Chapter SixTHE YELLOW BOOKS
It would be unflattering indeed to imply that Arthur Machen’s books were quickly discarded by their owners, or that they had ever crowded, in any considerable numbers, the shelves of the second-hand book shops. Nevertheless it is a fact that for some years, especially in the late Twenties and early Thirties, the shelves, counters and sidewalk tables of Fourth Avenue were high-lighted for browsers by the bindings that blazed forth the magic of Machen.
SOME MACHEN ITEMS: Showing one of the famous Knopf “Yellow Books,” title pages of Knopf edition and Pocket Book, Putnam’s 1915 edition of “The Bowmen” and several rare items.
SOME MACHEN ITEMS: Showing one of the famous Knopf “Yellow Books,” title pages of Knopf edition and Pocket Book, Putnam’s 1915 edition of “The Bowmen” and several rare items.
Mr. Alfred Knopf who undertook in the Twenties to introduce, or to reintroduce, Arthur Machen to American readers elected, perhaps for obvious reasons, to issue the odd-sized books in a bright yellow binding. For this, as well as for his work in bringing Machen across the Atlantic, Mr. Knopf is to be thanked; but whoever designed the books, having specified an unmistakable color for the cloth binding, decided also upon a dark blue paper label with gold lettering—a combination that became, in a reasonably short time, completely indecipherable. There was, however, no mistaking a Machen—even when it turned up in the darkest corner of the most unassuming hole-in-the-wall in Fourth Avenue, Twelfth Street or lower Lexington Avenue. Theadept Arthurian merely looked for the unmistakable yellow binding with its dark and indecipherable patch. It must be admitted that the production manager or book designer for Knopf planned better than he knew, for it seemed that time could not dull, nor dirt disguise, nor grime diminish the yellow of those bindings. The experienced browser could spot one at thirty feet in the dimmest corner of the dingiest shop, sandwiched though it might be betweenV. V.’s EyesandThe Conquest of Fearor buried under a pile of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian romances. A recent convert might, for a time, respond to the lure of the yellow only to find, on closer inspection, something about a eunuch by a man named Pettit, or an early Ben Hecht, or some other ordinary book bound in yellow; but in time he learned to distinguish that one especial hue. He came to know it, however faded, for it seemed to fade predictably.
Thus the yellow books issued by Knopf became the most eagerly sought-after books along Fourth Avenue. It was not too long of course, before they became scarce. Soon they were taken from tables and stacked reverently on shelves, and before very long they were behind glass doors or in the shelves behind the proprietor’s desk, or even in that holy of holies—the back room.
Today they have disappeared from Fourth Avenue. You may find, now and then, one of the Martin Secker editions, or perhaps one of the deluxe editions of the Heptameron—or even a set, fabulously priced, of the Caerleon edition. For the most part, however, the book shops are Machen-less, a condition that might be remedied, and profitably, by some enterprising publisher, or even by Mr. Knopf.
The House of Knopf, however, seems remarkably disinterested in its valuable property, and a valuable property it is, for not only did the series include almost all of the best of Machen, but almost every volume contained a preface or a foreword written especially for these editions by Mr. Machen. These comparatively recent Machen items are worth a volume of their own, a proposition warmly advanced by Mr. Joseph Vodrey but received coolly enough, thus far at least, by Mr. Knopf.
Machen had first appeared in print in America in 1894 when Roberts of Boston publishedThe Great God Pan. There were several other Machen items published in this country prior to the Twenties. Dana Estes brought outThe Hill of DreamsandThe House of Soulsnot long after the Richards editions and in similar format. Putnam publishedThe Bowmenin 1915 while the controversy over the legend was still raging. There were a few others, but the Machen boom was still to come. Mr. Cabell’s tribute to Machen inBeyond Life, published a few years later, undoubtedly did much to create a body of readers eager for Machen.
