William F. Gekle

“ But it so captured and fired the imagination of all Englishmen, and of the world, that people were unwilling for it to remain merely a magical tale by a Welshman writing strange tales in the city of London. People must have their miracles, and so Machen’s invention of the Bowmen became one of the hallowed legends of the war. You may remember the story, for you must have heard it, in one version or another, even if you had never even heard of Arthur Machen. ”

“ For literature as a removal from the common life, or art as an interpretation rather than a portrayal of life, has little to do with either naturalism or realism. It may be that, within this very decade, we will decide that the whole trend of the past thirty or forty years has been up a dead-end street inhabited by the dead-end kids of the literary world, whose greatest talent was to shock each other with the words they chalked up on the walls and fences of their realistic little slum. ”

“ I have just read The Hill of Dreams! By the brazen buttocks of that brimstone bellona who lolls in lakes of lava, never in my life have I read or even imagined that such a piece of escapist literature existed. He is superior to Dunsany and to Algernon Blackwood who though almost not an escapist may be classed with them. The book is filled with black magic. The man’s powers of psychotic invention are almost unbelievable and his familiarity with certain phenomena of abnormal psychology is creepy. ”

“ I daresay it is true that I am inclined to be bitter over the neglect accorded Arthur Machen. Of course the blame for that neglect cannot be fixed or fastened—but it must rest somewhere between the publishers of limited editions and the reprinters of almost unlimited editions, between the alpha and the omega, and the buying and reading public. That covers a lot of territory. One cannot indict the publishing world from top, literally, to bottom, literally. ”

“ Machen was, at this time, living the literary life, not quite as it was lived by the swish young men who were then breaking into print and whose names appeared in the more sensational evening papers and on court writs, but still, it was the literary life and still—a noble profession.
The Japanese bureau, its cubbyholes and compartments jammed with notes and notebooks and scraps of paper, had yielded up many tales and articles that appeared in this or that journal. Machen had already written The Holy Things, Psychology, Witchcraft, The Rose Garden, The Ceremony, Midsummer and many other. ”

“ Many of Machen’s most telling effects are achieved through the mere portrayal of a brooding landscape, the sombre background of mountains, the deep, rutted lanes that run along between head-high hedges, solitary hilltops shimmering in heat waves, old grey houses that sit somberly at the edge of the forest and rivers that coil in slow esses through forests and skirt the walls of mountains. There is no doubt that the wild Welsh countryside had this effect upon Machen himself. ”

“ Whether one was introduced to Machen by Cabell or Starrett or Van Vechten, or made the discovery for one’s self becomes a matter of some importance, at least to those who have come to know Machen and who regard him, as I do, as one of the greatest living writers in English literature. Yet it might seem that these personal recollections and this high regard, however deeply felt, are not quite reason enough for a book about such a man, nor significant enough to serve as an introduction to such a book. ”

“ The magic of Machen is due no less to his wonderful style than to his wonderful material. In these days when one can scarcely speak of style without being considered stuffy and perhaps even pedantic, to praise a writer for his style is almost to damn him with faint praise. ”

“ In a “London Letter” to the New York Times Book Section, Herbert W. Horwill wrote, in September 1935: “A curious literary problem is posed by that veteran author, Arthur Machen, in John o’ London’s Weekly. Imagine a man marooned on a desert island, and certain that he would remain there for the rest of his life. Imagine, moreover, that he possessed the literary faculty, and had salvaged pens, ink and paper from the wreck or else had devised home-made substitutes for them. Would such a man write, knowing that whatever he wrote would never be seen by any eye but his own? ”

“ One is forever running across a phrase or a notion one has encountered before—some where, some time, some place—and the place usually turns out to be another Machen essay. For the pattern of Machen’s thinking is as obvious as the pattern in the rug; as obvious, and as simple, as the definitions supplied in Hieroglyphics. ”

“ People who found New York in the Twenties as fabulous a city as Machen and Stevenson found London in [126] their day, were delighted with the yellow-bound books that came out under the Borzoi imprint. For many a speakeasy in the mid-Forties, or in the Village, offered possibilities as extraordinary as Stevenson’s Suicide Club or The Lost Club of Machen. Indeed there are undoubtedly those who can recall when their favorite haunt disappeared over-night and then, as if by magic, reappeared in the brownstone house across the street. ”

“ The most popular writers of pot-boilers have a style—and many of them have so pronounced [139] a style that they can be and have been recognizably parodied.
It might be said of a good style that it is one that cannot be parodied. An examination of Machen’s style would indicate that it is, in his case at least, quite true. For Machen’s style is a blend of many things; of words with magic connotation, of sentences that create moods, of passages that suggest, subtly and almost unconsciously, the exact atmosphere for which they were intended. ”

“ The Hill of Dreams, the picaresque of the mind, the Crusoe of the soul, was at the heart of Machen’s Great Romance. It responded to a phrase for which it had a natural affinity and so the Great Romance, The Hill of Dreams, was born.
“It was,” wrote Machen, “to represent loneliness not of body on a desert island, but loneliness of soul and mind and spirit in the midst of myriads and myriads of men. I [79] had some practical experience of this state to help me: not altogether in vain had I been constrained in Clarendon Road and to have my habitation in the tents of Notting Hill Gate. ”

“ It is realistic because it goes behind all the brutality, all the piggeries and inhumanities, of those frightful people, and shows us the strange, mad, transcendent passion that lay behind all those things—the wild desire for the land—a longing that burned, that devoured, that inflamed, that drove men to hell and death as would a passion for a goddess who might never be attained. Remember how ‘La Beauce’ is personified, how the earth swells and quickens before one, how every clod and morsel of the soil cries for its service and its sacrifice and its victims—I call that realism. ”

