The London Adventure or The Art of Wandering

by Arthur Machen

141 pp. , in red cloth.

Genres: London, Nonfiction, Biography, Walking

142 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1924

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

[Patrick.G.P · Rating 4 out of 5]

The London Adventure or The Art of Wandering is Arthur Machen’s third biography, though it reads more like a Psychogeographical tour of London, partly as is was when Machen wrote the book and partly as he would remember or even imagine it. Anecdotes turn into half-remembered stories, alleyways, byways and hidden corner shops become infinitely interesting here, mysterious, luring the reader into an atmospheric London seen through Machen’s eyes and mind.

To Machen the lives and times of those of the imagination, as he describes them, are more interesting than historical figures that have lived and breathed in London. One has to strip away layers of personality, history and other conventions for a person to become interesting, he describes imaginary people as being so alluring because they are so incredibly simple, ready to be enjoyed. Machen presents the idea that every person is an explorer within their own sphere of thought. Yes hundreds, even thousands of people have walked down this particular street and thought nothing of the house on the corner. But Machen takes it all in as something new and wondrous, and thoughts and feelings swell up as he carefully imagines the lives and times of those who owned and lived there. How the family is seated for Sunday dinner, how they prepare for an evening walk.

Throughout the book, Machen also comments on the artist's place in society, where he presents some very interesting ideas. He writes how the artist’s struggles are very often unrecognized and misunderstood by society. But the madness within him, the burning ember of creativity is something a great many people are envious of without fully realizing the process behind this. This misunderstanding sadly rings equally true in today’s society.

After the book proper, there is included in the volume a collection of his newspaper articles that deal with London in one way or another. Here more of Machen’s delightful meandering thoughts on the great city appear. London truly comes to life in these articles, written as explorations of various obscure parts and hidden corners of the city. In the Thames by Night, the city takes on an almost otherworldly quality through Machen’s writing. Even his wanderings through the more unsavory back streets, he manages to find people and places of interest and sees beauty in the most obscure places of London.

The only downside to the book and articles collected here is my own unfamiliarity with the great city, as I’ve only been there once, and the meandering style comes of slightly unstructured at times. There are stories within stories here, a digression ends with a completely new digression than the first one and for the most part, it is quite wonderful to read. At its best, it feels like sitting with Machen in some dimly lit London tavern, listening to his stories and anecdotes about the city over an ice-cold pint and getting lost within these wonderful Psychogeographical excursions.

[Ronald · Rating 4 out of 5]

What motivated me to read this book was high ratings for this book from two goodreads friends. This book was published in 1924 and is out of print. I went to the Newberry Library in Chicago and read this book in one sitting. The Newberry Library is a private, non-circulating library which contains older works, some of which are hundreds of years old.

Based on reviews, I expected an auto-biography, and based on the book's title I expected a telling of Arthur Machen's experience in London. The former is true but the latter isn't.

If I were to describe this book, I'll put it this way: Arthur Machen wrote an autobiography comprising of humorous incidents in his life. Coming from a maestro of supernatural horror, this was wonderfully unexpected!

Machen anticipated post modernism, and I can see how Machen influenced Borges. In _The London Adventure_, we have "writing about writing. " Machen wrote: "But here we are, still delaying over the great work, "The London Adventure"; and nothing done. I begin to reflect on the matter very seriously, as the summer wears on.."

Machen, in _The London Adventure_, reprints and comments on a negative review of one of his previous books.

Machen also gives extracts from his notebook of unrealized story ideas. Though these story ideas are not Kilgore Trout bad, I can see why Machen never developed them into a story.

Machen recounts a conversation:

"He was a very odd man from what they say," said the brass founder. "So was his cousin. He confuted Darwin."
"Really!" I interjected. "Surely not."
"Oh, yes he did," confirmed the dealer in aluminum. "He proved that Darwin was all wrong by the Hebrew Alphabet--and by the stars."

The prose style is musical. The prose has rhythm and sometimes a sentence is repeated, like the refrain in a song.

I'll close my review with a quote from the book:

"Strangeness which is the essence of beauty is the essence of truth, and the essence of the world. I have often felt that; when the ascent of a long hill brought me to the summit of an undiscovered height in London; and I looked down on a new land."

