Peter Whiffle

by Carl Van Vechten

Now Peter, as he sat on the bench beside me, began to speak of Arthur Machen: The most wonderful man writing English today and nobody knows him! His material is handled with the most consummate art; arrangement, reserve, repose, the perfect word, are never lacking from his work and yet, at the age of fifty, he is an obscure reporter on a London newspaper. There are, of course, reasons for this neglect. 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. You know how Algernon Blackwood documents his work and stops to explain his magic orgies, so that by the time you have finished reading one of his weird stories, you completely discount it. On the other hand, although Machen writes in the simplest English concerning the most unbelievable impieties, he never lifts the crimson curtain to permit you to see the sacrifice on the Manichean altar. He leaves that to the imagination. But his expression soars so high, there is such ecstasy in his prose, that we are not meanly thrilled or revolted by his negromancy; 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. Think, for a moment, of the life of Paul Verlaine, dragged out with punks and pimps in the dirtiest holes of Paris, and compare it with the pure simplicity of his religious poetry. Think of the Song of Songs which is Solomon's and the ancient pagan erotic rites in the holy temples. Remember the Eros of the brothels and the Eros of the sacred mysteries. Recall the Rosicrucian significance of the phallus, and its cryptic perpetuation in the cross and the church steeple. In the middle ages, do not forget, the Madonna was both the Virgin Mother of Christ and the patron of thieves, strumpets, and murderers. Far surpassing all other conceivable worldly pleasures is the boon promised by the gratification of the sensual appetite; faith promises a bliss that will endure for ever. In either case the mind is conscious of the enormous importance of the object to be obtained. Machen achieves the soaring ecstasy of Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn or Shelley's To a Skylark, and yet he seldom writes of cool, clean, beautiful things. 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), the story of a child who stumbles upon the performance of the horrid, supernatural rites of a forgotten race and the consequences of the discovery? Yet, Machen's genius burns so deep, his power is so wondrous, that the angels of Benozzo Gozzoli himself do not shine with more refulgent splendour than the outlines of this erotic tale, a tale which it would have been easy to vulgarize, which Blackwood, nay Poe himself, would have vulgarized, which Laforgue would have made grotesque or fantastic, which Baudelaire would have made poetic but obscene. But Machen's grace, his rare, ecstatic grace, is perpetual and unswerving. He creates his rhythmic circles without a break, the skies open to the reader, and the Lord, Jesus Christ, appears on a cloud, or Buddha sits placidly on his lotus. Even his name is mystic, for, according to the Arbatel of Magic, Machen is the name of the fourth heaven.

Machen does not often write of white magic; he is a negromancer; the baneful, the baleful, the horrendous are his subjects. With Baudelaire, he might pray, Evil be thou my good! Consider the theme of The Great God Pan, a psychic experiment, operation, if you will, on a pure young girl, and its consequences. Again a theme which another writer, any other writer, would have cheapened, filled in with sordid detail, described to the last black mass. But Machen knows better. He knows so much, indeed, that he is able to say nothing. He keeps the thaumaturgic secrets as the alchemists were bidden to do. Instead of raising the veil, he drops it. Instead of revealing, he conceals. The reader may imagine as much as he likes, or as much as he can, for nothing is said, but he rises from a reading of one of these books with a sense of exaltation, an awareness that he has tasted the waters of the Fountain of Beauty. There is, indeed, sometimes, in relation to this writer, a feeling[3] that he is truly inspired, that he is writing automatically of the eternal mysteries, that the hand which holds the pen is that of a blind genius, and yet....

More straightforward good English prose, limpid narrative, I am not yet acquainted with. What a teller of stories! This gift, tentatively displayed in The Chronicle of Clemendy, which purports to be a translation from an old manuscript—Machen has really been the translator of the Heptamaron, Béroalde de Verville's Moyen de Parvenir, and the Memoirs of Casanova—, flowered in The Three Imposters, nouvelles in the manner of the old Arabian authors. This work is not so well-known as The Dynamiter, which it somewhat resembles, but it deserves to be. Through it threads the theme, that of nearly all his tales, of the disintegration of a soul through an encounter with the mysteries which we are forbidden to know, the Sabbatic revels, the two-horned goat, alchemy, devil-worship, and the eternal and indescribable symbols. The problem is always the same, that of facing the great God Pan and the danger that lurks for the man who dares the facing.

