1
It would be unflattering indeed to imply that Arthur Machen’s books
were quickly discarded by their owners, or that they had ever crowded,
in any considerable numbers, the shelves of the second-hand book shops.
Nevertheless it is a fact that for some years, especially in the late
Twenties and early Thirties, the shelves, counters and sidewalk tables of
Fourth Avenue were high-lighted for browsers by the bindings that blazed
forth the magic of Machen.
[Illustration: SOME MACHEN ITEMS: Showing one of the famous Knopf “Yellow
Books,” title pages of Knopf edition and Pocket Book, Putnam’s 1915
edition of “The Bowmen” and several rare items.]
Mr. Alfred Knopf who undertook in the Twenties to introduce, or to
reintroduce, Arthur Machen to American readers elected, perhaps for
obvious reasons, to issue the odd-sized books in a bright yellow binding.
For this, as well as for his work in bringing Machen across the Atlantic,
Mr. Knopf is to be thanked; but whoever designed the books, having
specified an unmistakable color for the cloth binding, decided also upon
a dark blue paper label with gold lettering—a combination that became, in
a reasonably short time, completely indecipherable. There was, however,
no mistaking a Machen—even when it turned up in the darkest corner of
the most unassuming hole-in-the-wall in Fourth Avenue, Twelfth Street
or lower Lexington Avenue. The adept Arthurian merely looked for the
unmistakable yellow binding with its dark and indecipherable patch. It
must be admitted that the production manager or book designer for Knopf
planned better than he knew, for it seemed that time could not dull,
nor dirt disguise, nor grime diminish the yellow of those bindings.
The experienced browser could spot one at thirty feet in the dimmest
corner of the dingiest shop, sandwiched though it might be between _V.
V.’s Eyes_ and _The Conquest of Fear_ or buried under a pile of Edgar
Rice Burroughs’ Martian romances. A recent convert might, for a time,
respond to the lure of the yellow only to find, on closer inspection,
something about a eunuch by a man named Pettit, or an early Ben Hecht,
or some other ordinary book bound in yellow; but in time he learned to
distinguish that one especial hue. He came to know it, however faded, for
it seemed to fade predictably.
Thus the yellow books issued by Knopf became the most eagerly
sought-after books along Fourth Avenue. It was not too long of course,
before they became scarce. Soon they were taken from tables and stacked
reverently on shelves, and before very long they were behind glass doors
or in the shelves behind the proprietor’s desk, or even in that holy of
holies—the back room.
Today they have disappeared from Fourth Avenue. You may find, now
and then, one of the Martin Secker editions, or perhaps one of the
deluxe editions of the Heptameron—or even a set, fabulously priced, of
the Caerleon edition. For the most part, however, the book shops are
Machen-less, a condition that might be remedied, and profitably, by some
enterprising publisher, or even by Mr. Knopf.
The House of Knopf, however, seems remarkably disinterested in its
valuable property, and a valuable property it is, for not only did the
series include almost all of the best of Machen, but almost every volume
contained a preface or a foreword written especially for these editions
by Mr. Machen. These comparatively recent Machen items are worth a volume
of their own, a proposition warmly advanced by Mr. Joseph Vodrey but
received coolly enough, thus far at least, by Mr. Knopf.
2
Machen had first appeared in print in America in 1894 when Roberts of
Boston published _The Great God Pan_. There were several other Machen
items published in this country prior to the Twenties. Dana Estes brought
out _The Hill of Dreams_ and _The House of Souls_ not long after the
Richards editions and in similar format. Putnam published _The Bowmen_ in
1915 while the controversy over the legend was still raging. There were a
few others, but the Machen boom was still to come. Mr. Cabell’s tribute
to Machen in _Beyond Life_, published a few years later, undoubtedly did
much to create a body of readers eager for Machen.
Just how and when Mr. Alfred Knopf became interested in Machen as
a literary property I do not know, one does not with impunity ask
publishers why they seek out certain authors. Certainly Mr. Knopf was of
the opinion that the Twenties was ripe for Machen—anyone who remembers
that era would, even today, vindicate Mr. Knopf’s judgment. Yet somehow,
Machen did not catch on as well as might have been expected. Or perhaps
he did—for the Twenties. For this was certainly a prolific period,
genius was hailed weekly and books sold by the thousands. Perhaps
Machen’s books did sell quite well by the standards of the Twenties.
