ARTHUR MACHEN

Weaver of Fantasy

William Francis Gekle

Millbrook, N. Y. Round Table Press 1949

Copyright, 1949, by William Francis Gekle

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except by a reviewer, without the permission of the author.

Round Table Press MILLBROOK, N. Y.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

for Verne

PREFACE

It was, I suppose, during the closing months of the First World War that an urbane and witty gentleman, writing in the Confederate city of Richmond, set down these words in the course of one of his interminable, and witty and urbane, monologues: “I wonder if you are familiar with that uncanny genius whom the London directory prosaically lists as Arthur Machen?”

Since there was no reply, as indeed none was expected, the amiable Charteris chatted on about Arthur Machen and, oddly enough, Robert W. Chambers, for some moments, and then he concluded with this statement.... “But here in a secluded library is no place to speak of the thirty years’ neglect that has been accorded Mr. Arthur Machen; it is the sort of crime that ought to be discussed in the Biblical manner, from the house-top....”

That thirty years’ neglect has almost doubled—and indeed one might say with perfect truth that Arthur Machen has suffered a lifetime of neglect, and, in perfect truth, it must be added that the loss has been the world’s which so blindly accorded neglect to the uncanny genius of Arthur Machen.

This is the sort of crime, as Mr. James Branch Cabell suggested back in 1918, that ought to be discussed in the Biblical manner—and it is my intention to do so.

At this point there will be voices raised in protest ... dim voices trained to the librarian’s whisper, voices that echo in the vaults of university libraries and in the reading rooms of Memorial Collections. There will be other voices—the amiable, all-inclusive voice of the anthologist and the rasping roar of the reprint editor. There will be the excited exclamations of the cultists and the happy burblings of the bibliographers as they pounce upon another Machen item. And of course we may expect to hear the calm and cultured tones of the collectors, the excavators and the discoverers, who have pointed with smug satisfaction to their rows of faded bindings and their “obscure little pamphlets.” As for the horror boys, happy with their harpies and hieroglyphs and wild hallucinations, they will probably croak and sibilate in unholy glee and rush down to start their presses—reprinting madly all they can find of the magical tales of that wonderful Welshman, Arthur Machen.

It will appear that I anticipate a renewed interest in the works of Arthur Machen. I do. It may even become apparent that I expect the publication of this book to work the miracle—to right the wrong of sixty years of neglect. I do. Nor is this to be attributed to egotism, nor to a vast respect for my powers of persuasion. A number of literary men, of small stature and great, have written well and passionately of Arthur Machen, only to have their effusions produce a magnificent calm. It is simply that there are signs and portents (of which more anon) that the time is now. And then of course there is always the bare hope that my admiration for Arthur Machen and my enthusiasm for his work may be contagious enough to result in another Arthurian revival. That would be an event to rival a genuine miracle at Glastonbury itself.

I spoke of the voices that will be raised in praise and recognition of Arthur Machen. It may occur to some that there was bitterness in what I said, and in the way I spoke of collectors and cultists, and of bibliographers and bibliophiles, and of anthologists and of the zealots of the pulp press. I daresay it is true that I am inclined to be bitter over the neglect accorded Arthur Machen. Of course the blame for that neglect cannot be fixed or fastened—but it must rest somewhere between the publishers of limited editions and the reprinters of almost unlimited editions, between the alpha and the omega, and the buying and reading public. That covers a lot of territory. One cannot indict the publishing world from top, literally, to bottom, literally. One cannot indict, to paraphrase a much quoted statement of Edmund Burke’s, an entire reading public. One can, to make a concrete proposal, attempt to do something about it.

The interest shown in the prospectus announcing this book has been gratifying, but it does not, to my mind at least, dismiss the charge of neglect. It merely indicates that there are others who bear witness to the crime and who wish to see justice done.

The book has been announced as a critical survey—and it will be that. Many of the stories, written in that decade of the delicate decadents, will be re-examined and re-evaluated. Mr. Machen will sometimes be spoken of as a “Gothick novelist”—a thing he has said he is not. The stories of the “Great War,” as he called it, are seen in a new perspective, as anyone must know who has re-read them, especially The Terror, in the past few years.

