The Guide: A Collection of Rare & Unknown Work by Arthur Machen

 

Darkly Bright Press's new Arthur Machen collection, The Guide, is a 260+ page compilation of "eighty-two works originally published across twenty-seven periodicals and spanning nearly three decades," to quote from editor Christopher Tompkins's "A Brief Introduction."  It is subtitled "A Collection of Rare & Unknown Work"--for "rare" we can read it to mean as uncollected from periodicals, and for "unknown" we note that eighteen items are recent discoveries, and not referenced in the standard Bibliography of Arthur Machen (1965) by Adrian Goldstone and Wesley D. Sweetser. 

The titular essay, "The Guide," is one of the previously unknown pieces, and it appears second in the new volume, following "Thou Shalt Not Eat", a polemic against the "pompous twaddle written by . . . scientific people about meat and drink." "The Guide" (from The Daily News, 1918) is a curious rumination upon a country man's view of the city, and the city man's view of the country, both needing a kind of guide. 

And from there we find many disparate but interesting essays, reviews, etc. Some favorites include Machen's essays on some nineteenth-century literary figures from The Daily Herald in the 1920s. (Machen confesses:  "I do not like Balzac. I know that this is heresy according to the Church of Letters. I have made my confession; I am ready for the faggots and the stake.")  For The Morning Post in 1930 he wrote on the "Literary Merit of the Bible" ("It is noble vision, noble in expression."). There is a 1933 review of a volume by Richard Middleton. There are two reviews of Edgar Jepson's Memories of a Victorian (1933), and a review of Jepson's follow-up, Memories of an Edwardian (1937). The volume closes with a number of Machen's letters, including some 1936 exchanges on "folk memory" with Lord Raglan, after Machen had reviewed his book The Hero in John O'London's Weekly. .

I still have much to read in this volume, and I look forward to it. One may not always agree with Machen, but one revels in his ability with words. 

In an appendix there is an example of the shifting title and wordage of a tale from Machen's Ornaments in Jade, known variously as "Nature" or "The Splendid Holiday" or "Romance in Gwent: A Fantasia".  In another appendix is a short piece of "Notes on Arthur Machen's ''Sanfarian'" by Michael Fogus ("Sanfarian" conveniently appears earlier in the volume.)

Published in June in a limited edition hardcover, there are still some copies remaining, but if interested act one should soon to avoid disappointment.  Ordering details are available at the Darkly Bright Press website, here.