1
One might devote a great amount of time and give a great deal of thought
to the opening paragraph of a book about Arthur Machen. It is not merely
that one is faced with the usual problem of where to begin: in Caerleon
or London, in Richmond, Virginia or Newark, New Jersey or, for that
matter, wherever one first heard of or first read Arthur Machen. Nor is
it simply a matter of how to begin: with a quotation—there are a number
of very appropriate quotations—or with a review of a controversy raging
in the London newspapers in 1915, or with a few paragraphs taken from
_Peter Whiffle_, a rather outré novel published in New York some years
ago. Nor is it even a matter of when to begin: with the Nineties, the
Twenties, or only yesterday. The problem is one of selection, for one
might pick up the line of the legend of Arthur Machen anywhere along the
course of the last three quarters of a century. More than that, it is
also a matter of the personal history of almost anyone who might attempt
the task.
Most people will remember, I think, when it was and how it was, they
first became acquainted with the work of Machen. And in most cases, I
believe, it will be a rather strong and vivid memory. 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.
Of course there are facts and figures. Many a book gets under way with
an impressive array of figures, or with the clever juxtaposition of two
facts which, by their very contrast, seem to promise an unrelenting
interest and an unrelaxing grasp upon the reader, or it may start out
with a simple statement of fact. Such figures as, for example, these:
Arthur Machen’s works have appeared in anthologies which run to fabulous
numbers of copies, and one of his stories has been published in an
edition limited to two copies. Or a juxtaposition of facts, as for
example: Arthur Machen has been praised by Oscar Wilde, the arbiter
elegantiarum of the 1890’s, and by Walter Winchell, equally arbiter
elegantiarum of the 1930’s.
Or a simple statement of fact, supplied, stiffly and on crackly paper
by the British Ministry of Information: “Arthur Machen, the Welsh
novelist, was born in Caerleon-on-Usk in 1863.” His Majesty’s Ministry
or representative thereof, concludes with the intelligence that further
information may be found in a certain book which may be obtained from a
certain publisher.
Be it said, then, and to the everlasting glory of His Majesty’s Ministry
of Information, that Arthur Machen _was_ born at Caerleon-on-Usk. And in
the year 1863. A long time back.
2
Somerset Maugham once wrote something about the unhappy accidents of
birth that often place a man amid scenes that must seem forever strange,
and among men who must seem forever strangers. When such a person,
after years of painful adolescence, dramatic conflict, moving tragedy
and innumerable vicissitudes, finally arrives by some happy accident at
some other spot upon this planet he feels, in the words of more than one
sympathetic novelist, that he has “come home.” And then, presumably,
the conflict and the tragedy and the vicissitudes begin all over again.
In actual life writers, and artists of other sorts, are particularly
susceptible to this form of cosmic accident—or at least many of them
prefer to think so. It is, somehow, heartening to meet one who was
pleased with the place of his birth.
“I shall always,” wrote Arthur Machen, “esteem it as the greatest piece
of fortune that has fallen to me, that I was born in that noble, fallen
Caerleon-on-Usk, in the heart of Gwent.... For the older I grow the
more firmly am I convinced that anything which I may have accomplished
in literature is due to the fact that when my eyes were first opened in
earliest childhood they saw before them the vision of an enchanted land.”
There is no doubt that the simple fact that Arthur Machen was born in
Caerleon-on-Usk has had a tremendous influence upon his style, his
thinking, his writing, his philosophy and his life.
Caerleon-on-Usk, lying within the fabled land of Gwent and close to the
Welsh border, would have fascinated Arthur Machen even if he had not been
born there—just as it must fascinate everyone who has ever read Machen
and anyone who ever will read him. “Little, white Caerleon,” he calls it,
an island in the green meadows by the river, was once the headquarters of
the Second Augustan Legion, one of the farthest outposts of the sprawling
Roman Empire. The Romans originally called it Isca Silurum, evidently
for its situation on the river Usk. Later Latin writers called it Urbs
Legionem, a translation of the Welsh Caer-Leon.