Many of Machen’s articles and essays, and such works as Hieroglyphics and Doctor Stiggins, offer food for thought to those who may think, for example, that Mr. James Farrell has settled literary criteria, once and for all, in his book, of a few years ago, The League of Frightened Philistines.

This book is, then, the result of some twenty years preparation; at least half of them spent in planning to “do something about it.” The book has grown slowly, with many interruptions before, during and since the war. The opening chapter or Prologue, called “Conversation Piece,” was written a dozen or so years ago. It was scheduled for publication in one of the ephemeral magazines of the day. This particular one proved to be more ephemeral than most ... to paraphrase a rather famous line, “it sank from sight before it was set.” However, the piece is here presented as it was written some twelve years back. I believe now, as I did then, that there was need for a book about Arthur Machen. I hope this book will fill that need.

At least one chapter, the ninth, may seem to some a philippic, a potpourri of purely personal preferences and prejudices, having little to do with Arthur Machen and his works. Needless to say, I believe it extremely relevant.

—W.F.G.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I cannot recall whether it was James Branch Cabell or Vincent Starrett who first directed me to the works of Arthur Machen. I am deeply grateful to both, not only for this, but for their encouraging letters concerning my book.

To Montgomery Evans and Paul Jordan-Smith for their enthusiasm and interest, their intimate sketches of Machen, and for facts not available elsewhere. To Carl Van Vechten and Robert Hillyer for their articles on Machen, parts of which are quoted herein.

To Joseph Kelly Vodrey and Paul Seybolt for their informative and helpful letters, and to Nathan Van Patten whose bibliographical labors lightened my own. To Meyer Berger for his notes on the Mons affair, and to Harper’s Bazaar for permission to quote from them. To the late Alfred Goldsmith and his delightful reminiscences of Machen. To all of these I am deeply grateful.

To Alfred A. Knopf for permission to quote from the Machen books bearing the Borzoi imprint, and for having published them in the first place. To Robert McBride & Co. for permission to quote from The Terror, and to Dodd, Mead & Co. for permission to quote from More Authors and I.

To Hilary Machen for his courtesy in handling my proofs at Amersham and, finally, to Arthur Machen for the ‘plenary blessing’ he gave this book.

ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]

Prologue CONVERSATION PIECE

“And what,” asked the younger man, “are they?” He pointed to a long row of books plainly bound in yellow with faded blue and almost indecipherable titles. The Host felt a warmer glow than the brandy alone could have produced. “They are,” he said reverently, “my Machens.”

“Your whats?” asked the younger man absently. He had caught sight of a promising looking volume, enticingly entitled Aphrodite, on a lower shelf. The Host intercepted the glance, recognized the symptoms of failing interest and, with skill born of experience, drew his chair before the Aphrodite and pulled out a lapfull of the yellow books.

The younger man, not too obviously disappointed, concentrated on his small globular glass of Asbach Uralt. “Who,” he asked in tones that matched his look, “is Machen?”

“Arthur Machen,” began the Host in a voice that matched his look, “he is the ... he’s, well ... look!” He gestured to the shelves. “Fifteen books, and there are more, and you’ve never even heard of him. Fifteen of the most wonderful books in the English language, and you ask who he is!”

“Well,” said the young man with pardonable irritation, “just who is he?”

The Host settled back in his chair, fighting hard for[2] composure and coherence. “Arthur Machen,” he began again, and with every evidence of a strong determination to speak calmly, “is the man who has written more fine things than any dozen living authors you may care to mention. That may strike you as a rather broad and rash statement, but I am in a mood to shoot the works. And there are others, Highly Connected and Well Thought Of Persons, who have indicated much the same opinion. Arthur Machen has been appreciated by some of our best known composers of ‘literary appreciations.’ Unfortunately, this sort of praising is often akin to, and almost as effective as, burying. To the popular mind, a writer who has been appreciated by a duly accredited appreciator is a pet of the pedants, a delight of the dilettantes and nothing more. And, indeed, the titles found on some of the books containing these little essays in literary appreciation are often suggestive of archeological exploration rather than of due honor to a living author.

