets and red sunset fires, is a more authentic subject than the imagined castles of Touraine.

As his career progresses, he publishes works like The Great God Pan and The Three Impostors. These books bring him a measure of notoriety, but also lead to a confusing cycle of public rejection and private exhilaration. He finds that even harsh reviews, which dismiss his work as mere "thaumaturgic tricks," paradoxically serve to spur his creative process. He wanders the streets of London, finding in its hidden valleys and decaying Victorian architecture a source of inspiration that feels almost supernatural. He reflects on strange encounters with mysterious individuals, people who seem to step out of his own fiction and into his real life, blurring the lines between the act of creation and the unfolding of reality.

The narrative eventually follows his transition from a struggling writer and journalist to a brief, intense experience on the stage with the Benson company. He observes the obsessive, almost religious devotion the actors bring to the smallest technical details of a play, contrasting this dedication with his own life as a writer. The final movement of his life, as captured here, involves a departure from the grind of daily journalism. The book concludes with a profound sense of release, as he quotes the Latin verse expressing his deliverance from the "pit of misery" and the "mire of dregs," signaling a transition to a new stage of existence where his steps are finally set upon solid ground.

The People

• The Author: A man of deep introspection and stubborn creative persistence. He views his life as a series of experiments in consciousness, moving from the romantic, lonely idealism of his youth to a more grounded, though still mysterious, understanding of his own vocation.
• The Brothers: Two wealthy, pragmatic, yet surprisingly courteous book dealers. They represent the world of commerce and "proper" society. While they lack the author's interior, visionary life, they provide him with a necessary, if temporary, framework for survival and an exposure to the rare, curious volumes that fuel his imagination.
• The "Cousin Machen": A relative whose terrifying experiences as a prisoner in China serve as a cautionary tale of the physical world’s potential for horror. His trauma acts as a counterpoint to the author's own, more internal and spiritual anxieties.
• The Anonymous Strangers: A series of spectral, fleeting figures—the man who appears in a café to discuss "interior things," or the dark young man who speaks of black magic. They act as harbingers of the irrational, reminding the reader that the world is populated by characters who seem to exist on the edge of the author’s own fictional creations.

In Its Own Voice

The author reflects on the unreliability of the supernatural when approached through the lens of modern occult movements, noting:

I mean that the specific doctrines and circumstances of Theosophy: the Mahatma stories, the saucers that fell from the ceiling, the vases that were found mysteriously reposing in empty cupboards, the Messiahship of a gentleman whose name I choose to forget: all this is rubbish, not worth a moment’s consideration.

He describes his own shift toward finding inspiration in the humble landscapes of his home, rather than in the imitation of foreign literary styles:

I began to see that I was a citizen of Caerleon-on-Usk, and not of Tours or of Chinon, and that the old grey manor-houses and the white farms of Gwent had their beauty and significance, though they were not castles in Touraine.

He recounts the strange, transformative power of his own artistic experiments, which brought him to an unexpected emotional peak:

Everything, of body and of mind, was resolved into an infinite and an exquisite delight; into a joy so great that--let this be duly noted--it became almost intolerable in its ecstasy.

What It's Really About

At its core, this book is an inquiry into the nature of the "real" and the "imaginary." It argues against the idea that the physical world—the streets of London, the shops, the books sold for profit—is the only reality. The author posits that the most significant moments of human life often occur in the hidden, interior spaces of the mind, which he calls "interior things." He is deeply suspicious of the organized, superficial ways humans try to access the spiritual—such as séances or Theosophy—dismissing these as trivial. Instead, he suggests that genuine transcendence is an unbidden, often overwhelming experience that shatters one’s ordinary sense of self.

Another central theme is the development of the artistic ego. The author traces his own evolution from a young man who writes "for writing’s sake," mimicking the styles of others, to an artist who discovers that his own environment—no matter how small or humble—contains the infinite. He rejects the notion that a writer must travel to exotic locales to find material. By focusing on the "near," he finds the universal. This creates a tension in the book between the author’s outward life of poverty, cataloging, and journalism, and his inward life of creative obsession. The book is an argument for the dignity of the "faithful endeavor," even when that endeavor leads to public misunderstanding or personal ruin.

Finally, the book deals with the "disenchantment" of the world. The author frequently contrasts the magic he felt as a child or as a young, aspiring writer with the reality of his later, more mature observations. Yet, he does not view this disenchantment as a total loss. Rather, it is a process of stripping away the "plaster-Bagdad" of youthful illusions to reveal a more stark, yet durable, truth. He is preoccupied with how memories of the past—the "far" things—continue to govern and haunt the "near" realities of the present. The book asks whether our perceptions of the world are simply psychological tricks or glimpses into a deeper, more fundamental layer of existence, ultimately leaving the question open-ended but insisting on the vital importance of the question itself.

Why Read It Today

Readers who appreciate the atmospheric, slightly melancholic style of late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century autobiography will find much here to reward them. This is not a book for those who demand a high-octane plot; it is a meditative, wandering work that rewards patience. It feels like a long conversation with a highly intelligent, slightly eccentric mentor who is as interested in the history of a crumbling London street as he is in the mysteries of human consciousness.

Those who enjoy the intersection of reality and the uncanny will find the author’s observations on his own fiction—and the way his characters seemed to manifest in his real life—deeply fascinating. The book provides a rare, honest look at the life of a professional writer during a time when the literary marketplace was both expanding and becoming increasingly commodified. The author is remarkably candid about his failures, his reliance on "unworthy pangs of prudence," and his often-confused relationship with the public.

However, the reader should be prepared for the author’s period-specific attitudes and his occasionally dense, allusive prose. He assumes a familiarity with a literary canon and a London topography that may be unfamiliar to a modern reader. He does not provide a map, and he does not apologize for his digressions into the technicalities of the printing trade or the nuances of Latin theology. Yet, for those willing to walk these streets alongside him, the experience is strangely intimate. What stays with you long after the final page is the author's ability to pull the veil back on the mundane, turning a rainy night in a London square or a walk through an old wood into something that feels, for a fleeting moment, like a revelation. It is a book about the courage to live an interior life in an exterior world that is almost always too loud to notice it.