And one wonders, Peter continued, his eyes dilating with an expression which may have been either intense curiosity or horror, one wonders what price Machen himself has paid to learn his secret of how to keep the secrets! He must have encountered this horror himself and yet he lives to ask the riddle in flowing prose! What has it cost him to learn the answer? Popularity? Perhaps, for he is an obscure reporter on a London newspaper and he drinks beer! That is all any Englishman I have asked can tell me about him. Nobody reads his books; nobody has read them ... except the few who see and feel, and John Masefield is one of these. This master of English prose, this hierophant, who knows all the secrets and keeps them, this delver in forgotten lore, this wise poet who uplifts and inspires us, is an humble journalist and he drinks beer!

Peter paused and looked at me, possibly for corroboration, but what could I say? I had never, until then, touched upon Machen, although I remembered that Mina Loy had included him in her catalogue of protestants in the symposium at the Villa Allegra. Later, when I sought his books, I found them more difficult to arrive at than those of any of his contemporaries and today, thanks to the fame he has achieved through his invention of the mystic story of The Bowmen, the tale of the Angels at Mons, a story which was credited as true, for returning soldiers swore that they had really seen these angels who had led them into battle, thus arousing the inventive pride of the author, who published a preface to prove that the incident had never occurred except in his own brain, his early books command fantastic prices. Eight or nine pounds is asked for The Chronicle of Clemendy and forty or fifty pounds for his translation of Casanova. But on that day I said little about the matter, because I had nothing to say.

Now we were walking and presently stopped before Peter's door, a house on the south side of Stuyvesant Square, conveniently near, Peter observed, in sardonic reference to Marinetti's millennium, the Lying-in-Hospital. He unlocked the door and we entered. The hall was painted black and was entirely devoid of furniture. A lamp, depending on an iron chain from the ceiling, shed but a feeble glow, for it was enclosed in a globe of prelatial purple glass. We passed on to a chamber in which purple velvet curtains were caught back by heavy silver ropes, exposing at symmetrical intervals, the black walls, on which there were several pictures: Martin Schongauer's copperplate engraving of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, in which the most obscene and foulest of fiends tear and pull and bite the patient and kindly old man; Lucas Cranach's woodcut of the same subject, more fantastic but less terrifying; two or three of Goya's Caprichos; Félicien Rops's Le Vice Suprême, in which a skeleton in evening dress, holding his head in the curve of his elbow, chapeau claque in hand, opens wide an upright coffin to permit the emergence of a female skeleton in a fashionable robe; black ravens flit across the sky; Aubrey Beardsley's Messalina; Pieter Bruegel's allegorical copperplate of Lust, crammed with loathsome details; and William Blake's picture of Plague, in which a gigantic hideous form, pale-green, with the slime of stagnant pools, reeking with vegetable decays and gangrene, the face livid with the motley tints of pallor and putrescence, strides onward with extended arms, like a sower sowing his seeds, only the germs of his rancid harvest are not cast from his hands but drip from his fusty fingers. The carpet was black and in the very centre of the room was a huge silver table, fantastically carved, the top upheld by four basilisk caryatides. On this table stood a huge egg, round which was coiled a serpent, the whole fashioned from malachite, and a small cornelian casket, engraved in cuneiform characters. There were no windows in the room, and apparently no doors, for even the opening through which we had entered had disappeared, but the chamber was pleasantly lighted with a lambent glow, the origin of which it was impossible to discover, for no lamps were visible. In one corner, I noted a cabinet of ebony on the top of which perched an enormous black, short-haired cat, with yellow eyes, which, at first, indeed, until the animal made a slight movement, I took to be an objet d'art. Then Peter called, Lou Matagot, and with one magnificent bound, the creature landed on the silver table and arched his glossy back. Then he sharpened his claws and stretched his joints by the aid of the casket scratched with the cuneiform symbols.

Lou Matagot, Peter explained, signifies the Cat of Dreams, the Cat of the Sorcerers, in the Provençal dialect.

There were a few chairs, strangely modern, Ballet Russe chairs, upholstered in magenta and green and orange brocades in which were woven circles and crescents and stars of gold and silver, but Peter and I seated ourselves at one end of the room on a high purple couch, a sort of throne, piled with silver and black cushions, on which was worked in green threads an emblem, which Peter explained was the character of Mersilde, a fiend who has the power to transport you wherever you wish to go. Now, he pulled a silver rope which hung from the ceiling, the lights flashed off and on again, and I observed that we were no longer alone. A little black page boy in a rose doublet, with baggy silver trousers, and a turban of scarlet silk, surmounted by heron's plumes, sparkling with carbuncles, stood before us. He had apparently popped out of the floor like the harlequin in an English pantomime. At a sign from Peter, he pressed a button in the wall, a little cupboard opened, and he extracted a bottle of amber crystal, half-full of a clear green liquid, and two amber crystal glasses with iridescent flanges.

I am striving to discover the secrets, said Peter, as we sipped the liqueur, the taste of which was both pungent and bitter.