Introduction to Machen's Work
Most of Machen's fiction is short, and evokes wonder, terror, or both. His long short story "The Great God Pan" (1894), his first major success, caused a furore in London as the pagan demoness who is its central figure seemed to link the sense of horror with a prurient sexuality. Other short stories of around this time also explored paganism and sexuality. Most famous are "The Inmost Light" and "The White People". The latter is an eerie first-person account of a young girl's haunting by an evil statue she discovers in a wood, the fragility of her innocence creating a delicate balance between wonder and terror. The Three Impostors (1895) is essentially a collection of short stories linked together in a single frame: the most often reprinted have been "The Black Seal", the story of an anthropologist who discovers a tribe of throwback hominids living in the Welsh mountains, and "The White Powder", which concerns an unfortunate young man's degeneration into primeval slime. All of these stories can be seen as examples of the fantastic genre, set identifiably in the real world, yet tending to disturb our sense of its familiar possibilities. They were also very racy indeed for their time, and helped to lay the foundations of the contemporary horror-genre.
Around the end of the 1890s Machen began to be interested in the healing potential of a more orthodox mysticism. His novella "A Fragment of Life" chronicles the life of Edward Darnell, who begins the tale as a suburb-dwelling clerk but makes an inward and outward journey towards mysticism and the land of his birth, Wales. Of all Machen's works this is the most successful in imagining mystical rebirth in the context of the real world. A later novel The Secret Glory(1922) explores in similar vein the life of a schoolboy who embraces the grail-myth, to find ecstasy and martyrdom. The enigmatically titled "N", which Machen wrote when he was over seventy, is a kind of psychedelic fable which concerns the discovery of an alternate reality existing in the context of a humble, grey north London suburb. Machen's greatest power is thus, to bring together banal familiarity and impossible strangeness, to the great enhancement of both
Whether through the imagery of dark paganism or of mystical regeneration, Machen's fiction is consistent in its exploration of what he called ecstasy, a topic he explored fully in Hieroglyphics (1902) his work of literary theory. Though much of his non-fiction work is of polemical intent, and perhaps of lesser interest to readers today, his first volume of autobiography, Far Off Things (1922), has been widely celebrated for its mood of sustained reverie and its power to evoke a sense of wonder from landscape. Machen's temperament was intensely set against the materialism which he saw as the disease of his age; all of his work, both fiction and non-fiction, can be seen as polemic against the twin oppressions of business and science, and their secular visions of the world.
Annotated bibliography
All the items below are books, listed in the order of their first publication. This is in no sense a complete or scholarly bibliography: simply a guide to some landmark publications. Few if any are available as current publications.
1884 The Anatomy of Tobacco, London: George Redway.
Machen's first published book is neither fiction nor non-fiction, but a paean
to then-fashionable tobacco and pipe-smoking, written in 'fantastickal' seventeenth century
English. It is simultaneously a parody of scholastic philosophy. One of the most bizarre books ever written, and not much reprinted.
1888 The Chronicle of Clemendy, London: Carbonnek.
1894 The Great God Pan, London: John Lane.
1895 The Three Impostors, London: John Lane
1902 Hieroglyphics, London
1906 The House of Souls, London: Grant Richards.
1907 The Hill of Dreams, London: Grant Richards.
1915 The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War, London: Simpkin,
Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co.
1922 The Secret Glory, London: Martin Secker.
1922 Far Off Things, London: Martin Secker.
1924 The London Adventure, London: Martin Secker.
1933 The Green Round, London: Ernest Benn.
1946 Holy Terrors, London: Penguin.
1949 Tales of Horror and the Supernatural, London: The Richards
Press.
1988 (ed Christopher Palmer), The Collected Arthur Machen, London:
Duckworth
1992 (ed R.B.Russell), Ritual and Other Stories, East Sussex:Tartarus
Press
1995 (ed R.B.Russell), The Secret of the Sangraal, East Sussex:
Tartarus Press
A frame-tale in the manner of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, written
like so much of Machen's very early work in seventeenth century English. There
are moments when the framed tales strike notes of dark obsession, but the collection as a whole does not have the
power of Machen's work of the next decade. Not easy to find.