The Knopf printings seem to have been exhausted within a remarkably
short time and very rapidly disappeared from book stores until their
reappearance on second-hand stalls in the Thirties. Arthur Machen is not
remembered too well as one who was popular in the Twenties, but then all
too few of the writers of the Twenties are remembered at all.
Who were they? Critics and commentators of the times hailed book after
book, they acclaimed name after name—but most of those names are seldom
mentioned in the current revival of interest in the Twenties. The “best
seller” lists of the day hardly indicate that John Dos Passos, Cabell,
Van Vechten, etc., etc., were what all America was reading. Scott
Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis and one or two others are notable exceptions,
but the real best-sellers of the time would sound unfamiliar even to
students of that era. Most people were reading _The Sheik_, _If Winter
Comes_, _Black Oxen_, _The Green Hat_ and _So Big_. Zane Grey and Ibanez
were more widely read than Sinclair Lewis, even though _Main Street_ had
created a stir. There were outlines of history and of philosophy and even
the “art” of thinking was popularized. There were books about China and
Africa and India—and some of them even became the centers of controversy.
Storms raged over books whose very titles are unremembered today, while
the books we now consider “typical” of the Twenties sold slowly—and in
small editions. One discovers that Eleanor Wylie, Ellen Glasgow, Floyd
Dell, E. E. Cummings and most of the others who, even though they
were hailed on alternate Tuesdays and Sundays as “new stars of great
magnitude in the literary firmament,” were not too widely read, despite
the assistance some of them received from the newly formed book clubs.
Nor are they recalled nowadays with even fond recollection by very many.
It is, therefore, not surprising that Arthur Machen remains one of the
more obscure writers of the American Twenties, as well as of the English
Nineties.
Interest in Arthur Machen was stirring even before the Twenties, but it
was principally among writers and literary people. James Branch Cabell,
whose _Beyond Life_ was first published in 1919, was perhaps the first to
mention in print the name of Arthur Machen and something of his work. In
one of his lengthy monologues, speaking through the amiable and erudite
Charteris, he says, “I wonder if you are familiar with that uncanny
genius whom the London directory prosaically lists as Arthur Machen? If
so, you may remember that in his maddening volume _Hieroglyphics_ Mr.
Machen circumvolantly approaches to the doctrine I have just voiced—that
all enduring art must be an allegory. No doubt, he does not word this
axiom quite explicitly: but then Mr. Machen very rarely expresses
outright that which his wizardry suggests.”
It was about this time that Starrett discovered Arthur Machen, perhaps
through Cabell whose work he was among the first to praise. Starrett it
was, along with Paul Jordan-Smith, who tried to popularize Arthur Machen
even before the famous Knopf “yellow books” were issued. A small group
gathered about Starrett and Jordan-Smith to try to prove to publishers
that Machen _was_ important and that his books _were_ being collected.
In 1919 Smith wrote to several publishers about Machen, but they were
not interested. The group then made every effort to have Machen’s first
editions rise from nothing to ridiculous heights.
They succeeded all too well in this, for as Jordan-Smith says, “There
were only a few of us then, but we seemed to be many, for we were bidding
against one another in a hundred shops all over Britain. We did not
expect the publishers to enter the rare book field. We merely wanted them
to publish new books and reprint old ones by Machen. Instead they made
limited editions and spoiled the whole business.”
Mr. Starrett, who is one of the most enthusiastic of Machen’s admirers,
finally did something about it on his own. In 1923 he published, with
his friend Covici, a collection of Arthur Machen’s stories and essays
under the title _The Shining Pyramid_. This book was published in an
edition limited to 875 copies. It contained, besides the title story, a
number of pieces that had not previously been published in book form, and
many of which have not since been reprinted. This is one of the better
collections of Machen material which deserves reprinting today. In the
following year Starrett published another collection under the title _The
Glorious Mystery_. This, too, contained much new material and much that
has not appeared elsewhere.
At the same time, perhaps even before Starrett was preparing to publish
his collections, Alfred Knopf became interested in Arthur Machen and
wrote him with an offer to publish anything of his he could find.
