Arthur Machen regularly contributed short stories, vignettes, and articles to literary periodicals from early in his career. Never able to make a good and reliable living by journalism – let alone his books – after the death of his first wife Machen went on the stage, joining Frank Benson’s touring company. He continued to publish articles and reviews in numerous London literary magazines, but still found it necessary to seek steady employment to gain the regular income only that could provide.
In 1910 Machen became a full-time journalist, joining the London Evening News and settling to write what was assigned to him, in its required style and to its length. However, he was also allowed something of a ‘roving commission’ and the newspaper would publish his story “The Bowmen” and serialise the original versions of The Great Return and The Terror. It also serialised “Confessions of a Literary Man”, published in book form as Far-Off Things (1922). Machen worked at the Evening News until 1921 when he had to resign over an obituary of Lord Alfred Douglas, who, as he lived to 1945, had been in a position to sue Machen’s employer for a large sum in damages. Machen made no secret of his loathing of his time on the newspaper, referring to it in The London Adventure as ‘a prostitution of the soul’. But he still needed to earn a living, and continued to write for newspapers and magazines.
During the 1920s, when his work was finally but rather fleetingly in demand from trade book publishers, Machen was able to reprint some of the essays that he had published over the years. Two selections were included by Vincent Starrett in his American compilations The Shining Pyramid (1923) and The Glorious Mystery (1924). In the UK Machen collected 27 essays in Dog and Duck (1924) and there was a revised edition of The Shining Pyramid. There were two collections in 1926: Notes and Queries appeared late in the year, having been preceded by Dreads and Drolls a century ago this month.
Dreads and Drolls collected 29 articles that Machen had published in The Graphic, a weekly newspaper which had been founded in 1869 to compete with The Illustrated London News. While he was preparing the book Machen was still contributing to The Graphic – this came to an end at about the time Dreads and Drolls was published, with 60 articles written in total (all of which were finally collected in the expanded edition published by Tartarus Press in 2007). In a prefatory Note Machen wrote that his ‘“Dreads” and “Drolls” were gathered from all sorts of sources. Most of them are strictly veridical, but it may be confessed that here and there imagination plays a small part.’ That was certainly quite a get-out clause.
In “The Man With the Silver Staff” Machen wrote of the clown Joe Grimaldi and how he fell foul of Old Lucas, the notoriously corrupt Parish Constable of Clerkenwell, whose perjuries against the innocent had never been successfully challenged. But the mere appearance in the police office of a mysterious stranger brandishing a silver staff made Lucas retract his accusations against Grimaldi. Machen gave no explanation or theory: he seemingly did no more than recount a strange, old, story.
It was at the beginning of “The Mystery of Mr Haddock” that Machen stated what was in effect his manifesto for the type of work he preferred to write, not only in the series for The Graphic, but for most of his contributions to the periodicals: ‘Everything that is old is dear to me, but more especially the old which is ramshackle, disreputable, up a court or down an alley. […] I cannot define this curious joy of the down-at-heel hidden in a dark place…’ Machen took his readers along such a route to recount some possibly inexplicable events at “7B Coney Court”. Set in a favourite region of London, he went for the verisimilitude of sense of place – but declared that all names and places were fictitious. However – ‘assuming for the moment that names and places are as true as the tale’ Curzon’s Inn lies ‘somewhere between Fleet Street and Holborn. It is approached by a maze of crooked courts and paved alleys, guarded by iron posts…’ Coney Court itself is ‘of a dim red of ancient brickwork; the entrances are enriched with Corinthian pilasters, in the manner of the older doorways in King’s Bench Walk in the Temple; and the carved wooden penthouses over these doorways have been attributed to Grinling Gibbons…’ The story is told at one remove at least, and is a remarkable piece that has the characteristics of what might now be called an urban myth – if it was not an outright piece of fiction.
He returned to favoured subjects. “Casanova in London” describes some amusing (and possibly not so amusing) things that happened to him during his visit, which ended with Casanova's departure, as he ‘wisely posted away with all speed on the Dover Road.’ In “The Little People” Machen described the Asiki or ‘Little Beings’ who lived in the French Congo – finding similarities with the ‘fairies’ of Welsh and Irish folklore, and theories of the small dark indigenous inhabitants of the land who had retreated from the invading Celts. There were essays that reported on topical and current issues, if only so Machen could use them as reasons to reminisce or recount anecdotes gathered from wide reading and innumerable encounters. He could never keep away from the eighteenth century and the London that Dr Johnson knew. For example, although Machen began “Before Wembley” with the British Empire Exhibition of 1924-25, he gave most of his space to London’s vanished pleasure gardens, declaring that he was ‘for a return to Vauxhall’.
The years Machen spent as a newspaper journalist covering stories in all parts of London and throughout the country, much as he hated them, had provided him with the ability to write, apparently at least, with an easy facility – although, to some extent, at a cost to his earlier style. Even so, his articles and essays possessed a vivid and distinctive quality that only a thoughtful and accomplished writer – one with a deep ‘hinterland’ – could have given them. Their hearty individuality shone through and engaged the reader as Machen expressed his opinions and prejudices in a combative yet usually good-humoured manner. With their alluring and evocative titles, Machen’s best essays were discursive and leisurely as they developed their themes along wandering paths that could end far from the beginning and in unexpected places. ‘This is a great gift: to be able so to tell the bare truth that it seems a magnificent lie. To many of us it is rather given to invent elaborate fictions which are plainer (and duller) than the plainest facts.’
(John Howard)
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