The White People and Other Weird Stories (4 page)

The other feature that distinguishes
The Terror
is its mystery or even detective element. On the basis of several stories included here, one could easily imagine Machen writing an accomplished detective novel, but of course he would never have done so, for the notion of resolving all loose ends, and thereby emphasizing the rational intellect's understanding of the world, was anathema to Machen. For him, something of mystery must remain as a bulwark against the relentless march of science. And yet, in its way
The Terror
is nothing more than a logical working out of all possibilities, so that, by a process of elimination, a single explanation—even if it is supernatural—remains as the only viable solution to the case.

By the 1920s Machen occupied a peculiar, even bizarre position in the English literary scene. In 1923 a first edition of
The Hill of Dreams
was fetching the fabulous price of £1,500, or $7,500, far more than most people earned in an entire year. And yet, Machen himself was struggling along as a journalist for a variety of British magazines and newspapers, making ends meet only by writing with unrelenting regularity for such papers as the
London Graphic, John O'London's Weekly,
the
Lyons Mail,
and the
Observer;
toward the end of the decade he had lapsed into such poverty that an extraordinary effort was made by British writers—T. S. Eliot among them—to garner a Civil List pension for him; the effort succeeded in 1931. Thereafter Machen had an annual income of £100 from the British government, and this allowed him to live in comfort at his home in Old Amersham, Buckinghamshire, for the remaining sixteen years of his life.

Scarcely a year in the 1920s passed without some significant publication of Machen's work, but in the great majority of instances these presented stories, novels, or essays that he had written years or decades before. His major original works of the period were his three sensitive autobiographies,
Far Off Things
(1922),
Things Near and Far
(1923), and
The London Adventure
(1924), which paint a bittersweet portrait of the poverty he endured when he left his native Wales in the early 1880s to work as a Grub Street hack during the day while spending the evenings writing those imperishable works of fantasy and terror that have earned him a small but choice readership. Alfred A. Knopf began issuing a multivolume edition of his major works in the United States in 1922, and those volumes, with their familiar yellow covers, are still highly soughtafter items for the book collector.

One wonders whether Machen gained a sense of being posthumous in his own time. He was being hailed for works he had written as a young man in the 1890s, and little of his new work found either critical esteem or popular favor. He wrote relatively few actual works of fiction in the 1920s, aside from some stories for various anthologies edited by Cynthia Asquith. In the 1930s he resumed somewhat greater productivity in fiction writing and issued two late collections,
The Cosy Room
and
The Children of the Pool,
both published in 1936. The former volume contains stories written over a wide period, but the latter is an original collection of previously unpublished tales. They are, however, a sadly uneven mix. Machen's wife of many years, Purefoy, died on March 30, 1947, and he himself died several months later, on December 15, 1947.

Like many writers, Machen wrote too much, and wrote too often under the stress of economic necessity rather than aesthetic inspiration, but he should be judged by his best work, not his worst. In a career that spanned more than six decades, he produced some of the most evocative weird fiction in all literary history. Written with impeccably mellifluous prose, infused with a powerful mystical vision, and imbued with a wonder and terror that their author felt with every fiber of his being, his novels and tales will survive when works of far greater technical accomplishment fall by the wayside. Flawed as some of them are by certain crotchets—especially a furious hostility to science and secularism—that disfigure Machen's own philosophy, they are nonetheless as effective as they are because they echo the sincere beliefs of their author, whose eternal quest to preserve the mystery of the universe in an age of materialism is one to which we can all respond.

 

S. T. JOSHI

Machen's short stories were collected in his lifetime in the volumes
The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light
(John Lane/ Roberts Brothers, 1894),
The House of Souls
(Grant Richards, 1906; abridged ed. Knopf, 1922),
The Angels of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War
(Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1915),
Ornaments in Jade
(Knopf, 1924),
The Shining Pyramid
(Martin Secker, 1925),
The Children of the Pool and Other Stories
(Hutchinson, 1936), and
The Cosy Room and Other Stories
(Rich & Cowan, 1936). After his death, Philip Van Doren Stern assembled
Tales of Horror and the Supernatural
(Knopf, 1948), which has stayed in print to the present day from various publishers, most recently Tartarus Press (1997). Successive editions of
Ritual and Other Stories
(Tartarus Press, 1992, 1997, 2004) gather the stories not included in
Tales of Horror and the Supernatural.
S. T. Joshi has assembled three volumes of Machen's stories that contain nearly the totality of his short fiction:
The Three Impostors and Other Stories
(Chaosium, 2001),
The White People and Other Stories
(Chaosium, 2003), and
The Terror and Other Stories
(Chaosium, 2005).