Caerleon knew the hardened legionnaires, the men who crossed the Channel
other conquerors failed to cross. It knew the tread of men who followed
the eagles, and it knew the patricians who came with the Pax Romana in
the wake of the legions. Caerleon knew also the gallant companions of
the Round Table, for it was, in those times, a seat of Arthur the King,
and many a summons brought the knightly riders within its walls and many
a quest sent them off across the meadows where the river wound in great
esses toward the dark forests hanging along the mountainside. Nennius
places the scene of at least one of Arthur’s battles at Cairlion. As for
Gwent, it is now called Monmouthshire, but in those days it formed the
eastern division of the kingdom of South Wales, and some identify it
as one of the three divisions of Essyllwg, the country of the Silures.
Caerleon itself is the very stuff of legend, and yet it exists today, as
it did in the middle nineteenth century, a small and sleepy town not far
from the equally legendary Severn.
In this place and in the year 1863, Arthur Machen was born—the son of a
clergyman who had the poor “living” of Llanddewi Rectory. His father was
John Edward Jones, who afterwards added his wife’s surname to his own,
so that his son’s full signature became Arthur Llewelyn Jones Machen.
Daniel Jones, Machen’s grandfather, was Vicar of Caerleon-on-Usk and his
great grandfather was David Jones, Curate of St. Fagans, Glamorgan. It is
not the present writer’s intention to compose a biography, “fictionized”
or otherwise, of Arthur Machen. There will be none of your happy little
phrases about what the “little Arthur” did, or what the “young Machen”
or the “boy Machen” thought. Nor will the reader be asked to “imagine
the young Arthur growing up amid the storied stones of Caerleon,” or to
believe that “undoubtedly the young Arthur was influenced by the wild
Welsh countryside,” or even to “assume that the boy Machen made many
trips to the legendary shrines in and about Caerleon.”
Such a biography may one day be written, but one cannot refrain from
hoping that it will not be. Machen has written his own biography in at
least three of his books, and perhaps in all of them. The two frankly
autobiographical books, _Far Off Things_ and _Things Near and Far_ tell
most of the facts of his early life ... and they tell them with more
meaning than even the most skilled and sympathetic biographer could.
His novel, _The Hill of Dreams_, does more with the material suggested
in these notes of a lifetime than the most gifted novelist of our day
could attempt. The story of Lucian Taylor and his adventures, mental and
physical, mystical and spiritual, in the invented town of Caermaen, _is_
the story of Arthur Machen, beautifully told as no one else could tell
it. To these books the reader is referred and, fair warning, he will be
referred to them again and again!
To be sure, Machen _did_ make those little trips about the legendary town
in which he lived; he _was_ inspired by the storied stones of Caerleon
and he _was_ influenced by the wild Welsh countryside. He was an only
child and he lived in that solitude which is so often the lot of an only
child. He often accompanied his father on his “parish calls” and thus he
came to know every farm and every lane, every hill and every valley in
the heart of Gwent along the roads that led from the rectory at Llanddewi.
When he was eleven he went away to school, passing each term as a sort of
“interlude among strangers” until he could come home again to Caerleon.
Was he happy or unhappy at school? Was he fond of games or of mooning
about—the two alternatives, apparently, of English public school life?
That story is told in _The Hill of Dreams_ and again in _The Secret
Glory_. Machen’s schooldays were the schooldays of Lucian Taylor and
Ambrose Meyrick ... to their stories we must again refer the reader. For
conjecture and invention are beyond the scope of this study and Arthur
Machen is seventeen when he really enters into our particular field.
For in his seventeenth year Arthur Machen went up to London. There was
a very practical purpose behind this first visit to London—he was to
come up before the examiners for entrance into the Royal College of
Surgeons. Whether or not the actual purpose of this visit was of great
importance to Machen is one of the conjectural matters upon which we
shall not speculate. The matter had been arranged and decided by family
and friends—it was the necessary preliminary to a career in medicine or
in surgery. Machen prepared for it by walking some three or four miles
several times a week to the Pontypool Road Station to obtain copies of
the London papers. These he studied with great care, devoting special
attention to the theatrical pages. Not that he had ever given any
particular thought to the stage or to the theater, or that he was, in
the phrase of today, “stage-struck”; it was simply that the theater was
typical of what London was, and of what Caerleon was not. At any rate, on
a day in June 1880, he went up to London with his father. And thus began
The London Adventure.