Apparently Knopf’s negotiations coincided, in point of time at any rate,
with Starrett’s plans. In 1925 Machen published in London a collection
called _The Shining Pyramid_. The book was published simultaneously in
New York by Alfred Knopf. It contained an introduction in which Machen
wrote: “_The Shining Pyramid_ is the result of a collaboration. Two years
ago an American man of letters, full of industry, rummaged in old papers,
magazines and manuscripts owing their origin to me, and produced as a
result of his labors a volume published at Chicago, called _The Shining
Pyramid_. The American gentleman, I may say, did not disturb my peace by
consulting me as to the content of the book in question. Then, in 1924,
pleased, I suppose, with the results of his toils, he rummaged a little
more, and, using the same methods, produced a second volume of scraps
and odds and ends from my workshop. This book he entitled _The Glorious
Mystery_.”
Knopf had, by this time, published quite a number of Machen’s earlier
books. Three books were published in 1922, four in 1923, four in 1924 and
four in 1925, of which _The Shining Pyramid_, with its introduction, was
one. The “yellow books” were finding their way to the more discriminating
and discerning readers in America.
The publication of two books bearing the same title, one issuing from
Chicago, the other from London and New York, stirred up a controversy.
How far this went and how it terminated is not public knowledge. In
April of 1924 Knopf circulated to the trade a letter on the Alfred A.
Knopf-Arthur Machen versus Covici-McGee-Vincent Starrett controversy.
According to Paul Jordan-Smith the whole thing was the result of a
misunderstanding. “This much I know. Starrett had been given the
manuscripts of two or more books to get published as he could, at a
time when publishers were shy of Machen. Years ago I saw them and at
least one letter advising Starrett to do what he thought best about
publishing them. Then Knopf came along with an offer to publish anything
of Machen’s he could find. How Machen answered this I do not know, but
he did give the rights to Knopf. But in the meantime Starrett had made
arrangements with Covici, his Chicago friend and former book seller. It
was unfortunate, and I fancy Machen’s poverty and Knopf’s established
position made Machen want to transfer to him. Both were rather bitter.
But as I recall the matter over the years I was impressed with the fact
that both had acted in good faith until Knopf’s money made Machen jump. I
think he would not have embarrassed Starrett if he had not been utterly
lacking in money and had not had two small children to feed.”
Apparently the whole matter was settled amiably, for one of the
subsequent Knopf editions is dedicated to Vincent Starrett. The
“controversy,” such as it was, is not a matter to be revived, nor is it
my intention to do so. Machen, and all who know him, owe too much to both
Mr. Knopf and Mr. Starrett.
Another early worker in the Machen field was Carl Van Vechten. Besides
making Machen a sort of intellectual “prop” for his precious _Peter
Whiffle_, Mr. Van Vechten wrote some of the earliest appreciations of
Machen. I must confess that there was a time when V. V.’s eyes seemed
to me a trifle jaundiced in his estimate of Machen, and there was
a time when I rather hotly resented the implications of the title
_Excavations_. But time mellows most of us, Machenites especially, and
I have come to regard and to welcome Mr. Van Vechten as a trail-blazer.
It is true that I cannot accept some of his estimates of Machen, and I
dare say I have often thought that he liked Arthur Machen for all the
wrong reasons. However, let the student of Machen the Silurist decide
for himself. _Excavations_, containing reprints of Van Vechten’s earlier
reviews and articles, was published by the alert Mr. Knopf in 1926.
Vincent Starrett’s study of Machen is, I think, more in sympathy, or
at least more to my taste. The title of the book in which his essay
on Machen appears is _Buried Caesars_—it enraged me no less than
_Excavations_, and at one time I regarded these books as two voices in a
chorus that had come not only to praise Machen but to bury him in rather
extravagant prose.
3
There has been little news of Arthur Machen or about Arthur Machen since
the late 1920’s. He enjoyed a certain popularity for perhaps five years,
a popularity that lingered much longer in more literary circles. For
the most part Machen had disappeared from the world of literary figures
just as his books had disappeared from the bookshops. That he is still
read today we know, and we know too, that he has been slowly gaining
new readers through the years. In 1933 Machen published his last novel,
_The Green Round_. This has not yet been published in this country,
although it is scheduled for publication this year by August Derleth’s
“Arkham House.” In 1936 there were published in London two collections
of his stories, most of which were reprints of earlier stories with
the addition of some new pieces. These books are _The Children of the
Pool_, published by Hutchinson, and _The Cosy Room_, published by Rich
and Cowan. Within the past few years Machen’s stories have appeared in
anthologies put together by Dorothy Sayers, Somerset Maughan, Phillip Van
Doren Stern, Will Cuppy and, of all people, Boris Karloff!