Novel-length works of fiction include
The Chronicle of Clemendy
(Society of Pantagruelists, 1888), a picaresque novel;
The Three Impostors
(John Lane/Roberts Brothers, 1895);
The Hill of Dreams
(Grant Richards, 1907), a powerful study of artistic expression;
The Terror
(Duckworth, 1917);
The Secret Glory
(Martin Secker, 1922), a satire of the British school system; and
The Green Round
(Ernest Benn, 1933), a slight weird novel.

Machen's nonfiction writing is voluminous and largely uncollected. Important book-length works are
The Anatomy of Tobacco
(Redway, 1884), a tongue-in-cheek study of types of tobacco;
Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature
(Grant Richards, 1902), a significant statement of Machen's aesthetic principles ; and
The Canning Wonder
(Chatto & Windus, 1925), an account of a mysterious disappearance in the eighteenth century. In a class by themselves are Machen's three autobiographies,
Far Off Things
(Martin Secker, 1922),
Things Near and Far
(Martin Secker, 1923), and
The London Adventure
(Martin Secker, 1924); the first two were reprinted as
The Autobiography of Arthur Machen
(Richards Press, 1951). His periodical essays were gathered in
Dog and Duck
(Knopf, 1924),
Dreads and Drolls
(Martin Secker, 1926),
Notes and Queries
(Spurr & Swift, 1926), and in two volumes assembled by Vincent Starrett,
The Shining Pyramid
(Covici-McGee, 1923) and
The Glorious Mystery
(Covici-McGee, 1924), but the great majority—especially his hundreds of articles for the London
Evening News
(1910–21)—remain uncollected. An important recent volume of essays is
The Secret of the Sangraal,
edited by R. B. Russell (Tartarus Press, 1995). Russell has also edited an expanded edition of
Dreads and Drolls
(Tartarus Press, 2007).

A slim collection of letters—
A Few Letters from Arthur Machen
(Rowfant Club, 1932)—appeared in Machen's lifetime. A much more substantial volume is
Selected Letters,
edited by Roger Dobson, Godfrey Brangham, and R. A. Gilbert (Aquarian Press, 1989).

The Caerleon Edition of Machen's
Works
(Martin Secker, 1923; 9 vols.) is an impressive compilation. A more recent omnibus is
The Collected Arthur Machen
(Duckworth, 1988).

There is still no satisfactory biography of Machen; perhaps scholars have been intimidated by the brilliance of Machen's own autobiographies. Three biographies—Aidan Reynolds and William Charlton's
Arthur Machen: A Short Account of His Life and Work
(Richards Press, 1963); Mark Valentine's
Arthur Machen
(Seren, 1994); and John Gawsworth's
The Life of Arthur Machen
(Tartarus Press, 2005 [probably written in the 1930s])—all contain useful matter. Machen's wife, Purefoy, wrote a memoir that has been published as
Where Memory Slept: The Memoirs of Purefoy Machen,
edited by Godfrey Brangham (Green Round Press, 1991). The best critical study remains Wesley D. Sweetser's
Arthur Machen
(Twayne, 1964). Helpful criticism can be found in several small-press items, especially two booklets edited by Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson,
Arthur Machen: Apostle of Wonder
(Caermaen, 1985) and
Arthur Machen: Artist and Mystic
(Caermaen, 1986). Adrian Goldstone and Wesley Sweetser's
A Bibliography of Arthur Machen
(University of Texas Press, 1965) is exhaustive but now very much out of date. The Arthur Machen Society published a number of interesting items, including the journal
Avallaunius.
A later organization, The Friends of Arthur Machen, continues to publish the journal
Faunus.

Other criticism can be found in the following:

 

Adcock, Arthur St. John. “Arthur Machen.” In
The Glory That Was Grub Street.
New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1928, 213–44.

