Chapter TenTHINGS NEAR AND FAR
The original outline for this book included a chapter to be called “Hieroglyphics.” This was to be composed largely of what other writers had said or written about Arthur Machen. It seemed a good title and a sound enough notion, and certainly there has been enough said and written about Machen to compose a fine chapter indeed.
And then it occurred to me that there was a rather cynical note being struck here, that the use of that particular word in such a connection might imply (and I am quite sure that at one time it was meant to imply) a certain lack of respect for some of the material to be grouped under that heading. Much has been written about Machen, not as much, certainly, as one would like to see; and some of it, unfortunately, is the sort of thing with which one cannot agree. As, for example, the views of the anonymous Manchester guardian, the reviews of some of the early books as they appeared in London newspapers, and the estimates of Miss Dorothy Scarborough in her otherwise excellent book about the supernatural elements in English literature.
THE MACHENS IN LONDON: Photo taken by Holbrook Jackson in 1937. Left to right, Montgomery Evans, Mr. and Mrs. Machen and Bertram Rota before whose bookshop photo was taken.
THE MACHENS IN LONDON: Photo taken by Holbrook Jackson in 1937. Left to right, Montgomery Evans, Mr. and Mrs. Machen and Bertram Rota before whose bookshop photo was taken.
On the other hand: one cannot always agree with theidolizers and the cultists. These are, at times, even more annoying and sometimes rather embarrassing.
The admirers of Arthur Machen are probably as heterogeneous a collection as one is likely to find anywhere outside the membership lists of the Book of the Month Club, the Literary Guild and a distinguished After Shave Club. There are, among the more ardent Arthurians, poets and pedants, dilettantes and divorcees, men of letters and three-letter men from the universities, reviewers and romanticists, critics and connoisseurs, columnists and collectors of every description—a rare assemblage that numbers sincere admirers, warm friends, not a few dreads and some drolls. Mr. Machen’s works are known to the Librarians at Yale and at Stanford. They are known also to the librarians at Liggetts and Walgrens—for recently several anthologies have appeared on the forty-nine cent table and several Machen stories have made the grade in the corner drug store through the medium of the quarter pocketbooks. This is passing strange company for a man whose first editions were published in Vigo Street under the Sign of the Bodley Head and whose American triumphs were under the auspices of the aristocratic Borzoi.
Mr. Machen’s published works have fared as variously. His stories have appeared in anthologies whose sales have run into thousands, and there is noted in Van Patten’s bibliography a small work published in an edition of two copies.
How does one decide upon an edition of two copies? It must be admitted that, to his fervent admirers at least, the peddling of Machen to the millions along with themalteds and lunches at Liggetts is to be preferred to the arch-conservativeness that confines a Machen item to a very limited edition of two copies. It may cause shudders to run up and down the arthritic vertebrae of many a venerable Machenite to suggest such a thing, but I find myself wishing that Winchell would one day give Machen “the works.” And who knows but that he may? With realism and the realists in disorder, if not retreat, in disarray if not utter rout, with realism seen from a rapidly shifting focal point, with reviewers suggesting that the work and the world of our realists may be, after all, allegory—who knows but the Sunday Night Sage may not admonish Americans from coast to coast to demand from their bookseller a copy ofDog and Duck, or theAnatomy of Tobacco(LSMFT) or evenHieroglyphics?
Such unscholarly suggestions may seem unworthy, may even draw the fire of many Machenites who will deeply resent such facetious flippancy—but they are offered merely as an antidote to the equally absurd and equally unworthy tactics of some collectors who come to praise and to bury Machen in the same devout breath.
I must confess that, while I envy certain men and mausoleums the possession of many a Machen item, I am pleased beyond measure to findThe Great God PanorThe Cosy RoomorThe Novel of the White Powderin the gaudiest, grizzliest anthology of horror stories displayed for the delight of the drug store trade.