Just how and when Mr. Alfred Knopf became interested in Machen as a literary property I do not know, one does not with impunity ask publishers why they seek out certain authors. Certainly Mr. Knopf was of the opinion that the Twenties was ripe for Machen—anyone who remembers that era would, even today, vindicate Mr. Knopf’s judgment. Yet somehow, Machen did not catch on as well as might have been expected. Or perhaps he did—for the Twenties. For this was certainly a prolific period, geniuswas hailed weekly and books sold by the thousands. Perhaps Machen’s books did sell quite well by the standards of the Twenties. The Knopf printings seem to have been exhausted within a remarkably short time and very rapidly disappeared from book stores until their reappearance on second-hand stalls in the Thirties. Arthur Machen is not remembered too well as one who was popular in the Twenties, but then all too few of the writers of the Twenties are remembered at all.
Who were they? Critics and commentators of the times hailed book after book, they acclaimed name after name—but most of those names are seldom mentioned in the current revival of interest in the Twenties. The “best seller” lists of the day hardly indicate that John Dos Passos, Cabell, Van Vechten, etc., etc., were what all America was reading. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis and one or two others are notable exceptions, but the real best-sellers of the time would sound unfamiliar even to students of that era. Most people were readingThe Sheik,If Winter Comes,Black Oxen,The Green HatandSo Big. Zane Grey and Ibanez were more widely read than Sinclair Lewis, even thoughMain Streethad created a stir. There were outlines of history and of philosophy and even the “art” of thinking was popularized. There were books about China and Africa and India—and some of them even became the centers of controversy. Storms raged over books whose very titles are unremembered today, while the books we now consider “typical” of the Twenties sold slowly—and in small editions. One discovers that Eleanor Wylie, Ellen Glasgow, Floyd Dell, E. E. Cummings and most of the others who,even though they were hailed on alternate Tuesdays and Sundays as “new stars of great magnitude in the literary firmament,” were not too widely read, despite the assistance some of them received from the newly formed book clubs. Nor are they recalled nowadays with even fond recollection by very many. It is, therefore, not surprising that Arthur Machen remains one of the more obscure writers of the American Twenties, as well as of the English Nineties.
Interest in Arthur Machen was stirring even before the Twenties, but it was principally among writers and literary people. James Branch Cabell, whoseBeyond Lifewas first published in 1919, was perhaps the first to mention in print the name of Arthur Machen and something of his work. In one of his lengthy monologues, speaking through the amiable and erudite Charteris, he says, “I wonder if you are familiar with that uncanny genius whom the London directory prosaically lists as Arthur Machen? If so, you may remember that in his maddening volumeHieroglyphicsMr. Machen circumvolantly approaches to the doctrine I have just voiced—that all enduring art must be an allegory. No doubt, he does not word this axiom quite explicitly: but then Mr. Machen very rarely expresses outright that which his wizardry suggests.”
It was about this time that Starrett discovered Arthur Machen, perhaps through Cabell whose work he was among the first to praise. Starrett it was, along with Paul Jordan-Smith, who tried to popularize Arthur Machen even before the famous Knopf “yellow books” were issued. A small group gathered about Starrett and Jordan-Smith to try to prove to publishers that Machenwasimportant andthat his bookswerebeing collected. In 1919 Smith wrote to several publishers about Machen, but they were not interested. The group then made every effort to have Machen’s first editions rise from nothing to ridiculous heights.
They succeeded all too well in this, for as Jordan-Smith says, “There were only a few of us then, but we seemed to be many, for we were bidding against one another in a hundred shops all over Britain. We did not expect the publishers to enter the rare book field. We merely wanted them to publish new books and reprint old ones by Machen. Instead they made limited editions and spoiled the whole business.”
Mr. Starrett, who is one of the most enthusiastic of Machen’s admirers, finally did something about it on his own. In 1923 he published, with his friend Covici, a collection of Arthur Machen’s stories and essays under the titleThe Shining Pyramid. This book was published in an edition limited to 875 copies. It contained, besides the title story, a number of pieces that had not previously been published in book form, and many of which have not since been reprinted. This is one of the better collections of Machen material which deserves reprinting today. In the following year Starrett published another collection under the titleThe Glorious Mystery. This, too, contained much new material and much that has not appeared elsewhere.
