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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 his Atlantic article. 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 were picnics 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 torpedoed Athenia as 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 the Fifth, 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 closing days 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 the Atlantic Monthly probably 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 issued Tales of Horror and the Supernatural, the largest and the best collection of Machen’s stories ever published. Edited by Philip Van Doren Stern, it included a reprint of Hillyer’s Atlantic article. The book was reviewed with interest by Orville Prescott and John Dickinson Carr in the Times. The Nation’s reviewer 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’s The 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.