However, to return to the Arthurians, whether of the cultivated or the common garden variety. The response to a prospectus describing this volume when it was in its projectedstate was enlightening. There were letters on fine paper bearing the crests of famous colleges and libraries, there were scribbled notes from, obviously, “stfans” in Kansas City, Dallas, Scranton and the Coast. These letters did affect the construction of this book in one important respect. I determined then to add to the book a bibliography that would direct the reader of Machen to the stories and essays of Machen wherever they may be found. The scholars and the specialists know in which vaults the more valuable manuscripts are under lock and key. Let them rest in peace. One day, perhaps, they will be released and they will be read as it was intended, by the man who wrote them, that they should be. Meanwhile it may be amusing to compile a list of the unlikely and out of the way corners of literature in which there are mentions of Machen—and to the true Machenite the mere mention of Machen is rewarding.
We’ve wandered from Wilde to Winchell, but there are many more unexpected encounters awaiting the ardent Arthurian. For example, Tiffany Thayer,enfant terribleof the late Twenties and early Thirties, whose books were rather lurid things, made use of Machen in certain passages. We find, if we dredge deep enough, a passing reference to Machen, and one that might conceivably outrage the true believer.
An even more strange, and not too flattering, reference is found in one of the books of William Seabrooke. Mr. Seabrooke, who visited strange places and saw strange things, once visited, as a client, and I violate no confidence, an asylum. Since Mr. Seabrooke wrote a book about hisexperiences therein, any hesitation on my part would be a needless delicacy.
Mr. Seabrooke’s mention of Machen is even given a title: Self-Portrait of a Dementia Praecox Case on First Reading the works of Machen. The “self-portrait” follows: “Sweet spirits of my own dementia praecox! womb-wailing guide calls reechoing throughout sub-cavernousterraneous! fuga, fugae. Corncopios fugalations in depths arbeitung verstaltheight.... I have just readThe Hill of Dreams! By the brazen buttocks of that brimstone bellona who lolls in lakes of lava, never in my life have I read or even imagined that such a piece of escapist literature existed. He is superior to Dunsany and to Algernon Blackwood who though almost not an escapist may be classed with them. The book is filled with black magic. The man’s powers of psychotic invention are almost unbelievable and his familiarity with certain phenomena of abnormal psychology is creepy. Are you acquainted with Tchaikovski’s scherzi? especially the waltz-scherzo of his Fifth? It moves in this same weird, uncanny way. Now I wish I were dead....”
Seabrooke’s d.p. exhibits astonishing lucidity toward the end, is apparently versed in intellectual small talk, and displays a familiarity with the works of James Joyce as well.
It is sometimes fascinating to compare different reactions to certain of Machen’s tales. Basil Davenport writing in theSaturday Reviewsome years ago noted: “... there are some stories which portray a non-moral fall into a moral gulf; someone’s foot quite innocently slips, and there is no stopping above the bottom of hell ... that is what makes Mr. Arthur Machen’s stories supreme oftheir kind ... and such a story of irrational, irresistible temptation as Mr. Machen’sThe White People... about a little girl whose nurse happens to be a witch, and who becomes a devil-worshipper without the least idea of what she is doing.” Carl Van Vechten says of this same story: “Was ever a more malignantly depraved story written thanThe White People(which it might be profitable to compare with Henry James’sThe Turn of the Screw?).”
Mr. Carl Van Vechten’sPeter Whiffleprobably did as much to popularize Arthur Machen in the Twenties as any score of reviewers, but it also had the effect of rarifying Machen and conditioning him for a specific audience. It was Mr. Van Vechten’s (or rather, Peter’s) audience more than it was Machen’s. It was this audience, I think, that prompted Walter Winchell to report, breathlessly, that Arthur Machen was “tops among the literati.” Peter was a delightfully “naughty” character—there were so many of them in the Twenties! When he spoke of Machen he was speaking mostly about Peter. Nevertheless he was an able press agent. Said Peter, in part, and to paraphrase a phrase, we quote:
“It is a byword of the day that one only takes from a work of art what one brings to it, and how few readers can bring to Machen the requisite qualities, how few readers have gnosis! Machen evokes beauty out of horror, mystery and terror. He suggests the extremes of the terrible, the vicious, the most evil, by never describing them. His very reserve conveys the infinity of abomination.... But his expression soars so high, there is such ecstasy in his prose, that we are not meanly thrilled or revolted by hisnecromancy; rather we are uplifted and exalted by his suggestion of impurity and corruption, which leads us to ponder over the mysterious connection between man’s religious and sensual natures.” From this point on Peter’s bizarre rhapsody over Machen includes references to so many Florentine painters, Arabian necromancers, Asiatic messiahs and French Symbolistes that the average Machenite loses sight of his idol in the confusing blaze of intellectual pyrotechnics.
