Far Off Things

by Arthur Machen

Early edition bound in green cloth, with 1922 date in ( ) on copyright page. First?. Spine is darkened & has tiny chips and frays to the tips. Also a small tear to the cloth in the middle of the spine (tear aprox. 1cm long). Text clean, tight.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Horror, Biography Memoir, Gothic, Classics

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1922

About the author

Arthur Machen was a leading Welsh author of the 1890s. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His long story The Great God Pan made him famous and controversial in his lifetime, but The Hill of Dreams is generally considered his masterpiece. He also is well known for his leading role in creating the legend of the Angels of Mons.

At the age of eleven, Machen boarded at Hereford Cathedral School, where he received an excellent classical education. Family poverty ruled out attendance at university, and Machen was sent to London, where he sat exams to attend medical school but failed to get in. Machen, however, showed literary promise, publishing in 1881 a long poem "Eleusinia" on the subject of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Returning to London, he lived in relative poverty, attempting to work as a journalist, as a publisher's clerk, and as a children's tutor while writing in the evening and going on long rambling walks across London.

In 1884 he published his second work, the pastiche The Anatomy of Tobacco, and secured work with the publisher and bookseller George Redway as a cataloguer and magazine editor. This led to further work as a translator from French, translating the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre, Le Moyen de Parvenir (Fantastic Tales) of Béroalde de Verville, and the Memoirs of Casanova. Machen's translations in a spirited English style became standard ones for many years.

Around 1890 Machen began to publish in literary magazines, writing stories influenced by the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, some of which used gothic or fantastic themes. This led to his first major success, The Great God Pan. It was published in 1894 by John Lane in the noted Keynotes Series, which was part of the growing aesthetic movement of the time. Machen's story was widely denounced for its sexual and horrific content and subsequently sold well, going into a second edition.

Machen next produced The Three Impostors, a novel composed of a number of interwoven tales, in 1895. The novel and the stories within it were eventually to be regarded as among Machen's best works. However, following the scandal surrounding Oscar Wilde later that year, Machen's association with works of decadent horror made it difficult for him to find a publisher for new works. Thus, though he would write some of his greatest works over the next few years, some were published much later. These included The Hill of Dreams, Hieroglyphics, A Fragment of Life, the story The White People, and the stories which make up Ornaments in Jade.

Reviews

[Jonathan Ammon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A not-so-scary October read by a grandfather of the horror genre, this was a charming literary autobiography that filled me with a profound loneliness. It’s rare that I feel so known or perhaps unknown through reading someone else’s history. I have what must seem like an odd hope that I will see Machen in Heaven. I appreciate his well-developed thoughts on the Christian Gospel and medieval scholastic metaphysics as well as his beautiful turn of phrase, sense of the mystical, and love of the strange.

[Alex Burrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

If one of the functions of reading is to better understand yourself, then I couldn’t recommend this autobiographical work any more highly.

That being said, I grew up in rural Gwent (like Machen), wandered its magical pastures and forests alone (like Machen), am a writer (like Machen), lived and worked West London (like Machen)…

So, on top of enjoying descriptions of geography I recognise from a time I don’t, I’m left wondering one thing – to what extent do early childhood experiences cement the essence of our being?

Because, like Machen, I believe my love of and aptitude for poetry was forged in rolling chlorophylloid Welsh countryside. I believe that poetry is the backbone from which the ribs of my prose sprout. And I have resisted the temptation to conform to literary subjects and styles that might prove financially rewarding. So did Gwent make me? Because I thought I left Wales and home at the age of 17 to become my own man.

Rather than feel robbed of ownership of my personality, the conclusion is wonderfully encouraging. Whether through coincidence or common heritage, I am not alone in the history of the universe. I am not the only misfit, passionate Gwent-born writer who dreams in fire and works in clay. There has been at least one other. And he is highly regarded.

(With special thanks to the Treasurer of ‘The Friends of Arthur Machen’ for my 1926 New Adelphi Library edition of ‘Far Off Things’.)

[Lee Foust · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a lovely little memoir of his youth and early literary endeavors by Welsh supernatural author Arthur Machen. He's both a very witty and slightly sentimental author, and in these pages are heaped with nostalgia and beautiful descriptions of the Wales of his youth and the awe of nature that informs his best tales. Also there's the discovery of London, its allure, and then the hard times he spends there before finding his way. All of this creates a nice narrative arc. I was surprised to have so much in common with this man born almost exactly 100 years before I was (extra perk: when he spoke of the '80s, for instance, I knew immediately what he meant, our having been the same age, albeit a century apart, in each decade). The writer's solitude, the didactic exploration of literature through second hand bookshops, the delusions, childhood imagination, and then the struggle to find one's way in a world that values literature very little. Kindred spirits.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book chronicles Machens life from his years as a child, to his early year in London at the age of twenty to his return to his beloved Gwent and its mystical countryside. Unlike a typical autobiography, this doesn't follow a traditional chronological pattern and instead weaves in and out of time as a stream of thought. At no point is this ever a problem, and if anything gives the reader a look into Machens head. It wonderfully depicts a happy carefree childhood, the loneliness of being on your own in London, and the joy of his first publication The Anatomy of Tobacco and his welcomed homecoming.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful biography that is full of heart :)

Growing up in the same part of South Wales as Machen, this book charmed me from start to finish. Even most of the pubs are still there!