[Jim Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

For aybody familiar with Machen this book would appear to promise a Beginner's Guide to Psychogeography. It is -- in fact -- an apology from Machen for not being able to write that book. In doing so he creates an amusing, rambling oddity. Outrageously off-topic for much of its length, but it's a short, pungent expression of Machen's ideology and left even this depressed shambles desiring to go wandering for forgotten mysteries.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

A delightful book of meanderings, almost too meandering or I would have given it 5 stars because there are some really brilliant things in here that deserve some deeper thought but the style of it almost carries you right past them. I know, I know, that the style of the book maybe reflects the art of wandering itself, stumbling over the unexpected, taking up the digressions, exploring the bywyas. But still. I wanted more places, more stories of places, more London. Still, there are some real gems about the city, how we experience it, where its wonder lies, speaking both as urban geographer (I guess I could title myself that if I must?) and as author. And just thoughts on being human in this world of toil. This is clearly someone who has known toil.

In this pleasant and retiring spot I was sitting not long ago, enjoying gin and that great luxury and blessing of idleness, concerning which so much cant and false doctrine have been preached. (6)

On writing:

Always, or almost always, I have had the horror of beginning a new book. I have burnt my fingers to the bone again and again in the last forty years and I dread the fire of literature (12).

On life:

It is possible, just dimly possible, that the real pattern and scheme of life is not in the least apparent on the outward surface of things, which is the world of common sense and rationalism, and reasoned deductions; but rather lurks, half hidden, only apparent in certain rare lights, and then only to the prepared eye; a secret pattern, an ornament which seems to have but little relation or none at all to the obvious scheme of the universe’. (21)

One of my favourite phrases of all time is now ‘amiable Conandoylery’ (27). It certainly takes him a while to describe the purpose of this book he is being paid to write -- and this sense of literature as something for hire, something you must sell to live and feed your children is never absent here, anchoring his wonderings and wanderings. His dread as he sits ensconced in a comfortable pub that Spring has arrived and the book must be begun opens every chapter, humorously to be sure, but not entirely. But it is still on a subject he loves -- rambling the city:

[the book] originated in old rambles around London, rambles that began in 1890 when I lived in Soho Street and began to stroll about Soho and to see that here was something very curious and impressive; this transmutation of late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century social stolidity and even, in some cases, magnificence, into a wholly different order (30)

What he loves is not about tourist stops or antiquarian wonders but:

the general queerness; a piece, a tesserae, that fitted in very pleasantly with that hopeless 1860 terrace and that desolate 1900 shop, and the cabbages, and the raspberry plantations and, above all and before all, with the sense that I had never been that way before, that the scene to me was absolutely new and unknown as if the African Magician had suddenly set me down in the midst of Cathay, that I was as true an explorer as Columbus, as he who stood upon a peak in Darien. For if you think of it: the fact that the region which is to you so strange and unknown is familiar as daily bread and butter or—more likely—the lack of it to multitudes of your fellow men is of no significance on earth. (40)

There's some interesting colonial stuff here, though I think it echoes in my own mind far different than in his for I cannot divoce colonial exploration from despair, conquest, slavery and death. I am hesitant to strip these away, but in Machen's writing it seems to be simply the seed of wonder at what is new, and the achknowledgment that this lies alongside hunger and misery and want. Lightly done, but it is there.

My book, then, was to take all these things into account: the old, the shabby, the out of the way; and also the new and the red and the raw. But it was utterly to shun the familiar. For if you think of it, there is a London cognita and a London incognita(49)

He seeks the incognita, the overlooked. Finds the things that I too love:

I can look with a kind of pleasure on a very doorstep, on a doorstep approaching a shabby grey house of 1810 or thereabouts—if the stone be worn into a deep hollow by the feet of even a hundred years and a little over…The feet of the weary and hopeless, the glad and the exultant, the lustful and the pure have made that hollow; and most of those feet are now in the hollow of the grave: and that doorstep is to me sacramental, if not a sacrament, even though the neighbourhood round about Mount Pleasant is a very poor one. (48)

There is a section imagining the life of the reporter as a road, traveling through cities, opening up the countryside, ‘where there is no money but plenty of happiness’ (62)
There is, of course, a touch of teh gothic here, a familiar strand running through so much literature of the city:

Strangeness which is the essence of beauty is the essence of truth, and the essence of the world. I have often felt that, when the ascent of a long hill brought me to the summit of an undiscovered height in London; and I looked down on a new land. (127)

I loved the idea that we must no longer seek wonder in castles and keeps, but in the everyday. Even then the sense of the madness of developers and real estate, the joy in the battered cottage amongst plate glass and brick shops, a hold out against profit. On this score there are some brilliant descriptions of Enfield being developed (35) to return to, perhaps after I've visited Enfield.