Bjärstorp, Sara.
The Margins of Writing: A Study of Arthur Machen and the Literary Field of the
1890
s.
Lund, Sweden: Department of English, Lund University, 2005.

Eckersley, Adrian. “A Theme in the Early Work of Arthur Machen: ‘Degeneration.'”
English Literature in Transition
35 (1992): 277–87.

Gekle, William Francis.
Arthur Machen: Weaver of Fantasy.
Millbrook, NY: Round Table Press, 1949.

Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. “The Enchanted City: Arthur Machen and Locality.”
Durham University Journal
87, no. 2 (July 1995): 301–13.

Gunther, John. “The Truth about Arthur Machen.”
Bookman
(New York) 61 (July 1925): 571–574.

Hillyer, Robert. “Arthur Machen.”
Atlantic Monthly
179 (May 1947): 138–40.

———. “Arthur Machen.”
Yale Review
13 (October 1923): 174–76.

Jordan-Smith, Paul. “Black Magic: An Impression of Arthur Machen.” In
On Strange Altars.
New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1924, 214–35.

Joshi, S. T. “Arthur Machen: The Mystery of the Universe.” In
The Weird Tale.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990, 12–41.

Krutch, Joseph Wood. “Tales of a Mystic.”
Nation
(September 13, 1922): 258–59.

Leslie-McCarthy, Sage. “Re-vitalising the Little People: Arthur Machen's Tales of the Remnant Races.”
Australasian Victorian Studies Journal
11 (2005): 65–78.

Lynch, Helen. “Arthur Machen.”
Sewanee Review
47 (July–September 1939): 424–27.

Matteson, Robert S. “Arthur Machen: A Vision of an Enchanted Land.”
Personalist
46 (Spring 1965): 253–68.

Miles, Hamish. “Machen in Retrospect.”
Dial
74 (June 1923): 627–30.

Owens, Jill Tedford. “Arthur Machen's Supernaturalism: The Decadent Variety.”
University of Mississippi Studies in English
8 (1990): 117–26.

Roberts, R. Ellis. “Arthur Machen.”
Bookman
(London) 62 (September 1922): 240–42.

Russell, R. B., ed.
Machenalia
(2 vols.)
.
Lewes, UK: Tartarus Press, 1990.

Sewell, Brocard, ed.
Arthur Machen.
Llandeilo, Wales: St. Albert's Press, 1960.

Shiel, M. P. “On Scholar-Artistry.” In
Science, Life and Literature.
London: Williams & Norgate, 1950, 95–100.

Starrett, Vincent. “Arthur Machen: A Novelist of Ecstasy and Sin.”
Reedy's Mirror
(October 5, 1917): 631–32. Reprinted in Starrett's
Buried Caesars
. Chicago: Covici-McGee, 1923, 1–31.

Tyler, Robert L. “Arthur Machen: The Minor Writer and His Function.”
Approach
(Spring 1960): 21–26.

Van Vechten, Carl. “Arthur Machen: Dreamer and Mystic.”
Literary Digest International Book Review
1 (February 1923): 36–37. In Van Vechten's
Excavations.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926, 162–69.

———.
Peter Whiffle.
New York: Knopf, 1922. [See chapter 10.]

Wagenknecht, Edward.
Seven Masters of Supernatural Fiction.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991.

Wandrei, Donald. “Arthur Machen and
The Hill of Dreams.
”
Minnesota Quarterly
3, no. 3 (Spring 1926): 19–24.
Studies in Weird Fiction
no. 15 (Summer 1994): 27–30.

“The Inmost Light,” the two segments from
The Three Impostors
(“Novel of the Black Seal” and “Novel of the White Powder”), “The Red Hand,” “The White People,” and “A Fragment of Life” are taken from
The House of Souls
(Grant Richards, 1906). “The Bowmen” and “The Soldiers' Rest” are taken from
The Angels of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War
(Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1915). “The Great Return” and
The Terror
are taken from the Caerleon Edition of Machen's
Works
(Martin Secker, 1923), volume 7. “Out of the Earth” is taken from
The Shining Pyramid
(Martin Secker, 1925).