Hello again, EDfolk -- I'm not planning to return to active participation here, but I thought some Machen readers would be interested in a new compilation of his journalism. I'm posting comments here

[www.sffchronicles.com]

which I think you will be able to read without being members.

With best wishes.

DN

Thanks, Dale. I enjoyed reading your commentaries on Machen. A friend, who has since dropped off the face of the earth (literally or not I know not) once loaned me a booklet with some semi-obscure Machen essays. Did you happen to see his 1890s notebook, published in facsimile? I've only gone part-way through thus far. I think that passage in the autobiography about a set of Scott's novels in an idealized room is outstanding. I've both parts of the Autobiography in one volume with a frontispiece photo of Machen, early 1950s, in red binding-- have you seen that? I read part one a couple of years ago and then Things Near and Far about half a year later.

jkh

Hi, Kipling. Not to ignore your questions -- no, haven't seen the notebook, though I have seen mention of it. Far-Off Things is simply one of my favorite books, whatever genre or written by whomever, with six readings, first in 1976, most recently in 2009, and so a rereading next year wouldn't be too soon. I just have a printout from an online source. I kind of prefer to read Machen thus, because I react against the almost suffocating preoccupation one encounters in some quarters for reading Machen in signed rare editions on fine paper with wide margins or whatever. The physical qualities of such books can be a distraction from Machen's own writing, which needs no such frou-frou to make it very enjoyable indeed, and I don't want to feel I have to wear cotton gloves when I handle it.

Dale: That's well said with respect to Machen's work. As for his 1890s notebook, it's certainly interesting to see the framework of "The Hill of Dreams" in gestation, but as I admitted I haven't delved into it very far. But Smith's "Black Book" is more of a gold mine since it encompasses a longer period of creativity. Anyway, the publisher of the Machen notebook (paperback) also published new editions of his two later story collections-- The Children of the Pool and The Cosy Room. I have the Arno Press 1970s reprint of the former, his fourth-best book I think, after "The Hill of Dreams", "Far-Off Things" & "The House of Souls" in no particular order. I haven't read "The Secret Glory" and would probably find it depressing. I would like to see your thoughts on it if you have the time or desire. Thanks!

jkh

Sure, can do, Kipling.

I think The Secret Glory could have been an exceptional book. Unfortunately, it's (frankly) in my view a bungled opportunity.

Slightly edited notes after my second reading, in 1990: "the style carries one along, but what a self-indulgent book it seems! Ambrose Meyrick has to have a tell-tale light in his eyes marking him off from the common herd; although free of the base impulse to revenge, he gets to deck a schoolboy tormentor; as a boy he astonishes everyone by his scholarship papers, and as soon as he leaves Lupton, the odious public school, he pens a Rabelaisian pastiche in Old French that stumps most of the teachers, but which proves to be 'diabolically clever' and obscene in its send-up of one of the masters, his particular foe; he is granted visions, including one as he bows before the Holy Graal, and goes around with a mysterious joy no one can fathom; he enjoys sexual raptures with Nelly Foran, a maidservant, virtually under the nose of her employer; while in London with Nelly, at age 18 he makes notes for his Defense of Taverns, 'a book which is now rare and much sought after by collectors'; he becomes knowledgeable about wine and food, and scores off a literary critic who is a partisan of Machen's bête noire George Eliot; he discovers the hidden, lost Celtic Church, and laughs to himself through the conventional Anglican services at school; a Frenchman encounters Ambrose in London and can tell at a glance that he is an artist and mystic, but warns him that 'the populace always hates the artist'" etc.

I write a column for the New York C. S. Lewis Society on books in Lewis's life. (He was an amazingly active reader.) Here's one of those columns:

Arthur Machen’s The Secret Glory

The catalogue of Lewis’s library compiled in 1969 listed this novel. Its author, who subsisted largely on journalism throughout much of his life, underwent a few years of celebrity, particularly in the U.S. In the 1920s, Knopf and other publishers issued or reissued almost anything they could get their hands on that had Machen’s name on it, and after languishing in manuscript for many years, The Secret Glory was published (1922). In 1924, a small British publishing house, Spurr and Swift, went so far as to issue a selection, made by Machen himself, of reviews of Machen’s books, sardonically called Precious Balms – sardonic because the majority of the reviews were unfavorable. I thought it would be amusing, for this entry in the Bookshelf series, to rely on Precious Balms.

Punch [the magazine] reveals that the Secret Glory is that of the Holy Grail, “revealed in a Welsh farmhouse to the boy Ambrose Meyrick and his father.” The mystically-initiated boy “is sent to an exquisitely odious public school, where he becomes first a cowed and isolated dreamer and last a furtive and malicious rebel.” Ambrose runs off with “a sympathetic parlour-maid” after Machen has gratified his “savage humour” against the public school system. Unfortunately Machen never really comes to grips with the targets he satirizes. The Evening Standard found the book “incoherent and tiresome” since schoolboys and mysticism “do not mix.”

