5
In the summer of 1881 Machen was back in London in quest of a career. This one too, although it had nothing to do with figures, did not quite come off. For some time he had thought about journalism as his relatives advised, but he did not actually follow their advice until some years later. Meanwhile, he lived in an old red-brick Georgian house in Turnham Green where he wrote furiously in one manner or another. That Celtic appreciation of the fine phrase and the glorious sound of words was strong within him, for almost everything he read struck a responsive chord, and he would begin at once to compose an epic in the manner of the author or the book he was currently reading.
Thus there was a long heroic poem in the manner of William Morris, whose Earthly Paradise he had just purchased with his tea and tobacco money. Then there were innumerable verses in the manner of Robert Herrick. Now and then there would be a strong Swinburnian resurgence. And while all this furious creation was going on he worked in what was called the “editorial” department of a publishing house.
There are many tasks a literary man might do in serving his apprenticeship and Machen did most of them—or most of the ones current in the ’Eighties. He had assisted in the “grangerizing” of many old and odd volumes and he had composed “Shakespearean” calendars, selecting appropriate quotations from “The Bard” for each of the three hundred and sixty-five days. These and other more or less literary matters occupied his days and earned for him the sum of about a pound a week. At Turnham Green he wrote feverishly and planned prodigiously and read ravenously ... and almost every book he came upon set him off on another venture of his own.
There are some writers, and there are certain casts of mind, requiring exercises of this sort. It is rather odd that these should turn out to be the more imaginative writers after all. Yet it does seem that they have to work out for themselves theories of composition and devote much of their time and talent and energy to perfecting the technicalities of the trade of writing. Poe, of course, comes to mind, and Coleridge and Hawthorne. They first developed theories, seemingly so rigid. They devised formulae, seemingly so mechanical. And then they created tales and poems, not from their observations and experience, based not on facts, but on fancy. And they composed them, apparently, with little regard for the formulae and systems of their own devising. They seem to leap from the frankly imitative to the fearlessly imaginative, without ever taking any of the intermediate steps they themselves had postulated, or calling into use any of the technical and mechanical aids with which they had practiced their trade.
Machen in 1881 might recognize and respond to a pattern or formula in Swinburne, in Burton, in Morris, in Herrick, in Stevenson, in Balzac, in Rabelais. This is not to imply that Machen merely developed a style “in the manner of Swinburne,” or of Stevenson or of any of them. To each of these he brought something of Machen—and as he learned his craft, the technical tricks, the automatic alliterations and the polished phrasing were fused into something, a way of writing, no one else has ever had, no one but Arthur Machen.
Meanwhile Machen discovered that he disliked his labours at the publishing house in Chandos Street. The business of composing cultural calendars to be hung in London kitchens and country parlours did not interest him, nor did he see why it should interest anyone. He therefore resigned his position—and in the face of a raise to twenty-four shillings a week! He then became, of all things, tutor to a group of children, teaching them, of all things, mathematics! His head for figures seems to have improved considerably for, on going over the Euclid he was supposed to pass along to his charges, he found that it did make sense of a sort.
He had moved from Turnham Green to Clarendon Road—a street destined to become, one day, as well known as Baker Street, Cheyne Row and many another London street of literary fame. Machen was already existing on that famous and fantastic diet of “green tea, stale bread and great quantities of tobacco.” Fortunately, at first, his tutorial position entitled him to dinner with his pupils. Later his pupils changed, and with them his menu. The noon hour was spent in wandering about Turnham Green or Holland Park, with a pause for biscuit and beer at a convenient tavern.
These wanderings became a habit, and through the spring of 1883 Machen went further afield into the green suburbs to the north and west of the city. It was on these lonely outings that he first began to formulate one of his literary theories—that “in literature no imaginative effects are achieved through logical predetermination.” Now this theory—so demonstrably true in his own case—was arrived at by no logical predetermination but by sheer pedestrianism. It came about on these solitary walks when, as so often happened, the roads that led so invitingly to green and open country plunged suddenly into a row of horribly new brick houses or, more startling still, a vast and sprawling cemetery.