And then we have the testimony of C. Lewis Hind, a sort of literary journalist who once saw Machen plain. Mr. Hind did essays and sketches of literary people about London and collected them into books calledAuthors and IandMore Authors and I. He remembers having met Machen once at a dinner given for Sir Frank Benson and members of his Shakespearean Repertoire Company; he also recalls having seen Machen “slouching through the interminable corridors of the Evening News.”
An article on Machen, published in one of his collections, he credits to a letter from Vincent Starrett. Mr. Starrett’s enthusiasm apparently moved Hind to do a piece on Mr. Machen. The encounter described in the article was, apparently, a chance encounter of the sort in which Machen himself delighted.
Mr. Hind had gone, one evening, to call upon an acquaintance who lived in one of the London Inns of Court. While he was peering at the names inscribed on the oak door the door was opened—by Arthur Machen! “My friend was not in, but the author ofHieroglyphicsand I had some good, rapid talk. He is an admirable monologist when in the mood (seeHieroglyphics). For some reason or other I have a vivid recollection of that brief encounter—the open door, the snug room beyond, the books and a lamp, warmth and stillness, and Arthur Machen standing in the passage—smiling and talking, ready to talk but also ready to go back to his folios.”
Machen was, according to Mr. Hind, “a heavily built man, with a large genial, yet brooding, clean-shaven face; a good companion, I think, but one who keeps many of his thoughts to himself.” Mr. Hind was, in short, charmed and impressed, but he obviously did not consider Arthur Machen a V.I.P. It would be interesting to read Machen on Hind.
One of the most curious estimates of Machen is made by Professor Cornelius Weygandt in hisA Century of the English Novel. Professor Weygandt admires Machen somewhat for his essays, and classifies him as a “lesser late Victorian” along with Baring-Gould, Quiller-Couch, Marie Corelli, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Walter Pater and others—a very curious group indeed!
The professor devotes a full page to Machen, which is not at all bad, and well above the average, for lesser late Victorians! Machen’s great fault, the professor finds, is that he is not a story-teller, he has not taught himself the craft. He has little sense of the creation of character and his own life is, obviously, very narrow. As an essayist, however, concedes the Professor, Machen is often a bringer of delight.The Hill of Dreams, on the other hand, is savedfrom futility only by some good writing. So sayeth Professor Weygandt.
Wagenknecht, in hisCavalcade of the English Novel, is much more to my taste than the austere professor. He introduces Machen as “one of the most remarkable examples of sustained devotion to creative work in literary history.” He finds that Machen reveals a gift for breathless narrative to match LeFanu’s, but he feels that this quality is lacking in the book generally regarded as Machen’s masterpiece—The Hill of Dreams. Nevertheless, Wagenknecht considers Machen “important,” he rates him with Blackwood and de la Mare, and has included Machen’sThe Terrorin his collectionSix Novels of the Supernaturalpublished a few years ago by Viking.
The student of Machen is not content to have read everything Machen has ever written (and there are few who have), he must also read everything that has ever been written about Arthur Machen. He may begin, naturally enough, with a study of the period in which Machen first appears. There have been quite a few books written about the Nineties, these unaccountably yield but little material on Machen. Richard LeGallienne, Holbrook Jackson and Osburt Burdett, whose studies of that period are very carefully written and copiously annotated, scarcely mention Machen at all.
One then moves on to memoirs and biographies of the men who lived and wrote in this period, and even consults the critical studies on the whole vast subject of English literature. One picks up dozens of such books and soondevelops the habit of examining them from the back cover forward, for a glance at the index reveals whether the book is worth while, from this viewpoint, or not. Too often one finds mention of Macaulay, Lord; MacCarthy, Desmond; MacLeod, Fiona; even Mackenzie, Compton—but few are the mentions of Machen.
One finds too that the index of a book can be a very revealing thing indeed. We have before us, for example, the memoirs of a Literary Figure of, let us say, the 1890’s and the early 1900’s. The index indicates that our man knew everyone worth knowing. We find Shaw and More, Shelley and Kelley, Shakespeare, Rossetti and Donne, Keats and Yeats, Whistler and Wilde, Moore and Hardy and a generous sprinkling of the nobility. It would seem, from the index, that our man lived a very full and eventful life, that he was close, as they say, to the heart of things.
