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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.
On the other hand: one cannot always agree with the idolizers 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 the malteds 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 of Dog and Duck, or the Anatomy of Tobacco (LSMFT) or even Hieroglyphics?
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 find The Great God Pan or The Cosy Room or The Novel of the White Powder in 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 projected state 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 terrible of 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 his experiences 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 read The 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 the Saturday Review some 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 of their kind ... and such a story of irrational, irresistible temptation as Mr. Machen’s The 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 than The White People (which it might be profitable to compare with Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw?).”
Mr. Carl Van Vechten’s Peter Whiffle probably 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 his necromancy; 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.