I have in mind, specifically, two books whose titles seem to connote research into a particularly distant past. Buried Caesars and Excavations, those two books you see there; they would tell you in a much more literary style, and with considerable technical flourish, just who and what Arthur Machen was and is. But I am not minded to ask you to read them at present.

“I think,” resumed the Host generously gesturing toward the decanter and his friend’s glass, “that the time has come for a new and revised estimate of Arthur Machen. Would that I had the time, talent and/or the temerity to undertake the task! Let us, meanwhile, acknowledge but pass by these appreciators of Machen, at least for the moment.[3] He has attracted the attention and been subject to the discussion of Vincent Starrett, Carl Van Vechten, James Branch Cabell and others. He has even attracted the notice of such literary titans as Tiffany Thayer and Burton Rascoe. He has been crowned by that arbiter elegantiarum of American manners, morals and mentality, Walter Winchell, who once described Arthur Machen as ‘tops among the literati.’ This last, I fear, is not a critical estimate per se, but an indication of a vogue in certain quarters.

“Despite the fact that Mr. Machen has been ‘discovered’ by at least two of our most indefatigable bolster-uppers of literary reputations and revealers-of-lights-under-baskets; despite his having been exhumed and placed on exhibition upon a platform built for two, Machen remains yet to be properly appreciated and honored by a wider public. Perhaps he never will be, and perhaps it is best so. Machen once wrote that if a great book is really popular it is sure to owe its popularity to entirely wrong reasons. And I, for one, tremble to think of what Hollywood might do to Machen.” The Host paused briefly for replenishment.

“Far too often these appreciations have degenerated into what I have in my more bitter moments mentally called Match-Machen. An execrable pun, I grant you, but concerning a matter that is, to my mind, as offensive. I refer to the practice of certain appreciators who, in the execution of their self-appointed duties find it, for some reason or other, necessary to devise improbable genealogies to demonstrate their own wide literary knowledge and their conception of the subject of their labors. We find, for example, Mr. X in the act of appreciating a book by Mr. Y.

[4]

“How does he go about it? Why, he merely tells you that Mr. Y is the literary son of A out of B, whose maternal grandmother was C, and whose second-cousin is D. Another trick is to pretend that Mr. Y’s work is a play ... with music by R, scenery by S, costumes by T and lyrics by W. In short, you come away without the slightest notion about Mr. Y. But you have learned that Mr. X knows a great deal, apparently, about the doings of Messrs. A, B, C, D, R, S, T and W. Do you follow me?”

“But slightly,” confessed the younger man with that candor born of brandy.

“I will try to make myself clear,” said the Host selecting a volume from the shelves.

“Here we have an essay about a man called, let us say Blank. The author of this little essay will tell you that a passage of Blank’s prose suggests one of the more poignant episodes out of de Maupassant, set to music by Tchaikowski against a background of Gaugain’s Tahitian belles. Have you any idea what Blank’s prose is like?”

“No,” said the young man morosely.

“Good! Listen then to this. It is Vincent Starrett on Machen: ‘Joris Karl Huysmans, in a thoroughly good translation, perhaps remotely suggests Machen, both are debtors to Baudelaire.’ Now, does that tell you anything about Machen?”

“No, it does not!” said the young man. “But then, neither have you!”

“Quite true,” nodded the Host affably. “I am often carried away. But we have ably demonstrated my contention.” The younger man looked decidedly restless. “Um!”

[5]

“Know then,” said the Host relishing the sound of his voice, “that Arthur Machen, born in 1863, the son of a Welsh clergyman, first swam into the public ken early in the last decade of the last century—a fact which the public largely failed to appreciate until some years later. His earlier works were translations of the Heptameron, the Memoirs of Casanova, and several other large and, I should think, rather dull old works. But the most important were two remarkably unique books called The Anatomy of Tobacco and The Chronicle of Clemendy.