“ It has been intimated that Paris has always been something of an occupational disease among writers and minor poets. And here is Machen, off to France, like any puerile poetaster upon the publication of his first “slender volume.” To those who feel some word of explanation is due, some apology for an opinion seemingly shattered, it will be noted that Machen went to the South of France, to the countryside—and not to the northern cities and carefully manicured meadows and pompadoured pleasure-grounds of the Bois. ”

“ To make a case for any work of literature as a bit of effective propaganda for any cause is to distort and debase the purpose for which it was created.
There is much too much to do with literature today [176] that has nothing to do with literature at all. We must learn again that the weavers of fantasy are, after all, the veritable realists. For it must be admitted that we have at hand ample evidence that this is so.
There is realism in great literature, but realism alone does not make great literature. ”

“ That thirty years’ neglect has almost doubled—and indeed one might say with perfect truth that Arthur Machen has suffered a lifetime of neglect, and, in perfect truth, it must be added that the loss has been the world’s which so blindly accorded neglect to the uncanny genius of Arthur Machen. ”

“ MACHEN’S MAGIC 1
Of recent years there has been a tendency to regard the novel as something it has become rather than what it should be. Most novels that do not fall neatly into one of several categories created by the critics and reviewers are judged to be poor novels indeed. As a matter of fact, the whole of fiction, as well as of poetry, has come to be judged according to standards which, while they may be excellent standards when applied to journalism or the so-called “documentary,” serve fiction rather poorly. ”

“ Indeed, Machen had advanced the idea that “all impartial judges will allow that if Welsh literature were annihilated ... the loss to the world’s grand roll of masterpieces would be insignificant.” Yet he concedes a certain literary feeling that does not exist in the Anglo-Saxon ... an appreciative rather than creative faculty, lacking, perhaps, in the critical spirit but still, a delight in the noble phrase ... the music of words. And so—Machen tried, as a young man will, to write. ”

“ The books of Arthur Machen which have gained the greatest amount of attention are, naturally enough, the more sensational stories in which he touches upon themes that approach what is, or what has been in the past, forbidden territory. It seems odd that Arthur Machen, whose works have been so generally neglected, should have been scolded on occasion by various critics for his use of sexual themes. Actually there is no sexuality as such in any of Arthur Machen’s books. It does enter into some of the stories through the medium of mythology, Roman or Celtic, and sometimes aboriginal. ”

“ It was significant that the art of propaganda, perfected to the point of art by the original perpetrators of the war, should become the means of showing us the wondrous shape of things to come.
So well indoctrinated were our people, so thoroughly documented had we become, that it occurred to many to venture opinions on the state of man in this almost perfect state of the future. It was obvious, even to the prophets, that man would engage in activities other than pushing buttons to start and to stop things, to change climate or a record, to launch a war, a ship or a new hydro-electric plant. ”

“ There was magic in these men and in their manner of [143] telling a tale. There was, in each of them, an ability to create that which made its strongest appeal to that love of strangeness in most men’s minds.
DeQuincy, alone in London; Hawthorne, so solemnly settled in Salem, Coleridge surrounded by blue-stockings and blue lakes; Poe in his erratic course from salon to saloon ... these men made magic of a sort no realist could ever devise. Machen’s magic is of this sort. ”

“ There were suicide clubs, freak clubs, cults of the horrible, Hellfire clubs and many others. Man, wondering about his future and his world, wonders also about himself. The word psychology was used hardly at all, but men were becoming aware of their minds and its quirks. Who was there among a group, a club, who might not have been another Jekyll?
This, then, was London in the 90’s ... a city on the threshold of still another century. Machen could not have forgotten that it had been Caer Llud, that the Romans had been there, and before them the Cymry. ”

“ It is amazing, in a way, that a pleasant little group in a country rectory should decide over a little pamphlet written “about” the pagan rites at Eleusis, that their youthful relative was destined for a career in journalism. Of course, relatives are proud of one’s books and equally proud of one’s pamphlets, even if they do not read them. And so, perhaps, the rector and his family never bothered too much about the contents of the rarest Machen item of them all. Doubtless more than one of the ninety-nine copies slowly disintegrates in a Welsh garret to this very day. ”

“ Machen creates his own world. This world is a fusion of the world that is accepted in every day reality—in which events and their causes are explicable by traditional and humdrum interpretations—and one that is distinguished not only by the weird and extraordinary effects. ”

“ One doesn’t have to try very hard to believe in the existence of certain powers, especially those which cannot be, or have not yet been, explained as any known existing force. From this point onward the development [130] of a story by Machen may hinge upon the manner of telling as well as upon the selection of the materials for the tale. There must be no fumbling of the matter, no crude effects, no creaky props, no bolstering up by the shabby tricks and melodramatic artifices of the penny dreadfuls. Machen’s magic is very simply achieved. ”

“ At any rate, Machen saw the books in print and occupied himself with journalism, which he detested, and with thinking over the books he had written which, on the whole, he rather enjoyed. And so when, in the 1920’s, he began the New York Adventure, Machen sat down and wrote not one but a whole series of new introductions. There is no nonsense about these introductions, and no “graceful writing.” The introduction to the new edition of the Anatomy begins quite simply:
“It struck me once, during a long meditation on literature, that every man who has written has had but one idea in his head. ”