The volume contained two long short stories, the title story and "The
Inmost Light". Both concern the doings of evil scientists and women who
become monsters at their hands, and they shed an interesting light on current
debates concerning fin de siecle misogyny and evolutionary degeneration. The former story made a great
impression at the time, but some more recent readers have preferred less manic desolation of
the latter. Here you will witness the most lurid and spectacular side of Machen's talent. Both stories have been much anthologized and recently reprinted.
The master-tale of occult vengeance incorporates several equally racy and
fantastic framed tales, of degenerate races of pagan beings who may be
controlled by occult power, and of chemicals which induce the eroticized
trance-state of the ancient Witches' Sabbath. The most inventive, some would say manic,
of all Machen's major narratives.
Machen's one full-length statement of his writer's creed, of especial
interest to those who may be today involved with the literary theory of those
days. Machen defines the capacity to produce ecstasy in the reader as the
touchstone of all great writing.
Some of Machen's best short pieces of the 1890s were first published in
magazines. Many of these appeared here in book form for the first time. The most
important are "A Fragment of Life" and "The White People",
both of which have been claimed by some as his finest work. Much reprinted, and
most of the tales found their way into later anthologies.
Almost undoubtedly Machen's most important and moving work. Lucian Taylor,
the hero, is damned either through contact with an erotically pagan 'other'
world or through something degenerate in his own nature, which he thinks of as a
'faun' . He becomes a writer, and when he moves to London he becomes trapped by
the increasing reality of the dark imaginings of this creature within him, which
become increasingly real. Machen drew copiously on his own early years in Wales
and London, and the book as a whole is an exploration through imagination of a
potential fate which he personally avoided. One of the first explorations in
fiction of the figure of the doomed artist, who is biographically so much a part
of the decadent 1890s. Has been reprinted as paperback, and appeared in more
recent collections of Machen's work. .
Supertitled "The Angels of Mons". The title story is of historical significance, having given rise to the eponymous legend. Though the other stories also bear strong witness to the spiritual yearnings that prevailed in wartime, they are not machen at his writing best..
A novel of schoolboy rebellion and the quest of the holy grail. Ambrose, the
young hero, survives his appallingly materialistic and sadistic public school to
become a mystic in the Celtic tradition of his forefathers. A book much beloved of John Betjeman.
The first and most lyrical section of Machen's autobiographical memoir,
especially beloved of those who celebrate the author as a major stylist of
evocative prose. The sublime Welsh landscapes shape the childhood of the author
in approved Wordsworthian fashion.
Machen's final burst of autobiography abandons progressively its attempt to
tell a story and becomes instead concerned with its own genesis, and with the
strangeness of the universe we inhabit. Machen at his most ludic.
Machen's final full-length work of fiction is judged a failure by some.
However, in this work, Machen's earlier exploration of the fantastic moves
outward to embrace the absurd, of Kafka, Camus and Sartre. Not recommended for
devotees of gothic and horror, but of potential fascination for the rest of us.
Some of Machen's most daringly aesthetic pieces from the 1890s as well as
some more conventional fiction from the time of the First World War found their
way into this selection, which was published just before Machen's death in 1947.
A wide-ranging, just posthumous collection of the best of Machen's shorter
fiction, both of the 1890s, of the period around the First World War, and of his
prolific last years. Reprinted in 1960s as paperback
This hasn't quite the comprehensiveness the title implies, but is a very
good collection of what has a wide consensus as Machen's best. Includes The
Hill of Dreams, "A Fragment of Life", Far Off Things, "N"
A collection of Machen's fiction pieces published hitherto only in magazine
format. Includes "A Double Return" which was highly praised by Oscar
Wilde, and several of Machen's fine but neglected late tales.
A selection of Machen's most interesting essays and articles on non-fiction
topics, none hitherto published in book form.