3
The examiners found something Machen already knew—he had no head for
figures, either arithmetical or anatomical. And apparently Machen had
not the interest or the ability to acquire, within a period of time
agreeable to the examiners, a proficiency in either. It must not be
assumed, however, that Arthur Machen had already decided upon a career in
letters, to be pursued amid the pleasures of London. He had not. Years
later Machen wrote that he had no idea, when first he went to London, of
a career in literature. Indeed, he had _never_ thought of it as a career,
but as a destiny.
However, he had not been in London a month before he began to write.
There is nothing particularly prophetic about this, nor anything
especially startling. Most young men, at one time or another, try to
write. And usually their creative efforts are turned in the direction of
the epic, the heroic, the classic. A young man, trying to write, almost
never permits himself to indulge in a fancy for the light essay, the
brief episode. It is epic or it is nothing, usually the latter. Doubtless
the Freudians have an explanation for this. It would be, one supposes, a
very long and very complicated explanation.
Machen had his own explanation—for his own case. He attributes it to his
Celtic blood. Not that Machen thought the Celt, or the Welsh Celt at any
rate, had contributed much to the world’s literature. 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.
He wrote verses, of course. “Every literary career,” says Machen, “which
is to be concerned with the imaginative side of literature begins with
the writing of verses.” So Machen confirms, some sixty years before
it was conceived, the opinion expressed above. He had written verses
before, while still at the Hereford Cathedral School. They were concerned
somewhat with matters derived from the _Mabinogion_ and were probably
composed in the heroic manner. This set of verses was, as is the custom,
rejected.
He filled notebooks with “horrible rubbish—rubbish that had rhymes to
it.” Much of what he wrote was greatly influenced by Swinburne’s _Songs
Before Sunrise_. “Influenced” seems a mild sort of word to set alongside
Machen’s own “cataclysmic.” At any rate, writing what he describes
variously as rubbish and drivel, Machen tried, at the same time, to pass
his examinations for the Royal College of Surgeons. His examiners now
arrived at their decision regarding Machen’s arithmetical ability and the
career as a surgeon came to a close. Machen returned to Caerleon and the
writing continued, mostly, of course, after the family had retired for
the night.
4
A printer named Jones, who lived in the cathedral town of Hereford,
one day received in the post a manuscript accompanied by a request to
print one hundred copies of the poem. It was a poem. The title of the
poem, _Eleusinia_, probably conveyed nothing to Mr. Jones, stationer,
bookseller and printer of Hereford. As he struggled with the text,
written in a large sprawling hand on both sides of ordinary letter
paper, Mr. Jones might have wondered what our young people were coming
to. Certainly the subject matter of the poem was vastly different from
the Bibles, Prayer Books and Pitman’s Shorthand Manuals with which his
shelves were stocked.
Fortunately for Mr. Jones, the poet pretended no knowledge of
book-making. He specified no typographical niceties, he pleaded for no
ornaments, he indicated no preference in paper or in binding. His one
modest request, that the Greek phrase _Oudeis Muomenos Odureta_ to appear
on the title page, be set in Greek type, was withdrawn when Mr. Jones
wrote him that Greek type would be extra. And so the phrase appeared in
English, and with a typographical error, at no extra charge.
Mr. Jones presumably knew the young poet—remembered him as a purchaser
of letter paper and note books. The Llanddewi Rectory address was, in
a way, reassuring. His bill would probably be paid, but Mr. Jones must
have thought the usual thoughts about “minister’s sons.” As for the
poet—he preferred anonymity, the comparative anonymity of “By a Former
Member of the H.C.S.” For when a sixteen page pamphlet bearing the
title _Eleusinia_ and concerning itself with the Eleusian Mysteries, is
published by a Former Member of the Hereford Cathedral School it must be
admitted that such anonymity is, at best, comparative. Generations of
readers of novels about English public schools will realize that every
other former member of the H.C.S. would know at once that the book could
have been written by none other than “old Machen.”
Of course the edition of one hundred copies guaranteed that the anonymity
would still remain comparative—especially since it seemed unlikely that
the former membership of the H.C.S. at large would be interested enough
in poetry to purchase sixteen pages of it ... and without wrappers! It is
not known, exactly, what happened to ninety-nine copies of _Eleusinia_.
Henry Danielson in his _Arthur Machen: A Bibliography_ (1923) says that
his collation was taken from what is probably the only copy extant.