This book chronicles Machens life from his years as a child, to his early year in London. Unlike a typical autobiography, this doesn't follow a traditional chronological pattern and instead weaves in and out of time as a stream of thought. At no point is this ever a problem, and if anything gives the reader a look into Machens head.

It wonderfully depicts a happy carefree childhood, the loneliness of being on your own in London, and the joy of his first publication.

This is a fairly easy book to read, and only rarely does it stray into the overly flower.

This a probably not a book for fans of biographies alone, but is definitely a 'must read' for fans of Machen and those who love works about Gwent such as those by Fred Hando.

[Phinehas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have very rarely found an author whose work felt so close to my own sensibilities. Machen's writing is a sustained, languid reverie.

[Alex Sarll]

A memoir of sorts, of Arthur Machen's early life in both Gwent and London, and of the pull between them which meant he never felt quite at home in either – but which must also have been key to how well he could catch the way that humanity, whether in a gross or spiritual sense or some alloy of the two, is always yearning for something that little too far out of reach. Because as much as any conventional autobiography, this is a book in which Machen tries to show the figure in his carpet, explaining that really, when he wove stories, they were at heart a roundabout way of trying to get across the overwhelming sense of something awe-inspiring he felt when he saw the light catch a little house between the woods and the water just so. Which might explain why I, who so frequently find myself complaining that a book's story got in the way of its mood (looking at you, Piranesi), am such a devotee of Machen's work. I hadn't deliberately read this in the centenary of its first book publication, but it's an interesting counterbalance to all the celebration of 1922 as Modernism: Year Zero, having been serialised seven years earlier, looking back decades to "that Strand which is lost as Atlantis", and by a man who spiritually always felt he would have been much more at home a century or two before that. My edition is a more recent one, by the Machen-centric Three Impostors press; their annotations include some gems (Machen's journalistic career was ended by an obituary of the former Bosie which was not only disobliging, but libellous, on account of the old bastard not in fact having died), though elsewhere give the impression of assuming this distinctly niche publication will have fallen into the hands of someone wholly unfamiliar with any of Arthur Machen, English literature, or Google. Worse, at times they attempt pithily to summarise something like what Machen means with a references to the Great Work, which given his whole oeuvre could be seen as an attempt to get that down on paper, is fundamentally misguided. But they can be forgiven simply for making available, in a format where it can be read among trees and glinting sunlight, such a seductive, knowingly doomed attempt to preserve the memory of the cider, the taverns, the nooks and glimpses of a youth lost so far in time. I'm left longing to "go wandering over the mountains to west and to northward, climbing up into great high wild places of yellow gorse and grey limestone rocks, stretching and mounting onward and still beyond".

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

OK listening 🎶🔰

Another will written life short story by Arthur Machen about his teen life, friends, education, school, and early writing. It was not what I expected but you may enjoys. Enjoy the adventure of reading 👓 or listening 🎶 to Alexa as I do because of health issues 2022

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here is just one of several marvelous passages about the author's early years in Gwent, Wales--a short passage remarkable both for the nostalgia it conveys and for the vivid prose style:

"But the habits of the country, unlike those of London, generally fail to give reason or excuse for night wanderings. If you stayed in friendly and hospitable company much after ten of the night, it was usually a case of the spare room, newly aired sheets, one pipe more, and so to bed. This at all events on nights that were very black or tempestuous with wind and rain; for on such nights it is difficult to make out the faint footpath from stile to stile, and only the surest sense of locality will enable one to strike the felled tree or the narrow plank that, hidden by a dense growth of alders, crosses the winding of the brook."

[Merinde]

For anyone who ever wondered "but how much like Lucian (from The Hill of Dreams) was that Arthur Machen dude actually? The answer seems to be; quite a bit and not a lot. A bit less tortured, the same capacity for being enchanted by the landscape, much more of a sense of a wry humour. Or at least he seems to have developed that in his old age; maybe he wasn't quite able to laugh at it all as a young man. It wasn't unpleasant, but also not exactly fascinating, although his use of language is beautiful as always.

[Andrew Walter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wistful little set of recollections of Machen's early years, culminating in his first publishers deal. A few nice observations about creativity and childhood, all of which seem to be intended for readers with an appreciation of wry humour. There's comparisions of city life (London) and rural childhood (Gwent, Wales) which will ring true for any dreamers who've felt a bit overwhelmed by urbanity.

Available in its entirety at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35153

[Andrea Russo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book by one of the least known writers of horror/supernatural fiction. It's the first volume of his autobiography, and by far far the best of the three. It is an amazing piece of writing not only for the things he describes, but also (and most of all) for how he describes them, with a style which is far from the one he used in his fiction.

[Sem · Rating 5 out of 5]

*loves*

[Leaflet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely. My only complaint is that this book is far too thin.