And now Machen's turned up in the Daily Telegraph (needs registration, I think, so here's the full thing).

World of books

By A N Wilson, Daily Telegraph (Filed: 06/06/2005)

Angels were on his side

It is a rare writer who invents a myth. Many write fictions, but in the case of Arthur Machen (1863-1947) he was the creator of a story which quickly was adopted into folklore. That is, in a very short story called The Bowmen, published in a London newspaper, the Evening News, during the First World War, he conceived the fancy that during the Battle of Mons, Welsh archers from Agincourt and even angels, came to join the British forces in their fight against the Hun. Within weeks, there were testimonies by men at the front who, if they had not seen the angels, had met chaps who had.

Arthur Machen was a specialist in the borderlines between the material and the unseen. There is therefore something apt about the fact that his most famous story was not something people read, but rather something they believed as a superstition.

In the Great God Pan, his most alarming story, a doctor becomes obsessed by the idea that the real world is hidden by a veil. He performs an operation on the brain of a woman, who ends up seeing the most diabolical visions. She hangs herself - she has seen too much, and she is herself possessed of demonic strengths which are the ruin of the men with whom she makes love.

Oscar Wilde took young Machen out to dinner, he was so impressed by the book. "Un succes fou!" he exclaimed. "Un succes fou!"

"An incoherent nightmare of sex," was how one review described the book.

You would think this might have made Machen rich, but somehow his books were never popular. He was the child of a clergyman in the Vale of Usk. When he wrote a poem about the Greek mysteries, entitled Eleusinia, his unworldly parents somehow conceived that he could make his living by writing, and sent him to London to learn shorthand. A sad life in grotty lodgings in Turnham Green and Notting Hill (a poor district then) followed.

Between 1881 and 1922, he wrote 18 books and the whole lot only brought him in £635. Since he was married - first to a woman much older than himself, and then, after her death, to an "intellectual" called Purefoy, who bore two children - he had to keep afloat and that meant, as it has for so many of us, working for the papers.

His undoing as a journalist came through Alfred Douglas. In 1921, someone falsely told Machen that Douglas was dead. Machen had actually worked for Bosie in 1907 on a little mag Douglas edited called the Academy. Machen dashed off a fairly friendly obituary, but it was premature. Because of its careless assumption that Douglas was homosexual, the ever-litigious Lord Alfred sued, and won. Machen was sacked from the paper.

He could not find his own words to express his joy, bursting out in a quotation in Latin - "Eduxit me de lacu miseriae, et de luto faecis, " politely translated in the Prayer Book as a delivery from the "miry clay".

Most of us know enough Latin to know what "faecis" means and how aptly it describes journalism.

After his farewell to Fleet Street, he wrote a book called The Secret Glory, about a Welshman who has a vision of the holy cup of St Teilo, a sort of Graal. He elopes to London with a parlour maid and ends up being crucified by some Kurds.

Woven into this dramatic tale is much good anti-public school satire. The hero, Ambrose Meyrick, has been forced to undergo education at the hands of English philistines.

This is the book which fell into the hands of the teenage John Betjeman and changed his life. Betjeman fans will find so many foretastes of the great poems in The Secret Glory, including a strange verse of Machen's in which "I saw golden Myfanwy, as she bathed in the brook Targi".

Like Betjeman, Machen practised Joseph of Arimathea's Catholic religion, in the church which reached these shores centuries before the arrival of the Roman Catholics. "Catholic dogma is merely the witness, under a special symbolism, of the enduring facts of human nature and the universe; it is merely the voice which tells us distinctly that man is not the creature of the drawing room and the stock exchange, but a lonely awful soul confronted by the Source of all Souls."