The text of this first work of Arthur Machen is, naturally, as little
known to the general reader as a transcription of the Rosetta Stone
... and so it is likely to remain. What is it about? Machen says of
it, “this is a horrible production.” He wrote it, he adds, by turning
an encyclopedia article on _Eleusis_ into verse, “some of it blank,
some of it rhymed, all of it bad.” This is Machen’s estimate of it in
the notes he wrote for Danielson’s _Bibliography_. Nathan Van Patten
lists, _Beneath the Barley. A Note on the Origins of Eleusinia_ (1931).
Whether this explains the poem or the mysteries is known only to those
who have seen one of the twenty-five copies that were printed. However,
in a letter written in 1945, Machen says: “It is less than nothing, but
perhaps it might have suggested the entertaining question—‘Here is a boy
of seventeen who is interested in the Eleusian Mysteries: what the devil
will happen to him?’”
Well, Machen’s poem was published, and whatever he may have thought of
it in 1923 or in 1945, his relations, in 1884, thought well enough of it
to decide that journalism was the career for Arthur. 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.
5
In the summer of 1881 Machen was back in London in quest of a career.
This one too, although it had nothing to do with figures, did not quite
come off. For some time he had thought about journalism as his relatives
advised, but he did not actually follow their advice until some years
later. Meanwhile, he lived in an old red-brick Georgian house in Turnham
Green where he wrote furiously in one manner or another. That Celtic
appreciation of the fine phrase and the glorious sound of words was
strong within him, for almost everything he read struck a responsive
chord, and he would begin at once to compose an epic in the manner of the
author or the book he was currently reading.
Thus there was a long heroic poem in the manner of William Morris, whose
_Earthly Paradise_ he had just purchased with his tea and tobacco money.
Then there were innumerable verses in the manner of Robert Herrick. Now
and then there would be a strong Swinburnian resurgence. And while all
this furious creation was going on he worked in what was called the
“editorial” department of a publishing house.
There are many tasks a literary man might do in serving his
apprenticeship and Machen did most of them—or most of the ones current
in the ’Eighties. He had assisted in the “grangerizing” of many old and
odd volumes and he had composed “Shakespearean” calendars, selecting
appropriate quotations from “The Bard” for each of the three hundred and
sixty-five days. These and other more or less literary matters occupied
his days and earned for him the sum of about a pound a week. At Turnham
Green he wrote feverishly and planned prodigiously and read ravenously
... and almost every book he came upon set him off on another venture of
his own.
There are some writers, and there are certain casts of mind, requiring
exercises of this sort. It is rather odd that these should turn out to
be the more imaginative writers after all. Yet it does seem that they
have to work out for themselves theories of composition and devote much
of their time and talent and energy to perfecting the technicalities
of the trade of writing. Poe, of course, comes to mind, and Coleridge
and Hawthorne. They first developed theories, seemingly so rigid. They
devised formulae, seemingly so mechanical. And then they created tales
and poems, not from their observations and experience, based not on
facts, but on fancy. And they composed them, apparently, with little
regard for the formulae and systems of their own devising. They seem to
leap from the frankly imitative to the fearlessly imaginative, without
ever taking any of the intermediate steps they themselves had postulated,
or calling into use any of the technical and mechanical aids with which
they had practiced their trade.
Machen in 1881 might recognize and respond to a pattern or formula in
Swinburne, in Burton, in Morris, in Herrick, in Stevenson, in Balzac, in
Rabelais. This is not to imply that Machen merely developed a style “in
the manner of Swinburne,” or of Stevenson or of any of them. To each of
these he brought something of Machen—and as he learned his craft, the
technical tricks, the automatic alliterations and the polished phrasing
were fused into something, a way of writing, no one else has ever had, no
one but Arthur Machen.
Meanwhile Machen discovered that he disliked his labours at the
publishing house in Chandos Street. The business of composing cultural
calendars to be hung in London kitchens and country parlours did not
interest him, nor did he see why it should interest anyone. He therefore
resigned his position—and in the face of a raise to twenty-four shillings
a week! He then became, of all things, tutor to a group of children,
teaching them, of all things, mathematics! His head for figures seems to
have improved considerably for, on going over the Euclid he was supposed
to pass along to his charges, he found that it did make sense of a sort.