The Manchester Guardian mentions the “escapade” in which Ambrose goes to London with the “young lady of his choice,” detecting in the treatment a quality of “inebriate innocence.” Rose Macaulay in The Daily News says that while Ambrose’s mystical experiences are described “with a good deal of beauty,” Machen’s attempts at reporting his hero’s “contacts with actuality” are “distorted and unreal”; there’s “a good deal of silliness” and “bad taste” in the book. The Sheffield Daily Telegraph didn’t find the material relating to Ambrose’s writings, such as In Praise of Taverns, to be convincing. The Liverpool Daily Courier was dissatisfied with the conclusion, in which we learn that Ambrose went to Asia and was crucified. “Mr. Machen knows how to tell a story, but he does not demonstrate that capacity in this work.”

Lewis could have relished a book expressing detestation of the bullying and false values of the public schools and opposing to them the wonder of the Grail – if these elements had been handled with the right kind of imagination and literary skill. As far as we know, The Secret Glory may have been one of Joy’s [Lewis's wife's] books brought from America, not a book he bought. If he gave it a try, it’s likely that The Secret Glory’s flavor would have contrasted unfavorably with that of Charles Williams’s Grail thriller War in Heaven – even though that book is not one of Williams’s best.

Machen’s autobiographical Far-Off Things is better than The Secret Glory -- although The Boston Evening Transcript characterized it as “the reflections of a conceited man of mediocre ability, who buries his talent in the ashes of the past, mumbles over it incessant Latin quotations, and .. is continually irritated because the world hurries by without digging into the ashes, or listening respectfully to his incantations”! Machen is best known for a handful of horror stories, and I like his antiquarian-flavored wonder-tale “N.”


--Incidentally I've read one of Rose Macaulay's novels, Thery Were Defeated, which was outstanding (but not macabre). And the catalogue of Lewis's library made in 1969 showed not only The Secret Glory, but the familiar Machen omnibus, Tales of Horror and the Supernatural. My guess is that that book was brought to the household by Joy, Lewis's American wife, and I don't know if CSL ever read any of it. However, his friend, Charles Williams (author of seven novels of the supernatural) certainly had read Machen. My friend David Llewellyn Dodds has seen Williams's unpublished commonplace book, which has an entry(ies) suggesting Machen's "Great God Pan" may have influenced Williams's own creativity. I believe DLD means to publish on this eventually. And Chrstopher Tompkins at Darkly Bright has correspondence from exchanges between Machen and Dorothy L. Sayers in her role as anthologist -- he means to publish on that, too. So whether Lewis or Tolkien knew of Machen's work, at least one bonafide Inkling, Williams, did, and also one woman on the fringes of the all-male group.

DN

Dale: Thanks for the rundown on "The Secret Glory", and the column. The verdict of failed potential seems just, but not the pharisaic bitchiness of the London Evening Standard review. Rose Macaulay... I liked a short story of hers, "The Empty Berth", ever read it?

jkh

No, I haven't read "The Empty Berth." It looks like that might be hard to get hold of. I have several of her books, but so far They Were Defeated is the only one I've read.

[isfdb.org]


The Silence of Dean Maitland by "Maxwell Grey," which Machen approved of so strongly on a page in the Mist and Mystery book, is getting a grip on me after a somewhat slow start. It will be interesting to see if it becomes clear why Machen should have liked it. For much of it -- so far -- it seemed to be a fairly realistic late Victorian novel about rural English life, with cosy scenes in the rectory, local color description of the region, a scene in a village tavern with rustics talking things over and a 90-year-old amusingly repeating himself, etc. I can enjoy this sort of thing, but it wouldn't have brought to mind the critical priorities of the author of Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature, though of course a man's literary taste may expand with time, and so on.

The A. L. Burt cheap reprint of the novel that I got on interlibrary loan has a kind of vintage "chocolate box blonde" picture on the cover; it does not look a bit Machenian!

Dale Nelson Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> No, I haven't read "The Empty Berth." It looks
> like that might be hard to get hold of. I have
> several of her books, but so far They Were
> Defeated is the only one I've read.
>
> [isfdb.org]
>
>
> The Silence of Dean Maitland by "Maxwell Grey,"
> which Machen approved of so strongly on a page in
> the Mist and Mystery book, is getting a grip on me
> after a somewhat slow start. It will be
> interesting to see if it becomes clear why Machen
> should have liked it. For much of it -- so far --
> it seemed to be a fairly realistic late Victorian
> novel about rural English life, with cosy scenes
> in the rectory, local color description of the
> region, a scene in a village tavern with rustics
> talking things over and a 90-year-old amusingly
> repeating himself, etc. I can enjoy this sort of
> thing, but it wouldn't have brought to mind the
> critical priorities of the author of
> Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature,
> though of course a man's literary taste may expand
> with time, and so on.
>
> The A. L. Burt cheap reprint of the novel that I
> got on interlibrary loan has a kind of vintage
> "chocolate box blonde" picture on the cover; it
> does not look a bit Machenian!

