Weird Fiction discussion

Arthur Machen is widely credited as being a top British horror writer. I consider him the second earliest Weird Fiction writer. His output was not as great as Algernon Blackwood's, or most other early Weird Fiction writers, but there is still a lot to read by his hand. His work profoundly influenced early writers that published in Weird Tales, particularly Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and Frank Belknap Long.

Does anyone have a particular favorite Machen novel or short story? What makes it so memorable?

I don't think I have read anything by him yet, but I do have a Penguin collection of his stories on my shelf.

Edit: Wait no I have read "The Great God Pan"...but it was a while ago.

From what I can tell, Arthur Machen wrote three auto-biographies. I read one of them, The London Adventure or The Art of Wandering .

That book is comprised of amusing incidents in Arthur Machen's life.

Some examples:

--- Machen quotes from a negative review of one of his books
--- the book has extracts from Machen's notebook of unused story ideas. The story ideas are not Kilgore Trout bad, but I can see why he didn't use them.
--- Machen recounts a conversation in a pub:

"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."

I found the following rather unusual "appreciation" of Machen. I don't think I'd want Henry Savage delivering my eulogy!

ARTHUR MACHEN: AN APPRECIATION

“There ’e is!” shouted a ragged news-hawker, not impudently but with a surprising sort of ecstatic pride, as a group of us stood chatting outside a Fleet Street hostelry one day; ‘that’s ’im—the great Dr. Johnson!”

It was a somewhat embarrassing but by no means contemptible tribute to Arthur Machen, not least of the men of letters of our day but certainly not modern mentally or, with his scholar’s cloak and mass of silvered hair, in appearance. He has, indeed, some of the characteristics of Boswell’s hero, and has “dressed” the part for the films and for a photograph still to be seen displayed in yet another of the many taverns of the quarter.

But dogmatic as he may seem to be at times he is yet anything but the hectoring bully Johnson could be when in the humour; no Sir Oracle, whose mouth being open, no dog might bark. Machen’s urbanity is that which develops into benignity with the years.

When others are talking he listens with courteous attention. If anything tickles his fancy back goes his head with that loud laughter rarely heard among men. Learned without pedantry, a true scholar, his talk authoritative and enlivened by a fund of anecdote, a lover of life and the good things of life—never was man more remote from any form of nihilism!—dignified, polished, courtly; he meets less my idea of the irascible doctor than that of some great French ecclesiastic of the seventeenth century.

And a good hater withal. Royalist and cavalier, he would have played old Harry with presbyter and puritan of an earlier day. "What’s the matter with Dr. Clifford?” once heatedly demanded a controversial defender of the Nonconformist leader. “What’s the matter with typhoid!” retorted Machen shortly, ending the argument.

He belonged to a now defunct tavern society called The New Bohemians when, some fifteen years ago, I first met him. Once a week we sat around a table, drinking, talking, and firing off our verses occasionally. Loathing recited poetry he endured the verses, doubtless indulgently believing that youth should have its fling. The poets, for their part, looked coldly on discussions sometimes favoured by Machen and a devout few who found interest in the forms and ceremonies of the Anglican Church.

But such differences of taste were mere trifles: all looked up to him as a writer of achievement. It could not be otherwise with readers of any discernment who knew his books. They were still caviare to the general, although at that time Hieroglyphics had long been published (in the dawn of the century), and The Hill of Dreams and The House of Souls were now appearing.

That he had not a great name in the ’nineties, and is only now, indeed, coming into his inheritance, should be not, perhaps, surprising. Something of a hermit by disposition, he has never sought publicity; The Chronicle of Clemendy , an ’eighties masterpiece, circulated (and still circulates) only among private collectors; and The Great God Pan and other works of the kind, published when yellow was the hue, were too black for reviewers to stomach, and for that matter cannot be classed among his best work.

As to the later years, had he presently followed up Hieroglyphics and The Hill of Dreams with work of similar quality, he would no doubt have been recognized long since as the master of prose he is. But in the halcyon days of The New Bohemians he slid into Fleet Street and, for some ten years, was lost to literature until the recent appearance of The Secret Glory and Far Off Things.

