The Life of Arthur Machen, Gawsworth’s only substantial work apart from his poetry, was written in the early 1930s, but rejected by his publishers Rich & Cowan as Machen’s star was in decline at that period. The book contains a wealth of previously unpublished material on Machen’s literary career, exploring areas uncharted in Far Off Things and Things Near & Far, Machen’s memoirs from the 1920s.

Gawsworth, born Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong in London in 1912, was one of Machen’s most devoted disciples, doing much to keep his idol’s name in the public eye during Machen’s last years. Gawsworth, a champion of other Nineties figures such as M. P. Shiel and Ernest Dowson, inherited the title of King of Redonda on Shiel’s death in 1947. He ennobled many famous writers, including Rebecca West, Lawrence Durrell, Dylan Thomas and Henry Miller, as peers of the Caribbean realm. Gawsworth was a prolific and precocious versifier in the 1930s and was regarded as one of the coming poets of the age, but after the Second World War he descended into alcoholism, his stream of books and pamphlets dried up and he died, aged only 58, in 1970. Present-day interest in him is causing his books to rise in price. A signed edition of his Poems (1938), though worn and bumped and only 43 pp. long, was recently offered for sale in a dealer’s catalogue for £150.

Gawsworth’s biography chronicles Machen’s life up to 1933. Among its revelations is the fact that Machen based the character of Richmond, alias Wilkins, in The Three Impostors on Samuel Dougal, the Moat Farm murderer, who was hanged in 1903. Dougal rented Northend House in Buckinghamshire from Machen in the 1890s. Gawsworth also reveals that Machen received only six copies of his adolescent poem Eleusinia in 1881. The printer, Joseph Jones of Hereford, kept the remainder over a dispute in payment. We learn that Machen was related by marriage to J. B. Priestley: a Machen cousin from Cardiff married the novelist in 1926. We discover that Machen wrote his first journalism, in the form of book reviews, for the Hereford Times between 1881-83. G. K. Chesterton’s favourable review of Hieroglyphics is included in the biography, as is Machen’s brief history of his wife’s family, the Hudlestons. We discover that Machen’s dismissal from the London Evening News in 1921was not solely due to the libelling of Lord Alfred Douglas in the premature obituary: the malaise, said Machen, had set in some time before. Machen told Gawsworth why he believed he was not invited to contribute to The Yellow Book, the famous Nineties periodical: he had expressed enthusiasm for the Sherlock Holmes stories to the editor Henry Harland and felt this counted against him. The text of Machen’s Spoof Tennis, which anticipates Waiting for Godot is included. It is a pity that Gawsworth did not take the opportunity to update and revise the biography after Machen’s death, since although it is designed to be read by the Machen enthusiast rather than the general reader, it would certainly have found a publisher in the 1950s or ’60s.

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