“Most of Machen’s best work was written before 1901—and in that year he temporarily deserted literature for the stage. Machen’s most productive period then, from 1890 to 1901, affords a curious and striking contrast with what was assumed to be the important literature and the important literary group of the time. The 1890’s in England were celebrated, although few people grow festive about it now, for the Yellow Book Boys, that delightful coterie of delicate decadents who glorified the carnation and the pansy. But after the maddest music had died away, and the reddest wine had been drunk, Cynara and Dorian fluttered to the shelves and Oscar and Hubert and Adelbert retired into a certain pastel-shaded obscurity from which they emerge from time to time as a new volume of memoirs is published. The period still commands a certain amount of academic attention—and yet the best books of that period were written not by these ‘Men of the Nineties,’ but by Arthur Machen. A chap named Muddiman, whose book you see there, wrote his history

of these fellows and mentions Machen but briefly: ‘Arthur Machen, in those days, belonged to the short story[6] writers with Hubert Crackanthorpe, who was the great imaginative prose writer of the group.’ Alas, poor Hubert! Who knows him now! Holbrook Jackson and Richard Le Gallienne ignore Machen completely. And perhaps rightly so. Machen was not of the group, nor of the period. But here I wish to digress briefly....

“These delicate contemporaries of Machen derived from the French Symbolistes, who derived from Mallarme and Baudelaire, both of whom were admittedly influenced by Poe. It has been said that Machen was also influenced by Poe. The difference, if you will credit me, is that Poe’s influence, in as far as it exists, came to Machen direct. When it came to the others of the group it had been filtered through Gallic gravel and Symbolistic sand.

“So much for Machen’s literary history. No one could possibly tell it better than he has in Things Near and Far and Far Off Things—his two autobiographical collections. Nor is any literary history as simply told. It is not one of your tremendous collections of anecdotes concerning ‘literary figures of the day.’ It is the story of a lonely man who wanted, more than anything else, to write. And then—you must read Machen. All of him. I know of no other writer whose entire output can be so heartily recommended.

“You will realize, as you read, that when people use such names as Poe, Stevenson, Blackwood, and Henry James, they are but vaguely gesturing in the general direction of Machen’s own weird landscape. It is a land as strange as the misty mid-region of Weir where lies the dank tarn of Auber, the measureless caverns where runs the sacred river Alph. But it is like none of these. The young man of Gwent has[7] created his own landscape, a strange country spread out under a sky that glows as if great furnace doors had been opened, bordered by tall grey mountains, traversed by streams that coil their esses through silent woods. It is my fancy to think I have a picture of that country, painted by another genius. You see that Van Gogh hanging there?” The Host indicated a large framed print of writhing cypresses under a swirling sky. “On quiet November nights I sit here and look into it, half expecting to see young Meyrick or Lucian Taylor come down the hillside.

“It is curious to go over some of these former estimates of Arthur Machen. One first reads them through in a fine enthusiasm at finding someone else who has read Machen and found him good. But even those who praise him the most, fail to express, or even to hint at the ‘quiddity’ of Machen. They seem to find him so far beyond their powers to praise that they often resort to picayunish criticism. Thus we find Vincent Starrett mildly complaining about an absence of cloud descriptions in Machen. Or about a lack of humor. True, you’ll find no Maxfield Parrish sky castles, no James Gould Fletcher touches, no rotogravure alto-cirrus formations. But if ever a man could imply clouds without using the very word, Machen can. And although Machen has not yet introduced a pair of jolly grave-diggers to coax us back into our seats or cajole us into combing back our bristling hair, you will find he has humor.

“There does exist, however, a problem in classifying Machen—it seems to exist only a necessary evil. Essentially, I suppose, Machen is what might be called a Gothic novelist. He has been linked so often with the recognized practitioners[8] of the Gothic style and tradition. You’ll find no ivy-covered ruins, no deserted abbeys, no ravens, no baying mastiffs, not even a sinister monk—and we must rule out those jolly tosspots, the monks of Abergavenny. I daresay Machen would prefer to be known as a Silurist. His ruins are those of an older time, older even than the ruins of the golden city of the Roman legions.