Whay have I waited so long to read his fiction? It's available, unlike this book, which was an amazing birthday present in the form of a first edition.

[Morgan Scorpion · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you love London, you will love this book. Unlike the hero of his novel "The Hill of Dreams", Arthur Machen did not succumb to drugs and an early death. Instead, he lived to share his love of this city with us. Join him on his wanderings through this great metropolis, and share in the love yourself.

[Paul Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Village Press] (1974). SB. 141 Pages. Purchased from ISLEPORTBOOKS.

First published in 1924. An observational hodgepodge; rambling around London; at least, thinking of doing so… his notes… and memories… and vague aims… and regrets… the Welsh author and mystic explores some of his central preoccupations.

Post Machen ‘fantastic’ writing often seems mechanically inept; typically banal (derivative) and vacuous.

“I think that most of us prefer to take one set or order of illusions at a time…”

“…if life be anything more than feeding and sleeping like a healthy and well-kept pig…”

“…playing with pebbles and mistaking them for the foundations of the world…”

“…gradually corrupted and destroyed by the false idol he has made…”

“Everything is a miracle before it happens: the reasoning faculties have nothing to say in the presence of the unknown.”

“…the misery brought about by a slight tinge of genius…”

“…heavy strivings… to get clear of false paths…”

“…into places that might have been behind the scenes of the universe…”

“…I try to reverence the signs, omens, messages that are delivered in queer ways and queer places…”

“One should hear and weigh all sorts of messages delivered in all sorts of places…”

“…if any man could see a grain of wheat as it is in its essence, he would instantly become a raging maniac…”

“…where you come on the wild and know that you have come also into an older world before the time of sowing and reaping and gathering into barns…”

[Alex Sarll]

One of the texts in which Machen unwittingly founded psychogeography, though in none of his successors has it quite the same awe-inspiring sense of the Great Work. I originally read this in an old copy, fittingly exhumed from the depths of Westminster Libraries' reserve stock; I hope that cuts and clearouts notwithstanding, it's still there for those who need it. I reread it now in the handsome new Three Impostors edition; part of me bridles at the scholarly apparatus this version contains, when surely this is a book in which you should be able to lose yourself. But, I suppose even London has her A to Z. In the intervening decade, I suspect my own relationship with London has, like Machen's, become both deeper and more bittersweet, and certainly this now reads like a sadder book. It's haunted by the ghosts of books unwritten and, he now acknowledges, destined never to be written; even The London Adventure as we have it is the warm-up exercises for an ideal London Adventure which is never begun. And yet, in a fallen world, isn't that true of every book? So the account, like London itself, becomes a sign of infinity in a bounded existence, its melancholy inseparable from its grandeur.

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I rank this text with the most important books on walking thinking, and life -- Thoreau's Walking, Baudelaire, for example. I read it frequently. - BEfore Benjamin, Debord, the other Situaionalists,

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Arthur Machen’s The London Adventure, or The Art of Wandering (1924) is a mite difficult to classify. As the subtitle indicates, it is partly about ambling and meandering, both physically through the streets of London, and mentally wherever Machen’s mind takes him. It is sometimes put forward as a pioneering text of psychogeography. It has elements of memoir. It overlaps a little in its approach with two other London books that I like very much - H.V. Morton’s Ghosts of London (1939) (semi-forgotten bits of history tucked away in odd corners) and Arthur Ransome’s Bohemia in London (1907) (first-hand account of the back-street literary life). It has a proto-post-modernist side, since Machen writes at length about the writing of this very book, and the difficulties involved in deciding what it is going to be, and in executing the plan if there is ever is a plan.

In any case, it is a short book, only 150 pages, and very much of a fun, refreshing, and unusual read.

[Harvey Dias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Machen is often like sitting in front of a fire with him and his pipe and each of you with a snifter of brandy while he tells you about London and Wales and finds wonder, beauty and sometimes terror in the commonplace.

“Strangeness which is the essence of beauty is the essence of truth, and the essence of the world. I have often felt that; when the ascent of a long hill brought me to the summit of an undiscovered height in London; and I looked down on a new land.”
― Arthur Machen, The London Adventure or The Art of Wandering