The book itself is rather likely to be pretty dull stuff—mostly about our man’s preoccupation with his public school and his dislike of games, the amazing and discouraging tenacity with which his great aunt in Bath clung to life, the duplicity of publishers and the simply astonishing things that can and do befall an Englishman in Naples, Nice or Florence. Throughout the book, however, one encounters reports of what Whistler said to Pennell or Pater or both; what G.B.S. wrote to the brash American journalist and how Lord Lymph responded to a quip tossed out by Lord Lissom. Hence the index. One can only conclude that reviewers, and possibly publishers, read the index more carefully than the book itself.
Occasionally, however, the slow unrewarding progressthrough the shelves of the public library does yield a choice bit or two and these, be it noted, more frequently in books by Americans than by Englishmen.
Mr. Grant Richards who wrote in 1895 to Arthur Machen asking if he had anything he would care to have published, has written at least two books of his experiences as one of England’s most enterprising publishers. Neither of them contained a single mention of Arthur Machen although Richards published several of Machen’s books, and at a time when Machen’s name was certainly an asset to any publisher’s list.
The index of Richards’ book about A. E. Housman (Oxford, 1942) arouses hope. There are three references to Machen. The first of these is contained in a letter from Housman to Richards. The context, in full, follows: “I don’t think Machen ought to drink port on the top of Burgundy.” One may wonder, one is tantalized, by the implications of that brief note. Does it imply that Machen did drink port on top of Burgundy—or that he merely contemplated doing so or sought advice on the advisability. If he did, were the results memorable, and in what respect? Does it imply that Housman is a purist in these matters? A Tory in tippling? Does it hint at “an incident”?
Another reference is even more brief and profoundly unimportant. “We know too that Housman read Arthur Machen and Frederick Baron Corvo.” The most significant entry is this, from another Housman letter: “Thanks to you, I believe I possess Machen’s complete works. He is always interesting (except in theEvening News) and to some extent good. Mixing up religion and sexuality is not athing I am fond of, and in this book the Welsh element rather annoys me. The imitation of Rabelais is very clever.”
We know, at any rate, that Housman read Machen, quite a bit of him. He was not fond of the Welsh, nor of mixing religion and sexuality nor, for that matter, of mixing port and burgundy.
What we would like most to know from Mr. Richards, I think, is why it took him ten years to change his mind aboutThe Hill of Dreams, and why he changed it when he did. Of this, unfortunately, we have no hint.
The Machen revival of the Twenties lasted through to the end of the decade and, to some, to the end of an era. Machen appeared at rare intervals in public life, preferring the countryside of Wales and the company of his friends, a great many of them Americans. Paul Jordan-Smith and Robert Hillyer and Montgomery Evans have given us sketches of Machen through this period. For the most part, however, his work was done. In the early Thirties Machen wrote a novel,The Green Round. It has not yet been published in this country nor is it very well known. Machen says it is “sorry stuff.” As forTom O’Bedlam, it was an essay “written to order of an American.” Machen never saw the book in print.
In 1936 there was a brief revival of interest in Machen occasioned by the publication of two collections of his stories and essays. Hutchinson brought outThe Children of the Poolin which there appeared seven stories not previously collected. Rich and Cowan brought out a collection calledThe Cosy Room, consisting of essays and stories collected over a period from the late 1880’s to the late1920’s. Each of the pieces included in this collection is given a date—apparently the year in which it was written. Some of the dates supplied, presumably by Machen, give rise to bibliographical speculation. Most of these pieces had been published elsewhere although some of them, obviously “the wreckage of discarded and abandoned books,” appeared in print for the first time.