At the same time, perhaps even before Starrett was preparing to publish his collections, Alfred Knopf became interested in Arthur Machen and wrote him with an offer to publish anything of his he could find. Apparently Knopf’s negotiations coincided, in point of time at any rate, withStarrett’s plans. In 1925 Machen published in London a collection calledThe Shining Pyramid. The book was published simultaneously in New York by Alfred Knopf. It contained an introduction in which Machen wrote: “The Shining Pyramidis the result of a collaboration. Two years ago an American man of letters, full of industry, rummaged in old papers, magazines and manuscripts owing their origin to me, and produced as a result of his labors a volume published at Chicago, calledThe Shining Pyramid. The American gentleman, I may say, did not disturb my peace by consulting me as to the content of the book in question. Then, in 1924, pleased, I suppose, with the results of his toils, he rummaged a little more, and, using the same methods, produced a second volume of scraps and odds and ends from my workshop. This book he entitledThe Glorious Mystery.”
Knopf had, by this time, published quite a number of Machen’s earlier books. Three books were published in 1922, four in 1923, four in 1924 and four in 1925, of whichThe Shining Pyramid, with its introduction, was one. The “yellow books” were finding their way to the more discriminating and discerning readers in America.
The publication of two books bearing the same title, one issuing from Chicago, the other from London and New York, stirred up a controversy. How far this went and how it terminated is not public knowledge. In April of 1924 Knopf circulated to the trade a letter on the Alfred A. Knopf-Arthur Machen versus Covici-McGee-Vincent Starrett controversy. According to Paul Jordan-Smith the whole thing was the result of a misunderstanding. “This muchI know. Starrett had been given the manuscripts of two or more books to get published as he could, at a time when publishers were shy of Machen. Years ago I saw them and at least one letter advising Starrett to do what he thought best about publishing them. Then Knopf came along with an offer to publish anything of Machen’s he could find. How Machen answered this I do not know, but he did give the rights to Knopf. But in the meantime Starrett had made arrangements with Covici, his Chicago friend and former book seller. It was unfortunate, and I fancy Machen’s poverty and Knopf’s established position made Machen want to transfer to him. Both were rather bitter. But as I recall the matter over the years I was impressed with the fact that both had acted in good faith until Knopf’s money made Machen jump. I think he would not have embarrassed Starrett if he had not been utterly lacking in money and had not had two small children to feed.”
Apparently the whole matter was settled amiably, for one of the subsequent Knopf editions is dedicated to Vincent Starrett. The “controversy,” such as it was, is not a matter to be revived, nor is it my intention to do so. Machen, and all who know him, owe too much to both Mr. Knopf and Mr. Starrett.
Another early worker in the Machen field was Carl Van Vechten. Besides making Machen a sort of intellectual “prop” for his preciousPeter Whiffle, Mr. Van Vechten wrote some of the earliest appreciations of Machen. I must confess that there was a time when V. V.’s eyes seemed to me a trifle jaundiced in his estimate of Machen, and there was a time when I rather hotly resented the implicationsof the titleExcavations. But time mellows most of us, Machenites especially, and I have come to regard and to welcome Mr. Van Vechten as a trail-blazer. It is true that I cannot accept some of his estimates of Machen, and I dare say I have often thought that he liked Arthur Machen for all the wrong reasons. However, let the student of Machen the Silurist decide for himself.Excavations, containing reprints of Van Vechten’s earlier reviews and articles, was published by the alert Mr. Knopf in 1926.
Vincent Starrett’s study of Machen is, I think, more in sympathy, or at least more to my taste. The title of the book in which his essay on Machen appears isBuried Caesars—it enraged me no less thanExcavations, and at one time I regarded these books as two voices in a chorus that had come not only to praise Machen but to bury him in rather extravagant prose.
There has been little news of Arthur Machen or about Arthur Machen since the late 1920’s. He enjoyed a certain popularity for perhaps five years, a popularity that lingered much longer in more literary circles. For the most part Machen had disappeared from the world of literary figures just as his books had disappeared from the bookshops. That he is still read today we know, and we know too, that he has been slowly gaining new readers through the years. In 1933 Machen published his last novel,The Green Round. This has not yet been published in this country, although it is scheduled for publication this year by August Derleth’s “Arkham House.” In 1936 there were published in London two collections of his stories, most of which were reprintsof earlier stories with the addition of some new pieces. These books areThe Children of the Pool, published by Hutchinson, andThe Cosy Room, published by Rich and Cowan. Within the past few years Machen’s stories have appeared in anthologies put together by Dorothy Sayers, Somerset Maughan, Phillip Van Doren Stern, Will Cuppy and, of all people, Boris Karloff!
