Arthur Machen: Balms and Ornaments

Arthur Machen published two books in July 1924, one hundred years ago. Both are slim volumes, both were published in limited editions (numbered and signed), and both are highly interesting for very different reasons.

Precious Balms came out first. It is basically a collection of extracts from the negative reviews of his writings that Machen had received from early on (The Great God Pan, 1894) to the present (Dog and Duck, 1924). The title comes from Psalm 141, the text as given in the  Book of Common Prayer:  “Let the righteous rather smite me friendly and reprove me, but let not their precious balms break my head.” But the content of the volume is not all depressing, for just under a quarter of the published pages include a chapter “The Other Side” which gives some specimens of Machen’s good reviews.

Machen had the idea for the book on the 5th of November 1923 (per Gawsworth’s The Life of Arthur Machen, p.301). In February 1924, Machen passed the proofs for a prospectus for the book, which his publisher took to America for publicity, in which an anonymous statement (by Machen himself) noted that Machen was “languishing in the cells of Carmelite House, serving a term of eleven years” for a series of obscure crimes. The Americans did not understand Machen’s humor, and thought this referred to some kind of a prison sentence. Carmelite House was, in fact, the name of the building that was the home of a newspaper, the Evening News, where Machen had been employed for eleven years (April 1910 through November 1921).  

Machen passed the proofs of Precious Balms on June 5th 1924 (adding a letter of apology about the misunderstanding of the prospectus), and 265 copies total of Precious Balms were printed. By July 16th, Machen had received his author’s copies, but in a letter to Colin Summerford on July 25th, Machen wrote that “I believe the whole edition was subscribed before publication. Only very few copies were sent out for review.”   

One wonders if Machen knew that James Branch Cabell had done a similar exercise at the back of his book Beyond Life (1919), where the negative quotations appear on first glance to be publisher’s advertisements. Cabell re-worked these quotations variously in reprints. See my blog post here for further details and examples.  

The second book, Ornaments in Jade,  was published in the U.S. by Alfred A. Knopf of New York on 18 July 1924. Machen noted receiving his copies in August 1924. The edition was limited to one thousand copies, numbered, and signed by Machen. It is an oversized book, with a diamond pattern stamped in blind on the black cloth covers, and with soft jade green endpapers. This elegant production was issued in a black cardboard slipcase, which rarely has survived to the modern day.

Ornaments in Jade is a slim collection of ten prose poems, masquerading as short stories.  Machen wrote them in the summer of 1897, and after they were rejected by one publisher, he put them aside. (One appeared in print in 1908, in E. Nesbit's The Neolith.) John Gawsorth described them as “a sequence of ten very precious, very musical and very beautiful short symbolic tales, which were so chiselled and finished that he called them collectively Ornaments in Jade” (The Life of Arthur Machen, p. 145). Mark Valentine has perceptively noted: “Machen’s vivid evocation of the high splendours and the shaded secrets of the spiritual world, which he here distills into sentence after sentence that has the harmony of the psalms and yet the voluptuousness of the most vice-steeped verses of the decadents” (Arthur Machen, p. 58)

Thus two very different, and very interesting, Machen books, have now reached their century.