To the countryman, whose ideal landscape proceeds logically from valley to hill, from stream to pond, from crossroads to village, from fence to house and stile to pasture, these monstrous outcroppings of civilization, these sudden and terrible interruptions of what was and should have continued to be a pleasant prospect, are more horrible even than a factory belching smoke from seven stacks.
And so these pleasant saunters that so often ended before a hideous row of red-brick houses, the quiet lanes that terminated abruptly before a vast pile of bricks and boards, created in Machen the beginnings of that doctrine of the strange and terrifying things that lie so close to the surface of the quiet and the commonplace. The hideous face at the window in a story written years later is but a reflection of the sudden apparition of a raw, new suburb at the end of a quiet lane leading north out of London.
For the present these were but things seen and felt, they sank quietly below the surface and floated deep down in the well of the unconscious. Tutoring and Turnham Green and the twisting roads of Notting Hill were sufficient unto the days. The nights in his small room in Clarendon Road were more urgent—more filled with magic. For here there was not the sudden sight of a street hastily hacked into a hillside, nor the mounds and monuments of a cemetery, but great books and greater magic flowing from the majesty of Gothic cathedrals or the Arthurian romances or the Divine Comedy. He read by night, lighting candles when the gas meter clicked off, and passed for a time into the “Middle Ages, walking in the silvery light with the Masters of the Sentences, with the Angelic Doctor, listening to the high interminable argument of the Schools.” Out of these books and studies, and a great deal out of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy came a book that was to be called The Anatomy of Tobacco.
The book was sent to a publisher who, as it happened, liked it and who was prepared to publish it, after “certain preliminaries” were attended to. These preliminaries entailed a visit to Caerleon and called for another conference in the parlour at the Rectory. The family and the relations, remembering the pamphlet of a few years ago and encouraged by the news that the new book would contain many times more than sixteen pages, attended to the preliminaries.
In due course, in the year 1884, George Redway of London published The Anatomy of Tobacco. And a very handsome book it was, in its cream parchment boards and brick-red lettering on the spine. The author of this study of smoking, “Methodized, Divided, and Considered after a New Fashion” was one “Leolinus Silurensis, Professor of Fumical Philosophy in the University of Brentford,” in whom we may recognize our old friend, the former Member of the Hereford Cathedral School.
This is the book Machen calls “The Anatomy of Tankards” in his Far Off Things. There you may read the whys and the wherefores of this amazing composition, and the devious means by which Burton and tobacco and divers other curious books entered into its making. So convincing is his account of his investigations and research into the matter of taverns and tankards and such matters that quite a few collectors have spent considerable time, and were prepared to spend considerable sums, to acquire a copy of The Anatomy of Tankards. Meanwhile, Machen had quitted the six-by-ten room in the Clarendon Road and returned to Caerleon and a normal diet. Throughout the winter of 1884 he had worked on the proofs of the Anatomy and then upon an assignment from Redway for another book. This was a translation of the Heptameron of Marguerite of Navarre. Machen blithely undertook the task, despite his own sworn statement that upon leaving Hereford School he could not have conjugated the simplest, and most popular, of French verbs.
The merrie and delightsome tales of the French Marguerite occupied him through winter and spring in Gwent. Once more he walked in the deep lanes about Caerleon and alternately missed London and revelled in the luxury of not being in Clarendon Road. By the time June came to Caerleon he had sent off the last batch of his translation and Redway had written him and offered him a job. It did not seem too hard a thing to return to Clarendon Road with a job, a real one, in the City. He was to catalogue books—and such books! There were books on Alchemy and Magic, on Mysteries and Ancient Worship, on the occult sciences and Rosicrucians and all sorts of wonderful and baleful and mystic and incredible matters.