August Derleth, the youthful sage of Sac Prarie, has been more active than anyone else in recent years in his efforts to spread the magic of Machen. Back in 1937, in the November issue of Ben Abramson’s “Reading and Collecting,” Derleth published an article on Machen, to which was appended a bibliography by Nathan Van Patten. Derleth’s article, the first to appear in almost a decade, followed the pattern of most previous articles about Machen. But Derleth has gone beyond prose. He has, from time to time, included Machen’s more macabre pieces in his various collections of supernatural stories. He has also published, or is planning to publish, reprints of several Machen books.
The late H. P. Lovecraft was an admirer of Arthur Machen’s work and a foremost exponent of the Machen manner in modern fiction. It is difficult to apply the epithet “pulp writer” to Lovecraft, but that is, after all, what he was. Recent appraisals of his work, and the publication in book form of his stories, have done much to raise him out of this category. It was Lovecraft who introduced Machen to August Derleth and to who knows how many thousands of other readers. In his essay, recently republished by Ben Abramson,Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft supplies one of the most up-to-date, if perhaps one-sided,appraisals of Arthur Machen’s work. Lovecraft concentrates his attention, naturally enough, on Machen’s tales of horror and the supernatural. The result is a valuable piece of Machenania but one that should be approached only by an adept. The chance reader or the casual reader would receive a rather specialized view of Machen.
More than one observer of the literary scene has drawn the obvious parallel between the 1890’s in England and the 1920’s in our own country. Both periods were characterized by a sharp break with tradition. In both periods the younger writers found themselves voluntary exiles from their own country and both groups selected the same European city as the scene of their exile. There are other parallels, ... the flood of “little” magazines, the cultivation of the “continental” attitude, the revival of the art for art’s sake tradition and a general letting down of the bars once again. Mr. Waugh, the 1890 Mr. Waugh, might well have written hisReticence in Literaturefor the benefit of the new generation of bold, bad, young intellectuals.
Peter Munro Jack, writing in Malcolm Cowley’s symposiumAfter the Genteel Tradition, called this the “James Branch Cabell Period,” and Alfred Kazin, inOn Native Ground, refers to the writers of the Twenties as “The Exquisites,” while “All the Lost Generations” seems to him a suitable chapter heading to cover a brief history of the Twenties.
Mr. Jack credits it all to Cabell’sJurgenand to novels by Carl Van Vechten and Eleanor Wylie. “These books,”says Mr. Jack, “brought to our shores the very spirit of Rabelais and Voltaire, Balzac, Anatole France and Horace Walpole, Pater, Wilde, Machen, Max Beerbohm and Aldous Huxley ... and converted a barbarous literature over-night into an airy dance of verve, irony and Gallic sophistication.” Mr. Kazin also begins withJurgen, which apparently ushered in “a vogue of elaborate decadence and enthusiasm, very wicked, world-weary and ornate.” Kazin goes on to indicate that “just as the pale, imitative exoticism of the late Nineties had marked not merely the beginnings of revolt against the old parochialism but a leisure-class psychology in an America that had finally attained a leisure class, so that the new literature of sophistication that came in with the James Branch Cabell School was fundamentally the ambitious baroque luxury of a period that had finally obtained a self-conscious splendor of its own.”
Mr. Kazin writes from the vantage point of 1942, and anything can happen to a critic, a book, or a period in a dozen or more years. Hindsight used to be considered superior, in some ways, to foresight—but such is the condition of the world today that this is no longer particularly true. Mr. Kazin, writing in the heyday of the four evangelists of modern American fiction—Don Passos, Hemingway, Farrell and Steinbeck, looks back upon the era of “baroque luxury” and “self-conscious splendor” with anything but nostalgia. Malcolm Cowley, contributing an essay on Dos Passos to his own symposium, an essay which preceded Kazin’s book by five years, and to which Mr. Kazin is somewhat indebted, remarks that Dos Passos had entered college in those olden baroque days, “at the beginning of a periodwhich was later known as that of the Harvard aesthetes.” This is noted with an almost, but not quite, imperceptible touch of pride—or of snobbishness. These young Cantabrians, our boy Dos Passos among them, are reported to have acted in a manner befitting the Elizabethans, or least the men of the Nineties, or any other generation that felt it was living in a Golden Age. They read, Dos Passos still among them, Pater andThe Hill of Dreams, and they explored the slums of Boston—which must have seemed to them at least as romantic as Cheapside or Houndsditch.
