Well, definitely John Gawsworth’s The Life of Arthur Machen if you can get hold of a copy (a Tartarus book). This
should be read in tandem with Aiden Reynolds and William Charlton’s biography
Arthur Machen, which is more workmanlike but tells Machen’s life to the end
(Gawsworth’s book stops about ten years before Machen’s death). It also
examines Machen’s work more closely.
These full-length works of Machen’s
are indispensable:
The
Hill of Dreams (an unacknowledged classic novel of
decadent literature and the most important of his works; if you read nothing
else, read this)
Things
Near and Far (memoir)
Far
Off Things (memoir; this and Things Near and Far are these days
usually sold together in one volume; a third memoir is The London Adventure,
not as good but still well worth reading)
The
Secret Glory (a novel, badly flawed but
brilliant)
Hieroglyphics (Machen’s theory of good literature containing the element
of ecstasy is as idiosyncratic as Poe; cleverly constructed
novel-cum-literary-criticism)
A
Fragment of Life (often reprinted in collections as
a long short story, which is what it is, though it first appeared as a book)
Ornaments
in Jade (a collection of short prose-poetry
pieces)
Dog
& Duck (a collection of essays; Machen did
a few other non-fiction collections — Dreads
and Drolls, Bridles and Spurs, Notes and Queries — which are all worth the
read).
The
Terror (a cleverly written fantasy set
during the Great War; hack work, as Machen regarded it, but its anthropomorphic
animals might well have had an influence on Orwell’s Animal Farm almost thirty years later)
The
Bowmen (see note immediately below)
He is most famous
for a few slight stories collected as The
Bowmen, which he wrote for a newspaper he worked for during The Great War.
Although the stories can in no way be classified as literature they gave rise
to the widely believed myth, of The Angel of the Mons, so they are interesting
for this reason. Although Machen didn’t set out to write a hoax (a la Poe) that’s
what he achieved with these stories. Poe would have loved to have produced
them!
His other full-length works are
mostly early, written when he was trying to find his voice under the influence
of writers like Stevenson (of New Arabian Nights vintage) e.g. Machen’s novels The Three Imposters, The Great God Pan, etc. Unfortunately
they are the works he is remembered for (and praised for by the likes of
Stephen King and ST Joshi) but while his ideas were inventive and the structure
experimental, the language far from sparks. For me, at any rate, it is deadly
dull. His even earlier books (such as The
Chronicle of Clemendy) are influenced by eighteenth century authors, and
suffer in a similar way, where he is unable to get the writing to sing. (He
later produced a book of the best bad reviews he received, Precious Balms,
which shows he was widely lampooned for his attempts at producing horror.)
He produced many great short
stories, too numerous to mention here, but for me a lot of them are marred by
the Edwardian Stevenson-derived voice he affected that has not travelled well.
With these, you will have to take pot luck, and decide whether you like them or
not as you come to them. ‘The White People’ is a classic — once you get into
it! The story is book-ended by uninspiring narrative that attempts to ‘frame’
or contextualise it. Another classic is ‘N’ (which has the aforementioned
Edwardian voice, but here works), which first appeared as an original story in
his collection, The Cosy Room. It is
unusual also because it is a late work, when his spark had mostly gone (e.g. in
his novel The Green Round).
ST Joshi introduces the current
Penguin edition of Machen (The White
People and Other Weird Stories). I complained about Joshi’s Penguin
selection to my friend Ian Johnson, who wrote to me:
One complaint I have with these
Penguin Classics editions of weird fiction is that they are, with few
exceptions, edited by S. T. Joshi. Joshi is a first-rate if rather
pedantic scholar, and his annotations are thorough and informative, but he
labours in the shadow of Lovecraft’s long essay “Supernatural Horror in
Literature”; consequently, his Penguin selections of Blackwood, Dunsany,
Machen, et al. tend to be assembled from stories that either influenced Lovecraft
or were praised by Lovecraft. This is a great pity, since the
overall effect is to reduce these writers to mere footnotes to the Cthulhu
mythos and lens their works through same—not this this is explicitly Joshi’s
aim, but it perhaps serves to explain why he has included certain stories and
others omitted others. Interestingly, Hill of Dreams is
mentioned favourably in the Lovecraft essay, but HPL makes clear his preference
for Machen’s work of the 1890s.
In other words, Machen’s curse is to
have been defined by Lovecraft. It is a mixed blessing, of course. But it
explains why Joshi rates those stories so highly, which are not Machen’s best
work. I said to Ian that it was a pitiable shame that once again Machen (with
this Penguin edition) was being overlooked by lesser work for his masterpiece The Hill of Dreams.
His first commercial works were
catalogues (for a London book dealer), and two translations into English,
firstly of the Heptameron and
secondly The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova
(a four-volume bowdlerised version, as no printer could be found who would
print the first text he produced!). The translations seem to be well regarded,
at least at the time they were produced, but I am no judge on this.
If you ‘catch the bug’ with Machen,
you will find his voice is in everything he has written, and you will probably
want to read anything and everything, as I did and still do.
Don’t be put off by his politics,
which tended to be Tory (liberal Tory, but still Tory) and traditionalist. I
think these attributes prevented him from striking out unhindered into becoming
a greater writer than he was. They made him too hidebound, and sometimes too
cod (he had a second career as an actor, in which, I understand, his
distinctive voice was the main draw). In all, he had three careers: author
& translator, actor, newspaper journalist. Her followed these at different
times, not consecutively, though he was always first and foremost an
author.
Mack
[Donald M. Hassler] entertained some of the Machen Society people, and produced
a book, Arthur Machen and Montgomery Evans,
which I am ashamed to say I still have not purchased! I must do so.
Best,
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