Machen became the cataloguer of these curious volumes—and he came very close to being that wonderful phenomena of the twentieth century: a publisher’s advertising man! As a matter of fact, Machen did achieve something few, if any, publisher’s advertising men have accomplished—either before or since. Two of his catalogues have become highly prized collector’s items. They were published in 1887 and 1888 respectively.
Working in a book-filled garret in Catherine Street, Machen produced one catalogue which pops up from time to time in Machen bibliographies: The Literature of Occultism and Archeology. Then it occurred to him to paraphrase a chapter in Don Quixote, the one in which the Curate and the Barber examine the Knight’s library. This chapter was written in a manner calculated to entice the wary or unwary book collector into buying the books discussed. The catalogue was issued under the title A Chapter from the Book Called The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha. The other catalogue, issued in the following year, bore the title Thesaurus Incantatus, The Enchanted Treasure or, The Spagyric Quest of Beroaldus Cosmopolita.
It will do little good to look for copies of these catalogues. Vincent Starret, the fortunate possessor of at least one of them, in his collection of Machen’s tales, The Shining Pyramid (Covici-Fried, Chicago, 1923) has included two pieces called The Priest and the Barber and The Spagyric Quest of Beroaldus Cosmopolita. These are taken, of course, from the catalogues in question. As to whether you will find the Starret volumes readily available—well, they are worth the search.
Well then, here was Machen in a hot-bed of the occult and the devilish, surrounded by books of all sorts, especially the strange, the weird and the curious. His room in the Clarendon Road held as many books as it could accommodate along with its occupant—the overflow was stacked between the rungs of a ladder on the landing outside. He was busy with notebooks once more, and writing furiously as ever—but in despair rather than the fine frenzy and high spirits of a few years before. For now he was deep in Rabelais and Balzac—and these books cast a spell upon him. They were warm, glowing books in which life was full and rich and lusty—there were great eaters and drinkers and lovers in those days. They offered too great a contrast to the cold, lonely room in Clarendon Road and the diet of tea, tobacco and bread.
Machen was under the spell of a landscape bathed in a warm sun, with ruins standing close to roads, and wine flowing from vineyard to bottle to parched throats all within a few yards of enchanted space. This was a contrast indeed to the deep lanes of Gwent, the lonely ruins that stood in the shade and shadow of great hills and forests, and although Machen had spoken glowingly of the greenish-yellow cider of that land, still, he rather favored, in his mind at least, the wines of Touraine.
By night there was this magic of old books and by day there were the old books of magic, for the garret in Catherine Street was crowded with old and odd books of every sort, a collection that “represented that inclination of the human mind which may be a survival from the rites of the black swamp and the cave.” These studies did induce a frame of mind that might tend toward the strange and unusual. Living in this strange mixture of a glowing, gargantuan landscape and the dark labyrinths of the mediaeval mind, Machen tried, and sometimes desperately tried, to write.
“A man has no business to write,” said Machen many years later, “unless he has something in his heart, which, he feels cries out to be expressed.” And he had nothing to say—had only the urge to write, the vice of writing for writing’s sake—cacoethes scribendi—he called it! But then Machen has had time to reconsider his pronouncement of 1923, and to revise his opinion regarding men who wrote—and why they write.
In a “London Letter” to the New York Times Book Section, Herbert W. Horwill wrote, in September 1935: “A curious literary problem is posed by that veteran author, Arthur Machen, in John o’ London’s Weekly. Imagine a man marooned on a desert island, and certain that he would remain there for the rest of his life. Imagine, moreover, that he possessed the literary faculty, and had salvaged pens, ink and paper from the wreck or else had devised home-made substitutes for them. Would such a man write, knowing that whatever he wrote would never be seen by any eye but his own?