He had moved from Turnham Green to Clarendon Road—a street destined to
become, one day, as well known as Baker Street, Cheyne Row and many
another London street of literary fame. Machen was already existing on
that famous and fantastic diet of “green tea, stale bread and great
quantities of tobacco.” Fortunately, at first, his tutorial position
entitled him to dinner with his pupils. Later his pupils changed, and
with them his menu. The noon hour was spent in wandering about Turnham
Green or Holland Park, with a pause for biscuit and beer at a convenient
tavern.
These wanderings became a habit, and through the spring of 1883
Machen went further afield into the green suburbs to the north and
west of the city. It was on these lonely outings that he first began
to formulate one of his literary theories—that “in literature no
imaginative effects are achieved through logical predetermination.”
Now this theory—so demonstrably true in his own case—was arrived at by
no logical predetermination but by sheer pedestrianism. It came about
on these solitary walks when, as so often happened, the roads that led
so invitingly to green and open country plunged suddenly into a row of
horribly new brick houses or, more startling still, a vast and sprawling
cemetery.
To the countryman, whose ideal landscape proceeds logically from
valley to hill, from stream to pond, from crossroads to village, from
fence to house and stile to pasture, these monstrous outcroppings of
civilization, these sudden and terrible interruptions of what was and
should have continued to be a pleasant prospect, are more horrible even
than a factory belching smoke from seven stacks.
And so these pleasant saunters that so often ended before a hideous row
of red-brick houses, the quiet lanes that terminated abruptly before
a vast pile of bricks and boards, created in Machen the beginnings of
that doctrine of the strange and terrifying things that lie so close to
the surface of the quiet and the commonplace. The hideous face at the
window in a story written years later is but a reflection of the sudden
apparition of a raw, new suburb at the end of a quiet lane leading north
out of London.
For the present these were but things seen and felt, they sank quietly
below the surface and floated deep down in the well of the unconscious.
Tutoring and Turnham Green and the twisting roads of Notting Hill were
sufficient unto the days. The nights in his small room in Clarendon Road
were more urgent—more filled with magic. For here there was not the
sudden sight of a street hastily hacked into a hillside, nor the mounds
and monuments of a cemetery, but great books and greater magic flowing
from the majesty of Gothic cathedrals or the Arthurian romances or the
Divine Comedy. He read by night, lighting candles when the gas meter
clicked off, and passed for a time into the “Middle Ages, walking in
the silvery light with the Masters of the Sentences, with the Angelic
Doctor, listening to the high interminable argument of the Schools.” Out
of these books and studies, and a great deal out of Burton’s _Anatomy of
Melancholy_ came a book that was to be called _The Anatomy of Tobacco_.
The book was sent to a publisher who, as it happened, liked it and who
was prepared to publish it, after “certain preliminaries” were attended
to. These preliminaries entailed a visit to Caerleon and called for
another conference in the parlour at the Rectory. The family and the
relations, remembering the pamphlet of a few years ago and encouraged by
the news that the new book would contain many times more than sixteen
pages, attended to the preliminaries.
In due course, in the year 1884, George Redway of London published _The
Anatomy of Tobacco_. And a very handsome book it was, in its cream
parchment boards and brick-red lettering on the spine. The author of
this study of smoking, “Methodized, Divided, and Considered after a New
Fashion” was one “Leolinus Silurensis, Professor of Fumical Philosophy in
the University of Brentford,” in whom we may recognize our old friend,
the former Member of the Hereford Cathedral School.
This is the book Machen calls “The Anatomy of Tankards” in his _Far
Off Things_. There you may read the whys and the wherefores of this
amazing composition, and the devious means by which Burton and tobacco
and divers other curious books entered into its making. So convincing
is his account of his investigations and research into the matter of
taverns and tankards and such matters that quite a few collectors have
spent considerable time, and were prepared to spend considerable sums,
to acquire a copy of _The Anatomy of Tankards_. Meanwhile, Machen
had quitted the six-by-ten room in the Clarendon Road and returned
to Caerleon and a normal diet. Throughout the winter of 1884 he had
worked on the proofs of the _Anatomy_ and then upon an assignment from
Redway for another book. This was a translation of the _Heptameron_ of
Marguerite of Navarre. Machen blithely undertook the task, despite his
own sworn statement that upon leaving Hereford School he could not have
conjugated the simplest, and most popular, of French verbs.