August Derleth, the youthful sage of Sac Prarie, has been more active
than anyone else in recent years in his efforts to spread the magic of
Machen. Back in 1937, in the November issue of Ben Abramson’s “Reading
and Collecting,” Derleth published an article on Machen, to which
was appended a bibliography by Nathan Van Patten. Derleth’s article,
the first to appear in almost a decade, followed the pattern of most
previous articles about Machen. But Derleth has gone beyond prose. He
has, from time to time, included Machen’s more macabre pieces in his
various collections of supernatural stories. He has also published, or is
planning to publish, reprints of several Machen books.
The late H. P. Lovecraft was an admirer of Arthur Machen’s work and a
foremost exponent of the Machen manner in modern fiction. It is difficult
to apply the epithet “pulp writer” to Lovecraft, but that is, after all,
what he was. Recent appraisals of his work, and the publication in book
form of his stories, have done much to raise him out of this category. It
was Lovecraft who introduced Machen to August Derleth and to who knows
how many thousands of other readers. In his essay, recently republished
by Ben Abramson, _Supernatural Horror in Literature_, Lovecraft supplies
one of the most up-to-date, if perhaps one-sided, appraisals of Arthur
Machen’s work. Lovecraft concentrates his attention, naturally enough, on
Machen’s tales of horror and the supernatural. The result is a valuable
piece of Machenania but one that should be approached only by an adept.
The chance reader or the casual reader would receive a rather specialized
view of Machen.
4
More than one observer of the literary scene has drawn the obvious
parallel between the 1890’s in England and the 1920’s in our own country.
Both periods were characterized by a sharp break with tradition. In both
periods the younger writers found themselves voluntary exiles from their
own country and both groups selected the same European city as the scene
of their exile. There are other parallels, ... the flood of “little”
magazines, the cultivation of the “continental” attitude, the revival of
the art for art’s sake tradition and a general letting down of the bars
once again. Mr. Waugh, the 1890 Mr. Waugh, might well have written his
_Reticence in Literature_ for the benefit of the new generation of bold,
bad, young intellectuals.
Peter Munro Jack, writing in Malcolm Cowley’s symposium _After the
Genteel Tradition_, called this the “James Branch Cabell Period,” and
Alfred Kazin, in _On Native Ground_, refers to the writers of the
Twenties as “The Exquisites,” while “All the Lost Generations” seems to
him a suitable chapter heading to cover a brief history of the Twenties.
Mr. Jack credits it all to Cabell’s _Jurgen_ and to novels by Carl Van
Vechten and Eleanor Wylie. “These books,” says Mr. Jack, “brought to
our shores the very spirit of Rabelais and Voltaire, Balzac, Anatole
France and Horace Walpole, Pater, Wilde, Machen, Max Beerbohm and Aldous
Huxley ... and converted a barbarous literature over-night into an
airy dance of verve, irony and Gallic sophistication.” Mr. Kazin also
begins with _Jurgen_, which apparently ushered in “a vogue of elaborate
decadence and enthusiasm, very wicked, world-weary and ornate.” Kazin
goes on to indicate that “just as the pale, imitative exoticism of the
late Nineties had marked not merely the beginnings of revolt against
the old parochialism but a leisure-class psychology in an America that
had finally attained a leisure class, so that the new literature of
sophistication that came in with the James Branch Cabell School was
fundamentally the ambitious baroque luxury of a period that had finally
obtained a self-conscious splendor of its own.”
Mr. Kazin writes from the vantage point of 1942, and anything can happen
to a critic, a book, or a period in a dozen or more years. Hindsight
used to be considered superior, in some ways, to foresight—but such is
the condition of the world today that this is no longer particularly
true. Mr. Kazin, writing in the heyday of the four evangelists of modern
American fiction—Don Passos, Hemingway, Farrell and Steinbeck, looks
back upon the era of “baroque luxury” and “self-conscious splendor”
with anything but nostalgia. Malcolm Cowley, contributing an essay on
Dos Passos to his own symposium, an essay which preceded Kazin’s book
by five years, and to which Mr. Kazin is somewhat indebted, remarks
that Dos Passos had entered college in those olden baroque days, “at
the beginning of a period which was later known as that of the Harvard
aesthetes.” This is noted with an almost, but not quite, imperceptible
touch of pride—or of snobbishness. These young Cantabrians, our boy Dos
Passos among them, are reported to have acted in a manner befitting the
Elizabethans, or least the men of the Nineties, or any other generation
that felt it was living in a Golden Age. They read, Dos Passos still
among them, Pater and _The Hill of Dreams_, and they explored the
slums of Boston—which must have seemed to them at least as romantic as
Cheapside or Houndsditch.
