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In the late 1880’s Arthur Machen had, as he said, “Rabelais on the brain.” He had been for some years under the spell of the gargantuan tales and of Balzac’s Contes Drolatiques—and perhaps even more under the spell, literarily if not literally, of the Holy Bottle and the magic of Touraine and whatever it is about the land of France that so beguiles the young of the Anglo-Saxon peoples.
It was under the Rabelaisian influence that Machen had written his “great Romance,” The Chronicle of Clemendy, and made his translation of the Heptameron. And finally he had undertaken to translate and publish an even more difficult and bizarre book—Le Moyen de Parvenir by Beroalde de Verville.
This book, rather highly prized by collectors of at least two sorts, is incredibly dull. No fault of Machen’s certainly, although he might have permitted it to remain untranslated. Still, he was at the stage and of an age when this sort of thing had an appeal. And so he translated and published it in not one, but two editions. There was a large paper edition and an “ordinary” edition—both preceded by a very small edition (four copies) of a portion of the book under the title The Way to Attain.
Now of course every Machen bibliography lists this title, and many a Machenite has wished he might obtain a copy. Actually, it is one of the least important of Machen’s works. For this is merely a portion of Le Moyen de Parvenir—and very probably not an important part at that. Bibliographers, bibliophiles and bibliomaniacs are at liberty to go quietly mad in their quest for this queer little item. For queer it is—Machen himself cannot quite explain its existence. The four copies were issued in 1889, presumably by the Dryden Press who were to publish the complete work. A dispute over something or other arose and the project was dropped—at least by the Dryden Press. All four copies, apparently, are in the safe-keeping of Danielson, or they were at one time.
The other two editions were privately printed at Carbonnek in 1890 under the title of Fantastic Tales. There have been other editions, de luxe if not luxurious, for what is sometimes known as “the trade.” It may be assumed that the writer holds no very high opinion of this work. But then neither does Machen. He has described the book as being somewhat like a cathedral constructed entirely of gargoyles—as plain a warning as any ever given by an author regarding one of his works.
This fantastic collection of “discourses ... on Reformation politics ... many tales, some pointless, a few amusing” while it may provide puzzles, pleasure and profit for bibliophiles, is important only in that it marks the finish of the Rabelaisian influence upon Machen. Not that this influence was ever “Rabelaisian” in the usual sense ... it was rather like that of various French poets and novelists of several generations over still other generations of English and American writers. During certain periods our younger writers and “intellectuals” would have Verlaine on the brain, or Baudelaire in their bonnets, but eventually they would go back to writing stark novels about Sussex or Sauk Center, or Wales or Wisconsin or the moors of the Missouri.
The extent of this enthusiasm and the depth of this influence may be estimated from the following rhapsody delivered by Ambrose Meyrick in The Secret Glory. “Let me celebrate, above all, the little red wine. Not in any mortal vineyard did its father grape ripen; it was not nourished by the warmth of the visible sun, nor were the rains that made it swell common waters from the skies above us. Not even in the Chinonnais, earth sacred though that be, was the press made that caused its juices to be poured into the cuve, nor was the humming of its fermentation heard in any of the good cellars of the lower Touraine. But in that region which Keats celebrates when he sings the ‘Mermaid Tavern’ was this juice engendered—the vineyard lay low down in the south, among the starry plains where is the Terra Turonensis Celestis, that unimaginable country which Rabelais beheld in his vision where mighty Gargantua drinks from inexhaustible vats eternally, where Pantagruel is athirst for evermore, though he be satisfied continually. There, in the land of the Crowned Immortal Tosspots was that wine of ours vintaged, red with the rays of the Dog-star, made magical by the influence of Venus, fertilised by the happy aspect of Mercury. O rare, super-abundant and most excellent juice, fruit of all fortunate stars, by thee were we translated, exalted into the fellowship of that Tavern of which the old poet writes: Mihi est propositum in Taberna mori!”
Well, it was quite a thing while it lasted ... but the Rabelaisian vein petered out and Machen began to perceive that he was of Caerleon-on-Usk and not a townsman of Tours or a citizen 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.
Meanwhile he was back at his old trade of cataloguing. He had switched employers for, when York Street would yield little more than a pound a week, Leicester Square would give thirty shillings. So back he went to cataloguing ancient books. Not that he was much good at it, nor that he preferred it above all other forms of employment. As a matter of fact he rather disapproved of the whole business and issued what almost amounts to a Manifesto to Collectors: “I don’t care two-pence,” he wrote, “whether a book is in the first edition or in the tenth; nay, if the tenth is the best edition, I would rather have it ... the only question being: is the book worth reading or not?”
Nevertheless, cataloguing seems to have been a rather flourishing trade at the time, and a profitable practice—for the publisher at any rate. For this was a remarkably literate era, and publishers pandered profitably to the popular taste ... they were busily at work discovering rare books, improving some with plates borrowed from others, issuing new and enlarged editions at the drop of a folio, and discovering the pleasures and profits to be derived from making translations—particularly from the French. In the same building occupied by Machen’s employers were the offices of Vizatelly, the publisher who was even then bringing out translations of Zola’s works. At about the same time Machen was working there, Havelock Ellis was editing the Mermaid Tavern Series of Elizabethan Dramatists for Vizatelly. Ellis notes in his Autobiography that he was paid the sum of three guineas per volume—an amount he considered rather small. This may indeed have been a small amount—but he had a better deal of it than Machen who was asked, at about this time, to do a translation of the memoirs of Casanova.
The manner in which this undertaking came about was rather curious and very casual. One of the Brothers for whom he worked, and whom he does not otherwise identify in Things Near and Far, came to him one day with an old volume and asked Machen to translate from the place marked with a slip of paper. Machen set to work and about a year later he completed his translation of the twelve volumes of Casanova’s Memoirs. The place marked fell in about the fifth volume, and Machen simply translated through to the twelfth, began again at the first and worked through to the place in the fifth volume—which was “where he came in” as one says at the movies.
This monumental work, and the best translation to date of the Memoirs, was thrown in, as it were, with the cataloguing at thirty shillings a week. Machen simply remarks that he believes the cost to the firm to have been “strictly moderate.” Much more moderate than the three guineas per volume paid to Ellis for his editing. However, Machen was eventually offered an opportunity of profiting from his work. A few years later when the translation was about to be published, Machen was granted the privilege of investing a thousand pounds in the venture. One of the Brothers suggested that, as he was now an interested party, he might wish to revise the manuscript.
Of course publishing was not quite the same game it is today ... there were publishers then who were, if not actually unscrupulous, a trifle careless in their accounting and possibly slightly unethical. Vizatelly was prosecuted and jailed as a result of his translations of Zola. Machen has remarked upon the irony of the situation—for even while Vizatelly was in jail, charged with circulating obscene literature, Zola was being well received on his trip through England. When Vizatelly died shortly thereafter the Mermaid Tavern series was taken over by another publisher without so much as a by-your-leave. Ellis’ name was removed from the volumes, and that, apparently, settled that. Ellis treated the affair with a silence he knew would not be taken as a sign of contempt. One gathers that publishers in those days were not very thin-skinned. However, in his autobiographical sketches describing these events, Machen offers not the slightest criticism of the Brothers but he did, shortly thereafter, quit the publishing business.