The merrie and delightsome tales of the French Marguerite occupied him
through winter and spring in Gwent. Once more he walked in the deep lanes
about Caerleon and alternately missed London and revelled in the luxury
of not being in Clarendon Road. By the time June came to Caerleon he had
sent off the last batch of his translation and Redway had written him
and offered him a job. It did not seem too hard a thing to return to
Clarendon Road with a job, a real one, in the City. He was to catalogue
books—and such books! There were books on Alchemy and Magic, on Mysteries
and Ancient Worship, on the occult sciences and Rosicrucians and all
sorts of wonderful and baleful and mystic and incredible matters.
Machen became the cataloguer of these curious volumes—and he came
very close to being that wonderful phenomena of the twentieth
century: a publisher’s advertising man! As a matter of fact, Machen
did achieve something few, if any, publisher’s advertising men have
accomplished—either before or since. Two of his catalogues have become
highly prized collector’s items. They were published in 1887 and 1888
respectively.
Working in a book-filled garret in Catherine Street, Machen produced one
catalogue which pops up from time to time in Machen bibliographies: _The
Literature of Occultism and Archeology_. Then it occurred to him to
paraphrase a chapter in _Don Quixote_, the one in which the Curate and
the Barber examine the Knight’s library. This chapter was written in a
manner calculated to entice the wary or unwary book collector into buying
the books discussed. The catalogue was issued under the title _A Chapter
from the Book Called The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha_.
The other catalogue, issued in the following year, bore the title
_Thesaurus Incantatus, The Enchanted Treasure or, The Spagyric Quest of
Beroaldus Cosmopolita_.
It will do little good to look for copies of these catalogues. Vincent
Starret, the fortunate possessor of at least one of them, in his
collection of Machen’s tales, _The Shining Pyramid_ (Covici-Fried,
Chicago, 1923) has included two pieces called _The Priest and the Barber_
and _The Spagyric Quest of Beroaldus Cosmopolita_. These are taken, of
course, from the catalogues in question. As to whether you will find the
Starret volumes readily available—well, they are worth the search.
Well then, here was Machen in a hot-bed of the occult and the devilish,
surrounded by books of all sorts, especially the strange, the weird
and the curious. His room in the Clarendon Road held as many books as
it could accommodate along with its occupant—the overflow was stacked
between the rungs of a ladder on the landing outside. He was busy with
notebooks once more, and writing furiously as ever—but in despair rather
than the fine frenzy and high spirits of a few years before. For now
he was deep in Rabelais and Balzac—and these books cast a spell upon
him. They were warm, glowing books in which life was full and rich and
lusty—there were great eaters and drinkers and lovers in those days. They
offered too great a contrast to the cold, lonely room in Clarendon Road
and the diet of tea, tobacco and bread.
Machen was under the spell of a landscape bathed in a warm sun, with
ruins standing close to roads, and wine flowing from vineyard to bottle
to parched throats all within a few yards of enchanted space. This was a
contrast indeed to the deep lanes of Gwent, the lonely ruins that stood
in the shade and shadow of great hills and forests, and although Machen
had spoken glowingly of the greenish-yellow cider of that land, still, he
rather favored, in his mind at least, the wines of Touraine.
By night there was this magic of old books and by day there were the
old books of magic, for the garret in Catherine Street was crowded with
old and odd books of every sort, a collection that “represented that
inclination of the human mind which may be a survival from the rites of
the black swamp and the cave.” These studies did induce a frame of mind
that might tend toward the strange and unusual. Living in this strange
mixture of a glowing, gargantuan landscape and the dark labyrinths of the
mediaeval mind, Machen tried, and sometimes desperately tried, to write.
“A man has no business to write,” said Machen many years later,
“unless he has something in his heart, which, he feels cries out to be
expressed.” And he had nothing to say—had only the urge to write, the
vice of writing for writing’s sake—_cacoethes scribendi_—he called it!
But then Machen has had time to reconsider his pronouncement of 1923,
and to revise his opinion regarding men who wrote—and why they write.
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?