The dust-jacket of Hutchinson’sChildren of the Poolcarried an “Appreciation” of Machen, one of the finest and most admirable I have ever encountered. To find it on, of all places, a dust-jacket! This is no publisher’s blurb but an analysis that deserves to be included in this or any book about Machen. The author of the following tribute is unknown, to me at least: “Mr. Machen creates his own world. This world is a fusion of the world that is accepted in every day reality—in which events and their causes are explicable by traditional and humdrum interpretations—and one that is distinguished not only by the weird and extraordinary effects. The author does not try to present a state of affairs so topsy-turvy and bizarre that you are intrigued merely by its very madness. The supernatural insinuates itself subtly into these stories. They have an air of common reality until the author develops their mystical undercurrents. And in this blending Mr. Machen’s art is supreme. It has an infinite capacity for producing what E. J. O’Brien describes as “a willing suspension of disbelief” [this fine phrase has also been attributed to Dr. Canby, Bennet Cerf and, of course, Samuel Taylor Coleridge]. That Mr. Machen’s faculty in this direction can extend beyond the circle of sympathetic readers and convince masses has been proved by thefact that his imaginative treatment of a very famous occasion was accepted by thousands of men and women as literal description. These stories offer varied excursions into realms simultaneously unfathomable and alluring, and on that account alone they are memorable. But there is also Mr. Machen’s craftsmanship, and his style which is a delight to read. A character in the book says: ‘A man must know the grammar of his business, whatever it is; the rest, if it is to be the first order, must be the work of the hidden flame within.’”
Now and then Machen did an introduction or preface for a book or collection, none of them are of particular importance as Machen “items.” In 1937 Hutchinson brought out Philip Sergeant’sWitches and Warlockswith a preface by Machen. The book was, according to the publisher, suggested to Sergeant by his old friend Arthur Machen. In his introduction Machen quotes some of the theories expressed inThe White PeopleandThe Great God Pan. He hints, in other words, and in justification of his friend’s labours, that there are more things in heaven and earth than mere hawks and handsaws.
In the years since the publication of the “yellow books” by Knopf and the attendant enthusiasm for his works, Arthur Machen has been very little in the public eye. The Machen vogue of the 1920’s seemed to exhaust itself almost as soon as the Knopf editions were exhausted. The Caerleon Edition, published in 1923 by Seeker in London, quickly disappeared, and we entered once again upon a lengthy period of “neglect”.
Actually, Machen has not been as neglected as we might suppose. It is true that he has not been accorded the recognition that is his due, but there are hundreds, possibly thousands, who have never neglected nor forgotten Machen. The late Alfred Goldsmith, one of New York’s most amiable booksellers, wrote me, a year or two ago, that there is and always has been a constant, if small, demand for his books. Ben Abramson of the famed Argus Book Shop has his North Wall addicts who are always eager for Machen items. August Derleth, the one-man wonder of mid-western publishing circles, knows the value of a Machen story in a collection issuing from Arkham House. A new generation of booksellers on New York’s Fourth Avenue know Machen by reputation, even though many of them have never seen one of the eagerly sought-after books.
Machen himself went into retirement some years ago. For years there were gatherings at his home in St. John’s Wood, gay parties attended by writers and theatrical people and journalists—and Americans. Machen has always had a tremendous appeal for Americans—possibly because of our Hawthorne and Poe, and possibly because we managed to avoid the stagy school of the Gothic novelists which he so disliked. And Machen liked Americans, too, as Robert Hillyer related in hisAtlanticarticle. It pleased Machen that the majority of the letters he received about his works were from Americans. On one occasion he told Hillyer he would consider it a compliment to be taken “into the fold as a fellow American.”
Later, when Machen retired to Wales, there werepicnics on the cliffs overlooking the sea. Robert Hillyer has given us an amusing account of one of these festive occasions in his recent article on Machen. With the coming of the war these visits were impossible, of course. Montgomery Evans, late of the U. S. Army, member of the Salmagundi Club and resident of Greenwich, was the last of Machen’s visitors before the war.
Evans had known Machen since 1923. It was his pleasant practice to give parties with the Machens on such American occasions as the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. These parties promoted Anglo-American understanding with “American food and French wine” and such guests as Augustus John, Holbrooke Jackson, Tommy Earp and others. Evans happened to be again in England when World War II broke out. Machen had written an introduction for a book Evans was about to publish. Book and introduction went to the bottom of the North Atlantic with the torpedoedAtheniaas Evans was bound for home when the war was only a few days old.
Throughout the dark years of the war Machen corresponded with his American friends—Evans, Jordan-Smith, Goldsmith and others. These were unhappy days: Machen’s health was poor, his eyesight was failing rapidly, his son Hilary was in a German prison camp, letters were few and far between and Machen too old to contrive legends as he had done in the darker days of 1915.