“Mr. Machen tells us that he once heard this question discussed among a group of friends. Some answered yes and some no, and, when pipes were knocked out for the night, the problem was no nearer solution, though, to the best of his recollection, the ayes were in the majority. He voted with them himself, and, after further reflection, he still believes he was right. The hypothetical Crusoe might have no better implements available than quills of parrots’ feathers, paper made out of the bark of the guru tree and ink obtained by macerating the root of a certain plant. But, granted his possession of the literary faculty, he would possess also the literary impulse. He would write because he liked writing, apart from whatever fate might be in store for the thing written. The true spring of imaginative literature, Mr. Machen reminds us, is the delight of the creator in creation.”
In the desert island of Clarendon Road, all through the summer of 1885, Machen wrote. He wrote because he had to, because he was under the spell of a master of gargantuan languages, because he was enamoured of the sound of words and because he had an ear for the rich and rolling phrase. And, of course, he wrote because he had the literary impulse. The pound a week he was paid by Redway could not afford him the rich living, the pleasures of Touraine. But then, after despair and after much almost pointless scribbling, he came at last upon the idea for the Great Romance.
It was to be a book in which Rabelais and Gwent were mingled ... and thus began the “History of the Nine Joyous Journeys ... in which were contained the amorous inventions and fanciful tales of Master Gervase Perrot, Gent.” Machen had prepared for this great undertaking by purchasing his ruled quarto paper, his pen points and his penholders. Quite possibly he envisioned a plaque on the door of his little cell at 23 Clarendon Road, announcing that Here Had the Great Romance been Written! There was, however, this difficulty—the vision of the great romance declined to be more specific. There were no hints as to plot, no guidance as to characters. He began, at any rate, a Prologue, written in a flowing and flowery 17th Century manner.
But now his cataloguing in Catherine Street had come to an end, and with it his pound or thereabouts per week. Nevertheless, he wrote on, even though he knew that his composition of the Great Romance might be abruptly terminated some three or four days in the future. Then, presumably, he would return to Caerleon, in all probability on foot. As it happened, he returned hurriedly by train. Just as he had come to the end of his tea and tobacco and rent money, he had word that his mother was dying. Aunt Maria thoughtfully sent his fare with the summons.
Later, he returned to the “great romance,” writing once more in the familiar room in the rectory where the fire burned and the winds howled down from Twyn Barlwyn and tossed the branches and beat upon the door. He wrote late into the morning, long after his father had knocked out his last pipe and gone upstairs. So passed the winter of 1885. Through the days he walked in the lovely Gwentian hills and looked down upon the white farm houses standing in the midst of encircling trees. At night he worked in that room where he had, as a boy, first read de Quincy and Scott and the other writers who had helped to bring about the “renascence of wonder.” And in the following year he was alone. His father died that spring.
This was the John Edward Jones whose homecoming from Jesus College, Oxford, is described in the opening pages of Things Near and Far. Now Machen was more truly alone than ever. His father had been to him a good companion in his earliest rambles about the countryside. It had been his father’s hope that Arthur might one day return to Gwent to live, buy a small newspaper and settle down to a quiet career in country journalism.
There were certain inheritances that might help, when they came through. For Machen’s father seldom thought of the good these inheritances would do for him in his struggle to make ends meet at Llanddewi Rectory. But now he had gone and then, ironically, the long-lived Scottish relations went too, and the Scottish lawyers began to look through family Bibles for the next of kin.
Through these and other circumstances Machen at length came into money—smallish amounts which, shrewdly invested or even conservatively invested, might have stretched themselves out for a score or more years. This economic policy did not suggest itself or, if it did, was quietly ignored. The simple expedient of living modestly and comfortably, and dipping into a box for coins, when coins were required, seemed much the better plan.
In 1887 Machen returned to London, to live in Bedford Place, and to arrange for the publication of the Great Romance, now called The Chronicle of Clemendy. This was accomplished, with perhaps a deeper plunge into the box of coins, and the book was published that year. It was printed at Carbonnek, “for the society of Pantagruelists.” And it did, apparently, quite well. The nine joyous journeys and the merry monks of Abergavenny pleased Machen and his fellow Pantagruelists—which, in the year 1888 or 1948, is almost as much as can be asked of any book.