Dale, my copy of the Autobiography is the Richards Press edition with an introduction by Morchard Bishop, and 3 portraits. Ex-library of Quincy College. The photo of Machen in 1910, pipe in hand, is very striking. Have you seen this edition or photograph? And, if you don't mind can you describe the contents of Machen's "Dreads and Drolls"? A friend and
lifelong Machen fan sent me "7B Coney Court" and "The Strange Case of Emily Weston", two gems from that book, which I reread yesterday. Machen was always his favorite author, eclipsing Lovecraft by a country mile. Also, Dale, have you read Edith Birkhead's monumental study THE TALE OF TERROR? I am just now over halfway through it, and it's all anyone could wish for in wide-ranging scholarship and incisive criticism. She devoted a short chapter to Beckford's Vathek, which was, along with Lafcadio Hearn, Poe, Bierce, and the French Romantics, an important influence on Clark Ashton Smith. Birkhead's 1921 book is still the finest, most comprehensive study of the development of supernatural and occult fiction, would you agree?

jkh

Kipling, I haven't read Birkhead -- I don't know if I've ever even seen a library copy.

Project Gutenberg of Australia has an online text of Dreads and Drolls available for free download:

[gutenberg.net.au]

I've seen the Garnstone Press edition of the Autobiography, which includes the photograph you mention. The top of Machen's head is tilted towards the viewer, as I recall, and, the way it looks there, his haircut reminds me a little of Moe Howard's (Three Stooges).


Darkly Bright is about to start several weeks of reprinted reviews by Machen; some folks here might want to turn up for that.

[darklybrightpress.com]

In the first installment (above), for me the main thing is the reminder of Machen's esteem for the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Hands, anyone here who has read one or more of his novels?

...I didn't think so. :) But he's a good author to settle in with in books such as The Bride of Lammermoor, Old Mortality, The Heart of Midlothian, and several others that I've read, or so I found him at the time.

DN

Dale Nelson Wrote:
------------------------------------
> Darkly Bright is about to start several weeks of
> reprinted reviews by Machen; some folks here might
> want to turn up for that.
>
> [darklybrightpress.com]-
> a-child-of-three/
>
> In the first installment (above), for me the main
> thing is the reminder of Machen's esteem for the
> novels of Sir Walter Scott. Hands, anyone here
> who has read one or more of his novels?
>
> ...I didn't think so. :) But he's a good author
> to settle in with in books such as The Bride of
> Lammermoor, Old Mortality, The Heart of
> Midlothian, and several others that I've read, or
> so I found him at the time.
> DN

Dale, thanks for the Macheniana! The Edith Birkhead study is available in paperback. No, I haven't either (read one of Scott's novels), but her eighth chapter, "Scott and the Novel of Terror" at least affords me some perspective. My brother read "Ivanhoe," but if I had my druthers I suppose I would choose Scott's early and relatively mediocre "House of Aspen", published in 1799, only because I endured Fielding, Richardson, Defoe, Sterne, Radcliffe, and Charles Brockden Brown in my youth, as well as "Rasselas" and "Candide". As you know, Scott "was interested in tracing the sources of Terror and in studying the mechanism of ghost stories" (149). "The Tapestied Chamber" certainly bears this out.

jkh

On one occasion, Sir Walter Scott slept peacefully in a room with a corpse in a bed next to his, but he also confessed to being terrified once when sleeping next to a supposedly haunted room, and he said he once saw a wraith while walking. Scott's taste for the macabre was a guilty pleasure, disavowed by the time he began the Waverly series.

jkh

From my reading, I wouldn't make the case for Scott based on horror-mongering. There are other things to read for, as I know you would agree.

His poem "Proud Maisie" literally give me goosebumps, it's so good. Whew. There is such a thing as poetic imagination and there it is in 16 lines.

Proud Maisie is in the wood,
Walking so early;
Sweet Robin sits on the bush,
Singing so rarely.

"Tell me, thou bonny bird,
When shall I marry me?"—
"When six braw gentlemen
Kirkward shall carry ye."

"Who makes the bridal bed,
Birdie, say truly?"—
"The gray-headed sexton
That delves the grave duly.

"The glowworm o'er grave and stone
Shall light thee steady;
The owl from the steeple sing,
'Welcome, proud lady.'"