Re: Machen's Hieroglyphics
Posted by:
Dale Nelson (IP Logged)
Date: 1 October, 2019 03:11PM
Smith's writing often works on me very differently from Machen's -- though I admit that I haven't read a ton of Smith (mostly the first three Ballantine Adult Fantasy releases, I suppose), and none really recently.
Take Smith's "Dark Eidolon" -- one of his most famous stories. It piles on the sensational material -- I seem to remember one or more skeletons marching around with ruby-eyed rats in their ribcages, etc. As someone who's hardly had a cocktail in his life, my analogy will be dubious, but the story strikes me as like a cocktail with a high alcohol content (let's say gin), that burns the palate a bit. As, after drinking a cocktail like that, one's tongue's ability to savor other drinks could be impaired, so is the effect of the "Eidolon"; one could turn to other writing that one knows, from past reading, to be good, (say one of William Morris's prose romances), and find it seems insipid (for a while). The fault is not in Morris but in the "palate" having been seared by Smith's "cocktail."
I don't find that that's how Machen affects me, in general. Reading him, I could find myself approaching, with renewed relish, anything from Sebastian Evans's The High History of the Holy Graal to Cunningham's London Hand-Book. Machen endured a lot of poverty, but from what I know he seems to have retained a taste for life and literature to the last, and I think reading him tends to affect his readers the same way. You read hims writing and you want to read things he read. Perhaps before I ever read a Dickens novel, Machen's enthusiasm for The Pickwick Papers disposed me to be receptive towards the great Victorian novelist. Machen can stir you to relish reading about everything from the Vision of the Holy Graal to a coffee-house plate of beef and potatoes -- not, mind you, that he is lacking in discrimination. But the man and his writings convey such gusto! And, to take things farther, Machen is an affirmer of the reality of (shall we, nondenominationally, say) mystical Glory. He is a yea-sayer. Smith, from what I know of him, seems to have been a nay-sayer, like Lovecraft, a futilitarian, self-limited. And this seems to come across in their writings.
At any rate, we will be compelled to see Hieroglyphics as a testament of yea-saying vis-Ã -vis literature.
Now it's true that the Recluse is going to depreciate some classic works. He doesn't think very highly of George Eliot's Middlemarch, I think -- though he will allow it to achieve something impressive in its limited sphere. But his criticisms seem to me, as I recall this little book, to be largely for the sake of things he loves more profoundly.
But in any event, Hieroglyphics is not what I would call a "decadent" work (whatever the wallpaper!). The Recluse isn't advocating literature that cleverly mocks the conventional tastes, but rather he's inviting us all to think about that ready human love for the sense of wonder -- note well, something that he seems to think is innate in people, though it may be stifled; he isn't (like a decadent) pluming himself over against the dullards on account of his scented notepaper and limp-leather editions of poems in limited editions. Right?
The decadent poses at the bar with his glass of absinthe. If everyone was drinking absinthe he would drink something else. But Machen is happy to drink good beer, or burgundy, or, for all I know, an occasional absinthe if it's really what would suit his palate just then.
There's a funny little Machen anecdote about absinthe, by the way, which I'll have to relate here.
Dale Nelson 1 Oct 19
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 1 Oct 19 | 03:34PM by Dale Nelson.