At any rate Machen was accepted and more or less widely hailed as one
of the more important importations by some of the little magazines
that began to spring up at this time. “The Reviewer,” one of the most
important of the new journals, published Machen along with Ellen Glasgow,
Joseph Hergesheimer, Ernest Boyd, Ronald Firbank, Ben Ray Redman, Edwin
Muir and others. His public and enthusiastic acceptance by Van Vechten,
that inveterate organizer of torchlight parades, was quite enough to
launch Machen successfully with the intellectuals who, in those halcyon
days, had scarcely an ideology among them.
It has been said that the writers of this period, motivated no doubt
by the cynicism they either created or absorbed, or both, tended to
escape from this world they never made and produced in the process of
escaping some of the most exciting and readable books ever written in
America. Of course neither Mr. Cowley nor Mr. Kazin draws exactly these
conclusions—they are rather scornful of the Twenties and of the books
produced in the Twenties.
They are both, Mr. Kazin more than Mr. Cowley since he came in later, in
rather a hurry to get on to the Thirties when the Four Horsemen of the
Apocryphal were beginning to gallop madly down the back-country lanes and
through the congested streets of cities and the back-yards of milltowns.
Nevertheless it must be apparent to even the most ideological reader of
these weighty volumes that, for all their efforts at deprecating the
self-conscious splendor of the period, both Mr. Cowley and Mr. Kazin
manage to make the Twenties sound vastly more entertaining than the dull
period to follow, when the leftist interpretation of literature placed
black Marx against every novel that showed signs of having been written
for the sheer pleasure of writing, or the desire to create a character or
to tell a story.
This seems to be the great fault that is found, by such men as
these, with the novels of that era. They were not so judged in the
Nineteen-Twenties. The sentiments expressed by Arthur Machen in
_Hieroglyphics_, and echoed in Cabell’s _Beyond Life_, were rather widely
accepted at the time, not only by a large portion of the reading public,
but also by members of the more critical profession. Dyson, however
much he may have fussed with his pipes and his pencils, his notes and
his notions, expressed what was the literary credo of the day; “I will
give you the task of a literary man in a nutshell—to create a wonderful
story and to tell it in a wonderful manner.” And so Cabell and Wylie and
Fitzgerald and Hume and Wilder and many others created wonderful stories.
In this time of man and to this manner of writing Machen was admirably
suited.
People who found New York in the Twenties as fabulous a city as Machen
and Stevenson found London in their day, were delighted with the
yellow-bound books that came out under the Borzoi imprint. For many a
speakeasy in the mid-Forties, or in the Village, offered possibilities as
extraordinary as Stevenson’s _Suicide Club_ or _The Lost Club_ of Machen.
Indeed there are undoubtedly those who can recall when their favorite
haunt disappeared over-night and then, as if by magic, reappeared in the
brownstone house across the street. The city parks, as yet uninhabited
by muggers, were magical places after midnight and lonely as the sunken
lanes of Avalon. Those who delighted in the doings of Dyson and the
adventures of the Young Man in Spectacles were enchanted by the curious
byways of London, and they shared the satirical views of the dyspeptic
Doctor Stiggins and the Hermit of Barnsbury. It pleased immense numbers
of people who tired of Dreiser to find, in _Hieroglyphics_, this perfect
reflection of their own attitude: “Imagine having to spend twenty years
with _such_ people.”
The crash in the fall of 1929 was followed by a stunned silence—and
presently one began to hear the hoof beats of the four frightening
Horsemen and the voices of the economical evangelists crying, and
wreaking, havoc.
The realists began to be heard because realism seemed to be what people
wanted—politically, at any rate. The polemics disguised as novels began
to appear in greater and ever-increasing numbers. It has since become
obvious that realism of this sort was a one-way street to despair—and it
was the realists, not the now-silent “romanticists,” who were called,
in their own time, “The Irresponsibles.” But with the rise of the
proletarian novel, the heroic mill-hand and the long, dreary lines of the
unemployed, the period came to an end. Machen, along with the others,
ceased to be read except by those who re-read him, or discovered him in
the dusty bookshops where the yellow binding gleamed from the darkest
corner.
_Chapter Seven_