After the war Machen was placed on the King’s List—the result of a movement instituted largely through the efforts of Montgomery Evans. In a letter to Robert Hillyer Machen wrote: “Our gracious Sovereign, King George theFifth, out of his great bounty and kindness, has awarded me a pension.”
Mr. Hillyer’s reflection at this news is worth repeating here: “I had a vision of the fine old man in Bardic raiment, receiving a bag of gold from a mediaeval monarch clad in ermine and silks and with a golden crown on his head.”
Machen’s Street Fleet days were over now, he no longer appeared, a Johnstonian figure, in the streets of London, nor was he ever again to impersonate the great Doctor in pageants. There were occasional articles in magazines and one last book,The Holy Terrors, published in 1946.
With the close of the war, correspondence was resumed on a more regular schedule. Machen was failing badly, his eyesight was almost gone, his hand had lost its grace but his letters were, as Montgomery Evans notes, “as charming and Johnstonian as ever.” Hilary had been released from the Germans and returned home. Scarcely had the family been reunited at Amersham, however, when another blow fell—Machen’s wife died. This “ample, easy-going, good natured woman,” as Hillyer describes her, meant much to Machen and their two children. She was, she must have been, a woman of great understanding and of infinite patience. She accepted poverty, hoping always for the recognition she felt was her husband’s due. And of course she knew, as well as he, that what he wrote might interest, at most, comparatively few. After her death Machen declined rapidly. His letters had to be written by his son, but the mind that composed them was still that of “the greatest master of English prose in our time.” Then, in the closingdays of the year 1947, in a private hospital in Beaconsfield, Arthur Machen died at the age of 84.
Machen’s passing was not unnoticed.The New York Times(Dec. 16, 1947) printed his photograph and an obituary under the heading: “Author of the Story That Led to ‘Angel of Mons’ Legend Dies at 84—Won Success at 60.” A few other papers in the country carried similar stories—there were no bulletins, no eulogies by electronic commentators. Subscribers to theAtlantic Monthlyprobably recalled Robert Hillyer’s article on Machen in the May issue. Letters passed between friends expressing regret for there were, as Nathan Van Patten wrote, “some who mourn.”
Chief among these, perhaps, are the members of the Arthur Machen Society. This Society was formed early in the spring of 1948 by Nathan Van Patten, Vincent Starrett, Paul Jordan-Smith, Carl Van Vechten, Montgomery Evans, Robert Hillyer (all names that will long be associated with Machen) as well as August Derleth, Joseph Vodrey, Ben Abramson, James T. Babb, William P. Wreden, Frederick Coykendall, Cyril Clemens, Gilbert Seldes, Ashton Stevens and a score of comparative newcomers in the great society of the admirers of Arthur Machen.
This is an informal group which hopes, in the words of its president, Mr. Van Patten, to stimulate an interest in Arthur Machen’s work. There is to be an exchange of information and privately printed Machen material, with possibly an annual or quarterly publication.
In the summer of 1948 Alfred Knopf issuedTales of Horror and the Supernatural, the largest and the best collectionof Machen’s stories ever published. Edited by Philip Van Doren Stern, it included a reprint of Hillyer’sAtlanticarticle. The book was reviewed with interest by Orville Prescott and John Dickinson Carr in theTimes.The Nation’sreviewer thought the atmosphere of the tales did not “compensate for his failure to explain the inexplicable.” Mr. Knopf’s ad-men, applying modern techniques, exhorted readers to “remember Machen, it rhymes with crackin’.”
The Arthur Machen Society has already begun to make good its promise to stimulate interest in Arthur Machen:
Mr. Joseph Kelly Vodrey of Canton, Ohio, a specialist in Machen bibliography, has printed and distributed to the members of the Society a booklet:There Are Some Who Mourn, written by Nathan Van Patten.
Mr. Van Patten, a distinguished professor of bibliography at Stanford University and dean of Machenites, has printed a handsome booklet, limited to fifty copies, of Arthur Machen’sThe Gray’s Inn Coffee House.
There will be others. At long last something is being done to right the wrongs of which Mr. Cabell wrote so many years ago.