“Mr. Machen tells us that he once heard this question discussed among a
group of friends. Some answered yes and some no, and, when pipes were
knocked out for the night, the problem was no nearer solution, though,
to the best of his recollection, the ayes were in the majority. He voted
with them himself, and, after further reflection, he still believes
he was right. The hypothetical Crusoe might have no better implements
available than quills of parrots’ feathers, paper made out of the bark of
the guru tree and ink obtained by macerating the root of a certain plant.
But, granted his possession of the literary faculty, he would possess
also the literary impulse. He would write because he liked writing, apart
from whatever fate might be in store for the thing written. The true
spring of imaginative literature, Mr. Machen reminds us, is the delight
of the creator in creation.”
In the desert island of Clarendon Road, all through the summer of 1885,
Machen wrote. He wrote because he had to, because he was under the spell
of a master of gargantuan languages, because he was enamoured of the
sound of words and because he had an ear for the rich and rolling phrase.
And, of course, he wrote because he had the literary impulse. The pound
a week he was paid by Redway could not afford him the rich living, the
pleasures of Touraine. But then, after despair and after much almost
pointless scribbling, he came at last upon the idea for the Great Romance.
It was to be a book in which Rabelais and Gwent were mingled ... and
thus began the “History of the Nine Joyous Journeys ... in which were
contained the amorous inventions and fanciful tales of Master Gervase
Perrot, Gent.” Machen had prepared for this great undertaking by
purchasing his ruled quarto paper, his pen points and his penholders.
Quite possibly he envisioned a plaque on the door of his little cell
at 23 Clarendon Road, announcing that Here Had the Great Romance been
Written! There was, however, this difficulty—the vision of the great
romance declined to be more specific. There were no hints as to plot, no
guidance as to characters. He began, at any rate, a Prologue, written in
a flowing and flowery 17th Century manner.
But now his cataloguing in Catherine Street had come to an end, and
with it his pound or thereabouts per week. Nevertheless, he wrote on,
even though he knew that his composition of the Great Romance might
be abruptly terminated some three or four days in the future. Then,
presumably, he would return to Caerleon, in all probability on foot. As
it happened, he returned hurriedly by train. Just as he had come to the
end of his tea and tobacco and rent money, he had word that his mother
was dying. Aunt Maria thoughtfully sent his fare with the summons.
Later, he returned to the “great romance,” writing once more in the
familiar room in the rectory where the fire burned and the winds howled
down from Twyn Barlwyn and tossed the branches and beat upon the door.
He wrote late into the morning, long after his father had knocked out
his last pipe and gone upstairs. So passed the winter of 1885. Through
the days he walked in the lovely Gwentian hills and looked down upon the
white farm houses standing in the midst of encircling trees. At night
he worked in that room where he had, as a boy, first read de Quincy and
Scott and the other writers who had helped to bring about the “renascence
of wonder.” And in the following year he was alone. His father died that
spring.
This was the John Edward Jones whose homecoming from Jesus College,
Oxford, is described in the opening pages of _Things Near and Far_. Now
Machen was more truly alone than ever. His father had been to him a good
companion in his earliest rambles about the countryside. It had been his
father’s hope that Arthur might one day return to Gwent to live, buy a
small newspaper and settle down to a quiet career in country journalism.
There were certain inheritances that might help, when they came through.
For Machen’s father seldom thought of the good these inheritances would
do for him in his struggle to make ends meet at Llanddewi Rectory. But
now he had gone and then, ironically, the long-lived Scottish relations
went too, and the Scottish lawyers began to look through family Bibles
for the next of kin.
Through these and other circumstances Machen at length came into
money—smallish amounts which, shrewdly invested or even conservatively
invested, might have stretched themselves out for a score or more years.
This economic policy did not suggest itself or, if it did, was quietly
ignored. The simple expedient of living modestly and comfortably, and
dipping into a box for coins, when coins were required, seemed much the
better plan.
In 1887 Machen returned to London, to live in Bedford Place, and to
arrange for the publication of the Great Romance, now called _The
Chronicle of Clemendy_. This was accomplished, with perhaps a deeper
plunge into the box of coins, and the book was published that year. It
was printed at Carbonnek, “for the society of Pantagruelists.” And it
did, apparently, quite well. The nine joyous journeys and the merry monks
of Abergavenny pleased Machen and his fellow Pantagruelists—which, in the
year 1888 or 1948, is almost as much as can be asked of any book.
_Chapter Two_