In the later days of his journalistic career, meeting him once when he was about to leave the street, as he hoped forever. “A great joke,” he chuckled; “they’ve entirely forgotten at the office that some person of importance is to place a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Warrior tomorrow. I have described such ceremonies in terms of the English Church ritual at least one hundred and forty-seven times, and will so describe it no more. When, remembering, they rush round to my house early tomorrow morning, the little maid will have strict instructions to say firmly, ‘Mr. Machen is out!’ ”

Hieroglyphics is one of those books which, quite apart from its value as literature, can never be studied enough by the critic wishful to perfect himself in his art. It contains a theory of letters, expressed in the cyclical manner beloved of Coleridge, but avoiding that author’s metaphysical haziness, inviting continual analysis until it is either accepted or refuted. Briefly, its thesis is that there can be no great literature without ecstasy, and, with this standard, Don Quixote, Gargantua and Pantagruel and—unexpectedly—Pickwick, are pronounced the world’s greatest books in belles-lettres.

To me Hieroglyphics is most wonderful because it is probably the only English work of its kind which explains Rabelais. In this country an unpleasant aspect of the national character is revealed by the fact that the works of Rabelais are to be found chiefly in those shops an unforgettable picture of which, adroitly suggested rather than actually named, we owe to the genius of Joseph Conrad in The Secret Agent.

Let us never forget [says Machen] that the essence of the book is its splendid celebration of ecstasy, under the figure of the vine. . . . Then, in Rabelais you have another symbolism of ecstasy—the shape of gauloiserie, of gross, exuberant gaiety, expressing itself by outrageous tales, outrageous words, by a very cataract of obscenity, if you please, if only you will notice how the obscenity of Rabelais transcends the obscenity of common life; how grossness is poured out in a sort of mad torrent, in a frenzy, in a very passion of the unspeakable.

Then, thirdly, there is the impression one collects from the book: a transfigured picture of that wonderful age: there is the note of that vast, interminable argument of the schools, and, for a respond, the clear, enchanted voice of Plato; there is the vision, there is the mystery of the vast, far-lifted Gothic quire; and those fair, ornate, and smiling chateaux rise smiling from the rich banks of the Loire and the Vienne. The old tales told in farmhouse kitchens in the Chinonnais, the exultation of the new learning, of lost beauty recovered, the joy of the vintage, the old legends, the ancient turns of speech, the new style and manner of speaking; so to the old world answers the new. . . .

After going on to point out, that in all probability, Pantagruel is “a hint of the stature of the perfect man, of the ideal man, freed from the bonds of the common life, and common appetites, having only the eternal thirst for the eternal vine”; and that he, Panurge and Frere John, “are not so much three different characters, as the representative of man in his three persons,” he ends: think that when one knows of the key—or rather of the keys—one opens the pages almost with a sensation of dread. So it is a book that one consults at long intervals, because it is only at rare moments that a man can bear the spectacle of his own naked soul, and a vision that is splendid, certainly, but awful also, in its constant apposition of the eternal heights and the eternal depths.

No apology is needed for quotation at some length from this still little-known masterpiece of illuminative criticism. If Machen had written nothing else he would be assured of a permanent place in literature. And what a fine thing to have done!—to have taken Rabelais from the stews of English puritanism into realms where all great expressions of the spirit are sublimely above the dirt and noise of a world that chatters in sleep! With Hieroglyphics once read and made our own we are free to explore qualmlessly the great Frenchman's spiritual kingdom so far as our feeble soul-feet will take us.

The Hill of Dreams is another fine book, a novel notable for the perfection of its prose, as is The Secret Glory, but marred, as I think, by expressions of its author’s hatred of nonconformity. These give me the same feeling as when listening once to a lengthy non-conformist oration at the funeral of a relative. It was positively indecent, in the presence of the dead man, to hear how good he had been to the Boy Scouts!

As there is a dignity, a majesty, about death, so there should be a dignity in fine literature above deliberate attacks on things disliked; art, in a word, is the lesser for conscious propaganda. However, Machen’s work, in general, is not for the critic’s censure but for appreciation, praise and eulogy. It would be not difficult to be inspired by it to that very ecstasy he himself finds basic in all work that has endured.

That his own will delight lovers of English prose until English prose is no longer loved—an inconceivable contingency, unless something as good, or better, is in store—none with any pretensions to judgment can doubt. We lesser writers to whom literature is a great ideal; we who faint by the way and become resigned to the little we can do; may well acclaim, reverence, and be proud of writers of genius so far beyond our own minor powers and achievement.

The light burns low and fitfully in these days of plutocracy. Men are inclined to sneer at the life of the artist and the wisdom of the old Latin author: vita hominis sine Uteris mors est. There are always people who would take the bread from the children and give it to the dogs. But while artists come into the world resolutely set on struggling through in the face of discouragement and poverty—too often their material reward—there will be not only pleasure and a wider culture for the reader at large, but a lamp for the writer who falters in darkness. And of such artists is Arthur Machen.

Henry Savage