At any rate Machen was accepted and more or less widely hailed as one of the more important importations by some of the little magazines that began to spring up at this time. “The Reviewer,” one of the most important of the new journals, published Machen along with Ellen Glasgow, Joseph Hergesheimer, Ernest Boyd, Ronald Firbank, Ben Ray Redman, Edwin Muir and others. His public and enthusiastic acceptance by Van Vechten, that inveterate organizer of torchlight parades, was quite enough to launch Machen successfully with the intellectuals who, in those halcyon days, had scarcely an ideology among them.
It has been said that the writers of this period, motivated no doubt by the cynicism they either created or absorbed, or both, tended to escape from this world they never made and produced in the process of escaping some of the most exciting and readable books ever written in America. Of course neither Mr. Cowley nor Mr. Kazin draws exactly these conclusions—they are rather scornful of the Twenties and of the books produced in the Twenties.
They are both, Mr. Kazin more than Mr. Cowley sincehe came in later, in rather a hurry to get on to the Thirties when the Four Horsemen of the Apocryphal were beginning to gallop madly down the back-country lanes and through the congested streets of cities and the back-yards of milltowns. Nevertheless it must be apparent to even the most ideological reader of these weighty volumes that, for all their efforts at deprecating the self-conscious splendor of the period, both Mr. Cowley and Mr. Kazin manage to make the Twenties sound vastly more entertaining than the dull period to follow, when the leftist interpretation of literature placed black Marx against every novel that showed signs of having been written for the sheer pleasure of writing, or the desire to create a character or to tell a story.
This seems to be the great fault that is found, by such men as these, with the novels of that era. They were not so judged in the Nineteen-Twenties. The sentiments expressed by Arthur Machen inHieroglyphics, and echoed in Cabell’sBeyond Life, were rather widely accepted at the time, not only by a large portion of the reading public, but also by members of the more critical profession. Dyson, however much he may have fussed with his pipes and his pencils, his notes and his notions, expressed what was the literary credo of the day; “I will give you the task of a literary man in a nutshell—to create a wonderful story and to tell it in a wonderful manner.” And so Cabell and Wylie and Fitzgerald and Hume and Wilder and many others created wonderful stories. In this time of man and to this manner of writing Machen was admirably suited.
People who found New York in the Twenties as fabulous a city as Machen and Stevenson found London intheir day, were delighted with the yellow-bound books that came out under the Borzoi imprint. For many a speakeasy in the mid-Forties, or in the Village, offered possibilities as extraordinary as Stevenson’sSuicide CluborThe Lost Clubof Machen. Indeed there are undoubtedly those who can recall when their favorite haunt disappeared over-night and then, as if by magic, reappeared in the brownstone house across the street. The city parks, as yet uninhabited by muggers, were magical places after midnight and lonely as the sunken lanes of Avalon. Those who delighted in the doings of Dyson and the adventures of the Young Man in Spectacles were enchanted by the curious byways of London, and they shared the satirical views of the dyspeptic Doctor Stiggins and the Hermit of Barnsbury. It pleased immense numbers of people who tired of Dreiser to find, inHieroglyphics, this perfect reflection of their own attitude: “Imagine having to spend twenty years withsuchpeople.”
The crash in the fall of 1929 was followed by a stunned silence—and presently one began to hear the hoof beats of the four frightening Horsemen and the voices of the economical evangelists crying, and wreaking, havoc.
The realists began to be heard because realism seemed to be what people wanted—politically, at any rate. The polemics disguised as novels began to appear in greater and ever-increasing numbers. It has since become obvious that realism of this sort was a one-way street to despair—and it was the realists, not the now-silent “romanticists,” who were called, in their own time, “The Irresponsibles.” But with the rise of the proletarian novel, the heroic mill-hand and the long, dreary lines of the unemployed, theperiod came to an end. Machen, along with the others, ceased to be read except by those who re-read him, or discovered him in the dusty bookshops where the yellow binding gleamed from the darkest corner.